The Step Change Blog

In the age of disruption, businesses may find themselves questioning whether strategy matters in a world of constant change. But in a time where silos are crumbling to disruptive trends and industries are shifting to accommodate new technologies, strategy matters now more than ever.

With so many delivery channels to think about today, how do you know which marketing channel works best? The straight answer is, you don’t. Your best shot at success today is having a multichannel marketing approach to ensure you are frequently where your customers are.   

Are you proactively influencing how your target audience sees your brand in relation to all the other options available to them (a.k.a your competitors)? 

From a no-name free-range egg brand, Happy Chicken Eggs is now the eighth highest-selling SKU in Coles — in less than six months after it was launched.

So you already have a killer inbound marketing strategy. You may find yourself wondering  why you’re still having trouble getting your qualified leads down the pipeline. Why aren’t they converting?

Have you ever landed on a website to look into some content only to be confused by the plethora of information on the homepage? Sure enough, that website likely has a problem with its information architecture.

Every business today needs a good SEO strategy to differentiate themselves from everyone else. Those who manage to rank in top search results get up to 33% more clicks.

But even when you have done everything you could to boost your SEO efforts by creating great content or optimising your website to showcase who you are and what you’re offering, it’s easy to get lost in the fold with over 1.3 billion websites in existence as of January 2018. That’s a whole lot of content and links to sort out.

Running a business or managing a team is no walk in the park. Along the way, we realise that failure is unavoidable and sometimes even necessary. In this fourth video of a five-part interview series, we asked former Saatchi & Saatchi CEO Kevin Roberts on what we can learn from failure and how to make the most of it.

If I told you there was a way to earn three times as many leads without spending any more money on marketing, would you believe me? Because that’s exactly what happens when you switch from the traditional outbound marketing to content marketing.

Buyer personas. Either you have them but your team doesn’t know how to use them, so they’re good as gone — or your team simply skipped creating one to get to the ‘real work’.

While many companies are aware of the general importance of personas, they don’t fully understand what it is they’re trying to do when they create them.

Big announcements from the agency on our roadmap to growth, plus a look at the Step Change culture — all in this week’s Step Change News.

Today’s customers and prospects know exactly what they want and go online to find it. To market your business in this new age, you need more than just the right message to stand out and drive customer loyalty. You need to do more than just create the right offer.

Even Amazon‘s $685 billion market value couldn‘t save the Amazon Fire. Launching a product online takes a lot of work — and it‘s something that can elude even the largest companies in the world.

Digital transformation — you may have heard this term in a recent digital conference you’ve attended, or you may be even assigned to lead one. And you’re not the only one, because right now, it is a big focus in growing organisations.

Many agencies who are at their optimal performance are striving to achieve peak performance thinking that is what is needed to win.

So we asked former Saatchi & Saatchi CEO Kevin Roberts how to maintain peak performance in your team and as an individual. In this video, he also shares how he has been able to put this into action to get to where he is now.

If great strategic thinkers like Anita Roddick, Jean Nidetch, and Mother Teresa would run your business, how would they transform your customers into raving fans?

A blog is a powerful tool every business should have. If you want to stay relevant and competitive, if you want to be found online, a business blog is a necessity. It’s simply the most effective tactic that allows you to attract, engage, and nurture leads as they go through the stages in your marketing funnel.

It was Steve Forbes who famously said, “Your brand is the single most important investment in your business.” But some, if not most, businesses tend to misunderstand this. Here’s why.

In the second part of this series, Insights from Kevin Roberts, we ask the former CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi what goes on in his head when he talks to clients.

Look into any business and marketing is usually the first budget to be ignored — or cut out entirely. 

Marketers are facing a dilemma today. On one hand, it’s becoming clear that creating content is not only an effective way to raise publicity for their companies, but it’s also essential to do so. On the other hand, so many companies are using content that consumers have become overexposed to.

The typical consumer sees hundreds of articles, blog posts, videos, and other forms of content per day and only manage to fully consume or remember a small fraction of them.

Unless your content marketing strategy can stand out from the rest, there’s no way to convert viewers and readers to consumers.

Sustainable competitive advantages are becoming harder to find and harder to maintain. There are really only 2 ways that you can define these. What are they?

The best marketers know when to make and not to make decisions. This is why understanding Behavioural Economics as a science of decision-making and looking into the human behaviour is a must for CMOs. Here are 6 Step Change-recommended books on Behavioural Economics that CMOs should be reading.

Throughout the Director’s Guide to Digital series, we’ve established the need for digital to be fully integrated into your marketing strategy. Still, you can’t add any real value to your digital marketing efforts until you can measure performance and track how digital has added to the success of your overall strategy.

Former Saatchi & Saatchi CEO Kevin Roberts sheds light on essential matters like organisational growth, change, and creativity in this one-of-a-kind interview with Head of Strategy, Glenn Bartlett. This is the first post of the five-part video series. 

We recently surveyed 133 CEOs, Directors of Marketing and Sales, and CMOs to find out where companies are likely to invest for growth. 

We found that most young executives are aiming to increase investment across the board more than older executives. We also found it interesting that smaller cities like Adelaide are more adventurous in terms of virtual reality or augmented reality than Sydney or Melbourne.

The highlight of our survey reveals the key areas where business leaders plan to invest to grow their businesses this year.

In an ever-changing and highly competitive digital environment, not having a solid digital marketing campaign is a lost opportunity to attract new leads, engage your audience, and drive them through the funnel for actual conversion.

Still, so many businesses out there do not have a digital marketing strategy or know how to run an effective marketing campaign online. 

The Chief Financial Officer is a key player in any organisation and is someone you need to successfully engage with if you want to create positive change in an organisation. A CFO can be your biggest ally — or your greatest nemesis.

With our popcorn boxes ready and our digital thinking caps on, we stepped into The Dendy for Step Change Movie Night last week. We welcomed more than 200 clients and friends — our biggest audience ever.

With today’s digital space overloaded with so much content, cutting through the noise is only half the battle won.

You need to get your audience to complete the content engagement hierarchy to drive actual conversion.