Archive for the ‘Marketing Strategy’ Category
Best Marketing Strategy Insights of 2009
Monday, April 26th, 2010What strategies and tactics should you employ to maximize business results online? What are the leading marketing thought leaders saying about marketing strategies in 2010? How effective is demand generation software? How do you select the right market research to support your goals? Why is content marketing becoming critical? What key trends on the horizon do you need to be aware of? Can you fire your sales force?
Get the answers to these questions and more here in the best blog posts and articles of the past year on marketing strategy.
12 Marketing Minds, One Free eBook by Search Engine Guide
Jennifer Laycock previews a free eBook from Valeria Maltoni featuring thoughts on marketing strategy and tactics from 12 online pros including Beth Harte, Christina Kerley and Matt Dickman.
Don’t Forget the Brand in SEO, PPC and Social Media by Search Engine Journal
Garrett Pierson advises marketers to capitalize on their brands in all areas of online marketing, such as by search-optimizing for all common variants of company and product names, and presenting consistent brand images and messages across all areas of the firm’s social media presence.
Peter Guber’s magic formula for marketing success by iMedia Connection
Jodi Harris summarizes highlights from Mandalay Entertainment Founder and CEO Peter Guber’s keynote speech at the 2009 Entertainment Marketing Summit advising marketers to overcome resistance to change, create memorable stories and great content in order to motivate prospects.
101 Tips from 50 Small Business Bloggers by Open Forum
Glen Stansberry supplies a wealth of strategic guidance packed into short nuggets from a wide range of business thought leaders like Seth Godin, Anita Campbell, Mark Cuban, Jared Reitzin and Matt McGee.
The Marketing Automation & Lead Nurturing Myth by Nurture
A brief but insightful post contending that there is no such thing as “demand creation,” only demand identification and lead nurturing–and counseling marketers to undertake the right kinds of programs, then have patience.
Web Strategy in 2010 by baekdal.com
Thomas Baekdal offers a 22-point checklist for maximizing the way the web works today, from content generation and social media to calls to action.
A CMO’s guide to picking the right market research by iMedia Connection
Michael Estrin advises companies on how to find the most meaningful data for their tactics and brand, including using aggregators help you figure out which data are best for your needs.
What made the Digital Marketing World-Go-Round? 10 Takeaways from the MarketingProfs Digital Marketing World Virtual Conference by Modern B2B Marketing
Maria Pergolino wraps up the key takeaways from this virtual conference, covering areas from social media integration and landing page optimization to relationship-building and sales-marketing alignment.
Content Marketing / Custom Publishing Research – Marketers Telling the Story by Junta42
Joe Pulizzi reviews research from King Fish Media on the state of content marketing and provides some interesting statistics on the scope and ROI of custom content creation. His conclusion: “We are all publishers now.”
7 Free or Cheap Ways to Effectively Promote Your Business Online by Dumb Little Man
Actually, this post presents eight strategies for online promotion ranging from social networking and video to PR and local portal sites. It also includes links to additional resources to dig deeper into each area.
5 marketing megatrends you can’t ignore by iMedia Connection
The brilliant Adam Kleinberg expounds on five megatrends–including mass collaboration, constant connectivity and globalization–and details their impacts on marketing strategies.
Why Content Strategy is So Important by Acsellerant
Bob Leonard argues that marketers must become publishers, then details the seven components of a successful content strategy.
In Social Media, It’s Not Just Business, It’s Business-To-Business by Brian Solis
***** 5 Stars
Social media thought leader Brian Solis disects shifts in b2b marketing spending, making extensive use of data from eMarketer on metrics such as changing budget allocations, objectives of using social networks and other social media sites, ROI measurements and more.
Preparing for a world without salespeople by iMedia Connection
Reid Carr muses about how the rapid increase of online information and spread of social media are changing the sales process, particularly for younger consumers. Making the case that “companies need to adapt to the changing environment, in which the next generation of consumers doesn’t want to talk to your salespeople,” Reid provides guidance on how different types of firms can adapt to this shift.
5 Social Media Myths by Digital Tonto
A thought-provoking post on the true impact (smaller than you may think?) social media will have on other, more traditional form of media and information distribution. Well worth a read.
Best of 2008: Strategy and Branding
Monday, January 4th, 2010Resources for starting a new business, ideas for naming that business, mistakes to avoid, lead generation strategies to embrace, how to apply some of Warren Buffet’s wisdom to online marketing efforts…find all of that and more here in this final collection of the best posts on strategy and branding from the past year.
What’s in A Name? by MediaPost Online Publishing Insider
Kory Kredit explores the inexact science of business naming, from descriptive (AdBuyer.com) to ont-quite-real words (Aquisio) to misspellings (Personifi) to WTF? (Jivox, xy3).
Top 12 Resources for Start-Ups by Duct Tape Marketing
The ever-industrious John Jantsch provides a short but bookmark-worthy “list of resources to help small business owners get started and growing,” such as the SBA’s Small Business Planner, business resources from StartupNation, and guides to starting a business from AllBusiness.com, Inc.com and Entrepreneur magazine.
7 Things Big Dumb Companies Do That You Can’t Afford (Especially Now) by Remarkable Communication
The brilliant Sonia Simone pulls no punches in warning small business owners away from some of the myopic and unproductive practices still sometime seen in their larger competitors, like printing up 10,000 brochures (then throwing away 9,500 of them) and “forgetting that `we’ includes the customer,” as well as recommending effective practices to use instead. Of course it isn’t only big businesses that make mistakes, so to be fair Sonia details in another excellent post dumb things small businesses do, advising entrepreneurs to avoid the number “one,” as in over-reliance on one customer, one vendor or one partner.
Lead generation playbook: 5 steps to a 375% conversion lift by Marketing Experiments Blog
Hunter Boyle and Brian Carroll provide a helpful, educational online clinic on “what happens after prospects hit the ‘submit’ button, and how marketing and sales teams can work together more effectively to expand their customer base and get the most revenue per lead.”
Warren Buffett, Search Marketing Guru? by MediaPost Search Insider
In this well-worth-bookmarking post, Steve Baldwin presents a list of “Buffetisms” he has taped up on the wall of his cubicle (Steve Baldwin sits in a cube?!) and how they relate to search engine marketing. One example: “‘Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.’ All of us run the risk of growing complacent, just because our ROI is somewhere in the black.” An even better one: “‘I don’t look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.’ Keep this one in mind when you decide whether to fight a pitched battle for #1 placement on a high-traffic SERP. You might be far better off looking for smaller gains on longer-tail keywords, 2nd-tier engines, or by using day-parting or other segmentation technologies.”
The 6 Untold Reasons Why Businesses Fail by Growthink
Dave Lavinsky elaborates on six common but often unrecognized causes of business failure, such as confusing ego with a business opportunity, trusting “white lie” feedback and failing to make a 100% commitment.
100 Tiny Tips to Create and Maintain Loyal Customers by Bootstrapper
This must-read post for every small business owner and marketing professional provides tips on everything from where to find new customers (not only in the obvious venues like on Facebook and at industry conventions, but at volunteer events and other places) to how to effectively network, communicate and build relationships (e.g., “Send a thank you gift when a customer renews a contract”), to easy-to-use tools and services (such as FreshBooks) to help your business run more smoothly.
The boobs have it, the biggest PR blunder since New Coke by Marketing Edge
The always brilliant Albert Maruggi explains how UPS bungled an unusually powerful branding opportunity with Kentucky Derby-winning horse Big Brown. Due to “short-sightedness combined with a lack decisive management” on the part of UPS, the company had to shell out big bucks to avoid sharing the spotlight with Hooters—not a brand one normally associates with either horse racing or parcel shipping.
SEO: best bang for your buck for generating online leads by E-consultancy
Aliya Zaidi summarizes research from E-consultancy showing that while “natural search, email marketing and paid search are still the most commonly used methods for generating online leads,” “SEO (is) seen as providing the best value for money.” PPC gets a higher percentage of budgets (not surprising, as it has a direct cost per click not applicable to natural search) but natural search clicks provide superior value.
How to run marketing like a profit center by iMedia Connection
Is your marketing department more focused on “firefighting” than executing productive strategies? Is it difficult to measure the ROI of marketing activities and prove the value to the CEO? Having trouble coordinating activities with other functions? David Hutchinson provides a roadmap to success in this excellent article, using marketing operations—process-based management well-established in other disciplines that “enables informed decision making, accountability, sustainability, visibility, teamwork, strategic thinking and best practices execution.” For a longer treatment of this topic, pick up a copy of Value Acceleration: The Secrets to Building an Unbeatable Competitive Advantage
How to Profit From Testimonials…Even With No Testimonials! by Copyblogger
Dean Rieck (is that real hair?) delivers 17 clever ways to get the effect of testimonials for your product or service without actually using testimonials, such as showing pictures of people using your product or service, noting how long you’ve been in business and/or how many products you’ve sold, displaying a seal or approval, or citing favorable reviews.
5 Things Salespeople Really Need From Marketing by Sales and Sales Management Blog
Sales guru-ess Jill Konrath concisely explains what a sales team needs from the marketing department in order to launch a new product successfully, including sales tools, competitive research, and above all a compelling value proposition.
A Better Method for New Product Launches – Rolling Thunder
Saturday, December 19th, 2009This post was originally published on the WebMarketCentral blog in September 2009.
According to research by Schneider Associates, only 38% of b2b product launches are rated “successful” by the companies introducing the new products. After decades of new product launch experience, why such a dismal rate? Why does the following still sound familiar?
“Traditional launches act as big corporate Lighting Bolts, the big Ta Da. We plan big events, create loads of new sales tools and collateral, place those all important ad campaigns. All the while keeping everything in hush, hush secrecy ‘til we near the big day. Then comes the big ‘Ta Da’. Our press release hits the wire, we hold some big chest-thumping event and then start selling our hearts out, having trained the sales force the day or week before. The next day (or week) we go back to business as usual. Exhausted, but assured that we’ve done our jobs. Just look at all the attendees at the launch, that great PR coverage, the acclaims from near and far. Then reality strikes. Revenues are slower ramping than we expected, the sales force cries for qualified leads – and the excitement of the launch day fades to a distant memory. We shake our heads and wonder why we aren’t successful.”
Those are the questions asked, and answered, by marketing strategist Rebel Brown in her new eBook, Rolling Thunder: Powering Momentous Market Launches. She contrasts the traditional “lightning bolt” launch process with a more gradual, momentum-building approach she calls Rolling Thunder.
Lightning-bolt launches simply no longer work as well as they did in the days of information scarcity. Information overload makes it more likely that even big announcements will be missed. The Rolling Thunder approach addresses this by building credibility over time, creating anticipation, and leveraging social media to feed the momentum.
As Rebel puts it, “Successful launches leverage a series of interactions, laying the foundations for market success before the ‘announcement’ ever happens. Great launches build momentum over time to propel a product or company into the market, far above the noise and with sustainable credibility. Rolling Thunder launches increase in power over time, just as a single raindrop becomes a downpour.”
A key requirement of the Rolling Thunder approach is flexibility—the ability and willingness to change messages and tactics based on early market feedback. With the lightning bolt approach, you have one shot at getting your message right, and if it falls flat, the launch is a disappointment. With Rolling Thunder, if the message isn’t quite right at the outset, there is time to make adjustments before your mainstream market is exposed to it.
In addition to laying out an effective launch strategy, Rebel includes some important “don’ts” for a successful launch:
- Don’t make claims about yourself. Let your customers and other key influencers speak for you.
- Don’t rely excessively on advertising. It may be part of the mix, but focus on leveraging PR and social media.
- Don’t bash competitors. Don’t even mention them.
- Don’t rely on press releases to drive leads. They are part of mix. Used properly, they help build credibility. But relationships, not announcements, ultimately lead to sales.
Want to make your next launch more successful? The Rolling Thunder eBook provides a compelling new framework.
