B-to-B Marketing: The Power of the Personal Note
There’s a simple business communication tactic that can have a huge impact on how your clients and prospects feel about you and your organization: The handwritten personal note.Here’s why personal notes are so effective in building strong client relationships and six tips for using personal notes in 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.
Advertising: Still the Most Fun You Can Have with Clothes On
Famed ad man Jerry Della Femina, the creative genius behind many brilliant ad campaigns (remember the singing cats of Meow Mix?) and the author of From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor, once said that “advertising is the most fun you can have with your clothes on.”I’ve spent my entire career in advertising and marketing and have owned a marketing consulting firm in Cleveland, Ohio for 20 years. Here’s why I believe Della Femina is right about advertising and marketing and my advice for anyone considering a marketing career.
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.
Who Owns Your Marketing Campaigns? You May Be Surprised
Many companies hire marketing agencies or freelancers to develop marketing campaigns and materials. But marketers often overlook a critical step in the process: Ensuring that they own the intellectual property they’ve paid a marketing team to develop. And marketing agencies often fail to protect their legal rights to materials they’ve produced. What are the most common intellectual property mistakes marketers and agencies make and how can you avoid them? Here are some tips for your smart marketing strategy from Sharon Toerek, an expert on legal issues in marketing.
5 Lessons from My UPS Guy: How to Create Loyal Customers
One of the most difficult marketing challenges is differentiating a service business from its competitors. One strategy is to market the knowledge and experience of the firm’s employees. Another is to focus on how the firm's employees make customers feel. Case in point: Tom, my UPS delivery guy. Here are 5 lessons in how to create loyal customers from a UPS driver in Cleveland.
5 Ways to Blow the Sale with a Bad Proposal
The quality of your sales proposal can make or break your ability to close the deal. So why do so many business-to-business (B2B) marketers produce such poor sales proposals? Here are five common mistakes in sales proposals that can cost you the business and some lessons for your smart marketing strategy.
How to Create Great Advertising with Storytelling
Top 10 lists are everywhere this time of year. One of the most interesting lists for marketers is the Top 10 Most Viewed Ads on YouTube, as reported on Mashable.com. These are TV spots people chose to watch online, by the millions. That’s an advertiser’s dream. But what makes these ads so popular? It’s not crazy gimmicks or over-the-top production techniques, though some of the ads have spectacular visual effects. I think it’s about storytelling. The most watched ads of 2011 engage viewers in a compelling story. Here’s why storytelling is such an effective advertising technique and how to tell stories in your smart marketing strategy.
10 Ways to Get Great Client Testimonials for B2B Marketing
There’s nothing more powerful in marketing than a testimonial from your customers about the value of your products or services.That’s why so many smart marketers, especially companies that sell business-to-business (B2B) professional services, use client testimonials in their advertising, sales presentations, brochures, and websites.So how do you get a client to give you a great testimonial for your marketing campaigns? Follow these 10 tips.
4 Things My Idea File Taught Me about Great Direct Mail
Most marketing agencies keep an idea file of creative, interesting promotions by other marketers that serve as inspiration for new marketing campaigns.Since we’re moving soon to new offices (a new suite in the same building in Cleveland, Ohio), I decided to take the opportunity to weed out our idea file, especially our massive collection of direct mail.I tossed a lot of old stuff, but I was surprised at how many direct marketing campaigns created five, ten, or even 20 years ago still pack a powerful marketing punch.I wondered: Why do some direct marketing campaigns stand the test of time? What do these campaigns have in common that makes them so effective?Here are four things our old idea file taught me about great direct mail that you can apply to your smart marketing strategy.
Marketing Professional Services: Sell Smarts, Not Service
Promoting a professional services firm is one of the most difficult challenges in marketing.Whether you’re selling legal services, marketing services, accounting, IT, insurance, benefits, payroll, or consulting, it can be tough to create a marketing strategy that differentiates your company from everyone else who does what you do.Here's the usual approach: “We have great capabilities and we deliver great service.” No offense, but you must, or you wouldn’t still be in business. Plus, all your competitors say the same thing.Is that really what makes you stand out? Is that the reason clients choose you?The real value professional services firms sell is their expertise and their ability to use that expertise to solve clients’ problems. Here’s how to create a smart marketing strategy for a business-to-business professional services company by selling your smarts.
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.
10 Tips for Choosing a B2B Trade Show Sponsorship
If you’re a business-to-business (B2B) marketer, sponsoring your industry's trade show can deliver high visibility for your brand. But trade show sponsorship can be a big investment. Sponsorship packages for some national shows are topping six figures and even smaller sponsorship options can be costly. Before you spend valuable marketing dollars on a trade show sponsorship, here are 10 guidelines for choosing sponsorships that are worth the marketing investment.
Top 10 Tips for a Successful B2B Marketing Strategy
Are you marketing to business decision-makers? Here are my top 10 recommendations for developing a smart business-to-business (B2B) marketing strategy, based on the tried-and-true principles of B2B marketing and my experience as a marketing strategy consultant.
How to Tell Your Branding Story in Your Product
There’s more to effective product branding and marketing than putting a logo on a label or box. Telling a brand story through well-crafted marketing copy can capture the essence of a brand. And building those brand messages into the physical product itself can reinforce the brand’s value proposition every time the product is used.Here are three consumer product marketers who are doing this brilliantly, and some branding advice for your smart marketing strategy.
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.
6 Factors that Set Great Brands Apart
Every smart marketer knows the importance of branding. A strong brand differentiates your company from competitors, conveys the highest value you deliver, and serves as an implicit promise to your customers of what your organization stands for.But what’s the difference between a good brand and a truly great one? How do you create a brand identity that’s so powerful, it becomes one of your most valuable assets -- and the centerpiece of a smart marketing strategy?Here are six factors that separate the best brands from the rest, and examples of marketers who are using these factors to set the bar for branding success.
4 Lessons Big Direct Marketers Can Learn from Small Mailers
The marketing budget for a local, service-based business is a tiny fraction of what a global company spends on marketing. Yet small marketers with limited resources sometimes outshine the big guys when it comes to marketing effectiveness, especially in direct mail.Here’s how a regional painting business in Cleveland, Ohio nailed a prospect direct mail campaign with a simple postcard, while Dell, a huge business-to-business marketer, committed several cardinal sins of direct marketing in a B2B direct mail promotion -- plus four lessons for your smart marketing strategy.
Can Your Marketing Campaign Pass the “Huh?” Test?
A marketer has a few seconds at best to engage the audience in an ad or marketing message. But many marketers forget this simple fact when they develop marketing campaigns using elaborate or confusing creative concepts.When the audience’s reaction to an ad is “Huh?” instead of “Wow!,” it’s a painful waste of marketing resources. Here are three examples of advertising and marketing campaigns that fail the “Huh?” test – and three tips to avoid making mistakes like this in your smart marketing strategy.