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
Search Marketing in Google’s New World
Early in 2011, marketers got a wake-up call in the form of something called The Panda Algorithm Update. What’s a Panda algorithm, and why was it a wake-up call for marketers? The Panda algorithm is one of Google’s top-secret formulas for determining page rank — that is, where a particular web page will show up in a Google search. The release of this algorithm was a wake-up call that showed marketers in no uncertain terms that to achieve higher online rankings meant playing by Google’s rules with white-hat Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tactics. It started in February when retail giant Read More
6 Sources for Legal, Low-cost or Free Images
This image shows two weeks of post headlines & illustrations from this blog. The free or low-cost sources the images, clockwise from upper left, are: a photo of the editor’s grandson that she took, a chart from a survey we conducted created in Excel, a licensed cartoon ($12), a free cartoon, a scanner image of a man’s hand, and a photo of the editor’s dog. Looking for great photos for your blog or social media site — without spending much cash? Good news from Silicon Valley last week: Wired.com staff-produced are now available in high-resolution format under a Creative Commons Read More
Corporate Holiday Gift Etiquette
Guest post by Kevin Wessner, Senior Vice President, MarketingFX A gift basket that can be shared may be a good option when budgets are tight. I’ve been in the business of supplying promotional items to corporations for many years, and every year, I get questions like these about this time of year: I want to send a gift to my customer, and I want to put my logo on it. But I don’t want it to look cheap or tacky. What do I do? I need to send a gift to someone I work with, but I don’t know them well. Read More
Baiting Your Hook for Retweets
Any avid fisherman will tell you that to catch anything, you need the right bait. Twitter is a lot like fishing: to get noticed by the mass of fish swimming by in the Twitter stream, you need the right bait. Step one is deciding what you want to catch. Are you angling for retweets, clicks, or followers? If it’s followers you’re after, you need to dangle attractive bait over time, and you need to tailor your bait specifically to your audience by using the words and phrases that attract them. Clicks, of course, depend on giving someone just enough information Read More
Why Marketing Automation Matters for 2012
By Edgar Rodriguez, EVP Marketing, Distribion, Inc. Marketing automation isn’t a new idea. Software platforms that enable marketing and sales departments to increase lead conversion by leveraging captured data to automate and streamline communications and audience segmentation have been around in various forms for almost two decades. Distributed marketing platforms are a bit newer – they’ve been around about five years. These advanced systems provide an integrated set of online tools so that local users can easily search, find, select, assemble, customize, distribute and track campaign assets across multiple channels at the local level while allowing central or corporate marketing Read More
How to Create Contagious Content
Earlier today, Distributed Marketing Blog Editor Deb McAlister-Holland joined MyPRGenie for a session on the tips and techniques that marketers can use to help content “go viral” – even without a video. It was a huge success, attended by a wide range of PR people, marketers and bloggers who want to be heard and draw traffic without spending a lot. Usually, the phrase going viral brings to mind videos that score millions of hits overnight. But the word “viral” just means content that is so contagious that it gets shared far beyond its original audience. Any kind of content can go Read More
