As Kaplan and Norton say in their now classic book Strategy Maps, the strategy is based on a differentiated customer value proposition.

To put it another way, unless you find something unique and valuable to your customers, there’s no way to guarantee your business success.

Customer Value Proposition (CVP) in digital domain (6Cs Model)

6Cs of customer motivation, initially suggested by Dave Chaffey is still one of the most online popular customer value proposition models.

6Cs model, as the name implies, consists of 6 dimensions of possible value propositions in the digital world:

Despite the fact that the 6Cs model is widely cited in digital marketing books and articles, it’s assumptions are still very similar to the physical market assumptions. It seems that the author, have considered the digital market just as the old physical one, except the fact that the new market in enabled by digital distribution and delivery services.

The product ownership rights are still considered as granted, to make an example. However, we are all aware of the copyright infringements and violations in the digital era.

As Kevin Kelly notes, the Internet is a large copying machine waiting for new content to copy it freely as much as possible.

Therefore, despite the fact that the digital communication technologies provided creators with convenient ways to deliver their product,  they made product piracy even more convenient.

Considering the above fact and many other ignored characteristics of the current digital era, it seems that we have to find a new model to survive in the digital age. The age in which stealing a product is much easier and faster and straight forward than purchasing it.

Kevin Kelly in his book titled The Inevitable coins the term “generative values” to describe values which people are still ready to pay for them even in the digital flowing era.

I just leave this diagram here to describe every single component of it in the future articles:

8 Value Proposition Ideas in the digital age

Related Article: Immediacy is something people are willing to pay for.

Note: I have used the term ideas instead of Model as Kelly doesn’t claim that he has suggested a model. Instead, he just calls the above factors as value generation ideas to convince the customer to pay in the post-copyright era.

The post Online Value Proposition Models and Ideas appeared first on webmindset.

Digital Content Marketing: A step by step guide

What is content marketing: Is it what are you looking for?

• What is the definition of content and what do we mean by digital content?

• Definition of content marketing

  • Content marketing and permission marketing are not the same concepts

    Many content marketers insist on using permission marketing mindset in designing a content marketing campaign.

    Sure it’s a better approach to pull the audience instead of pushing them through the sales funnel. However, still, you can design an interruption marketing campaign based on content marketing tools and methods.

  • Any content marketing plan should pursue the goal of changing or enhancing the consumer behavior.

    You can take a look at the models I have quoted for the consumer behavior concept to find some ideas about the targets which are possible to set in this regard.

  • It’s part of your digital branding strategy

• Where can I find a better or more comprehensive definition of content marketing?

  Heidi Cohen has collected a collection of 21 different definitions of content marketing from the content marketing experts. This article is one of the best sources if you want to have a better understanding of the concept.

• Is it useful to me / my company?

  • What’s your digital strategy?

    Before developing a content strategy or content marketing plan, you have to think about your digital strategy. As have mentioned in my article on developing a digital strategy, there are five critical topics to consider before developing any content plan:

    • What do we mean by the term digital in our business?
    • What are the “real” opportunities there?
    • Whether we look for a better digital presence or deployment of more digital processes.
    • What is our time horizon?
    • Do we consider digital technology as a core competency or just as a strategic enabler?

  • Why do you want to use it?

    • Increasing Brand Awareness
    • Increasing Brand Preference
    • Greater reach at a lower cost
    • Attracting new prospects
    • Overcoming objections (existing ones, future ones)
    • Exploring prospects’ pain points
    • Inviting Strategic Partners
    • Lead conversion
    • Lead nurturing
    • Customer Conversion
    • Building trust and rapport with audience
    • Retention (loyalty)
    • Upsell
    • Passionate Subscribers

  • Are you able to create content?

    It may look like an easy challenge. However, content creation is the most critical bottleneck for content marketers.

  • Are you suitable for this skill?

    • You need a content marketer mindset
      • Consider integration
      • True customer value
      • Customer Centric Approach (Curve)
    • You need to have some skills
      • Storytelling
    • You need to have some traits
      • analytical aptitude
      • patience
      • persistence
      • generosity
      • Conversational
      • creative

Think about your content strategy

• What is the content strategy?

  • Definition of content strategy
  • The Difference between content marketing and content strategy
  • Content Marketing without content strategy: A powerful car without navigation system

• What’s your content mix?

  • What combination of evergreen / topical content fits your needs?
  • What proportion of your content should be original? What’s the best share for the curated content?
  • What combination of content types would be better for your purpose?
  • Which types of content presentation methods would be more effective for your audience?

• What’s your core purpose?

• What’s your preferred content strategy theme?

  • Inbound?
  • Outbound?
  • Hybrid?

• How to design The Content Ecosystem

  • Combining the components
  • Choosing the primary platform and the content hub

The most important questions to ask before starting content marketing

• What are your objectives?

• Who are your audiences?

  • Persona

    • What do they need?
    • Where do they look for solutions?
    • Demographics
      • Age
      • Location
      • Gender
      • Income Level
      • Education Level
      • Marital Status
      • Occupation
    • Psychological Factors
      • Personality
      • Attitude
      • Values
      • Interests
      • Hobbies
      • Lifestyle

• What can you do for your audience?

  • What’s your online value proposition? What do you have to offer that the audience is willing to pay for it?

• How can you differentiate yourself from them?

  • Competitor Analysis

  • Content Research

  • Designing a differentiated offer
    • content
    • price
    • value
    • structure
    • wrapping
    • Identity

It’s all about customer base (Developing, Maintaining, and Managing)

• Minimum Viable Audience

• Empathy in the digital world

  • Why it’s core of content marketing
  • How to draw an empathy map
    • Think, Feel, Act, See Model

• What are your Key Performance Indicators?

  • Classification of the key performance indicators (KPIs):
    • KPIs measuring efficiency vs. KPIs measuring effectiveness
    • Primary KPIs vs. Secondary KPIs
  • ROI is just of the indicators and even not the most important one!

• What are your Key Operational Indicators?

  I’ve listed some of the most important Key Performance Indicators in content marketing. Besides KPIs, there are other type of indicators called KOI (Key Operational Indicators) concerned with the efficiency of the process. The conversion ratio is considered as one of the most important KOIs.

Operational Aspects of Content Marketing

• Corporate Content Machine

  • Why do we call it a content machine?
  • How to design your content machine
    • Content Production Capacity Management (CPCM)

• Choosing the right platform for your content machine

  • Are you going to be a pure digital player?
  • Channels
    • Medium vs. Media
    • The classical make or buy dilemma
  • The Web vs. App
  • Future of mobile and mobility
  • Which screen is smarter for you?
    • Forget about smart devices, look for smart screens
  • Social networks: structure or infrastructure?

• The Content Creation Process

  • Do you have any content?

    • What kind of resources do you have for your content factory?
    • Creation or Curation?
    • Relevance
    • Value
    • Originality

  • User Generated Content vs. Branded Content

  • Questions to ask about each piece of content

    • Content Essence
    • The most effective content type
    • Short-form or long-form? This is the question!
      • Definition of the long-form content
      • Why do many content marketers recommend using long-form content?
    • The art of copywriting

  • The content fine tuning process

    • Form is the content (The new version of the old phrase: Medium is the message)
    • SEO is not about keywords anymore:
      • Information content of the message
      • Information structure
    • Content Identity

• Content Distribution & Delivery Process

  • Editorial Calendar

    • How often should you publish?
    • Managing your topics portfolio

  • Channel Selection

  • Content Promotion and Traffic Generation

    • SEO
      • Keyword dominance era is over: Semantic Structure as a new approach to page evaluation in SEO
      • A list of free SEO tools
    • Paid search marketing
    • Social Media Marketing
    • Email Marketing
    • Guest Blogging

• Process Optimization & Auditing

  • Customer Journey Analysis
  • Conversion Rate Optimization
  • A/B Testing
  • Audience Engagement Tools / Auditing
    • Engagement as process addiction
      • Review of the Hooked book by Nir Eyal
    • Gamification
    • Loyalty Programs
    • How to audit engagement process?

• Content Management System

  • Internal Content Management System

    • Developing effective and efficient metadata
      • Metadata: Data about the data

  • External Content Management system

  • Managing content in different stages of the content life cycle

    • Goal Setting
    • Creation
    • Publishing
    • Promotion
    • Maintenance
    • Retirement

How to design a content-centered marketing campaign?

Agile Content Marketing: Fad or Fashion? (Sorry. There’s no third choice!)

• Rethinking agility concept in content industry context
• Collaboration: Tips and Traps

How to build a content-based business?

• The most popular content revenue models

  • Direct Selling
  • Subscription
  • Quantity Based
  • Selling Advertising Space
  • Collecting market information
  • Collecting donations

• Incredible but forgotten content revenue models

• Which pricing strategy fits your business?

  • Freemium Business Model
  • How will you overcome the penny gap barrier?

• A content-focused organization

  • How to develop a content-centered organization?
  • Positions you should think about
    • Chief Content Officer (CCO)
      • Chief Content Officer as an emerging role
      • Chief Content Officer Job Description
    • Chief Technical Officer (CTO)
  • Benchmarks
    • Leading Content Creating Companies

Future of content marketing

• Trends

  • Expansion of Social Media
  • Multiple Devices and Multiple Screens
  • Distrust of Advertising
  • Content Shock: Fact or Fiction?
  • People to follow
  • Blogs to read

• Megatrends

Future of content

• Emergence of the global mind and content-less community

The post Digital Content Marketing Roadmap (A Step-by-Step Guide) appeared first on webmindset.

The digital strategy is one of the buzzwords in today’s technical conversations. However, still there’s not a real consensus on the meaning of the term.

The terms digital strategy and IT strategy are used interchangeably by most of the technicians.

However, as Mark McDonald emphasizes in his classic article in Harvard Business Review, digital strategy does not equal IT strategy. Most of the IT technologies, McDonald notes, treat IT in isolation and without aiming to create a digital edge.

The definition of the digital strategy proposed by the digital strategy conference is one of the rare definitions that takes strategic concepts into consideration:

Digital strategy is the process of identifying, articulating and executing on digital opportunities that will increase your organization’s competitive advantage.

Hence, there are a couple of questions that we should answer before developing a comprehensive plan for digital strategy. Here I’ve listed some of them:

• What do we mean by the term digital?

  As Pete Swabey notes in his article titled what is digital strategy, we have to specify the meaning of the term digital. There’s a wide variety of tools, technics, and solutions that could be labled as digital. Even an E-cigarette is a kind of digital tool! So digital technology may mean a digital platform for internal communication in a company while it may mean social network presence or data mining solutions in the other one.

• What are the “real” opportunities?

  Not every digital potential is a digital opportunity. Every day we face with new digital tools and solutions: New digital channels, new software, new gadgets, and new digital hypes. But which one can be an opportunity? Shall I use every available social media channel to reach potential audience? Shall I push my colleagues toward a paperless office? It is really advantageous to automate and digitize every organizational process?

• ِDigital Presence vs Digital Process

  Many businesses are physical businesses who look for some kind of digital presence. They want to reach the potential customers (or audience as we call it in content marketing) and pull / push them through the sales channels. But other businesses are using digital technology to build / develop their business processes. They may be hybrid business or a pure digital player.

• We have to know our time horizon

  This is the question that shapes the whole strategy. Do we look for short-term results from our digital initiatives? Or we are ready to invest in our digital strategy for a couple of years without any tangible result? The former may lead to an aggressive content marketing campaign while the later may lead to a digital-first public relations department.

• Digital technology as a core competency or as an strategic enabler?

  This is the classical question of digital-based vs. digital-first strategy. In the digital-based strategies, we try to use digital technology as a strategic enabler helping us in deployment and implementation of the strategy. So referring to Mark McDonald statement, as far as integration is concerned, it’s an integrated approach. However, there’s another approach to the digital technology: Developing a strategy based on digital competencies. This approach is called as digital-first approach by some authors.

In developing any digital action plan, you have to think about the above-mentioned questions. Otherwise, new tools and initiatives will just lead to more resource consumption and strategic conflicts.

This is the reason that I put the Digital Strategy in the first steps of the content marketing roadmap.

The post 5 critical questions to answer before developing your digital strategy appeared first on webmindset.