If Multi-Channel Marketing Efforts Are Good Enough for an Icon, They Are Good Enough For You
For brands, it is vital to be everywhere that your potential target market is. It doesn’t matter how big the brand is, nor do past brand achievements. Not resting on laurels is a key component of an iconic global brand. Take for instance the Barbie brand, owned by Mattel. Barbie can claim the following achievements. 99% global brand awareness The typical American girl owns 10 Barbie dolls Annual sales are around $1.6 Billion The Barbie brand is valued at $2 Billion, making it the world’s most valuable toy brand Just from those two very simple marketing statistics, one might easily Read More
1950’s Rules to Drive Customer Engagement Now
Legendary radio personality Paul Harvey formulated three rules of audience engagement back in the 1950’s – and those decades-old rules can help marketers jump-start social media and email marketing efforts today. His 1-2-3 approach to audience engagement is particularly applicable to social media and email marketing, even though he formulated them decades before either one was even dreamed about. The Paul Harvey approach goes like this: Grab their attention with an intriguing “teaser” that gets them to want to hear more. Give them the rest of the story (succinctly, clearly, and directly). Wrap up and close (by repeating the main 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
Four Marketing Lessons from The Grateful Dead
By Deb McAlister-Holland On April 15, 2010, IDC analysts Frank Gens and Amy Konary presented an executive briefing called The Maturing Cloud: What the Grateful Dead Can Teach Us About Cloud Economics. In addition to IDC’s usual carefully researched data, the webinar included a wealth of thought-provoking information that used analogies from the band’s storied history and correlated it to the technology industry. When I thought about how Gens and Konary used the Grateful Dead analogy to clarify many of the most confusing aspects of cloud computing, I realized that I could apply the same lessons to distributed marketing. In some ways, of 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
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
Friday News Round-Up: Size Doesn’t Matter in Marketing, Facebook Takes on Telcos
Here’s this week’s round-up of “must read” news stories for marketers. What makes these stories stand out? They offer key information or lessons that multi-channel distributed marketing organizations should take to heart. Facebook Launches SMS Service – This week, Facebook launched Facebook Messenger, a free app that lets users access Facebook messages from their phone without installing Facebook Mobile. It’s the first time Facebook has unbundled one service from the rest of its services, and the media reaction has been mixed at best. Some love it, because it simplifies the process of checking for messages without waiting while your friends photos attempt to load Read More
Keeping Up with Social Media As It Evolves, Changes
Social media is evolving, changing, and growing every day. Even seasoned marketers who’ve been involved in social and digital marketing since the beginning have trouble keeping up with the fast pace and new opportunities it presents. That’s why webcasts like the presentation from Distribion, LIMRA, and Socialware are important, regardless of how successful your current social media marketing efforts are. Here’s a summary of the jam-packed webcast: The 5W’s of Social Media Marketing How they evolved & why they’re different than what you learned in college Why, who, what, where, when: the 5W’s Why? Word of mouse replaced word of mouth Read More
Five Social Media Myths that Can Cripple Marketing
When it comes to social media, even the experts learn something new every day. Most CMO’s admit that developing the expertise they need to effectively use social media is a key priority. Unfortunately, there are a lot of myths out there that can derail almost any social media marketing plan. Here are five that come up often in talks with corporate marketing. Make sure you don’t fall for any of them! Myth #1: Social Media is free. Robert Heinlein’s famous motto TANSTAFL applies here, as everywhere else in life. (“There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.”) Yes, many of Read More
