Site Article Index
- Talk to Me: 10 Tips for Translating PR Results Into the Language of Business
As communications experts, we should find it easy to convey the value of our services to the business managers in our organizations. Yet many public relations professionals struggle with expressing results in a way that allows senior executives to easily recognize the impact that PR has on the success of the business.
Sometimes doing a little more for your email subscribers can make a huge difference. Tafford Uniforms of North Wales, Pa., faced a challenge to engage email subscribers because of two common but seemingly incongruent realities.
If you want to get ahead in your marketing career, stop using four-letter words that begin with the letter "F." No, we aren't talking about THAT word. (Although cursing your boss is probably not going to get you very far, either.) But the F-words here are far more lethal, more destructive, and more devastating to your career and professional fulfillment.
It's a challenge faced by hundreds of small companies: how to get the CXO of a Fortune 1000 company to consider its product. One effective strategy that helped get companies such as Citrix and VMware off the ground is to align closely with a major partner. Building a strong channel, even with just one or two partners, can be much more effective and easier to leverage than trying to develop your own sales team and customer relationships. The following five tips can help B2B companies maintain strong channel partnerships.
How much do you know about your customers right now, at this moment? A lot of companies can show you composite profiles that describe their target customers, including job titles, needs, obligations, and goals. No doubt about it: It's important to know those things. But relying solely on such information to connect with customers is like trying to strike up a conversation with a cardboard cutout. It just isn't enough.
What works in enticing a new generation of buyers? Here's why some of your efforts to reach this demographic might be going amiss.
As marketers, we are all looking to reach "nirvana": targeting the right person with the right message at the right time. It's the clear path to driving conversion rates that exceed expectations. The days of blasting promotion messages to all are dead and gone. The conversation has changed. We must put ourselves in customers' shoes and target them individually as best we can through data-driven strategies.
Here are 10 essentials of software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution marketing.
Contextual ads, whether delivered by Google, Yahoo, or any other company, are not standalone ads in the way that a newspaper classified ad is. In fact, your pay-per-click ad is simply the connector between a desired keyword or phrase and a destination landing page. So while you may have some wonderful things to say about your products or services, your PPC ad is not the place to try to cram your latest sales message into 95 characters.
There are five keys to making a relevance-centered approach a reality in your direct digital marketing programs(such as email, websites, mobile, and so on).
How do you know whether your lead-generation program is working and delivering a good ROI for the company? You may be doing some lead tracking to understand conversion rates and customer profitability, which is great. But the sales team will inevitably let Marketing know that (1) Marketing was just a small step in closing the sale so the sales team deserves the credit; (2) the sales team would have found and closed those leads anyway, so there is no incremental value; or (3) the leads are fine, but there is just never enough. We need reliable measurements to both prove and improve our marketing effectiveness.
Search queries, the exact word or phrases a person types, are a vital clue into the objectives of the searcher and how valuable that person is to your business. Is each searcher relevant to you? Are all the search queries equally valuable? Can you write a single text ad that matches the intent of each of those queries and inspires searchers to click and convert? The answer, likely, is no. Yet, search queries don't play as prominent a role in paid-search management as they should, especially with Broad-match and Phrase-match campaigns.
Have you heard this one? "All the research shows that companies that spend on marketing during a recession come out ahead of the competition as the economy rebounds." It's a catchy buzz phrase—and if people believe it, even better. But here's the thing: What research, exactly?
It might sound counter-intuitive, but "sweating the small stuff" is actually a recipe for success. In fact, it can be one of best weapons in your business arsenal.
It's time to start investing in the future, for real. Brand equity from the old economy is about dead. The financial collapse is a sign of a larger movement that would have us stop draining off reserves, and get us back to the business of making promises to tomorrow's customers.
As the technology and the legal issues around email evolve, so should your email marketing programs. Otherwise, you could misstep, and that could cost you opportunities to communicate with your customers or constituents as well as damage credibility. Here are nine pitfalls to avoid, that can put you out of business.
Retailers did everything possible to attract buyers over the holidays. From educational sessions to discounts and coupons, and special offers, retailers used their ingenuity and marketing smarts to make the best of a dismal season. Nonetheless, numbers were down and every indicator pointed toward an even gloomier 2009. Perhaps the very profile of the retail environment has shifted as consumers settle in for what may be a protracted economic change. Here are some smart, manageable tips on how to survive through the second half of the 2009 buying season and keep your business on track.
Disconnects are a big cause of strategy failure. You think you've communicated well, then find out you have—just not to your target audience. Or maybe at the end of a long research session, you realize that input from colleagues in the company's Ohio office was critical to your strategy, yet was overlooked in favor of input from more-assertive colleagues in the New York office. There are five major disconnects that consistently trip up strategy implementation.
When it comes to email subject lines, the Golden Rule hasn't changed: Tell what's inside, don't sell what's inside. If you have something to sell or a message you want to get across, that subject line better be good... or else your prospects might head to a different neighborhood.
If you're like most online marketers, you may not realize that some of the technologies that power your website can be critical tools for improving the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. For example, did you know that you can use data from your site-search solution to create emails with lists of popular products that match your customers' preferences? The result: stronger brand visibility, higher conversions, and a more engaging customer experience.
There are many similarities between social-media marketing and email; but they are two distinct marketing channels, and they should be used separately to enhance or magnify, not just promote, each other. Think of it this way: Social media is for awareness; email is for retention.
Growing your in-house database should be at the top of every marketers list. Why? When done correctly, it will house your most-qualified and responsive prospects. Though organic list growth may take time and effort, you will love the rewards. Consider the following techniques to acquire new leads and grow your list with success.
Marketers these days find themselves increasingly squeezed between a big rock and a very hard place: Their mandate is to demonstrably improve ROI, with reduced budgets, while communicating with skittish audiences that are less inclined to make purchases. Not surprisingly, people are looking for ways to change the game altogether.
Everyone's looking to do more with less these days. After comparing the cost of postal mail (about a dollar apiece) with the cost of email (about a penny apiece) any B2B marketer is going to prefer using email as the medium for staying in touch with current customers and inquirers. No-brainer, right? But here's the rub: Most B2B companies have email addresses for only a fraction of their customers. And, even worse, if their privacy policies call for opt-in, only a fraction of that fraction are emailable. So, what are the options for business marketers to increase their customer coverage via email? Here are four approaches that can work.
Effective networking is all about giving. One of the best ways to give to your network members is to help them build their personal brands. And if you help them build their brands on the Web, you demonstrate how savvy you are about the new Web 2.0 world we live in. And, for marketers, being savvy about social media is essential! Here's a list of 10 free or very low-cost Web 2.0–focused personal-branding gifts.
In Part 1 of this article, the author talked a little bit about the necessary components to a successful landing page: You need "bones" to hold it all together; you need to keep the message on track and motivating by maintaining a consistent theme throughout; and you need to stir emotions... pique curiosity... and so on. Once a prospect's heart (and all those emotions that go along with it) gets in the game, you're pretty much home free. Well... almost.
Companies are increasingly looking to create vibrant and healthy online communities for their businesses. But many companies are seeing their efforts fail or produce flat results. Here are six reasons why many online communities never materialize, and what you can do to improve your own efforts to build online communities.
For those of us who were brought up e-marketing, e-shopping, e-dating, e-gossiping—and all things e—we may feel smug that we are truly paperless (are we really?), and thus we are so green in our behavior that who would dare cast a stone at us? Well, it's time to wake up. Direct mailers can actually be very responsible environmentally—and perhaps e-marketers need to pay closer attention to the environmental life cycle of digital commerce.
Although she has been successful in promoting and extending corporate brands, the author entered into another chapter of her life a few years ago: re-energizing an acting career. Eventually, she came to see marketing herself as an actor as the same as marketing any other product or service. She revisited common-sense ideas on how to extend a brand. These common-sense ideas, usually known but put on the marketer's back burner, should always be top of mind to help you get noticed and extend your brand.
Affiliate marketing is in a growth stage, strengthened of late by an explosion in the number of bloggers and other site publishers who are recognizing its rewards. But an affiliate program can be catastrophic if they are not well-managed.
When the latest marketing answers fail to produce the results you expect, maybe it's time to start asking different questions. You don't need me to tell you that we're in a crisis of confidence: Consumers don't believe or act on the information we give them in the ways we'd hope, so we're losing faith in the strategies and tools we use to communicate with them. We're asked questions about sales, and we reply with answers about "engagement" and conversational "buzz." Budgets are down, expectations are up, and the proliferation of new solutions for "engaging" with consumers in conversations seems inversely proportional to results that our employers and clients can value. We believe that
You're a marketer who's hip to the idea of social media: You have a blog, you know Facebook inside and out, and you can Tweet with the best of them. But the big question is, Are you listening as well as talking? Here are some of the top tools for listening to and monitoring the online chatter about your brand.
Sometimes we get so caught up in the procedural logistics of email marketing that we forget we're communicating with real people. We think in terms of lists, databases, target audiences, and segments. With email, as with conventional channels, it's important to remember that there are real people on the other end of our messages. When we press the send button, we're not just delivering messages to in-boxes, we're communicating with individuals. Here are three tips to help you personalize and "conversationalize" your email and, in so doing, remind yourself (or retrain your brain, if necessary) that there's a living, breathing person receiving those digital marketing messages you send.
It's no secret that the business world is slow to change. Sure, it has made the evolution from typewriters to computers for word processing, and from snail mail to email for written communication. But in regard to the core of doing business—from the methods and measurements that are used to the way departments are siloed—many 21st-century companies might as well be stuck in the Stone Age. And now that the recession has set in, this unwillingness to replace old business models, strategies, and metrics with new ones is causing some companies hardship and leading many others to their deaths. Given the gloomy circumstances many businesses find themselves in today, I ask CEOs and marketing exe
Today's buyer is in control. This transition means that our sales teams are no longer required as a conduit of information. Industry websites, vendor sites, blogs, social media, and search all make the required information readily available and, by doing so, leave the sales representative out of the room. As a result, it's impossible for the sales rep to read a buyer's physical body language to understand what aspects of a message are of interest and determine whether the prospect wants to move forward. Marketing teams must therefore instead read a buyer's digital body language—his or her Web activities, email responses, search activities, and engagements in events and demos—to understand
The first few months of 2009 have already been tumultuous for reputations. So what can be done? Below, some of the findings of that online-reputation study as they relate to seven realities of managing online reputation in today's world—and some solutions to strengthen your reputation in the months ahead.
While games remain the most widely downloaded smartphone apps, developers haven't forgotten about those of us who have work to do. In fact, we found quite a few apps that are useful for marketers. Take a gander, and then tell us the applications you've found useful for improving productivity and staying up-to-date on all things marketing.
For decades, the prevailing wisdom was that nonprofits should learn from for-profit enterprises how to become "more businesslike." Many nonprofits thus embraced best practices in branding, marketing, service delivery, money management, and leadership. They have also learned how to keep different business models running simultaneously. To be successful in all these endeavors has required nonprofits to develop approaches and skills—particularly in communication and branding—that (surprise!) for-profits can now learn from.
Capturing the experiences of your most successful customers not only boosts your credibility but also educates buyers and shows them the payoff of your solutions. Here are 25 ways to use customer success stories in your sales and marketing to increase buyers' trust.
For every email marketer who has ever heard an executive say, "Email generates revenue, just send more email," this one is for you. Most email marketers care about their subscribers and want to provide a good experience. But sometimes, business demands make it hard to advocate for long-term subscriber value. Men's Wearhouse offers a great solution to this dilemma.
Part 1 of this article series examined the purpose, definition, and metric associated with win/loss analysis. This final part discusses getting started, questions to include in the discussion, when and how to conduct the analysis, and using the findings
Companies are realizing that in today's competitive business environment, marketers must go beyond the status quo of a Web site that acts like a brochure if they are to induce user behavior and enter the world of opportunity outside of counting visitors and click-throughs. The trick is to combine both art and science to understand your customers and maximize your marketing mix. While analytics are definitely a starting point, B2B firms need to move beyond that to turn their Web sites into a lead-generation tool.
A great-looking email template is important for establishing credibility and brand recognition with readers; but, as the old saying goes, never judge a book by its cover. The same mentality should always be applied to email campaigns. A nice-looking template means nothing if subscribers aren't engaged and interested in what you have to say. The content of your email or newsletter is vital to the success of your campaign. Whether creating awareness, generating sales, or building customer loyalty, it's important to remember what keeps customers coming back for more.
How can businesses use social media to shorten the sales cycle? And how can marketers measure the ROI of their social media investments?
Here's a scenario many of us have experienced: The CEO sets the revenue goals in the annual business plan; the plan is handed down; and the business units scramble to make the numbers. Only one thing is wrong: We don't know how the decision was made about what matters. Deciding what matters leads to solid criteria development. Deciding what success looks like will drive what matters. There is a link between what matters in a general sense and what matters to your business unit or organization. Follow these four steps to figure it out.
Here are five essential areas of any email marketing program that are worth poking around in. Turn over some rocks, and don't hesitate to dump anything you discover underneath that shouldn't be there. In the spirit of spring, let's do some email cleanup.
As much as we would all like to believe that we're masters of our own destiny, the unfortunate truth in business is that growth stalls. Over the course of a decade, more than half of companies stall... and that's in normal economic times. Given what we're facing now, how should companies respond?
The need to better align the sales and marketing organizations is generally well known. They are connected through their shared roles in motivating customer-purchase activities and divided by different cultures that concentrate on distinct portions of the customer-purchase funnel. There's no doubt that alignment is good, but what must you ultimately accomplish to drive performance and profitability?
How can your webinar receive a standing ovation? In a follow-up to last week's article, here's a guide to the technical steps for ensuring your webinar becomes a smash hit... as much within your own organization as among the intended audience.
You get it. Email needs to be relevant, timely, and personalized, and it has to arrive in the inbox—not the spam folder. When an email renders, it should load images perfectly, guide the eye through stunning, effective design that drives subscribers to convert—download, purchase, whatever. But effective one-to-one marketing is more than just email.
Harnessing the power of customer insights throughout your organization produces a powerful, ongoing interactive connection with key constituents that competitors can't duplicate. Beyond the clever words and attention-getting visuals, the connection with the customer truly engages. When the product has been reviewed, when the ad is over, it's the feeling that remains that makes the sale and keeps the customer. If your marketing is based on customer insights, it's likely that your customers are going to feel understood—and therefore good about themselves. That's the feeling that will build the brand and drive sales.
For cooking up new leads or positioning a company as a thought leader and trusted industry resource, webinars serve as an effective tactic. They create dialog and tempt prospects to get to know you better. In fact, webinars can become a company's best lead-generation tool; now get the scoop on what goes into planning a great online event from our own online event team.
Marketers talk about asking for feedback all the time. Yet, few marketers take the time to really engage with subscribers on any level. That's why BettyCrocker.com stands out.
Measuring your natural-search performance is definitely a good idea. However, establishing goals for your natural-search program is what will help communicate direction for the program and serve as a guide for measuring overall success. The challenge lies in establishing realistic goals in an achievable timeframe.
Video viewing is way up, but so are video postings. These days, it takes more than a dancing baby to attract eyeballs and gather viral momentum. Here's a straightforward guide for netting your audience's attention, with advice from organizations that are working video to their advantage.
Before you ask me to go to work for you, go to work for yourself. When you've implemented the suggestions above, I'm more receptive to helping you connect with your next job opportunity. But I don't have time or inclination to work with job-seeking networking spammers. Heed the lesson of the online social networkers: "It's the relationship, stupid." You won't stay unemployed forever. But the work you put into documenting your accomplishments online and taking an interest in others in your field is a long-term investment in yourself.
Marketers today understand that consumers think, feel, and react in ways different from June Cleaver some 50 years ago. We use descriptors like fickle, indecisive, and disloyal to describe the modern consumer. Just what do these terms mean? Mainly, they mean that consumers have too many choices—multiple brands, brand extensions, and sub-brands—and too much stimulation, especially online, making it nearly impossible to predict their next move. And yet, marketers continue to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on segmentation analysis and other research, hoping to understand and predict the behavior of these fickle consumers. It's as though they're still chasing June Cleaver when neith
A good landing page should tell a story. But filling the page with fluff isn't going to sell your product or service. There is a method to the madness behind the creation of a great splash or jump page. And it's a pretty systematic, organized, and detailed method, at that.
Email marketing is likely your most effective tool for improving customer relationships, building brand awareness, and generating sales. It is also the most abused one. Practitioners of knee-jerk planning rely on emails to bolster a sagging month or fill in the holes left when other marketing techniques miss their mark. Even though it works (which is why it is abused), there is a price to be paid. Customers become disenchanted when they receive numerous emails promoting one sale after another or one product over and over. Everyone's threshold is different. Some may opt out after a week, others a month, and still others a year or more. (Note: there tends to be a jump in opt outs at the
On company Web sites everywhere, community sections are popping up—both a cause and an effect of a climate in which more and more marketing directors and brand managers are being asked by their companies, "Why don't we do something 2.0?" Although an online community can bring innumerable benefits to a brand, launching one is a project that should be considered carefully, to ensure that your efforts will have the desired results.
Do video ads work to turn viewers into buyers and passionate brand advocates? For starters, measurement of the effectiveness of video ads gets bogged down by syndication, viral distribution, viewing via social networks, and many other factors. So how can you find out if your video ad "worked"—an even more important question in tough economic times when marketing budgets are tight?
When done properly, win/loss analysis provides clarity and insights into customers' perceptions of your product, experiences throughout the sales cycle, and expectations created by your company messaging.
Want to improve your online conversion rates? Reconsider your registration page. Whether your conversion process includes registering for a demo, signing up for an e-newsletter, or making a purchase, there are particular rules you should follow.
When the slow season strikes, devote some energy to pumping up your brand. These five exercises will show you where to start to best position yourself for the inevitable upturn.
Decision-makers who are worried over the stability of their company's finances should remember one simple truth: The source of your business's cash flow is your customer base. What all of this boils down to is the need to make smart, informed investment and cost-cutting decisions that have both a short-term and a long term perspective.
Marketing events with paid search campaigns can be a great source for additional traffic and, with these tips, can also be an efficient promotion channel.
Some businesses opting for digital instead of print do it because they've gone green. Others want to harness the internet's speed, reach, and other capabilities. The rest like the convenience of online or have some other strategic purpose that points them that way. But it might pay to slow down and make sure that you've picked the better route... or, combination of tools. So, here's a list of filters to consider.
Earlier this month, the author offered five ideas for getting ahead in an economy that's got us down. As promised, here are five more inexpensive (yet powerful!) ideas that can help you and your business come out on top.
First, there were blogs. Next came mass-market social-networking sites. Now some companies are bringing it all under one roof and hosting their own interactive online customer communities. Should yours be doing the same? Well, to quote an oft-quoted answer, "it depends."
Why do brand leaders wait until their brands are at the breaking point, at risk of joining the likes of Radio Shack and 7Up? Instead, renovate your brands while it is strong and growing. Spot changing market dynamics and address them as opportunities... before they have time to develop into threats.
At this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the Consumer Electronics Association announced it expects mobile phone unit sales in 2009 to grow some 31 percent in North America, with global unit sales reaching approximately 1.2 billion. The announcement validates the mobile market as a wellspring of untapped potential, but it also poses the challenge of how to effectively engage audiences increasingly selective about how, when, and where they buy.
Many companies already recognize the value of translations for reaching that vast worldwide audience. They've been having product information, press releases, and marketing and advertising copy converted into the languages of their current and potential customers for years. But smart companies realize that to strike a chord with more buyers, they'll have to "localize" their messages so that audiences will feel that everything about an electronic or printed communication has been produced by someone just like them. Not only is the text in their language (with proper idioms and slang), but the graphics, navigation buttons and user interface are familiar. In short, nothing hinders the flow o
Not all customers are alike, and what appeals to one may not interest another. Therefore, it is important that you connect the message you are sending to your customers' differing interests. Email messages that are segmented, targeted, and relevant to the recipient are much more likely to be opened and acted upon.
Linking strategy is about doing whatever it takes—buying, swapping, going after as many reciprocals as possible—to maximize your presence on the vast expanse that is the World Wide Web, all of which will ultimately lead to increased site traffic and improved search engine rank, right? Wrong.
Where do marketers turn once all the fat has long since been trimmed and all that's left is muscle and bone? And how do we break the downward spiral of cut, cut, and cut some more? Here are some ideas on what to cut... and (just as critically) what not to cut.
For most CEOs, good marketing is a bit like pornography—it's hard to define precisely, but they know it when they see it. Still, it's clear that one of the problems is that most CEOs cannot put their finger on what Marketing isn't getting done—but they can envision that nothing much would likely change if the whole marketing team were to disappear. So, what's a CMO to do?
Where can you get the best ROI in online media? The answer is simple: great search engine rankings. Learn what it takes to push your listing to the top of your category with these latest exclusive tips from search and linking strategists.
How do companies reap solid advertising ROI from email newsletters? They incorporate four key marketing tactics into their campaigns: relevancy, list quality, design, and tactical landing pages. And then they apply them, like this....
If you are on Twitter to represent your company, your boss will probably soon ask you to prove the value that your tweets have to your business, if he or she hasn't already asked. So how do you know whether your followers are listening or whether you're just tweeting in the wind? How do you know whether tweets about topic X have more or less value than tweets about topic Y?
Hyundai took the bull by the horns in this bear market and scored big. It used behavioral segmentation to identify what was keeping prospects from buying and then developed a strategy that made it easier for customers to part with their hard-earned dollars. What can you learn from its example? In every market change, even a downturn, there is an opportunity to use the power of behavioral segmentation to make your product or service stand out.
One of the most dangerous trends emerging is that B2B marketers, and their extended search-marketing resources, are regularly making bad decisions based on "solid analytics data." All too often, marketers are deciding to spend either more or less money based solely on the conversion rate of how a certain search phrase, ad creative, or banner ad performs: in other words, the percentage of people who visited the site and requested a whitepaper, a demo, etc. While conversion rate, in the context of an analytics report, is one way to measure the effectiveness a search phrase, it can be extremely misleading.
GM's CEO, Rick Wagoner, has opined that the automaker's biggest blunder was to walk away from the electric car. But GM's biggest strategic blunder might have been its failure to view Saturn strategically—and as a consequence not allowing it to fulfill its destiny as a domestic competitor to Toyota, Nissan, and Honda that could actually win. As the company makes hard decisions in the struggle to survive, the challenge to GM will be its ability to learn from—and not compound—that mistake.
Every day we are bombarded with bad news about the economy: dismal corporate earnings, budget cuts, advertising gone dark, clients and agencies and people coming and going, and a sense of turbulence, malaise, and timidity. What can marketing do? Today's brand leaders should follow these 7 Ps of branding as a guide during the recession, and beyond....
Social media is cool! Blogging and podcasts are cool! We're so cutting edge! Yeah, whatever. The people looking at social media long and hard fall into a few camps, and this article is for those who are scrunching their noses up and asking, "How exactly does social media improve my business?"
When the going gets tough, the tough get... cheap. Today, a good marketing idea has to be as inexpensive as it is clever. In this first of a two-part series are five inexpensive suggestions that can lead to productive results.
People succeed together because they share a unified sense of purpose and a common vision for what they need to do. This unified sense of purpose comes from core beliefs. Core beliefs help a team to create together because they share a common worldview that helps people filter their observations, establish values, and hold certain things in similar high esteem. Such a worldview also acts as a guiding beacon, orienting people regarding who they are and what they can do together.
Facebook provides marketers the ability to directly connect with customers, and potential customers, on a deep and personal level. If you're not leveraging that opportunity to cement relationships and differentiate yourself in the mind of the consumer, you're opening the door to competitors who are.
There's been a lot of brouhaha of late about Facebook's ill-fated attempt to change its terms of service to maintain licensing rights of terminated accounts—and understandably so. The issue of customer data ownership is an important one. However, many businesses with an active presence on the social site are now fearful of getting caught up in any ensuing consumer backlash, and they are wondering what to do—keep our Facebook pages or move on to someplace safer? The short answer is, Right now, just keep focusing on connecting with your customers wherever they are (and they are still, absolutely, on Facebook, in droves).
As part of the research I did in preparation for my recent book, BrandDigital, I interviewed some of the best and brightest people in the fields of marketing and digital technology, and they provided incredible insight on how digital tools and tactics can be used to not simply increase operating efficiency but also increase customer loyalty. Here I share some of those insights, with specific focus on my conversation with Bob Pearson, Vice-President of Communities and Conversations at Dell. Though Dell is a computer manufacturer, the ideas that Bob discussed can be adopted by any organization, no matter what size, industry, or level of technological acumen.
Sears performed a courageous email-marketing act in mid-December. Like every retailer, Sears was surely eager for additional sales and revenue as the worst holiday season in memory reached a crescendo and the sale window started to close. Despite that pressure, the Sears team had the discipline to hit the pause button on the hard sell in attempting to make a connection with subscribers. Instead, it sent a co-marketing email with Heroes at Home, promoting a national gift registry for returning US soldiers.
Email is a medium for economically and effectively marketing your small business. But most everything out there that provides guidelines, best-practices, and advice on the application of the channel to your marketing efforts are largely geared toward bigger businesses. Until now, that is, because here are 10 tips you can leverage and implement easily and quickly—while still having a positive influence on your bottom line—without having to worry yourself with multivariate testing, dynamic content development, and data integration.
Even in a social media world, email pulls as the strongest-performing marketing channel. The first step on the path to strong performance, however, is a compelling subject line. Here's what makes for a good subject line, as well as a list of our own 100 subject lines that will both inspire and delight.
As companies tighten their ad spending, inexpensive social media is clearly the next marketing frontier. As with any new craze, there are enormous opportunities. And with them come giant pitfalls that must be avoided.
What's your Return On Sound? Budgets may be tight and long-term planning may feel out of reach, but a few simple principles can help lay the groundwork for long-term brand value for "sonic identity." Music and sound create significant long-term brand power. That effect comes by design, and it starts with a few questions.
Knowing what to improve and by how much is vital to establishing realistic performance targets and metrics. This two-part article discusses how to use benchmarking to assess your organization's performance and to understand what changes to make. Part 1 defined benchmarking and explored its value. This second and final part identifies marketing capabilities and process that can be benchmarked and outlines the five phases associated with a successful benchmarking initiative.
A few basic thoughts advertisers should consider for the 2010 Super Bowl: • Who watches the Super Bowl? Approximately 100 million viewers, with more than 40 percent of them women. • Who spends the most money as a consumer? Women spend approximately 85 percent; men spend only 15 percent. • Who focuses more on the game—and who on the commercials? Though many women love football, and a lot of men enjoy seeing the new commercials, women focus more on the commercials... and men more on the game. The 2009 Super Bowl commercials were far below my expectations.
Your company may already have more than enough traffic on your Web site to achieve your business goals, but the problem is that you may have a leaky Web site: Prospects and customers are visiting your Web site, but very few are taking the next step to do business with you. Here's how to plug the leaks.
When a company launches a blog, it wants to know all it can about the traffic coming to the site, particularly the amount of traffic. But is traffic volume the best way to measure the performance of your blog? Here are ways to measure your blog's traffic that are likely more critical.
There are a number of ways to measure the success of a Word-of-Mouth marketing campaign on the Web. Start by looking in the right place: where the target audience congregates online.
Over the past two years "green" has become part of nearly every serious business discussion. But what will happen now in this damaged economy? Some of the green pressure on companies will lessen, but the underlying forces driving the green wave will continue over the coming years—from volatile commodity prices (which will rise again aggressively after the recession) to a rise in transparency to tougher questions from key stakeholders (such as your business customers, consumers, and employees). Those big picture trends will continue over years, but here now a few specific predictions for 2009.
The economy is sour, consumers aren't buying, and the competitive landscape is mutating. What's a marketer to do? Well, you can start by following advice from the likes of Tim Berry, Seth Godin, David Meerman Scott, Bryan Eisenberg, and Jonathan Salem Baskin, as they discuss marketing smarter, and for less.
What are the seven most important words in Web marketing? Here's a hint: Search, engine, and optimization don't make the cut. So what words do make the list? What are the seven words that will make your Web site worth viewing?
Getting your permission-based email marketing emails into the inbox and ensuring that your email design is just right are closely related. Here is some useful information on the nexus between the two as well as on doing both well.
Perhaps your spending has spiraled out of control and your conversions haven't budged. Or, like many of us, maybe your performance is fine but your budgets have been slashed, forcing you to produce the same results with less spend. Before you scrap everything and start from scratch, pull out this trusty first-aid kit for PPC campaigns.
The current financial meltdown prompts another, larger catastrophe in the works: the change in the earth's climate and what it will do to business and society. Although those two challenges may seem worlds apart, there are three critical attributes of the financial crisis that are eerily similar to those of the climate crisis.
Dear CEO: Welcome to the blogoshere! So, umm, how do you really start? How do you get started blogging, and do it well? Let's avoid the technical requirements. (You've got people who can figure that stuff out!) Instead, let's focus on creating the right mindset.
Digital marketing isn't just an ever-growing collection of components anymore (if it ever was). Don't limit your perception of it to adding the latest Web 2.0 gadget to your site or playing in the newest online community. It's not simply about befriending the Johnny-come-lately of the Web 2.0 family, ranging from YouTube to Twitter to podcasts, blogs, MySpace, Facebook and SecondLife. There is no "connect the dots," because digital marketing is geometric, not linear. What's it all about then? These days, it's about creating fusion.
The key to a corporate blog's success lies in a company's ability to earn the trust of its readers, and a well thought out blogging policy can provide the necessary foundation. Here are some of the factors any organization should consider in order to give credence to a blog.
In the Wild West of Facebook, there are nonethless a few established laws by which to market your product, service, or cause. Renegades beware: Failing to adhere to these can result in warnings, requests for immediate action, suspension, termination/disablement, or just plain user turnoff. Here are four approaches to avoid.
Blogs provide rich opportunities for organizations to interact with customers. But now marketers are wondering how to create even more dynamic content and "stickiness." That next level of intimacy has already started to emerge with video blogs, or vlogs.
CEOs and CMOs are interested in seeing marketing organizations improve their performance in two key areas: effectiveness (the ability to produce the desired result) and efficiency (reducing waste). The economic environment makes these efforts even more top-of-mind. Often the question that remains is how much do we need to improve? Benchmarking is one way to assess your organization's performance and understand what changes to make.
It's probably no surprise that the process of acquiring new customers comes with one of the higher price tags of any of your marketing initiatives. The value of growing your customer base is obvious: the potential to sell more products or services. Moreover, increasing customer loyalty will reduce your marketing costs by providing you with a growing number of prospects and customers that can be easily and efficiently communicated with. Accounting for these 5 basic lifecycle tactics for the coming year will help identify areas of focus when laying out your strategy and setting goals.
Wall Street had a stormy 2008, but there is a silver lining: Industry leaders are now turning to all things "eco" as a new source of (genuine?) green. Here are the top 5 green marketing stories from a volatile year—and what they may mean for your business in 2009.
Finding the balance between search engine optimization (SEO) and a successful user experience can be a challenge. The two strategies can conflict, and companies may mistakenly favor one over the other.
What does your brand look like? Is it recognizable—in any medium? Or does it change its appearance and present a confusing array of visual styles? Most organizations understand the strategic importance of a consistent visual style... but fall short on implementation, especially when there are multiple in-house or agency creative teams.
The author recently had lunch with a good friend, a restaurateur. The food was delicious, but the lessons shared were even better. It seems the fragile nature of the restaurant business has more than a few things in common with the fragile nature of doing business on the Web.
Will nearly 100 percent of my marketing email end up in my customers' spam folders? The answer may be "yes" if your company doesn't change its email practices.
How did the Obama for America campaign do it? By its adherence to several game-changing strategies.
The news about investment in marketing is not good as many firms cut their marketing budgets left and right. Instead of taking an ax to your marketing budget, consider first how your budget is allocated and move some resources to marketing activities that yield a higher ROI.
Do you know what will ensure your web site's success in 2009? Here's the top 10 ideas for online marketing success this coming year... and beyond.
Digital marketing is hot. And a recent MarketingProfs survey showed that the first items that marketers faced with reduced budgets would cut were print advertising and tradeshows. So, why focus on print collateral at all? Here's a close look at three reasons why print collateral may still be viable and relevant.
What's of greater value: the idea itself, the selling of the idea, or the production of the idea? While there seems to be a shift afoot, why does our industry continue to struggle to ascribe value to (and get paid for!) the core concepts that fuel everything else?
When we are given the opportunity to stand out from our competitors, we must be memorable! What will standout so that people who are there will tweet positively about your company, your presentation, your product? What will they remember? What will they say about you?
Personal branding is something that every career-minded professional needs to be thinking about—every day, and with everything they do. With the recession growing in severity and marketing budgets being cut, now is the time for you to be thinking about your personal brand—before your name lands on the layoff list.
In the holiday email season of 2008, retailers turned up the gas on their email campaigns, hoping to salvage what was predicted to be a flat or down consumer-spending season. Chad White's Retail Email Index shows retailers sent a record number of emails in early December. But, he also points out, this spurt followed a flattening of the index, perhaps caused when major retailers encountered deliverability problems. It's not clear whether this email burst caused or influenced those deliverability woes, but an increase in frequency typically often leads to more unsubscribes and a higher spam-complaint rate, which in turn reduces deliverability. That's one of the trade-offs you can expe
Want to really impress your boss, your board, your employees, or your mom? Want to drive your customers to the competition? Then simply fall flat on your face in your attempt to get your business to stand for something in the marketplace in 2009. That will really make an impact—and fill you with warm fuzzy feelings of non-accomplishment. So, if you're ready to fail, buckle your seatbelt and engage the air bag, because we're getting ready to crash and burn.
Would your prospects be more likely to buy if they knew how others have benefited from your services? If so, maybe it's time to tell them. Better yet, let your current clients do the talking. But make it easy for them to share their experiences with a wide audience. Launch a customer case study program.
What does "return on investment" really stand for? Roughly, it means the value we expect to get out of the effort we put into something—the output (return) resulting from an input (investment). But here's the trick: ignoring the input, or doing nothing in social media, will guarantee no return at all. So what is the "Return on Ignoring" social media? Here are some perspectives from the front lines.
by William Leake
Gems of 2008: If you're like most of us, you probably have a LinkedIn profile and a slew of (or at least some) connections there. But are you leveraging LinkedIn to the best of its abilities, as both a marketing tool and career resource?
Gems of 2008: Online reputation management means tracking your brand and reacting when necessary. Brand monitoring can save you from a potential disaster when someone cites your name in an article that misrepresents you. What's more, it can help you proactively join conversations around your topic area, helping to get your brand name out there.
Gems of 2008: You need an e-newsletter and you know it. But before rolling up your sleeves, please review the following six bromides from a recent how-to article phoned in by a reigning email-marketing magnate. After each, I'll explain how to do the exact opposite so that you can avoid polluting the e-cosystem with mediocre e-newsletters.
Gems of 2008: Ever sigh to yourself, "There just aren't enough hours in the day!"? You're not alone. Most marketers are overloaded and under-resourced. But it doesn't have to be that way. And managing your time more efficiently isn't the answer.
Gems of 2008: People have not stopped buying things, so how are they researching and purchasing products since they have made themselves immune to old marketing techniques like banner ads and direct mail? The answer is with search engines and Google. According to comScore, Americans conducted 11.5 billion searches in June 2008, and Google was used for 61.5% of those searches. This means it is essential that you make it easy for customers to find you, and one of the most effective ways to do so is search engine optimization (SEO), which focuses on getting your Web site listed in the unpaid, organic search engine results.
In a genre of disaster movies, there's a dramatic moment when an asteroid is plummeting toward Earth. Amidst a flurry of intense heroics, the asteroid is redirected... and tragedy is averted. But shouldn't the scientists be working sooner to change the asteroid's path? Which brings us to the relationship between advertising and shopper marketing... and a checklist of five things to consider to change the asteroid's path.
Why do people believe things irrationally, in the face of zero evidence? You already know the answer: People who really, really want to believe, will believe... regardless of where the evidence points. Are you managing your marketing program this way?
In search, you have a very short window of opportunity for engaging your prospect. The only way to get a solid competitive advantage in SEO is to use techniques that ensure you are giving a prospect exactly what he or she is looking for. Otherwise, your prospect will simply click the back button and visit one of your competitors—a process that takes mere seconds.
Is your company packaging experiences? Are they sought—or are they sold? And, drilling the concept down one more level: have you ever looked at yourself and considered the package that you offer and the experience you provide? In the current downturn, where layoffs loom large, those with the better shot at developing business or finding a job understand that the complete package and the experience contribute to a brand identity that stands out in a crowded marketplace.
Recent buzz about personas has created some confusion. If you've tried to develop and deploy personas, you may have experienced resistance from other departments because they don't grasp the value that personas purportedly provide. The reason may be that personas (in the form of customer profiles) by themselves don't offer all that much. But personas are not just customer profiles; rather, "personas" is the title for a complex tool that has four components.
To weather the current economic storm, companies must take a step back and assess their core business and brand for continued relevance. Dramatic changes in behavior by cash-strapped consumers have had an impact on respected brands ranging from Starbucks (closing 600 stores) to automotive giants, which have announced cutbacks in North American production and are asking the federal government to help save them from bankruptcy. Did these organizations anticipate the downturn and make the necessary adjustments in advance?
What if we thought about using scenarios as a creative way to segment the market? After all, different customer sets face different scenarios that trigger their response. By understanding the various scenarios that different customers face, you can take a unique marketing approach to each scenario.
A good opt-in procedure lays the foundation for a strong email program. But a well-thought-out series of welcome emails will help turn your newcomer into a long-term subscriber.
Mobile advertising is deemed complex for the same reason online used to be: Standards are murky at best. Online advertising evolved because online dashboards allowed agencies to monitor and optimize their digital campaigns in real time. Why doesn't mobile do this?
This focus on "The What" is exacerbated by some search engine optimization techniques intended to drive traffic rather than to brand product, sell services, or convert traffic into customers. Traffic is important, but converting that traffic into paying customers is more important. Even the best and brightest search engine optimizers will tell you that their job is to deliver traffic, not orders—closing the deal is your job, and anybody who tells you that closing can be done by means of some automatic never-touched-by-human-hands method is just plain nuts.
This is the second part of an article that discusses the importance of good Web site design and the process of streamlining the creation of Web sites.
Eco-logos are all the rage—but how valuable are they as a marketing tool? Are there some hidden risks that warrant a second look? Let's consider the three ingredients of an effective marketing logo—green or otherwise—and their implications for the savvy eco-marketer.
Unfortunately, for most marketers, email marketing remains an educated guess predicated on seasonal and industry trends. What most marketers don't realize is that they have an opportunity to send out smart, high-performance campaigns based on true consumer desires. Here's how.
By now you've heard the news—your paid marketing and advertising efforts are suffering from a loss of credibility with your target market. Marketing authorities Al Ries and daughter Laura have even declared the "Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR" when it comes to building brands and perceptions in the minds of consumers. In effect, marketers are now dealing with a "credibility gap"—if you were to create an ad tomorrow that was 100% fact, your target audience may not believe the message solely because it came in the form of a paid advertisement. The good news is that you can close the gap significantly for your brand's marketing activities by leveraging PR and marketing together.
We are awash in "green" articles that highlight examples and best-practices of companies such as Patagonia, Stonyfield Farm, and Timberland—businesses that have had sustainability as part of their DNA from the outset. But what is the right approach for large, multinational brands?
As blogs, social networks, and social sites explode in popularity and emerge as a low-cost marketing tool in tougher economic times, companies are looking for help in navigating the world of social media. But does your business really need a social media consultant, or can you go it alone?
Where R U? In other words, where is your text message strategy? When will your organization begin using text messaging and other mobile messaging services in your marketing, customer care, and collections processes?
In the two weeks leading up to the November 4 election, email messages came fast and furious from the presidential campaigns of both John McCain and Barack Obama. In the last week, both supporters received at least two emails a day from both campaigns. In evaluating those email messages, I saw commonly held best-practices that should be emulated, practices that should be avoided by marketers, and a few new concepts that may inspire email marketers to take their programs to the next level. Despite the outcome of the election, lessons can be learned from both presidential candidates. Also, some practices simply do not cross over from the relationships that political candidates form with
Marketers navigating these tricky economic waters need to stay focused on profitable expansion rather than contraction. If you can grow, even in these times, you will emerge on the other side of the economic crisis ahead of the competition. Creativity, combined with on-demand marketing tools, will help. When budgets are tight is the best time to try new and less-costly techniques leveraging Web 2.0 technologies.
Good site design starts with an idea—not with a technology. In today's internet obsessed world, far too many people are becoming more focused on the latest and greatest Web 2.0 buzzwords than on the fundamental purpose of the Web site. Whether that purpose is to provide information or allow for the purchase of a product or service, there is a main purpose for the site and that needs to be identified.
Leading companies do not subscribe to the notion that marketing is a discretionary expense. They know that there is business opportunity during economic downturns, and marketing can lead the way.
Can asking a question in an ad increase sales? Some will argue vehemently that the use of a question is a non-starter, a pre-ordained copywriting disaster. Craig Huey, founder and president of the award-winning Creative Direct Marketing Group, froths at the idea of a question in sales copy. Nevertheless, a question is a tool. And as with any tool, any copywriting strategy or tactic, if a question is not formulated and handled with proper caution it could indeed do immeasurably more harm than good. Well, let me correct that: If you're a direct marketer who tests, you can measure precisely how much harm a poorly phrased question will do... or how well a good one will convert.
It's a fact of list life: You're always going to lose a chunk of your email list to bounces, unsubscribes, and spam complaints. In the past, you might have just shrugged off this loss—typically 30 percent or more annually—because you were able to acquire new subscribers at a much higher rate than what you lost. But your ability to do so might be getting tougher now. With consumers getting pickier about whom they want to receive email from, along with the growing constraint caused by consumer and business spending cutbacks and the prospect of tightened marketing budgets, it's more important than ever to focus on retaining your subscribers and customers. These three strategies can help y
Ongoing economic uncertainty has made aspirational luxury customers more selective about what they purchase than ever. "Aspirationals" are aggressively prioritizing discretionary spending, purchasing a select few emotionally charged luxury items but buying everything else at mass or "masstige" outlets. Companies that want to continue to profit from aspirational customers must make their brands accessible and relevant to them by taking their lifestyles into consideration and meeting them half way. Here are seven tips to draw out aspirationals, just in time for the holidays.
The process of thinking deeply is known as "workable wondering," which involves the use of empirical, rigorous, and relevant information to challenge our assumptions. It means more than collecting information. It requires reading between the lines.
Most companies should be using paid search as a mandatory component of their marketing. And with search engine marketing spending expected to reach $25 billion by 2012, it's obvious that a good share of marketers understand its potential. But first, understanding best-practices is essential to success.
The more quantitatively you can measure your social media, the better. And the closer those measurements are to business outcomes, even better. How rapidly people in the network engage with you and respond to your "call to action," such as write a review, participate in the blog discussion, or forward something to a colleague... can (and should!) all be measured.
During the 12 years that Christa Carone has been with Xerox, the company has been on quite a roller-coaster ride, having gone through significant challenges back in 1999 through 2001/2002, when the company's brand and reputation really took a hit. Recently she discussed with Roy Young her work to strengthen the company's reputation in the marketplace, to bring the brand back to a place that is worthy of such an iconic name like Xerox, and to help the company grow.
A Web site has to accomplish only two basic things to deliver success for your business—and those two things are mission-critical. A successful Web site must be built from the ground up to attract and capture: first, the attention of your target audience and, second, the attention of the major search engines.
In this day and age, one could say that green is the new black. More than ever, consumers are engaged in environmentally sound practices. And companies can easily leverage this "green" trend to not only show their customers their concern with the global environment but also reduce the continually increasing cost of the direct mail process.
Whitepapers have been with us for a long time. But innovations in printing and distribution—and even in the way we conceive of whitepaper content—have dramatically changed the game. Let's take a look at the ways we can bring color to the whitepaper—and multiply the impact of our efforts.
Deliverability is high up on the list of an email marketer's concerns. In fact, a recent report from Jupiter Research, the 2008 Email Marketing Buyer's Guide, found that deliverability is the number-one consideration for marketers when selecting an email service provider (ESP). Unfortunately, the best ESPs on the market can do only so much to aid in getting marketing messages to the inbox. The majority of the control lies in the hands of the sender.
New media and technology have inherently changed the way the newest generations experience the world: how they learn, live, play, and communicate. So what's this mean for marketers, specifically, who want to reach digital natives... and the rest of us, too?
Whenever I can, I include telemarketing as part of a comprehensive lead-generation program. When it comes to setting sales appointments, populating a database with decision-maker names, or filling seats at an event, there's no contact method that's more direct or more effective. The results of telemarketing are usually measurable, too, which is also a rare benefit for any campaign tactic. But, actually, you can expect more from your telemarketing programs than appointment-setting and seat-filling. In fact, telemarketing can lend tremendous support to helping you achieve other aspects sales and marketing initiatives.
Predicting where your prospects are online is tricky—and often expensive. And it's not always about where they are but also what are the best ways to reach them. How should you decide where to start? The military has utilized a system called CARVER, a mnemonic term for the weighting factors used to identify and prioritize targets. CARVER helps to discover the greatest opportunities to inflict the most damage while employing the lowest amount of available assets. CARVER stands for... Criticality Accessibility Recuperability (return-on-investment) Vulnerability Effect Recognizability For marketing purposes, CARVER can be applied to help determine which digital marketing tactics
The burgeoning online marketing industry has produced a veritable treasure trove of technologies and their associated tools to support your efforts. With this cache of options comes the need to be accurate in your selection, making sure the tool matches the objective.
Marketing pundits have advocated throughout this year that tough economic times are the right time to build bands and grow share of voice. But this will not work for every company. Here are the six approaches that can help you assess whether spending more or less is right for your business.
Marketing executives and entrepreneurs alike have rushed to China in the last decade. Yet, today, India offers an excellent, although somewhat misunderstood, alternative. Here are some myths (and realities) about tapping the potential of this country of 1.1 billion.
Retailers have been aggressively planning their holiday marketing strategies for months. In these stressful economic times, it is more important than ever to build messages that resonate with your audience. Like retailers, nonprofits should be thinking about how they can tell their story and leverage the holiday season. In this article, we'll discuss some techniques that nonprofits can use to bolster revenue and solicit support from members through email and online tactics.
In 2003, the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act (CAN-SPAM Act) became law. It was a big step toward cleaning up the "Wild West" of email marketing. Continuing that clean-up, earlier this year the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) modified the act, allowing email marketers to use their "accurately registered post office box or private mailbox" instead of a "valid physical postal address" in their emails. The CAN-SPAM act, however, has not changed much over the years and should be followed not only because it is the law but also because it will make you a better email marketer.
Paul Barsch, Marketing Director at Teradata, the business intelligence and data warehousing firm, is responsible for coordinating services engineering teams to define, build, and bring new offers to market. A self-described "information junkie" with over 15 years in marketing for information technology and consulting firms, Paul challenges all marketers to bring value to their organizations by taking the analytical path to understanding customers.
While mobile marketing can be invasive on its own, integration with the larger marketing campaign mix and proper tracking of customer response can ensure that customers are drawn in, rather than turned off, by mobile messages. The mobile medium has achieved staying power as a gateway for marketers to reach customers in motion. For example, SMS can serve as the initial point of contact with customers, with the intention to drive the customer somewhere (to a store, kiosk, Web site, and so on).
A customer-focused approach to marketing communications applies whether you're a property manager renting out high-end vacation homes in Maine to wealthy residents of NYC, or an international high-tech company providing support to clients who rely on an enterprisewide accounting software. No matter what you sell or to whom, by framing your marketing message from the customer's point of view first—not yours—you'll craft much more targeted copy: customer-centric copy.
During your annual planning ritual, do you study and analyze the current situation in your market and then move on straight to setting your goals? Big mistake! Chances are, your goals end up far less ambitious than they should have been. So do your financial results. Instead, identify and map your opportunities before setting goals.
The good news: More of your customers can read your email messages on their smartphones now, instead of waiting until they get back to a computer. The bad news: The email that looks so great on your PC may look like a garbled mess on the phone. These HTML cross-platform optimization tips can make your message render better on both PC and mobile phone.
Don't you get tired of hearing about how great referrals are? Especially if you're not getting enough of them? It's worth taking the time to understand why most referral efforts don't work and to understand what keys need to be in place in order to get the results you want.
While blogs and social networks seem to get most of the attention when it comes to social media talk, podcasts and videos also remain viable channels to reach and connect with an audience. CC Chapman should know, as he's been active in the blogosphere and social networking spaces for years, but was also among the first bloggers to embrace and effectively utilize podcasting as a communication and brand-building tool. Today, he continues to show his clients how they can put his knowledge to work for them via his work at The Advance Guard. CC was kind enough to talk to us about his Video and Podcasting: Making Media as Marketing session at Marketing Profs Digital Marketing Mixer, and also
Since public relations isn't done "to" a company, it's done "with" the management team or owners, there's an essentially different nature to how this kind of professional service is successfully delivered. It's much more akin to legal or medical services with the "defendants" or "patients" (read management team members) having to be deeply and consistently involved in an on-going process. As the now famous slogan coined by tech PR guru Regis McKenna goes, "PR is a process, not an event." Without that, it generally goes nowhere and the agency won't be working with that client for long.
Should SMS be used for every marketing message? No, definitely not. Your company must consider whether or not your intended message is urgent and determine if subscribers will appreciate receiving it in a mobile form. With that said, there are certainly are two major reasons SMS should be on your shortlist.
Do you know what people are saying about you? Online reputation management consists of tracking your brand and reacting when necessary. Sometimes it's tedious. But brand monitoring can save you from a potential disaster. It can also help you proactively join conversations around your topic area, to get your brand name out there.
The power of great creative is that it over-delivers. It exceeds expectations. It signals that you care about and respect your audience—and it affects your brand when you need it most: the formative moment of a prospect's first impression of you. Measure precisely how much of a difference this makes.
Love 'em or hate 'em, politicians are some of the most effective marketers out there. Let's break down how they achieve their ends, and how we marketers can cop their best moves to win the vote—for our products and services.
Marketers have recognized the immense creative talent that resides outside of Madison Avenue. They've recognized that, with Consumer-Generated Advertising, properly executed, they can generate quality, consumer-relevant content at a fraction of the cost of conventional agency productions. And these commercials break through the clutter with their "real" feel and relevant messaging.
Social marketing techniques such as blogging, wikis, podcasts, twitter, and virtual worlds have given marketers an extraordinary range of opportunities to reach out to audiences. But do these techniques really pay off—or are they just trendy alternatives that offer no measurable return on marketing investment?
If you are an email marketer who is doing traditional "batch and blast" email marketing, now's a good time to start segmenting and sending triggered emails. Doing so allows you to send more relevant emails and achieves better response from your subscribers.
Business are flocking to Twitter, but many still aren't sure how to leverage the tool to grow their business. Here's how Comcast, Dell, The Home Depot and others are using Twitter to reach their customers and nurture their businesses, and how you can, too.
If you're like us, you probably have one of those piles on your desk that keeps being moved from one corner to another. You know, that pile you need to get to but avoid because it will take some real effort to tackle? For many marketing professionals, marketing accountability, analytics ,and ROI are in this pile. Marketers must stop avoiding this topic and tackle the pile!
Think of it: There are many businesses that offer similar products or services. Prospective customers can purchase goods or services from any competitor, literally anywhere in the world if they choose to, thanks to the Internet. Net result: effectively marketing a business, which translates to owning a slice of customer mind-share, is more challenging than it ever was. It takes something more to market successfully now. And it certainly takes something more than a one-time strategy and a couple of marketing tactics to be effective. That "something" is relevance.
Companies have been scrambling to figure out how to leverage Web. 2.0 applications, but are they doing so for all the wrong reasons? With all the buzz about blogs, wikis, widgets, and other forms of user-driven Web interactions, the question your business needs to answer is, "Is this what our customers want?"
Why are "mirror neurons" so relevant to marketers? Because they reveal why we're hardwired to imitate, cradle to grave. Mirror neurons explain why we sometimes do things that we can't explain. They can also be a source of valuable instruction for product marketers, able to turn a brand from a moderate success into runaway success that no-one can live without.
Marketers responsible for lead generation are all too familiar with some common challenges—getting closed-loop feedback from the sales organization, measuring marketing effectiveness beyond just lead quantity and cost per lead, and building strong alignment with the sales organization. As presented in the MarketingProfs' research report, "B-to-B Lead Generation: Marketing ROI and Performance Evaluation Study," effective lead-generation marketing is very much tied to overcoming these challenges to prioritize lead quality over lead quantity.
Kodak has invested people, energy, and two years of dedicated effort into building its social media program, and has met with great success. Here, Amber Naslund talks to the people behind Kodak's efforts to find out why their social media program is so valuable to their business, and how they've defined success.
Good email design is a critical part of ensuring a high response rate. A major frustration within the industry is the lack of standards to guide designers when creating HTML email. Though there isn't one email-marketing design bible, there are fundamental design rules that should be applied. This article reviews some of the high-level design principles as well as more in-depth rules affecting some of the most common issues email marketers face.
There's a new kid on the social media block that's starting to garner a lot of attention from companies. Microblogging sites, such as Twitter, are increasingly becoming a companion to an existing blog—or a standalone strategy for businesses that are using social media to connect with their customers. But many companies aren't sure what the microblogging "rules of the road" are. This is where Connie Reece comes in.
It's hard to do great marketing without a clear plan. Unfortunately, many marketing plans simply don't work very well; they add little value and end up on a shelf, collecting dust. Marketing leaders need to be aware of these five common pitfalls, and steer clear.
An authentic and established sustainable commitment resonates with women. Here's how companies can work toward more sustainable operations, offer products that reflect that intention, and (in doing so) create good business with a double whammy.
Rohit Bhargava is a well-respected marketer and blogger and frequent speaker at conferences, including the upcoming MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Mixer. Here, he shares advice on how to get the most from the conference experience and discusses where social media is headed, as well as how businesses can make the most of it.
Although more than 80% of high-tech marketers say they have a lead-nurturing strategy, 64% say their strategy needs improvement, according to a February 2008 survey by TeleNet Marketing Solutions. As for which areas of overall lead-generation strategy tech marketers would like to improve in the next year, nurturing of long-term leads was the No. 1 response. Nurturing shortens the sales cycle and improves return on investment from lead-generation activities, so it is important to reconsider your nurturing strategy frequently. Consider the following three recommendations to enhance your strategy.
The top 10 challenges facing the interactive marketing community are very much the same as those facing the entire marketing community... in that almost every marketing professional must address the interactive/online marketing medium. When they are asked about top challenges, many marketers say things like "social media" or "search engine optimization" or "integrating online and offline." But I think the challenges are much more fundamental to the individual and the organization. Here's my list of the top challenges, and my recommendations for dealing with them.
Many people think the power to restore our environment—to curb greenhouse gases, to clean up our air and water, to cut down on precious resources' ending up in landfills—lies in the hands of scientists and engineers, or lawyers and legislators. But the real power of green lies in the hands of marketers.
Last week Google released Chrome, its new standards-compliant Web browser. But what does that mean to you? Though Google offers a great comic that explains the big changes, it is a bit jargon-heavy and, frankly, long at 32 (comic) pages. Here's an introduction of Chrome for the layman.
Clearly, Abraham Lincoln knew the difference between the almost-right word—and, the right word. A distinction famously defined by Mark Twain some 25 years later as "the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning." With that thought in mind, here are a few choice words on word choice to help you get more of the right words into your communications. And, make your writing more effective.
Whitepapers can be a highly effective tool to establish your credibility, promote a product or service, and get results. Here are the 10 best practices to writing a whitepaper that will get your company noticed.
Within the grand taxonomy of consumer touchpoints, e-newsletters hold a sorry position. They're the longwinded busybodies who never get invited to the cool parties. Porcelain-skinned print campaigns turn up their perky, sans-serif noses at e-newsletters' frumpy templates and canned copy. Super Bowl spots kick sand in e-newsletters' bespectacled faces. Yet, these boxy embodiments of mediocrity move product and build loyalty. Marketing people are aware of this—they've proven it with charts and everything. You need an e-newsletter and you know it. So to that end, please review the following six bromides from a recent how-to article phoned in by a reigning email-marketing magnate... and then
Everyone wants brand equity. But building it, when you are more likely to qualify for the Inc. 500 rather than the Fortune 500, can be a puzzle. Particularly when the role models for brand equity are global icons like Coca Cola, Volvo, or Sony—hardly your peer set. The good news is that the path to building brand equity is clear. Here are six simple steps you can take to get started.
The vast red and blue oceans of the marketing world tsunamied into our awareness and vocabulary a few years ago, when two professors, W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, claimed that competition can be rendered irrelevant. Their book, Blue Ocean Strategy, heralded the news to marketing managers and CEOs all over the world: After years and years of surviving in red bloody oceans, swarming with murderous competitors, finally there's a better alternative! Let us consider an example of a company that supposedly followed the Blue Ocean strategy.
Is your company guilty of throwing dollars at campaigns to increase Web traffic, only to turn around and squander sales opportunities due to poor telephone and email handling? Make sure that your telephone system isn't preventing prospects from reaching out and touching someone at your company. As soon as you finish reading this article, pick up the phone and call your company's sales lines and test the process for yourself.
"Case study" is really just another way to say "storytelling." The best ones recognize that we all connect on a primal level with anything that begins with "Once upon a time" and ends with "and they lived happily ever after." So how do you write a case study that shows you care, makes your clients feel good, and (indirectly) demonstrates your credentials?
There's probably no better case study on how a business leverages social media to connect with customers and grow itself than Gary Vaynerchuk's Wine Library. Here, Gary shares the reasons your company should pay attention to social media, and what impact these tools will have in the years to come.
With the rise of search engines, Wi-Fi, and a Do-It-Yourself mindset, today's consumers are more empowered than ever before. They not only believe that they're entitled to information but also have unprecedented access to information on a global scale. An increasing number of consumers turn first to the Internet when they want to make a purchase—even if the product will be bought offline. That's why any PR strategy focused solely on media gatekeepers is missing a large piece of the market. While there's still value in sending your message via traditional media, more and more prospective customers are doing their own research online, bypassing newspaper, magazines, radio, and TV complet
Performance management has been applied to various parts of a business for quite a long time, particularly when it comes to manufacturing, logistics, and product development. Applying the concept to marketing is finally coming of age.
Every touch from every department is marketing. Each customer interaction, whether via phone, email, direct mail, or Web, leaves an impression about your brand. Are your marketing communications self-serving, or are they serving customer needs?
Businesses today are hunkering down. With consumers clutching their wallets more tightly, companies are scrutinizing every budget item in an effort to maintain profitability even as revenues are flat and costs rise. And with marketing commonly viewed as a discretionary spend, it is one of the likeliest victims of the ax.
In the luxury brand business, stretching brands too thinly across market segments may gain short-term revenue increases, but it also almost guarantees long-term loss to the shareholders, brand owners, and, well, consumers. So, set your limits for how much you really want to stretch your brand before you open your doors to the public.
Email is not dying in the midst of the social-media revolution. In fact, the question we should be asking is: How can email marketers best leverage the new social-marketing applications?
It is essential that you make it easy for customers to find you, and one of the most effective ways to do so is search engine optimization, which focuses on getting your Web site listed in the unpaid, organic search engine results. How do you actually get your Web site ranked high in search engines? The answer is quite simple, but getting there can be a bit more difficult.
Michael Antman's recent article, "Six Reasons Word-of-Mouth Doesn't Work," struck a chord. He raises reasonable points about the limitations of WOM; after all, it can't completely replace other forms of marketing communications. However, we can't ignore the impact of WOM. What's more, here's what companies should be doing to leverage it.
Email continues to be a highly effective channel. But for too many marketers, email revenue per subscriber is not growing, and more and more subscribers are simply ignoring the messages. How can we continue to grow our email programs?
It takes time and experience to stay on the cutting edge of SEO, and more than likely you don't have that kind of time, considering your other marketing efforts. So here's a quick update on what's hot and what's not in the world of search engine optimization.
If you are in the business of serving customers, right now is the time to seek out the intangible opportunities to soothe the savaged consumer soul. Here are 11 ideas that will bring you dividends by soothing the frayed nerves during these times of spending woes.
Marketers are under pressure to generate returns. Cost-per-lead lead-generation advertising allows online marketers to pay only for leads—not for clicks and impressions that might never convert. Here are four steps to generate leads and increase your returns.
Change is inevitable: As an economy matures, ages, and ultimately evolves into something new, adjustments must be made to our business development, marketing, and branding. Failure to adapt to new realities results in potentially unwanted and dramatic consequences. We are all aware of how modern economies have developed from those based on agriculture, to those based on industry, and then on information. But where do we stand now? Is the information economy dead? If so, what's replaced it?
Now that we know that 85% of B2B customers use the Internet at some point during the buying process, why is it that so many business executives still contend that online marketing "doesn't work" for businesses with enterprise solutions or complex sales cycles?
It's a marketer's dream. Customers are so passionate about your product they actually crave it. In fact, outside of the US, your product is the number-one consumed fruit. However, here's where the dream hits reality. You're in the US, where two-thirds of US consumers have never tasted a mango. You've been hired to generate sales during the Mexican mango season—which is only four months long. One thing is crystal clear: You have to get it right the first time. Or mangos will be out of season and you'll be out of a job. That's the situation that our firm, Lewis & Neale Public Relations and JRS Consulting, faced when EMEX, an association of Mexican mango producers and shippers, retaine
You already know the importance of a permission-based email list. You even practice list segmentation to improve the relevance of the emails you send to your customers and prospects. But how much time do you devote to cleaning your email list? If your email hygiene is lax, you're greatly limiting the success of your campaigns.
There's a lot that China could do better, like every country in the world. But the Beijing Olympics PR machine is failing badly to put a positive spin on anything. So, what are they doing wrong?
Marketers have become masters of segmentation inside our own organizations. We've segmented ourselves into Lead Generators. Message Makers. Brand Stewards. Useful, of course—in fact, indispensable. But indispensable the way facilities management is indispensable. Or travel management. Or any other organization that an enterprise relies on, but cannot be easily shown to have direct impact on revenue. And if you don't have direct impact on revenue, you don't directly impact profit. And if you don't do that, you're second in line for everything—except maybe workforce reductions.
It's an ugly truth, but a truth nonetheless: Marketers are sinners. We're not talking lying or cheating or stealing or coveting here. We're talking about the sin of assumption. And many of us commit that sin on a regular basis, from assumptions about what to say to assumptions about how to say it.
You've wolfed down lunch in record time and have seven minutes before your next meeting—time enough to Google "customer service tips," which brings up terabytes of platitudes on friendliness, knowledge, going the extra mile, blah, blah, blah. You know these cookie-cutter best-practices probably work, but they're too obvious and stale to motivate your people toward new plateaus. Instead, try on these three unusual mindsets that your team may actually find useful.
Could your Web site could do a better job of engaging, converting, and retaining customers? Look at how another industry—in this case, real estate—preps their product for market. Here's how you can apply their strategies to your own situation.
Is there any form of marketing communications more compelling than word-of-mouth, the enthusiastic and genuine recommendation of a person you like and trust? It's no wonder that virtually every business-to-business marketer prizes this organic, spontaneous, and—perhaps best of all—practically cost-free method of bringing in business. But some businesses, especially on the B2B side, rely far too heavily on organic word-of-mouth strategies and, specifically, on acquiring new customers primarily through referrals.
When the economy gets tight, customers can take forever to reach a buying decision. So, managers think up incentives that will encourage the customer to buy. Whatever lure you use should inspire the prospective customer to edge a little closer to a purchase, which is sometimes easier said than done.
Matt Strain is director of worldwide relationship marketing at Adobe, where after just three years he is recognized as a Marketing Champion who adds financial value to the company. He has had a distinguished career in technology marketing. He recently took time to share his thoughts about what makes him successful and offered advice to fellow marketers for getting ahead in our challenging and competitive field.
Marketers spend gazillions on branding. But what is often missing is a focus on the people who carry the brand around every day: The front line folks who answer phones, sales reps who follow leads, the custodians.... Every word they utter is part of your brand. Yet, how many of them are aware of that?
It starts simply. You're setting up fields for your email signup form and instead of grabbing just the basics for information, you start to wander: What if I got all the information I want up front? So then it begins: name, address, home number, work number, mobile number, bag phone number, AOL IM, Yahoo IM, favorite band, favorite station, favorite team. Suddenly, users are looking at a form worthy of governmental consideration.
Reducing the number of people who unsubscribe from your mailing list is one of the key ways to minimize list churn and in turn make it easier to grow your list. That doesn't mean you make it harder for people to leave, however. Instead, learn why people leave, offer them other ways to remain in the relationship and make the process a great customer experience.
In Part 2 of this series, the author looked at defining your success goals and what to measure when running multivariate tests. Let's now look at your site factors and learn how to select the right ones to test. By now, your marketing goals are clearly defined and you're ready to run a multivariate test to optimize your site's marketing effectiveness... but which elements, or factors, should you test?
Given how critically important effective content is right now and how important copywriters are to the creation of same - it might help the cause of world peace and mutual understanding to shine a little light on things. How do you choose a good freelance copywriter and how do you increase the odds of getting through a successful project? Here are a few ideas to help you make better decisions, which can pay real dividends.
It's hard to believe how different it was, just a mere fifteen years ago, to conduct secondary market research. There was no Internet, no Yahoo!, no Google search, no Web-accessible databases to tap. How times have changed. But, not always for the better.
Your organization has decided to outsource its search marketing, yet quickly realizes that one size doesn't fit all. In fact, finding the right search marketing vendor depends on your needs, preferences, site and budget. These 20 questions are a good place to start...
Successful email marketing strategy is a lot like a spin class at the gym: We start with a predefined warm-up, slowly move into the heart of the workout (remembering to breathe), and finish with a focused, well deserved cool-down. In fact, email marketers could learn a technique or two from spinning....
Missed deadlines. Blown budgets. Shoddy code. Bad design. The "Well, it works on my machine!" routine. Throw a dizzying array of technical terms into the mix, and you end up with a recipe for digital disaster. The process doesn't have to be such a slippery slope. Here's how to nurture a successful relationship with your Web team.
Do you want to record a video message for on-demand access? Do you want to do live video from a conference? Or do you have completely different objectives? For marketers who want to put video communication to good use, the key is finding the right tools. Here's a great place to start.
Film festivals have become the prime venue where independent filmmakers launch their works to the public. Festivals offer an excellent place to build buzz about your film, find distribution deals, network, get press coverage, and experience an audience for your movie. Despite the importance of film festivals, most independent filmmakers have not really considered how best to market themselves to these venues.
Want to take your performance to that ideal level of highly effective and efficient marketing? It takes better access to detailed data and ROI discipline, but it also comes along with greater growth and better levels of budgets, according to the recently released study.
Face it. If you are an online marketer, you're a publisher. Your Web properties are media sites, whether you consider them such or not; so you might as well make the most of it and provide your customers and prospects with something of value.
Does an economic slowdown necessarily mean that business-to-business marketers have to find even more ways to do more with less? Or can a downturn create opportunity for smart marketers to grow and thrive?
Bringing a new product to market is one of the most costly and risky activities that any GM faces. Voice-of-the-customer research and stage gate reviews have improved the odds of achieving success. But do they go far enough? Three important tasks are frequently overlooked even though they offer the ability to identify weak links early on. So, how can you overcome the odds? Arm your team with a three-step commercialization insurance policy designed to identify and assess risks.
Recipients of unwanted email messages have found a new way to unsubscribe from lists: Hit the Spam button. Major Internet service providers are now (or will soon be) using feedback loops to communicate complaints back to the message sender. What does this mean to email marketers? It means they need to rethink the way they display their unsubscribe link, especially if they are sending to a questionable list or are starting to receive complaints.
Blended search, also known as universal search, is starting to change the way searchers see search results—and consequently, the way search marketers and Web site owners approach search marketing.
This is a tale of flimflam and a unique way that Boar's Head is battling it. Given the power of word-of-mouth, it's hard to overlook the potential of how Boar's Head is empowering its customer base. (And see how you can, too.)
Integrating your email marketing application and your internal databases will take time and planning. Start by selecting an email marketing application along with an open CRM application. In doing so, you will increase efficiency and ROI by bringing these powerful tools together.
More than 90% of journalists go online to find story ideas, with 73% specifically researching press releases. With Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and free automatic email alerts from Google News so readily available, it makes sense that the Web is a prime source of consistently updated information for busy journalists. So how can your organization capitalize on these trends?
Too many organizations have made bad impressions on bloggers by trying to reach them on their terms, instead of the bloggers'. But the process of engaging bloggers can be surprisingly easy. Follow these steps to launch a simple but effective blogger outreach program... in one day.
You can improve lead-capture and sales-conversion rates by directing your prospective customers to special Web site landing pages. But you can enjoy even greater success by expanding your landing pages—turning them into microsites—and customizing the home pages and navigation menus of those microsites.
Effective marketing campaigns don't necessarily require big-company budgets. By being smart in the up-front planning stage, you can maximize the greatest value from your budget, regardless of its size. Here are eight low-cost tools you can use immediately to give your marketing program an instant shot in the arm.
While most people think of public relations as media relations, there are times when either you can't reach your audience through print, broadcast or the Internet, or you need to supplement your media program. That's when you need to think about face-to-face marketing—placing clients directly in front of targeted audiences through informational events structured around their interests. This strategy works well for consumer markets (think cooking demonstrations in grocery stores, hospital-sponsored health fairs, and hotel-sponsored bridal expos). It also works well for B2B companies like construction companies, law firms, or consultancies—businesses that want to showcase the expertise of t
B2B sales happen over a period of several months as trust builds between the prospect and the seller. Webinars may be used not just to bring new leads in the door but also to move existing leads through the pipeline to a final contract. Rather than a one-hit approach, you need to determine where webinars fit into the overall sales cycle.
What does "best practices" in Marketing Operations look like, and how do industry-leading companies operate and integrate this highly valuable function? Marketing Operations Partners recently polled more than 80 marketing leaders to find out.
Long-term, lifecycle emails train a customer into becoming a better one, and they enhance the relationship between customer and company. It's sometimes hard to sell to the finance group that lifecycle emails work. And now, with trends going toward social networks and word-of-mouth networking, how do lifecycle emails compete? Here are three techniques you can use effectively to fight the good fight.
What's this new buzzword "TransPromo" all about? The term is heard more and more frequently in industry circles today, at conferences, trade shows, and even in boardrooms. So just what is TransPromo?
The "need" for differentiation is so well accepted, it's considered simplistic to even make the case for differentiation. Why make a case for something everyone already knows? I disagree. Put some further thought in it. Most everything I've read and heard about differentiation is wrong. I suspect the same is true for you.
All email marketing managers search for ways to grow their subscription files, and many options and opportunities exist to grow subscription files organically. Unfortunately, some email marketers still rely on purchasing permission-based lists as a means to increase their email file. By doing so, however, they settle for a quick fix that really does not result in a stable, viable, and cost-effective file. The saying "Good things come to those who wait" applies to smart email marketing managers who appreciate the logic and process of growing their subscription file organically, over time, with well-developed marketing efforts.
There are countless ways to get into the game with Social Media. Check out these few sample Social Media tools and see how they can be used effectively and efficiently.
With the Hispanic population in the US expected to surpass white non-Hispanic inhabitants by 2030, marketers are scrambling for ways to tap into growing spending power while generating loyalty to their brands. Strong, enduring brand loyalty can be built among Hispanics, but not by using tactics that work for white, Middle America.
Like most of us, you probably have a LinkedIn profile and a slew of connections there. But are you leveraging LinkedIn to the best of its abilities, as both a marketing tool and career resource? If you aren't sure, you aren't alone. Indeed, many of the 16+ million people who have signed up on LinkedIn are probably asking "now what???"
In his last article, the author defined multivariate testing and how it can optimize your Web marketing, as well as five common errors to avoid. Now, he looks at what to measure in your tests and how to define your criteria for success. Before you start formulating a test hypothesis, or begin running your tests, the first and most important step is to ensure that you have clearly defined objectives for your Web site. You'll want to examine your marketing goals in order to determine the appropriate success factors that all of your organization's stakeholders can agree upon. Let's start with typical measurable Web site goals.
Launching new products, services, or segments is the lifeblood of growth for most organizations. Yet, despite its importance, the launch process is often mishandled or assigned inadequate resources. Many of the mistakes that companies make are basic—yet frighteningly frequent and consistent across various types of businesses and industries. Here are six common fault lines in the launch process that very company should look out for.
Today, leads flow to Marketing from ever-increasing online sources—email campaigns, the company Web site, Google AdWords and Google searches, webinars, online advertising, blogs, and virtual trade shows—as well as from traditional marketing activities. The sheer volume of leads, or "suspects," can be overwhelming. How does Marketing prioritize all these suspects?
The modern email inbox is a perpetual promotion machine of colors, styles, and sales pitches all fighting to be seen. In an attempt to break from the herd, many email marketers ironically adopt a herd mentality of more clutter, more content, more, more, more. This misguided pursuit of increased visibility merely leads to increased invisibility. Before joining the invisible ranks of the "clutter cult" of email marketers, consider that a huge body of marketing research demonstrates that the human mind is a sucker for simplicity and focus. The eye embraces that which can be easily digested. Less is more.
Isn't direct mail pricey? It can be. But don't think that you have to create big, flashy mailers. In fact, when your goal is to generate sales leads, simpler, cheaper formats often work better. Here are five basic direct mail tools that you can use to generate sales leads quickly and inexpensively.
You've probably heard phrases such as site optimization, search engine optimization, event optimization, and campaign optimization. A more recent concept with broader application to marketing is the idea of marketing optimization.
As marketing managers seek to keep their brands fresh and relevant, many are tempted to jump on the latest trends and fads. You know: online and major media advertising with new imagery... new slogans and taglines... new product packaging... all playing to the latest pop-cult phenomena, hot colors, and new vibes. But is that really the solution? The short answer is "no."
Marketing professionals know that careful, accurate, and constant campaign tracking and analysis are just as important as delivery itself. Your email marketing campaigns, integrated with Google Analytics, make this possible—and easier to do than ever before.
Consider this: Every business, company, and organization is made of a unique group of people functioning in a unique culture. Accordingly, every organization considering a blog must address its own unique set of circumstances before it can determine whether a blog is the right step. Here are five key considerations for launching a blog.
Luanne Tierney, Senior Director US and Canada Channels Marketing at Cisco, has had a 20-year career in technology marketing—the past 12 years at Cisco, and before that at Apple, HP, and 3Com. She is a "Marketing Champion," because she drives cash flow for Cisco by helping channel partners market more effectively. Excerpted here is her philosophy of leadership in marketing.
There are 7 problems so rampant in B2B companies that they seem infectious, passed along as marketing people switch companies or work with contagious agencies. Treatment, however, is available. Here are the 7 diseases, their symptoms, probable causes, and suggested remedies.
Email marketers are perpetually caught in the middle. On the one hand, we are celebrated for being the go-to resource for generating short-term revenue results. On the other hand, the applause dies down when the budget talk comes around and we continue to be handicapped by limited investment and strained resources. What's an email marketer to do? Here are five ideas.
Building a list of responsive subscribers via a Web site that has a bit of traffic and quality content is surprisingly easy. But sometimes, when working with users, we're surprised to see low conversion rates. So, we take a look into just why that might be. Here are five factors to consider when growing your list.
By looking at your company's readiness in conjunction with your market, your competitors, and your buyers, you'll be able to determine what the potential is (or isn't) for social media. What's more, you'll be able to assess where you should be diving in, or what's a realistic starting place.
Your media plan likely contains all the usual, well-known media options: TV and radio ads, print ads and outdoor advertising. We've all been going with these options for years, decades in fact. We've always known we wouldn't be fired for nominating them. Just like an IT guy wouldn't be fired for installing an IBM solution. But this security is fast disappearing. One day soon, you might be fired for limiting yourself to these options.
Many brands and companies today are constantly reinvigorating their businesses and positioning them for growth. There is a constant need to innovate, reinvigorate, update, recalibrate, or just simply fend off the competition in an effort to better explain "why buy me." To move forward, companies and brands need to first take a look at their current brand positioning. But for a moment, it makes sense to go back to the brand drawing board to answer the question, "Just what is brand positioning, anyway?"
Your email marketing messages should avoid these Top 10 spam filter triggers. Even more importantly, your messages should include the Top 10 most powerful words in direct response to ensure successful delivery, avoid complaints, and improve response.
If you're a marketer, every undelivered message translates into lost revenue. Luckily, there are ways to improve the odds of delivery and decrease the chance of running into problems in the first place. The key to email deliverability lies in earning the trust of internet service providers, or ISPs. Because these companies need to provide quality service to their subscribers, they devise standard protocols and policies regarding unsolicited bulk email.
Should your company should start a blog, open a Facebook account, or be on YouTube? Start by taking a giant step backward and assessing the social media landscape as it relates to your market, your buyers, and your competitors. Here are three key factors to consider.
Considering the stakes, it's no surprise that the online sales channel is becoming increasingly important to the bottom line of top-shelf brands as consumers of luxury products and services continue to demonstrate their willingness to spend as much through commerce-enabled Web sites as they do in stores. Despite this trend, many luxury brands continue to separate their online and mainline marketing efforts, confusing customers with disconnected messaging and missing golden opportunities to cross-support expensive marketing initiatives. What few realize is that the best experience—the experience that the customer wants—results when all channels work together and complement each other. H
Nonprofits are confronted with many of the questions that any other enterprise often ponders: How do I connect with my customers? Which communication vehicle will provide my organization with the highest return on investment? How can I determine what my target market wants? While many of our corporate friends have turned to email marketing to help answer these questions, the concept is comparatively new to nonprofits. Email marketing may not be the silver bullet for every problem, but it provides us with an efficient and affordable tool to communicate with our constituents.
Search marketing can be a confusing and misunderstood marketing tactic. Many have heard the term but aren't sure what it means; others have an idea of what it's about but need to know how to get started. This article both walks you through the definitions and types of search marketing tactics available as well as indicates how (and when) to best apply them to grow your business.
Today's diverse consumers are looking for more than just talk. They want companies to be an authentic part of their niche community. They are savvy and skeptical. They are watching to see how sincere you are in including them—as employees, senior managers, board members, media partners, vendors, and so on...
At a recent conference, Sylvia Reynolds, chief marketing officer for Wells Fargo, asked, "When did Marketing become the make-it-pretty department?" Reynolds then reminded conference participants that the fundamental role of Marketing has always been about the customer. Essentially, Marketing's role is to find, keep, and grow the value of customers. So what does that mean, and how does a marketer get beyond the "make it pretty" syndrome?
With the growing significance of the Web as an integral part of the long B2B sales process, companies are more aware of the value of content: meaningful communications material that attracts and holds prospect attention. But... where will that content come from? It can (and should) come from you and your employees.
As a result of its online customer community, a company can get much more than basic product feedback. It gains deep insight into the needs of customers, and creates ever-greater customer loyalty by embracing customers as co-designers. Most importantly, the company goes directly to the source for product enhancements, pulling new innovations and ideas directly from the minds of the customers who use, buy, and recommend its products. This is the holy grail of customer-centered product design. Online customer communities can enable the connections, host the conversations, and facilitate the processes that make routine innovation possible.
Viral marketing has been all the rage in recent years: Companies are intoxicated with the idea of creating the next video that spreads across the Internet and becomes a viral sensation. But for every successful viral effort there are countless attempts that totally miss the mark. Here's where David Meerman Scott comes in. Scott understands why ideas spread in a Web 2.0 world, and he educates his clients on why the "old school" rules of PR and marketing are totally irrelevant in a time of content-sharing on YouTube and Twitter.
We design our marketing campaigns for "rational" buyers. But do buyers ever act rationally? In a preview of his keynote at the MarketingProfs event next month, NY Times bestselling author and MIT Prof Dan Ariely talks about the irrational factors that influence buying decisions.
If you've heard it once, you've heard it a thousand times: subject lines matter when it comes to email marketing. Think of subject lines like the headline of a newspaper article. If it grabs you, you start to read. Over the past few months, the author collected subject lines from all sorts of senders, all based on how they grabbed him the second he saw them. What you'll see here is quick analysis of what he liked or despised. The hope is that after perusing this piece, you get a sense of what other marketers are doing and how you can be better, resulting in more opens, more views, and more purchases.
How can you build and steward a long-term customer relationship if you can't access your prospect in the first place? To reach those big fish takes creativity, perseverance, ingenuity, chutzpah, and, sometimes, just plain dumb luck. Here are five creative ideas that will get you in the front door.
HTML email marketing is now thriving and widely encouraged for its strong ROI and results. Pundits predict an ROI of $45.65 for every dollar spent on email marketing in 2008. Email was also voted best marketing vehicle for customer retention, according to Jupiter Research. HTML email has come a long way, but there is one major pain point that remains: compatibility across all major email accounts.
Today's technology offers ample opportunities to start conversations with and among customers, fans, foes, competitors, and the press—any person or group who cares to listen and, perhaps, act on the messages received. By some estimates, 85% of the information companies collect is not in a form that they can access or analyze—it is unstructured. The Gartner Group reports unstructured data doubles every three months while seven million web pages are published every day. This cacophony presents the one of the biggest challenges companies face today.
An engagement between a buyer and a seller begins with a single point of contact. It could be as a sale or an inquiry that, with the appropriate follow-up, can be converted into an ongoing experience for both the seller and the buyer. It is such an experience or set of experiences that create what we define as an engagement—or at least the potential of creating one.
As a marketing professional, you likely work in a specialized function that may feel like a silo in your company. But you're also best positioned to break down the walls between your function and others (like R&D, sales, finance, and so forth). It's not an easy task, but the following five tactics can help.
Blogging takes advances in marketing one step further by allowing businesses to initiate conversations with their audience. Gaining a better understanding of your customers allows you to more effectively and efficiently market to them. This, of course, lowers your marketing costs.
One of the biggest challenges that marketing departments face is producing marketing tools that actually get used by the sales team. You want to create marketing tools that help sell products, not collateral that sits on a shelf. So how do you do it? How do you create a marketing tool that not only gets used but also can reinforce your marketing messaging so that everyone is speaking the same language?
You may or may not be using the basic segmentation strategy of RFM (recency, frequency, monetary): dividing your email mailing list into a few buckets based on recency in ordering or visitation to the site, the number of times they've ordered or visited the site, and the lifetime spend. But here's a better approach to segmentation.
As web marketers seek new ways to boost conversion rates and improve the site experience of their visitors, interest in multivariate testing is on a feverish rise. But those unfamiliar with the techniques are often unclear about where to start, or how to ensure success.
Marketers must continually fight the temptation of executing random, disconnected lead-generation activities to prospects. Success today requires marketers to apply the discipline of campaign development in order to establish a relevant, timely dialog with the target audience.
by Lester Wunderman
Online users expect more today from Web sites, and competition is fierce. Marketers should be considering how to change their sites to keep up with customer expectations of the Web, and to increase conversions and enhance the brand experience. In fact, all companies with public-facing Web sites may soon be challenged with a redesign. There is opportunity for marketers to take the lessons of customer-centricity and put them to work to optimize customer relationships online.
Email marketers must keep in mind that a consumer who decides to opt in to the brand's email channel is likely a fan of that brand. Do not lose those consumers by making the following mistakes.
Nearly all search engines use spiders (also known as robots, their original name) to go out and scour the Web looking for Web pages. These search engine spiders then bring the data back to be indexed by the engine. Since roughly 1996, individual meta commands have been used on individual Web pages to modify how search engine spiders behave. The most useful of these commands are fairly universal and respected by almost all search engines. Here are some of the more popular ones and reasons you might want to use them (or not).
When Bob Lutz of GM or Jonathan Schwartz of Sun set up their blogs, they probably didn't worry too much about the review with Legal. But how does, say, a midlevel corporate marketer or product manager set out to create an "official" blog with the sanction of Legal?
Web analytics tools and pay per click reporting features are becoming more sophisticated, offering savvy marketers vital insights into what's working, what's not, and what needs more effort. But there is so much data available that it can become difficult to determine what to look at and which to ignore. TMI (or Too Much Information) becomes both a blessing and a curse.
If you hadn't paid much attention to title tags until now, but you implemented the basic concepts covered in part one of this series, you are already well on your way to creating a better user experience as well as a more-optimized search experience. Of course, most of us aren't satisfied with just the basics.
Ever sigh to yourself, "There just aren't enough hours in the day!"? You're not alone. Most marketers are overloaded and under-resourced. But it doesn't have to be that way. And managing your time more efficiently isn't the answer. Nor is simply delegating. You also need to be discerning about what you take on. In fact, when was the last time you prioritized your "to-do" list based on what will help further your marketing career instead of merely what will get you through your week?
We may all be tightening our belts a bit more soon. As a result, our marketing budgets will be under even more scrutiny, and marketing professionals will be held even more accountable for the money they invest. The pressure for marketing to demonstrate the contribution and value it is making will increase... yes, even more.
There are plenty of reasons for email marketers to pay attention to their unsubscribes. But if we read a bit between the lines, we might find some value by learning both to reduce the number of unsubscribes from our campaigns and to better engage those who stay with us.
Mobile technology continues to develop. The number of consumers with mobile devices capable of retrieving and viewing email continues to increase rapidly. The early adopters of the Blackberry have given way, in numbers at least, to those using what are fast becoming fully functional internet-ready devices. With multiple mobile platforms on the market and mobile phone companies vying for the sale of not only the devices but also the data plans that supply the bandwidth, these "mini-messengers" are in the hands of millions of consumers. Could your email be more mobile friendly?
Why is it that one of the most important elements of a Web site—title tags—which also tend to be one of the easiest to manage, is so often done incorrectly? What makes that shortcoming even more amazing is that SEO practitioners constantly talk about title tags. In fact, if ever there could be an area of universal or near-universal agreement in the SEO community, it would be in regard to the importance of title tags.
Much is being said these days about how marketing effectiveness can be increased by targeting customers with the right message at the right time based on customer behaviors and buying patterns. However, many companies have not been able to evolve past text-based confirmation messages.
Ultimately, brand protection is all about vigilance. By regularly monitoring the use of brands online, organizations can ensure prior infractions don't recur and can rapidly identify when new incidents arise. In a world where an organization's brand can represent half, or more, of the company's equity, it's an investment of time and resources that's well made.
In a rush to get a new product to market, many companies don't invest the necessary time to get a solid strategy in place to ensure its success. Here are six keys to determine the right strategies to minimize the chance that you will spend hours—and a chunk of your marketing budget—implementing a flawed plan. Bonus: Get a Marketing Template.
Technology marketers have spent decades trying to connect with CIOs. And in an environment where technology is fueling innovation, yet investment capital remains tight, reaching CIOs has never been more important (or more difficult). Here are five proven approaches.
Today we discuss some SEO tactics that may or may not be Black Hat, and how to deliver a dope smack to commenters who don't add to the conversation. All that and more in this Marketing Over Coffee, a weekly audio program sponsored by MarketingProfs that covers classic marketing tactics and what's new on the technology front.
One of the biggest hurdles that many companies face in adopting a blogging strategy is that they aren't sure how to quantify the results of their efforts. But as blogging has evolved, and it has become much easier to accurately measure blog performance and tie those measurements back to achieving specific goals.
Sculpting PageRank? Are you scratching your head, wondering whether Stephan is talking about carving a masterpiece? In a way, he is. If you are considering your options for getting a jump on your competitors in the search results, take a closer look at PageRank sculpting.
The ability to move, motivate, and entice consumers within the confines of their inbox is not an easy task. Too often, marketers overlook the tools available to attract and draw customers to open their messages. The inbox is a competitive arena in which you must fight for your open. The battle can be won by effectively utilizing and optimizing four straightforward email marketing elements.
What's the trick to starting afresh? Be prepared to seriously start over and establish strategies to keep your brand from falling into that rut to nowhere. Here are some ideas to kick-start your new approach.
What goes unnoticed by many can be an keen advantage for the few. By taking steps to not only build a personal brand but also seek new ways to circulate your name, you will be more successful. Here are three easy (and easily overlooked) things you can do to juice up your personal branding.
With apologies to Philip Kotler, whose four Ps—product, price, place, and promotion—have been integral to any successful product or service marketing effort of the past 50 years, today's successful marketing hinges on five new Ps. Whereas the Ps we studied in college are all from the provider's point of view, these new Ps focus with laser-like clarity on the customer.
In the past, the CMO and CIO have had a tenuous relationship, with both roles vociferously complaining about the other's lack of understanding, knowledge, and respect. But two powerful exponential trends are forcing Marketing and IT to communicate and collaborate like never before.
There's so much that business can learn from showbiz: Not to step onto the stage with a lousy script. How to give a blockbuster performance. How to get your face in the newspaper without robbing a bank. But, before you can even think about how to develop box-office appeal for your business, you gotta know what part you're playing.
You can uncover a slew of companies that tout the virtues of this email service and that email service and that other service over there in the corner. How does a corporate marketer charged with the sole purpose of finding the right company to provide software and service to get an email marketing campaigns off the ground make the right choice?
What is so powerful that it could spoil your customer relationships, blemish your reputation, entangle you in a legal battle, or even put you out of work? Email is that powerful tool. To maintain control over it, you must know the rules of email etiquette.
The best communications strategies will envelop not only authorities in new and traditional media, but also those voices in the "Magic Middle," who help carry information and discussions among your customers directly. Here's the foundation that will help you and your company engage with bloggers more effectively and genuinely.
Since many traditional advertising platforms are static in nature, and consumers are becoming increasingly interactive in their preferences, companies must become increasingly adept at using a mix of new interactive tools to reach their audiences. We are living in an interactive, entertainment-oriented society; let that fact guide you as you develop new marketing programs.
A company's chief communications officer (CCO) and its chief marketing officer (CMO) play vital roles that are very different from each other but can intersect in powerful ways. By understanding what your firm's CCO does, you can gain insights into how to build a relationship that benefits not only the two of you but also your company overall.
Here's the story of how Best Buy built an internal social-networking forum for its 140,000 employees, and how its original goal to get more information about customer likes and dislikes through the sales associates on the floor morphed into something else entirely.
How do you start from scratch yet create a top-ranked marketing blog in less than a year? If the author had anything close to a foolproof formula, she'd be making an infomercial right now rather than writing this article. Nevertheless, here she shares some tips from her own experience to help you achieve success with your marketing blog.
If you now understand (or can at least appreciate!) the first four Cs of Permission Email Marketing: Conscious Consent, Choice, Clarity and Confidence, you're ready for our final two: Control and Confirmation.
The most challenging part of a new Chief Marketing Officer's job is the first 4-6 months, when the marketing foundation is being poured. After that, it's all about delivering ongoing results and proving (and re-proving) the value that marketing provides. Here are six tips to give a new CMO some early success, strong momentum, and a solid leadership platform.
If you saw the last episode of The Apprentice, you know that two teams of celebrity contestants were asked to create a campaign to help launch a new product, Dial Yogurt Body Wash. The task was to come up with a four-page advertorial for Redbook Magazine. Each team took a different approach, but they both missed something critical.
If the Internet community didn't know its place in politics back in 2004, it certainly does today. Its "place" is to engage and educate us, promote candidates, help with fundraising and more... all through the use of new social-media tools that are increasingly vital to a candidate's overall marketing strategy.
Despite all the talk, the mainstream media coverage, the conferences, courses, and books on social media marketing, there's quite a bit of ambivalence, fear, and (sometimes) outright hostility directed toward social media by CMOs, CEOs, and CFOs. All of this leads to the dreaded "we just want to stick our toe in the water, and see what this stuff is all about" and "we want to do a small, low-budget social media project and track the ROI."
There are many efficient Search Engine Optimization techniques to optimize your business's Web site, and then there are nefarious methods. These six sneaky techniques will not only ruin your reputation and get your site banned from Google, but could have legal ramifications.
Every February for the last 50 years, stock car enthusiasts across the country have packed their sunscreen and descended on Daytona. This year, unfortunately, the economy also decided to head south. But fear not, race fans. There is hope for the brand that doesn't want to lose ground in a slowdown. In fact, a lot the same strategies that help NASCAR drivers win on the track can help your company survive the rough recessionary road ahead.
In this second of our three-part series on the six Cs of permission email marketing, we continue to define the permission fundamentals by examining the third and fourth dimensions of permission: Clarity and Confidence.
Not long ago, few B2B companies had a marketing operations function. Today, this function is becoming an important facet of the marketing organization, enabling it to operate more like a business, with formalized processes, infrastructure, and reporting. Here are three essentials that a marketing operation function should perform.
Marketing with Twitter, Google Docs for SEO, who the Connectors are and why you need them... all that and more in this Marketing Over Coffee, a weekly audio program sponsored by MarketingProfs that covers classic marketing tactics as well as what's new on the technology front.
Case studies are a marketer's secret weapon for creating an emotional link with valuable prospects, because compelling case studies invite prospects to place themselves in the story and imagine the rewards of their own successful outcome. A well-told case study makes "getting to yes" easier. Here's how to create one.
With marketing channels proliferating and messaging devices diversifying, it's not hard to imagine a future where permissions are granted not only by marketing channel (email, postal mail, phone, RSS), but also by content, device, time, and place. All the more reason to genuinely understand "permission," which in the world of email marketing seems relegated to subjective definitions.
As a marketing professional, do you proclaim your offerings to be real or authentic? If so, you may find your customers calling them (and you) fake. So stop it: Don't just say you're real; be real.
Over the past 15 years, business-to-business marketers have focused on the pipeline—leads converting to opportunities converting to wins. The reason was simple...
Suppose your product features are much like your competitors', and the benefits of using your products or services are similar. Looks like you're on the commodity train. When a typical approach fails to distinguish your business from the pack, it may be time to take your messages into the heart of the customer experience.
Small businesses are the heart and soul of our world entrepreneurial economy. They create, inspire, and fundamentally change people's lives. Here are 12 global small business trends to watch in 2008—trends that can be embraced by any culture and will add value to any nation.
For email marketers, dealing with the small business owner can be an ongoing challenge. There are typically three main obstacles to introducing email marketing to a small businesses.
How to blog for SEO juice, some killer WordPress plugins, and a Super Bowl Ad wrap-up... all that and more in this Marketing Over Coffee, a weekly audio program sponsored by MarketingProfs that covers classic marketing tactics and what's new on the technology front.
The Net Promoter concept and idea has taken hold the world over. The simplicity of one "ultimate" question is compelling. And it gives CEOs something to easily grasp and point to regarding a customer target. Those who have started to work through this concept have hit some walls, though none of them insurmountable.
Most marketers have email addresses for less than half their customers and prospects. If this is the case for your company, it might make sense to explore email appending. Let's first look at the process, and then we'll examine how one publisher implemented its communication plan.
General search engines like Google and Yahoo aren't designed for B2B companies, which is why so many experience disappointing results. Recent developments with smaller Vertical Search Engines (or VSEs) are providing a strong alternative. But, as with any growing industry, it's important to research and understand these alternatives before making the plunge. The advantages of vertical search will go a long way toward providing professionals with relevant business results while also helping advertisers and marketers target a very specific and relevant audience. Following these guidelines can help navigate this important industry trend.
Marketers are better served by liquid fluidity in their thought processes and approaches. That way they can adapt to sudden changes and new, hot technologies as social media continues its march forward. As this natural process continues to unfold over time and communities evolve, their information needs and consumption of media will evolve, too. With increasingly diverse and changing marketing environments, successful marketers will focus on social media principles rather than tactics.
New technologies are becoming increasingly harder to ignore. Today's strategies must address the full spectrum of channels, as they offer unique opportunities for differentiation and for developing real competitive advantage. Mind these four key points to develop a winning digital strategy.
Sadly, the value of most conference panels is questionable, due mostly to the lack of effective moderation. But done well, a panel can be enlightening and instructive and can serve the needs of the audience (and the speakers) equally well. In other words: Yes, there is a right way to moderate a conference panel!
So many brands and companies are constantly reinvigorating their businesses and positioning them for growth. There is a constant need to innovate, reinvigorate, update, recalibrate, or just simply fend off the competition in an effort to better explain "why buy me." To move forward, companies and brands need to first take a look at their current brand positioning. But for a moment, even a brief moment, it would make sense to go back to the brand drawing board to answer the question, Just what is brand positioning anyway?
What is viral marketing? Is keyword density still a factor in SEO?—that and some other stuff that we've been testing... in this Marketing Over Coffee, a weekly audio program sponsored by MarketingProfs that covers classic marketing tactics and what's new on the technology front.
There is a new wave of branding that aims to occupy every minute of the customer's day with an unbroken theme of branded experience rather than the momentary brand rush of purchase. Experiential brand building is taking on new and all-encompassing dimensions. IKEA, for example, is no longer just a flat-pack-furniture and homewares store. It's a construction company that builds IKEA houses, based on the IKEA promise of easy living and affordable design. Welcome to the world of living branding—a new breed of 24/7 brands that are likely to occupy more and more of our lives, from our waking moments to when we retire to bed.
Are we in a recession, or poised to enter one? Maybe, maybe not. However, let's assume that the US economy will be in a recession and that as marketers we need to work within that reality. Here are five tips for what you can do to market your products or services in an economic downturn.
Do you have the preview pane enabled in your inbox? Many of your email recipients use this setting and some even read most of their emails this way. In short, the preview pane is important email real estate, and you can use it to your advantage. What readers see in this area can influence their decision to open your email to read more or to scroll down to see more.
The role of the Chief Marketing Officer has evolved since some of the first CMOs, such as Mark Mears of Blimpie International and Phil Gospels-Strumpette of Coca-Cola, came on the scene in early 1990s. The CMO role—which initially tended to emphasize advertising, brand management, and market research—continued to evolve over the past 15 years as a result of the emergence of new media, the growing number of sales and service touch points, more complex distribution models, and the fragmentation of customer segments. The CMO has moved from focusing primarily on brands and clever advertising to a larger, more strategic role designed to enable a company to meet the ever-changing needs of a
Just as city planners utilize master plans to promote healthy municipal growth, a "Customer Community Master Plan" enables marketing executives to determine an overall customer interaction plan that will allow your company and its relationships to thrive and prosper. In other words, such a master plan avoids pitfalls.
To inspire long-term relationships with this new breed of luxury consumer, you must understand how they want to relate to your brand.
The New Year is in full swing. You've probably made a few personal resolutions, but what about making some resolutions that will help you improve your email marketing? Here's our guide to the six marketing resolutions that will make a difference to your business in 2008.
The scramble to justify budgets can result in a hyper focus on short-term ROI rather than a long-term sustainable path to continuous improvement. In truth, continually improving marketing effectiveness involves addressing three key interrelated, foundational areas.
Learn what Metcalfe's Law has to do with marketing and networking, hear some best practices with PURLs, and why January is Tech Geek Nirvana. All that and more in this Marketing Over Coffee, a weekly audio program sponsored by MarketingProfs that covers classic marketing tactics and what's new on the technology front.
Email can be a great call to action for multichannel customers, particularly in retail but also in B2B marketing. We all know that email can play a powerful role in turning Web researchers and site browsers into buyers. In fact, more and more of our retailer clients are building a specific segment of in-store buyers—and getting results that blow away store managers. Lessons learned in these B2C experiences can also be applied to B2B, especially with the advance of more strategic account management approaches that cross business and geographic boundaries.
Are you LinkedIn? Do you Spoke, Ryze, Jigsaw, or ZoomInfo? In 2008, will you get a Second Life? If these social-networking concepts are not on your radar, you are ignoring a dynamic trend that could have a profound impact on key areas of your business, such as revenue growth, talent acquisition and development, and operational efficiency and effectiveness.
This is not an article that offers tips for a job search, per se. Rather, this article offers career management advice, which is applicable whether you are in a job search or happily employed, and even if you own your own business. Here are eight things you should be doing in '08, to potentially boost your earnings, increase your visibility, and create more and better opportunities.
Designing an account registration and sign-in process that doesn't frustrate users is very difficult to achieve. It looks easy at the outset, but a pile of subtleties can sneak up, making something that should be simple... instead stressful for the users. Here are eight common design mistakes we often see as we watch users try to create accounts.
Learn some tips for writing provocative and compelling copy, get some insight into how to best use online calendaring services and how they differ from each other, and make New Year's resolutions that are both important and achievable.
There is an entire industry devoted to helping companies determine customer satisfaction levels through surveys and analysis. But how much real value does knowledge of "satisfaction" contribute to helping you keep profitable customers? The answer, unfortunately, is "not much." Though surveys do serve a purpose (primarily showing trending: "Are we doing better or worse than last year?"), they don't tell the whole story. The following are three fundamental reasons why it's dangerous to rely on customer satisfaction surveys to help improve your customer experience.
Naming. Doesn't matter what you're naming—your product, your business, your Web site or heck, even your child, your choice is important. Here are a flock of—actually, 18—ideas, strategies, and tools to make your name discovery a little easier.
If you haven't done it yet, now is the perfect time to map out plans for your email program. Any changes you might make in the first few months of the year will stand you in good stead; any plans or changes that you implement in the first quarter should pay dividends for the balance of the year. Here are several actionable ideas.
Search engine optimization decrees that there are a certain set of words that people tend to search with. But when those same people arrive on your Web site, a different set of words, called "customer carewords" becomes important. Choosing the right carewords will bring visitors through your Web site... and complete the sale.
Increasingly, companies are beginning to reach out to their customers to help them with their marketing efforts; in some cases, companies are actually turning some marketing functions over to their customers entirely. Here is how companies have successfully turned at least one of the 4 Ps of Marketing over to their customers.
A "press kit" is a collection of a few vital pieces of information that makes it easier for the media to tell your story accurately and with full details. By putting the power of your press kit to work, your company can enjoy more accurate media coverage, more exposure for story ideas, and more complete information through press coverage.
In the face of mounting competition and hype from rival networks Facebook and MySpace, LinkedIn has stayed true to its mission of creating a network for business professionals. I've been a member of the service for years, but until recently it had not had the critical mass necessary to get traction. Over the last six months, however, I've seen a flood of people using the service to connect professionally. As I said, LinkedIn doesn't pretend to be MySpace or Facebook. The design is clean, but a little stark, and it could use a little more personality to make it more engaging. In this video tour, I focus on what LinkedIn does well within its network and how you can apply the same logi
Notoriously private, Warren Buffett doesn't have a lot to say publicly, except for his annual letter to shareholders that usually makes the rounds of the Wall Street Journal, Business Week and other top publications. However, for his marketing programs, and specifically GEICO commercials, Buffett has an open checkbook.
If you've ever heard George Carlin's famous "Seven Dirty Words" you can't say on TV, you can safely avoid using all seven in your subject lines. They will definitely get you blocked. Here is a list of 100 more that you should avoid using as well.
Marketers interested in measuring effectiveness and ROI need to understand whether marketing mix modeling can work for them, or how to get the most from it. Modeling measurements are often considered a bit mysterious. But MMM has long been a reliable measurement for consumer packaged goods companies and is now proving to be a great planning and measurement tool.
What will happen when ideas become commodities just like everything else? Some people certainly buy ads from advertising agencies on the strength of the agency's own brand name, but is the value of those brands under threat?
Not a day goes by when I don't see complex technical terms thrown around in the press or on blogs. I often wonder whether the average marketer knows what half of these terms mean. This series of articles and videos is aimed at graphically illustrating (this is where the whiteboard comes into play) complex terms in ways that normal, non-geek people can understand. Herein is API (application programming interface). One of the core tenets of Web2.0 is the idea around "open APIs," as you've no doubt heard before. The concept behind the API is really pretty simple when you break it down, as this video explains.
There's a new air of excitement behind the mobile Web. Initiatives like Verizon's recent announcement to open their network, Google's Open Handset initiative, new wireless auctions, and the iPhone have energized users. For the intelligent marketer the question must be, "Is mobile the right medium to reach my constituencies?"
What is marketing automation? What are the four methods of measuring Web site traffic? Find out in the latest episode of Marketing Over Coffee, a weekly audio program sponsored by MarketingProfs that covers classic marketing tactics and what's new on the technology front.
With product marketing, your company will be able to prepare the sales channels to relate to the buyer and enable these channels to focus on the most effective messages and programs. You will be able to develop outbound marketing initiatives that move prospects into and through the pipeline to drive revenue and increase customer retention and loyalty. You will have people on your team who are always thinking about how to use what they know about the market and buyers to influence the product strategy. With this change, your marketing will be more than just selling and advertising. It will help you define the target market, position yourself as different and superior in that target market,
In Part One and Part Two of this series, the author discussed using "voice of the customer" (VOC) in defining innovative core products and services. The focus was on breakthroughs in the basic product, on hitting the home runs. Here, we take a different perspective—using innovation to acquire and retain customers once the core product or service is defined.
Marketers love talking about products like the Swiffer or iPod, two colossal successes in terms of brilliance in innovation and new product development. In fact, rumor has it there are more consulting firms taking credit for Swiffer's development and success than can fit into the new Yankee Stadium. The puzzling question remains: Why aren't there more examples of unabashed new product successes?
Direct marketers live in an impatient world. A week (maybe two) after a campaign drops, the verdict is in. And if that campaign appears not to be working, it either gets fixed pronto, or the direct marketer gets fired. To avoid being shown the door, the DM manager needs to know how to swiftly solve direct marketing's most common and costly problems.
Work of any kind requires an understanding of the appropriate tools for the job, and social media is no different. Here are some suggestions for a starter set of social media tools. The actual applications will change, over time, because technology tends to do that. But the basic functions should evolve a little more slowly.
The traditional marketing mix focused on the 4 Ps of Product, Price, Place and Promotion. Today, marketers need to expand their vision to include the new 4 Ps of Pearls, Pumps, Purses, and Power. To capture the $0.85 that women spend out of every dollar, it is time to rethink how marketers are approaching their jobs.
Customer conversations are everywhere today—social networks, blogs, forums, and other social-media outlets. These are unbiased, unfiltered interactions that can deliver rich information about how your customers talk about topics that are relevant to your company and brand. Though it would be nice if people were to use your company's messaging in their everyday interactions, the reality is that for the most part they don't. Social SEO—tapping into how they talk about you and your industry so that you can determine how they will search—is the most effective and foolproof way to master that art/science/guessing game of picking keywords.
Online surveys are an increasingly common way to solicit feedback, but response rates are often quite low due to poor survey design, lengthy surveys, requests for personal information, or a lack of incentives for survey completion. So how do you ensure that people respond to your survey? Follow these seven simple rules of engagement.
Whether or not you completely understand social media or social networking sites, the one aspect you must understand is that they are going to change the way businesses advertise. Facebook, in particular, is constantly evolving and improving its users' experience with new features and applications. As a result, Facebook is trying to change the way businesses market and advertise their products and services to potential consumers.
The advent of new media poses some challenges for even the best PR professional.
We all know some tried-and-true tips and tricks for building an email list. But there are five key points to consider and five glaring points to avoid when creating opt-in lists from the very start.
Of course you know what LinkedIn is. You already have an account, right? So what's the next step? Here are four thorny questions about LinkedIn (and their related answers) to help you get the most out of this professional social networking tool.
Marketing is suffering from a crisis of credibility. So what can marketers do to be seen as part of a machine that drives revenue and profits, not just the people who throw parties and buy swag?
What do you get when you combine video, social networking, micromedia, and a very savvy French entrepreneur? You get Seesmic. Seesmic is a social network where the primary content is video. Users record video, post it to the site, and other users reply in video. It's new and it's red-hot. It's also a glimpse of the future.
Here are the 10 biggest business blunders, and advice on how you can avoid them sinking you (and your company).
A strong commitment to environmental sustainability in product design and manufacturing can yield significant opportunities to grow your business, to innovate, and to build brand equity. In fact, if you don't manage your business with respect to environmental and social sustainability, your business may not be sustained!
Given the ease of online publishing, there's no excuse for a company not to have a current, effective press kit. But why are press kits missing from so many Web sites? What's their real value? What must absolutely must be in your press kit? And what should you leave out? Here are the details that make all the difference.
Complex technical terms are often thrown around in the media or on blogs. Does the average marketer know what half of these terms mean? This series is aimed at illustrating (this is where the whiteboard comes into play) complex terms in ways that normal, non-geeks can understand. In this installment, we take a look at AJAX, which stands for Asynchronous JAvasript and XML. As a marketer, you don't need to know about Javascript, which is a programming language, nor do you really need to know about XML, which is a data storage standard. But the asynchronous part is what is interesting. It allows Web pages to behave in a more dynamic, application-like manner. Google's Reader, Mail and Docu
Is pay-per-click losing momentum? Are people numbing to pay-per-click ads as they have to banner ads? Is growth in the channel waning, or is it just maturing? Hear Steve Rubel and Alan Rimm-Kaufman debate the issue; Alan is a fan of pay-per-click, while Steve has his doubts.
Whether you are campaigning to gain budget approval to implement your nurturing strategy or need to illustrate ROI for an existing nurturing program (or you are just trying to evaluate your current tactics) effective measurement of your nurturing program is critical. Outlined below are five steps to measure your nurturing initiative and start having it be viewed as a profit center rather than a cost center.
Press kits are like business cards. If you don't have one, you have no way to make an introduction and no way to provide valuable information to people with whom you want to do business. A press kit is a collection of a few vital pieces of information that makes it easier for the media to tell your story accurately and with full details. By putting the power of your press kit to work, your company can enjoy more accurate media coverage, more exposure for story ideas, and more complete information through press coverage.
LinkedIn doesn't pretend to be MySpace or Facebook. In the face of mounting competition and hype from rival networks, LinkedIn has stayed true to its mission of creating a network for business professionals. In this video tour, Matt Dickman focuses on what LinkedIn does well, and how you can leverage its strengths.
In a recent blog post, Cymfony's Jim Nail wrote about a study that provocatively proclaimed that spending on conversational marketing will outpace traditional marketing by 2012. Is that even possible? To find out, Paul Dunay chatted with Jim and Pete Blackshaw, executive vice-president at Nielsen Online Strategic Services. What ensued was a very lively debate about whether marketers are prepared to support conversational marketing—and the answer isn't very pretty. As Jim and Pete point out, not only are marketers not using Web 2.0 tools to create a conversation, but to even listen effectively they need to overhaul their infrastructures—big time.
Link building is the tactic of getting other Web sites to link to your Web site. Getting inbound links from well-ranked, reputable, and relevant sites means that your Web site will receive good rankings and a lot of free traffic. Here is checklist of actions you can take to rapidly increase the link popularity of your Web site.
Do you know what your customers are saying about you? If not, you (and your brand!) are at a distinct disadvantage. Take the opportunity to participate in the blogosphere -- even if only on a small scale -- and you'll help shape your brand, rather than having it be shaped exclusively by your customers.
Lots of companies create interesting and attention-getting ads with the brand name or major takeaway buried somewhere therein. So what happens? Consumers remember the great ad. But for the life of them, they have no idea what it was for... or who it was by. Don't less this happen to you!
If you are someone who is partially or wholly responsible for the long-term direction of your Web site, or the Web sites of your clients, you have to be able to explain Google's OpenSocial in clear and concise terms. So what is OpenSocial? And why does it matter?
Long-term corporate success is linked to the ability to innovate, and Marketing should play a more central role. Who is better positioned to give insight into who will buy, how many they will buy, why they buy, and when specific markets will buy? It is time for marketing executives and professionals to step into a leadership role and lead the innovation charge!
Eduardo Conrado is the Vice President of Global Business and Technology Marketing & Communications for Motorola. His role encompasses three of Motorola's four primary businesses with revenues of over $17 billion: Home & Networks Mobility, Government & Public Safety, and Enterprise Mobility. Eduardo controls the marketing for all of Motorola's enterprise B2B products worldwide. Here, he discussses his approach to thought leadership as well as how he defines success. He also offers insights into which Web 2.0 tactics are working for his teams around the globe.
Podcasting can give your company a new image and personality. And, increasingly, podcasting offers the promise of being another highly effective way to reach and develop potential customers. That's only if you can produce compelling, "buzz-worthy" content, of course.
With the emphasis recently on customer relationship management (CRM), it seems there's a customer love-fest in the making. It's an orgy, almost: Every company wants a close relationship with me, and they want one with you, too. They want close relationships with their business buyers and suppliers. Of course, as the name spells out, what they really want to do is "manage" these close relationships. There's one small thing missing from all this talk about customer relationships, both on and off the web. Not every customer (and, in particular, not every business customer or supplier) wants a close relationship, nor do they want to be managed.
Are dead email addresses haunting your open and click-through rates? If once-active recipients have stopped opening your emails, are no longer actively reading your messages, or aren't clicking on email links, those recipients are no longer in the land of the living. In the spirit of Halloween, here's some advice to determine whether your dying email list can be saved.
Is microblogging the latest fad or the next big thing? Microblogging is just like regular blogging, except it's limited to 140 characters. The leader in the space is Twitter. To get a better sense of this emerging social media tool, we assembled a micro-panel to discuss it: Jeremiah Owyang, a senior analyst on social computing at Forrester Research and a fan of Twitter, and David Berkowitz, director of emerging media at 360i, who is skeptical about Twitter's application to business. We hope you enjoy the lively debate!
It's an unfortunate fact: No matter how good your search engine optimization company or in-house talent is, brand new Web sites have a more difficult time achieving search engine success for competitive phrases than their older counterparts, particularly on Google. However, the worst thing that a new site owner can possibly do is presume that they are "too late to the game" and decide not to pursue this marketing channel at all. A good search engine optimization company should be able to effectively work with a new Web site; setting the foundation for a remarkable success story while still achieving steadily increasing short-term benefit.
Anyone who has taken Marketing 101 knows the 4 Ps of Marketing: Product, Price, Place and Promotion. But what you may not know is that some companies - including these four - are turning these Ps over completely to customers. (Graphic: David Armano.)
What is advertising's most important word? The simple, innocuous word "like": a nondescript word that carries with it all the conceptualization power you need to create a business identity, to form a brand personality, and to position your product or service in the mind of your audience.
When your boss or client has the final say, and the decision doesn't make good marketing sense, what do you do? Many senior managers have little marketing knowledge, yet the buck stops with them. Here's an approach to help you "convince" them that you have a solid point.
There's no silver bullet for search engine optimization. You need to do the right things over and over, over extended periods of time. Key among these are generating relevant content, gaining inbound links, and designing and coding for search friendliness. Perform these 10 exercises to start your program of search engine fitness.
Your reputation can be greatly enhanced and reinforced by speaking at industry events. This article provides a checklist to help you win valuable speaking gigs. Invest some time in getting on the stage, and it will pay off many times over in helping you build your business. Follow the tips and tricks herein to maximize the benefits.
What is Digg? And how does it work? This pair of videos about social-network site Digg.com is a look at the site from the inside-out... with the goal of educating marketers on this social network. Learn why you should (or shouldn't) care about Digg.
Without metrics to track performance, marketing and business plans are ineffective. For marketers, three primary metrics stand out as a starting point for tracking their performance. Once companies are aware of their competitive position, their desired outcomes, and what it will take to achieve those outcomes, companies will be better able to identify the success factors, benchmarks, and appropriate metrics to meet their target.
This past weekend, Nike hosted its 4th annual Women's Marathon in San Francisco... and, friends, this is no ordinary marathon. Yes, it's still 26.2 miles of courage and pain, but this course is also full of female-friendly delights and surprises. Specifically designed with women in mind, the Nike Women's Marathon motivates women to bring their body, mind, spirit, and camaraderie to run their best race. Let's take a look at the core marketing-to-women strategies that Nike is using to elevate the impact of this event.
The better you are at involving your customers in the philosophy of your brand, the better they'll understand why you're special.
Understanding how the Internet changes the rules of marketing is a huge challenge for CEOs: Which practices are obsolete? What new opportunities should be pursued? How do we define success in this new scenario?
In a world that is now fully connected, people and businesses are putting their opinions, observations, insights, thoughts, and capabilities online, via some very helpful tools. Here's what one fictitious small business did to grow its customer base, and reach potential customers worldwide.
In this MarketingProfs Classic, originally published in April of 2003, Suzan St. Maur highlights 10 online writing concepts that also kick offline. "After all the agonies we suffered some years ago when some tried to make offline text work online, we've finally turned the tables," she writes. "Now we can borrow back a number of online writing concepts and use them to sharpen up our paper-based marketing communications."
Marketers may be from Venus and IT might be from Mars, but marketers nonetheless need to understand what the IT guys are talking about. In a new series of short videos, Matt Dickman simplifies technobabble into a framework that marketers can understand. The next time IT speaks "geek," you can surprise them with your knowledge instead of just nodding along.
Facebook is the hot social-networking site of the moment. With the site's incredible growth in recent months, many marketers are scrambling to find a way to access the site's millions of users, who could be potential customers. Here are the steps to successfully use Facebook to better reach and understand your customers, as a fellow member of the community.
Marketers need to consider a new calculus: "return on marketing integrity"—that is, a new type of "ROMI"—which can lead to stronger business performance.
Companies should (and can!) implement a sustainable, consistent telephone prospecting program to develop a "sales territory" using an approach that sales reps will actually adopt. If telephone prospecting controls the destiny of your business, you should investigate a better way to control your telephone prospecting. Start here.
Should a marketer simply start blogging or wait instead until all of the blogging policies and procedures are established before beginning? In other words: Which comes first the policy or the blog?
The MarketingProfs Book Club is back! "Robin Hood Marketing" shows how to sell your cause as successfully as the great marketers of corporate America sell their brands and products. Here's how nonprofits can "steal" tactics from the big brands.
Beaten down by a constant stream of customer "No's," some salespeople find it difficult to pick themselves up and jump back in the game. But there are other salespeople whose motivation and resilience enable them to make every customer call as enthusiastically as if it were the first. For the majority of us who, perhaps, fall somewhere in the middle, there is an opportunity to increase "motivational intelligence" by keeping in mind five simple principles.
Out of 18 choices, why does one piece of content get 49% of the vote while another gets 0%?
Advertising is dead. Consumers have been over-advertised to and over-sold. So what's a marketer to do?
Today many companies and brands are engaging in "Partnership Marketing," "Marketing Alliances," "Strategic Partnerships," and even "Partnership Brand Marketing" programs. But often they boil down to just promotions, perhaps maybe even on a larger scale. But the true success of partnership brand marketing lies in its power to open up new and alternative channels of distribution for both the companies and the brands involved.
...television without sound, romance without kisses, the rumba without rhythm, a joke without a punch line. If your Web site disappointments, you need something that provides the eureka factor.
In this MP Classic, originally published in 2002, Nick Usborne debunks the notion that the secret to good copy is using certain words or phrases. Saying as much suggests "that if I had access to the *exact* set of brushes and paints used by Picasso, I could become a great painter," Nick writes. However, there are some simple steps you can take that, when taken in the right sequence, really can improve your copy.
The fifth-largest advertising organization in the world is Tokyo's Dentsu. Its gross profit of more than $2 billion is largely generated in Japan. Although Dentsu politely declines to name its clients, a little research reveals that its biggest accounts include Shiseido cosmetics and Toyota. Here's a look inside the organization.
There is quite a difference in what is seen by humans on a Web site and what is seen by a search engine "spider" a program that routinely combs the Internet indexing Web sites. An untold numbers of expensive Web sites out there are beautiful to behold from a human perspective, yet all but invisible to search engine spiders (and thus searchers). Here is a small list of common Web site elements, in two categories: what search engines cannot see, and what they can see.
Attracting—and ultimately closing—deals with new clients can take professional service providers anywhere between several months and several years. Since most firms rely on their partners and principals to bring in new work, client acquisition ends up consuming a lot of the organization's most valuable resources. One sure way to increase profitability, then, is to find ways to reduce the time that these highly paid professionals spend developing new business—so that they can devote more time to generating revenue.
You've heard of it, you've read about it, you've even signed up for it—and you still wonder how to get the most out of it. LinkedIn is the most popular business networking environment around. Its jump from 13 million signups to 14 million happened in about a month. Here are eight things you should do today to start getting more out of the dynamic platform of LinkedIn.
In Aikido, martial arts students study and practice katas—pre-arranged movements that enable them to deal with an opponent successfully. The centuries-old art teaches practitioners to use the force of an opponent against the opponent. This strategy gives the student a definite advantage if they are attacked. In a similar way, what were considered strengths in Web 1.0 have become weaknesses in Web 2.0. Now, agility and intellect are critical. There are several things businesses need to pay attention to if they're going to thrive in this environment.
For any online business, the goal of search engine marketing is to achieve high rankings in the major search engines for keyword phrases specific to the products or services offered. What's more, it's just as crucial to ensure that the keywords chosen are the ones most likely to convert to sale or action. Traffic is great - sales are even better! Here's where to start.
You might be an expert when it comes to marketing to large businesses. But selling your products and services to smaller companies requires an entirely different strategy.
There's new interest in solving an age-old corporate problem of how to measure customer satisfaction. Lukcily, there are new tools for doing so, too.
It's well known that a page-one search placement on Google, Yahoo, or MSN is imperative for driving organic traffic to your Web site. But if you're already in the enviable top spot position, is there something more you can do to gain even more traffic? There is, and aggressive web players are implementing the strategy effectively. Here's how.
What constitutes marketing operations? Marketing operations adds an emerging dimension to the marketing mix. Enabled by new processes and technology, it goes beyond the 4Ps (Product, Price, Place, Promotion), and 3Cs (Customers, Competitors, Corporation), to fully round out the marketing mix.
Here are five powerful referral strategies—and precise action steps—that, when used either individually or collectively, can cause a flood of new introductions.
These 18 concepts will give you an edge on your competition—or an edge, period. So if the same old left-brain thinking that everybody else is using just doesn't get you where you want to be, try these creative concepts on for size.
In this MarketingProfs Classic, Jim Lenskold reminds us that, since the dreaded annual planning and budgeting process isn't going away, it's time to make the effort to get more value out of the process. Jim writes, "Here are four ways to use financial insight to create more profitable strategies and tactical plans while building greater credibility with your executive team."
Almost without exception, the automated emails sent to confirm an action a customer has just taken are uniformly drab and impersonal. Which is a crying shame because when a customer first gives you his or her email address, you have a small window of opportunity: Customers are expecting a confirmation email from you. They are waiting for it. And when it arrives, almost 100% of people will open it. In other words, this is your first and best chance to make a great impression. Here are three things you can do to give some "personal power" to any email communication.
Marketers often lament, "If only I had more time...." Improving your productivity by using something like GTD (Getting Things Done) will take you part of the way there. But you also need to become ruthless at delegating. The more effectively you delegate, the faster you will excel in your career.
Results from a recent survey found that only 17% of us indicated that our CEOs would give marketing an A. What's more, this study and others continue to suggest that a gap remains between a company's business goals and the metrics marketing uses to measure their impact on these goals. The need and opportunity remains for marketing to improve the linkage between marketing expenditures and delivered results. But what should we measure? And which metrics are best?
Leading consumer-products companies are looking to rebrand, repackage and relaunch... often too frequently. Sometimes, the effort is merely putting a bandage on a deeper sore. It's far less painful to assess lagging sales in a superficial manner than it is to dig deeper into company practices, customer-service issues, and the actual product mix being offered—not to mention how customers are experiencing the brand and whether that brand is delivering on its promises. In fact, companies that really want to dig for the truth ought to seek answers to these questions... .
At a time when business and marketing strategy changes at the speed of light, and competitors, partners and customers have instant access to information, the days of the handler the publicist are numbered.
What's the most common mistake companies make in crafting collateral? What are the keys to creating content that reflects a company's credibility? And how does a company stop talking about itself... and focus on its customers? Here, the author of "Writing Copy for Dummies" shares his insider secrets and expertise.
In an online sales environment that is both increasingly competitive and cluttered, B2B marketers must be able to perform two critically important tasks: They must communicate a unique brand identity, and they must be agile enough to quickly customize lead generation and communication programs to meet their measurable objectives. These tasks can be especially challenging for small-to-medium-sized B2B firms, as well as for divisions of very large firms. Here's where they are turning for help.
Kronos had an obvious identity problem that clearly impacted its sales performance, so getting support from the executive suite for a branding initiative should have been a slam-dunk. Except not quite. While everyone agreed there was a brand problem, the solution was costly and very long-term. Here's how Marketing won over Management, by talking a language they understood.
Part one of this three-part series examined the overall role the customer can (and should!) play in innovation. Here is a deeper look at five specific ways that Marketing can engage the customer in the innovation process, using examples from LEGO, a company that has used these techniques with clear and brilliant success.
Paul has earned his keep over the past 20 years by building buzz for heavyweights like Google, IBM, and Microsoft. These days he's immersed himself in social media, which serves him well as the director of Global Field & Interactive Marketing for BearingPoint. In this one-on-one, he gives us the lowdown on how to use social media to kick-start your buzz marketing efforts.
How come some brands are great, while others manage to be just good? Is there a trick up the sleeves of those great brands—a trick that good, sustainable brands can adopt to become equally well-known? The answer is yes.
Stories aren't just for campfires and school children. They're a powerful way for businesses to communicate their value, to create an emotional hook that sticks. Nordstrom's and HP have used them effectively to convey outstanding customer service (the former) and innovation (the latter). Yet most businesses remain tongue-tied—not because they don't have stories to tell, but because they don't know how to tell them. But you don't have to be a writer to create an effective business story. In fact, all it takes is three simple steps.
If you're responsible for the direction of the online strategies for your company or organization, you've probably been hearing buzz about Twitter, a next-generation instant messaging tool. Even if you're new to Twitter, this article will serve as a guide to educate you to help you make a decision, by linking to resources and providing a starting point for your strategy.
Site visitors rarely want to view just one page on your site, except in the case of landing pages or single-page sites. If people actually want to get something done on your site, they will generally work through two or three different pages before taking an action. So here is the question of the day: How well do your pages work together? Or to put it another way: How strong is the transition between your pages?
Driving sales is what B2B marketing is all about. Although the precise roles and responsibilities of Marketing may differ from company to company, your marching orders are the same: Help Sales produce more with less. All marketers want to know best practices and share experiences about driving sales. Here are 25 metrics you should select from to prove marketing drives sales... and to track progress.
Google is now (and has been for some time) collecting data on individual users, and they are assuming that users will trust them with this data to "Do No Evil," as their famous slogan goes. Only time will tell whether the trust is well-placed.
With the rise of social media and user-generated content, there are more factors than ever to consider when designing a company Web site. Throw in SEO and choosing the proper design/layout for your Web site, and it all gets very confusing... very quickly. Which means that Web site optimization experts such as Karen Breen Vogel are in very high demand. Vogel understands how to lead organic traffic to Web sites—but, perhaps more importantly, she understands how to give those users the content they are looking for when they arrive. Here Vogel cuts through the clutter and gives invaluable advice on how to build disciplined Web site optimization programs that build on strengths and business ob
If you are adopting Net Promoter as part of your survey/metrics approach, there's a rich part of the findings that many who are implementing this approach don't consider: learning from your "Detractors." Here, Jeanne Bliss focuses on Detractors, and how to mine the gold by listening hard to their feedback to improve your organization and relationship with your customers.
Selling now takes more time and resources then ever before. In fact, the sales cycle has become 22% longer as buyers more carefully consider their decisions. If this true for you, then consider it a great opportunity for email marketing segmentation strategies. By segmenting your prospects, you can boost revenue, improve conversion from email marketing, strengthen buyer satisfaction, and build your brand. Sound like a tall order for a segmentation strategy? Consider these ideas.
People are often in a rush to get their needs fulfilled. Decision-makers want things done yesterday. In other words: Responding to prospects in a timely manner is critical for customer acquisition and retention. Whether companies manage B2C or B2B relationships, the first businesses to reply to customer inquiries have a better chance at scoring than those who ignore them or respond too late. Has your company established prospect follow-up protocols and standards? Begin by answering these questions.
Savvy companies like Dove, Ponds, and Nike know that women are empowered, and those companies have shown us how powerful the images and stories of real women are. What's next on the Marketing to Women horizon?
Jerry Bader doesn't drink. But if he did, he'd start with Reyka Vodka—not because it's better or worse than any other vodka, but because the company has an extraordinary marketing campaign and an equally clever integrated Web site with an enchanting (if somewhat bizarre) Icelandic spokeswoman. The video commercials for the campaign drew 20,000 views in the first three weeks after being posted on YouTube, and they hold some interesting lessons for marketers.
Does sex sell? You bet it does. But there's another essential element that goes hand-in-hand with sex. And that's controversy.
Looking at the robust projections for online shopping, it would be tempting to think that if you build it, they will come. Yet marketers must resist temptation and take a more strategic approach—one that focuses on customer experience. The truth is, from a functional and ease-of-use perspective, all e-commerce sites are not created equal.
A wise but anonymous marketer once said that a market research report that gets described as "interesting" has failed. It's only when it's "useful" that it gets the pass mark. After all, what's the point of interesting research if it can't be put to use? The sad truth is that most market research is not very useful and more often than not ends up as a door stop for the marketing manager's office. Here's how to avoid that result.
Many companies have by now launched initial social media initiatives and are looking to move their efforts to the next step. This is where social media experts such as Josh Hallett come in. Here, Hallett helps demystify this form of "new marketing," particularly for those companies who have dipped their toes in the social media waters and are wondering, "What now?"
"You can't sit around and wait for inspiration," said Jack London. "You have to go after it with a club." Pick up your club (your pencil, your laptop, your sketchbook) and let's go. Whatever your particular challenge, these 10 strategies can help you innovate—on a deadline.
Blogging is a phenomenon that can no longer be ignored by today's competitive companies. So how does your company best harness the power of blogs? Here are common-use cases for any organization.
Without working too hard, company management can cultivate a cadre of enemies within the press. To do the task well, however, you should follow a set of 13 simple guidelines that will ensure that you alienate many, or most, of the Fourth Estate.
If you're responsible for the direction of your online strategies for your company or organization, you've probably been asked by your colleagues to take a look at a social network. If you're new to the Facebook phenomenon, this will serve as a guide for you to get started, link to resources to help, and provide an overview as a web decision maker. But first, what is Facebook?
How can marketing professionals engage the customer to produce ideas for radical innovation? Marketing's leadership should materialize in five ways.
An increasingly competitive job market in recent years has led to the birth of the idea of "personal branding," as jobseekers look for ways to stand out to potential employers. One of the leaders of this burgeoning space is William Arruda, coauthor of the bestseller Career Distinction. Arruda's philosophy centers on identifying and communicating the unique value you can bring to an employer. If done correctly, your reputation and credibility will help you stand out from the crowd, and create an environment in which job opportunities come to you.
If you've ever heard George Carlin's famous "Seven Dirty Words" you can't say on TV, you can safely avoid using all seven in your subject lines. They will definitely get you blocked. Here are 100 more you should avoid using as well.
There is a frenzied optimism on the simplicity and potency of the new NetPromoter concept. But beware, if your end game is simply pushing for the greatest NetPromoter score�know that at the end of the day this may just be the latest of your corporations' customer scoreboards. As with any customer feedback system, it's what you do with the information that's key.
PowerPoint recently (and quietly) celebrated its 20th birthday. Why do some people love it while others passionately hate it? And how can we learn from its strength and its limitations, to be better and more effective communicators?
By now you've all heard—Internet ad spending is up, spending on traditional media is down. With so much attention given to Web 2.0 and its technology-enabled marketing tactics, marketers using traditional approaches are under increased pressure to become more digital and technology driven.
If your users generate content, what's the role of the professional web writer?Is an online copywriter or web writer any longer relevant for a site that generates a lot of its content through user contributions? Nick thinks so. In fact, he says that the job of the web writer becomes even more critical.
A few more traditionally male-oriented brands are connecting with the women's market in clever ways, and it is worth taking note of their approaches. Take, for instance, the Under Armour and Trojan brands, each of which has relatively new ad campaigns that bear this out. In both cases, the brands dialed into the specifics of the humor, tone, message, and design they know to be effective for their existing typically male market, but they developed approaches that definitely invited women into that conversation.
Every company has a story to tell, but how do marketers figure out the best way to tell it, in a compelling way? Here are six questions that will help you develop your marketing story.
You're rolling out a marketing campaign. Launching a product. Revitalizing your brand. What's the big idea? Not to sound flippant, but you need one. Because without it, it's likely your campaign, product launch, or brand repositioning won't be memorable—or particularly effective. Here's where to start.
Creating a customer experience map compels a company to take a customer-centric view. By identifying, mapping, and measuring the customer experience, you are able to identify and address any gaps and disconnects within your organization that you customers might experience. To realistically measure the customer experience, however, you need to establish and follow a disciplined process that will reveal what truly matters to your customers. The process entails the following five steps.
Consumers are beginning to take environmental impact into consideration in purchase decisions. Businesses that demonstrate environmental responsibility have the opportunity to contribute favorably to their images while aligning themselves with the preferences of their customers. To get the full value out of green practices over time, companies need to let the public know what they are doing and why it matters.
In today's ever-changing, increasingly interactive media world, marketers are captivated by a new business buzzword: "consumer-generated content." While word-of-mouth has always been powerful, consumer-accessible technology (the Internet, podcasting, video production, social networks, etc.) puts it on steroids. Success in this new world order requires marketers to develop a new perspective, a new skill set, and a new role in consumers' lives.
Market power used to be much like a big castle surrounded by high walls and a moat to control access. If the old-school world was the castle and the moat, the new model is more like an aerial view of San Francisco—lots of paths in and out.
Last month, Kwik-E-Mart's opened around the country. You know, the one from the imaginary world of The Simpsons? What's more, the Geico Cavemen have their own sitcom, and fictitious TV-character blogs like Monk's are things that real viewers can comment on. You don't have to be a Twitter-head or a Second-Lifer to see the melding of your real and virtual experiences into one. What's this mean for marketers?
It might seem farfetched to characterize a metric as sexy. But by the time you are done reading this article you'll be more than attracted to the metric. Are you are spending tons of time, energy, and budget on Web marketing efforts but your conversion rates (or ROI) are stuck in the 2-4% range? You may be trying really hard to figure out how to improve the performance, but you might be stymied by the fact that there is ton of data and you have no idea where to start. Looking at the bounce rate is a good place to begin.
Online social communities are all the rage. Sites such as MySpace, YouTube, and Facebook have grabbed headlines over the past year or so as examples of how to create successful communities. As a result, many businesses have tried to emulate these sites and create vibrant online networks... with mixed results. If you aim to create a successful online community, follow these key steps to ensure your success.
The Search Engine Optimization market is over $10 billion in North America alone. The biggest question isn't whether you should utilize Search, but rather who will manage your campaigns. What should your organization do? It depends. When you review your options for in-house or outsourced Search or pay-per-click bid management, consider the following.
There are two of the things you need to do with an effective sales page: You need to write a strong sales message, and you need to minimize the perception of risk. In other words, you need to write compelling sales copy, at the same time keeping anxiety levels at a minimum. Here's how.
No matter how savvy the marketer, the impact that ROI marketing will have on the corporate culture can be an eye-opening experience. ROI isn't just a nifty tool to keep vendors in line. The infrastructure frameworks that serve the ROI model will lay bare the decisions of everyone who touches the marketing program, and that includes you. So what must you be prepared to do if and when your company embarks on the lofty quest of ROI marketing?
There is a healthy respect and fear-factor surrounding the blogosphere, een for those of us with some background in online community building. So let's start with some baby steps. Step one: Listen first, and then join the conversation.
Lead generation is an important function, yet one of the least understood and most mismanaged in many organizations. Why is that so, and what can you do to put in place a best-in-class lead generation program? Here are six keys to getting lead generation right.
As YouTube, Google and MySpace announce that video advertising will become a key driver in their future revenue strategies, the glitzy, anonymous ads we have been used to for years will have to change course. Ads need to be intriguing in some way; they need to urge us to watch them.
Organic search engine optimization, until recently, had been a fairly straightforward endeavor. That changed in the middle of May 2007, when Google began rolling out its "Universal Search." This new search option may have long-term repercussions for every search engine optimization company if it becomes the standard.
If you want to be cutting edge, the way to do it is with audio and video.
Planning and running a customer advisory program may seem daunting at first. But you can manage the job by charting your company's direction and approach at the outset. Here are the top three fears companies often have, along with advice on how to quell them.
Often regarded as a soft science, the ROI of marketing programs can be difficult to measure. Here are essential tips that should form the basis of the initial stages of your quantifiable marketing strategy.
The Web enables an entirely different way of doing business. Collaboration on a scale previously impossible now occurs on an ongoing basis. Mass sharing ideas globally is easy using wikis and other software. Here's what it means for companies today.
Want to make your ads more effective? Project a stronger brand personality?
In this follow-up to a MarketingProfs Classic—and one of our most popular articles ever—the author shares his experiences from some of the world's leading ad agencies. In his view, a well-written creative brief is the road map that will lead the way toward a stronger brand. Here's how.
So you're looking for an impresario of innovation, a doyenne of the different, a marketing maven. But how do you know if the person you're interviewing is really the Wizard of Wow that your organization can count on to help pep up its profits? And how do you know your corporate culture will accept this champion of change?
You can flip the 80/20 in your favor by devoting your marketing resources to creating a referral network that will compound in value year after year.
Whether you're attempting to position a company or product as a category leader, gain permission from a community to make changes, or push a law through the legislature, PR needs to tell interesting yet believable stories that make the target audience consider a new perspective or see the sponsor in a new light.
If you practice Internet marketing, you know the importance of a high-converting "landing page"—also called a promotional page, jump page, or squeeze page. Regardless of the specific purpose, one fact remains the same—you want the user to take some type of action. Here are seven landing-page best practices for increasing conversion rates and getting users to take the action you're hoping for.
Advertising is a funny thing. When it works, it can attract a multitude of solid sales leads. And therein lies a problem—especially if a small or midsize business isn't prepared for the ensuing results. Here are three common sense things to prepare before your businesses launches an advertising campaign.
Let's face it: If we want to realize the vision of integrated marketing and strategic marketing, of a more collaborative and enjoyable work environment, of more stature and influence in our organizations, we need to let go of the old. Marketing needs a new MO.
Does the hype of the iPhone equal runaway success? Is the game already won? Or will there be an equal and opposite reaction when possibility and excitement about the future gives way to reality, and inevitable issues arise with service, availability, bugs in functionality and unfulfilled expectations?
The sales playbook captures your company's knowledge about its markets, value propositions, offers, competitors, and best practices. These are the very elements that fall within the marketing organization's domain, which is why marketing plays a strategic role in developing the playbook.
Housing booms, dot-coms, high-tech, bio-med, religious fervor, Republican or Democrat regimes, peace-war—all of it... all the best (and worst) bubbles have, or will, pop on their way back to the center. In terms of the "Greening of America," we are currently on the thesis end of the pendulum, with a fair amount more left to go to reach the apex. And then the backward slope begins. The bubble pops at the top.
Some 80% of available jobs are never advertised, and over half of all employees obtain their jobs through networking. The most important component of a successful job search is your network, consisting of friends, family, neighbors, acquaintances, teachers, and coworkers.
Part 1 of this series discussed the evolution of customer reference programs and gave guidance on how to create a program that's a strategic asset to your company. Here, part 2 discusses the next steps of customer program evolution... and how to change corporate culture by focusing on customers.
Recently, we have been seeing more and more emails that take the "instant best buddy" approach: You sign up for some information on a site, and minutes later you receive a breathless email and hear how the author has just taken his kids to the beach, but simply had to rush home and share some terribly important news about an upcoming product launch. It's tempting to dismiss these emails. But here's the thing: They work.
Suppose you survey a company's employees and ask them to select just one tune that expressed their true feelings about their company's culture, their work experience, and their satisfaction as employees. What song would each of them choose? And what employee behaviors would likely parallel such a song choice? Frivolous questions? Hardly. Some theme already plays in each employee's head right now, directly affecting job performance and the ultimate experience delivered to customers. Here are three song possibilities, and some lessons they can teach us.
The social media landscape over the last year or so has changed dramatically. Companies that were once skeptical about tools such as blogs are now blogging or considering starting one. Unfortunately, many companies that do so still have little idea of how to grow their blog into an integral part of their marketing efforts. Here are eight easy steps you can take to grow your blog's readership.
Each year, we ask decision-makers at a group of 100 leading brands: "At pitch, what are the specific reasons for choosing one agency over another?" In the latest results, "good chemistry" ranked as the leading factor. Here's a full list of the top 20 factors.
UCLA Professor Albert Mehrabian is best known for his 7%-38%-55% Rule. It states that 55% of communication is attributable to non-verbal behaviors like body language and facial expressions; 38% of communication is attributable to voice, including volume, tone, pitch, cadence, and quality; and only 7% of communication is attributable to the words used. Yet companies continue to pile on the Web text in the hope that search engines will index it and someone might actually read it... even though many Web site visitors merely scan for headlines, bulleted points, and captions.
Over one-third of employers have eliminated a candidate because of "digital dirt"—information about you online that is either unflattering or inconsistent with the image you would like to portray. Digital dirt could be preventing you from getting interviews and ultimately landing your ideal job. So if you have digital dirt, it's time to clean up your act. Here's the three-step process.
Just as sports teams have fans, brands have evangelists. And just as each fan feels a sense of ownership in the team, a brand evangelist has that same sense of ownership in the brand. That sense of ownership gives brand evangelists a powerful incentive to see the brand succeed. But how can companies encourage their customers to become brand evangelists? These eight steps can help your company create an environment that makes it easier for customers to become empowered brand "owners."
What if you never had to look for a job again? Try a job search role reversal: Instead of seeking out jobs, have them come to you. That's the future of career management—and for savvy careerists, the future is now.
Landing pages have become the Omega-3s of Web marketing: if you're not using them and optimizing them ad infinitum, you're squandering your online ad dollars. Or so the landing page optimization crowd would have you believe. In the spirit of probing the pros and cons of this popular post-click marketing format—and, okay, doing a little tongue-in-cheek myth busting—we offer our take of the top 5 best and worst things about landing pages, in contrast to multi-page landing paths.
Many Web sites offer a resource library for visitors—an area filled with articles covering relevant topics to the industry with which the site is connected. The articles may cover how to do something, or they may define an aspect of the industry, but they do not usually directly sell the company's products or services. While it's true that a resource library, on the surface, exists to benefit site visitors, it doesn't end there; it also provides benefits that can have a direct impact on any business.
An effective online content strategy, artfully executed, drives action. Organizations that use online content well have a clearly defined goal—to sell products, generate leads, or get people to join a community, vote, or donate money—and they deploy a content strategy that directly contributes to reaching that goal.
A use case, often created for product development, is commonly used to capture functional requirements. A use case provides one or more scenarios for how a solution/system/product/service achieves a specific business goal. From this perspective, then, another way to think about a use case is as a usage scenario. With a little modification, a use case can be transformed into an extraordinary sales-enablement tool.
How rare is it to see a senior marketer from any professional service firm—even one as prominent as BearingPoint—leading a series of cutting-edge conversations that do not appear to be directed at just his internal colleagues? We checked in with Paul Dunay and learned the extent to which he has intentionally begun to "do things differently" and how positively it has benefited BearingPoint. Here is his story.
Everyone has heard the common complaint that America is becoming less literate, but the onus for this alleged circumstance is nearly always placed on the reader (or, rather, non-reader) instead of where it often belongs: the writer. Many professional writers seem to have lost the ability to write clear, comprehensible copy that instantly communicates its point. That's especially worrisome in advertising, which depends on quick communication for its effectiveness.
Marketers spend a lot of time and money creating messaging, tools, and training for salespeople. Unlike lead-generation campaigns and demand-management programs, where you can track impact on suspect, prospect, and customer activity, our "sales support" investments are much harder to measure. But, the day of reckoning is near. We are going to have to demonstrate an ROI for this big-dollar budget item.
The ladder is the most enduring metaphor for career advancement, yet it is no longer constructive to think of your career progression as climbing a ladder. In today's dynamic knowledge economy, this sporadic, effortful approach to career management isn't the most effective. Instead, you have to kick over the ladder and view your career climb as a ramp.
Picture three email campaigns. The first is poorly written, with broken links. The second has a fancy design, but it renders so badly that half the recipients can't see the offer. The third has great content and great design—but gets not-so-great results. Our third entrant—by all accounts the creative "winner"—in fact loses, because all three emails came from the same company and hit the inbox on the same day. There's a message here.
In the old days, marketers could use hype and exaggeration to get noticed and people would simply accept it. Not anymore. Today, if you want consumers to pay attention, you had better be truthful. And if you want them to fondly remember your brand, you'd better be emotional.
PR success isn't mysterious. It comes down to a mix of old-fashioned research, savvy trend-watching and good people skills. It is the age-old talent of telling a good story. That's really the essential difference between PR and advertising. Here's the "secret recipe" for telling your business story through public relations.
In 1994, Philips launched "EarthLight," an energy-efficient compact fluorescent light bulb with a clumsy shape that was incompatible with most conventional lamps; it had a confusing package—and a $15 price tag compared with 75 cents for the incandescent bulbs. Sales languished.
Professional success today requires that you change the way you think about your career—by treating career management as an ongoing activity. Creating your personal brand helps you do so—with the ultimate goal of distinguishing yourself. But before you start working on building your brand, you need to adopt a new mindset—the "Career Distinction" mindset.
We often complain that we have too few success stories or lack examples in specific verticals, or in specific geographies, or find that the customers' quotes are bland and lack specific metrics of success. Even worse, all success stories age. Those that are a few years old may cease to be relevant—they were based on old releases of the software or situations that no longer match current customer needs. How can we accelerate the collection and use of relevant and useful success stories? Here are four ways.
Do your marketing and sales communications perpetuate the head-to-head competitive bakeoff? Or does it equip and enable your sales people to participate earlier and more effectively in the customer buying cycle? There is an easy way to tell.
New postal rates were implemented last month. But the rate hike is not just a normal increase across the board. Instead, there is a tangle of new regulations that will affect how mail is classified and how rates are applied. Direct marketers: take note.
Customer case stories are a powerful way to communicate the value of a company, product, or service. Nobody speaks more loudly for you than your customers. But if that's the case, why do so many customer success stories and case studies fall short? Here are 10 things that blunt case study effectiveness... and what you can do to avoid each.
As more businesses become aware of the unprecedented number of people around the world who are approaching age 60, more of them are getting serious about reaching Boomers. Call it the new Silver and Gold Rush. Smart businesses understand that the old media—print, radio, and television—won't be enough to reach this market. To communicate with Boomers, your business will need to evaluate and choose among a wide variety of online and offline marketing methods.
As today's markets consolidate and become increasingly competitive, and as buyers become more sophisticated and demanding, customer references gain even greater importance. But many customer reference programs are stuck in outmoded thinking, and that could be significantly holding your company back. So how can your reference program evolve to meet today's challenges?
How long will the Second Life media frenzy last? And if not for PR, what is the value of investing time and money with avatars when marketing budgets are under renewed pressure to deliver real returns from real consumers? Joel argues that there is more than meets the eye in Second Life. Indeed, there is genuine value to be extracted for brands that are willing to learn the dynamics of the "metaverse" and play by its rules. Get the full story.
Brands that deliver general interest newsletters filled with tips, tools, and advice—but not unique, brand-differentiating content—should re-think their approach. Progressive brands are making advances in their approach, tightening the focus of their relationship marketing, and now filling newsletters with more unique-to-the-brand content.
At some point, your business will suffer a failure that disappoints customers. The measure of a company is taken at such moments. Customers see your true colors at these times more than at any other. How you explain, react, remove the pain, and take accountability for your actions, clearly signals your sentiment toward customers and reveals the collective "heart" of your organization.
Can you make money by giving away your product? Absolutely—and companies like Adobe (PDF Reader) and Macromedia (Shockwave Player) have proven it. With Web 2.0, consumers have gotten a lot of things at no cost due to various monetization practices—and that's good. But should you give away your product? That's another question entirely.
Podcasts are an excellent way to share your latest findings and juiciest developments in a medium that's engaging, fun, and portable. If you're thinking about podcasting, here's the second installment of an insider's peek at the creation of a podcast series, complete with professional tips from a talented audio team.
by Loren McDonald Email is the most-used tool in the marketer's arsenal—but there's a pretty good chance your CEO just doesn't understand its contribution to the bottom line. Unfortunately, that's because most marketers don't get it either. And, as long as we don't get it, we also won't get the boss's ear long enough to get the resources we need.
Let's give it up for Unilever! This company has not made any false moves on the marketing-to-women front, and the "presenting" sponsorship for its Pond's brand is another smart strategy in a long line of savvy business decisions. With its sponsorship of "The Starter Wife," Pond's gets its name linked to the show in all online and offline media, plus product placement in the show, integrated marketing, and promotions—and most importantly, a new brand image.
The major problem with blogs is that they are a relatively new—albeit rapidly growing—Web phenomenon. As a result, they constitute a more or less uncharted realm for companies, with few official policies or guidelines.
Here's to you! You just got deputized to handle demand generation. You're not sure if you should reach for the champagne, or the antacid... From this point on, you're a metric-driven marketer; your success is measured by the number of leads you generate. Just don't take your eyes off the end game: revenue. How can you avoid lead myopia?
Numerous people have studied the process that creative people go through to develop their ideas. Most of these students of creativity agree that ideas come from a subconscious process that takes two relatively unassociated thoughts and combines them together to produce a new thought—a new idea.
It's no longer the world of work you knew when you graduated from college. The tried and true career management techniques you've been using just don't work in today's marketplace. Working hard, writing a compelling resume, staying connected to head hunters are all so... 20th century. To achieve the highest level of success and fulfillment today, you must immerse yourself in the Web 2.0 frame of mind. That means developing a new set of career management habits.
If you are flying from Los Angeles to Tokyo, you can learn how to say "how are you" in Japanese. The lesson is provided as part of the JAL in-flight entertainment in four language categories: numbers, dates, words, and dialogue. Other airlines also offer interactive audiovisual language programs, including Virgin Atlantic, Air France, and Singapore Airlines. It's all part of the trend toward brand engagement, one of the two great trends reshaping branding today and tossing such tired, 30-year-old theories like "positioning" to the dustbin of marketing history.
Podcasts are an excellent way to share your latest findings and juiciest developments in a medium that's engaging, fun, and portable. If you're thinking about podcasting, here's an insider's peek at the creation of a podcast series, complete with professional tips from a talented audio team.
Before it was released on July 4, 2002, many expected the $7.3 million game would join the ranks of the $436 hammer and $640 toilet seat as a study of excess. Few predicted "America's Army" would become the artillery's most effective marketing tool, conveying the authentic military experience in a voice that prospective recruits want to hear.
Whether your company has an ongoing customer relationship, such as a bank or magazine publisher does, or your sales effort is based on single-unit sales and repeat purchasers, attrition affects us all. It behooves us to better understand the what and why of attrition and exactly what, if anything, can be done about it. The first question one should ask: "Is customer retention a problem in my company?"
Marketing within social networks and Virtual Worlds is becoming a viable means for reaching and influencing the attitudes and behavior of consumers in ways that was never before believed possible. In fact, marketers who have dabbled in Virtual Worlds recognize the enormous potential of the medium... but have ventured only far enough to reveal the tip of the iceberg.
Changes in the way customers buy technology are stressing existing vendor channel and partner organizations, processes, and capabilities. As a result, companies need to rethink the ways they allocate their channel marketing resources and how they use marketing infrastructure to scale their channel operations, particularly as they target the small- and medium-sized business market.
"RSS" stands for "Really Simple Syndication." In a nutshell, it is the technology that is enabling blogs, podcasts, and all major online news rooms. RSS is rapidly displacing email and Web sites as the preferred method for distributing online content. However, although the syndication technology may indeed be "simple," highly effective RSS deployments are not. Success hinges on a careful re-thinking of content channels and marketing strategies. To get RSS right the first time, companies need to understand the basic paradigm shift it represents, and how they should integrate it with overall corporate marketing and PR communications.
This MarketingProfs Classic, originally published January 8, 2002, remains as relevant today as ever. As Nick Usborne writes, some words really can make a difference on your site. They are not "powerful" in isolation but, in the right context, can make an important difference.
Last year, a study by comScore Networks found that an average of 63% of online searchers who proceeded to complete a purchase did so offline rather than online. Just as online and offline shopping have fused into a single experience, marketers have the opportunity to follow suit by fusing their isolated marketing efforts into a single initiative.
The day just ended, and you can't stop thinking about the cool new feature that may improve your online venture. Basic questions keep popping up. Is it going to bring more visitors? Is it going to improve their experience? How much is it going to cost? And then, you recall that only two days ago you were dealing with the same dilemma. Different feature, though. Sound familiar? The day just ended, and you can't stop thinking about the cool new feature that may improve your online venture. Basic questions keep popping up. Is it going to bring more visitors? Is it going to improve their experience? How much is it going to cost? And then, you recall that only two days ago you were dealing with t
Selling is not so much about the features of our products or services—or even the benefits the customer receives. Rather, it is about our relationship with the customer. People do business with people they trust.
With spring comes not only a new season but a "sticky" new segment. Book Club is back for "Round Three" with the hottest book of the year, "Made To Stick" by Chip and Dan Heath. "Made To Stick" analyzes why some ideas survive while many others die. But that's not all; the authors have deconstructed why ideas that didn't have revenue incentives, like urban legends and fables, have amplified across social groups and through many generations. Here, they discuss this plus more of the book's concepts.
Lead nurturing has become an integral component of an overall marketing strategy. While there is an ever-growing incentive to implement an effective lead nurturing strategy with business partners and prospects, determining which specific tactics to utilize can prove challenging.
The results of a recent Red Herring CMO survey revealed that marketing and sales alignment remains one the top five strategic issues for 2007. Approximately 42% of the respondents termed it a crucial problem. Companies attempting to resolve the issue often approach the problem by trying to tighten the alignment of marketing activities within the sales cycle, improving coordination around lead generation, and increasing sales force participation in the marketing process. Sadly, these attempts often fail. Here's how to enact meaningful change.
Sandra Zoratti, vice-president of worldwide marketing of the soon-to-be-formed InfoPrint Solutions Company, a Ricoh/IBM joint venture, added interactive marketing to the InfoPrint Solutions Company marketing mix to multiply the reach of the sales force in pursuit of the coveted small and medium-sized business market. Here is an overview of Sandra's innovative marketing communications approach.
If you're like most marketers, you're probably struggling with the best ways to help your salespeople have more meaningful conversations with customers and prospects. Here are five quick tips for creating scripted conversations to help salespeople more effectively communicate your company's business value to customers and prospects.
If your business targets a local region, the trick is connecting with those in your own back yard. It's wonderful to rank well in search engines for a competitive search phrase, but if your product is only available to a small subset, how much time and bandwidth can you afford to waste dealing with visitors from too far afield? By taking the right steps early you can get better search rankings from your SEO campaign and, more importantly, attract an audience from the right locale.
Should your organization get into mobile marketing? The evidence shows that mobile marketing skews toward the business-to-consumer segment, and (slowly but surely) it is starting to gain momentum. Read on to find out whether the vehicle might be right for you.
Target as a retail operation has the perfect name. The retailer defined its target and hit the bullseye.
There is no reason why every company can't deliver an exciting image to its audience; one that generates the kind of buzz and excitement usually associated with companies like Apple, Victoria's Secret, Benetton, Absolut Vodka, and Sony. It may seem impossible to produce a whole lot of steam for things like sand paper, accounting services, and facial tissue. But even the most mundane offerings can get hearts racing and the blogosphere blogging.
Executives in every industry are demanding definitive results linking marketing spend to business impact, and tradeshows are no exception. Exhibit managers need solid data when selecting the right tradeshows for their companies.
For many marketing vehicles, it is difficult to directly estimate ROI -- the proportion of revenues in the financial year due to marketing. Not so with direct mail, however. Here's how.
The complaints against advertising are seemingly endless, limited only by the creativity of its critics. But advertising is fundamentally benevolent, the author says. Advertising is a communication technique that attempts to influence the behavior of others—no more nor less so than the techniques used by parents, journalists, teachers, and politicians.
Sometimes the best laid plans go wrong because, in fact, they weren't the best laid plans. In this season of spring, when new life and fresh hope comes a-budding, author Jon Kranz offers a little... fertilizer. Herewith, a grumpy, glass-half-empty, downright surly look at all the ways marketers shoot themselves in the foot.
As marketers, we often spend considerable time on developing creative logos and brand identities for our companies or organizations. We may ensure our Web site is well designed and easy to navigate, and our marketing collateral is top-notch. We may have sales manuals and charts or graphs to measure our ROI. We may conduct customer satisfaction surveys to see whether our products or services do what we say they will. But, it's also important not to overlook your physical space and the people who occupy it. The way your office looks, the way your staff conducts themselves and how they appear are important components of your brand. Every touchpoint counts, especially those detailed here.
CEO "dashboards" can be a great way to shed light on customers and sales process performance and get feedback on how you as the CEO are performing your role. CEOs who want to know sooner what will be coming down the pike later will design a dashboard to track the following.
Many businesses and individuals have leaped blindly into the blog pool. Countless bloggers have found the water a bit too chilly and have abandoned blogging altogether. Still others are barely keeping their heads above water as they grapple with the challenges of blogging. Perhaps you are contemplating blogging? Leading bloggers have some important warnings for you.
When you think about it, nearly every big business began as a small business. Nike's first sale came from the trunk of a car, and Starbucks began its life as a mom-and-pop coffee shop. But a bigger business doesn't always equate to a better business. At some point, big becomes bad. Big becomes a matter of being convenient rather than being unique (McDonald's). Big becomes a game of market share, not customer care (Wal-Mart). It seems that by the time a small business gets big, it's time for it to act small again. Paradoxical? Yes. Impractical? No.
Reflecting on past green products that were moving toward mainstream but failed, illustrates some of the challenges of legitimacy that innovation can face. On the other hand, monitoring those who have been notoriously self-serving and successful reveals marketing efforts to exemplify emotion, evade rationalization and drive profits.
Many CEOs say that the way marketing happens in their organizations is ineffective. What's more, many CEOs believe that within the management teams and employees at companies they have worked in, marketers are focused on the wrong things. So what really matters to CEOs?
We all know the basics of the consistent value proposition: When involved in providing a service or selling a product, every aspect of the customer experience must be consistent within the mindset of the prospect—from pricing to packaging, from customer support and billing to email and even company letterhead. If all these variables of the business equation remain consistent, you will be on the road to satisfying the psychological need of consistency. So what exactly does the consistent value proposition have to do with ethical search engine optimization?
Issues like inbox deliverability or rendering are not the real problems that confound email marketers. Here's the real issue: Most companies are uninformed about email-marketing best practices and lack in-house expert resources. But because even poorly done email tends to perform fairly well, companies don't realize how much money they may actually be leaving on the table. How can you leave much less on that table?
That nerve-wracking question can come near the beginning of an official job interview or sneak up before the meeting is about to close. But poised executives are always ready to answer what is likely the most important question that surfaces in a serious dialogue between decision-makers and prospective employees. These seven tips help you become that poised executive.
When most marketers think about humor, it's typically in the context of television and print ads. But humor can be an effective communication tool across a range of print and interactive media, whether you're talking to a B2B or B2C audience. No kidding...
Mother's Day is almost here, a day filled with fresh flowers, delicious dark chocolates, fancy fragrances, and gem-filled jewelry. But is that really the way to a woman's heart? What'll really make her swoon is sleek, metal, shiny, and fast.
Yet another responsibility has been added to the CEO's already considerable load.... Because we live in an increasingly complex world, and the sales organization is the most critical link to the customer, it should be the driving force. That's why the CEO must understand every aspect of the sales process—to ensure the accuracy of the organization's strategy execution.
Some very successful companies have made the transition from the Real World (RL) to a three-dimensional realm called Second Life (SL)—a virtual world where millions of dollars are spent. The rationale behind these transitions ranges from attracting press coverage to brand engagement with potential clients. Whatever the desired outcome, SL is truly a unique and cutting-edge business platform that facilitates virtual conferences, training, sales meetings, consumer research—and much more. So, what business model works best when transitioning to a virtual world? The short answer is—it's situational and depends on the desired outcome.
For over a year, there's been lots of talk about Web 2.0. Whether hyped or not, there's definitely some meat to it. The Web is no longer static and one-way. Instead, visitors play a role. Users participate and connect to each other through services as opposed to visiting Web sites. So what does this mean for marketing online? Readers provide two insights in response to this week's challenge.
There are an ever growing number of opportunities for PR people to take advantage of the next generation web. More efficient, more effective, more creative means of launching products and services have to be implemented beyond the tired old standby—the static press release.
How can management -- from CEOs, CMOs and the rest of the alphabet soup of corporate executives -- run successful companies if they lack people skills?
Now that YouTube is more popular than all the sites of the TV networks combined, some wonder whether broadcast TV's days are numbered. It may well become more important for your brand or company to be on YouTube than to be advertised on TV. Undoubtedly for some, that day has already arrived.
There are a number of rich places to find content for your newsletter. Some of it takes the form of free articles. Some of it you pay for, and you can request any kind of content you like. Whatever your industry and the focus of your e-newsletter, there are plenty of places to get good content for every issue you send.
After hearing all the buzz about blogs and how popular they are becoming, your company decided to dive into the blogging waters. But that was months ago, and even though you've posted a few times, your blog has gotten little or no comments, and only a handful of visitors a day! Before you give up and decide to pull the plug on your blogging experience, let's look at some ideas for revitalizing you blog into a place that both you and your customers can benefit from. Here are eight points to consider.
Marketing effectiveness—achieving it requires an organization with the resources and know-how to achieve the fine balance between the art and science of marketing. In other words, it take a little of both to create marketing programs that meet measurable business objectives. Here are seven hurdles to marketing effectiveness, along with proven techniques for how to surmount them.
Well-executed market segmentation quickly identify customer profiles that have a higher likelihood to buy. And once a company has identified that customer profile, it can use that information to target new customers with similar profiles. By targeting these prospects directly, marketers gain higher and quicker return on their marketing investments. The following real-life case study provides a good example how segmentation can improve your marketing and customer interaction as well as increase sales.
Building Web sites involves three very different kinds of skill—technical, visual, and editorial—and the three must work together, which is why the task is so daunting. Here are 10 tips for smoothing the process.
Never before have business-to-business (B2B) marketers faced such enormous pressure in their jobs. With competition intensifying and prospective customers becoming increasingly elusive, companies are demanding that marketers deliver measurable results. Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) are now expected to demonstrate the impact of their actions and the return on their investments. The failure of so many marketing executives to rigorously and successfully defend their decisions partly explains why the average tenure of top CMOs is now less than 23 months. Several factors have dramatically altered the landscape of B2B marketing in recent years, forcing marketing practitioners to rethink thei
How companies deal with negative experiences is just as important as creating positive experiences. In light of the recent pet-food poisoning cases, several companies have taken the lead in reassuring pet owners that they are being proactive in responding to concerns. Which is good: Reacting immediately and proactively is not an option. In fact, it's the right thing to do from both a humane perspective and from a brand-sustainability perspective.
This week, how do you create a sense of urgency when comes to contacting prospects and following up with clients? Join the conversation!
In his keynotes and recordings, world-class motivational speaker and sales trainer Zig Ziglar often talks about the importance of having meaningful, specific goals. And he'll drive home his point with the rhetorical question, "What would you rather be in life, a meaningful specific or a wandering generality?" As marketers and business owners, if we want our sales copy to produce profitable results we would do well to heed Zig's admonition. Because nothing will hold the attention of your reader and advance your selling proposition as well as specific and meaningful benefit-oriented copy.
In this era of blocked images, preview panes, new ISP deliverability rules, and the constant flux in rendering issues associated with Web-based and desktop email clients... a one-size-fits-all email design just won't cut it. Each email template needs to be "tuned-up"—that is, assessed and configured optimally for each campaign for it to truly deliver. Here are four key steps, as well as advice for ongoing list and delivery maintenance.
Maybe you own your own business, or perhaps you're a critical cog in the corporate machinery responsible for marketing your company, brand, product, or service. If that describes you, here are 18 things you need to know about Web marketing but might be afraid to believe.
Congratulations! The lead machine is up and running. Your marketing programs are bringing in new prospects and you're starting to have an impact on the revenue line. You have a bigger budget this quarter, and more target audiences to add to your list. The stakes just got higher. With untested audiences, programs, and media, you're adding new variables to the mix. But there's no guarantee the increased spend will have a proportional increase in leads. How can you avoid being a victim of your own success?
This week, the Lenskold Group and MarketingProfs released results of our new survey on marketing accountability, measurements, and ROI. The 2007 Marketing ROI and Measurements Study focuses on the difference between companies using profitability metrics and those using traditional marketing metrics with no financial metrics. Among other findings, the research clearly shows that companies using profitability metrics for at least some of their marketing campaigns have an advantage in outgrowing competitors and earning the confidence of their CEOs and CFOs.
There are two distinct ways to approach the writing of a Web page... at least, according to this author. Here they are.
Creative accounting is certainly an ill-advised proposition, but in most other areas of business, from manufacturing to marketing to management, creative thinking often represents your most valuable, viable opportunity to differentiate your company from the competition. With indistinguishable offerings saturating many industries, creativity might even be your most important asset. That's why it's worth examining creativity and what the creative process requires.
Who is a Citizen Marketer? The fan who creates his own poster and trailer for an upcoming movie is a Citizen Marketer. But a Citizen Marketer can also be the customer who creates an online community around saving a discontinued product, or the loyal customer who uses their bad customer service experience to bring about change within an organization. Above all else, Citizen Marketers are motivated by a sense of loyalty. The rise of social media tools has given citizen marketing its jumpstart into the business mainstream, and companies today must understand the what motivates their customers to make the transition to concerned Citizen Marketers, and who they are.
Many business owners or CEOs have not taken the time to educate themselves about what marketing is, and what it should be doing for them. Sometimes, even those who have lack a good grasp on a good and accurate definition of marketing. Why does this happen? And what can we do about it?
The goal of lead generation is the creation of more selling opportunities. As a result, lead generation is a critical subset of a company's sales and marketing strategy, and it must be carefully managed to ensure that the sales team is in front of qualified buyers, selling and closing.
These smartest and bravest professional service firms have discovered the risks and rewards of the client satisfaction survey done right. Here's how you can do the same.
We've learned not to trust email to arrive safely in the recipient's inbox. So we leave voicemail asking whether the person received the email or the earlier voicemail. How much follow-up is too much? Where do you draw the line to avoid becoming a stalker or "that crazy person who keeps calling and emailing?"
The Exodus story tells us about one of the world's first CEOs. With Passover beginning the night of April 2, it seems fitting to look at Moses' strengths and weaknesses. Was he a good leader? Did he market freedom and the Promised Land successfully? Whether your religious traditions embrace the Old Testament or not, the Exodus story captures the responsibilities of leadership. Moses certainly has some similarities to present-day leaders... and some differences, of course.
Customers are having a harder time than ever getting service from the companies they do business with, regardless of how much they spend, how long they've been a customer, or how profitable they are for the company. There is a fever pitch from customers using the power of the Internet to make their pain known. The result: a frenzied awareness of a problem that often leads to an even more frenzied approach to a "solution." Here's how to unearth the motivation, metrics, and mechanics you need to connect the silos of your organization and deliver a meaningful set of products and services to your customers.
This month, college players are hoping their hard work, preparation and practice will pay off with a NCAA title. Marketers, like the college teams, can use these five winning strategies to improve their email marketing game.
A Web widget is a mini tool—a chunk of code that people can insert in just about any Web page to perform a specific function. Usually, Web widgets are snippets of HTML. Experienced Web developers may question the significance of Web widgets. For them, the concept of chunks of reusable HTML doesn't seem particularly revolutionary. However, for marketers, widgets have become very important.
In the beginning, your company created a Web site. And it was good. But then it grew. And grew. And grew. Until it encompassed the heavens and the earth in content. Something for everyone. Everything for someone. And it ceased to be a coherent presentation to anyone. It became Encyclopedia Corporatica—a massive tome of information that includes press releases from five years ago. An impressive body of work, to be sure. But as a sales tool, as a marketing vehicle, it sags under its own weight.
There's no use longing for the return of the good old days. The new world of electronic information and global competition is here to stay. Customers will no longer simply gravitate to the brands, products, services, and organizations their parents trusted. Instead, they will continue to experiment, change, talk back, and exercise their newfound freedom of choice in ways that make life for organizational leaders increasingly challenging. In response, we need to learn new ways of creating stronger, longer-lasting ties with our customers. In some cases, that means getting back to basics.
The long tail of the "Green Marketing" niche seems to be getting thicker as America mainstreams into greener consumerism (some call it "prosumerism"). With such a dynamic and emerging marketplace, it's important to understand where the Green Market came from and how it will progress into the future. This series of articles will be taking a closer look at this burgeoning market by dissecting the factors that may contribute to its sustainability... or fracture its foundation. Here's the first in the series.
The press release is certainly not dead, as some PR people may have you believe. Yes, it's been loaded up with jargon. Weighed down with buzzwords. Scrubbed clean of any meaningful executive quotes. But, in spite of it all, the press release can provide more value and is read by more people than ever before.
As "A Whole New Mind" author Daniel Pink puts it, we have entered a new era: a less linear "conceptual age." As we live our personal lives with a better understanding of how interconnected everything is, our work as marketers should also be considering how consumers take in our messages. Today, storytelling—in its many forms—is one of the most powerful tools for presenting the truths of your product, service, or brand.
Private labels started as cheap, inferior products and more recently became copycats. Today, best-practice retailers are using "premium store brands" to help position the retailer as a "brand." In fact, the emergence of the new premium private labels is the hottest trend in retailing.
We've all been on the receiving end of far too many poorly constructed surveys that required too much time and energy simply to share our thoughts. Here's a top 12 list of how to conduct surveys without losing contact with your customer.
The perennial cry from CEOs around the globe is that they are focused on their customers: It is their highest-priority mission, the critical job of their company—and everything emanates from understanding what customers need and want and delivering on it. However, without up-to-date trend information about profitable versus non-profitable customers and the issues that drive the best customers away, CEOs and their businesses are unable to manage customers as assets. Here's how marketers can help.
Warren Buffett is regarded by his peers as one of the brightest and most savvy minds in investment, business strategy, and CEO leadership. Buffett is known for the autonomy he gives to his managers, the ability to think "long term," and unparalleled skill in evaluating talent. He's also a CEO who spends a lot of money on marketing. Here are three lessons you can borrow from Buffett.
As one of the 4 Ps of marketing, pricing is the most direct way of communicating value to customers. It has the most direct impact on bottom-line performance. At the same time, price as a marketing instrument is tricky. Here's the basics of pricing from both a strategic and tactical angle.
Most marketers have heard by now of the kerfuffle about an internal memo, leaked through a popular Starbucks fan blogsite, penned by Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz. The blogosphere is abuzz with the come-to-Jesus nature of Schultz's revelation that Starbucks may have lost its mystique. So what's next for the brand?
Marketing operations enables an organization to run the marketing function as a fully accountable business. Marketing operations is about performance, financial management, strategic planning, marketing resource, and skills assessment and management. If you are considering developing a marketing operations function, this article outlines some the five primary responsibilities.
An annual review of your brand can take several forms. The full-blown brand audit, in many cases, is complete overkill. Unless there are obvious signs that your brand is under performing, a quick checkup will likely suffice.
Most of us dread unproductive business meetings. Here's several ways to improve their efficiency and usefulness.
"Text mining" enables a company to harvest and analyze the array of unstructured textual information available to it. Early-adopter organizations in industries such as consumer goods, healthcare/pharmaceutical, retail, hospitality, and government are already successfully leveraging the practice to get closer to their customers—and add distance between themselves and their competition.
Women love fashion. But fashion doesn't love them. Not real women, at least. Most women aren't supermodels—in fact, the average American woman is 5'4", weighs 140 lbs., and wears a size 14. So most American women find the fashion industry a bit out of touch. Who is in touch with the millions of American women with billions of dollars to spend? Savvy companies like Target, Chico's, and J.C. Penney, that's who.
Getting your site to rank high in the search engine results and getting searchers to click through to your site are among the foremost objectives of B2B search engine optimization. But that's just the beginning. You still have to turn the visitor into a customer or client.
It's the first week of the quarter. You're on deadline to get new programs and sales tools in gear. Meanwhile, the sales team is having its kickoff—and changing the success criteria for your lead machine! They're not deliberately changing the game on you. They're in "New Quarter's Resolutions" mode. If they made goal last quarter, their quotas are higher. If they didn't, they're in the hot seat. Either way, they're re-evaluating and retooling the sales model—and now your carefully planned lead-generation programs are out of alignment.
There are many market research firms out there, from tiny consulting firms to huge multinational corporations. With all those choices, how do you find one that will best fit your company's needs? Don't be intimidated. Be inquisitive. Ask these four questions of your next research supplier.
Case studies are like condensed action films—full of characters, plot, and conflict—in which, thanks to your help, the clients get what they want. Part of a case study's persuasive power comes from its energy. It should be exciting to tell and hear. Many of us, though, bore with ours. The reason? We use the standard problem-solution-result formula—and fumble "the solution" part.
Consumer-generated reviews. Blogging. MySpace. Viral marketing. There's no doubt about it, Web 2.0 is booming. And it's putting the power of the Web into the hands of individuals. At the same time, this shift in power is wreaking havoc with marketing plans. As marketers, we are not used to relinquishing control. But what marketers are now beginning to realize, however, is that this change also unearths a myriad opportunities.
This week: Do you compensate a sales team on gross sales or gross profit for services? See if you agree with our experts. Coming up: Hate meetings? How can you make them productive? Add your two pesos.
A lump of coal in your Christmas stocking—that's what the most recent holiday mailing you managed may have felt like. So while the pain and memory are relatively fresh, let's take a look at some smarter ways to get out a holiday mailing, assuming that angst of holiday mailings is a fact of life for most businesses.
Google's search engine is a widely used tool for locating information or items on the Internet. On any given search, in mere seconds it offers up a vast set of relevant links for the user to sift through. A new environment termed "Virtual Worlds" has created a similar challenge—finding a vast range of items in a timely manner.
Attending networking events can be frustrating and ultimately a waste of time for many business owners and professionals. Here are three ways to make them pay off for you.
Profitable growth is a key business priority for every business. Marketing must be prepared not just to handle the demands for steady growth but also to respond to the occasional call for more aggressive growth. Marketing ROI brings the framework for financial analysis and measurements to help guide strategic and tactical decisions toward greater profits. But how can we best apply these techniques to achieve aggressive growth objectives? Here are six steps that will lead you down the right path.
Marketers can no longer rely on only quantitative data to address an issue. Qualitative tools, such as advanced video analytics and "day-in-the-life" sketches, are needed to unearth the deeper insights—the where, when, and how much—to make decisions that stick.
Tradeshows can be one of the most expensive forms of marketing. Paying to act as an event sponsor (complete with a booth and travel for employees) often runs into the tens of thousands of dollars. But there are options to tradeshow sponsorships that will still get you out in front of the same prospects, but cost much less and provide more value.
Jim Carville popularized the phrase "It's the economy, stupid" in the first Clinton presidential campaign. For the savviest brand managers and customer service organizations, now "It's the experience, stupid."
He could stop traffic in Moscow, Tokyo, Nairobi, Shanghai, and Mumbai. Kings, presidents, and prime ministers worldwide would take his call. He outshines Madonna, Mick Jagger, and Meryl Streep. Although it has been more than 25 years since he occupied center stage, he is the world's greatest personal brand. He is the incomparable Muhammad Ali. Ali's boxing record is the stuff of legend, and boxing has never been the same since he retired. But just as interesting are the lessons his life holds for developing your own personal brand.
Experts say that free press is worth more, inch for inch, than paid advertising. That's because free press has the appearance of being a third-party endorsement of what you and your business have to say. So what are the dos and don'ts? What can you do to enhance your chances of getting what you want... and avoiding or minimizing what you don't?
Whenever people strive to buy a complex product, they want to learn as much as they can prior to talking with a sales rep. For example, people spend almost two months researching new cars online before ever stepping into a car showroom. Or they download user manuals for expensive cameras to study features before making purchasing decisions. If they're doing that for cars and cameras, you can imagine how much time they are spending to learn about complex B2B products and services prior to giving your sales rep a call.
Glitches happen and setbacks occur when we deal with customers -- they're as inevitable as death and taxes. The key to retaining these customers when an error occurs is handling them right from the start. Whether your company or organization delivers products, services, or promises... its credibility and reputation is on the line when you don't deliver what you say you will, and when. There's no magic pill to averting these situations, but you can be proactive in redeeming yourself and retaining customers when things go wrong. Here are three ways to keep your customers when you can't deliver.
Contrary to popular opinion, Boomer women aren't in denial about aging. Advertisers are. And the women they're supposed to be trying to connect with are getting annoyed.
Luke runs MySpace marketing campaigns on a daily basis. Here, he shares his real-world experiences and tips, including the best way to leverage MySpace to zero in on your target market.
Taglines—those few descriptive words that position your brand—set your business apart from the competition and arouse interest in your product or service. The most exceptional taglines can remind potential customers about your brand without mentioning your product, service, or company name: "When you care enough to send the very best," "The quicker picker-upper," "We try harder," and "Just do it!" Here is some solid advice about creating a tagline that will resonate with your own customers.
Let's review: Women make 80 percent of all purchases. They buy more electronic equipment, vehicles, and home-improvement products than men do. Women hold nearly 50 percent of all jobs. In dual-income families, more than 30 percent out-earn their husbands. They control considerable sums of money and spend it for a variety of products, services, investments, and household expenditures. Nevertheless, many advertisers not only create ads that will appeal only to men but also showcase ads that (worse!) actually turn women off.
What's the best way to rectify an embarrassing situation with a client? Read on for sound advice on how to handle client blunders and other screw-ups.
Watching CRM dashboards is like monitoring stocks online—it's easy to get mesmerized by the merest up tick or downturn in lead flow. But like savvy investors, savvy marketers need to do the legwork to understand what's really being measured—before getting seduced by graphs and charts.
A lot has changed in marketing since 2002, but some principles still hold true. This MarketingProfs Classic, originally published January 22, 2002, is a timeless look at the mistakes email marketers make—mistakes that prevent an email newsletter from reaching its full potential.
We're back for another round, bookworms. And in this segment we're discussing branding with the brand masters themselves: the inimitable Al and Laura Ries. What will we be doing this segment? We'll be getting a little Darwinian, debunking some long-held branding "truths"—and, likely, spurring some debate. Please join us!
With 2007 in full swing, here are our online marketing predictions for the rest of the year to come. We busted out our omniscient crystal ball, and this is what it told us... .
It may seem strange to compare an e-newsletter with a blog. But it's not so strange at all, because it wasn't long ago that we turned to online newsletters -- not static Web sites -- to find interesting, engaging, timely and topical news and information. The best e-newsletters share many of the same qualities as good blogs. Here are four.
Establishing credibility is one of the most critical elements in securing a new customer. The customer must see you as a credible and trustworthy resource. Here's how to establish credibility with a prospective customer.
Most adopters of search engine optimization have been B2C companies operating in an e-commerce environment. However, as business-to-business marketers recognize the potential of search, many are seeking ways to implement an effective B2B search engine optimization strategy. To be successful, however, you need to understand the critical differences between B2C and B2B SEO.
No matter how you feel about PETA, as an entity or a cause, you probably know its marketing. Even those don't admire it, in other words, are likely aware of it. Pointed, outrageous, admired and criticized, PETA's messaging is the type that makes the audience sit up and take notice.
Podcasting is a very powerful, yet misunderstood, form of social media. While listening to podcasts has become very popular in the last few years, the creation process still has some high hurdles, especially for listeners that are considering starting their own podcast. The process of starting a podcast from a technical point of view can be cumbersome. This article will outline 10 steps to starting your own podcast that will help make this sometimes difficult process as painless as possible.
Here's a popular way to generate online leads: Buy a keyword ad on a search engine site. In your ad, offer free content -- such as a white paper -- to respondents who complete a short form. In theory, this type of campaign works well: The people who respond get something of value. You get leads. Everyone's happy. Not so fast... .
Today's leading companies don't rely on chance for market success. They take a scientific approach -- just as they do for product development -- to align company resources and activities for maximum launch impact. As margins grow razor thin and competition comes from anywhere, scientific product launches can help your company not just survive, but thrive.
Small businesses don't often have the resources for the amount of effort needed to succeed with the likes of Google, Yahoo and MSN Search out there. Luckily, the Internet offers lots of free tools to maximize marketing and search engine efforts. Readers offer three ways to take advantage.
Marketing professionals don't get too far in their organizations unless they're perceived as true cash-flow leaders. Such leaders influence people in other parts of the organization to think in terms of how to generate cash flow. They're accountable for profitability. And they use their understanding of the market to set a strategic direction for growth that the rest of their firm follows. Cash-flow leaders thus contribute unique value to their organizations—and reap the rewards in the form of stimulating, satisfying careers. How can you become a cash-flow leader? The following guidelines can help.
Marketers, by the very nature of their job function, must juggle numerous campaigns, a range of portfolios, multiple channels, and various corporate, political, and personnel issues—all simultaneously. Do you have multiple action lists running concurrently in your brain? Or great ideas buried within files, folders, emails, Post-It notes, and to-do lists? If that sounds like you, join the club! But I have to warn you: This is one club Stephan will be resigning from soon. Here's his plan.
Walk through any bookstore and you'll find dozens of books about the marketing and branding efforts of corporate America. The process of corporate communication has been thinly sliced and diced over and over, but what you won't find is a book about the one truly essential characteristic in our 21st century world: the company persona -- and how words that work are used to create and sustain it.
Some of you may think "scent marketing" and identify with a company like Yankee Candle, which understands the power of scent—but today's technology goes beyond melted wax, potpourri, and fragrant oils. And most significantly, scent technology today reaches far beyond the home. Increasingly, scent branding is being broadly deployed in major retail and boutique stores, airlines, museums, and other marketing venues across the globe, and in a neighborhood near you.
Here are three new ways for you, and your creative team, to trigger some gigantic ideas.
Conventional wisdom would have many executives believe that social responsibility is in conflict with revenue and profit growth. It's true: A company's responsibility is to increase profits. Yet social responsibility doesn't have to be a drag on the bottom line. Today, you can actually make money by giving.
The delicate relationship between management and marketing is a dance roughly akin to that between fox and hen, but with far less goodwill. To management, you're only as good as your last campaign. So let's look at the 12 tenets of Social Media Marketing to see how you can up your success rate.
Ah, sales and marketing. They're like two siblings fighting in the back seat while mom, pop—or a company executive—drives the car. Jonathan doesn't know how to stop all this bickering (and he's not interested in "who started it"), but here he suggests a few ways those of us on the marketing side can ease the tension by better serving their sales brethren with more productive collateral.
Marketers, for better or worse, need to find meaningful ways to measure their effectiveness. Within the organization, a marketer can earn respect, and be appreciated, by speaking a language that other employees understand: the language of sales and profits.
They say that "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery." Not if you are a Web site owner and you have a brand to protect! Stephan has seen designs copied, content copied... even entire sites copied. It's easy for someone to "View Source" and take whatever they like, without regard to copyright. Here's what to do about it.
If you're trying to market to adults who were born between 1965 and 1994, then you need to understand the best method for reaching generation X and generation Y. The answer is more traditional than you might think.
Most midsize-to-large companies have long learned the value of the press release, but the vast majority of small companies haven't. The notion seems to be that, to make it into the newspaper, companies must have some momentous news to break. But, by forfeiting the newspaper coverage to the "big boys," small companies are missing out on possibly the most dynamic form of promotion and lead generation there is—and it's free.
As a marketer, you regularly cultivate your company's brand so customers know what the firm and its products stand for. As the following story reveals, you must draw on these same skills to let others within your organization know that marketing stands for cash. You can help others in your organization see the link between marketing and cash through several means. But persuasive communication and smart decisions are two particularly potent tools.
It appears that these differing expectations, and the evolution of the role of professional services marketer, have begun to fall into two distinct camps, both of which are grounded in expertise: the efficiency specialist, and the analytical specialist/market creator.
Recently, the author has heard the term "mantra" used much more in a business context, as in a "guiding principle" that inspires you to do whatever special things you do. In the past it might have called a "motto," or a "creative strategy," but today... it's a mantra. So what's your mantra?
There are many resources on the Web for small budgets, and they can enhance the way you interact with your customers. They key is to understand what you need and find the service that best fits your needs.
Most companies don't know what to do to systematically guide this new breed of consumer marketing advocates. But you can build a "program" that will enable you to access and develop a dialogue with these key influencers.
Rejecting corporate games is risky, especially for marketers who need to be—and should be— team players. The author writes from many years of experience engineering scavenger hunts through Disneyland and cruise ships, directing countless silly videos and employee film fests, and choreographing send-up musicals, dance-a-thons and sing-alongs.
Marketing team members, as well as services and sales employees, must work together like this season's football players to achieve company goals. Read on for excellent advice on how to work better as a team.
In the world of engineers, where numbers and measurable impacts reign supreme, marketing communications may seem like a bunch of mumbo jumbo, a pointless exercise in corporate frivolity. But not to electronics components manufacturer Minco.
One of the critical parts of generating a large number of quality referrals is, of course, getting quality referrals, as opposed to just getting names and phone numbers. You can assure yourself of getting quality referrals if you take the time to learn who your client knows prior to asking for referrals. If you know who your client knows, or probably knows, you can suggest potential referrals to your client.
Lemonade is refreshing, particularly on a hot day. With a little sugar and a lot of squeezing, sour lemons are transformed into a nice, healthy source of sustenance. Similarly, profitable customer loyalty can be a healthy source of sustenance for brand equity and a powerhouse on hot days of competition. But how about squeezing the lemons, or acting on the less-attractive feedback from customers, to transform ambivalent and at-risk customers into a reliable source of profit?
Gartner recently predicted a drop off in Second Life hype, followed by a stablization and eventual trend toward sustainable growth in this burgeoning metaverse. Meanwhile, bloggers and other social media sorts have been debating whether Second Life is so... well, 2006. Greg Verdino admits that he might have contributed to some extent to the "outing" of Second Life. Here, the refreshingly honest Greg offers a balanced view of the opportunities and the risks of doing business in Second Life.
Practicing these eight simple strategies will help reduce your quarterly revenues, delay deals, and consume resources foolishly. But making a few changes may move you from being a "victim of momentum" to achieving your numbers predictably.
There are a number of questions marketers should explore when creating and nurturing an online branded community.
What does Mickey Mouse have to do with higher education? Several administrators from St. Edward's University found themselves pondering that unusual question several years ago as they filed into a classroom at the Disney Institute. They came to Orlando, with a tinge of skepticism, to attend a business seminar on applying the Disney model of customer service to colleges and universities.
Brand ambassadors are similar to brand evangelists in that they also have a vested interest in seeing their favorite brand succeed. It's not so much that they attempt to influence other customers to buy a product, but that they share their passion for a brand with their fellow customers. Whereas a company markets to customers in order to sell more products, brand ambassadors attempt to relay their passion for a brand to other customers. Here's how to design your brand ambassador program.
New opportunities for marketers sometimes come quickly and take many forms: marketing technologies, "best practices" applied by leading-edge organizations, new services and products offered by vendors. And marketers may be tempted to jump onto the latest bandwagon. But to reinforce Marketing's role as a generator of cash flow, you need to separate fads from the real deal. How? Follow these guidelines...
Microsoft's PowerPoint long ago became one of the most popular tools for business presentations. That's likely because of its efficiency and simplicity. But what about cases when PowerPoint's resources are not enough to deliver on the goals of communication?
The cardinal rule in MySpace is the same one as in the blogosphere: Keep it real. Before you leap in to MySpace as a marketer, you'd best understand it. Because if you don't, the MySpace community can turn on you the moment you make your first misstep. Just like bloggers can (many MySpace users are bloggers, too, since MySpace supports blogging within its platform).
You can't judge a job by its title. Whatever your background, if you're trying to move into a new area you can get potential employers' attention. Job titles and job experience can be transferred from one job to another. It's all in how you present yourself.
Think of personas—customer archetypes—as "stand-ins" representing the needs, goals, and personal characteristics of various groups of your customers. They are invaluable for giving salespeople insight into the behaviors, expectations, and motivations of users and buyers in the buying process.
Startup and emerging independent software vendors (ISVs) in the current market landscape are confronted with an asymmetric playing field that is fast defining the ground rules for marketing strategy development. The 21st century software industry is superpower-dominated, and today's software marketers must plan for success in the midst of software giants.
Chief Content Officer Ann Handley takes a look back at the blogging year that was for the MarketingProfs Daily Fix blog—and the lessons learned from launching a group blog for marketers. If you're thinking of starting your own blog, or if you're just curious about what it takes, take a gander.
There are many challenges in leading a winning sales team, but research has identified 3 key challenges that sales managers most commonly face. How are you currently approaching these situations? Are you getting the results you are looking for?
What does it mean to truly be marketing-led organization? And what does it take to understand the consequences in implementing this dramatic shift in strategy and culture?
Done well, marketing can eliminate the need to sell. In fact, your marketing materials can do the job of selling if you focus on creating a set of materials that provide an education for the reader—an education that compels them to buy. Most business owners can't really articulate why someone should buy from them. Lacking a compelling argument, many business owners attempt to fill brochures with nice sound bites or product descriptions. This type of marketing, typically housed in the tri-fold brochure, does little to help you stand out in a crowd, let alone educate. Here are the steps to create a toolkit of marketing materials that are flexible, affordable, personal, practical, and most
Writing a compelling story is the inner game of marketing and is often the exclusive realm of your creative agencies. The client scowls during the presentation, asks if the logo could be bigger, and then picks the execution they think is the funniest. This symbiotic relationship holds up pretty well unless a client-side marketer sneaks behind the curtain for a look. Which the author did.
Want to make sure your message doesn't get through? That your campaign disappears without a trace? That your communication program suffers a quick, painful death? Then be sure to try one of these attention-stoppers.
After years of trial and error, attempting to predict the ebb and flow of marketing campaign response, the author put together a reference calendar. It shows blackout dates for email campaigns that B2B marketers should avoid if possible.
Big changes are coming fast and, as marketers, we would be well advised to learn some lessons about metaverse marketing now, lest we be trumped by more nimble competitors. But we need to be smart about our approach, realistic in our expectations and consumer-centric in our executions. Doing it just to do it isn't good enough. On the other hand, neither is waiting to see what happens.
Once again, it is that time of year... when marketing departments are busily preparing next year's budget. As we all know, chances are you won't be able to get everything you're asking for. But, believe it or not, this may actually be a good thing.
Salespeople often overlook one of the most effective and quick ways to both establish themselves as experts in their field and generate a pipeline of quality prospects.
Here's what Jim believes will be the trends for 2007 in marketing ROI as well as priorities you should keep in mind. Progress in 2007 will not come from new technologies or techniques, he says, but from increased adoption as we get smarter about addressing measurement challenges and recognize the opportunity to align marketing strategies and tactics with business objectives.
Customers want a seamless experience with your company—something that's difficult to deliver if you and your colleagues in other functions are separated by silos. To give customers what they want—and bring in the cash your firm needs to stay healthy—managers must break down those silos and replace them with cross-functional collaboration. This work requires strengthening your silo-spanning skills or populating your marketing department with people who possess skills or experience from other function areas. Specifically, here are six ways to bust silos... .
This week, how do you train product salespeople to sell services? Here are three steps.
Whether your launch is for an entirely new product or for a line extension, these seven marketing communication musts will put you on the path to success.
What makes for great advertising? What's the most critical element of a good campaign? And who are the MVPs on a marketing team? This week, Roy Young interviews marketing champion Steve Cone, head of advertising and brand management at Citigroup Global Wealth Management, who gives his take on these issues... and more.
Ever read a book and wanted to discuss or debate it with fellow marketers? Now you can. Or ask the author a question? Now you can do that, too. Introducing the MarketingProfs Book Club. Offering a free-flow of ideas—and some free books—our Book Club keeps you ahead of the marketing curve and provides an arena to virtually meet some of the best minds in marketing. For our inaugural Book Club segment, we'll be reading 'Citizen Marketers,' the just-released, highly anticipated book by famed customer-evangelist team Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba. Here's the kickoff Q&A with the authors.
Do you have the killer instinct? A small percentage of Web content really makes a difference. It makes the sale, delivers the service, and builds the brand. This is the killer Web content. It probably represents less than 10% of content published on the Web, because—let's face it—most content just gets in the way.
Marketing professionals widely use the 4 Ps for marketing a product. But how do you market yourself when YOU are the product? How do you make your own accomplishments believable?
Customer choice is driven universally by many things -- including trust, confidence, relationships, convenience, ease of doing business, and support. But at the same time, lack of follow-up is the number-one issue that annoys B2B customers. If trust is a key driver of customer choice, and lack of follow-up is the number one issue that annoys buyers, then busienss relationships and commitments must be carefully managed through effective tools and best practices. Here's the best tool to have in your toolbox.
Most of us in professional services marketing clearly understand that we must meet expectations that are really not our own—shareholder expectations, board expectations, market expectations. But what about your own "Leadership Legacy"? Have you thought about your personal hopes, goals, desires, and expectations for creating an impact on your firm?
So you've got a small marketing budget? That's OK, there's still a lot you can do to reach your audience; it just may take a little more elbow grease. The first key to stretching a budget is shrinking your focus.
Blogs are continuing to grow in popularity, and they are no longer merely a way for angst-ridden teenagers to express themselves. Today, progressive companies are communicating with bloggers in their industries—and even creating their own blogs as marketing communications tools. A weblog is a wonderful tool for not only better serving your community of customers but also improving your bottom line. But that can only happen if you are willing to enter this space after due diligence and with the commitment necessary for your blog to achieve its full potential. These 10 steps will help walk you through that process before you jump into the blogosphere and start setting up your company's blo
Regardless of the business model that predominates in your company, you can help your superiors and colleagues see your connection to cash flow by actively supporting that model through your marketing strategies.
All too often, Web pages, even homepages, provide readers with a variety of choices, but don't really provide a clear way forward. This is particularly true when a site has multiple products or services to sell. If visitors read your homepage and become interested in something you are selling or offering, what should they do next? Where should they click? Are they ready to go directly to the order page? Would conversions be higher if visitors first read a full sales page?
Today, your Web site is more than just a media source where people find information about your business; it's the place where many customer relationships begin. In your prospects' minds, their experience of your site is a foreshadowing of their experience with your company or organization. Establishing a favorable relationship is quite a challenge. But you can improve your odds by challenging your site with these 10 important questions.
This week: Should you hire experienced marketing professionals, or those with less experience but more potential?
In the nonprofit sector, marketing is often considered a dirty word, a necessary evil that no one admits spending too much time or money on. But to build a successful nonprofit organization to help people, you still need to follow the laws of branding. Why? Because powerful nonprofit brands will raise more money, attract more volunteers and help more people.
It takes an incredible amount of intense drive, determination, and a strong ego to breathe life into a business and create products from scratch, but it's also that same ego that won't let a business owner be objective about what their business needs to succeed.
They're born between 1979 and 2001—the kids of Baby Boomers and the nation's most racially and ethnically diverse generation. They have strong opinions on which brands they'll buy and for which employers they'll work. They're going to have a huge impact on business and marketing, and the world may be better for it.
Pay-per-click advertising is the biggest lead-generation breakthrough to come about in a long time. For small and midsize companies, in particular—and thanks to its ability to narrowly target prospects, tightly manage spending, and precisely measure results—PPC is one of the most efficient lead generation tools ever developed. It does, however, have a downside.
"You're doing what?" was the astounded reaction the author received from colleagues when she decided to leave a decade-long marketing position and take a new job in another industry. She was doing the unthinkable, and not at the early stage of her career but right in the middle—just when most marketing professionals get very comfortable. Why did she jump? And how do you know if and when it's time for a similar change?
Most people who ask "What do you do?" aren't signing up for the lecture, so don't give it to them.
Here's a challenge to you: What is your company like? What metaphors would you use to describe your organization? And: what would your colleagues say?
Wendy White recently came from Intel to serve as Motorola's director of global technology for marketing and communications. She heads up marketing for all R&D, software, and early-stage technology incubation, and what's more, embodies the new-product-development breed of marketing champions. Here, White talks with Roy Young about the challenges and rewards of her role as well as the larger issue of how she "markets marketing" within Motorola.
The ultimate goal of any marketing campaign is to create brand loyalty. You want customers to remain loyal to you no matter what price your competitors offer them, no matter what product substitutes they offer, no matter what services they offer. But what if a customer's experience wtih your organization is less than shining? Here's how to handle that, too.
Cheryl Keener, recently named senior director of customer development at Sunnyvale, CA-based Network Appliance, leads her company's "Evidence to Win" program. In part, the program is designed to cultivate positive relationships with major customers by documenting the success stories that customers tell as a result of using NetApp's products. Here, Keener talks with Roy Young about the development, use and context of her program as well as discusses the larger issue of being a "marketing champion" inside her organization.
"You can't manage what you don't measure" is a saying that will never go out of style. It's not only timeless; it's increasingly critical for marketers to heed. Measurement forces us to be clear and specific and to crisply define our terms. It is the great clarifier in a world of ambiguous and imprecise language. A new book from professors out of the Universities of Pennsylvania and Virginia is one of the best new books about marketing metrics. Titled "Marketing Metrics: 50+ Metrics Every Executive Should Master," the text is a sort of cookbook with must-have recipes for helping marketing managers or executives to design a scorecard, evaluate their business, or better assess market, comp
Marketing departments perform many tasks throughout the year: hiring good talent, keeping quality employees, choosing the right communications strategy, improving ROI, and generating higher quality leads for Sales. But with increasing competition and diminishing budgets, achieving these goals is becoming increasingly difficult. Fortunately, there is a crucial step that marketing departments can take to have a positive impact on the outcome of their initiatives for the year: deploying an effective lead-management process.
What does it really take to cement brand loyalty? In addition to time, patience, commitment, and sound brand management, what else can marketing executives do to build and maintain brand loyalty? Especially in an age when the consumer has so many choices—too many choices—in an increasingly global marketplace?
This week: When you aren't ready to send a product out to pasture, how do you reinvigorate it? How can a company reposition its brand and increase sales?
A few weeks ago the author penned a popular article here on how negative thoughts can sabotage your writing. This week, she looks at the mirror image of the topic. Read on to find out how this look at the "flip side" can help you write faster and better.
To be successful today, you must have a clear and compelling online identity. People are googling you and making decisions about you from what Google reveals. Whether you are an employee looking to advance in your company, a professional seeking your next marketing role, or a consultant looking to land your ideal client, you should plan on being googled. And you should prepare for it.
How did the NBA overcome the 1999 retirement of Michael Jordan and a variety of black eyes that might have doomed a lesser brand? It launched and supported a new product—one by the name of LeBron James. The NBA's resurgence is a classic example of the power of a new product. But we're getting ahead of ourselves; the story begins with the bad old days, and it ends with some takeaways you can apply to your own brand.
Marketing is the engine of any enterprise. Yet marketing is often underutilized. We find marketing practitioners frustrated at not being able to make the essential contributions to their company's success that they are capable of—and ideally positioned to provide. Peer managers and members of the executive team have difficulty articulating how, precisely, the marketing function can help the organization grow and meet its strategic objectives. Equally troubling, marketers themselves face a challenge in describing the value of their work in terms that other executives understand. Put simply, marketers struggle to master the language of business. Marketers must champion marketing in order t
Overall, big brands typically screw up search in two big ways, and Nike is no different... .
It may be bold. It may be controversial. But the author is convinced the following will prove true: Without customer-centricity, or a role in gathering and interpreting the voice of the customer, marketing will become nothing more than the execution arm of companies. There are signs of this everywhere....
Next year will bring major shifts in beauty, especially organics, and fashion as consumers take more control over all aspects of their harried lives. Interestingly, growth will come from non-traditional sources... .
You can do Hollywood tie-ins right. It just takes nerves of steel, the ability to say no to a lot of very charming people, and a ton of planning. But you will live to fight another day if you follow this prescription... .
If you're able to just snap your fingers and make work appear on command, more power to you. If not, and you ever find yourself having to do some sales, what follows are some musings from a business development department about preparation, organization, getting and staying in touch, and keeping it all going... .
Innovation seems so unmanageable—more akin to the artist searching for a muse than a business process. We dive into the "fuzzy front-end" of product development hoping that by talking to customers or anticipating trends we will find that source of inspiration, that flash of insight. Here's a different suggestion: Break a rule! Do something that disrupts a fundamental tenet of your market or industry.
This week, readers offer ways to sift through executive-level advice and keep potential Web design meddlers in check.
Since marketers first entered the boardroom as CMOs, companies have recognized the strategic value of marketing. Often, sadly, that recognition has not been translated into quantifiable business success. But there is a way to magnify the strategic value of marketing and simplify marketers' jobs in the process. All it requires is that marketing take an early and active role in defining the company's product portfolio.
ou work with your team to design a well-integrated marketing plan that you believe is the best approach to the market. And, sure enough, upper management demands a budget cut that disrupts your plan. The budget-cutting process puts you as a marketer in defensive mode—you may lose key tactics that have strategic value in the marketing mix, or the cuts scale back the overall marketing to the point where you question the potential impact. Marketers need to be prepared to articulate their strategy in terms that are relevant to executives. Three steps may help your case....
In today's workforce, employees who are Spanish speakers give companies a competitive advantage. Smart companies do not put the cart before the horse: They build an infrastructure of Hispanic employees before advertising to Hispanic market segments.
Silvia Lagnado, new group vice-president at London-based Unilever, embodies marketing championship—in particular, the ability to "span silos" by building bridges between marketing and her company's many other functions to generate cash flow. Silvia heads a team devoted to "brand development," including conceptualizing new products and creating advertisements, packaging, and marketing strategies. Here, Roy Young uncovers what makes her a "marketing champion."
Take the time to ensure you have a well-thought-out, fully developed marketing strategy. It may require more work upfront, but it will pay off in the long run. After all, about the only thing worse than not knowing where you're going is starting out for your destination, only to find out later that it's not really where you want to go.
Whether serving customers face-to-face or via email, the Web, phone, fax, instant messaging, self-service (or some combination thereof), a firm's reputation for world-class customer care is built one customer and one contact at a time. Frontline employees in operations, sales, service, or account management all play key roles in delivering this all-important contact. Accordingly, a firm must continually evolve its internal operating systems and processes into structures that empower rather than impede the frontline's success with customers. This is a tall order. Yet, keeping an eye on a few key priorities will help you succeed. In fact, employees need three things to perform effectively
B2B events are incredibly efficient. Your clients and prospects gather there... in growing numbers. Plus, events like these blend face-to-face selling and broadcast-style marketing, giving you a shot at the best of both worlds. Provided you're smart. And, provided you can overcome the professionals' legendary reluctance to be, well, social. What do you do, then, to get the most out of these opportunities? How do your overcome your introversion? Or, at least mitigate its effect?
As competition heats up and sales start to stagnate, companies often seek to breathe new life into the brand through rebranding. In all too many cases, however, those expensive rebranding efforts fail to yield the desired business results. Here are some of the key reasons rebranding often fails. More than executional mistakes that blunt the effectiveness of rebranding efforts, these are critical errors that almost always lead to failure.
Just as teenagers use catch phrases, certain words and phrases crop up again and again in Web sites and news releases—so much so that the gobbledygook grates against nerves. Well, duh. Like, companies, yeah, they just totally don't communicate very well, you know?
If you and your marketing team use an ad hoc approach to processes, you've got serious problems. For one thing, this tack deprives you of the credibility you need to earn your superiors' and peers' support for your ideas. When non-marketing executives sense that the marketing group is using ad hoc processes, they question those processes' reliability—as well as your team's professionalism. Non-standardized processes also waste time and money as people duplicate one another's efforts or work at cross-purposes.
The business conference season is in full bloom this month, and you've probably noticed that many of these get-togethers are focused on the current hot topic of corporate innovation. Yet, attendees could benefit taking a moment to peek back into history and learn from the innovators from another era.
When people hear about online marketing, they often think of two of the more popular methods that a company can use to enhance its visibility on the Web: organic search engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising. In an ideal world, you would use both strategically to maximize your site's profile. However, budgetary constraints often make that impossible, and trying to do both on a limited budget or with minimal resources can result in neither campaign producing ideal results. In this case, it's usually better to focus on one or the other. But which is best for you?
What's the best way to get big results from a small budget?
Look to dream with the R&D team if you want marketing to be valued as a leader of future cash flow.
A recent book, "Marketing Metrics: 50+ Metrics Every Executive Should Master " (Wharton, 2006), claims that there are over 50 metrics every executive should master. Faced with such a daunting number, most marketers are likely to want to know which of the 50 are critical, and which are merely nice to know. The truth is: there is no specific number of measurements that the effective marketer must have, but revenue, profit, and return on investment are fundamental for every marketing organization. For many small companies, the number of important measurements and metrics will be considerably less than 50, but for the larger and more complex businesses the number will be considerably more...
We all know about ADD—Attention Deficit Disorder. The larger problem, in terms of getting response to our communications, is TDD—Time Deficit Disorder.
Are you ready to transition a product into new markets or define next generations of a solution? Knowing in which direction to take your product and marketing strategy can be difficult to determine, taking many months and using significant resources. The following six steps can help you jumpstart your strategy-planning efforts with a streamlined and effective approach in developing a targeted product and market strategy.
According to a survey recently published in Gallup Management Journal, a startling 69% of workers are either not-engaged or actively disengaged on the job. Further research from the firm estimates that approximately $370 billion is lost annually due to lower productivity from actively disengaged workers alone. So what can you do about this alarming trend?
Quick—is your marketing mobile? Can your message reach your on-the-go audience and can your in-motion customer interact with you wherever they are? In the past, as long as you were advertising out-of-home, you could have answered "yes." But today, unless your media plan contains a significant amount of mobile-compatible mediums, you are not optimizing your reach. Here's how.
Web marketers don't sit in labs, mixing and testing search engine formulas. Good Web marketers form online relationships by joining discussion forums, subscribing to e-newsletters, visiting blogs, and introducing themselves to online media. So get inspired and get yourself out there.
Viral marketing focuses on leveraging existing social networks by encouraging customers to share product information with their friends. Here are some key insights that all marketers should use as they develop word of mouth campaigns.
Simplicity is probably the most important underlying factor when it comes to the performance of any Web page... whether your homepage, an interior page, a sales page, or a landing page. Here are six ways to keep your pages simple and increase conversions.
Many marketers make an all-too-common error in the way they present their story: They don't speak the language an executive audience uses and values. Here's how can you master the language of business.
Why do you want a blog? Simply put, blogs make it easy to communicate more effectively with the audience you care about. They're the easiest way to update a Web site, provide simple and effective ways of automatically organizing the content you create, and notify your audience when your site has been updated. A blog can also allow you to collect feedback from that audience. And blogs are a great complement to the communications technologies you already use, such as email newsletters, conference calls and mailings. If you're ready to jump in and get started, the following short checklist offers some essential steps you'll want to follow.
Hiring managers are googling you—as are your clients and business partners. Maybe you're being googled right now as you read this article. Personal googling is a phenomenon guaranteed to impact your career. Do you know what Google says about you?
In the new world of Customer Advisory Programs, companies are making needed changes to their councils to support changes in their business strategies. They are reevaluating their program research objectives, participant mix, and planned activities to ensure that their program supports the decisions that need to be made. Companies are also putting the necessary organizational changes into place to support their program extensions. Management knows that by leveraging the insight from the councils, it will make better decisions to remain a leader in the competitive marketplace.
How does an organization doing business both offline and online overcome the perception that it's only an Internet company?
Specialized and targeted audiences are great, but what about those Fortune 500 advertisers that still wish to reach a truly LARGE audience? The author challenged his R&D team to develop a new advertising vehicle that delivers a true mass audience. The following are the lessons they learned about reaching big audiences.
Writers face specific challenges when writing a home page. In fact, home pages can be tricky, simply because your page not only has its own job to do but also has to support a group of second-level pages. Here's how Nick approaches the task... whether a site has a total of 10 pages or a thousand pages.
Connecting to the female consumer is not easy, because there is no single magical way to target women. They are a diverse group, and in many ways it is harder to reach them than their male counterparts. As a follow up to part one of this article, here are specific ideas to increase your business with female customers.
Marketing often gets no respect. What's more, there are damaging myths about marketing that non-marketing managers circulate—such as "marketing is only about advertising" and "marketing is about tactics, not strategy." In their new book, Roy and David offer a prescription for marketers to learn how to gain both respect and a seat at the strategy table. Here are 10 questions about dispelling myths, winning respect, and what the author does with his 10 free copies of his book.
How do you know what product sales are driven from which keywords within your paid search efforts? Which keywords are driving the most profitable traffic? Are you doing everything to maximize your paid search ROI? A common perception within the online advertising community is that a successful ad sells product it was intended to sell. Surprisingly, that is not always the case. In reality, online conversions often originate from traffic generated by keywords that are entirely unrelated to the items eventually purchased. For instance, a large percentage of fur coats on one merchant's site were purchased by people who searched on "gold watches." Who would have thought gold watches and fur co
Can you imagine what it would be like to charge 20-200% more than your competitor and own market category dominance? This final part of the Boot Camp series focuses on ways your organization can increase its economic power.
After months of work and weariness, your company Web site is designed, search-engine optimized, and packed with rich, interesting content. The building blocks are all in place. Your next challenge is to tweak the structure you have to attract more of the business you want to get. The following are five simple yet powerful ways to squeeze even more value from the site you've invested in. Most can be accomplished with a simple text editor, such as Contribute; almost all of them exploit content you've already created. Yet they can all make a substantial contribution to your site's success.
The search engine marketing industry is consistently evolving, sometimes at a pace that makes it hard to believe that search engine marketing services can stay on top of all the latest developments. The one constant for search engine marketing firms, and for the industry in general, is change—usually for the better, sometimes for the worse, but almost always significant.
The author doesn't own a Blackberry. But his clients don't know that. They're impressed when they receive an email from him with the tag line: Sent from a BlackBerry wireless handheld. It shows that he's available 24/7 and always responsive to their every need. Is he lying? Literally, yes. However, in the world of business we are always stretching the truth to impress our customers, right? Read Hesh's lighter view of the business world.
As a marketer, you have no shortage of metrics at your disposal—including brand awareness, customer satisfaction, and ad readership, to name just a few. But your CEO and CFO, as well as your firm's shareholders, care less about these metrics than they do about others—particularly cash flow. Here are the right metrics to use to communicate marketing's real value.
Make no mistake about it: When companies run out of ideas, bad things happen to brands. Instead of differentiating their offerings with meaningful value-added features, like healthier and more flavorful products, time-saving recipes and packaging, or even emotive, associative value, marketers end up resorting to price cuts and special promotions. Instead of taking a long-term view of customer value and growth in sales, earnings and new product development, their focus shifts to a short-term desire to grow market share with discounting and deal-making.
What do Major League Baseball, Coca Cola, Well Forgo Bank, the W Hotel, and the American Cancer Society have in common? They all use a virtual realm to reach out to potential customers and supporters in novel ways.
Although Mark Hyman, M.D, the New York Times best selling author and practicing physician, had a strong, multi-faceted marketing and sales plan in place, the addition of an article-marketing strategy helped in his bid to push his book to the no. 2 spot of the NY Times best seller list. Dr. Hyman's article-marketing campaign was only one piece of the puzzle, but an important piece that helped him establish key relationships with site publishers that will result in increased, targeted traffic and stronger sales for many months and years to come. By including a targeted article marketing program into your marketing and sales plan, you can also achieve book-marketing success.
This week: Many businesses have succeeded in selling products online in the form of e-books, e-reports and other downloadable content. Of course, it's not as simple as posting the product on your Web site and hoping buyers will come. The challenge comes in getting potential customers to your site in the first place.
It's every company's dream, having a community of customers that are so devoted to your company, that they will market and evangelize you to other members of their community. Customers that feel a sense of ownership in your company, and that want to spread your message to others. Such strong bonds between companies and their communities of customers aren't the norm, and cannot be developed without great planning and dedication. But for companies that are willing to embrace and empower their communities, the results can be magical. Here are five companies that have embraced their community of customers as their marketing partners.
The Starbucks Coffee marketing research department is kept busy providing oodles and oodles of insights into the Starbucks brand through yearly brand audits. And take it from this former long-time Starbucks marketer, the company learns a lot from these studies. However, when it comes to measuring and managing the Starbucks brand on a daily basis, the Starbucks marketing department generally relies on a much simpler method—a brand checkbook.
Do members of your company's executive team—along with your peers throughout the organization—see the connection between marketing and the cash flowing into your company's coffers? If not, they probably view you as merely a tactical tool (brochure writer, a trade-show participant, Web site "put-it-upper"), not a true strategic partner. And they likely underutilize marketing. To deliver maximum value for your firm, you'll need to correct their misperceptions of marketing's value. How? Avoid the 10 biggest mistakes marketers make.
Some of the most recent cultural touch points—groups riding the underground buzz on YouTube; MySpace selling music from indie bands; and the skinny jeans fashion trend—show a new market code at work. The young, tech-savvy members of a new generation of consumers are rewriting the rules and changing how everyone will do business. In fact, there are 10 cravings that are driving this renegade new group. Part one explored the first five cravings. Here is the last five, as well as two critical principles to understand about the so-called Connected Generation.
Whether you are working on a personal branding campaign or you're focused on differentiating your company's brand from its competitors, you need to constantly ask yourself if your brand is demonstrating the 10 Cs of branding.
The marketing times, they certainly are a-changin'. So how does it feel? To be on your own? With no direction home? Like a complete unknown? Like a rolling stone? How does it feel to have consumers in charge of what, how, and when they watch, read, listen, and click? So what's a marketer to do in this chaotic environment of abundant products and services, fast-flying consumers, and a rapidly changing landscape?
Milton Hershey once said that quality was the best kind of advertising in the world. For your company to be successful, the service provided must be of the highest quality possible. Focus on delivering world-class service first, then (and only then) consider marketing it. Here's how.
B2B marketers who are recognizing the limitations of today's email-marketing and Web-analytics applications for generating qualified sales leads are switching to lead-generation solutions to ensure a continuous stream of qualified leads. Keep these five points in mind to ensure that you make a purchase that meets the needs of your company.
For many sales professionals, prospecting or qualifying is the least favorite aspect of their job. Often, in the rush to dig into a new account and make a new sale, only a cursory attempt is made at qualifying, and the salesperson ends up spending time with the wrong people. In this era of hyper-competition and limited resources, how can sales professionals qualify and select the right prospects with whom to spend their valuable time?
As a competent, well-prepared media spokesperson, you will earn the respect of the reporters while positioning yourself as a thought leader and elevating your company's position in the marketplace.
The value of creating passionate users is becoming clear to brands wishing to thrive in the "experience economy." Provide an experience that is useful, usable, desirable, and differentiated... and you will create demand for your brand and delight your customers. This article is not about just visual design. As designers of digital experiences, what are we doing to develop compassion toward the users we are designing for?
Baby Boomers may still hold the purse strings, but a new generation of savvy 18- to 40-year-olds are changing the way all of us do business. It doesn't matter whether you're a rock band, a fashion designer, a nonprofit organization, or a sporting goods outlet, you and your team need to understand what makes this new generation tick.
Referrals are one of the most effective ways to gain business. But what's the best vehicle....in-person conversations, email newsletters, blogs, articles?
People have long conducted market research. Not with fancy focus groups or complicated conjoint analysis, but just by asking questions and listening to the answers. Using this art of listening is so crucial to the success of your company's marketing, that to deny it is to invite failure. Follow along as we show you how to use marketing research to funnel knowledge into your marketing programs.
Traffic is good, but ultimately it's all about conversion.
If people pay attention to what interests them and ignore everything else, how can you break through the clutter with a message that people care about? All you have to do is press your customers' hot buttons.
The most important areas of marketing are the three Ps: positioning, presentation and panache.
You've decided to hire a consultant to take on a large marketing project. Maybe you've had dozens of successful consulting relationships—maybe you've never had one. In either case, you're about to open your cell phone and call a consultant when you stop dead in your tracks, wondering how you can improve the results. What are the right questions to ask to make sure you make the best choice and get the best performance from a consultant? We asked several top executives to share the questions they ask consultants during the search process.
Have you ever reached for a brownie when you were trying to lose weight? Or stayed in bed when you intended to go to the gym? Or put off paying bills because it was "too much of a hassle"? There are lots of different ways in which we sabotage ourselves. This is true of life in general and also true of the writing life.
It isn't the most high-tech tool in the office, and it may not have fancy bells and whistles, but for many companies and organizations the telephone is often the first line of customer service communication. And many are using it badly. Yet creating the internal tools will help establish protocols that can make telephone communication a marketing communications channel for external information. Here are five recommendations.
Learning from past experiences to improve future actions is an important characteristic of human nature. Obviously, the world of business is no exception. To advance the field of corporate strategy, or better yet, to advance the search for a universal formula for enduring corporate success, it is imperative to use a broader perspective and start by asking two simple questions....
We all want press coverage. We all have visions of the rest of the world valuing us, our companies, and our contributions. But what happens when a reporter really is on line one? A blessed few can pick up the phone and say brilliant things. The vast majority of us panic.
Most companies have a policy that puts the customer first, but too often that policy isn't implemented by the people on the front lines. Why is that?
Marketing Operations is an emerging discipline with the potential to significantly increase performance and accountability in complex marketing organizations. It addresses the seven deadliest marketing sins that plague organizations of all sizes by leveraging a strong front-end infrastructure to reinforce marketing strategy and back-end programs and tactics. Is your organization ready for a change?
Do you remember a time when most restaurant meals were the sit down, full-service, dessert-included variety? Even if all you wanted was a cup of soup or a simple salad, you were offered the blue plate special with everything at one price. Then the culinary folks came up with small plates, a la carte items, tastings, pairing menus, buffets and the like.... Similarly, high-tech companies have stopped serving everything one way with a side of structured licensing? Where once companies had to select / install / customize/upgrade, now we're allowed to use smaller-scale online services that do one thing really well, without integration and without customization.
If you're marketing in a highly competitive keyword space or providing products and services with little or no name recognition, you should consider creating branded keywords and driving their search demand with buzz.
Web 2.0 has changed what product definitions look like, and how things that are sold as 'free' can make money. So while the 4 Ps are a good start as buckets, let's update them for today's era and discuss what you need to be doing to keep your mix both relevant and impactful. Here's one take on what's happening…and some ideas on what you need to do to win your market.
Rewards program members are more likely to have spent a greater amount of money in the past six months across 11 retail categories examined in a recent study, including home improvement, electronics, grocery and book stores. Check out the study's specific results here.
Web 2.0 reflects how the Web is changing from watching to "involving." What are the best ways to engage with customers in this new climate?
Generating quality leads is a growing challenge for many marketing professionals. More than ever before, legions of marketing materials are competing for the attention of prospects. How can you be sure to stand out from the crowd?
Every time the tradeshow season rolls around, marketers ask themselves the same old question: how can I tap into the special sales markets without using last year's hats, bags, Frisbees, pens, and other boring gimmicks? The solution is so simple and effective—good old-fashioned books.
If your company isn't looking at the latest trends in marketing to women, focusing a significant amount of your resources on this market, and generating innovative marketing ideas, you are missing out on a substantial amount of revenue. Women have the power, the money and the will to work with companies who recognize them, appreciate them and truly want to serve them. To develop a sound plan, here's what you need to know.
Marketers assume that "Googling" for information is an automatic response the instant a Web surfer opens a browser. And for many Internet users, the theory is true. But for a number of reasons, and with increasing regularity, many people bypass search engines altogether in favor of a technique called direct navigation. Simply put, direct navigation is when a users directly types a Web address into a browser.
For marketers, technologically sophisticated products and services pose a special problem—translating the technical talk that engineers love into the plain talk customers need and will act upon. From the depths of my experience with bits, bytes, high-voltage devices and semi-toxic chemical compounds, we offer a few suggestions that will help you turn good science into compelling marketing copy.
A fundamental question in selling is not why people sell, but why people buy. People buy for their own reasons—not for the seller's. In fact, their motivation to buy may have very little to do with the reasons sellers think they should buy. When it comes down to it, people buy something to meet their needs or resolve the problems they are facing. A good sales professional can help customers come to that realization. But it doesn't happen as easily as you might think.
Done well, e-books deliver authentic thought leadership, branding an organization as one to do business with. Here are some examples of successful e-books to get your creative energy flowing....
In Part 1 of this two-part article, the author looked at how MySpace (and the social networking industry in general) has evolved. Here in the second part, Cliff examines how he has applied what he has learned and observed to the MyCityRocks testbed, which he launched in Houston in 2005.
Every day, we are reminded that providing value to customers is a surefire route to success. True enough. But do you know what that really means? The concept of customer value has been around for over 20 years, and many books and articles have been written about it. Yet its growth in popularity has also been accompanied by frequent misunderstandings and spotty application. Here we revisit the customer value concept, review a common misunderstanding about customer value, and present a comprehensive definition that both synthesizes existing research and serves as a model for delivering higher levels of value to your customers. Let's start with a misunderstanding.
If your visitors like your Web site, there is a very good likelihood that the search engines will, too. With this in mind, the following 10 tips focus on how to develop your site with your visitors in mind, and also effectively conduct search engine optimization.
In grade school, one of the key determinants of popularity on the playground was how quickly you were selected when the time came to choose up sides for basketball, baseball, or soccer. In the same way, the developing business model for the next 10 years depends hugely on which set of developer and ecosystem partners pick you. However, unlike grade school, you might have more ability to influence this selection.
Why should you create a Voice of the Customer program? And what steps should you take to do so?
There's an invasion of little orange buttons on Web sites, and it has nothing to do with a new marketing campaign from Home Depot. Often labeled "XML," "RSS," or more recently "Subscribe," feeds are playing a leading role in the user-controlled distribution and fragmentation of Web content.
Summertime is traditionally when most of us kick back and relax in the sun. But marketing managers know it's also the calm before the storm. With so much revenue potential on the line in Q3 and Q4, summer is when managers turn their attention to setting strategy for ramping up their sales teams toward fall success. So, how is your money best spent? What really helps salespeople move business through the funnel? What messages are most likely to resonate with customers? The following 10 tips are based on years of experience living the challenges you face at year-end.
A customer reference program can have a significant impact on all customer-related functions in an enterprise. To maximize and demonstrate the strategic business benefits of a program, an effective RMS needs—at a minimum—the following capabilities....
It is the beginning of the fiscal year, and the marketing budget is fully funded. Giddy with delight, you begin diligently signing contracts and distributing spend for marketing investments throughout the year. But pretty soon, you begin to get the funny feeling that something—perhaps the cost-cutting chainsaw—is in the offing. Your worst fears are confirmed when, four months later, the CFO knocks on the office door and mentions the marketing budget has just been cut by 70%. Suddenly, you are a candidate for "stressed out" marketing.
This week: When done right, desktop-based applications are beneficial tools that give marketers a way to keep customers engaged with their company by providing them with entertainment, information, or functionality. Here's how marketers are tapping into their power.
The growth of MySpace has been front and center in the media over the past 12 months, in part because of the continued incredible growth of the venture but also because of social outrage generated by those who view it as an inappropriate and unsafe environment for teenagers. Here, Cliff looks at what has happened with MySpace, what has changed, and what he's learned about the online social networking business model over the past 12 months.
"User-generated content" is much more than today's most tossed-around-the-tongue buzzword. It's the difference between having a flood of site traffic or just a trickle. Empower your users to create information that their peers want to see, and your site becomes a living, breathing place to be. Profiles, photos, and blogs still have currency in this post-and-share world—but video blogging is the hot now thing that's taking off fast.
A reference management system is an important part of customer relationship management. But if you're waiting for this functionality to get added to your CRM system, don't hold your breath. This is the first part of a two-part article that examines the importance of an RMS and the choices available for incorporating this functionality into your technology infrastructure.
Much as you might dread it, planning and budgeting are not going away. So you may as well make the effort to get more value out of the process. It's actually an ideal time for putting basic ROI analysis to use. Here are four ways to use financial insight to create more profitable strategies and tactical plans while building greater credibility with your executive team.
It's safe to say that we all have a list of top marketing strategies. Every year they appear on the strategic plan, they drive activities throughout the firm, and their progress is discussed at the highest levels. But are the top strategies that firms identify really the ones that they should be pursuing? How do they know for sure? Perhaps they're prioritizing activities simply because they think they worked in the past. Or because they know that competitors are doing them (yes, the lemming principle is alive and well in professional services!). There's only one way to know for sure whether your firm is directing its marketing efforts wisely. And that is to measure.
The elevator speech is that tightly scripted, 30-second introduction that should pack as much information about a person as possible in an engaging, persuasive, and interesting way, right? Unfortunately, even the "best" elevator speech can be an express trip to oblivion instead of a shining personal marketing moment.
Many of the new technologies that get hype today won't matter down the road. But there are always a few in the mix that need to be considered deeply. Granted, figuring out the difference is hard, especially with the high volume of noise that can exist in coverage of the Next Big Thing the business press.
Blog advertising expenditures have exploded in the past year. Companies can make a really big brand splash for relatively little money, meaning that blogs provide advertisers an excellent opportunity to reach a devoted audience niche. But blog numbers, until recently, have been little more than curiosities to big brands.
The precedent-setting commitment of Warren Buffet and Bill Gates to charitable work is bringing corporate philanthropy to the forefront. After many years of corporate scandals and Sarbanes-Oxley news, the tipping point has arrived. Corporate philanthropy is good—both for business and the nonprofits that benefit from it. And the better news is... you don't have to be in big business to do it.
Your initial contact with a prospective customer leaves little margin for error. The first conversation is the most critical and least forgiving point of the entire sales process. Within the first 20 seconds you must simultaneously establish relevance and credibility—or you will be dismissed as just more marketing noise in the relentless barrage of sellers looking for attention.
With all the emphasis these days on getting your message out using online media, we simply forget to focus on how to develop the right message. Many a company goes to market without having fully defined its customer value proposition. Don't make that mistake.
Do your customers look at your products with the same eager anticipation as they once did? Have your customers stayed "married" to you? Would you consider them still in love—or waiting it out until someone better comes along?
Today's multichannel catalog/online environment is a lot like the summer county fair. In fact, there are some surprisingly apt comparisons.
Emerging economies are home to 84% of the global population and account for almost half the world's production. What's more, these regions are home to relatively inexperienced (and apparently, therefore, impressionable) populations and potentially high purchasing power. Clearly, this represents a real opportunity if there ever was one. Or does it?
Is your commitment to customers real? Or are you merely jockeying for position on the latest customer scoreboard?
Last year, MP3 player sales totaled $4.23 billion. Half of all US teens now own a player (with video capabilities increasingly becoming the norm). And of the two billion cell phones in use worldwide, 236 million now contain 3G technology enabling video playback. Can you say mini media market? Well, it may not be so mini.... As Mark Twain observed, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics. But timing is everything.
Computers are the campfires of today, around which we are all gathered. If you have a good story to tell there, people will listen. Here is a practical guide to creating brand-driven Web entertainment that marketers can use in their content-development efforts. The key is to have fun, experiment, and create some memorable stories.
There's more than one way to skin a cat—and for achieving natural search engine results.
Thanks to technology, you've got a big file of data available for your review and analysis. But what to do with all those numbers? How do you change them into English? How do you help them tell you a story about an advertising campaign?
Why do customer efforts crash and burn? Are you wrestling with customer leadership? What are you doing to match the commitment to the customer to the actions of the organization? And, is the Chief Customer Officer the solution? Such questions are asked (and answered) in Jeanne Bliss's new book, "Chief Customer Officer," a highly energetic, tell-it-like-it-is treatise on how to create and execute a customer-centric agenda. Her passion and battle scars are threaded throughout the book. Her recommendations have been vetted and tested in the real world, at some of the largest, most powerful companies in the world—Microsoft, Lands End, Allstate Insurance, among others. As Bliss writes in the
Here are four common mistakes that service firm leaders make, and five tips on how to save time, money, and heartache when thinking about the dreaded competition.
As retailers strive to touch consumers at every step of the purchase cycle, retail marketing has evolved to become a mosaic of mass-media branding, tactics for driving store traffic, in-store experience, and loyalty programs. It's a lot to manage, but this checklist should help.
This article is an outline for implementing a strong market conversation strategy at your company. Such a strategy can drive results similar to traditional PR and marketing efforts at a substantially lower upfront cost. That effort, however, requires an ongoing investment of employee time and effort. If you follow this article's core concepts and apply them to your industry, you'll see an increased presence in the media, an increase in perceived expertise, a growing intra-company knowledge base, and an exploding search engine presence. More importantly, you'll find that your company becomes an increasingly important player in your industry. You'll find that surprising and disruptive oppo
A great many changes are taking place online right now. This is particularly true when you are trying to reach and sell to potential customers who are up-to-date with new technologies and ways of using the Web. Meanwhile, too many online marketers are still scratching their heads and wondering whether they can muster the courage to launch a blog.
There is currently a fundamental shift in business thinking. In fact, business leaders are embracing, with great impact, the concept of integrating analytical abilities and creativity. And this is where our left brain-right brain discussion takes us....
You are probably very familiar with the concept of communications planning. Perhaps you manage the communications for your company. Now you need to take that same communications expertise and apply it to yourself.
To design marketing plans that are effective in attracting and selling to more women, you have to know where you are today. In other words: To get the right answers, you must start with the correct questions. As your company focuses on developing appropriate strategies, here are some questions you should consider.
Along the path toward better marketing accountability, there are many rocks, holes, roots, and other tripping hazards. Here are a few of the most common ones. Which ones are blocking your path?
How do consumers decide what to buy? And how much money do they have to spend for what they want to buy? Marketers have long tried to figure it out, and you're probably no exception in finding out that there haven't been any good answers. So you rely on things like household income data to measure the potential spending power of your prospects and customers. And, for a long time, that kind of "potential" was all that was available. But today it is no longer enough if you are serious about targeting the right consumer, with the right product, at the right time.
In a classic "New Yorker" cartoon, a man approaches the pearly gates. Saint Peter, greeting the new arrival, gestures to a sign saying "Birth, Death & Beyond" and comments, "Actually, I preferred 'Heaven,' too, but then the marketing guys got hold of it." Ah, the dreaded "m" word. Instead of inspiring awe and admiration, it's now more likely to prompt contempt and eye-rolling.
For some organizations, there's no business like tradeshow business. But diversifying your marketing efforts leads to better results. So what are the alternatives to tradeshow marketing?
Remember back in the '90s, when voice of the customer (VOC) was all the rage? It was a process discipline, a way for companies to gather customer insight to drive product and service requirements. But VOC got lost amidst a booming tech sector, abundant resources, and the many, many new markets, customers, and transactions that companies pursued. Somewhere along the way, pulling out all the stops to delight the installed customer base got lost. But today, VOC is again moving to the center of the radar.
Your organization is struggling to emerge from an overcrowded marketplace and forge a separate and unique identity—to create an enduring and powerful brand. How do you do it? Simple, says the UK's John Simmons. In "We, Me, Them & It: How to Write Powerfully for Business," Simmons suggests: Write differently. Beyond the basics that most firms lean on to distinguish themselves—graphics, colors, logos, essentially a visual identity overhaul—language, and more specifically tone of voice, is a powerful way to forge a distinctive identity, writes Simmons. Branding, after all, is about differentiation. And describing a brand begins with words.
Make no mistake: Online, your success in converting interest into acquisition depends on your ability to connect with prospects precisely where they are in the buying process. B2B and B2C buyers go through similar stages in that process as they consider their purchasing decision: needs assessment, requirements analysis, evaluation, purchasing. Using this model, there are four distinct methods you can use to successfully transition prospects from first click to conversion.
Traditional TV tends to deliver measurable advertising results only for true mass-market products—in part because you need about $15 million to begin even the smallest mainstream TV campaign. Cable TV, on the other hand, is a powerfully viable alternative, delivering much higher ROI on much lower budgets in a national campaign. With cable TV, significant impact can be seen from as little as $500,000 in media spending.
Selling intangibles is hard work. Putting together a successful Web site that peddles intangibles is even harder. Here's a look at the top sins that many professional services sites—maybe most—commit... along with some suggestions on what can be done about them.
Sometimes, copywriters and content writers write in clichés. They say things like, "Company X offers an integrated end-to-end solution." To a reader, the line has barely any meaning, and certainly no impact. Why not? Because it is too familiar. Because he or she has read the same phrase too many times before, in too many other places.
If only clients would stand still. How much easier our lives as marketing professionals would be if client needs were consistent year after year and their marketplaces were never buffeted with changes from the economy or competition. Unfortunately, that's not the case.
The whole is more than the sum of its parts. To recognize and value the baby boomer opportunity, it is critical to comprehend all of the pieces of their lives and how they are linked together holistically. Success with this market will come to those who understand how boomers define who they are and where they are going to... on a road that's never been traveled before. First things first: Who are these boomers, and why are they so important?
Guerrilla Marketing is often defined as an unconventional way of performing promotional activities on a very low budget. While this is accurate, it's not quite right. The great guerrillas like Che or Mao had something more going for them than being "unconventional and cheap." Their battles became legend because they were thinking beyond the next quarter.
If you want to learn how to develop new revenue generating customer relationships, check out the strategic Nike+ iPod alliance. Would a similar model work for you?
Unfortunately, many companies see the creation of a loyalty program as the panacea for endemic customer turnover, churn, and dissatisfaction. This wish couldn't be further from the reality of what a program can reasonably be expected to achieve. The truth is, a loyalty program—no matter how well executed—can't overcome a company's inability to execute consistently on the four Ps of marketing: product, price, place, and promotion. That is why, in this new customer-centric environment, companies should add two more Ps to their marketing mix to effectively engender customer loyalty....
One way to delight users is with the guy-in-the-unexpected-context phenomenon. Any company with way-over-the-top customer service is giving its users an unexpected, del