Originally published by the Content Marketing Institute, and Written by Joe Pulizzi.

This post was written with the assistance of my co-author for Managing Content Marketing and lead strategist for the Content Marketing Institute, Robert Rose. Thanks Robert!

I’m tired… tired of the large amount of destructive posts about content marketing that are completely and utterly false.

Two posts in particular, as penned by Hubspot, are clearly written by individuals (no offense here) who do not understand what content marketing really is (here is one and here is the other for your reading enjoyment).

I’m not sure why Hubspot is targeting the term content marketing and misleading its customers in such a way. Do they want to misinform marketing professionals? That is something I cannot live with.

Disclaimer: I am a Hubspot customer (pending future status).

What is inbound marketing?

When the term “inbound marketing” first started to get traction, I thought it was pretty much the same as content marketing. I was wrong.

According to my good friend David Meerman Scott, as published in the book Inbound Marketing (from Hubspot founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah), “Inbound Marketing is about getting found online, through search engines and on sites like Facebook and YouTube and Twitter…”

That said, if you only focus on inbound marketing, you will fail as a marketing professional.

Why you need a content marketing mindset

Content marketing is the practice of creating relevant and compelling content in a consistent fashion to a targeted buyer, focusing on all stages of the buying process, from brand awareness through to brand evangelism. Content marketing, unlike inbound marketing, has been around for hundreds of years, most notably starting in 1895 by John Deere with The Furrow magazine (although I argue that the cave people were drawing stories on walls to sell product). See the video for more:

 

 

While inbound marketing (as opposed to outbound marketing) and getting found online by prospects are critical, what do you do with your story once they find you? If content marketing were a football field, inbound marketing would get you to the 35-yard line. Definitely critical, but hard to score from that distance.

After inbound marketing, you need lead nurturing. Once the lead is nurtured and becomes a customer at some point, you need customer service content. What if you want to upsell or cross sell to the customer? Well, that’s a whole set of different content. What if your goal is customer retention and loyalty? Well that’s another content strategy as well. Lots of valuable content spread out around the web will help you reach a few of your content marketing goals, but not all of them. NOTE: Some will argue that lead nurturing is part of inbound marketing. Even if that is true, it still means you have to throw a Hail Mary to score a touchdown.

Content marketing must include strategic planning, content creation, distribution, and metrics for multiple stages of the buying cycle to multiple customer personas. In my view, that means a complete content marketing strategy would incorporate inbound marketing principles, but it would also take a more holistic approach to meeting a business’s overall marketing goals.

Uh, print?

Even more importantly, content marketing is channel-agnostic. That means that content marketers should be looking at ALL available channels to engage with customers… print, in-person, and online (including mobile). The outstanding Ritz Carlton magazine, placed in hotel rooms, does not have anything to do with being found; neither does the amazing LEGO Club magazine, which has been produced in print for over 30 years (I received the original Brick Kicks magazine back in the 80s). LEGO Club magazine is not inbound marketing.

The business goals of content marketing

With content marketing, there are a number of overall business goals you could have:

Brand awareness or reinforcement
This is almost always the first thing that is thought of when you look at content marketing. The goal may be that you are just trying to find a more effective way than advertising to create awareness for your product or service. This is the long-tail strategy. Content marketing is a great vehicle for that, as it’s organic, authentic, and a great way for you to start driving engagement with your brand. Content marketing and inbound marketing overlap in this area.

Lead conversion and nurturing
The most basic part of inbound marketing is the conversion metric. How you define a lead will vary — but from a content marketing perspective, this is where you have (through the exchange of engaging content) encouraged someone to give up enough information about themselves that you now have permission to “market” to them. This can include signing up for a “demo”, registering for an event, subscribing to your e-newsletter, or gaining access to your Resource Center. Once you have the prospect’s permission, you can use content to help move them through the buying cycle.

Customer conversion
In many cases, you already have a ton of content in this area. This is where, as marketers, we have traditionally focused — the “proof points” to the sale. Examples include case studies you send to your prospects that illustrate how you’ve solved the problem before — or the “testimonials” section on your client page. Ultimately, this is the content you’ve created as a marketer to illustrate to the hot prospect why your solution is better or will uniquely meet his or her needs.

Customer service
This is where content marketing can really earn its “subscribe” stripes. How well are you using content to create value or reinforce the customer’s decision AFTER the sale? This goes well beyond the user manual, the documented process for success, and the FAQ on your website. These are the best practices for how to use your product or service. How can customers get the MOST out of your product or service? What are the successful, innovative ways that you’ve seen your product or service get extended into other solutions?

Customer loyalty/retention
Just like you have a planned lead nurturing process to turn prospects into customers, you also need a planned customer retention strategy. If your ultimate goal is to turn customers into passionate subscribers who share your stories, this area needs major attention. Options may be a customer e-newsletter or printed newsletter, a print or tablet magazine, or possibly a user event or webinar series.

Customer upsell
Marketing doesn’t stop at the “checkout” button any longer. If you’re particularly good at using content to service the customer in a subscribe model, you also have the opportunity to be effective at creating ongoing engagement for the other products and services you offer. Why stop communicating with prospects once they become customers? Instead, communicate with them more frequently (certainly not in a creepy way) and engage them with additional value. Customer upsell and customer retention goals can work hand-in-hand.

Passionate subscribers
If you can successfully move customers to this stage, you have really accomplished something. Content — and especially content generated by satisfied customers — can be one of the most powerful ways for us to reach any business goal. This is when content marketing starts to work for you exponentially. Apple Computer is the quintessential example of this. Ask yourself what their content marketing strategy is. They have no social media presence. They have no blog. But they have successfully built their passionate subscriber base — and these people create fan sites, write, share, and evangelize the Apple brand. Your ultimate goal should be to create a community of evangelists who are prepared to fight for your brand.

So which of these goals makes sense for your content marketing? Maybe it’s only an inbound marketing initiative and you’re just trying to help drive more leads into the sales and marketing process. Maybe you’re trying to create a program that increases awareness, drives down the cost of organic traffic to your website, and increases your position with search engines. Maybe you are working to improve your customer retention rate. Take a moment now to get your mental juices flowing.

What do you want to accomplish with content marketing?

 

One last message from the soapbox

I’ve seen way too many presentations and read way too many articles from “gurus” touting that all marketing resources should switch to inbound marketing. Or even content marketing for that matter? For some small businesses, this could be the case. But for smart, growing businesses, we should be leveraging content marketing throughout all our marketing initiatives — even (gasp) traditional marketing and advertising. (Check out this excellent post by Robert Rose about how content marketing is butter, not the bread.)

Yes, traditional marketing doesn’t work the way it used to because the consumer is in complete control. If they don’t want to pay attention, they won’t. Telling interesting stories is a much better way to get attention. But in many circumstances, traditional marketing and advertising can work (Old Spice showed us the power of paid advertising in collaboration with content marketing and social media). The point is, there is no black and white in marketing; it’s all gray.  There are no silver bullets. Marketing objectives sometimes need to be solved with a combination of efforts, not by putting all your eggs in one basket.

As a marketing professional, it’s your responsibility to call BS when you see it. I hope you will.

NOTE: If you are looking to see content marketing in action, check out Content Marketing World On Demand, featuring over 40 videos from the leading content marketing experts from David Meerman Scott to brands like DuPont, Intel and Sherwin Williams.

 

Originally published by the Content Marketing Institute, and Written by Joe Pulizzi.

Advertising is one of the most expensive elements in the marketing mix, whether print, broadcast or online. And because of the fickle and subjective nature of advertising, seemingly great ideas can flop, while unexpected approaches surprise even the most experienced marketers. With all financial investment at stake, it makes sense to gain insight into customer reaction.

There are a variety of options for advertising testing. The extent of testing depends on the expected advertising budget-both ad production and placement. Clearly a $1.3 million Super Bowl spot requires more elaborate testing than a $20,000 print ad.

So what are the advertising testing options? And when should you use one testing type vs. another?

Most experts agree on two broad types of advertising testing: concept testing and copy testing.

Concept testing is sometimes called pre-testing, and is generally exploratory using headlines, rough layouts or storyboards. Concept testing typically uses qualitative research techniques including focus groups or depth interviews to gain insight into effective ad concepts, identify problems or issues, or to generate new ad concepts.

In contrast, copy testing evaluates different executions of an advertising campaign using finished (or close to finished) ad executions. Copy testing typically employs quantitative research techniques including surveys to measure recall or recognition. Larger sample sizes can provide a level of statistical validity decisions that may be important with larger investments.

What’s more, you may use both types of testing for an important or expensive advertising campaign, using concept testing for the early stages of campaign development, and copy testing to select the final ad option.

Finally, advanced copy testing using quantitative techniques can also involve physiological measures including eye-movement analysis, galvanic skin-response methods and brain-wave analysis. Although I will suggest these are too complex or expensive for most requirements.

And what would a blog post about advertising testing be without an example of an actual ad test. Earlier this year, FUSION b2b conducted an ad test for client BOSCH Power Tools. Per above ad testing types, this was definitely a copy test using finished print ads with a striking visual (ala Cyborg) and varying headline, copy and the treatment of the direct response offer.

(click any ad example above to enlarge)

We set-up a survey using the free web-based SurveyMonkey tool and posed four (4) questions:

1. Which headline do you prefer most? Which headline would you stop and read?
2. Which copy version do you prefer most?
3. Which Free Offer treatment and layout position do you prefer most?
4. Please rate overall preference of each ad on a scale of 1-5 (1+hate, 5=love)

The ad test was emailed to a random list of remodelers, the target audience from the circulation of Hanley-Wood’s Remodeling magazine. We received hundreds of survey responses making the copy test statistically significant, and most importantly, a clear direction with a large percentage of respondents selecting the “Maximize Your Multi-Tool” headline and copy. The preference for “offer treatment” was even more pronounced with nearly 68% preferring the offer in yellow, top right position (an unconventional offer position, and unexpected outcome).

More Resources:

Advertising Research Foundation

As always, please comment, Retweet, Facebok Like and bookmark using the Share tools.

Business-to-business marketing is changing rapidly. The marketing mix is evolving, in a good way. There are many reasons for this metamorphosis. First, business-to-business buyers (like consumers) increasingly use the Internet for sourcing and selecting products and services. Therefore search optimization becomes more important than ever. Internet search engine optimization (SEO) and social media both improve search results.

Second, traditional marketing tactics like advertising and trade shows are expensive, and are being cut back and often replaced with less expensive Internet and social media. To prove this, in a recent study we identified downward trends in advertising, printing and tradeshows. Yes, there are exceptions.

Third, Internet-based marketing (including social media) can be more measurable than traditional marketing. Fourth, a focus on lead generation can be facilitated by website registration pages, and communicated via social media and integrated with traditional marketing.

The new marketing mix still requires a strategic marketing foundation to ensure all downstream marketing supports brand strategy and positioning. But the new marketing mix buckets many traditional marketing tactics as Outbound Marketing, and many Internet and social media activities as Inbound Marketing. Marketing measurement is integrated with both Inbound and Outbound and feeds back to planning and budgeting via reporting as a closed-loop system. See the modern marketing mix diagram below.

Free Grading Service Now Available!

A new marketing grading service is available that measures company or brand marketing performance on a 4.0 grade point average scale similar to education, and then issues a Marketing Report Card.

The free Marketing GPA™/Marketing Report Card™ service grades five (5) categories including:  brand execution, marketing programs, Internet marketing, social media integration, and marketing results measurement. The service is available to qualified brand owners from FUSION b2b, a Chicago-region marketing agency.

A brief, web-based form must be completed and submitted to FUSION b2b. The “student” or brand owner will receive a Marketing Report Card report with both category (above) grades, and a composite grade. In addition FUSION provides three (3) “Big Ideas” or recommendations for improving your marketing GPA.

“A number of diagnostics are available that measure Internet and social media effectiveness. To our knowledge, there are no free, public services that measure both traditional and Internet marketing,” states Neil Brown, FUSION b2b Chief Marketing Officer. “Obviously, this customized evaluation and recommendation cannot be executed real-time. Our goal is to respond to requests for the Marketing Report Card within 48 hours. We hope this service will be fun and assist marketers in driving change within their organizations.”

To access the Marketing GPA™/Marketing Report Card™ form , Click HERE.

(PUBLICITY: PART 2 of 2)

Per the prior post, the popularity and use of free publicity historically increases when the economy tanks. In the midst of this seemingly extended downturn, PR is certainly gaining priority in the construction marketing mix. At the same time, PR is changing significantly. So how can you refine your PR to realize greater results?

PART 1 of our series will examined how PR has changed, and how your PR program can change to leverage new PR opportunities. PART 2 of this series focuses on the specifics of PR distribution options.

As always, please share your comments and personal experience to bring some broader perspectives to our discussion!

News Distribution Tips

As you might expect, there is no “silver bullet” or single solution that address all needs. Most marketing practitioners use a combination of approaches for getting news and PR releases in front of editors and influencers.

Fusion B2B, and PR programs for Fusion’s clients use a several options for news distribution. Heather Hawes, Account Executive shares her process. “First we post news on our websites and blogs. This allows for Retweeting and bookmarking. Next we distribute to our own editor (email) databases. The news announcements are also formatted to included links to these respective internet domains. Depending on how “big” the news item is, we will then distribute using both free and paid services. We still realize the majority of placements thru our own, custom editor lists.”

“Distribution services increase news reach and placements, particularly across the internet, and with blogs that would be hard to identify“, adds Neil M. Brown, Managing Partner of the Fusion B2B.

So which service should construction marketers use for distributing news announcements and press releases to your targets? No question, there are more options than ever. The following table list some of the top news distribution services that range from free to substantial fees for more value-added services. The table includes CMA’s ranking based on quality, costs, network scope and Google PageRank. Note that the service name hotlinks to the respective websites.

#	Name	Cost	Distribution Network	PageRank
1	PRWeb	$80	250k RSS, 30k journalists
2	BusinessWire	$395-$675	Nat’l/Regional Selects/200 Industry Selects
3	PRNewswire	$415-$715	85,000 registered journalists
4	Marketwire	$285-$485	300k RSS, 8k news & broadcasts
5	24-7 Press Release	$0-$49	60,000 editors/journalists/bloggers
6	PR.com	$0-$199	Vertical Industry Selects
7	Cision	$250-$350	300k outlets/Monitoring
8	Vocus	$380	250k RSS, 30k journalists/bloggers
9	Free-Press-Release.com	$0-$30	Country and Industry Selects
10	1888PressRelease.com	$0-$29	Websites, RSS Feeds,Blogs

Per above, depending on the importance of the news, you may opt for free distribution for minor releases, to the highest level of services for news that requires the broadest distribution, or specific features like financial disclosure compliance which BusinessWire and PR Newswire both support.

Our staff often uses a combination of free and paid, thus ensuring that multiple news sources will pick-up the news.

Fusion ranks PRWeb highest by virtue of the combination of reasonable fees, broad distribution and high Google PageRank. Upon review, Businesswire and PR Newswire are the top-end services, and very similar. Although Businesswire pricing is more reasonable for smaller clients.

We have experienced excellent search results using 24-7pressrelease.com and Free-press-release.com. After this exercise, we are inclined to further evaluate PR.com.

Following are some additional services we found but did not analyze. In the meantime, what services do you prefer and why? Please comment, Retweet and bookmark!

#	Name	PageRank
1	Newswire Today	PR6
2	Press Release Network	PR6
3	Thomas Net News	PR6
4	PR Log	PR6
5	PR-Inside	PR6
6	ClickPress	PR5
7	PR Leap	PR5
8	PR Zoom	PR5
9	Pressbox.co.uk	PR5
10	Free Press Release Center	PR4
11	EcommWire	PR4
12	PR Free	PR4

( PUBLICITY:  PART 1 of 2)

The popularity and use of free publicity historically increases when the economy tanks. In the midst of this seemingly extended downturn, PR is certainly gaining priority in the business-to-business  marketing mix. At the same time, PR is changing significantly. So how can you refine your PR to realize greater results?

PART 1 of our series will examine how PR has changed, and how your PR program can change to leverage new PR opportunities. PART 2 will focus on the specifics of PR distribution options.

As always, please share your comments and personal experience to bring some reality to our discussion!

PR Has Changed

So, how has PR changed? Not to overstate, but in the last few years PR has changed more than in the last 30 years combined. How? The changing roles of journalists and marketing practitioners, and the rapidly increasing use of social media in PR.
No doubt, the recession has taken a toll on journalists with layoffs, and those remaining having greater workloads, tightening budgets, and added responsibilities of writing for multiple mediums. According to the 2010 PRWeek/PR Newswire Media Survey, 59% of traditional (print) journalists are the author of a blog, and are also expected to contribute to online news, Twitter and other channels.

With greater workload, the research tools used by journalists might identify opportunities for marketing practitioners. Not surprisingly, Google and other search engines rank highest. 95% in 2010 per the PRWeek survey, followed by company websites (93%), Wikipedia (47%), newswires (36%), social networks (33%), and blogs (32%).

Social Media Emergence

While the hype of social media pervades marketing practitioners, the use of social media for publicity is growing rapidly, and becoming a major part of both journalist and practitioners PR activities.

According to the survey, in 2010 79% of journalists have a Facebook profile, 46% have a LinkedIn profile, and 58% have a Twitter profile. Only 11% have no profiles. Twitter realized the most dramatic increase from just 22% in 2009.

In addition, 43% of PR practitioners use social networks to pitch media, with 76% using Twitter and 49% using Facebook. One of the key reasons practitioners use social media? Search engine results! Often posts to social media channels rank higher than even company websites for key search terms. And as noted above, journalists use search engines 93% of the time for research.

A discussion of PR and social media would be incomplete without acknowledging the growing importance of blogs. Per above, 59% of traditional (print) journalists write blogs. In addition, 45% of journalists have quoted a blog in an article, and journalists use both general blogs (24%) and company blogs (23%) for research. On the practitioner side, 66% are targeting bloggers more than before.

“The corporate, brand or subject matter blog can be the hub of an integrated PR program, using social media channels for news distribution,” suggests Neil M. Brown, Managing Partner at Fusion B2B.

The New Rules of PR

So what are the implications of the changing PR landscape to practitioners or client-side marketers? Clearly PR strategies and tactics should embrace these changes, and leverage the opportunities.

“Now more than ever, practitioners should be deploying blogs, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube profiles. Wikipedia pages. Bookmark and Share links on website pages. The blog and all profiles should be linked to the website, which should have RSS feeds. News announcements should be formatted to include links to these assets and other relevant information sources,” shares Neil M. Brown.

Fusion B2B is a good example of effective PR and integrated social media. Heather Hawes, Account Manager for Fusion B2B agency sums it up. “Just a couple of years ago, we would email a news announcement to trade editors. We still distribute to trade editors, but we also post news on our websites and blogs with RSS feeds, use Twitter, Facebook, and social Bookmarking tools to distribute the news and submit to free news distribution services. If the news item is big or strategic enough, we will submit to paid distribution services. Finally, we can measure placements with alerts and searches. Its faster, deeper and more measurable.”

What are your PR experiences? Please comment below. And by all means, Retweet, Share and Bookmark. For automatic alerts, sign up for email feeds of all Construction Marketing Blogposts above.

Next: PUBLICITY, PR Distribution Options.

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by Eric Gagnon

Many agency and marketing folks often consider running only full-page ads in their B2B campaigns, under the mistaken assumption that a full page ad always makes a bigger splash than any smaller ad size.

But you can run a successful lead-generation advertising program using smaller ad sizes, if you focus on highlighting the boldness, clarity, and readability of your product’s major sales benefit, you can make a small ad generate even greater sales response than full-page ads.

In fact, once I’m able to un-hypnotize a client from thinking they need to run full pages, I usually advise them to start a new advertising program with half, quarter, and (sometimes) even one-eighth ad sizes, to reduce the risk and expense of their print ad buys, and to test the response of the publication, sales message, and promotion used in these ads.

It’s a Fact: Ugly Little Ads Work

If you flip through successive issues of any trade publication, you’ll often see the same smaller half, quarter, and one-eighth page ads repeating every single month.

This is often a telltale sign these fractional-space ads are paying their own way by generating solid sales leads for their advertisers, where larger, prettier, full-page ads in the same pubs often appear and disappear like footprints along the beach.

In fact, some fractional ads have become legendary for their pulling power and longevity. According to top ad executive Fred Poppe, the late co-founder of Poppe Tyson, the ad below for Downs Crane and Hoist ran in trade publications for 35 years, outpulling the average ad in these publications by 50%:

Who Can Benefit from Running Fractional Ads?

Just about any type of product can be advertised effectively in a smaller page size, but companies selling a product or service that customers order when they need it—such as industrial supplies, commodity products or materials, or specialized engineering or technical services—are especially suited to smaller ad programs.

These are the kinds of products readers want when they need it (and not before), and they’ll usually buy it from the last company whose ad they remembered in the latest issue of their industry’s trade publication. And to meet this need, a smaller ad (if it’s effective) that repeats, issue to issue, is often more memorable than a one-shot, three-time run of full page ads.

Keys to Fractional Ad Layout and Presentation

Let me show you a few techniques you can use to boost the attention-getting, persuasive power of a smaller ad for any B2B product or service, to make it do the work of a much larger ad.

Let’s start with a rough sketch of the ad copy layout. These were sales copy benefit points we developed for a company selling a fiber-optic visual inspection system that helps technicians pinpoint leaks and flaws in pipelines, engines and other closed mechanical components:

We’ll create a one-quarter page ad (3-3/8” W x 4-7/8” H), but these techiques apply to even smaller ad sizes all the way down to one-eighth page ads, although some elements would have to be scaled down, or removed, as appropriate.

Setting the Headline

For smaller ad sizes, text usually does a better job of communicating sales benefits than product shots or illustrations. So when you’re producing a fractional ad, you’ll want your headline to do most of the work of attracting attention to your ad.

The copy for this headline presents a very effective and compelling sales benefit, so let’s make it the boldest feature of this ad, and give it about a third of the ad’s total space.

Bold, sans-serif fonts generally work best for headlines, so let’s set this one like so:

Set like this, the headline above doesn’t make the best use of the one-third space we’ve reserved for this ad, so let’s work on its line breaks and justification to make it fit better into this space.

When working with text, you can often improve the readability and appeal of a headline by changing its line breaks. While we’re at it, let’s increase the font size of the headline, which obviously makes it bolder:

—the tweaked headline on the bottom looks much bolder and more readable, but we can make it even bolder by reversing the type and placing it inside a solid color box. Muted blues, greens, or reds look best for this effect:

See how reversed text makes this headline look bolder and more readable? Reversing text in solid color is a great technique for increasing boldness in a fractional ad.

This technique also works well when producing a black and white ad, by using a 50% black screen instead of color:

Filling in the Subhead

In this ad, the subhead we developed from th three-step copywriting exercise:

Highlight Potential Surface Flaws and Other Surface Defects With IntelliScan AVIS

— starts to tell the story about this product, rounding out the main sales benefit expressed in the headline.

Get the subhead right up close to the headline by snugging it right up under the headline, so the reader’s eye moves from the headline, down into the subhead.

You can set this subhead in the same type as the headline, or in a slightly less-bold variation, like so:

You may notice we also shortened this text a bit, so we could make the subhead line a little bigger.

Show Me the Product!

Smaller ads require tight, close-cropped product shots. A photo of the product in use is always better than a standalone shot. Here’s a good shot we can use for this ad space:

Now We Negotiate…

Optimizing a small ad for maximum sales impact always seems to be a negotiation between the major elements of the ad—headline, subhead, product shot, body copy, and call to action/contact info.

Since we’re making the headline do most of the selling for this ad, the product shot will stand behind the headline and subhead, but we want to make it equally prominent with the body copy.

Placing the Body Copy

By placing the product shot directly to the left of the body copy for this ad, we’ll save space in this ad, and boost the readability and interest of both:

Make Me an Offer, and Tell Me What to Do Next…

The purpose of B2B advertising is to generate quality sales leads for your company’s product, and ads will always pull better if you offer some kind of FREE promotional premium or FREE incentive for the reader to contact your company.

For sales of technically-oriented products, FREE premiums, like software utilities, special-function calculators, or white papers, or any other FREE deliverable that puts your product into the prospect’s mind and/or helps him/her to do their job better, or more productively, is a definite motivator for sales response—that is, getting the reader to call your company, contact a rep or distributor, or visit your Web site.

(Did I mention that it should be FREE?)

Here, we’re offering access to a Web video and a white paper on technical aspects of materials inspection.

We’ll also place the company logo and contact information at the bottom, with the phone number and Web site link, set large and readable.

And here’s our final ad:

Now, let’s pull this ad up alongside any other full-page ad we might see in a typical trade publication, and see how it stacks up:

As you can see, this ugly little ad more than holds its own against a full page ad costing three times as much. The secret is using a bold, readable headline that answers a prospect need (it helped that we reversed the type on it, too). Once you draw the reader’s attention with the headline, the rest of the elements of the ad can do their work.

Ugly, little, hard-tugging ads like this one won’t win any design awards, and your CEO won’t wave them around in front of his board members, but they’ll likely pull solid sales response while keeping your marketing budget under control. For my money (and yours) I’ll put my trust in these ugly little ads every time.

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Despite high interest in database marketing (DBM), many marketers still have not implemented DBM. One of the reasons for this is a lack of practical information. Depending on your objectives, you should consider one or more DBM strategies including:
1. Segmentation
2. New Customer Acquisition
3. Customer Penetration
4. Customer Retention
5. Marketing Intelligence
6. Measuring Results

Step 1 – Segmentation

Segmenting customers and prospects into various classifications is the first step in DBM. The most basic level of segmentation involves classifying, coding or sorting customers and prospects by type, size or potential. Business marketers can utilize Standard Industrial Classifications (SIC codes) established by the federal government to categorize most business types. Other typical classifications include sales revenue, employees, product purchases, purchase interest, etc.

A higher level of segmentation involves profiling, scoring, or modeling of customers and prospects. Profiling identifies frequencies (percentages) of different categories, for example, financial services comprise 17% of XYZ Corporation’s customer base. In addition, the 80/20 rule can be illustrated utilizing percentages, for example, 80% of XYZ profits are derived from the top 20% of customers.

Scoring, as the name implies, ranks segments or individual customers by some predetermined criteria, often sales or gross margin contribution. Dividing the ranked list into three groups is common to identify heavy, moderate, and light users. Mail order marketers utilize RFM, that is recency, frequency and monetary or transaction value, as criteria for judging customer worth.

Modeling employs statistical techniques like multiple regression to identify factors that correlate to high sales potential or likelihood of promotional response. Prospective customers can then be “fitted” to these models to determine which prospects should be priorities.

Step 2 – Customer Acquisition

Identifying and communicating with high potential prospects is a goal of most marketers. The segmentation tools described allow you to focus on prospects that are “heavy users” or that fit predetermined criteria. DBM can be utilized to identify new customer “gains”, and to track trends in new customer activity. Finally DBM can be used to target and manage prospect communications, marketing, and sales programs.

Step 3 – Customer Penetration

What is your “account penetration” level by customer? DBM can help identify penetration by comparing transaction data to total customer purchases. In addition, modeling “ideal” product mix by customer type will identify cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. Again, the segmentation step can identify opportunities.

Step 4 – Customer Retention

Strategies in this area have grown in importance since the high cost of new customer acquisition has been well documented. DBM can support the identification of lost customers to be reclaimed, dormant customers to be reactivated, as well as the Lifetime Value (LTV) of customers. DBM often is the foundation for implementing loyalty building strategies including continuity or points programs, recognition, and other value-added marketing or sales programs.

Step 5 – Marketing Intelligence

Sometimes a by-product of DBM is the ability to utilize the database as a marketing intelligence device. Segmentation supports intelligence gathering. Often a customer record will include unlimited text entries. Remote database access and “real-time” updating reinforce marketing intelligence applications.

Step 6 – Measuring Results

Tracking of marketing, sales, advertising and communications program results is possible by “capturing” customer/prospect responses, transactions, etc., in the database. Updating customer records allows the database to remain “fresh”. In addition, coding and sorting allows for the testing of alternative programs or offers, with responses carefully measured to support ongoing improvements.

Why Database Marketing?

Database marketing promises to deliver more effective marketing and communications, first by improving customer understanding through segmentation, and then by using this information to communicate with customers in a targeted, even personalized, way. At least six DBM strategies should be considered including segmentation, customer acquisition, penetration, retention, market intelligence and measuring results.

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No question Social Media or Social Marketing is the marketing topic du jour.
And while the benefits of Social to B2B marketers are becoming more obvious,
traditional marketing still delivers measurable sales. For many marketers,
the website is the foundation of marketing activity. Integrated with social
media, websites become even more potent a marketing weapon.

Certainly every B2B market has its own nuances, but old fashioned new
product launches, special promotions and sales and channel programs are the
marketing that drives real sales. Advertising and publicity build awareness
and even direct response.

Its important not to forget what marketing strategies and tactics deliver
sales, as it is easy for a marketer to get sucked into spending hours on
social media with little sales results to show for it.

To be sure, all marketing activities should be planned, budgeted,
prioritized and integrated. Social Media supports traditional marketing, it
does not replace. For most of our B2B clients, we consider the following
tactics:

• Brand identity, graphic themes, messaging, taglines

• Website, search optimization, social media

• Advertising

• Publicity

• Brochures, literature and content

• Sales programs, promotions and training

• Channel marketing

• Trade shows and events

• Direct marketing including email and webcasts

• Photography and video

What traditional marketing do you implement and how does Social Media fit
into the so-called marketing mix?

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