Q: How much do you expect your organization’s mobile marketing budget to change from 2012 to 2013?
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A combined 71% of respondents said they would see budget increases, with over half of those reporting increases seeing more than 10%.
While this is great news for many marketing teams, it’s also a tough challenge: Mobile is still a new channel with several unknowns. So today’s MarketingSherpa blog post will share our discoveries in the hopes that our findings can aid your strategy planning efforts for the upcoming year.
I sat down with Benjamin Filip, Research Manager, Data Sciences, MECLABS, and a lead data analyst for the report, for a look at what we can learn from the data to help you get the best use of your (hopefully bigger) mobile budget.
“It really depends on what an organization’s goals are,” Benjamin said. “Some factors to consider in planning how to spend a bigger budget are usage, effectiveness and difficulty.”
According to the data below, from the 2012 Mobile Marketing Benchmark Report, when comparing the factors of usage, effectiveness and difficulty, we can find some good opportunities. For example, our respondents reported “Includes video content” as a highly effective tactic that is not very difficult to implement, yet it is not highly utilized.
One buzz word/phrase that became very popular in business circles this year was “big data.” And, even though the term is trendy and probably overused, the overall concept has major implications for marketers.
Marketers are awash in campaign data, more so now than ever before. Email marketing campaigns produce data about open rates, clickthroughs, unsubcribes, and more. Visitor activity on company websites can be tracked, and in the case of registered users or leads flagged for scoring, that activity is not only tracked but also attributed to a particular individual.
Elements tracked can include the website visit itself and activities such as downloading Web content or watching embedded video. That tracking can get pretty granular, such as combining a series of website activities, or exactly where in an embedded video the viewer stopped the playback.
Taken as discrete pieces, all these data points are essentially meaningless. Taken together, they can provide insight into the tracked individual. Furthermore, subjected to deeper analysis, they can provide insight into what the most promising prospect or customer with the most long-term value looks like for the company.
This is where predictive analytics come into play. To provide more insight into predictive analytics and big data, I interviewed Omer Artun, CEO and founder of AgilOne, a cloud-based predictive marketing intelligence company. Omer also has an academic background in pattern recognition, data mining and complex systems.
Comments Off on Cause Marketing: “Likes for Tikes” campaign generates a 39% increase in Facebook Likes for small firm
Thinking of businesses during the holiday season often conjures up the image of Charles Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge, building his fortune a penny at a time and miserly clutching every one. The uncanny number of movie versions of the tale usually perpetuate this, with an updated Ebenezer being a stingy CEO or mogul – see Bill Murray in Scrooged.
But, for many companies in the marketing industry, the truth is much closer to the old Jimmy Stewart classic, It’s a Wonderful Life – people building a business by working hard while balancing the profits of business and goodwill.
World Synergy is an online marketing firm based out of Cleveland, Ohio, going into its 16th year of business. It provides a real-life example of how companies are integrating giving back with business as usual.
Toys for Tots has been the charity of choice for World Synergy, and Facebook the chosen outlet for the give-back campaign “Likes for Tikes.”
“It is an outreach opportunity for us. … We wanted to get engaged with our current customer base and our employees’ friends and family,” said Glenn Smith, President and CEO, World Synergy. Read more…
Most email marketing campaigns (but not all) focus on three goals:
Getting the recipient to open the email
Taking the next step by following the call-to-action in the email
Clicking through to the final destination, which is often a specific landing page on the website with an action to be taken, such as filling out a registration form
The key performance indicators for email marketing are often open rate and clickthrough rate, and then that final conversion on the website, which can take a number of different forms. A consumer marketing email effort might seek out an immediate purchase, where as a B2B campaign might look for additional information on the email subscriber to more fully populate a database record.
Of course, the key to any email marketing program is getting the recipient to take that first action – opening the email. Without an open, there can be no clickthrough and certainly no final conversion on the website.
“The Web expects you to generate a lot of content,” said Muhammad Yasin, Director of Marketing, HCC Medical Insurance Services.
“It expects you to generate regularly, with … quality content and to generate it prolifically while you are at it,” he concluded.
The demand is great, as Muhammad said. Sometimes, the Web can feel like a marketer’s very own Little Shop of Horrors, and content is the constantly hungry wail of “Feed me, Seymour!”
Repurposing has been a useful solution to this constant demand for Muhammad, and many marketers are searching for a consistent plan for repurposing that will relieve both time and budget.
I realized that he had a lot of knowledge to share about repurposing, but it wouldn’t fit into the case study. Ta-da – a new blog post is born, filled with seven tips to help you with your own content repurposing.
In researching the article, and speaking about many customer relationship management concepts with six experts on the topic, one aspect of CRM that came up was, “How is CRM defined?”
Even between the story’s sources, there was no hard and fast definition. However, I thought it was also interesting to think about how different people define CRM, often depending on their role in a company or as a thought leader in the customer relationship management field.
Although there is an entire continuum of concepts, most can fit into one of these three general areas, completing the sentence, “CRM is ____:”
Simply the software piece called a CRM solution, such as Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics, InfusionSoft, Oracle Siebel, et al.
All technology related to customer relationship management, including CRM solutions, marketing automation software and email marketing solutions
Everything involved in the customer lifecycle and customer interactions with a company, including all of the above, customer service and more
Since this topic did not make it into the newsletter’s how-to article beyond the introduction, I thought I’d give MarketingSherpa Blog readers the opportunity to hear what several of those experts had to say on answering, “What is CRM?”
Editor’s Note: One of the prizes of winning the MarketingSherpa Reader’s Choice Awards is the chance for a guest post here on the MarketingSherpa blog. Today’s post is by Tom Pick of Webbiquity, chosen as best B2B marketing blog … by you.
With more than 90% of B2B and high-value consumer product purchasing decisions now starting with online research, online visibility is crucial. Companies that seem to be “everywhere” online for specific search phrases, with relevant content, stand an outsized chance of winning the business.
Maximizing online visibility isn’t just a matter of search engine optimization (SEO), though that plays a key role. As prospective buyers look to influential third-party information sources as well as peer reviews in addition to vendor content, disciplines that have traditionally operated in silos (SEO, online advertising, social media, PR) need to work together in a coordinated fashion.
Content that is not coordinated between different functions (e.g., marketing emphasizes customer service while PR talks about new features) is confusing to prospective customers. Content that is re-created independently by different functions rather than created once and then repurposed is a waste of money. And, content that isn’t cross-linked for search optimization purposes is a missed opportunity.
Comments Off on Marketing Video: How to deliver relevant marketing based on different personality types
With our content creation for February’s Email Summit 2013 in Las Vegas now in full swing, we wanted to take one last, loving look at our previous Summit – B2B Summit 2012.
Keynote Sally Hogshead was insightful and inspiring. After she stepped off the stage and the crowd headed out to the cocktail hour, Luke Thorpe threw his camera on his shoulder, I grabbed my mic, and we asked her a few questions to help the MarketingSherpa blog audience understand how to market to different personality types …
For those impatient and busy types, here are a few timestamps if you’d like to jump ahead in the video …
Q: Which of the following statements are representative of your organization’s website strategy?
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Why do you have a website?
“I usually start by asking new customers: ‘Why do you have a website?’” said Søren Sprogø, owner, Afdeling 18.
“Any answer but ‘To make more money!’ is wrong.”
“Next question of course then is, ‘How can your website help you earn more money?’ Now that’s the big one, and it can be discussed for hours. But by building your website around this question, you ensure that it supports your business and that it is measurable,” Søren concluded.
Infographic: How to Create a Model of Your Customer’s Mind
You need a repeatable methodology focused on building your organization’s customer wisdom throughout your campaigns and websites. This infographic can get you started.
