Comments Off on Command-and-Control Marketing vs. Servant-based Marketing
What are we really talking about when we’re discuss cutting-edge marketing topics like mobile, social media and Priority Inbox?
These are just technologies. Zeros and ones dancing around in some magic box in the sky. In this interview with Jim Ducharme, Community Manager, GetResponse, I lay out my argument for where you really should focus your efforts in the year ahead, and it’s not on technology …
Comments Off on Social Media Marketing: Opportunity knocks worldwide
Living in the U.S., we often use social media to reach domestic customers. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn were popular here first, and that sticks with us. But as social networking expands worldwide, the size of the audience we could be reachinghas multiplied.
Focusing exclusively on the U.S. would ignore 80% of the people on Facebook and Twitter, according to “It’s a Social World,” a report from comScore. On LinkedIn, it would ignore more than 60% of the audience (Note: You’ll need to provide an email address to download the report. It’s worth it.)
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The report is full of mindboggling stats like, “social networking captures nearly 1 out of every 5 minutes spent online worldwide,” and “social networking sites now reach 82% of the world’s online population, representing 1.2 billion users.”
If your company sells anywhere outside the U.S. (or ever hopes to), and you’re marketing through social media, then the report points to a world of opportunity. Social penetration among online audiences is above 90% in 35 of the 43 countries measured.
“Content creation stands apart in the cluster of tactics, both for its difficulty and its effectiveness. Good content creates buzz and attracts links,” Kaci said. “For this reason, marketers who commit to the effort required in creating quality content can improve their SEO positions.”
So what makes good and effective content?
This is one of the most common questions I’m asked by marketers. Keep in mind, mine is a skewed sample. If I made plumbing fixtures, I would probably always get asked, “What makes good and effective plumbing fixtures?”
So I was very interested by Kaci’s data that, yes, marketers really do struggle with this. I’ve noticed that, when they become aware of this opportunity, marketers tend to fall in the same common trap — they focus on things, like blog posts or Facebook pages.
Commtouch’s marketing team was able to leverage its internal subject matter experts — in this case, data analysts — to create valuable content and grab the attention of traditional media and influential bloggers in its field.
Like many MarketingSherpa interviews, I had more good information than could fit into the article. The source for the article, Rebecca Steinberg Herson, Vice President, Marketing, Commtouch, provided five excellent tactics for getting your content marketing material out into the wild.
Without further ado, here are Rebecca’s very actionable tactics:
Comments Off on Mobile Marketing: Get your audience’s attention – wait till they’re bored
As a culture, we are rarely separated from our mobile phones. We take them to work, grocery stores, restaurants, the gym — you name it. Whenever there’s a timeout at a kid’s soccer game, mom pulls out her phone to decide where to take the kids afterward.
In April 2011, Google found that 89% of smartphone users fiddled with the device throughout the day. Pew Research Center found that 42% of cell-owning adults used their devices to cure boredom, and that figure hit 72% in the 18-to-29 age category.
R.J. Talyor, Senior Director, Mobile Products, ExactTarget, summed up the typical consumer attitude toward mobile phones when he shared the following image last week at MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2012.
“It’s a great metaphor for the consumers we are marketing to these days,” Talyor said. “They have the phones almost embedded in their arms, always with them.”
Rather than assuming what people will be doing at certain times of day and building a mobile marketing campaign around that assumption, Talyor suggests that marketers try targeting “granular moments,” or specific situations the audience encounters.
“How can I take advantage about the location of that individual, and how can I take advantage of what I know about that individual’s market?” Talyor said.
Comments Off on Email Summit: Brian Solis on the connected consumer and the digitally evolving world
Last week, we held our Email Summit 2012 at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, where more than 750 of your marketing peers joined us for four days of keynotes, workshops, discussion panels, case study sessions and networking.
Brian Solis, Principal, Altimeter, joined us as one of our three keynote speakers for the Summit. Brian spoke to the audience about integrating social media with your email marketing to engage a new type of connected customers. After his keynote, Brian took a few minutes to chat with GetResponse Community Manager, Jim Ducharme.
In this video interview, Brian talks about two main thoughts:
The connected consumer
The democratizing of information is creating an empowered and connected consumer
Technology simply facilitates to bring about change
Success now comes from listening and learning from consumers
The “Digital Darwinism” concept
When technology and society evolve faster than your ability to adapt
Examples of companies fading away because consumer behavior is evolving toward a digital world
The connected consumer requires you to design the experiences and outcomes they want in the channels they want
The MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2012 audience was treated to Brian Solis, author of The End of Business as Usual: Rewire the way you work to succeed in the customer revolution.
He opened with the idea that the real marketing challenge is the culture of the organization, and he provided a phrase he uses to describe this:
“Digital Darwinism is the evolution of consumer behavior when society and technology evolve faster than your ability to adapt.”
Another big idea he offered was “social media is the new normal.” He continued that, “Social media is different than other media channels before it. Here, it’s about relationships, recognition, engagement, value and help.”
As you might guess from this set-up, the intro of Brian’s talk focused on social media and the mobile experience, and he offered many data points, such as:
More than 350 million Facebook users access the platform via mobile devices
Daily mobile social networking grew 58% in 2011
Accessing social platforms via mobile browser is up 25%
Accessing social platforms via mobile apps is up 126%
And given these numbers, Brian offered a chart that illustrates that the “connected consumer” isn’t limited to a certain age group:
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Brian said, “My mother uses Facebook more than I could ever hope to use it. I may have to opt out of her feed.”
The mobile and social introduction led into the main theme of the keynote: integrating all the channels including social, mobile and email.
Editor’s Note: Email Summit is attended by hundreds of marketers every year from a wide range of companies —solo entrepreneurs all the way up to Fortune 50 stalwarts. So to give the small- and medium-sized business readers of this blog some actionable advice from this year’s Summit, we’re giving Rebekah Henson, Education Marketing Associate, AWeber, a chance to provide the SMB perspective. In full disclosure, AWeber sponsored an SMB-focused special report from MarketingSherpa, is a sponsor of Email Summit, and the editor of this blog used to root against Chris Webber (no relation).
“The customer is king.” That’s been the overarching theme of Email Summit 2012. From the first words of Dr. Flint McGlaughlin’s keynote on day one, promising not to teach us new things but instead to teach us to see things differently, the focus of this year’s Summit has been all about valuing your customers.
That is right up every small business’s alley. Speakers from all different backgrounds and business sizes spoke on panels and presented on their findings, but you can easily apply several key takeaways from the week no matter how big or small your business happens to be.
Comments Off on Email Summit: Mobile marketing panel on the complex sale
Day one of the MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2012 opened with Sergio Balegno, Director of Research, MECLABS, and Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, CEO and Managing Director, MECLABS, the parent company of MarketingExperiments, with an emphasis that this is a research-based event driven by the 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, featuring W. Jeffrey Rice, Senior Research Analyst, as the lead author.
The afternoon kicked off with two sets of breakout sessions featuring both direct sale and complex sale tracks.
Get conversion-focused artificial intelligence training from Flint McGlaughlin. Go to MeclabsAI.com/GetProductive to register for this no cost event and see the 7 principles Flint will teach (MeclabsAI is the parent company of MarketingSherpa.
New technology is always bewildering. We get a newfangled tool. We play with it. We relate it to other stuff. We try to understand it.
The problem is that new technology is new. You can relate it to older stuff at first, but you have to move on. Thinking about it in old ways can hold you back.
Take email marketing, for example. Companies used it as a digital form of direct mail for years. We now know email is not direct mail, but some companies continue reliving the past. Here are a few examples:
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.
