I recently attended an excellent (and highly entertaining) webinar presented by Mark Ritson, Adjunct Professor of Marketing at Melbourne Business School as part of the Digital Survivor Series, hosted by Sitecore. The title of the webinar had me intrigued given that Sitecore specialise in web content management and marketing automation software and are therefore very much in the digital space. 'The Death of Digital and the Era of Integration' proved to be every bit as fascinating and controversial as the title suggests. Essentially Mark was challenging the notion, which has become quite prevalent in recent years, that digital marketing and social media are the be-all and end-all of modern mar
I was talking to a business owner recently about their social media marketing activity and it came to light that, while they were actually active on social media, they didn't have any sort of plan regarding who they were targeting or what they wanted to achieve with their social media channels. I hear this frequently from small business owners: they know that they ought to be embracing social media in their marketing activity but they have put the proverbial cart before the horse! As I mentioned in my last blog post to be successful in any aspect of your business, you need to plan your approach. In this case, I suggested a 'back-to-basics' review of this business's overarching marketing plan
I wrote a blog post last week about the three key elements of a small business digital marketing strategy, in which I highlighted the increasing importance of a social media presence to complement the other elements of the plan. In my experience, many small business owners have either not fully embraced social media, are unsure which channels they should be active on or are not seeing the results they hoped for from their social media marketing activity. In fact the Sensis Social Media Report released in June this year, found that while just under half (48%) of small and medium-sized businesses now have a social media presence, just a fifth (21%) are measuring their return on investment and
