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
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
Managing Complex Marketing Projects
Multichannel marketing is a given for most marketers. None of us can afford to bet our company’s success by trying to reach our customers through just one channel. In large, distributed marketing organizations where creative and brand management are handled at the corporate level and local or field sales and marketing organizations execute their own campaigns, the process of planning, managing, executing, measuring, and reporting on marketing activities can become very complicated, very quickly. So what do you do to simplify a process that isn’t simple? Start by recognizing the three basic problems that are inherent in a complex marketing Read More
Repetition, Transparency, Multi-channel Communications Help Rebuild Trust
One of the daily challenges for marketing is building trust among consumers. It’s never been easy, but it’s gotten harder over the last two years. Luckily, multi-channel marketers have a clear path to reaching out to the public through web, social media, PR, and trusted local agents or managers. Building trust in difficult economic times is all about repetition, transparency, and multi-channel communications. Consider the three tables included in this blog post, all from Edelman’s 11th Annual Trust Barometer study, released earlier this year. Then there’s this table — where consumers look first for information. It may be a little misleading because Google Read More
What Employers Want When Hiring Social Media Talent
Peter Shankman, founder of HARO (Help a Reporter Out), a service that links bloggers, journalists, and content producers (video, audio, digital, print) with expert sources, has said, “Don’t hire a social media expert. It’s like a deli hiring someone who’s an expert in taking the bread out of the freezer. Unless they can also make a great sandwich, being an expert on taking the bread out is a pretty useless skill.” He’s right (as usual). When it comes to hiring a social media marketing manager, the operative words are marketing and manager. Here’s the sad truth that all too many hip Read More
Email Evolution: New Trends in a Proven Marketing Communications Channel
By Deb McAlister-Holland For nearly 3 decades, I’ve had an email marketing campaign of some kind running every business day. Yes, there was email 30 years ago. In fact, email is 40 years old. Back when I sent my first few campaigns, there wasn’t a lot of commercial email being sent. I worked for a computer company, and the people who got our email were mostly people who had purchased our products. They were happy to get a notice from us about a new toy they could buy to add to their system, or a new software product that was Read More
What to Do When Customer Service Meets Social Media: 5 Basic Lessons
In June 1984, the first online customer support forum for computer users sponsored by a computer maker opened its virtual doors on CompuServe on a Tuesday morning. Around noon on Thursday, the volume of inquiries was running about five times what the company planners had projected, and by the end of the day on Friday, it was over 8 times the anticipated volume. Although the volume has been going up steadily ever since, less than 20% of customer service inquiries were submitted digitally before 1998, and as recently as 2005, just 45% of technical support inquiries were submitted via email or landing page. Read More
Defining Measurable Value for Multi-Channel Marketing Automation
Guest Blog By David Potter, Vice President, Professional Services, Distribion, Inc. One of the basic assumptions this blog makes is that its readers are marketers who are interested in improving their multi-channel marketing results through almost any means possible. Another is that there is a place for technology in almost any distributed marketing organization – that it in any situation where there is a centralized corporate marketing department and one or more field or local marketing and sales organizations that use marketing materials created by corporate marketing to reach local prospects and customers. But is that an accurate assumption? Can Read More
Friday News Round-up: Tweet Success, Made-to-Order Marketing
Tweet Success = Right Tweet, Right Time – Social Media Today posted an excellent blog post this week on the best post times for various kinds of social media. The blog said that posting to Twitter at noon, 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. midweek and on weekends was optimal. For Facebook, Saturday morning is the optimal time for any post, although those posted around noon also get more traffic. As for blogs, Monday morning is the best time. The lesson for marketers: Social media (like email) has become a kind of adult homework. The optimal times match the times when Read More
New Multi-Channel Marketing Priorities
In July, The Distributed Marketing Blog completed its first survey of marketing executives. We asked about their current spending priorities, spending plans for 2012, their view of how effective various marketing channels were, and how they selected different marketing communications tools. So far, we’ve published three sets of data tables that detailed some of the findings. The first looked at planned 2012 spending , the second reported on marketing spending by channel, and the third rated marketing communications channels on their effectiveness. As we have continued to analyze the results, as well as the emails and feedback we’ve gotten from the Read More
