nine skills
Executing your marketing plan takes up to nine skills. And most
creative shops don't cover all the bases. Instead, try
one guy with all nine.
1. Creative concepts. Where it starts - the
idea, a strategic original idea that can be rolled out across your
marketing strategy, unifying your brand and delivering your message in a
way that hits home for your target market. The hard-but-fun part.
Learn about it.
2. Information architecture. Sounds hard, but
it's just a structure for the idea - the way everything's organised. Big wallcharts
abound. See how we do it.
3. Content strategy. Deciding what you put into
your architecture that's readable by humans - themes, subjects, words and
pictures, providing the plan for creating your killer copy.
Plus gizmos like content feeds and application design. Read
more on it.
4. Application design. The job of specifying
in precise detail what you want your website or other solution to do.
Involves things like use cases and customer journeys. See
some examples.
5. User experience. The look and feel of your
content; defining how people interact with it.The interface in its broader
context - not just how an e-commerce site compares to Amazon, but how it
compares to Mr Smith's Corner Store. Hard. Learn
my approach.
6. Database marketing makes use of the information
you gather from your users. What to collect, how to use it to increase
your sales, and how to build those contacts into a managed conversation
over time, creating a solid customer relationship. See
how useful it can be.
7. Brand building. Those contacts are building a brand
- but is it yours or someone else's? One-to-one marketing needs to happen
in sync with your brand. See
how it works.
8. Campaign planning. Once you've got the platform,
you need to do something with it. A campaign is how it happens. Discover
how I do it.
9. Killer copy. Plain talk: use of words to communicate
ideas. It's where Redpump's Chris
started - as an agency copywriter. Read
about it.