From the category archives:

Personalized Communication

What the Grateful Dead Can Teach Us About Consumer Insights and Marketing.

The Grateful Dead created a lasting legacy. You may not like their music, or identify with the culture and period of time when the band was at its high point, but you have to appreciate and admire what they cultivated in terms of followers and passionate fans. So, what does this have to do with marketing insights, targeting and all the other great stuff we talk about in our Fifth Gear Analytics Blog? Well, the book provides some interesting takeaways for those of us interested in consumer insights and using marketing analytics to improve our products and services.

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Cookie Cutter B2B Sales Methodologies Don’t Work.

No sales cycle should ever be looked at from a cookie cutter approach, but this is especially true and examining the B2B sales process. In B2B transactions, there is no way to fully predict the decision making hierarchy, as every organization has a different marketing or purchasing structure with unique buyer types. This can make your B2B marketing messaging a challenge.

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Customer Engagement: A New Spin on Customer Intimacy

A while ago, one of my advisors challenged me to read an old business book, The Discipline of Market Leaders, by Treacy and Wiersma. It was first published in 1995, and I didn’t think it had much relevance to today’s fast-changing world of marketing strategy. So it wasn’t until recently, when I was stuck on a 10 ½ hour flight, that I opened the book. The book detailed three dimensions of competitive strategy: value leadership, product leadership and customer intimacy. And it was in the latter section that I was astounded by something written 15 years ago and what I perceived as a foreshadowing of today’s enthusiasm for customer engagement.

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“Relationship Marketing” Is More Than Just a Buzzword from 2008… It’s a Necessity!

What exactly is relationship marketing? Is it just another buzzword to add to our list of ever growing terms for how we justify new marketing efforts, marketing budget transition and, shift in strategy? According to Marketing-Jive – it did not make the 2010 top marketing buzzwords list. It was, however, on the top 100 buzzwords list for 2008. Is it a thing of the past? My belief, with the explosion of social media is that relationship marketing is no longer the strategy, but rather the end goal.

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5 Steps to Clean up Your Marketing Campaigns With Old Spice Body Wash.

The Internet is buzzing about Old Spice’s new viral video campaign. Many marketers view this as a great social media success story, but as Augie Ray at Forrester pointed out, there are as much if not more lessons to be learned about marketing in general. Here are 5 steps any marketer can take to apply lessons learned from Old Spice’s success to their campaigns:

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Survey Says: Email Provides the Perfect Direct Response Test Kitchen.

Email marketing campaign typically work better when an incentive is offered to the readers to complete a task or interact with the sending brand. Studies show that where incentives are offered, response rate is higher. Knowing how to incentify is the key to unlocking successful email marketing campaigns.

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The Transition of “Digital Days” to “Multichannel Days.”

Earlier this month, I attended the Digital Days conference sponsored by the DMA in New York City. The conference highlighted how critical it is for companies to look at their direct, digital and targeted marketing in a multichannel context. The issue is: Is it really only about Digital these days?

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The Future Is “Tradigital”

Media consumption changes are blurring the boundaries between the old and the new, as TV viewing is either delayed or online; print now offers it’s content in print and digital form; and online activities are leveraged for both online and offline sales goals. Once you controlled the conversation, now you are part of the conversation.

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The Web Content Management Maturity Curve

Web content management started as a nearly-exclusive responsibility of IT, the website group, or the agency responsible for digital publishing. Under the optimization phase, marketers are taking a more significant role in the management of content, with 36% taking an active role content authoring. This combined with the growth of the use of WCM to support marketing initiatives, has the marketing function with a significant stake in WCM technologies for the foreseeable future.

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Getting the Most From Your Mobile Marketing Campaign.

Mobile Marketing and Social Media are rapidly growing because they are providing companies the unique opportunity to connect with consumers and they allow companies to track the user experience across multiple channels which is also known as Social CRM.

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