These short and easy to absorb videos will help you get your head around your marketing strategy priorities in a way you can capture the relevant internal and external forces, the strategic priority of the business and target markets which will help you achieve your goals. There is 3 videos in the sequence.
Student Tips – “How To”
The widely used Microsoft WORD (2007 – 2016 versions) have some features that can help you improve your assignment results through simpler but accurate referencing and presentation to engage your Professor and markers.
Watch and apply !
Global Digital Community
We have been having an awesome time delivering the Digital Marketing Free Online Course – such great feedback from the the more than 4500 enrolled, global digitally intrigued citizens and those following the sessions live.
Last week when @elishabooth was guest speaker talking digital marketing plans, we introduced the hashtag #igetdigital and the conversation has run across Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Linkedin since then with some great posts about digital issues, great examples of digital and great questions that help everyone involved “get digital”.
This week (week 3) @amashman is hosting and @brijidgroup – James Lloyd is presenting a session on SEO and SEM which will be complimented by the Advertising Opportunity and Digital devices to wrap up. (7pm tonight, 1/9/15, Sydney time !)
Follow the session live or use #igetdigital (twitter) to get involved tonight. Next week, @rich_evans is talking social media and by then most participants will be able to complete their digital marketing plan template.
To access live, enroll here https://www.itmasters.edu.au/free-short-course-digital-marketing/ You can get the recordings of previous weeks and the resources and watch future sessions live.
Enjoy
Digital Marketing is all around us, specifically the tools for Digital Marketing impact our lives daily through many of the devices we carry and through old school media asking us to follow or like !
From August 18th in conjunction with Charles Sturt University and ITMasters 
I’m running a 5 week free online course with 4 live sessions to decode digital and discuss how you need to be thinking about digital as part of your customer communication strategy, given that if you are not, your competitors probably are !
We’ll discuss what the tools for digital are and how to use them to interact with your consumers across a range of digital devices including wearables to develop a workable digital marketing plan. We’ll also discuss integration of digital and analogue media so you can reach customers (B2B or B2C) across their media day.
You need to enroll to access the live and recorded content and any other resources we make available, sign up @ https://www.itmasters.edu.au/free-short-course-digital-marketing/
The current version of Microsoft’s Project software (2013) has really improve marketers ability to manage even better projects, campaigns, NPD, events and launches. With great new pre formated reports, communication and stakeholder engagement has never been more available and as we all know, keeping people informed and motivated is critical to project success.
While on the surface Microsoft Project 2013 (MS Project) can look like a complex piece of software, you need to make conscious decisions about how you are going to use it and then stick with that plan – you can base this on your stakeholder needs and use the software as a tool to help deliver on those. Its true, you can let the software bog you down, but if you have a goal on want you want out of it, and focus on that, it’ll be a great asset for you.
Reporting with Microsoft Project
For marketers, the software really only needs 4 things to work for you – that list of jobs to be completed, your estimated duration of each of those jobs, your best ideas on how the project needs to flow or the precedence of tasks, and finally who (individuals or teams) is doing each task. With this, you then have a project schedule, important start and finish dates, duration and if you have costs for your resources, a cashflow budget for your project also.
Then you can do some of your own work on the look and feel of the project – milestones, add in some notes on Goals, Scope and Assumptions and the strategic alignment of the project with the businesses needs. You then have a portfolio of reports to build your presentations and communications with, that will get sign off, win over sponsors, motivate your team and other stakeholders and generally make you look like someone who is completely on top of the projects they are responsible for.
There is a lot of tracking and reporting options for when the project is underway, but often in the fast paced marketing environment where you are running multiple, short term projects, its the proposal and baseline plan that is used to run the project.
While it sounds pretty nerdy, we are big fans of MS Project 2013 for Marketing Projects and can help though our facilitated sessions around 1 of your actual, upcoming projects or through our Project Reporting & Communicating 1 day course or the 2 day Project Management Skills for Marketers session.
Book Securely at Eventbrite for all our courses (booking fees included)
People talk about marketing from a communication POV but there’s a lot more going on behind the scenes.
Marketing can help making smarter decisions through the conscious alignment of what the organisation needs and an understanding of which stakeholders (customers) can best help deliver on those.
People with a marketing orientation (they can be anywhere in your organisation) are on top of what challenges face the Org and are very aware of who their important stakeholders are and what’s affecting them, today.
The smarter decision comes from being proactive, empowered and understanding what fits and what’s on the fringes. When you demonstrate this in your actions, touch-points inside and outside the organisation, you build trust, gain credibility and are far more efficient. Those fringe offers, opportunities and proposals don’t take up all of your precious time. Yes, as part of your ongoing environmental scanning, you’ll have an eye out for new things, but your knowledge of the Org and your customers/stakeholders will keep you progressive, innovative and value adding.
In 2015 we’ve got a series of F2F interactive courses happening in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane – see our training page for the the full list of 7 marketing short courses and 29 dates across the year, the first one is in Sydney 30-31 of March.
New courses include ROI & Budgets for Marketers, #MarComms101 looking at all communications options from analogue to digital and paid, earned and owned and critically, the integration of these, Project Reporting and Communication, Market Orientation plus Marketing for Smarter Decisions. Our regular strategic planning sessions and project courses including learning how to use Microsoft Project for your campaigns, events and NPD on on as well.
Here’s a short video intro – enjoy and let me know if you have any questions. Secure booking is via the calender on the right of this screen or direct to our events page on http://www.eventbrite.com.au/o/liberated-vision-amashman-7935550716
I’ll look forward to seeing you in a course and please share this with colleagues who you think might be interested too !
There’s lots of chat about employee advocacy which is great for marketers as it elevates the recognition that people are massively important in the marketing mix. Certainly while you and your team might be fantastic at all aspects of the marketing mix, if you are let down by the people internal to the business or your distribution touch points, all your good work can unravel !
Marketers need to work across the organisation motivating and getting all types of staff up to speed with the customer and marketing challenges, some might call this internal marketing but its even more as you look to empower your people to live the brand and be excited about being ambassadors for it. Its going to require conscious effort and marketers need to be working with HR or those responsible for bring new people in (and moving people out) to ensure you’ve got people who can add value not just administer processes !
To imaging how good this could be for your organisation, you need only think back to inter departmental breakdowns, poor communications inside the business or in a retail sense how a waiter or waitress may have taken the positive edge of your last coffee, date, or special occasion !
Action – Do an audit of the people in your network who might have any kind of touch point with customers or critical stakeholders, start with more and improved communication, empower these people by demonstrating trust, train them where training is needed, listen to them for coal face feedback and then work on getting more like them !
Do something about the first step today.
Employee Advocacy and Social Opportunity
Marketing is a cool concept to me – its impacted my work and personal ideas and I find it a great platform to discuss, develop and solve issues at many levels. Certainly if your organisation is marketing orientated or centric you organisation/ business has the best change of really firing as everyone and diverse stakeholders work together to achieve so much more than a bunch of individuals !
Yes its all about the customer / stakeholder but its also about realising your goals and finding the right customers or stakeholders that will allow you to do that – hence the chronic problem of anyone using the words mass and marketing in the same sentence, hence to lack of applicability of mass media unless very carefully targeted and hence the danger of short term focus around transactions rather than relationships and journeys and brand story etc.
Marketing is an opportunity to get your people working together (way beyond the marketing department), learning about and understanding customers who you can really make a difference for, working with technology and creativity/innovation to differentiate, giving the organisation reason and momentum to perform and attracting great people to to complete the cycle. Motivated, happy people solve difficult problems, develop cool solutions and are quick learners – what you need in our current crazy fast moving environments.
My posts are going to be about different things I see as interesting and emerging in this space which includes Strategy, Communications and Project Management of Marketing type issues – campaigns, new product/service and events. They will also feature bits and pieces of theory that are great platforms for checking your direction and for testing options in a world that would rather you didn’t!
Thanks Andrew
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