Great Cross Media Marketing Seminar
Don’t miss our seminar tomorrow on Cross Media Marketing at the BizTimes Expo. Heritage and Cultivate Communications will be presenting tomorrow May 17th at 11:00am at the BizTimes Expo at Potowatomi Casino. Learn some great insights into how to choose the right marketing strategy to reach the right clients with the right message.
Ways to Measure Marketing Effectiveness (Marketing ROI)
There are several ways to measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. The key is to build a tracking mechanism into each marketing tactic before it is deployed. In order to respond to your Call to Action (e.g., discount, coupon, brochure, white paper, consultation, etc.) the respondent must provide a valid campaign code which is entered into your response tracking system.
The same Call to Action can be promoted using multiple marketing tactics. By assigning a unique tracking mechanism to each marketing tactic, you can identify which marketing efforts deliver a positive Return on Investment (ROI) and which ones do not.
Here are 10 tracking mechanisms you can use to measure the effectiveness of your marketing:
1. Campaign Codes
2. Telephone Numbers
3. SMS Keywords (text message responses)
4. Email Addresses (unique email addresses)
5. Website Landing Pages (unique URLs)
6. Mail-in Response Cards
7. Social Media Interactions (number of comments, likes, shares, connections, follows)
8. Online Form Submissions (unique forms)
9. Coupons/Certificates/Rebates (presented at point of purchase)
10. Market Insight Surveys (administered before and after brand building campaign)
You’ve measured the low-hanging fruit. Now what?
It’s clear that professional marketers are keen to prove that measurement itself is a worthy activity. It’s also clear that most have chosen to succeed at measuring the low-hanging-fruit, the tactical marketing activities like those cited above. This is entirely understandable.
Thanks mostly to those marketers who are “breaking measurement ground” for future marketers the next step will be to begin to measure more strategically robust marketing initiatives, such as the following:
- How are we doing at defining and identifying the most strategically appropriate clients?
- Beyond the simple measures of revenue generated, who are our most strategically important and loyal clients? How are we doing at retaining them?
- How are we doing at increasing our revenues from these most strategically important and loyal clients?
Technology will indeed play a part in the heightened profile and sophistication of marketing measurement. For example, looking at the list above, it’s clear that a firm’s financial systems, when linked to its client relationship management platform, will help the firm define and identify the most strategically appropriate clients, and keep track of the firm’s “share of wallet” with those clients. In addition, data mining practices of client behaviors will help reveal those clients who are true evangelists.
For now, marketers should aim to incrementally push the envelope on their firms’ investment in measuring marketing’s ROI. Start tactically, gain some early measurement successes, and then urge your practitioners to invest in more strategically meaningful techniques.
Direct Mail Makes an Impact on Generation Y
There’s a large, highly educated, influential segment of the population that likes to spend and is receptive to direct mail. They’re the young consumers who make up Generation Y, and if you’re not engaging them yet, it’s time to start. This group — also known as Millennials — is widely thought to rival the Baby Boomers in size.
“From a branding perspective, we know that Gen Y’s are now making brand decisions that will stick with them for a long time,” says Jason Ryan Dorsey, author of Y-Size Your Business. “These are decisions in everything from technology products and automobiles to consumer packaged goods and apparel.”
“A recently completed study showed that if you’re marketing packaged goods like soap or beverages, it’s much more likely the kids are going to be making the decisions about what to buy for the household, and if it’s a tech product for sure,” says Lamont Swittenberg, managing director at Luminosity Marketing, a New York–based analytical marketing communications firm.
But the tech-savvy, diverse group isn’t making it easy for marketers to reach them. “They’re more tech savvy and more comfortable with technology than previous generations, and they’re essentially on the go,” Swittenberg says. “Because they are difficult to reach you have to execute an integrated marketing campaign to surround them with different touch points.”
Considering only social media and e-mail in an integrated campaign, however, may prove shortsighted. Mail is effective, too. “Sending something by direct mail is a way of breaking through the clutter because they do receive so much communication that comes digitally,” Swittenberg says. “And you still can’t replace the personal touch from direct mail.” A survey from interactive marketing provider ExactTarget found 75 percent of people ages 25 to 34 have made a purchase resulting from direct mail.
“The leap for marketers is to recognize the different lens Gen Y applies to reading their mail and adjust the marketing message to make those Gen Y differences a measurable advantage,” Dorsey says. For instance, Millennials prefer pictures and directions to online video rather than long blocks of text or fancy words, he says. This group also wants to see people like themselves represented in the marketing material, Dorsey says, and preferably in candid shots.
Elizabethtown College sends mail to young alumni as part of a yearlong integrated fundraising strategy that also includes phone calls and online communication through e‑mail and social media. Elizabethtown has also started printing quick response (QR) codes on its pieces, which allow targets to quickly jump to a website by snapping a photo of the barcode with a smart phone.
The college also uses mail to reinforce marketing messages sent digitally, as it did with a brochure that followed an e-mail about a fundraising challenge with a rival school. Integrated marketing campaigns that included print outperformed all of their previous efforts.
Social Media is not a Comprehensive Marketing Plan
Go ahead and admit it. As marketers, we’ve all heard that ridiculous statement spoken at least once – for others, much too often. We have even heard it spoken by the CEO or CFO in leadership meetings. You know what I’m referring to: the statement that sends shivers down the spines of all marketers. What is the statement? “Let’s just focus on social media.” Excuse me for stating the obvious, but social media does not represent the entire marketing pie.
The marketing pie is comprised of many facets, depending on whether a business is targeting consumers or businesses – or is a non-profit that depends on fundraising. Some niches offer differences based on whether you are selling a service rather than a product. But, there are key elements found in everyone’s marketing pie:
- Brand strategies and corporate identity (creative direction for logo/tagline that showcases the brand personality, style guidelines, brand consistency across all )
- Corporate communications (annual reports, brochures, facts sheets, case studies)
- Competitive research/analysis of industry and trend research/analysis
- Internet marketing (SEO, search strategies, email marketing, banner ad strategies)
- Website creation, traffic analysis, landing page creation and analysis (including links from email marketing and banner ads)
- Direct mail (themes, schedules)
- Advertising (design, copy, analysis of placements based on costs and eyeballs)
- Public relations and media outreach (press releases, media alerts, media advisories, online press kits, expert interviews)
- Events (tradeshows, seminars, webinars)
- Evaluation metrics and budget analysis
- Social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, WordPress)
Without a doubt, social media is one element of a comprehensive marketing plan. But without any of the other initiatives, social media ALONE cannot sustain a company’s marketing efforts. Consider a business that creates and launches Facebook and Twitter pages. Sure, lots of people may initially “like” the Facebook page and check out the updates as well as “follow” the Twitter page. But what happens if there are no main websites, micro-sites, or customized product or campaign landing pages. Without implementation of other pieces of the marketing pie, the impact of a company’s social media will fall flat.
There is no debate about the value of social media. It is a useful tool to develop two-way conversations with customers. It creates awareness and generates exposure. It develops relationships with existing customers and attracts potential customers. And it builds a loyal following by driving traffic to a company’s main website. In the words of Matt Dickman, “Social media isn’t the end-all-be-all, but it offers marketers unparalleled opportunities to participate in relevant ways. It also provides a launch pad for other marketing tactics. Social media is not an island – it’s a high-power engine on a larger marketing ship.”
5 techniques for an effective ‘call to action’
Every direct mail piece should have a call to action, a response you want users to complete. But how do you encourage users to act? How do you create an effective call to action?
A call to action provides…
- Focus to your site
- A way to measure your pieces success
- Direction to your users
How then do you create an effective call to action? Here are 5 techniques which help achieve just that.
1. Lay the groundwork
Before a user is willing to complete a call to action they have to recognize the need. Before you ask people to respond, first identify a problem and present a product that solves that problem. You also need to communicate the benefits of responding. What will the user get out of completing the call to action?
2. Offer a little extra
Sometimes you may have to sweeten the deal to encourage users to complete a call to action. Incentives could include discounts, entry into a competition or a free gift.
3. Use active urgent language
A call to action should clearly tell users what you want them to do. They should include active words such as:
- Call
- Buy
- Register
- Subscribe
- Donate
All of these encourage users to take an action.
To create a sense of urgency and a need to act now, these words can be used alongside phrases such as:
- Offer expires March 31st
- For a short time only
- Order now and receive a free gift
4. Get the position right
Another important factor is the position of your call to action on the piece. Ideally it should be placed high on the piece and in the center. It is not just the position of your call to action that matters. It is also the space around it. The more space around a call to action the more attention is drawn to it. Clutter up your call to action with surrounding content and it will be lost in the overall noise of the page.
5. Carry the call through
Finally, consider what happens when a user does respond to your call to action. The rest of the process needs to be as carefully thought through as the call to action itself. One particular word of warning – if you require users to provide personal data about themselves, resist the temptation to collect unnecessary information.
5 Reasons Print Is Making a Comeback in 2012
Print is a major driver in many marketing campaigns. Print is a powerful media…and its power is multiplied when used as part of a multi-channel campaign. Print enhances the impact of television, broadcasting, and the internet by providing an extra dimension that’s warm, inviting, personally relevant, and can be technologically savvy.
Sales Lift
Studies show that print advertising drives consumers to online shopping. An iProspect study found that 67% of online searches are driven by offline messages, with 39% of shoppers ultimately making a purchase. Those shoppers who receive a direct mail piece directing them to an online site spend on average 13% more than those who do not receive a printed piece. Moreover, printed materials associated with online campaigns alone have been shown to boost online spending by 28%.
A study by Exact Target found that 76% of internet users surveyed have been directly influenced to purchase an item or service thanks to a direct mail piece. A United States Postal Service study identifies a $21 million difference in online sales per million site visitors between those who had received a catalog at their home address and those that had not. Households receiving print materials shop online more often, spend more meaningful time at retail websites, and are found to be twice as likely to make an online purchase.
Brand Awareness in the Digital Age
Consumers are more likely to learn about new brands, products, and services from print media (e.g., magazines and newspapers), rather than from social media channels, such as Facebook and Twitter. In addition, highly active smartphone owners, those who do six or more activities daily on mobile, are both subscribing to and reading more print materials than any of the other groups.
New Opportunities-New Vision
While online and mobile use continues to grow, marketers are acknowledging and voting with their dollars that print is a vital component of the marketing mix. Print is an integral vehicle in cross media platforms, employing innovative technologies, including PURLS, QR codes, augmented reality, and intelligent print imaging, to bridge the gap between the real and digital worlds.
Print Still Excites People
It’s harder and harder to get people to agree to an interview for an online story. But mention that it will be a printed feature and executives rearrange their schedule. The printed word is still perceived as more credible to many people than anything on the web.
Unplug
More and more people are actively choosing to unplug, or disconnect themselves from digital media. I’m doing this more myself. I’m finding myself turning off my phone and email more to engage with printed material. A year ago I didn’t see this coming. Today, I relish the opportunities when I can’t be reached. If I’m right, many of your customers are feeling the same. Your print communication may be just what they need.
Why You Should Integrate Your Marketing Data?
A good online marketing strategy has many different components. But the internet is a fast paced and ever-morphing place. Like Ferris Bueller said, it “moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” So the tactics you use to carry out your marketing campaigns need to be agile and responsive in order to be effective. And integrating all your marketing data is a key to that agility and responsiveness.
What Integrating Marketing Data Gives You:
1. Convenience and Simplicity
Integrating marketing data allows you to conveniently and regularly monitor and track the various aspects of your marketing campaigns, as well as the overall results. When you have various feeds coming in, you need a centralized place to see how they are all working individually and together. Many companies have all sorts of great data coming in but they do not make compiling and evaluating it a priority. No one has the time or patience to log in to multiple sources or skim through email reports to piece together a snapshot for various campaigns. Integrating data from things like Google Analytics, Adwords, email, sales leads, phone tracking, social media, reputation management and SEO efforts allows you and your team to conveniently and easily know what tasks are being done and the results via one centralized hub.
2. Sharing of Information
Your employees have to work with one another in order to be effective. Likewise, your marketing data needs to work together to give you the best results. When your marketing data is not integrated, you have to rely on someone to do something with each report from various data sources. We already covered the fact that no one has time to do that, so sharing that data moves even lower on the priority list. Integrating that data allows your team to access the most current information immediately. And it assures they are armed with the full picture on the various aspects of campaigns. That means, for example, that your sales team and marketing team can work in concert when they send targeted emails or reach out to the right group of prospective clients. Your sales team knows what marketing materials were sent out; your marketing team knows which aspects of campaigns are best suited for certain targets. Your social media team can immediately respond to customer service complaints from reputation management data. With integrated marketing data, your entire team can more effectively target and nurture leads, as well as manage existing clients.
3. Ability to Act Quickly
The internet thrust marketing into a world of real-time reality. You have to be on top of not only crisis management issues that pop up, but trends and changes in your and your clients’ industries. If you don’t have a handle on your data, you can’t adjust and respond quickly. You don’t know what is and isn’t working so won’t know when you should adjust campaigns for a better ROI. And before you know it, the train will have left the station without you. By integrating marketing data, you have one information hub through which to monitor everything. This convenience assures that you always know what is going on and can act immediately when needed. Integrating marketing data allows your team to be more efficient, effective, responsive and agile.
A Logo Is Not a Brand
Lots of organizations come to us asking for “a new brand.” They typically mean a new name, or icon, or a new look and feel for their existing name. Lots of people think that brand begins and ends there — that once we shine up the name they can stick it below their email signature, pop it on their website, and they have a new brand. Brand is much more than a name or a logo.
Brand is your strategy. If you’re a consumer brand, brand is your products and the story that those products tell together. If you’re a nonprofit organization, brand is your aspirations and the progress you are making toward them. Seriousness is a brand. Back in 1969 NASA didn’t have the best logo. But man did it have a brand. It has a nicer logo now — but the brand no longer is as strong. If you don’t know where you’re going or how you’re going to get there, that’s your brand, no matter what fancy new name you come up with.
Brand is your customer service. If donors call your organization all excited and gets caught up in voicemail and can’t figure out who they should talk to, and leave a message for someone unsure if it’s the right person, that’s your brand. It says you don’t really care all that much about your donors. If they come to your annual dinner and can’t hear the speaker because of a lousy sound system, that’s your brand. It says that you don’t think it’s really important whether they hear what you have to say or not.
Brand is the way you speak. If you build a new website and fill it with outdated copy, you don’t have a new brand. If the copy is too technical that’s your brand. If your annual report puts people to sleep, that’s your brand. If it’s trying to be all things to all people, that’s your brand.
Message is a central part of your brand, but message alone cannot make a great brand. How many times have you encountered a product or service that didn’t live up to what the copy writers told you about it? That disconnect is your brand.
Brand is the whole array of your communication tools. Brand is the quality of the sign on the door that says, “Back in 10 minutes.” It’s whether you use a generic voicemail system with canned music, or whether you create your own custom program. The former says you are just like everyone else and you’re fine with that; the latter says you are original. You might have a pretty sale banner that adheres to all the right visual standards, but if it’s sagging and hung up with duct tape, that’s your brand. It says you don’t pay attention to the details. Can you imagine seeing a crooked banner with duct tape in an Apple store? Never. And that’s their brand.
Brand is your people. Brand is your people and the way they represent you. Having a good team starts with good hiring and continues with strong and consistent training and development. No matter how well your employees adhere to your new brand style guide, if they couldn’t care less about the job they’re doing, that’s your brand.
Brand is your facilities. Are the lights on, or is your team working in darkness? Is the place clean and uncluttered? Does it have signage that’s consistent with your visual standards? Does it look and feel alive?
Brand is your logo and visuals, too. A great brand deserves a great logo and great graphic design and visuals. It can make the difference when the customer is choosing between two great brands. But these alone cannot make your brand great.
Ultimately, brand is about caring about your business at every level and in every detail, from the big things like mission and vision, to your people, your customers, and every interaction anyone is ever going to have with you, no matter how small.
Whether you know it or not, whether you have a fancy logo or not, you do have a brand. The question is whether or not it’s the brand you really want.
Your Mailing Lists will Impact Customer Experience and Loyalty
If you’re a direct mail and e-mail marketer, and you worry about the possibility of your sales declining along with the current economic contraction, the key to maintaining sales growth may lie in the existing customers in your direct marketing mailing lists.
According to a recent article in Response Magazine entitled Overcoming Economic Struggles by Focusing on Customer Loyalty, based on a recent Customer Management Exchange survey conducted ahead of the Customer Experience Exchange 2011, “improving loyalty is now a key objective for 58.6 percent of customer-experience professionals.”
If you want to keep your existing customers and expand your share of their market basket, you need to offer them more products and/or services that meet their wants and needs, as well as a superior customer experience. The same holds true for increasing the business you get from converting prospects and suspects to customer. Because today’s shopper can go to the internet for instant price comparisons, customer experience becomes the only sustainable competitive advantage.
So how do you provide the customers, suspects and prospects in your direct mailing marketing lists with a superior customer experience? The answer comes down to learning more about them and using that knowledge for:
- Better audience segmentation and targeting
- Personalizing every touch-point
- Developing products and/or services to meet a wider range of their needs and wants
And, how do you learn more about them? Well, there are three main channels of information on the customers in your direct mail marketing lists:
- Engaging them in an interactive dialogue by driving them to your web site and/or micro sites via direct mail, e-mail, on-line, print, etc.
- Importing data from internal sources like transaction and customer service data
- Data appending and other data enhancement services from external marketing data services providers
Data appending is a quick and easy way to increase your knowledge of the customers and prospects in your existing direct marketing mailing list. It’s the simple process of adding data to your existing direct marketing mailing list from an external data resource. Your database then becomes a hybrid file built from compiled and proprietary data sources. The added selection parameters could include demographic, geographic, lifestyle, interests, and behavioral data. The depth and breadth of our consumer data file enables extremely accurate customer profiling and granular audience segmentation which will help you to improve both your customer experience and your response rates.
5 Steps to Launching an Optimized Website
There are a variety of misconceptions surrounding search engine optimization today. One big misconception that many website owners have is that once they have their site set up and they submit it to search engines, they’ll get traffic right away. The truth is that there is a lot more to bringing traffic to your website. Search engine optimization is a task that is ongoing and it does take quite a bit of work.
1 – Having a Reasonable Goal in Mind: Having a reasonable goal means understanding that depending on your strategy, resources and competency you will either have to spend lots of time fine-tuning your campaign, or pay someone else to.
Most competitive keywords take up to a year to secure with consistent optimization applied. Hence, managing expectations means understanding the competitive thresholds for your keywords and the degree of trust required for a website to “break loose” and start climbing over competitors.
The idea is to target keywords within your reach initially, but build the more competitive keywords into the site architecture, link structure and off page SEO to brand each page with a purpose, which leads to the next point.
2 – Create Pages for Specific Purposes – Just because visitors arrive does not ensure success. You need compelling content infused with overtones of intent. Instead of overwhelming visitors with a bland one-size-fits-all approach, try segmenting your traffic by offering one specific conversion objective per page; unify your message, images & call to action.
Search engines look at singular and plural keywords in a unique fashion. For example, just because you rank for one variation of a keyword does not ensure you will rank automatically for the stemmed or plural or synonymic variant.
With this in mind, make sure you have a predefined destination page for each variation or create a page for multiple keywords by using the singular, plural and alternative keywords in the title or meta data. For example, a page about pricing could use keywords on the page about SEO rate, rates, fees, fee, costs, cost, SEO pricing, etc…
If that does not work, then try utilizing conversion paths vs. traditional landing pages by offering a selection of 2-3 choice/selections to clarify consumer intent.
3 – Employ Staggered Link Diversity – Different links work better for different stages of your website’s development. For example, to warm things up, Yahoo Directory, Business.com, Best of the Web and other trusted directories work wonders to escalate trust.
After adding the base layer of links, invest time and energy looking for niche related links from notable aged sites in addition to fresh editorial links from news, press releases, blogs and social media to balance the mix.
It’s better to get deep links to specific pages with specific anchor text rather than just acquiring random links to the homepage. No one said building links is easy, but it is a mandatory step to distinguish your pages in search engines.
4- Add Fresh Content Regularly – Industries are competitive, which means you need to offer something worthwhile to search engine spiders and human visitors alike to encourage them to consider your website as an authority on a subject.
The ultimate objective of SEO is to develop authority; from there rankings are produced from the on page and off page synergy of trust, citation and the coherence and / or synergy of the collective content within your website.
5 – Pay Attention to the Long-Tail – Long tail keywords (keyword incorporating 3 or more words and or modifiers) are responsible for 80% of the traffic to most websites.
Rarely do websites start from zero then jump to the top for competitive keywords. First they show signs of traction with one or more keywords then that phenomenon continues to stem as additional keywords cross the tipping point and become buoyant.
The key is to use analytics, referral data to study where that traction occurs, then intersect the intent of those keywords with additional pages within your website that have a related theme.
If you pick up on a keyword “breaking lose” then feed it with additional editorial pages using similar titles and / or internal links to polish the ranking factor to create more traction through keyword stemming.