When Wal-Mart announced plans to use its retail locations to fulfill online orders last week, the media and business community broke into a collective game of word association. The word? Amazon.

Prior to breaking the news, Wal-Mart was already one of the few companies that could compete with Amazon online. But after unveiling how it plans to do so—by fulfilling online orders in its own stores—Wal-Mart became Amazon’s first serious threat.

The irony is that Wal-Mart will fulfill these orders using Amazon’s own in-store locker strategy. Wal-Mart has the significant advantage of already having 10,000 retail locations—something Amazon can’t currently compete with. For Amazon, staying competitive will either require rolling out a slew of its own physical locations (which is a possibility considering its test store concept last year) or establishing partnerships with 3rd-party brick-and-mortar retailers (something it is very much in the process of doing). In the meantime, however, all Wal-Mart has to do is boost its online game. Well, and install the lockers.

Clearly Amazon and Wal-Mart have different product sets. They also don’t overlap 100% in target customer bases, and there are a bunch of other things that are fundamentally different about their models… But for the sake of oversimplification, let’s say that all Wal-Mart has to do to rise to ecommerce supremacy is up the online ante. What exactly would that take? A lot. But Wal-Mart’s two most crucial priorities will be helping online customers navigate its extensive product list easily and quickly, and streamlining online and offline operations to create a turnkey overall experience.

Priority #1: Wal-Mart must transform itself into an invisible (and psychic) personal shopper to help customers navigate its vast inventory.

Like Amazon, Wal-Mart has a massive product offering. This isn’t a new problem for either of them, but as the race to fulfill orders guarantees quicker turnaround times and more convenience after placing the order, Wal-Mart must control every thing it can before the order is placed to ensure it’s actually placed through them. In this case, that means making sure customers can find what they’re looking for, quickly and easily. Or, in the case that customers don’t know exactly what that is, helping them figure it out with a fairly high degree of accuracy.

The good news is that this isn’t Wal-Mart’s first rodeo; they’re not exactly starting from scratch. They know who their customers are and they’ve got tons of data from past purchases and online behavior to inform their efforts.

They’ve also got enough content to appeal to every person in the US if they want to – it’s just a question of surfacing the right content to the right people. Therefore there is no extra work involved in getting more products or content; the challenge is simply using it better.

To act as an invisible personal shopper, Wal-Mart must master what they do with this powerful combination of content and data—and when they do it. The goal is to use it in real-time, as customers are browsing their online store. This is different from standard product recommendations—things like “people who liked this, also like that”–which online shoppers have become accustomed to. Retailers now have the technology to go far beyond these persona/segment-based tools.

They can make use of both historical data (what this particular individual has looked at and/or purchased in the past) and current data (what this particular individual is looking at right now) to make predictions that will shape a particular customer’s experience in context and real-time.

Priority #2: Create a streamlined and turnkey experience across all touch points between online and offline visits.

With this new model comes the potential for far more room for error than ever before. Online customers who will now be traveling to Wal-Mart’s physical locations to pick up their orders will no doubt expect a consistent experience from the moment they order all the way to fulfillment. Along the way, there are a number of touch points, including email, direct marketing, advertising, customer service, and so on.

Building on the idea of personalizing each individual’s online experience, Wal-Mart can easily improve each subsequent experience—something that may seem like it involves a significant level of complexity. But with the right infrastructure, it can be completely automated and dynamic.

The key to accomplishing this is putting visitor profiles at the heart of each cross channel experience. In other words, Wal-Mart can use the same model of targeting used online to inform which content each customer sees across all other channels. In the end, the digital channels match email marketing matches advertising matches direct mail matches messaging at the point of pick-up (a phrase I just coined, mind you), and so on.

At the end of the day, Wal-Mart’s rise to online dominance really just revolves around turning an otherwise complicated shopping experience into one that feels quaint and easy. It can accomplish this by setting up a strong behind-the-scenes infrastructure that puts the customer experience at the forefront. And isn’t that what their new strategy is all about—giving the customer what they want where they want it?

Sending the Right Offer to the Right Customer at the Right Time

Establishing direct marketing success does not need to revolve around sending a huge amount of messages across a large number of channels. Rather, gaining the competitive edge involves sending the right offer to the right customer at the right time. Instead of distributing “batch and blast” messages, it’s about being smarter and not focusing solely on volume.

Marketers can increase results by sending fewer, more targeted messages. Survey results from MyBuys and the e-Tailing Group highlight the effects of personalized messages on online shoppers’ purchasing decisions. The survey shows 40% of consumers agree they buy more from retailers who personalize messages across all channels. Two-thirds (66%) of consumers say the retailers they favor offer promotions and merchandise tailored to their past purchasing and browsing behaviors. More than half of these consumers (54%) are willing to share information about themselves for a more personalized shopping experience.

To achieve the greatest results, marketers need to gather and analyze as much data as possible to paint a clear picture of their customers, enabling them to deliver relevant personalized messages that appeal to recipients.

Incorporating Big Data and Marketing Analytics

This is where big data and marketing analytics come into play for direct marketers. Gathering information from social media interactions, ad-clicks, email opt-ins, and newsletter subscriptions, etc. present marketers with an opportunity to paint a portrait of their customers and their interests, needs, and behaviors. The use of data and analytics can enable marketers to determine what people are looking for or what they’re likely to be most receptive to, as a means to deliver the right message at the right time, across all channels or simply the channels the customer prefers.

While direct mail budgets and volumes may be declining, many brands are simply using is more selectively—and intelligently—within cross-channel marketing strategies. For instance, direct mail can be used to reach customers or prospects who marketers cannot reach through cheaper, more immediate channels like email. Some consumers may not have or don’t open email on a regular basis, and that’s when direct mail strategies should be deployed, as these prospects could still be interested customers.

While recent survey results indicate direct mail spending may be on the decline, this doesn’t mean direct marketing as a whole is following suit. To keep a competitive advantage within direct marketing, marketers need to focus on creating and delivering relevant, targeted messages, which, in turn, can lead to increased sales and brand loyalty.

Now we’re not talking about scaring the bejesus out of your customers, but rather, using your content and features to create a surprise through mediums like email or social media marketing. All our attention on analytics and metrics, writes Redick, “certainly make[s] our profession more efficient. But they also can make brands less exciting and surprising. With all of this information at our disposal, we risk robbing brands of opportunities for serendipity — the delightful surprises that happen when we least expect them, attracting the attention of consumers.”

In Redick’s opinion, surprise is is the most powerful marketing tool because:

Surprise is addicting
According to Redick, scientists at Emory and Baylor used MRIs to measure changes in human brain activity, and the study “suggests that people are designed to crave the unexpected.” Redick gives Birchbox, the successful subscription beauty product mystery box as an example, proving that business models can be built around this insight. One of our personal favorite mystery addictions in the retail world is ModCloth’s stylish surprise grab bags. For $15, you could snag anything from a skirt, to a dress or a cute coat worth up to $300. The surprise grab bags are only available at random and sell out immediately in nanoseconds!

Surprise induces change in behavior
“Surprise introduces us to new stimuli, which we must then reconcile with shifts in our beliefs and behavior,” writes Redick. Training the mind to think in terms of desired consumer behavior can help unlock innovative strategies. “When developing an advertising campagin, we are often too focused on the question, ‘what do we need to say?’ Instead, we should focus on the question of ‘What expectations do our customers and prospects hold, and how can we turn those on in their head?’” says Redick.

Surprise spikes emotions
Surprise isn’t an emotion, but rather an emotion enhancer. Redick explains, “The interesting thing about surprise is that it appears to amplify whatever you’re feeling. When we’re surprised and angry, we’re outraged. Remember what happened when Netflix raised subscription prices without warning? Combine happiness with surprise, and you hit the upper register of the feeling-good scale.” Redick gives Zappos as an excellent example of a company successfully combining happiness with surprise. The online shoe retailer goes to great lengths to deliver shoes before they’re promised, hence customers are not only surprised by the early arrival of their purchase, but delighted.

Surprise creates passionate relationships
Similar to a relationship with a loved one, the element of surprise with your customers can spice things up. Redick explains that “one experiment conducted among middle-aged married couples found that engaging in less common, but more ‘exciting’ activities like skiing or dancing led to greater marriage satisfaction that pursuing activities that are more common and ‘pleasant,’ like seeing a movie or cooking together.” Just as married couples reacted favorably to unexpected or exciting events, a client, customer or business partner will also be drawn to an unexpected or surprising pitch – provided it’s in line with the business relationship.

The technical and analytic aspects of social media and email marketing are extraordinarily important, but if you’re looking for new ways to stand out, or to reignite a spark with some of your long-term business relationships, don’t be afraid to try something new, daring, or even surprising. When used effectively, surprise truly can be the most effective marketing tool.

What is an example of a time that a marketing effort has surprised you, and how do you remember reacting?

Systematic innovation is at the core of all agile practices, even though the term is somewhat of an oxymoron. Sparks of innovation don’t easily coexist with a systematic approach; systematic approaches don’t necessarily produce sparks of inspiration.

They are somewhat at odds, but agile practices make them complementary opposites—not mutually exclusive. In fact, the agile process is what allows for the innovation.

History Has Put Innovation at the Forefront

The goal of innovation dominates modern business, following a long history of business management eras that began over 100 years ago.

The history of business management in the U.S. has evolved through several distinctive eras—

• The Efficiency Era: Business management begins as a quasi-engineering efficiency study in the wake of late 19th century monopolies and robber-baron greed
• The Social Era: A time of great prosperity and hope, where businesses served as collective mechanisms for social reform and widespread increase in living standards after World War II
• The Shareholder Value Era: Beginning with the deregulation in the 1980s, American business went through a period of sacrosanct ideology about shareholder value, greed is good, and the rise of great income disparities between management and workers.

And now, I would add to that list, a new era we are entering:

• The Agile Era: A combination of all of remnants of all those past management era, but one dominated by a rising need for real, global innovation using what we have come to call agile business practices.

Along with this need for innovation, agile has embedded within it a new management ethic—emerging from the independent undertones of the software industry—which seeks to promote networks over hierarchies, creativity over uniformity, human over mechanism, and customer need over political agenda.

How did we get here?

The Birth of Modern Business Management

As author Walter Kiechel III summarized recently in Harvard Business Review, historians generally point to one event as the symbolic birth of business management:

The meeting of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Chicago, May 1886, where Henry R. Towne, cofounder of the Yale Lock Manufacturing Company, proposed the idea of codifying a “management of works” as a way to apply engineering principles to business production.

Towne’s presentation was significant because he formalized two main points of business management:

1. Management consists of a set of practices that can be studied and improved.
2. Management should be rooted in classical economics and the efficient use of resources

Towne’s audience was almost exclusively engineers.

The Efficiency Era, 1880s—1940

The first decades of business management were dominated by aspirations of scientific exactitude. Notable companies from this period were American Sugar, American Telephone and Telegraph Company, General Electric, Allied Chemical, International Harvester, U.S. Steel, Union Carbide, Sears Roebuck, Western Union.

The efficiency era came on the heels of a “robber-baron” period in American capitalism, a climate dominated by monopoly, corruption, and exorbitant wealth from men whose last names still conjure the image of obscene wealth: Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Morgan, Mellon, Stanford, Astor.

A rising middle class began to push against these political bosses and robber barons, with progressives wanting to bring the wisdom of science and process to business.

“The One Best Way”

Frederick Taylor, in his Principles of Scientific Management (1911), advocated for applying the scientific method to business.

Taylor first outlined the difference between “numbers people” and “people people” and pointed to it as the key tension in the workplace, but he also asserted that the differences between the quantifiable and the human in relationships shouldn’t be “cartoon” adversaries, but rather, complementary.

There was a belief that all businesses could be operated in the “one best way” if scientific processes were followed, but studies also uncovered the human psychology at work as well.

Example: A study on worker productivity showed that turning the lights in a factory up or down increased worker productivity. Up or down, it did matter. It wasn’t the light level; it was the fact that management was paying attention at all as perceived by the workers. Apparently, any attention from management was good for productivity.

Later studies showed productivity would also increase most during two significant workplace occurrences:

1. When workers forged into a group, and
2. When management solicited feedback and suggestions.

This period was also marked by overt classism, where those in management believed their ascendancy to power was the ultimate answer to The Great Depression, inept government, and the changes being brought on in the world by social upheaval.

The Social Era: 1940—1980

This era of business management, following World War II and ending with the Reagan presidency, was marked by overall confidence, public support, and good feelings about the potential for business to improve life, with employment linked to social stability, health care, housing, and the social contract with labor unions.

Notable companies during this period were General Foods, Eastman Kodak, Proctor & Gamble, United Aircraft, 3M, Chrysler, Woolworth, Goodyear.

Kiechel also notes the rise of some important business management scholars during this time, saying, “Entering into these stuffy rooms [of efficiency] blew a blast of fresh, cleansing air. Call it Hurricane Drucker.”

Peter Drucker

Many consider Peter Drucker the father of modern management, with several important publications during his life, including:

• Concept of the Corporation (1946)
• The Practice of Management (1954)
• Managing for Results (1964)

Concept of the Corporation was the first book of its kind, delving into how large corporations impact society on a broad level, and Managing for Results, 18 years later, may have been the first book on business strategy.

Drucker said, management is not adaptive only—it must push objectives to affect and change environment. “Business exists to produce results,” and the work of management should be to always look for opportunities.

Drucker saw the corporation as a social network, and believed business had two functions: innovation and marketing, ideas that remain critical to agile business practices in our own time.

His strategy was a throwback to Taylorism and strict measurement, not just of worker productivity, but of everything. And it worked. By the end of the 1970s, the 200 largest firms in the U.S. accounted for over 60% of total business sales, employment and income.

Win-Win

Also influential during this time of great promise for American business was Mary Parker Follett, a social worker, management consultant and pioneer in the fields of organizational theory and organizational behavior. Her ideas of “constructive confrontation” and “win-win’ remain with us, as well. Follett coined the term “win-win” as a mechanism of integrated solutions rather than simply compromising.

Along with Lillian Gilbreth, Follett was one of two great women management gurus in the early days of classical management theory. She admonished micromanaging as “bossism,” and she is regarded by some as the mother of scientific management.

X and Y

Douglas McGregor’s Theory X/Theory Y set up a philosophical dichotomy between pure control and pure autonomy.

In simple terms, Theory X posited “people are lazy and need policing” in the workplace. Theory Y countered, “People seek meaning in work and contribute based on positive design.”

The two schools of thought still struggle against one another.

The Shareholder Value Era: 1980—current

The 1980s brought on a retreat of business from broad social involvement to market specialization and servitude to market forces. Business declined in its moral ambitions, with a decline in union power, globalization, the rise of MBA degrees, and an overall obsession with shareholder value.

The 1980s ushered in an era of deregulation in transportation—airlines, railroads, and trucking—as well as deregulations in telecommunications and finance. The importation of cars, steel, and consumer electronics rose sharply, followed by an unprecedented age of technology with the rise of personal computer hardware and software.

Junk bonds and financial takeovers became standard practice without constraints, percolating through a “greed is good” societal undertone. Management began to change, with heavier and heavier emphasis on shareholders, often to the detriment of stakeholder interests.

Corporate management’s clearest goal since the 1980s has been to create wealth for their shareholders, and rewards for managers who played by those rules grew in ownership incentives and stock options. By 1999, stock options accounted for 50% of executive pay, and the ratio of CEO pay to average worker pay went through the roof in the U.S., peaking at over 500:1 in 2000 according to research from the Institute for Policy Studies.

Value Creation

In 1985, the terms “value creation” first arose in business strategy circles to justify exorbitant corporate paychecks. CEOs, the logic went, created the value and therefore should enjoy the spoils of the business profit—as measured by the increase in company stock price.

This period also saw the rise of information technology, growing from small data management expert firms to the all-pervasive sea of data that runs through every department of modern business today.

More than just networks and servers, IT connected businesses directly to billions of customers in an easily measured and trackable way, an ability that has only increased with more social media outlets and mobile technology.

That Brings Us to the Present Day.

And that brings me to the close of Part 1 of this post.

Read Part 2, coming soon!

“What does formatted information have to do with transparency?”

With examples from CarMax and McDonalds, Marcus talks about the importance of honesty to consumers in his Ted Talk. He also covers how you can reduce negativity by directly addressing it through transparency in the information you share with your customers and consumers. Here are three examples:

1. Transparency through Honesty

McDonalds of Canada launched a forum for consumers called “Our Food. Your Questions.” Anyone can ask anything and they guarantee a response. Sometimes the response is a simple statement, other times it’s a helpful video explaining the answer. Someone inevitably asked, “What’s the secret Big Mac sauce?” And McDonalds answered. You can find out how they responded by watching the talk below.

2. Transparency through Education

In another example from McDonalds, Marcus reiterates that while the fast-food industry is often the target of harsh criticism for its high-calorie menu options, there is an opportunity to turn the negativity around. How? By educating consumers. Marcus talks about how McDonalds is among those fast-food franchises that are choosing to include the number of calories in their value meal menu listings, making it EASIER for customers to review their options and make an educated choice before buying.

3. Transparency through Trust

CarMax takes the negative stigma of the “used car salesman” out of the sales process by certifying used vehicles, offering no-haggle pricing and guaranteeing your purchase. In his presentation, Marcus tells the story about how he purchased a vehicle through CarMax because he was completely satisfied with the level of trust he felt in the sales process due to the honesty of the content.

He concludes that CarMax may even be changing the industry as a whole, by changing the way consumers think about buying cars. CarMax’s strong messaging lends to the overall brand trust with calls to action, such as this from the website: “Search, select and buy with confidence—only 1 in 3 cars we evaluate is good enough to be a CarMax car.” 

Inbound Marketing Takeaway

Your customers don’t want a brochure or your business card, they want you to fix their problems. Don’t tell them about how great your product is; tell them how you can help them. “Your customers want to know HOW you do what you do.” —Marcus Sheridan

Watch the entire TED Talk video here. It’s absolutely worth 12 minutes of your time.

In order to define a tactic as a lead generation tactic, a marketing tactic has to meet several criteria:

1. The marketing tactic should generate large numbers of qualified leads for you.
2. You should be able to use the marketing tactic to target a specific audience of people who may want to buy your products or services.
3. You should be able to measure the number of leads you get, each time you use the marketing tactic; and…
4. You should be able to measure the costs and ROI that you get from using that tactic, based on your average Cost-Per-Lead.

There are seven marketing tactics that meet these criteria. I call them the “Magnificent 7,” because they are the best marketing tactics for providing companies with large numbers of actionable leads.

The Online Lead Generation Tactics

First, there are what I call the “online lead generation advertising” tactics. These tactics involve reaching out to your customers by placing Pay-Per-Click ads on various online venues.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) involves setting up ad campaigns on Google and Bing. When your target customer searches for certain keyword-related search terms (i.e. “durable golf shoes”), your SEM ad will appear at the top of their search results.

It only takes a few minutes to set up an SEM ad campaign, where it may take months of SEO work on your web site to move it to the top of “natural search results.” Also, the results of your SEM ad campaign are easier to measure, because Google and Bing give you a set of powerful analytics tools to record how many clicks your ad received, your average Cost-Per-Click, and other data.

Social Media Advertising involves placing banner ads with special offers on Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media sites. Your banner ads are targeted to social media users on those sites who may have an interest in your products or services. For example, if you post an ad for honeymoon travel packages on Facebook, it will appear on the pages of people who mark their status as “Engaged.”

Even Twitter is now offering its own form of social media advertising. You can send out “Promoted Tweets” with special offers attached. For example, if you send out a “Promoted Tweet” offering business accounting software, it will appear in the Twitter feeds of CFOs and other business executives who may have a use for it.

Display Advertising is the oldest and most widely-used form of online advertising. Since the early years of the Internet, display ads (also called banner ads) have appeared on millions of web sites. They’ve become so familiar that most web surfers ignore them today.

But display ads are now enjoying a resurgence on mobile devices. Mobile advertising has skyrocketed over the past few years, as marketers are adding video and animation elements to the ads, and using ads to create interactive experiences on the customer’s iPhone or iPad. Some mobile ads are now receiving Click-Through Rates as high as 15%.

E-Mail Marketing is another effective online lead generation tactic (although not really an online advertising tactic). Many marketers are reluctant to try e-mail marketing, because they’re afraid their marketing e-mails will be mistaken for spam.

But studies show that e-mail marketing works, if you know how to do it right. I recommend using targeted permission-based mailing lists, where you are sending out your marketing e-mails to potential customers who have signed up to receive special offers from companies like yours.

I also recommend following the guidelines for legitimate e-mail marketing, as set forth in the 2003 CAN-SPAM Act. Using these guidelines can help to ensure that your marketing e-mails will get through to your customers, and won’t be blocked out by spam filters.

The “Tried-and-True” Tactics

The last three tactics I advocate using are the “tried-and-true” lead generation tactics. Some marketers argue that these tactics are obsolete, because they are too expensive, or because they are not “Digital Age” tactics.

But many companies are still using these three tactics, and they bring in thousands of legitimate leads for the companies that know how to use them in a practical and cost-effective way.

Direct Mail is a very effective tactic to use if you’re selling a product or service that you need to explain in detail, or if the customer needs to think seriously about whether or not to take you up on the offer. A direct mail package gives you the room you need to fully explain the features and benefits of your product or service in writing.

But direct mail is also expensive. It’s best to use it only if you’re selling a product or service that gives you a high ROI for what you spend on the campaign. Either you’re selling a high-priced item, like a car, or your customer has a Lifetime Value. Many insurance companies still use direct mail, because they know that people who take them up on the offer will pay monthly premiums that will provide them with a long-term return.

Cold Calling works best today if you’re selling B2B products to other businesses. Cold calling is different from telemarketing, in that you use a targeted calling list of potential customers. In other words, you’re not just auto-dialing people at random. You’re calling business owners and executives who might actually have a need or interest in your products or services.

Finally, Trade Shows are still a great way to collect leads, because they bring you face-to-face with customers who may be looking to buy your types of products or services. These days, people don’t attend trade shows unless they have a good reason to be there. If you pick the shows where your potential customers are most likely to be, these shows can provide a positive return for the money you spend.

Which Tactics Should You Use?

Which of these tactics should you be using? As many as will “work” for your type of business, as many as you can use successfully.

If, for example, using direct mail as a lead generation tactic (1) provides you with a significant number of actionable leads, and (2) is cost effective for your business, and provides a positive ROI, then you should definitely use direct mail. If the same principle (that is, both 1 and 2) applies to trade shows, or social media ads, or e-mail marketing, or any other lead generation tactic, you should use that tactic as well.

Ideally, you should test each of the seven tactics to find out how well they work for you, and how cost effective they are for your business. If all seven tactics “work” for you (and if you have the budget and resources), you should use all seven. If only three or four work well and are cost effective for you, you should use those three or four.

For decades your hazelnut spread has turned everyday consumers into product purists. From brownies and cookies to hot chocolate and crepes, Nutella has been the cornerstone of a delicious treat.

As you’re aware, since 2007, Sara Rosso—arguably your most passionate superfan—has hosted World Nutella Day. She love(d) your product so much that she wanted the world to dedicate a single day—February 5—to embracing it.

What she did was nothing less than astounding. On the World Nutella Day website, Rosso has gathered more than 700 recipes, tweeted and shared on Facebook the favorite sayings, stories and links of Nutella fans and, most important, encouraged everyone to try Nutella just once.

But on May 25, all her hard work will have been in vain. That’s because you inexplicably shut down her tremendous efforts, sending a cease-and-desist letter to her mailbox—the sort of action a brand might take against a brand hijacker, hacker or activist.

I’d like to explain something we’ve learned about fans like Rosso. She is a rare breed. Fans like Rosso doesn’t come along often, and for many brands they doesn’t come along at all. She generated free positive press from the likes of NBC, CNN and ABC (credit to HuffPo for sourcing the links). She even built social-media presences with more than 47,000 fans and followers.

Sara Rosso is a bona fide Nutella superfan: a consumer so passionate about Nutella that she has dedicated her precious time to furthering the brand’s cause. She’s the type of fan that brand managers dream of—creating content on behalf of the brand and sharing it with her following of other superfans and casual fans, who then pass the message along to potential fans. This superfan activity helps the brand’s message spread exponentially, at little to no cost to the brand.

I didn’t know there was a World Nutella Day. However, I now know that there isn’t going to be another one. So not only have you eliminated one of the most impressive superfan-created content-marketing activities that I have ever seen, but the story of the holiday’s cancellation is garnering national attention. You’ve turned a positive into a negative, and I haven’t the slightest idea why.

It’s funny that something like this has come up, if only because embracing the superfan is at the core of many of our social-media strategies. It’s what expanded a community of “Mother Lovers” (fans of the show How I Met Your Mother) from zero to more than 2 million in less than two years. It’s what keeps that community’s People Talking About This (PTAT) percentage above 20 percent (well above the industry standard). The ability to celebrate the passion of a brand’s fans is exactly why social media is such a powerful marketing medium for brands.

We have a category on our blog called Consumers Control Brands. That’s not meant to be taken literally, of course, but we strongly believe that in the post-advertising age, it’s the conversations between people—the content they’re sharing and creating across a variety of publishing channels—that can spell success or failure for a brand. So it’s a fool’s error to think that one can fully control one’s own brand. Your attempt to control the Nutella brand by eliminating World Nutella Day has not, in fact, controlled the message. Instead, it has spawned negative press that will be read by thousands, if not millions.

So what did you accomplish?

I don’t mean to come off as brash (though I’m sure I did). All of us here at Story are passionate about creating engaging branded content, and it’s heartbreaking to hear a story such as this one. But there’s still time. If you’d like to save your story, we’d love to help.

Sincerely,

Jon Thomas
Editor-in-Chief, Post-Advertising

P.S. Sara, if you’re reading this, bravo. Regardless of what Nutella has decided to do, your actions are utterly impressive, and I’m sorry I’ve only now noticed them. We should have been applauding you for years.

Photo Credit: allison.hare via Compfight cc

The future is bright, loud and fast! We know that the global audience is spending more time connected to digital media, hyper-communicating their likes, dislikes leading to too much information.

With media buyers now moving their budgets to new areas such as display, standard pre-roll etc, media buying is increasingly happening in an automated fashion through digital platforms (eg. exchanges, trading desks, DSPs), replacing traditional routes of RFPs, negotiations, insertion orders.

In today’s SoLoMo(social-local-mobile) context and emergence of interactive media, data is gold as it’s associated with audience, ad delivery, commerce and must be available in near real-time to enable dynamically informed buying decisions, this means for large scale operations In-memory computing, Big data analytics, Cloud can make a significant difference.

Positive digital interactions with customers, prospects can propel company growth and this brings the focus onto four major parameters such as ROMI (Return on Marketing Investment), Data compliance & Analytics, Technology advancement, Company culture (shown in the diagram ) that can influence the maturity of Programmatic buying (PB). Here is some background reading on Programmatic advertising.

Impact of programmatic buying on marketing operations and Media holding company model

Marketing operations will become more efficient and can build a strong foundation based on metrics, best practices for campaign optimization, funds (forecast, reconcile and reallocate), performance reporting. There is a good chance of better campaign ROI not only because of media performance or better targeting but also because of the price squeeze, man power reduction due to better tools. Positive experience and results from the digital media will, overtime, influence marketing operations team to increase their expectations from traditional marketing channels.

Large media holding companies have been buying-out leading digital media agencies to keep up with the trend of budgets swinging towards the digital wave. With increasing transparencies and a shorter value chain, a considerable portion of the media industry is set to become a high-volume, low-margin business model (similar to supermarkets) with pricing models moving towards ROI basis instead of activity based pricing.

Customers could end up expecting similar transparencies, ROI in traditional media channels. Also with better customer platforms (DSPs), this industry will witness something (rollback buying etc in-house) similar to what happened to the publishing industry in the 80’s when desktop publishing came, lot of publishing was rolled back in-house.

Positives and negatives of programmatic buying for marketing organizations and CIO’s

Positives

Programmatic buying increases the effectiveness, efficiencies of marketing organizations and increases the probability of bringing the right message to the right audience at the right time. Today’s CMOs and CIOs have a vital role to play as enablers by leveraging integrated customer information to make consistent customer interactions across channels a reality. Similar to MDM, CDI (Customer data Integration) projects, programmatic buying could trigger data integration across first, second, third party online and offline sources in a unified manner.

Negatives

Targeting precision, ad relevance can bring a creepy feeling to customers who think they are being followed and publishers are trying to keep premium inventory in private exchanges to protect margins and brand. Non-compliance of cookie legislation could attract a penalties (this of course is evolving globally with governments getting involved) and lawsuits, giving more problems for the CIOs and their legal colleagues which could in turn slowdown data integration projects.

In case you are interested to have an overview of the Programmatic buying landscape , here it is:

Functionality and trend Benefits Supply Side Platform (SSP) – enables publishers

• Options across proprietary optimization algorithms (Admel) vs manual or own optimization technology (ApNexus)-
• Increasing breadth across ad format acceptance( from basic banner formats to mobile)-
• New features such as private exchange, variable price floor controls, anonymous participation, advertiser-level bid reporting, audience data management

• Better packaging, positioning of media to buyers-
• Increased monetization, operational efficiencies, multi-channel optimization-
• Gives better control and protection to publishers worried about premium inventory or brand association with certain advertisers.

Ad exchanges – facilitates bidded buying/selling connecting multiple ad networks

• Self-service, backend platforms enables log-in, set-up, manage campaigns, run analytics and optimize without even talking to a sales person-
• Verification systems validate and stop an ad loading if content is not as per advertisers preference( avoid violent, competitor content etc)-
• Some allow buyers, sellers to participate, some allow only ad networks-
• Advertisers have visibility on the site, ad unit and publishers have visibility on which advertisers are buying their inventory and what they are willing to pay-
• Some exchanges allow floor price settings, offering a risk free proposition for publishers ( ad networks don’t tend to offer this)

• Encourages competition and drives up ad space price per impression, as each impression is valued-
• Ad exchanges are different from ad networks that often sell at a lower eCPM to close high volume sales or may not be in a position to quantitatively compare different ad buy offers.-
• Visibility for publishers help them control what advertisers and creative’s they want to encourage on their sites.-
• Few intermediaries in the value chain offer ad budget savings

Demand Side Platform (DSP) – enables buyers

• Advancements in expertise across algorithmic optimization, knowledge of audience management, breadth of media access, unified campaign tracking and reporting-
• Leading vendors have more than 50% of the impression volume RTB enabled.

• Buyers prefer a single platform that is operationally efficient to access, manage and report inventory supply and campaigns across display, mobile and video

Real-time bidding (RTB) – enables real-time selling/buying one ad impression at a time

• 2009 onwards, ad exchanges and SSP’s announced RTB support bringing a surge in activity from DSP’s, ad networks, agency trading desks and other media intermediaries.-
• The EU cookie directive which came into effect in May 2011 can bring some challenges to data collection, usage and in turn affect RTB growth.

• RTB’s have cut inefficiencies in the media buying process, offers de-duplicated reach and can cap the number of impressions that audiences would see in a particular campaign-
• RTB is an efficient way to buy impressions in real time, having an engine that calculates real time prices can really transform results for advertisers.

Data management platform (DMP) – the audience intelligence engine

• DMP creates a single view of the user by aggregating data across first, second, third party online and offline sources in a unified manner, including segmenting and tagging.-
• Leading organizations are building rich user information as a differentiator in an increasingly crowded online advertising area

• Interactive marketers now have an opportunity to leverage DMPs and run audience based marketing campaigns more effectively than ever before, however, for DMP initiatives, the time and effort required to pull various departments together, such as IT, legal, CRM cannot be underestimated.

Image by Bob Spore

We are not “businessmen,” per se. We are in the creative department, which means that we’re a little mad, perhaps, and that our thought process is…maybe a bit skewed. What I’m trying to say is that maybe we have the complete wrong spin on this. (Okay…enough with the editorial “we.” It’s giving me a headache). Maybe the accidental dip into the business section should be excused as one of those vagaries of life which is better swept under the carpet and completely ignored.

We were vastly amused (and by amused, I mean shocked to the point where we spat our morning coffee all down the front of our madras slacks) while reading an article (republished from Bloomberg) in the Akron Beacon Journal with the title, “Time Warner Cable to Squeeze More Profit From Fewer Users.“

The article itself didn’t hold any surprises. It’s something we’ve all come to expect in these leaner times; companies charging a bit more for services to make up for a shrinking customer base. Nothing shocking here, just something that makes you shake your head in weary resignation.

No, the rapid eye blinks of disbelief came with the line: “Time Warner Cable is also less worried about losing subscribers, so long as it squeezes more profit out of the ones who are left.” This translates to: “Heads up, die-hards…you’re about to get soaked!“

“The idea is to boost average revenue per user, rather than trying to attract more customers,” said Chief Operating Officer Rob Marcus. Which means (as far as I can ascertain) that they will be promoting company growth by…not…growing…apparently. Novel concept.

And this is even with a sales rise of 6.6%, plus a share rise of $1.41 (better than the projected $1.37), up to 15% from last year, using the obviously antiquated method of attempting to attract new customers with, oh…I don’t know…something called sales incentives.

But hey…why do that when you can treat your existing customers as if they’re a captive audience?

Could you see if we tried that? “You want a 50-word news release? No problem. That’s part of our basic package. You will need to sign this 2-year contract, realizing that most of the client contract will go through someone in terra Del Fuego, named after either ‘Dave’ or ‘Mary’ from the local ‘English as a Second Language’ Center, and if you want a face-to-face meeting with an AE, it’ll be at our convenience and will happen anytime within an 8-hour window. That’ll be $8,000. And correct spelling is not bundled with that.”

TWC noted a “Muted reaction.”

Gee, I wonder why. You ever wonder what kind of reaction you’ll get once the disbelief wears off?

Oh, and Time Warner just announced that they’ve hired former AOL CFO Arthur Minson as their new CFO, with a base salary of $900,000. That’s base salary, boys and girls.

But, perhaps my feelings about this are all “much ado about nothing.” I admit that I am not a businessman, preferring the madness prevalent in the art side over that of the business side. This type of decision might be considered de rigeur by the business world and I don’t realize because I’m just not business savvy enough.

It’s like when my friend Seanachai laughed at my “Ohio-based bucolic naivete” when I mentioned how hard it was to believe the blood-thirstyness of the characters in ‘Game of Thrones’ and he began to lecture me on the similarities between that and the English ‘War of the Roses.’ At least I think that’s what he said. I began to nod off at some point.

If this is true, you have to admit that at least it’s a gutsy move to actually say out loud that your new business profile is to eschew new income and just stick it to your existing, loyal customers.

But this is just my opinion…your mileage may vary.

It’s the color, logo design, typographic finesse and overall graphic appeal that make a beer stand out. When was the last time you chose a boring bottle over a label with true pizzazz when snagging a strange new beer from the supermarket shelf? I didn’t think so.

That being said, below are eight of the most aesthetically appealing craft beer brands on the market today. Lackluster brands – take a hint.

Rogue

Rogue’s simple but vivid use of color is highly effective and complements the clean, linear figures on each of their beer labels. Eccentric character illustrations and dichromatic color palettes highlight this brewery’s bottled beverages from afar.

The bright hues present on their beer labels tend to coincide with the name and variety of the respective brew. Experimental libations are often presented with equally unconventional designs, spouting Rogue’s bold brand personality.

What Rogue does best: Simple, high-contrast color schemes with big, clean graphic charm.

Brooklyn

New York City’s Brooklyn Brewery has an ace in the hole with their brilliant bottling. Legendary graphic designer Milton Glaser is the mind behind Brooklyn’s logo and subsequent package designs. If you’re unfamiliar, he’s the same guy who crafted the I Love NY campaign for the Big Apple in the late 1970s.

These labels are adorned with glistening finishes and eye-catching patterns. Each design is molded around the whimsical, rounded form of the signature Brooklyn “B” and uses an array of striking color palettes to make the bottles pop off the shelf.

What Brooklyn Brewery does best: Sleek use of line and form, complementary color palettes and shiny label finishes.

Great Divide

With their bold, text-heavy beer labels, Great Divide makes fine use of typographic talent to present each of their concoctions. Capitalized lettering is well-placed to fill negative space and supplement the small, animated silhouettes underneath.

For a brewery that makes a point out of their high-ABV productions, they do well at making a statement through their labels. Following Great Divide’s widespread success and subsequent expansion, a 2008 redesign brought us the current line of bottle art, now worthy of the award-winning beer that it holds.

What Great Divide does best: Large, audacious text-centered design that fits right in with the company’s high-gravity brewing philosophies.

Sierra Nevada

Sierra Nevada’s beers exemplify the mountainous environ that spawned them. The perennial lineup sports picturesque little landscapes nestled between the rustic logo and the brew’s designation. Others utilize a similar illustrative approach to work in fanciful characters and exotic creatures to the label.

They’re tight, whimsical and almost palpable in their characteristics. Each beer gets its own look that really gives the drinker-to-be an idea of what he or she is about to stick his or her face into.

What Sierra Nevada does best: Boasting the product’s rich origins to beautify their beers’ labels.

Ommegang

Ommegang is a Cooperstown, NY-based brewery specializing in Belgian ales. Their bottle designs tend to go for expressive old-timey scenes, each set in silhouette fashion (much like Great Divide’s aesthetic).

Every aspect of the Ommegang designs showcase a classy, vintage look; golds and silvers abound, and even the brewery’s decorative lion logo is reminiscent of an age-old European coat of arms. The neatly ordained graphic elements take precedence here, making these bottles fashionable from afar.

What Ommegang does best: Crafting an ornate, refined look for their brewery’s special old-world focus.

Southern Tier

Loud, eccentric, sometimes even flamboyant: Southern Tier’s robust brand personality seeps through in their design. Their beer labeling is confident and down to earth, often giving people a real feel for what they’re going to be drinking. The lush label graphics on their seasonal and specialty beers do an unparalleled job of painting a delicious picture for consumers (such as the Pumking, Jahva, Choklat and Crème Brulee).

These designs are looser than some of the aforementioned, but the high contrast colors and popping fonts pull each bottle into an appealing and cohesive presentation.

What Southern Tier does best: Vibrant, rough-around-the-edges design that uses appetizing images to turn on first-time consumers.

21^st Amendment

The guys over at 21^st Amendment do things a little differently. Their brews are released exclusively in cans (and on draught), so the looks are inherently much different. They stray far from the conventionally bland reds and blues we see on so many beer cans, instead portraying historical figures in dramatic cartoon form.

These designs speak to our fond familiarity with (but often embellished deviation from) well-known American history. It’s simultaneously a smart marketing move and attractive visual theme.

What 21^st Amendment does best: Cleverly recreating characters we can identify with and adopting a sassy spin on well-known events in their designs.

Flying Dog

Here’s a more chaotic approach to package design – but chaos isn’t always a bad thing. Like other breweries, Flying Dog still exhibits their brand’s logo (on the neck of each bottle), but the main label is encompassed by enthralling sketches from the strange and wonderful illustrator Ralph Steadman.

A former collaborator of crazed author and self-coined Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson (a figure tied to the foundations of the brewery), Steadman creates his inked aberrations for each of Flying Dog’s varieties. Raw, raunchy and sometimes disturbing, the dog-derived creatures are seamlessly melded with spattered beer titles. This brewery is the quintessential example of well-branded graphic design that embodies the same devil-may-care attitude that they’re known for.

What Flying Dog does best: Expressive character illustrations that epitomize their brand’s punchy personality.

Whether you’re a beer brand or not, these well-designed drink receptacles reveal some highly effective ways to market a product and convey a brand’s personality. Creating a relevant and attractive logo for your brand’s product or service is the most straightforward way to communicate with consumers. Successfully doing so will make you stand out from the competition – much like an enticing beer bottle on a shelf.

1. Author Central
This is the main page for authors in which Amazon allows you to provide your profile, add videos, link to your blog, a build a list of your favorite books. This powerful tool is like having an entire webpage devoted to you and your books. Here you will also be able to track your book sales and trends. Using Author Central in conjunction with you blog will create a very powerful way to market yourself and your books.

2. Affiliate Program
This is an easy way to monetize your website. You provide a link on your website back to your book on Amazon’s website. If they buy your book through this link, you collect a small commission from Amazon. This commission also applies to any Amazon product that you link to from your website.

3. Listmania!
With Listmania you create lists of books relevant to a particular topic. This is a great way for you to connect with readers and buyers. This is especially a good way to show your readers, and those interested in your genre, that you are a source of information that can help them in their search for information about a particular topic. You don’t need to have purchased these items from Amazon. And, you can include your book within your lists. But don’t overdue it. Only include books that you truly believe will help those reading your lists.

4. Search-Inside-The-Book
You can dramatically improve your book sales by using this feature. It allows buyers to read parts of your book, as well as search through your book by typing in a search term. The reader can see your table of contents, index, foreword, introduction, and parts of different chapters. By allowing this feature, a buyer can feel more comfortable when choosing to buy your book over another.

5. Book Tags
Start tagging your books with appropriate keywords. You can easily come up with helpful tags if you put yourself into the shoes of your readers. What tags, or keywords, would a person searching for a book like yours be thinking of? You can easily tag your book by visiting your books product page. You should also ask others to also tag your book.

6. “So You’d Like To…” Guides
With this tool you build a guide around a particular topic that is helpful to Amazon shoppers. By doing this you can position yourself as an expert in a particular subject. Your guide will help shoppers find books, or items, and give them information relevant to a specific topic. You can easily build a guide around the topic that your book covers.

7. Connect Your Blog Feed
As an author, it is essential that you have a blog. This is where you can discuss your books, and anything related to them and your particular topic. You simply type in your blog’s feed, also known as an RSS. Amazon will display a short portion of your most recent blog postings.

WOM is the leading way customers find out about start-ups and small businesses, study after study has shown. Even search is now driven by Word of Mouth. (Google and other search engines optimize for user reviews, a form of WOM.)

Yet most companies aren’t fully harnessing the power of Word of Mouth.

Here are five ways to turn Word of Mouth into leads and sales now.

Identify WOM Champions or “Advocates.”
Ask your customers the “Ultimate Question” for loyalty: “On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend our company or product to your friends?” Customers who respond 9 or 10 are Advocates. A simple survey can do the trick.

Encourage Advocates to rate and review your products.Seventy percent of consumers trust online reviews, Nielsen says. And 67% of consumers don’t buy after reading only one to three negative reviews, according to Lightspeed Research. Make it easy for Advocates to create and post online reviews by giving them online tools. Here’s an example of online reviews tool Webroot, a security software company, give to its Advocates.

Amplify Advocates.
Enable Advocates to rave about you on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and elsewhere by including social sharing widgets in content creation forms.

Monetize Advocates.
Give Advocates promotional offers they can share with their friends and colleague. Here’s a hint: give Advocates special offers to share instead of the same offers you give everyone.

Generate referral leads.
Make it easy for Advocates to generate referral leads and referral traffic to your website and landing pages by including links in the content and offers they share with their friends and colleagues.

Like any marketing programs, WOM marketing takes time and effort. But compared to other marketing approaches, WOM marketing is inexpensive and effective. So get started now!

1. Integrate online and offline efforts

Make sure that you integrate your marketing promotion online and offline efforts. This means that the messaging and offers are consistent across your print, broadcast, website and social media channels during your marketing promotion (and ideally always).

2. Maintain consistency for maximum results

Be mindful so that you use the same branding across channels. This means having the same recognizable imagery. You also need to make sure that there’s a consistent “voice.” The goal here is to make your marketing promotion efforts recognizable and have people easily associate the marketing promotion with your brand.

3. Put your marketing promotion on steroids: make it a total company effort

There are a variety of ways to get the whole company involved in your summer marketing promotion that will help your company hit a homer. Your employees are one of your most valuable resources, so use them.

• Encourage employees to like and share social posts.

Especially on Facebook, where EdgeRank determines the visibility of your posts. Employee engagement can help get your posts the initial engagement needed to get your content viewed. The more engagement, the more eyeballs.

• Get your employees excited about the summer promotion.

When everyone’s on board to make it happen, it’s more fun and it’s more likely to get done. Everyone should understand what’s going on, not only so that you can benefit from the insights of cross-functional teams, but also so that anyone in your company can effectively communicate the offering during your marketing promotion.

4. Reward loyal customers

Everyone likes to feel loved and appreciated. Your brand advocates are a powerful resource in today’s digital and shareable age. You need them. It only benefits you to reward them. A marketing promotion is one way to make your happy customers happy. Make them even happier by giving them something extra for their loyalty. Not only does this generate goodwill, but it will also help generate more word-of-mouth buzz and will keep your best customers returning for more. Remember, it’s always easier to keep a customer than get a new one. How can you reward your loyal customers?

• Give them sneak peaks

Sneak peaks are kind of like secrets. People like the feeling of knowing that they’re among the first to know about something. It makes them feel important.

• Give them exclusive discounts and offers

Everybody loves a discount or a special offer as a reward for their dedication to a brand. It just plain works.

• Let them go at it first

If you are having some kind of sale or marketing promotion in which there is limited availability, giving your loyal customers the first crack at it is a great way to get them excited. They will be grateful for the opportunity. Others who find out about their chance to get in first will see the benefits of patronage.

• Showcase them

Loyal customers love to see themselves showcased on a brand’s blog, in the newsletter, or on social channels. It makes them feel special, they feel important, and they get a little slice of momentary fame on some level. It’s super easy to do, and it makes people feel loved. It also provides “social proof” for other potential customers and for them to identify with the people showcased. Social proof will help to propel your marketing promotion forward.

5. Give brand advocates a platform

If you already have people that are super excited about your company, product, service, brand, employees, or anything relevant to the company, you need to do more than just let them talk. Give them a microphone. When other people speak on behalf of your brand, it’s powerful word-of-mouth marketing for you.

• Make it super easy

People are more likely to do things that don’t require time and effort. Make it as easy as possible for customers to share their good experiences. Add “tweet this” buttons to images and copy so that people can promote your offering with the click of a button. One example of a company that does an excellent job with this is HootSuite. Within their mobile app, there is a feature called “Share the love.” When you click on it, it sets up a tweet on your phone with a witty little comment about why you love HootSuite with a custom hashtag. And you can do it again and again and get different results. This also means putting social sharing buttons on your online landing pages, microsites, websites, etc.

• Give customers multiple opportunities to give feedback, both online and offline

The more chances you give people to give feedback, the more likely you are to get it from them.

6. Set clear goals

Know exactly what you hope to accomplish with your marketing promotion and make sure every effort that goes into the project does something to affect the bottom line. You’ve got limited resources. Time and money go into everything you do, so only do what will have an affect on the bottom line. Think of your goals as the “thesis” of your promotion and make sure everything you write from then on out supports your thesis.

• Make your goals attainable
• Make your goals something that can be measured
• Keep them posted so everyone knows what they’re going after

7. Measure, measure, measure

Like I said, you’ve got limited resources. Measuring your efforts will help you determine what’s working and what’s not working during your marketing promotion, so you can quickly stop anything that isn’t helping you accomplish your goals. Measure early and measure often. Not only is this important for efficiency and effectiveness, but it also gives you the opportunity to make adjustments before you get too far down the road.

• Determine social post timing and frequency
• Do A/B testing on landing pages when possible
• Determine which social networks drive the most referral traffic
• Determine what keywords are driving traffic to your website
• Determine what times are best for your particular audience for email open rates
• Determine what kinds of headlines get the most clicks
• Determine what content is most popular

8. Adjust accordingly

What good are the measurements if you don’t do anything with them?

• Post at optimal times at the right frequency – read this article from Hubspot for more information about how to find the sweet spot for your brand
• Shift to different kinds of content if it’s not getting any traffic
• Figure out how to write more compelling headlines if you’re not getting any click throughs
  • Try reading Copyblogger’s article “How to Write Magnetic Headlines” or “Content Strategy: 9 Secrets for Writing Blog Titles” from Content Marketing Institute

9. Keep records

If you’re going to go to all of this effort to figure out what works and what doesn’t work, make sure to document the processes and what works. Your time is valuable, and the more you keep track of what works, the less time you spend doing things that don’t work. It prevents you from reinventing the wheel every time and provides a guide for your next marketing promotion.

What is your summer promotion this year?

It is a very open environment which promotes interaction and not isolation.

Some ways our company tries to be human:

• The same hold true for the way we conduct marketing. Trade show marketing has been a part of our business for the past 15 years. It is all about people meeting people.
• We only have an automated phone system after normal business hours. During business hours, we answer calls and make sure people are directed to a person and not an answer machine.
• Parking next to the building. People can access our facilities without having to take too many steps.

These same principles are being applied online:

• Continuous improvement to make our corporate website cleaner and more user-friendly
• Connecting with people on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and GooglePlus
• Simpler Reporting
• Timely return on emails and phone calls

The other part of being human is making sure that you interact with your peers and take an interest in them. These people are your teammates and all of you need to act as a strong, supportive unit. I can’t stress enough how important this is with respect to the company being a successful one. Make sure people work in an environment that they can talk about their experiences with clients. It helps keep everyone in the loop.

Remember – Even with all the channels being hurled at us, it still takes people to make transactions. People have to need or want your services. With that said, make sure to keep your marketing practices always focused on people and you will see far more success than if you are focused only on technology.

Disruption is anything that interferes with (or disrupts) the way that things are traditionally done. According to Miriam-Webster, disruption means “to interrupt the normal course or unity of”

To provide some real-life examples of “disruption” in action, Uber is currently disrupting the transportation category offering personal luxury transportation in place of a basic taxi ride.

In the hospitality arena, Airbnb is offering travelers a new way to book lodging. You can “rent” a room, an apartment, a chateau, even a treehouse. And all at a much more reasonable rate than most standard hotels.

Even Facebook was “disruptive” when it launched – creating a new way of interacting with your friends and family.

I believe that we need some disruption in the licensing and promotions world.

That’s why I launched Jenerosity Marketing.

It can’t just be about creating a branded program any longer. It has to be about creating a program and making sure from the beginning that consumers are engaged.

When you are planning your licensing strategy, are you including a plan for communicating it to your fans?

Will you have a Facebook presence? Pinterest boards? How will you incorporate Instagram?

When developing a third-party promotion, are you looking at how you can maximize your digital and social media assets on both sides of the partnership?

If you answered yes to the above questions, then you are the disruptor, getting ahead of the curve and changing with the times as we advance even further into digital marketing.

If you answered no, I would suggest that you start to think about where you are going to be in 2, 3, 5 years when consumers are no longer watching TV commercials, shopping in brick and mortar stores and everything is essentially online. Will you be ready to communicate with your consumers in a meaningful way? How will you promote your licensed product line or promotion?

Let us know what you are doing to stay ahead of the “disruption” curve in the Comments below.

No matter what size, or type, or whether you are offering a product or a service this “road map” will prove to be invaluable when decisions need to be made. You have a great product or service and you are anxious for everyone to know about it and you want to just get out there and start selling. STOP. Do you have a plan? Do you know when you get there? It always amazes me how many start up companies and entrepreneurs operate without a marketing plan.

In the not so recent past many businesses, start ups, retailers and b2b companies felt that any marketing initiatives were well beyond their reach. To have any impact on their audience, a lot of dollars were needed. Enter Social Media, and businesses everywhere are getting into the “marketing” of their businesses. Which is absolutely wonderful! In today’s business landscape, businesses are all embarking on the Social Media… some with little or no understanding of the true time cost of doing it properly. But I digress,that’s another blog for another time.

Jumping on the band wagon without a clear definition of your value proposition and your unique selling point is dangerous. Equally dangerous is not defining your businesses brand voice, brand tone and brand personality. This is where a marketing plan comes in. The purpose of a marketing plan is to map out the direction of where you need to be… and define the measurement of success for your business… it is essentially this “destination point” which will prove to be invaluable when decisions need to be made.

In this “road map” you need to determine your strategy, identify your priorities and then build out your tactics from there. Start by identifying who your target market is. Define as much as you can: age, sex, profession or career, income level, level of educational attainment and geographic location…. and go farther. Define your target markets likes and dislikes, habits, hobbies. This is the age of niche marketing!

Clearly define your business and set reasonable quantifiable objectives. It’s important to be honest. Don’t set yourself up for failure…be aware of the potential hazards before you start…and when detours happen along the way, your marketing plan will provide you with a solid base to switch gears and turn to an alternative road to get you where you are going… to success!

Room chants back: Hi Anne.

Now that I got that confession out of the way, let’s admit it: Lead nurturing is not easy. Anyone who says it is isn’t telling the truth. Nurturing practices vary by company, industry, and buyer persona. You’ve seen the topic in countless blog posts, webinars, white papers – you name it. So, how do companies nurture leads successfully?

That’s where agencies come in. I know, I know, you’re probably striking up images of a questionable salesman trying to sell an elusive product or service. But not all agencies are created equal. Not to mention, most companies are afraid to even admit they might need an agency for lead nurturing. But numbers don’t lie. In a recent blog post from Marketo they back up the notion of using an agency, pointing out how agencies significantly shorten the time for success and improve overall results.

In light of industry shy-ness towards agencies, we at Marketstar are starting an agency coping group called “Agencies Anonymous.” Our goal is to provide you with steps to help you recover (and uncover) a strategy for lead nurturing that actually works and get over the reluctance of using an agency for lead nurturing. We’ve gleaned insight from the famous 12-Step program and have adopted the following 6-Step Program to coping with your lead nurturing failures.

Step 1: The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem.

Lead nurturing and management isn’t only a marketing automation tool that you have implemented. Marketing Leadership Council says a tool is only 20% of a successful lead nurturing plan. To be truly successful, companies must have a seamless integration between people, processes, and the tool itself. Do you have the right people? What about your processes and proven methods?

Step 2: Experiences beyond our own can restore you to sanity.

Agencies do exactly this. We put your lead nurturing into our experts hands and get results faster and cheaper than the expensive time it takes for you to learn lead nurturing and hire an internal team to manage it. Agencies are quickly becoming experts at lead nurturing, so let us help you optimize. Sanity restored.

Step 3: An agency’s care of your lead nurturing might not be such a bad idea.

Like I said earlier, lead nurturing is not easy, and it’s OK to admit that. Many agencies have invested the time to learn marketing automation and make it sing for plenty of clients. The agency you choose should instill a sense of sanity to your marketing efforts. There are plenty of maddening mistakes that come with learning a new process. We have already conquered spots where most beginners stumble and have experience navigating the tricky process of passing off leads between marketing and sales.

Step 4: Take a brutally honest inventory of your current nurturing plan.

Get out a pen and a piece of paper, shut your office door, and ask yourself these questions: How many sales-ready leads are you producing? What’s your sales team doing with them? Can you trace bottom line right back to your nurturing? What do you have to show your boss?

Step 5: Admit potential for growth to yourself, your team, and your superiors.

It’s okay to learn from the past. This is part of the buy-in process for your superiors. If you can prove an outsourced lead nurturing solution will yield more results than throwing leads into a database black hole, you’ll be eventually applauded for your marketing team tangibly contributing to the bottom line. Agencies are there to fill in the gaps of your team, without replacing it. A graphics and printing agency is better at making a billboard, that’s why the task generally gets outsourced to them.

Step 6: We’re finally ready to fix our mistakes and move forward.

Here’s where you pick your agency. With buy-in, and confidence that the agency you pick will provide results, you’re ready to graduate. Congratulations. We hope you find success and prosperity in your agency’s outsourced lead nurturing team.

Selecting an agency.

Now that you have the 6 steps to overcoming your fear of lead nurturing and are ready to partner with an agency, it’s time to pick the right one. Here are 5 qualities or features your agency must have:

• Reputable, extensive client list
• Marketing automation certification – even better if they’re a partner to the marketing automation platform you use
• Proven results on projects
• Transparent reporting capabilities
• Stellar team of marketing strategist, tool administrators, writers, programmers, and designers

Good luck in your search and may you have lead nurturing success in the future!

Apply now to the Marketo Agency Program.

To learn more about Marketo’s agency offerings, register for our upcoming webinar with Peter O’Neill of Forrester to learn more about your agency can create new opportunities. Download the white paper Technology and the Evolution of the Marketing Agency.

So I was heating up a burrito for lunch just yesterday and reading the package before I threw it away… here’s what I saw.

The brand of the burrito is Evol and in case you’re wondering, I’ve tried a lot of store-bought frozen burrito brands and Evol is by far the best if you’re into organic and healthy foods. But that’s beside the point. And no, I don’t work for Evol. I just like their burritos.

I was caught off guard by the wording on the label because I’ve never had a food label recognize what I was doing at that point in time. I was killing time waiting for my burrito to cook and the fact that my burrito wrapper was smart enough to realize that made me want to investigate what else the wrapper had to say. Maybe it knew my future too :)

Marketing Trend or Technique?

So what’s the big deal? It’s just some clever text on a burrito wrapper.

Seeing this type of personal marketing brought to mind a larger trend towards a lighter type of marketing that I’ve noticed in recent years. You’ve probably seen it too on websites, TV, food packaging, and all different types of marketing. If the marketing experts have come up with a name for this technique, I just did some searching and can’t find it. It’s possible that it is just a trend in marketing more than an actual technique.

Let me take a shot at defining it and  challenge you to think about how you can use this type of marketing in your business…

For the purposes of this discussion, let’s call it Personal Marketing. I consider it “personal” because this type of marketing usually acknowledges the consumer first and focuses on them rather than on the product or service being marketed. In the case of the burrito packaging, it was speaking directly to me and using the personal pronoun YOU. As I mentioned, it even acknowledged my exact current state (waiting for the burrito to cook).

A company doesn’t always have to focus on the consumer to make their marketing more personal. Another recent example of Personal Marketing I’ve seen on TV is companies criticizing themselves and being honest about mistakes. I assume they are trying to show themselves as imperfect, willing to change, and accountable – not something big companies often do. This takes a lot of “marketing guts” and goes a long way for personalizing the company to consumers. Some examples of this are the BP apology and recovery commercials related to the gulf oil spill or Dominos Pizza making fun of itself (see video below)

The opposite of Personal Marketing is traditional marketing and its the standard way big companies have marketed themselves for a few decades. If the Evol marketing team wanted to use traditional marketing on their burrito wrapper, they probably would have just talked about what’s in their burritos and why they are great. I imagine the paragraph would have started with “Our burritos…” and focused on the product and not the customer.

The major difference between personal marketing and traditional marketing is the focus on building a relationship between company and consumer rather than just selling a product or marketing a brand. In the past, this type of relationship building may have seemed unprofessional to large companies but now they are realizing that it is crucial in creating a brand that is admired and talked about.

Lighten Up Your Marketing

How can you use personal marketing and connect with your customers more while marketing your business or products? Here are a few ideas…

• Add a little humor in your marketing. Humor always personalizes you and engages your customers.
• Be honest to your customer base about the mistakes you’ve made and make them right
• Start viewing your customers as people and not numbers that help you reach your bottom line financial goals.
• If you are a small business, be honest about it and don’t try to create the facade of a large company. Since so many markets are dominated by large companies, it is often refreshing for people to see a small business that is ok being small.

What Do You Think?

Have you seen this trend in marketing? What are some examples you can think of?

Do you think it’s a just a marketing fad or an actual marketing technique?

The benefit brands have from leveraging advocates ties back to the fact that people trust conversations they have with each other, over the ones they are having with the brand. And because people trust other people, these word-of-mouth recommendations drive inquiries.

Gartner also reports on why people share and are motivated to share on social channels. The report cites a study that appeared in the Harvard Business Review in the sixties that analyzed why people talk about their favorite brands. Although the study was conducted offline in the pre-Internet era, the results still hold true today. The study found that people share because:

1. The brand experience is so enjoyable that they want to tell their friends.
2. It shows that they are “cool” and “in the know” about a certain brand.
3. They have an innate desire to help other people.
4. The brand’s content or campaign is funny and entertaining.

Advocacy marketing is a hot topic in the marketing space right now. It’s no secret that word-of-mouth is powerful. When making any decision that requires significant consideration, people always consult friends and family for recommendations, suggestions, and advice. Social media has provided a new medium for word-of-mouth and brands are trying to quickly adapt. What’s more – technology now provides the ability for brands to leverage and empower advocates at a scale like never before.

For more details, Gartner clients should download the full report.

The latest push forward has centered largely on digital marketing: websites, email marketing, social media marketing, multimedia marketing and mobile marketing –and the underlying data and analytics aspects that make it “go” —to name just a few options available to pros today.

As companies shift their budgets to include the latest technologies, the same questions about priorities keep coming up again and again: Has digital marketing completely eclipsed traditional marketing? Do classic strategies matter anymore?

The buzz around today’s new platforms could lead you to believe that yes, digital marketing does, in fact, require your immediate –and complete –attention. But savvy marketers know there’s no need to jettison established channels in favor of every new opportunity that comes along. One, if not the main truism, remains: It’s always about customer engagement, and making those relationships more interactive.

Here’s why traditional marketing still matters . . . and how you can combine marketing channels to create effective campaigns:

• Different audiences exist on different channels. Few companies can say for certain that their entire audience has “gone digital.” So why give up on those who connect with you elsewhere? For all the people glued to their smartphones, there are still plenty glued to their television sets.By balancing your efforts and your marketing spend, you stay connected with customers and potential customers everywhere.
• Different techniques engage your audience in different ways. There’s a difference in the way a television campaign engages your audience versus how a social media campaign calls them to action. Audiences who view your messages on their smartphones or tablets have a different experience than ones who catch your ad in the paper.By combining passive (view and connect) and interactive (respond and connect) strategies, you stand a better chance of engaging a broader audience overall.
• Integration benefits both sides of the marketing spectrum. The brand messaging strength of a traditional ad campaign can add punch to your social media messages. On the other hand, uploading your best (most meaningful, most funny, etc.) ads to YouTube gives your fans a chance to share what it means to them. The opportunity to interact with you on Twitter or Facebook can keep the impact of a television spot going long after its 30 seconds have passed. Including a QR code in your print campaigns ensures that your website gets plugged in to your audience’s smartphones. The options are truly endless!

Ultimately, a balance between the old and new makes for the most comprehensive—and successful—approach. If you can use the best aspects of your digital campaigns to add spice to your traditional campaigns, and the strongest messages of your traditional campaigns to add resonance to your digital efforts, you’ve gone further than any single channel, or type of channel, could possibly go.

And that sounds exactly like what every smart marketer wants to achieve: creating compelling, lasting and mutually-rewarding customer relationships.

There’s a Way to Limit COLD CALLS!?

I joked about it earlier but yes, it’s true: sales people don’t like cold calling. Those that don’t mind it are my heroes, because I know sales people who 10 years into their career still hate cold calling. One of the beauties of inbound marketing is, when done properly, it limits the amount of traditional cold calls and changes the nature of a cold call.

Today’s consumers are using the internet more than ever to find solutions to their problems. They are able to gather tons of information on products/services by accessing web-based content, more specifically my company’s content. After viewing and downloading our free content, consumers have a better understanding of who we are and what we do. This gives me an edge with prospects that have already familiarized themselves with the brand I represent- an edge that is especially useful when making initiate contact.

Best of all, because our marketing analytics software gives me an opportunity to see exactly where they’ve been on our site, I feel a familiarity with the consumer as well. I can better understand what their problem may be, what pain points they have, or what solutions they are looking for based of what they’ve viewed. This two-way street of familiarity essentially eliminates the idea of a traditional cold call and makes communication much easier.

Turning Sales People from Pushers to Teachers and Consultants.

Traditionally, consumers think of sales people as those awful guys on the used car lot. Sales people are just there to push their product and don’t care about the consumer’s needs. Inbound marketing changes all that; it recognizes the consumer is now in control. As a site visitor turns into a lead, I am not here to push anything onto them.

Using the information gathered from the content the consumer viewed, I am able to decipher what problems they may have so that I can help teach and consult with them about their needs and our potential solutions through content, online engagement, and direct conversation. In other words, I can add real value.

I can tailor my customer service to fit the wants and needs of each lead, building stronger relationships. The content I use while teaching and consulting turns me into a trusted advisor. I am no longer the guy at the used car lot. Consumers are more likely to come back to me as return customers because of this relationship.

More Money in our Pockets

If asked what drives them, most sales people would say money. Fair enough. Inbound marketing best practices allow me to offer more value and a better experience to my prospects and customers.

If I do this, it’s a sure bet I’ll walk away with more money in my pocket when all is said and done.

Analytics is the Key

By using data to analyze the sales cycles of previous and current consumers, I can better understand what’s needed to create a sale.

I gather information during the entire sales cycle. By averaging data from all sales made, I can understand that it takes X site visits, Y clicks, and Z pieces of content before a visitor is ready to buy. Why don’t you go ask McDonalds how many commercials it took before you went and purchased their latest McWhatever? This data is incredibly valuable in shortening the sales cycle timeline.

Because all the information can be easily tracked and averaged, I know which visitors are ready to consider purchasing; this kind of information saves a lot of time chasing down site visitors who aren’t ready to purchase. It also shortens the sales cycle. Why do I care? A shortened sales cycle timeline means more sales over a given period of time, which means more money in my pocket.

Conclusion

Inbound Marketing is a salesperson’s dream; it helps limit those pesky cold calls that we all dislike so much. It moves us from pushers of products and services and turns us into teachers and consultants to prospects and clients. And as long as you are willing to properly review the data analytics, it shortens the sales cycle timeline, allowing for more conversions and more success.

I dare you to find a salesperson who would complain about any of the three benefits I just listed. I know my teammates couldn’t.

The idea of content calendars is a thorny one for many. I’m no editor!, they say. But if you create anything using text, or pictures (moving or static), the truth is you absolutely are.

But help is very much at hand. There are some frankly incredible resources out there to help. You only need to head over to Joe Pulizzi‘s fantastic Content Marketing Institute (CMI) to get everything you need to create a dynamic, relevant and phenomenally effective content calendar and strategy. This is the gateway to an effective inbound marketing plan.

Inbound marketing is the only way to build solid relationships with your customers, uninterrupted or even enhanced by your competitors’ futile efforts.

I confidently predict your competitors to be blowing chunks since, at least here in the UK, there are so few examples of people using inbound marketing effectively and consistently. To them, a raspberry.

To you, the sweetest apple. You have chosen well.

How high do you want to go?

Here are my favourite resources for brainstorming and collating a content calendar – effectively the cornerstone of inbound marketing, creating consistent stream of valuable information to reel in your prospective partners and slowly turn them into clients:

• A 2-step editorial calendar template – CMI
• Vertical Management’s content calendar template
• The Social Media Publishing Schedule Every Marketer Needs – Hubspot
• How To Build And Operate A Content Marketing Machine (direct link to PDF) – Marketo

I guarantee that between those three articles, with accompanying spreadsheets, and a PDF, you’ll have everything you need to plan and produce an ever-changing but totally-focused year of inbound marketing taking you and your business to heights you couldn’t even aspire to, today.

What is inbound marketing, really?

The ‘experts’ will spin all kinds of bullcrap in manifest directions. Ultimately it’s the kind of sticky, engaging content produced in-house that will get people tossing and turning in their beds while they struggle to sleep against the incredible inspiration you have generated.

They won’t win if you do your job properly. Red eyes, happy minds. C’est la vie.

Oh, and a corollary – you don’t need to work with any inbound marketing agency to make inbound marketing work for you. You just need to have a goal, some metrics, and always be measuring.

The likes of Infusionsoft and Hubspot will make the journey easier, but they won’t carry you a la that ridiculously cheesy Footprints poem.

What is content?

There are fundamentally three types of content, and a system I cover extensively in my book Sharing Superheroes:

• Short-term: The Tweet. The Facebook update.
• Medium-term: The blog post. The news feature. The webinar. The video interview.
• Long term: The ebook. The case study. The podcast series or video show.

What I did

We’re not active on LinkedIn, or Google+, and we can’t access Pinterest on our network so that’s out.

Right now, since everything is shiny new, all that’s on our plate is the two titans of social networking – Facebook and Twitter.

I rocked over to Hubspot and grabbed their social media publishing spreadsheet (link above and here).

To coach my peers in marketing to regularly brainstorm headline topics to underpin our daily content output, I held a workshop based on, and shared resources featured in, CMI’s 2-step editorial calendar template article.

We haven’t yet moved on to long-term content. That’s for another day. And it will be very important when we turn our focus from our B2C content strategy, to partner prospecting.

What if you’re at the point where thinking about the publishing component of your business is completely new? Let’s circle back to the CMI and look at one of Barbra Gago‘s best-ever articles, Step-by-Step Templates for Mapping your B2B Content.

PS – if you still haven’t found what you’re looking for – you have now. Thanks for everything, @katedreyer!

PPS – I’ll be talking much more about inbound marketing soon. Meantime check out that book I recommended. And since you’ve got this far, a prize: the first two people to email me at hello@davethackeray.com saying “Sharing Superheroes Whoops Ass! (Even though I haven’t read it yet)” in the subject line get a free copy of the book, if they have a UK postal address.

Enjoyed this lesson for content strategy success? Get in touch on Twitter @davethackeray and let me know your thoughts.

When I hear someone say that, I cringe. When I say it myself, I feel a defensive urge to explain what I do.

I trace my aversion to the term back to a girl who drove the Wienermobile. She was a lovely girl. In fact, her perpetual smile and cheerleader personality made her well suited to the position. When she first mentioned she was in marketing for Oscar Mayer, I was impressed; when I discovered she was touring county fairs in a fiberglass hot dog, I was somewhat less impressed. To be fair, she was, in fact, in marketing for Oscar Mayer. As she was only 21, it’s possible that she went on to be chief marketing officer of an international sausage conglomerate. I suspect not, but it’s possible.

You see, the problem is that the terms “marketer” and “marketing” cast a very large net. In fact, I would opine that no one could legitimately tell you how many marketing jobs there are in the world. I tried to find out. I went to Google, (which is the modern day version of the Oracle of Delphi) to seek the answer. No luck. And if the answer doesn’t appear within the first 10 results of a Google search, it doesn’t exist.

It seems every institution of higher education in the world offers a business degree, and 90% of those who graduate go into “marketing.” I suppose the term “marketing” sounds glamorous to some. But when a guy in a gorilla suit standing alongside a highway trying to attract attention to a used car dealership calls himself a marketer, I have to wonder.

I don’t want to seem arrogant, but not all marketing is equal. I spend much of my time managing a million-dollar budget and trying to relate highly technical messages to a perfectly selected subgroup of potential customers. I’ve been working in “marketing” for more than 30 years; I graduated magna cum laude with a BA in Journalism, and I hold an MBA in marketing from Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management. But it’s not just about me and my credentials. I work with some of the most phenomenal marketers in the business. No way should they be painted with that brush; it’s just an entirely different job.

This all went through my mind the other day when someone suggested the Hooters Girls were in marketing. First of all, I thought the fiction was that these “spokesbimbos” were actually waitresses … but is cooing around spring break in orange hot pants marketing?

Oscar Mayer or Hooters have certainly been successful with their marketing, and I don’t begrudge them that. I just don’t want my colleagues or myself to be conflated with them. Perhaps new terminology is necessary to separate the infomercial spokesman from product managers.

Musicians suffer from the same kind of misappellation. The guy in the subway collecting donations in his guitar case for his caterwauling is every bit as much of a musician as Yo-Yo Ma. There’s room for both in this world, but we need some sort of distinction.

The military worked this out long ago. They’re all soldiers, but they have ranks, and display that rank on their uniforms. Every soldier starts with a single stripe and may eventually work his way up to all of those stars and additional stripes. So maybe marketers need a uniform. We could start by wearing orange hot pants and then a gorilla suit.

Wait.

That won’t work.

I just thought about our new intern … the orange hot pants really won’t work for him.

Originally posted on BtoBlog

The statement, spoken brazenly by a work colleague, momentarily floored me. I thought deception and lying were the same thing. A little bit of research suggests there may be a difference.

In ‘Why Leaders Lie: The Truth About Lying in International Politics’, the author claims there are three different kinds of deception: lying, spinning, and concealment.

Lying is when a person makes a statement he knows to be false in order to deceive the target audience. “Lying can involve making up facts that one knows to be false or denying facts that one knows to be true.” In addition, a person is lying when he uses true facts to make the case that something is true which he knows is not true.

On the other hand, spinning is when a person emphasizes certain facts to make a point, while, at the same time, avoiding inconvenient facts that detract from the point. “Spinning is all about interpreting the known facts in a way that allows the spinner to tell a favorable story.”

Finally, concealment happens when a person doesn’t reveal information that would weaken the point he is trying to make. That person is hiding the truth.

As a society, we view each of these deceptions differently. The basic tenets of many cultures include the commandment “Thou shalt not lie.” On the other hand, concealment is discouraged but viewed as less troubling than lying; it is designated as the sin of omission. Of the three types of deception, only spinning seems to be permitted by society. According to popular wisdom, traditional marketers and politicians base their careers on spinning.

Follow me on Twitter (@jbecher) – no lying, no spinning, and no concealment.

This blog was originally posted on Manage By Walking Around on May 19, 2013.

The Recipe

#1 – Targeted Top-Funnel Content That Addresses Persona and Pain Points

In previous campaigns, our customer, Axis|SybronEndo, had always focused its emails and ads on generic bottom-funnel offers, such as signing up for a product demonstration. Our customer seldom got many new leads from these campaigns. Sometimes the company would attempt to entice new leads with free offers, such as a sweepstakes to get free products. It would get more leads from these enter-to-win campaigns, but these leads seldom came back to the website for more information or additional offers.

We started with identifying the goal of the campaign—in this case to introduce a new product called TF^TMAdaptive to dentists and get them to sign up for demonstrations. We specifically targeted Endodontists (Dentists who perform root canals), and we addressed a common pain point: the time-consuming process of prepping teeth for root canals. Our strategy was to prepare a top-funnel (TOFU) educational piece on Adaptive Motion Technology, an advance in the way dental preparation tools can “sense” pressure that needs to be modified to complete the preparation. This enables dentists to complete the job more accurately the first time and reduce “chair time” with a patient. This technology is new to most endodontists, so we created the top-funnel download as an introduction to the technology—and not so much about the product itself.

#2 – Supporting Content

We didn’t go overboard with lead nurturing content, assuming endodontists are already familiar with root canal preparation technology, so our mid-funnel (MOFU) content introduced the TF Adaptive device, its specifications and user experiences. The key lead nurturing piece was a download highlighting the experiences and quotes from a well-known dentist who has used the device. We supported the campaign with several blogs, which featured video interviews with product managers and customers at a recent Dental Industry tradeshow. The idea was to provide “social proof” from other dentists using and recommending the technology to their peers.

#3 – Multichannel Promotion

We launched the campaign from a variety of channels to test them for viability and lead conversion. We made sure that messaging was consistent between all channels, CTAs and landing pages.

• We sent emails for the initial download offer to both opted-in and “rented” lists of known general dentists and endodontists
• We placed Facebook promoted posts for a blog post that included a CTA to the initial download offer
• We placed PPC ads to a landing page for the offer
• We placed CTAs on the website home and blog pages
• Our customer designed and placed ads on Dentistry Today targeting pages where competitors were known to place their ads
• The journal ads pointed to a microsite for the new product, where we placed CTAs for the top-funnel offer, as well as for requesting a demonstration
• We published blog posts and promoted them via social media

#4 – Conversion Rate Optimization

We A/B tested both CTAs and landing pages for the top-funnel offer. We also A/B tested different subject lines for subgroups of dentists in the email marketing part of the campaign before launching the email to the larger email lists. There were significant differences in conversion rates, so we chose the higher rate versions for the larger campaign effort.

#5 – Funnel Optimization

We wanted to give leads an opportunity to move down the funnel at their own pace, and in some cases we expected leads to be ready to purchase right away, so we:

• Placed bottom funnel CTAs (request a demo or request a sales call) on confirmation pages (after landing page conversion)
• Placed both TOFU and BOFU CTAs on blog posts related to the campaign
• Placed both TOFU and BOFU CTAs throughout the website
• Placed both TOFU and BOFU CTAs on the product microsite

These CTAs produced a significant number of sales qualified leads who were ready for a call from a sales rep, which at least in part helped to accelerate leads through the funnel and increase both lifecycle stage conversions and sales in the first month of the campaign.

Results

The TF Adaptive campaign is still running and will continue to be launched in various channels to produce more sales leads. In the first month of running this campaign, the following increases were recorded compared to previous months:

• Traffic: +42%
• Raw Leads: +508%
• Marketing Qualified Leads: +283%
• Sales Qualified Leads: +631%
• New Demonstration Requests: 421
• New Customers: 55

Marketing Takeaway

Even in a highly technical B2B marketing setting, the right combination of content targeting and multichannel promotion can lead to outstanding results in a relatively short period of time. In the case of promoting a new product that can help endodontists do a better, faster job with root canals, attracting them in with educational content and publishing both online and offline proved to be a powerful cocktail for driving both new leads and new customers. Giving leads the opportunity to learn more about the product through lead nurturing or to make a quick decision for a test drive via CTAs led to a relatively high proportion of SQL conversions early in the campaign. Conversion rate optimization throughout the campaign stages helped to maximize conversions and exceed all previous digital campaign metrics by wide margins. This campaign gives us a great recipe for future product and event campaigns for our customer and for other B2B customers.

To read more about this campaign, please download our case study (no form required):