Franchiser Scores Sales with Distributed Marketing
If you’re like most marketers, this is the time of year when you’re being asked to take a sharp knife to your marketing budget for 2012. To get better results without spending more, think distributed marketing. The more customer-facing employees who have the ability to tailor the communications they send out without jeopardizing brand and regulatory compliance, the better. How do you do that? By giving local, field, and individual sales and marketing reps access to approved content that they can personalize with a few mouse clicks. Why does this matter? Because distributed marketing technology has been proven to increase Read More
Blogs Much More Than “Graffitti with Punctuation”
“Blogging is not writing. It’s graffiti with punctuation.” That’s what movie maker Stephen Soderbergh said in his film “Contagion.” Of course, he isn’t a corporate marketer faced with a changing customer buying pattern and the need to build in-bound traffic from search engines. If he was, he’d know that today blogging is one of the most important marketing tools available. Yes, there are still some old-fashioned corporate marketers who agree with Soderbergh. But they’re an endangered species as nimble, social media savvy mid-size companies push their way into the “big leagues”, demonstrating along the way the value of blogging and Read More
Harnessing the Power of Word-of-Mouse
We often promote this blog through press releases and advance copy sent to other bloggers and journalists. Last week, Forbes.com columnist David Coursey surprised us by a draft blog post that quoted him and submitting it to Forbes.com as a guest post. “I had planned to write something about the topic myself, and link back to your blog as the source for some of the information, but I couldn’t think of anything to write except what you’d already put together,” Coursey said. Before we knew it, our blog post was featured on the top “promo bar” on Forbes.com. And instead Read More
Who Owns Your LinkedIn Contacts?
Who owns your LinkedIn profile? (Hint: it might not be you.) That was the headline on a post on this blog back in June, 2011 — and the answer we arrived at with help from a number of legal and compliance experts was, “It depends.” That leads us to a related question: who owns LinkedIn contacts — an employer or the employee? A court in England has issued an order that requires an employee who resigned to start his own consulting business to turn over all of his LinkedIn contacts to his former employer – along with receipts and contracts proving that Read More
Trick or Tweet: 7 Social Media Horror Stories
Yes, it’s Halloween in the Twitterverse (and the rest of the social media world) — and to make sure that it’s all treats, and no tricks that can come back to haunt you, here’s a list of Halloween “don’ts” for marketers that make sense all year round. Don’t let personal comments (or prejudices) ruin your relationship with a big client or prospective client. Consider what happened to this PR firm when one of its executives tweeted a negative comment about the home town of the founder of one of the agency’s largest clients. Don’t let customer service complaints take over Read More
Blogging Success Webinar – Join Us Nov. 15!
The Distributed Marketing Blog launched in late March. As anyone who’s ever started a new blog knows, it’s not easy to build traffic, SEO rank, and credibility – but we had a plan, and the plan worked. With help from our friends at MyPRGenie and a lot of Twitter and Facebook friends who shared links to posts, we topped 117,000 readers for a post just 12 weeks after our launch (June 10, 2011), and we’ve held down a spot on the first page of Google’s page 1 results for our primary keywords since April (three weeks after launch). On November 15, Read More
Four Avoidable Marketing Metrics Mistakes
A lot of marketers wanted to emulate TV’s Mad Men: creative geniuses who build brands and marketing empires. Instead, became math men spending their days with statistics and spreadsheets filled with complex formulas for measuring every message and justifying spending. In fact, half of CMO’s say that justifying spending through metrics takes more than 30% of marketing staff time, and another 20% say it occupies nearly half of their time. The sheer amount of data available to marketers today (much of it free) would have overwhelmed Don Draper and his peers. Unfortunately, it’s pretty overwhelming to modern marketers, too. Even Read More
Email Metrics That Make Sense
No matter what email marketing solution you use, it’s sure to come with a set of email campaign metrics that will help you judge the success of your campaigns. The most common metrics built into the reporting dashboard in email solutions are: Accepted rate – What percent of your messages were actually delivered to someone’s in-box, and what percent were diverted before they reached their target? (Diversions can be caused by an email gateway, a spam filter, or some other filtering mechanism such as a domain unsubscribe filter.) Confirmed open rate – How many times was your email message opened? Read More
Why Testing Email Subject Lines Isn’t Optional
By Deb McAlister-Holland Marketers understand that email marketing is changing. Still, in July 2011, 95% of the marketing executives surveyed by The Distributed Marketing blog rated email “somewhat” or “very” effective in delivering results – far more than any other marketing communications channel. At the same time, everyone involved in email marketing acknowledges that the effectiveness of an email campaign is easier to measure – and harder to achieve – than ever before. Younger target groups – the 18-35 demographic – use email less each year, with text and social media becoming more important communications tools in this group. Meanwhile, Read More
Best Source of Qualified Leads? SEM
Multi-channel marketers have many channels to reach potential customers — but few have the budget to use all of them for every message. So what’s the single best source of qualified leads? According to a survey from Hearst Business Media Electronics Group and Goldstein Group Communications, it’s search engine marketing. You can see the complete survey here, but we’ve excerpted one table below. With the company’s website and search engines as the two primary sources of qualified leads, the message for marketers is clear: focus on the essentials of search engine marketing. And that means measuring, monitoring, and understanding how prospective Read More
