Before women could vote in national elections they got a shoe specifically designed for them: Keds. It’s a classic example of marketing: identify a market segment (middle class women) with a need (a more comfortable shoe), and create a product specifically to meet that need. Keds didn’t try to be everything to everyone, and that was central to its success.
Continue reading
Many of blog posts have been about particular, discreet tactics: how to use Facebook and emails, host events, improve conversion rates, etc. The real opportunity is when you start to use all of these together strategically with a program of integrated, cross-channel marketing. Continue reading
Many companies have created the position of a chief marketing technologist (it may go by different names in different companies).
A chief martech is a person who is equally comfortable and knowledgeable about both marketing and technology. They can act as a link between marketing and IT, explaining the needs of marketing to IT, and the requirements of IT to marketing. Continue reading
A few years ago I heard the CMO of Vistaprint give a talk and he mentioned that they email customers every day. “I know we’re not supposed to,” he said, “but we’ve found that daily works best for us.”
They’re not alone. HubSpot, which sends out millions of emails for its customers, put out a report saying that companies that email 16-30 times a month have the highest open rates. I receive daily emails from organizations ranging from 1-800-flowers to WGBH. Continue reading
Unlike these informational emails that I’m sending you, most business emails will have a call to action that they want the recipient to do such as take advantage of a limited time offer, return to complete an abandoned shopping cart, sign up for a webinar, attend a summer networking event – whatever. Continue reading
Influencer marketing involves getting key industry influencers to promote your products. Every industry has influencers. They can include reporters, analysts, VCs, etc. In this tip I’m talking about social media influencers.
Continue reading
A couple weeks ago Facebook made an announcement that they are changing their news feed algorithm to emphasize posts from friends and family over those from brands and publishers because that’s what people prefer to see.
It’s not uncommon for people to Like over 100 brand and interest pages, and the median number of friends is 200. If even a few of those friends are active in posting it’s impossible for a person to see everything. So Facebook needs to prioritize and personalize what you see. Continue reading
It’s often said that acquiring new customers is something like five times as expensive as retaining existing ones. As a result customer retention programs tend to be much more profitable than customer acquisition programs. A study by Bain and the Harvard Business School said that increasing customer retention by 5% increased profits by 25-95%. Continue reading
Usually I am recommending that you have ads with strong calls to action for an offer (sign up for our webinar, download our market brief, get our infographic, etc). Those lead people to click, complete forms, give you their contact information, and enable you to further market to them.
However, you can use Google AdWords inexpensively to grow awareness by running display network ads that you pay for on a cost per click (CPC) basis that don’t have any calls to action at all. Continue reading
You can achieve constant, incremental improvements to your marketing results with tweaking and testing. But just as in the startup world you can sometimes get huge improvements by trying something out of the box. It might be in the area of creative, or offers, or forms, or places to place your ads or content. Continue reading