5 New Rules and 5 Proven Principles for Marketing Success
In this new, technology-driven world of marketing, do the proven principles of marketing strategy still apply? Or are there new rules for marketing success? Here are five new marketing rules created by the enormous impact of technology plus five time-tested marketing principles -- and the reasons to consider both in a smart marketing strategy.
Association Membership Marketing: 12 Steps for Success
Member acquisition is a constant challenge and a top priority for most trade associations. Who do you target? How do you reach prospective members? And how do you convince them to join your organization?Here’s how the American Advertising Federation-Cleveland (AAF-CLE) developed a successful membership marketing strategy and campaign that exceeded its goals and laid the foundation for future member acquisition.
10 New Year’s Resolutions for Smart Marketers
At the beginning of a new year, most of us will resolve to live healthier lives and clean out our closets.New Year’s resolutions also can extend to marketing – and many smart marketers use the turning of the calendar page to make some long-overdue changes to their marketing strategies.Here are 10 resolutions to make your marketing more effective in the New Year.
How to Use Your Brand Voice to Be Heard in Social Media
Social media is the noisiest place on the planet. Every day, there are over 1 billion Facebook posts and 400 million Tweets.If you’re straining to be heard amid the social media din, try using one of your most powerful marketing assets: The voice of your brand.Here’s why brand voice is important in a smart marketing strategy, especially for social media marketing.
11 Ideas for Using White Papers in a B2B Marketing Strategy
If you’re a business-to-business (B2B) marketer, white papers can be a powerful way to demonstrate your expertise and differentiate your company from competitors. In part three of a three-part series, here are 11 ideas for using white papers as marketing tactics in a smart B2B marketing strategy.
7 Ways to Show Your Social Media Followers Some Love
One of the best ways to engage and keep social media followers is to make them feel special. Here are seven ways to show some love to social media followers in a smart marketing strategy.
How Breaking a Customer Promise Can Hurt Your Brand
our company’s brand represents the value customers receive when they interact with your business. It's a promise: When you choose to purchase from us, this is what we will deliver to you.When you break that promise – through defective products, shoddy workmanship, or poor service – you might lose the customer.But in this age of social media, you might also lose your reputation. Remember the musician who made a YouTube video about United Airlines breaking his guitar? It got more than 12 million views and spawned a whole culture of people creating videos so showcase their service complaints.How can you avoid mistakes that hurt your brand? And what can you do if those mistakes happen? Here are four insights from my recent experience for your smart marketing strategy.
7 Ways to Make Social Media a Top Marketing Priority
Whether you’re marketing to businesses or consumers, social media marketing should play a prominent role in your marketing plan. Here are seven ways to make social media marketing a top priority in your smart marketing strategy.
7 Ways to Get Results from Your Business-to-Business Blog
Every marketing guru (including me) is telling their clients to blog, for lots of good reasons. But blogging is a big commitment. Do blogs produce real results for B2B marketers? Does blogging truly lead to fame and fortune? I’ve just completed my second year writing a blog about marketing strategy. Here are seven ways I’ve used the blog to increase visibility for my business (fame) and get new clients (fortune) and some blogging tips for your smart marketing strategy.
How to be a Great Content Curator on Social Media
The most successful social media marketers create and publish a high volume of original content through blogs, videos, white papers, and other vehicles.But they also share quality content produced by others. Gathering, sorting, and republishing content from other authors that you believe your followers will value is called curation. By being a great content curator, you help customers, prospects, and colleagues find the “good stuff” online and know what to read. This not only makes you an informative and influential social media contributor, but it also helps attract new followers. Here’s how to find, filter, and share the best content with your social media followers in a smart marketing strategy.
Branding at Birth: How Young is Too Young for Marketing?
Did you see the recent article in Adweek about efforts by major consumer marketers like Disney to establish brand preferences in children ages 0-3? The Next Great American Consumer by Brian Braiker provides a fascinating look at this development. Braiker says branding at birth is “a trend—fueled in part by the growth of digital devices—toward aggressively targeting a demographic that didn’t exist, in marketers’ eyes, until recently: infants to 3-year-olds. By getting their logos and iconic characters in front of babies—even those with still-blurry eyesight—they hope to establish brand-name preference before she or he has uttered a word.”Is this a smart marketing strategy? Or is this the scariest thing you’ve seen all week? The answer to both questions is yes. Here’s why.
Shut Up, Already: How Over-Marketing Kills Relationships
Permission-based marketing is now at the heart of relationships between companies and their customers and prospects. People opt-in to receive your emails, like your company on Facebook, subscribe to an RSS feed from your website or your channel on YouTube, or follow you on Twitter or LinkedIn.But having permission to market to someone isn’t a license to bombard them with marketing messages. In fact, not knowing when to shut up is a classic marketing mistake.Here’s how over-marketing can kill a customer or prospect relationship and 7 ways to avoid this costly error in your smart marketing strategy.
New Sales Rep, Key Account: Top 10 Tips for B2B Success
Smart business-to-business (B2B) marketers work hard to create and keep great relationships with their clients.In my last post, I shared the story of how a new B2B sales rep nearly destroyed a 10-year client relationship with my marketing agency by making six crucial mistakes in the first meeting.But transitioning a legacy client to a new sales rep doesn’t have to be a sales minefield. When handled well, assigning a new rep to a key account can be an opportunity to increase the client’s satisfaction and boost sales.Here are 10 things a new sales rep can do to ensure a smooth transition and earn a long-time client’s trust.
21 Tips for Power Networking: When the Product is You
If you break into a cold sweat at the thought of walking into a business networking event as a complete stranger, you’re not alone.Networking is essential to building and growing a business, especially for business-to-business (B2B) marketers who participate in professional associations and trade shows.But it takes skill and experience to feel confident in a networking situation, and it takes careful planning to capitalize on the value of networking for lead generation.Here’s what I’ve learned about personal marketing and successful networking at B2B events, and 21 tips you can use to make networking a powerful component of your smart marketing strategy.
Landing the Big One: 10 Tips for Selling to Large Companies
Do you market products and services to businesses? If large companies are your target market, it can be tough to break in as a new supplier. Here are 10 tips for a smart sales and marketing strategy that can help you land a big client.
13 Cheap, Easy Ways to Market Your Product or Business
Got a tight marketing budget? Here are 13 easy ways to promote your product or business without spending a lot of money. Some have more impact than others, but all are marketing tactics nearly anyone can deploy in a small-budget, smart marketing strategy.