From the category archives:

Marketing Strategy

Apple: A Story of Consistent Brand Messaging Across Channels.

Unless you’ve been sleeping under a rock, you are aware that Apple has flooded the market with impressive state-of-the-art and stylish consumer electronics:  iPhone cell phones, iPod MP3 players, iPod Touch hand-held computers, and now the iPad tablet computer. Apple sold 3 million iPads in the first 80 days after launch. On the front-end of [...]

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The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Marketing Database Creation.

At some point in every database marketing project the ‘build vs. buy’ decision must be made. As a marketing practitioner I was tasked with building the marketing databases at two different companies. I then spent the bulk of my career on the provider side building marketing databases for clients, and I’ve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly of database marketing creation. As a Marketing Information Manager tasked with building a marketing database for a large regional bank, my first thought was to build it in house. After all, not many companies in those days had more computers or programmers than banks and I’d only need a small team to build and maintain the database. After pursuing this course for a while, I determined that the only way to get this accomplished in any sort of reasonable time frame and within budget was to contract with an outside database supplier.

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10 Marketing Trends for 2011

The meaning of marketing continues to evolve and how that changes the way we engage with our customers. Trends are emerging in customer engagement, how we integrate data, how we leverage marketing analytics. As marketers, we are also seeing social media usage mature, changes in mobile marketing and increased conversation about customer privacy. Customer touchpoint becomes a priority and understanding how all of these trends can work together will be the key to marketing success in 2011.

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Web Analytics: Understanding the Real Value of Online Conversions.

Nobody loves numbers more than your boss. Except his or her boss. Oh, and your boss’s boss too, unless you’ve already reached the top of the totem pole. Web analytics tools are at their most powerful when you can interpret and integrate the numbers they provide—the rapturous layers of percentages and pie charts—with what happens in the context of your organization’s business, outside the world of site visitor data. Did you get all that? In two recent SIGMA web analytics engagements, the key to the findings wasn’t was happening on page 27 of the site, or who was coming from Google. The key was to find the magic number—the value of what the online conversion or successful engagement meant to the company.

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Is RFID Getting Primed to Change Digital Marketing?

RFID, or Radio-Frequency Identification is the use of an object (typically referred to as an RFID tag) applied to or incorporated into a product for the purpose of identification and tracking using radio waves. These tags can be read from several meters away, out of the line of sight of the reader, and the reader can be linked via networks and integrated with applications.

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The Social Media Bandwagon Has Become a Supersonic Jet.

As a Social Media marketer with SIGMA Marketing Group, I am still amazed when I meet business savvy folks who have not yet adopted social media usage in any way, shape or form. There are varying degrees of usage and unique formulas for different business types and vertical markets, but I don’t care who you are… Social Media is here to stay, and will continue to evolve rapidly. I recently wrote an article on social media usage by industry, which focused primarily on B2B Social Media, but it provided some interesting insights about what industries have adopted social.

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Can Lead Generation Become More than “Frosting and Cherries?”

I recently called on a client and he described his vision of lead generation as “frosting and cherries.”  Let me explain.  His view is that the current state of lead generation is dead.  Salespeople in the “Internet world” have relied on leads from marketing which are neither good nor productive.  In his opinion, salespeople need [...]

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Pareto’s Law or the Long Tail Theory? What Marketers Must Measure Now.

The foundational concept of all database marketing is the Pareto Principle, that 80% of your sales and profitability will come from about 20% of your customers. When we have analyzed our clients’ customer bases to prove out this theory, we often find that the distribution is even more uneven– that 100% or more of customer profitability comes from an exceedingly small group—because clients are actually losing money from some part of their customer population. The 80/20 theory often holds true for product sales as well – 80% of sales often comes from just 20% of the products offered by a manufacturer. This concept has driven everything in database marketing from audience identification to campaign structure, sales strategy etc.

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Understanding the Five Customer Relationship Stages to Full Engagement With Your Brand

As our clients juggle new channels, new technology and new media, we realize that their relationships with their customers and prospects have to be 24/7 and “always on”. How we help them with Analytics, strategy and marketing technology today really goes beyond just the marketing process, but helps them deliver a consistent and relevant brand experience across the entire consumer relationship.

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8 Tips to Improve Campaign Landing Page Conversion

Are you running campaigns that are getting a decent click through rate, but no conversions? Are you running campaigns that don’t really deliver? You might want to consider these 8 tips to improve landing page conversion.

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