The Role of Distributed Marketing in Building Brand Awareness
CMO.com recently featured an article about why CMO’s are not good at selling the concept of brand awareness. On the surface, this seems almost incomprehensible to me, as it is a basic fundamental truth of marketing that brand awareness is the first step to inducing purchase. However, this notion makes sense in the context of CMO’s selling brand awareness initiatives to the CEO. Typically, a CEO will ask how much a brand awareness campaign is going to cost and what is going to be its impact on sales. Impact on sales is often considered only with a short term time Read More
Strengthening a Hotel Brand Through Distributed Marketing
The Software Advice blog recently featured an article about what hotel brands can do to get more bookings directly rather than getting bookings from online travel agencies. With online travel agencies, hotels have to pay commissions for each booking that the agency brings in. This idea would seem like a cost containment measure for hotel brands, and cost containment is usually something that appeals to most businesses. With summer travel season getting started and hospitality and travel being one of our key industries, it is the perfect time to discuss this topic. A number of the suggestions made in the Read More
How Does Social Media Buzz Impact Sales?
This is a hot button issue amongst marketers today. AdAge reported in March that Coca-Cola announced that it found no statistically significant short term impact on sales based on social media buzz. Eventually, Wendy Clark, a senior marketer from Coca-Cola, wrote a follow up piece to the AdAge story about how important social media is in the overall marketing communication mix. This week, AdAge reported that McKinsey Company released data that indicated that one of their telecom clients suffered an 8% loss in sales based upon negative sentiment in the social media space. For that company, that 8% loss in Read More
Multichannel, Distributed Marketing Automation Still Growing
Last Fall, one of Distribion’s big marketing pieces was an infographic simply named The Rise of Distributed Marketing. 8 months later, news coming out of the multichannel marketing automation sector is still positive. Recently, Gartner released data indicating that marketing automation software will achieve 11% growth this year. Various other statistics have indicated extended periods of growth over the next 4-5 years in the category. Part of the reason why this growth is occurring is because organizations are realizing that they are at a disadvantage without using this type of technology. Many of the challenges that are commonplace in organizations Read More
MultiChannel Marketing is Not Static
Last year, Eric Jackson wrote a piece on Forbes about why Facebook might disappear in 5 years. This week, approximately one year later, he revisited that topic, and believes that the events of the past year were on track with his 2012 post and that Facebook is poised to disappear. The way Jackson uses the word “disappear” is a bit sensationalistic. He doesn’t expect Facebook to go out of business, but he is expecting that Facebook’s prominence is on pace to decline as the next 4 years transpire. While none of us can say we know exactly what will happen Read More
Distributed Marketing & Customer Winback
Customer winback is a subject that goes well with our most recent blog about customer retention. It is best to not lose quality customers to begin with, but there are situations when customers will be lost. However, all is not necessarily lost when a customer leaves. There may be options to bring these customers back into the fold. From a cost and revenue perspective, there is a bit of sensibility in this element, as customer winbacks are often known to be less expensive customer acquisitions than brand new customer acquisitions. The customer decision making process of whether or not to Read More
Distributed Marketing & Customer Retention: Keeping Quality Customers Around
Keeping quality, existing clients is a good idea for any sort of business. It is usually a better idea from a cost and revenue management standpoint to keep existing clients with your company. In industries that typically use distributed marketing models, this is even more relevant as field agents can often accumulate a large book of business if they stay around long enough. A fairly common scenario in insurance & financial services companies is the notion of inheriting customers. When a local sales agent retires or leaves the industry, clients of that agent are sent off to other agents within Read More
Distributed Social Media Marketing: A Benefit for Busy Sales Agents
By now, there should be little doubt regarding the pervasiveness of social media. We’ve shared statistics on social media multiple times in the last year in this space, and new statistics come out frequently augmenting the case for social media. Without a well devised and implemented presence in social media, a company misses great opportunities to achieve greater success. Most target audiences can be found somewhere in social media. Nevertheless, a quality presence in the social media space doesn’t occur out of thin air. Social media is something that takes a time commitment, a good degree of training & knowledge on Read More
Getting a Quick Start: Evaluating With Your Own Campaigns
The idea of trying your marketing platform with one of my marketing campaigns just makes the evaluation process that much easier.” AVP of Sales Distribution **This is the second part in a blog series. Click here for Part One. ** One of the many advantages of the Quick Start program is that a company has the opportunity to evaluate what the Distribion platform can do for them. Marketing initiatives do not exist in a separate domain with no connection to the outside world. What happens within the marketing function has a material impact on the company as a whole. It Read More
Permissions & Centralized Marketing Control
One of the key features of the Distributed Marketing Platform is permissions. The platform is entirely permission based. There is a key administrator or administrators depending upon the size of the organization using the platform. Administrators can set business rules as they see fit with regard to content, assets, approval flows, etc. They have control over the look, feel and capabilities of the user environment. Why is this done? It is done because it creates benefits at both the corporate and local levels. At the corporate level, there is increased centralized marketing control. Centralized marketing control and maintaining a strong Read More
