MarketingSherpa Blog

Earlier this year, I was asked to moderate a case study panel at DFW Rocks Social Media Day. It was a fast and furious two days with multiple concurrent tracks and a lot of great information for attendees.

Since so much was happening at once, I wasn’t able to take in all the great content. So I reached out to Lissa Duty, Organizer of DFW Rocks Social Media 2014 and Vice President of Community Management at Advice Interactive Group, for her take on the event to give MarketingSherpa readers the opportunity to learn some of the top takeaways.

Insights from the organizer

From the organizer’s perspective, Lissa said that this year’s event placed a higher importance on live content.

She explained, “This year, I really saw the value in having the live blog to share the conference sessions and highlight the speakers, even after the event, plus the live tweets, which did make for the #DFWRocks2014 hashtag streaming on Twitter at one point.”

What’s Lissa’s quick-hit advice on social media marketing?

“You must start with creating a social media plan,” Lissa said.

She then outlined three key points:

Key Point #1. Understand why you’re using social media

It’s not just to “get rich.” Understand why you feel social media is important to you, your customer and your brand.

Key Point #2. Research what your customer wants to know about your brand

Discover how you can share that message uniquely in each social space, and then create a plan to give them that message.

Read more…

Yuchun Lee, Vice President and General Manager, Enterprise Marketing Management Group, IBM, understands analytics and metrics are, as he puts it, “a huge part of marketers’ lives.”

He says the question then becomes, “How much time and energy should marketers spend checking out metrics and worrying about the analytics of their efforts?”

Yuchun adds, “I think the market trend has been moving towards incorporating more and more data and analysis of customers.”

This includes learning what messaging is relevant to your customers.

“Being able to analyze the data to understand a customer becomes paramount for every business,” explains Yuchun.

This data analysis allows you to determine consumer sentiment, which in turn provides a framework for relevant communications. 

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Hey marketers of 1985 … imagine if you could overhear many of your potential customers’ conversations in an ethical way. Why, if they had an interest in buying a product or service in your category, you could just reach out and start a conversation of your own. This would be way cooler than a hoverboard or flying car (although not quite as cool as the Mr. Fusion Home Energy Reactor).

Of course, the year is 2012, and we’re now living the dream. On social media, people open up their conversations to the world about what they want to buy, where they want to go, and what they’re trying to crassly self-promote. But how many marketers take advantage of listening combined with proactive social touches to act on these conversations? Here’s a real-life example of how it can work. So I tweeted …

Most people probably just saw my tweet as a crassly self-promotional attempt to brag about the beautiful March weather here in Jacksonville while trying to poach top marketing talent from frigid northern locations and let them know about the job openings here at MECLABS. (wink, wink)

However, one clever marketer saw an opportunity of a different kind …

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New products with lots of features can be intimidating. A learning curve has to be overcome before customers can fall in love and recommend the product to a friend. And I can think of few products that are as feature-laden as Microsoft Office 2010.

After teaching about email marketing at ExactTarget’s Connections 2011 on the latest stop of MarketingSherpa’s Email Marketing LEAPS Advanced Practices Workshop, I’ve been soaking in all of the email marketing content presented here. Diana Lawson’s case study really stood out to me because it was a great example of how to use email to enamor customers with a feature-rich product.

The senior product manager at Microsoft presented a case study yesterday describing how her team launched a lifecycle email program to build loyalty among Microsoft Office 2010’s newest customers.

“We need people to get the value of Microsoft Office right away… So there’s no buyer’s remorse, and more a feeling of ‘I am so glad I bought this,'” Lawson says.

The emails deliver targeted how-to content and videos for five months. One of their main goals is to improve relationships with customers by offering helpful content from team leaders behind Office 2010.

Here’s how the lifecycle emails work (results below): Read more…

2008 has come and gone and I have a folder loaded with a year’s worth of Sherpa articles I’ve written. Here are a few of my favorites, from which I’ve pulled out nuggets of wisdom to share.

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