How Do Consumers Make Decisions? Theory or Fact?

How do customers make decisions? This question has been at the core of marketing strategy for many years. As marketers manipulate the various principles of marketing, the consumers they seek to reach also change their decision making criteria. So how does a professional marketer adapt to this evolving environment? First they need to understand the typical consumer decision making process and tailor their marketing strategy accordingly. Then they need to constantly evaluate their existing customers, as well as their prospect universe, to come up with a marketing strategy.

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Winning With Customers – B2B Playbook Review

Before we can understand how to win with customers, we need to first understand why we lose. Appropriately Chapter 2 of the book is titled “Why we lose” and delves into the six reasons why companies lose. Reason #1, in my view, is the most powerful—We lose because we don’t understand the customer’s perspective. (You’ll need to read the book for the other 5 reasons!)

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Web Analytics 2.0 – It’s Not All About the Web.

By now, most marketers have embraced the digital channel and the fact that a majority of consumers are spending a significant amount of time playing, researching, transacting and communicating on the web. According to Advertising Age’s 2010 Digital Market Facts (Feb 22, 2010), Internet spending as a percent of all U.S. marketing spend is estimated to be over 20% by 2012.

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The Secret Sauce for Successful Marketing Campaigns

As the practice of marketing analytics is making a name for itself, and businesses are starting to catch on that they’ve been capturing all this great customer information. These same businesses are now starting to realize they should consider using it! If you are using predictive analytics to target your marketing campaigns, you should be seeing improvement in response rate from versus older campaigns where no predictive analytics were available. It is still common practice to send email campaigns or direct mail pieces to every contact in your list, hoping that mass distribution will lead to higher volume of responses.

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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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Marketing Miracle No. 1: Walking on Water

It’s no longer good enough to provide our clients with innovative ideas and measureable results. In the current recessional climate we need to be Marketing Miracle Workers. In our Client Satisfaction survey we ask our clients to rank us on the “can’t imagine doing business without SIGMA.” factor. It’s important to us that they feel we are essential to their success! That is why we have to produce marketing miracles for our clients.

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How Much Are Your Customers Worth?

As marketers, we have heard about it for years: It is important to understand the total value of your customers over the “lifetime” of their relationship with your brand, product or service. Makes sense, right? Why would you not want to understand the total impact a loyal customer can have on your acquisition and retention efforts based on this calculation? However, a great number of marketers we speak to still overlook future revenue opportunities by not recognizing the true lifetime value of current customers. Even though quite a number of companies can recognize differences among customers’ loyalty over a lifetime, they are often unable to quantify or act on those differences.

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Social Media Synergy Can Be As Magical as a Disney Vacation.

The Dis is now a hub of activity for Disney enthusiasts. Attracting the attention of millions of fans was a business opportunity didn’t escape Pete. He entered a partnership for a travel agency called Dreams Unlimited Travel and linked it to the website. Enthusiasts poured into the travel agency to reserve their vacations. Those successes lead to additional businesses that include off site hotels, condos, Disney cruises, vacations to other area theme parks, and more.

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Tour de France Sponsorship – Can It Win the Marketing Race?

Through the use of marketing analytics we help our customers target at a much more granular, and profitable, level than a sponsorship of a team or event. Forget broad demographic categories; we help our customers target based on hundreds of variables and identify those prospects that have the highest lifetime value.

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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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