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
Are you settling for marketing mediocrity?
Social Media Today just published a list of the 10 Most Common Oversights in Digital Marketing. It’s an interesting list of common mistakes marketers make in social media. One of the ten (#8) jumps out at anyone who’s ever managed a multi-channel marketing campaign in a distributed marketing organization: Settling for mediocrity: In the age of superior technology and unprecedented connectivity, settling for mediocrity is a crime. What a powerful indictment of “business as usual”! Maybe it isn’t a crime, but failing to harness the right technology is certainly responsible for lost opportunities, increased costs, and slower time to market for many companies. Forrester Read More
Happy 40th Birthday, Email!
http://flic.kr/p/86P7Yw Forty years ago, engineer Ray Tomlinson sent the first electronic mail message. No one remembers now what the message said, only that it was short and difficult to compose. But whatever it said, it changed the communications picture forever. When he showed his work to a colleague, he was told firmly, “Don’t go telling anyone! That’s not what we’re supposed to be doing.” Tomlinson never profited from his pioneering work, but his story of the creation of email, and how he came to use the “@” symbol to direct messages between networks, is fascinating and available online here. Here are Read More
What Channels Deliver the Best Results?
In the first quarter of 2011, Gleanster conducted the Multi-Channel Marketing Management Survey in which CMO’s were asked to select the two most effective communications channels. Traditional marketing tools beat out newer tools by a wide margin. Why? The survey report concludes that one of the major reasons is that most companies have not yet invested the time required to develop expertise in best practices, execution and measurement for social media. In highly regulated industries like financial services, health care, and insurance, the percentages were even higher, with 91% or more of the survey respondents picked “traditional” marketing methods like email, microsites Read More
Personalized Selling 101
Selling is about people. One person offers something of value – a product, a service, an idea or promise. Others want what the first person is offering enough to trade something of value to get it – time, money, or attention. The better the two people understand each other, the more likely it is that the sale will happen. According to a 2010 Kelsey Group survey that’s why 97% of us research products and services online before buying them locally. In the insurance industry, most companies have two kinds of representatives who sell their products: employed or “captive” insurance agents, Read More
Marketing is Dead
Marketing is dead. Before rejecting the idea, think again. The truth is that only a tiny fraction of a marketer’s time is actually spent on marketing – that is, on creating demand for a product or service, shaping the brand, and supporting sales. How is that possible? Just look at the number of communications channels a marketer has to manage in today’s multi-channel world – and add to each communications channel the necessity for planning and budgeting, delivering or implementing, tracking and reporting on each one. Add managing the process of distributing marketing and sales support materials in an indirect Read More
Using Distributed Marketing Technology to End the Battle Between Sales and Marketing
How many times have you heard comments like this from sales people? Marketing never gives us the right information we need to close the deal. We have to spend hours and hours creating our own customized content to sell effectively. It takes too long to find the right information and get permission to customize it for our prospects. Chances are you’ve heard those complaints just about as often as you’ve heard the opposite coming from the corporate marketing department. Sales never uses the approved materials and the brand is compromised because of inconsistent messages. We have to spend hours and Read More
Distributed Marketing Automation Buyer’s Checklist
Buyers searching for the best distributed marketing platform to solve the marketing automation problems that are unique to a multi-channel distributed marketing environment come at the problem from different starting points. So, while there is no “one size fits all” solution that will work for every company, there are a few items to add to every buyer’s checklist. The top four boxes to check when considering a distributed marketing platform are: Centralized, Rules-Based Compliance + Local Customization, Personalization Closed-loop Marketing Analytics “WOW” Factor: What Can You Do AFTER Purchasing That You CAN’T Do Now? Industry-Specific Integration, Performance The first two items on Read More
