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Marketing Career: How to get budget approval to build your skills

October 5th, 2012

What challenges undermine your marketing department’s potential? When we asked that question to 1,646 marketers while researching for the MarketingSherpa 2012 Executive Guide to Marketing Personnel, here’s how they responded …

 

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So today’s MarketingSherpa blog post is aimed at helping you overcome challenges #1 and #3: to help you get budget approval to build your skills. With Email Summit 2013 coming up in February, we’ll use a MarketingSherpa Summit as the example for this blog post to show you the factors you should consider when conducting a little internal marketing of your own.

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Email Marketing: 83% of CMOs says social media will affect email programs

October 4th, 2012

According to the 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, CMOs see social media and mobile as the developments that will have the biggest impact on email marketing in the near future …

Q. What new developments will most affect your email marketing program in the next 12 months? Select up to five developments.

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So here’s the challenge to you, email marketers of the world. Not only must you integrate social media into your email marketing, you must integrate a rapidly changing social media environment.

Just when you thought you could rest after successfully integrating Twitter and Facebook, for example, along comes Pinterest.

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Market Competition 101: The 3 types of competitors to keep an eye on

September 28th, 2012

I was reading The Wall Street Journal one morning about food makers using mobile games to market to children. It struck me that content marketing has a major effect on how some companies, especially publishers and media companies, must regard their competition. (It also struck me that my kids need to spend less time on the iPad, but I digress.)

So, I thought I would use that article as inspiration for an example to teach a quick marketing 101 lesson on the three types of competitors you must account for when marketing your product or service. For the sake of this blog post, our company is Spacely Games, and we make mobile games aimed at children.

I also got some input from Paul Clowe, Sr. Director of Finance & Operations, MECLABS, who has recently conducted competitive research here at MECLABS.

 

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Orphan Forms: Marketing 101 change drives 32% increase in form completions

September 7th, 2012

Marketers are poor parents.

Walking recently by a sea turtle nest here on Jacksonville Beach, I was thinking about how sea turtles abandon their young after laying their eggs.

Harsh, yes, but as marketers, are we really any better?

We create landing pages, triggered emails and lead forms, and then … eventually forget about them.

Sure, we have good excuses. We’re busy. With the turnover in most marketing departments, we might not have even been around when some of these orphans were created. Additionally, unlike a reflective process — such as a continual media placement where we get a bill and must make a choice — keeping an old page live is essentially an automatic choice with no additional cost.

And, before I get on a soapbox, we have our share of orphans at MECLABS as well (which Pamela Markey, Director of Marketing and Brand Strategy, MECLABS, lovingly refers to as “land mines”). After all, our sites are more than 10 years old.

But, I want to tell you a quick story about the results we received by showing some love to one of our orphan forms. My goal is to inspire you to conduct a basic site audit to find what pages, forms and automated messages you’re overlooking.

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Automatic for the People: The pros and cons of triggered emails

September 6th, 2012

Pilots have it easy. All they do is flip on the autopilot, order some Sleepytime® tea from the galley, and get a little shuteye, snoozing across the Atlantic, until they land at Schiphol (word of caution: this is based on my utter lack of knowledge of what pilots actually do … but thanks for getting us there safely).

In all seriousness, marketers have an autopilot, too … of sorts – the automated, event-triggered email. When I read Megan McCardle’s line in Newsweek, “Looking for a fail-safe plan to get rich without working?” I thought, “That could almost be a description of triggered emails.”

Think about it: Triggered emails offer the Holy Grail of email marketing that is so difficult to achieve – relevant, timely information.

I sign up to your email address, you welcome me … right at the moment I am most interested in receiving emails from you. And, perhaps, I hop right on a promotion in that welcome email, since you’re reaching me at the peak of my interest in your company (hey, I just signed up for your list).

Or I abandon a shopping cart because the product is 20% too expensive and then, poof, like magic, I get a 20% discount code in my inbox.

Or it’s my birthday, and you give me a free bottle of prosecco or wine to celebrate (hey, I’m going out tonight anyway), as Pizza Express did for Kate …

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Lead Generation: Trends in 2012 marketing budgets

August 24th, 2012

According to the MarketingSherpa 2012 Lead Generation Benchmark Report (free excerpt at that link), 71% of survey respondents indicated that generating high-quality leads was a top challenge.

So, in today’s blog post, let’s look at lead generation budget trends (hint: money is moving to online tactics) and provide some resources to help you make wise use of that budget.

To help you get the most effective use of your budget, here are several case studies and how-to articles for some of the tactics mentioned in the above chart.

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Content Marketing: 3 tips for how to get started

August 17th, 2012

At Optimization Summit 2012, Michael Lykke Aagaard, Online Copywriter / Landing Page Fanatic, Contentverve, pulled me aside for an interview about content marketing. Below is an excerpt where we discuss three tips for getting started …

 

 

Let me (I hope) exceed your expectations in this blog post by adding three more tips for how to get started, helping you, in this case, to overcome common objections you might receive in trying to launch or expand content marketing in your organization …

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Conversion Rate Optimization: Your peers’ top takeaways from Optimization Summit 2012

August 16th, 2012

With B2B Summit 2012 right around the corner in Orlando, let’s take a quick look at your peers’ top takeaways from our last Summit – Optimization Summit 2012. In case you couldn’t be there, listen in to what fellow Web marketing directors and optimization managers learned at the Summit to help guide and prioritize your own A/B testing and landing page optimization efforts.

 


Here are some of the key takeaways. Feel free to use the links below to jump directly to these parts of the video …

0:34 – Celeste Parins of Mindvalley on value proposition

1:11 – Matt Silverstein of The Elevation Group on radical redesigns

1:40 – Matt Brutsche of Austin Search Marketing on getting into the mind of the customer

2:00 – Mike Weiss of Internet Sales Experts on understanding the customer’s path on your landing pages

2:42 – Ray Lam and Victoria Harben of the University of Denver on live optimization

3:03 – Suzette Kooyman of Enhance Your Net on taking a consumer-centric approach instead of a corporate approach

3:37 – Suzanne Axtell of O’Reilly Media on determining where to start testing and optimizing

4:10 – Reagan Miller of Financial Times on having a testing methodology

4:23 – Alan Markowitz of Ellie Mae on friction and anxiety points

4:50 – Diane Baker of netDirectMerchants on value proposition

 

Related Resources:

Optimization Summit 2012 Event Recap: 5 takeaways about test planning, executive buy-in and optimizing nonprofit marketing

Demand Generation: Optimization Summit 2012 wrap-up for B2B marketers

B2B Summit 2011: 5 takeaways on social media, lead generation, building a customer-centric approach, and more

Class Is In Session: Q&A with Web analytics professors about Optimization Summit 2012

August 14th, 2012

You network with the most interesting people at a MarketingSherpa Summit, and Optimization Summit 2012 was no exception for me. I caught up with one of the top optimizers from Denmark and a nonprofit marketer heavily engaged in A/B testing, and I also met two professors in the increasingly popular Web analytics field.

With our next event, B2B Summit 2012 in Orlando, just around the corner, I wanted to take a moment to look back at our last event in today’s MarketingSherpa blog post and share an interview with those professors, who can provide a unique viewpoint on Internet marketing.

With their experience teaching others in the classroom and having to convey overall marketing principles, they are a step removed from the average in-the-trenches, brand-side marketers, overly focused on the “putting out today’s fire” crises that sap so many marketers’ attention.

And, since they’re not vendors of platform providers, well, they’re not trying to sell you on their unique marketing buzzword approach that just happens to map very nicely to the products and services they are trying to sell.

Ray Lam and Victoria Harben are adjunct faculty and teach Web Analytics, a graduate-level course in University College at the University of Denver. During Optimization Summit 2012, they live-tweeted the event to their students from @COMM4324.

 

MarketingSherpa: What were the top lessons you learned at Optimization Summit that you think could be helpful to brand-side marketers?

Victoria: The main point that was reiterated throughout Optimization Summit was to always test; don’t rely on assumptions, intuition, guesstimations, or theory — rather, get out there and test it. It’s always best to back up a hunch with data, and that’s exactly what the Summit instilled in me: test, test, test! We’re teaching a Web Analytics class at DU through the New Media and Internet Marketing program, and this is the first thing we tell our students.

Ray:  The top lesson I learned was Dr. Flint McGlaughlin’s conversion formula: C=4m+3v+2(i-f)-2a. Where m=motivation, v=clarity of value proposition (why), i=incentive to take action, f=friction elements of the process, and a=anxiety about entering the process. This simple formula helps marketers think about the different elements that need to be considered when constructing a landing page.

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Social Media Marketing: 7 steps for using contests and sweepstakes to promote your brand

August 9th, 2012

Bribe them and buy them. That was an old-school marketing technique to acquire customers when the value proposition of a product just wasn’t strong enough to pull in enough interest of its own.

Do corporate social media accounts face that challenge? While many Facebook pages and Twitter accounts offer strong value (news, humor, insider information, etc.), the average corporate account can find it challenging to develop a following without an incentive.

One incentive that works well for many marketers is a sweepstakes or contest. (While those terms are often used interchangeably, technically the winner of a sweepstakes is decided by random chance, and a contest is decided by skill and competition.)

“Some of the main benefits of a social media-based contest are fast time-to-market, immediate responses/results, low-cost and no-cost program options, and measureable ROI,” said Sandra Fathi, President, Affect. “I have yet to find an organization — business-to-business or business-to-consumer — that would not benefit from some type of online contest.”

Sandra pointed out that even the President is holding an online sweepstakes to help with fundraising efforts.

 

The goal of online sweepstakes and contests

 While online sweepstakes and contests can help boost your social media following, they can help you meet other objectives as well.

“The goals of any marketing effort should align directly with business goals – and the same holds true for social media promotions,” Sandra said. She provided some example objectives:

  • Accelerate social media adoption/participation
  • Increase brand awareness
  • Generate leads/sales
  • Drive product/service usage
  • Recognize or reward customers/prospects

However, sometimes it pays to think outside the box.

“For example, we launched the New York Intern Project as a recruiting tool that also provided ancillary benefits, such as doubling our social media following, generating media coverage and new business opportunities with clients who were interested in hosting contests of their own,” Sandra said.

Here are a few mini-case studies to help you visualize successful sweepstakes and contests, and then we’ll review seven steps for launching your own sweepstakes and contests.

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