Tag Archives for digital marketing

Last week we shared some useful templates that would help UX designers, product managers, project managers, content creators, quality controllers, and trainers streamline their workflows..

And this week our team has created five new templates that are useful for business consultants, scrum masters, human resources professionals, digital marketers, customer experience managers, and growth hackers to simplify their day-to-day tasks. 

Check out our diagram community for templates for 100s of business use cases spanning many industries.

This week’s templates include:

• What? So what? Now what? Template
• Mad Sad Glad Template
• Culture Design Canvas
• AARRR Framework
• Customer Touchpoint Map

What? So what? Now what? Template

The “What? So what? Now what?” template is a valuable tool forbusiness consultants and project managers. It helps in analyzing situations, understanding their implications, and developing actionable steps to address them. 

Here are five simple steps to use this template:

1. Identify the “What”: Clearly define and describe the current situation or issue. Gather relevant information and facts about it.
2. Explore the “So what”: Dive deeper into the implications of the identified situation. Consider the potential consequences, impacts, and risks associated with it to gain a comprehensive understanding of the situation’s significance.
3. Determine the “Now what”: Once you have a clear understanding of the situation and its implications, it’s time to develop an action plan. Outline the specific steps that need to be taken to address the situation effectively.
4. Prioritize actions: Evaluate the outlined actions and prioritize them based on their urgency, feasibility, and potential impact. This step ensures that you focus on the most critical and impactful actions first.
5. Implement and monitor progress: Put the action plan into motion and regularly monitor the progress. Track the implementation of the identified actions and assess their effectiveness. Make any necessary adjustments as you move forward.

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Mad Sad Glad Template

The Mad Sad Glad template is a common tool used by Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches, and team leaders to facilitate retrospectives or feedback sessions. It enables teams to reflect on their frustrations, disappointments, and positive experiences in a structured way.

Here are five simple steps to use this template:

1. Set the stage: Create a safe and inclusive environment for the team to share their thoughts and feelings openly. Explain the purpose of the Mad Sad Glad template and how it will help the team reflect on their experiences.
2. Identify the Mad: Invite team members to express what made them mad or frustrated during a specific project. Get them to highlight any obstacles, challenges, or issues that impacted their work negatively.
3. Explore the Sad: Encourage team members to share what made them sad or disappointed. Discuss any missed opportunities, failures, or setbacks that affected their morale or progress.
4. Discover the Glad: Shift the focus to the positive experiences. Invite team members to express what made them glad or brought them joy during the project. This could include successful outcomes, achievements, or moments of collaboration and support.
5. Generate insights and actions: Review the Mad, Sad, and Glad inputs collectively. Identify common themes, patterns, or trends that emerge. From these insights, collaborate with the team to determine actionable steps to address the challenges, build upon successes, and improve team dynamics.

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Culture Design Canvas

The Culture Design Canvas is a tool used by organizational development consultants and human resources professionals to analyze and shape organizational culture. It provides a framework for exploring key aspects of culture and aligning stakeholders toward a desired culture.

Here’s how to use this template:

1. Define purpose and values: Begin by clearly defining the purpose and core values of the organization. Discuss the overarching mission and the guiding principles that drive the organization’s culture.
2. Explore rituals and behaviors: Identify the rituals, routines, and behaviors that are prevalent within the organization. This step involves examining how people interact, communicate, and collaborate. Assess whether these rituals and behaviors align with the desired culture.
3. Assess symbols and artifacts: Symbols and artifacts represent the visible elements of culture, such as the physical workspace, logos, and company traditions. Evaluate the existing symbols and artifacts and consider their impact on the overall culture.
4. Identify enablers and blockers: Look at the factors that support or hinder the desired culture. This step involves analyzing structures, systems, policies, and leadership behaviors that influence the organization’s culture. Identify what supports the desired culture and what needs to be addressed or changed.
5. Design action steps: Based on the insights gained from the previous steps, collaborate with stakeholders to design actionable steps to shape the desired culture. Develop initiatives, programs, and interventions that align with the purpose, values, rituals, and behaviors identified earlier.

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AARRR Framework

The AARRR framework, also known as the Pirate Metrics, is a tool used by growth hackers, digital marketers, and product managers. It provides a systematic approach to analyze and optimize a startup or product’s growth.

Here are five simple steps to use this framework:

1. Acquisition: Focus on acquiring new customers or users for your product or service. Identify the channels and strategies that attract potential customers and bring them to your website, app, or store.
2. Activation: Once you have acquired users, the next step is to ensure they have a positive first experience with your product. Activate them by guiding them through the initial onboarding process and helping them understand the value your product offers.
3. Retention: Encourage users to keep coming back and engaging with your product or service. Implement retention strategies such as personalized communication, valuable content, and regular updates to enhance user loyalty and reduce churn.
4. Revenue: Generate revenue by monetizing your product or service. Identify different revenue streams such as subscriptions, advertising, or e-commerce transactions. Implement strategies to optimize your pricing, upselling, and cross-selling opportunities.
5. Referral: Leverage satisfied customers to generate word-of-mouth referrals and expand your user base. Implement referral programs, encourage social sharing, and provide incentives for customers to recommend your product to others.

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Customer Touchpoint Map

The Customer Touchpoint Map is used by customer experience managers and user experience designers. It helps visualize and understand the various interactions a customer has with a company across different channels and touchpoints.

Here’s how to use this template:

1. Identify touchpoints: Begin by identifying all the touchpoints where your customers interact with your company. These touchpoints can include your website, social media platforms, customer support, physical stores, email, and more.
2. Understand customer journey: Map out the customer journey from the initial point of contact to post-purchase interactions. Understand the different stages and emotions customers experience along the way.
3. Assess customer interactions: Evaluate the quality and effectiveness of customer interactions at each touchpoint. Consider factors such as ease of use, response times, clarity of communication, and overall customer satisfaction.
4. Identify pain points and opportunities: Identify pain points or areas where customers may face challenges or frustrations. Look for opportunities to improve the customer experience, such as streamlining processes, enhancing communication, or adding value-added services.
5. Optimize touchpoints: Develop strategies to optimize each touchpoint based on your findings. Implement improvements to enhance customer satisfaction, align touchpoints with your brand promise, and provide a consistent and seamless experience.

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The internet probably wasn’t designed to be a virtual playground for social media and content marketers, but it is now. Yet, as it constantly evolves and we communicate more, an entirely new set of challenges arises; and as the amount of information multiplies and attention spans shrink, marketers will be all the more pressed to stand out.

The 3-5-7 rule illustrates how to navigate a crowded environment of sales pitches. It claims that you only have 3 seconds to get someone’s attention, 5 seconds to continue engaging them, and past 7 seconds, if they are still engaged, then your mission will have been accomplished. That may seem unfair to have so little time available to effectively market a valuable service or product, but, truthfully, that is the state of the world we now live in requiring us to constantly innovate.

Innovating means reassessing stagnant methods, making improvements, and redesigning for ergonomic or economic purposes. Essentially, innovation is about taking inspired action; it’s what provokes the internet marketer to ask: what hooks a potential buyer to focus in on my product in the middle of the hoopla? When content is the keyword of content marketing, a mind map holds a viable solution to rid the marketing madness shuffle once and for all; it is the alternative way of creating the right hook that marketers are looking for.

Realistically, it’s going to take time for someone to learn about a topic well enough to understand it. When you want to educate your consumers–some of whom are averse to paying attention long enough to learn anything at all–the trick is being able to guide them and get them to tune out the endless 140-character messages, pop-up ads, or those incessant notifications blaring from each one of their digital devices.

You must tell these casual internet browsers that their time will be well-spent paying attention to what you’re selling. As the 3-5-7 rule predicts, you have a decent chance to convert them from browsers into buyers if they are still hanging around after 7 seconds. You won’t be able to rely on fancy words and stellar copy alone, though. Because of this, mind maps increase your advantage and the impact of your sales pitch by giving the viewer alternative ways to process new information.

Understanding Visual Learning to Improve Your Content Marketing

Western society is expected to be predominantly literate, but literacy doesn’t automatically entail the interest to read. Penn State York presents a case about how people who learn primarily from a visual stimulus, indicating that they tend to more easily remember information presented in pictures, charts, or diagrams. There is some debate among neuroscientists and psychologists about whether or not there are any hierarchies of the learning styles many educational systems have adapted. There may be such a thing as a kinesthetic learner, an auditory learner, and a visual learner. On the other hand, as some might argue, there might be no such thing.

Regardless, some individuals are going to have more visual-spatial intelligence than others. Anyone with sight is going to retain information at least to some degree from illustrative images. Tap into the psychology of what makes strong, captivating content marketing and you will hack your way into the minds of your new customers. 

Mind Maps: A Versatile Marketing Resource

Mind maps are good tools for organizing business meetings as well as other general concepts into a more cohesive idea. Ironically enough, mind maps are useful for more than mind mapping itself. If you were to construct a mind map and embed it in a website or blog, you instantly have for yourself an infographic. Another good reason to appreciate visuals is that they encourage social sharing. A link on Twitter to your blog won’t be as impactful especially when the rocking content you’ve curated can’t be seen firsthand. When you or your audience share images on content-driven sites like Pinterest, Instagram, and Flickr, your reach will expand even further. The very fact that there are social media platforms created just for images should motivate you to factor in visual data in all your sales and marketing goals.

4 Ways to Use Mind Maps in Digital Marketing

• Devise a social media marketing strategy using a mind map.
  There are many social media sites and few more pops up every day. Keeping track of them and updating them is a total headache. You can create a mind map template for this task. For instance, you can create a simple mind map with few social networks for everyday updates while maintaining a bit more complex one with all social sites for important updates. There are endless options so you can take a pick.
• Develop or refine the niche for your blog’s content.
  We all have suffered the writers’ block at some point. Which is why it’s critical to have a strategy to brainstorm ideas for your next blog posts or article. Mind maps are perfect for that too. Or you can consider creating a concept map which is very similar to a mind map. Keep in mind that mind maps drawn using Creately can be shared with others for instant feedback. Finding and collaborating on ideas just got easier.
• Design an infographic.
  Info-graphics are a powerful marketing tool. However creating info-graphics is a complex time-consuming task. It’s a combination of many tasks like finding data, analyzing and extracting data, initial mock-up and finally creating the info-graphics. And these main tasks have subtle sub-tasks attached to them. If your planning on using them heavily in marketing it’s a good idea to maintain a mind map so you can easily repeat the steps.
• Explain a business model or its services page for your website.
  Want to explain your business model in a visual manner? Mind maps are perfect for that too. If creativity is your thing you can probably use a mind map for your FAQ page as well. Time and again studies have proved that visually appealing content makes it easier to grasp an idea. So showcase your business model using a mind map and see the difference.
  

  How to plan a web design projects ( click on image to use as a template )

Let your mind map guide you to clarity about new business developments. Use it to compliment your sales copy. Let it be the tool that gives you that precious 7 seconds that will convert your browsers into buyers. Creately offers remarkable mind mapping software to help you do all these things and more. Contact support to learn more about the neat visuals, diagrams, and charts that you can construct using our product. We would also love to hear your feedback and stay connected. Like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter.

Ken Myers is a father, husband, and entrepreneur. He has combined his passion for helping families find in-home care with his experience to build a business. Learn more about him by visiting @KenneyMyers on Twitter.