From the category archives:

Marketing Technology

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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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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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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Is the Enterprise Ready for Cloud Marketing Services?

Is the typical Enterprise ready for marketing services from the “Cloud?” This question is one that involves more than marketing technology. As more and more services are becoming available over the internet or “the cloud,” the question will be asked, and answered, more frequently. A likely influencing factor is the maturity of the Enterprise’s Datacenter. The datacenter’s evolution may just offer Marketing the flexibility to evaluate more marketing technology options.

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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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Understanding B2B Campaign Responses – Building a Methodology

SIGMA Marketing Group has recently completed an analysis of past B2B campaigns and we have discovered some important findings that are now guiding our campaign designs. We discovered that prospects respond at a significantly lower rate than customers. It’s also clear that response rates vary by the methodology used to conduct the marketing touch, with email prospecting consistently performing at the lowest response rate. We found that prospect response rates vary depending on the relationship the company has with the prospect, for example if the prospect is a past customer they are more likely to respond then other prospects.

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DMA: 2010 – Channel Integration + Marketing Technology + Data = ROI

This year’s DMA show in San Francisco was chock full of sessions and exhibitors talking about how to best navigate through this interesting marketing landscape of emerging channels like social media, mobile, the explosion of data and the challenges marketers are facing to attribute success and ROI. The scales have been tipped to the point of no return for marketing organizations to combine the right creative marketing saavy with technological know-how and then apply the right amount of analytics to make sure everything is delivering solid ROI.

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B2B Social Media Landscape Appears to Be Wide Open

As I’m reading the “Fall 2010 Social Business Report” from NetProspex, I find that my biggest assumption about social media in the B2B space is entirely true. We can all agree that social media is still an emerging multi-channel, multi-faceted medium for marketing communications. We can further agree that while there are experts out there, we are all still learning what works and what doesn’t. Currently working in the B2B social space myself, I have come to believe that many (or most) B2B companies have not grasped the relevance nor the value of social media usage as it pertains to their business.

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Are Personas the New Customer Segments?

The digital concept of Persona is catching up with the database marketer’s idea of Segmentation. The web experience has become richer and web strategists have embraced the idea of many personas and tooled the experience to deliver choices and personalization and different pathways to support the different groups of visitors. Marketers commonly talk about Personas in the plural form, and this is a great thing for improved relevance for consumers.

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