Social Marketing or Marketing on Social Networks?
Does your company practice social media marketing, or do you use social networks for marketing? There is a difference. The first – social media marketing – requires a strategy specific to social channels, and content tailored to those platforms. The second – marketing on social networks – is simply distributing traditional marketing messages through social media. Social media marketing works. Marketing on social networks doesn’t. Social media marketing is a true two-way conversation between a company and its customers, prospective customers, and the world at large. Marketing through social networks “pushes” company offerings to anyone who can hear them. This includes tactics Read More
Five Rules of Content Marketing
Content marketing works. That simple premise is why more and more marketers are making content marketing a core part of their lead generation strategies. One of the reasons that they work is that providing high-quality content helps build trust and rapport with prospects and customers, making it easier for them to make an eventual purchasing or renewal decision. It’s not a new idea. Early in my career, I worked at Shell Oil Company in Houston, where the “Come to Shell for Answers” booklets were a primary part of our marketing communications budget. Back then, we called it thought leadership marketing, Read More
Best Practices in Multi-Channel Distributed Marketing
Distribion and The Distributed Marketing Blog today announced a free webinar for marketing professionals interested in distributed marketing best practices, trends, and useful techniques for “glocalization” – a way to empower local sales organizations to personalize and customize nulti-channel communications campaigns without compromising brand or regulatory standards. The webinar will take place at noon, on Tuesday, May 8. Attendance is free, but pre-registration is required. Registration is now available by clicking this link. Distributed marketing best practices deliver measurable results for organizations where strategy and creative resides in corporate marketing but local or field sales and marketing organizations or channel Read More
Using Case Studies to Make Your Sales Point
Satisfied, happy customers extolling the virtues of a product or service after they’ve tried it and gotten the results they wanted. It’s the one sales and marketing message that never goes out of date, and never gets old. Finding customers willing to do that isn’t always easy, which is why using case studies isn’t first on every marketer’s to do list, every day. Some of our largest clients consider our products to be part of their “secret sauce” and won’t let us name them. Yet one of the key selling points we make in every sales presentation is based around proven, Read More
How to Sell Marketing Automation to the Boss
A few weeks ago, I attended a luncheon where Danesh De Silva, Vice President of Marketing at Orametrix, presented a great case study on how he had used marketing automation technology to transform his company’s marketing operations and the ROI he’s gotten. When Dan was finished with his story, one of the people at my table shook his head sadly. “He’s so right. I know that I could do great things if I just had the right tools. But how do I ‘sell’ marketing automation to my boss?” It’s a common question. A marketing director or even vice president of marketing becomes convinced Read More
Marketing Sherpa Features Our Blog
David Kirkpatrick, a reporter with industry research firm MEC Labs’ popular Marketing Sherpa blog, today featured The Distributed Marketing Blog and its parent company, Distribion, in a case study. Case Study #CS32133: Overall Content Marketing Strategy Leads to 2,000% Lift in Blog Traffic, 40% Boost in Revenue looks at the blog and its success over the past 12 months. Kirkpatrick points out some of the unique pain points associated with distributed marketing, and explains how the content marketing strategy that Distribion adopted contributed to the company’s growth. With the focus on distributed marketing best practices and industry news, the company 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
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
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
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
