“Blogging is not writing. It’s graffiti with punctuation.” That’s what movie maker Stephen Soderbergh said in his film “Contagion.” Of course, he isn’t a corporate marketer faced with a changing customer buying pattern and the need to build in-bound traffic from search engines. If he was, he’d know that today blogging is one of the […]
Multi-Channel Marketing.
Harnessing the Power of Word-of-Mouse
We often promote this blog through press releases and advance copy sent to other bloggers and journalists. Last week, Forbes.com columnist David Coursey surprised us by a draft blog post that quoted him and submitting it to Forbes.com as a guest post. “I had planned to write something about the topic myself, and link back […]
Who Owns Your LinkedIn Contacts?
Who owns your LinkedIn profile? (Hint: it might not be you.) That was the headline on a post on this blog back in June, 2011 — and the answer we arrived at with help from a number of legal and compliance experts was, “It depends.” That leads us to a related question: who owns LinkedIn contacts […]
Trick or Tweet: 7 Social Media Horror Stories
Yes, it’s Halloween in the Twitterverse (and the rest of the social media world) — and to make sure that it’s all treats, and no tricks that can come back to haunt you, here’s a list of Halloween “don’ts” for marketers that make sense all year round. Don’t let personal comments (or prejudices) ruin your […]
Four Avoidable Marketing Metrics Mistakes
A lot of marketers wanted to emulate TV’s Mad Men: creative geniuses who build brands and marketing empires. Instead, became math men spending their days with statistics and spreadsheets filled with complex formulas for measuring every message and justifying spending. In fact, half of CMO’s say that justifying spending through metrics takes more than 30% […]
Email Metrics That Make Sense
No matter what email marketing solution you use, it’s sure to come with a set of email campaign metrics that will help you judge the success of your campaigns. The most common metrics built into the reporting dashboard in email solutions are: Accepted rate – What percent of your messages were actually delivered to someone’s […]
Why Testing Email Subject Lines Isn’t Optional
By Deb McAlister-Holland Marketers understand that email marketing is changing. Still, in July 2011, 95% of the marketing executives surveyed by The Distributed Marketing blog rated email “somewhat” or “very” effective in delivering results – far more than any other marketing communications channel. At the same time, everyone involved in email marketing acknowledges that the […]
Best Source of Qualified Leads? SEM
Multi-channel marketers have many channels to reach potential customers — but few have the budget to use all of them for every message. So what’s the single best source of qualified leads? According to a survey from Hearst Business Media Electronics Group and Goldstein Group Communications, it’s search engine marketing. You can see the complete […]
Print Collateral Drives Sales
If you relied solely on the trade press and Twitter, it would be easy to think that marketing and sales organizations have moved beyond print to a world where everything is digital. But actual data shows that print remains near the top of the list for many marketers. Why? Because it works, and there are […]
Social Media Is NOT Free
Ever been in a meeting with a senior executive who says, “So why is your budget this big? I thought we were relying on Twitter and Facebook and all that social media stuff more. And that’s free.” There’s a widespread myth out there that social media is free. It isn’t. For a social media marketing campaign you need people, time, and technology […]
6 Ways to Improve Email ROI
Got a great email marketing solution? Got a solid opt-in and scrubbed contact list? That’s half the battle to a great return on your email marketing investment. Here are six simple tips you can use to improve almost any email marketing effort. 1. Remember why it’s called a “message”. If you think of your email […]
CRM + Marketing Automation
Few organizations today could thrive if they relied solely on Rolodexes, paper lead sheets, or Outlook address books. Whether they use a SaaS solution like Zoho or Salesforce.com, or a robust customized CRM solution, most organizations are convinced that they’re getting an excellent result from their CRM investment. The question is, could they be getting […]