Grandparents.com aims to entice grandparents to register a profile and/or subscribe to a free email newsletter by providing useful content that’s relevant to being a grandparent. Sound familiar? That’s kind of what we do at MarketingSherpa (for marketers, of course).
Whenever you have a site like this there’s one thing you’ve got to keep in mind, says Jerry Shereshewsky, CEO of Grandparents.com: “The Web is research on the hoof.” Read more…
While talking to Gary Meo, Senior VP at Scarborough Research, about new metrics for measuring newspaper audiences, I couldn’t help but ask: What are his thoughts about the future of newspapers and what they need to do to survive.
Gary’s job is to oversee consumer behavior surveys in 81 local markets. His company works with 241 major newspapers in the industry to determine audience size and demographics. Read more…
I’m working on MarketingSherpa’s 2009 Wisdom Report, and I’m surprised by how many PR entries there are. Last year, we didn’t get near as many. (For those of you who don’t know, our Wisdom Report is an annual compilation of bits of wisdom marketers share with us from the past year.)
In addition, our end of year survey shows that PR best practices are a priority for marketers in 2009. I can’t help but think this must be a reflection of the economy and, subsequently, of marketers’ tightening budgets. PR, after all, is inexpensive and can be very effective. Read more…
I wasn’t looking for advice about online advertising when I scheduled time to talk to Jerry Shereshewsky, CEO, Grandparents.com, for a MarketingSherpa article I’m writing about marketing to grandparents.
That is what I should have expected from someone with 39 years of experience in the industry who last year took the helm of an ad-supported resource site for grandparents.
Read more…
This tip came from Franke James, editor and founder of Office-Politics.com. When holding a meeting with your team, try using the “six thinking hats” model. It’s meant to build consensus and get people thinking in the same direction.
It also allows for optimistic ideas to grow, while letting negative ideas be aired, she says. It can control the naysayers in a group. Read more…
During my quest to find best practices about how marketers should defend their 2009 marketing budgets, I came across some useful information that didn’t make it into the special report.
Franke James, editor and founder of Office-Politics.com, contributed the idea of making a “mind map.” Her advice is to take out a piece of paper pre-budget meeting and map out the relationship between you and key decision makers (the people who will be in the budget meeting). Read more…
I am a huge fan of the AMC television series Mad Men — a drama about the ad men and women of Madison Avenue in the 1960s. That’s why a blog post about the shutdown of Mad Men Twitter feeds caught my eye.
Apparently, fans were posing as Mad Men characters, creating Twitter profiles for them, and posting regular Twitter updates. AMC asked Twitter to shut down the feeds, which angered fans. Read more…
Granted this is just one consumer’s complaint, but it’s something to think about. A consumer named “Rob” recently was quoted in a Consumerist post about how Amazon ruined his wife’s surprise Christmas gift this year by sending email recommendations about the present after he purchased it.
His wife actually saw a subject line referring to the surprise gift (a TomTom GPS) on the couple’s shared Google homepage enabled with an iGoogle email widget showing recent emails.
Read more…
Most of you know that one way to drive people to a website is by putting the address on everything that might get in front of the eyes of potential customers.
I’d like to provide another suggestion: Give people an incentive to actually go to the website.
If you’re a college or university trying to increase admissions, for example, try including an MP3 card in direct mailings. You could have whatever message or logo you want printed onto the card, which looks like a credit card.
It could say visit our site to receive one free MP3 music download. That gets your target audience through the gates, so to speak. Hopefully they will look around the site while waiting for the song to download.
“This has been incredibly useful for private schools and colleges,” says Fred Snyder, VP of Sales, Eastern Region, for Geiger, one of the oldest and largest privately held promotional products companies in the world.
Snyder provided some background information for a Sherpa report on how to maximize the ROI of promotional products in a tough economy. He also provided this tip!
Is this marketing genius? Pontiflex, the self-dubbed first open and transparent cost-per-lead (CPL) market, yesterday announced the revealing of a free Online Advertising ROI Calculator.
It allows online advertisers and marketers (Pontiflex’s target audience) to compare the costs of online advertising campaigns based on CPM, CPC, and CPL pricing models.
Read more…
