Top Posts from Our First Year
Since it’s a slow period between Christmas and the New Year, now is a good time to take a look back at the first year of posts on The Distributed Marketing Blog. Our mission is to publish industry news, best practices, tips and techniques for marketing professionals who work in distributed multi-channel marketing organizations. Our primary audience works in highly regulated industries such as insurance, financial services, biopharmaceutical and health care, but our readers come from a wide range of disciplines. A look at the 12 posts that attracted the most visitors, pick-ups by the media or other blogs, and social Read More
Studies say LinkedIn Beats Twitter, Ad Spending Shifts
Several year-end studies point out a gap in lead generation performance among social media sites plus significant changes ahead for social media advertisers and the websites that rely on social advertising revenue. According to a new study published in the Media Bistro blog, 91% of business to business marketers use Twitter, but LinkedIn generates twice as many leads. Facebook ranked #2 in terms of leads, followed by company blogs, the story reports, while Twitter came in fourth. The survey results arrived at the same time that two different companies announced new lead generation tools for LinkedIn. One, according to the Digital Journal, Read More
Influence Marketing Tips from Hobbiton & Hogwarts
Most marketers would agree that finding and persuading the individuals who shape markets is critical. Word of mouse — the online buzz that comes when key influencers are tweeting, chatting, and posting about a product – is often the difference between an industry leading brand and a laggard. If you’re looking for a bit of magic to boost results in your 2012 marketing efforts, you might want to follow the lead of magic makers like J.K. Rowling and Peter Jackson, who ignored traditional media in favor of wooing and winning the hearts of social media and Internet influencers. Author J.K. Rowling Read More
Content Marketing Increases Despite Skeptics
Digital lead generation through content marketing was once viewed as an expensive and unproven technique. As recently as 2010, surveys showed that up to a third of executives were unsure that the strategies were worth their time according to a recent article by Nicholas Kinports. That’s not far from the results that we got when we surveyed 190 U.S. and Canadian marketers with the title CMO, Vice President, Sr. Vice President, or Director of Marketing several months ago. In our survey, 45% of the marketers surveyed said that they used content marketing as a lead generation tool, but 55% did Read More
5 Social Media Mistakes to Avoid
If there are any marketers out there who don’t have social media marketing on their 2012 marketing plan, they’re a definite minority. Nearly everyone agrees that it’s among the most cost-effective tools available to us. But there are five common social media mistakes that can be quite costly – so make sure that you plan now to avoid them in 2012. Posting sporadically or inconsistently. Social media, like blogging, is a marathon – not a sprint. Even if your very first blog post or tweet gets tons of clicks, there’s no guarantee that the next one will do the same. Measurable Read More
17 Fun Freebies that Build Thought Leadership
If you’re a smart marketer, you know that the easiest sale of all is a sale to someone who already knows, likes and trusts you. One of the best ways to create loyalty long before a customer buys from you and position yourself as a thought leader is to offer a valuable freebie that ties into your topic. A free ebook, White Paper, quiz, special report or a calculator can be a convenient way to enhance your expertise, position yourself as the go-to expert in your field, and generate free publicity for your company. Journalists and bloggers love telling their readers Read More
How Closed Loop Reporting Speeds Year-End Tasks
If you’re a marketer, and you haven’t finished your 2012 marketing budget, then it’s probably number one on your to do list. And that, inevitably, means you’ve been looking at all of the marketing metrics and reporting available to you in order to make your case for spending. We’ve been doing that in my office, too. But I’m lucky: I have a closed-loop reporting system that aggregates the data that matters to my management, so it’s easy to find the information that supports the marketing department’s contribution to revenue. In fact, the closed-loop reporting system is part of the product Read More
Do U Txt? No? U Will Soon!
Marketers: Do U Txt? If you don’t use SMS — those 160-character messages exchanged on mobile phones – for your marketing now, you probably will before the year 2014. That’s the prediction from market research giant Gartner, which believes t hat global mobile or smart phone access to the Internet will surpass computer access by that time. Text messages work on everything from the most basic handsets to feature-rich smartphones, so they’re the lowest common denominator in terms of sending immediate information to prospective or current customers. The most popular usage for marketing texts now is mobile coupons and other incentives Read More
The Distributed Marketing Circle of Life
Recently, I heard a very smart marketer say that his job wouldn’t be tenable without his “circle of life” – a web of vendors and services he relies on to manage, integrate and optimize campaigns. He’s not alone. Forrester, Gartner, and IDC all predict that marketing automation will continue to be a top investment priority for CMO’s for the next three years (through 2015), a position that Focus Research says it has held for the past five years. Multi-channel marketing automation uses an integrated set of online tools that empower users to easily search, find, select, assemble, customize, distribute and Read More
Four Landing Page Mistakes to Avoid
A simple landing page with no navigation links, a clear call to action, and just enough “sell” copy to encourage conversion, can improve campaign results dramatically. The clients I work with are in different industries, and they approach online marketing from very different perspectives. The one thing they have in common is that effective landing pages are critical to their success. In fact, the measured ROI on campaigns often governs budget approval for future campaigns, and the design and function of your landing page is critical to your measured ROI. Like many other digital media tools, landing pages weren’t part Read More
