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Millennials now represent the largest generation, having finally overtaken the painfully self-regarding, drug-favoring boomers. Which means that brands want to attract them, move them and inspire them to higher levels of loyalty. Millennials are, though, supposed to be fickle beings. How can you get them to be committed? In the week that Amazon finally takes over Whole Foods, CEO Jeff Bezos showed how.
With the rise of so many digital options, the marketing landscape has become extremely complex. New buzzwords crop up every day and new tools promise to be the next best technology to drive growth. Despite all of this, the fundamentals of business haven’t changed. In fact, stepping back and reflecting on the basic goals of growth can often get lost when smitten by new powerful data-driven tools, automation rules and new social and digital options. While the tools marketers leverage today are often changing rapidly, what was true in 1950 is still true today when it comes to successful businesses. Every successful business needs new customer trials, proper and quality communication with its customers, and needs to maintain a positive reputation in its community.In a recent survey my company conducted with our client base of thousands of local businesses, we determined that the most successful businesses were focused on these three business fundamentals when making marketing decisions. We spoke with small business owners throughout the country in face-to-face interviews to learn about their time in business, positive and negative factors that influence their companies, marketing and customer loyalty, and more. While some used different tools to accomplish their goals, all were using some form of modern and traditional means to execute their strategies....
The "hub and spoke" model is not a new concept in marketing, either: I'm not the genius who came up with it. I'm just the dude trying to illustrate it and advocate for it using this comparison with the Disney theme parks. The idea has been around for so long because it works: it is a fantastic way to envision our overall marketing strategies and how each component works together to reinforce the central ideas of our businesses. It can help us to ensure we aren't leaving out or neglecting one or more of those components so that we always know that our marketing machine is working at its most efficient....
Interpublic’s Hill Holliday is out with a new brand research study, the Brand Edge Index, that takes a deep dive into various product categories and ranks top brands based on proprietary surveys. The first installment looks at the home appliance category and rates brands in six subsets: vacuums, dishwashers, washer machines, ranges, refrigerators, and grills. The rankings are based on 5,600 survey respondents who assessed 45 brands. Top-ranked brands included Dyson (vacuums), Bosch (dishwashers), Samsung (both washing machines and refrigerators), and Weber (grills). The report found that niche brands and disruptive brands frequently outrank longstanding first-to-market brands. Awareness doesn’t always lead to preference or advantage. In part, that’s explained by the survey finding that reliability is the most important attribute for home appliance brands....
Now that we're well into 2017, are you checking items off your marketing to-do list? Or, like many of us procrastinators, do you have a to-do list that consists of just one item: "Make 2017 marketing to-do list"? If the latter is the case, IBM has you covered. The software company has put together an infographic guide to help marketers prioritize their efforts this year, and it also explains the benefits that each idea can have on your program. For example, stories are up to 22 times more memorable than facts or figures alone, the infographic claims, and it gives tips on how to captivate your audience with better stories this year....
If you’ve been in marketing for more than a hot second, you’ve no doubt heard of the Buyer’s Journey. What you might not know is that this journey has dramatically changed in the last decade. 67% of the buyer’s journey is now digital. Today’s buyer is up to 90% of the way through their buying journey before they reach out to the vendor.Interactive content is front and center in this digital shift in the Buyer’s Journey. As companies produce more and more content in order to satisfy today’s self-guided buyer, only the most engaging content will stand out and get noticed. Why does interactive content stand out in the sea of content online today? Because it doesn’t talk at buyers – it talks with them. There are interactive content types for every stage in the Buyer’s Journey: Awareness, Evaluation, and Decision-making. However, it plays an especially important role for both the buyer and the business in the Awareness stage....
When a book telling people to throw away almost everything they own becomes a best seller and the start of a spiritual movement, it’s a good indication we’re consuming too much. But it’s hard to reconcile this idea when so many families, even in some of the world’s most durable economies, feel like they are barely getting by. Households have never had so many material goods, yet we hear constant reports of economic anxiety and feelings of hopelessness. The problem is livings standards. Our expectations of what we should own have increased—but incomes, for many of us, haven’t kept up. The disconnect leaves households vulnerable and struggling. There is no doubt living standards are rising. People around the world, of all income levels, are living longer, finding more leisure time, and enjoying more luxuries than at any time in history. Remember, only 30 years ago, air-conditioning was a luxury. Now it’s practically seen as a necessity....
Forrester’s data shows that marketers have their sights set on improving loyalty in 2016. In fact, 80% of marketing decision-makers at large organizations call it a top marketing priority for the next year. And, my recent conversations with loyalty marketers reveal a desire to shift from transactional loyalty to more emotional loyalty. Marketers want a deeper, lasting relationship with customers that tugs on both emotions and purse strings. But are they actually executing on it? We surveyed 60 loyalty marketers from North America to find out.
From a strategy perspective, the marketers we surveyed aspire to, and are investing in, evolving their loyalty programs and initiatives. They turn to loyalty to drive multiple business outcomes, including retaining existing customers (of course), engaging customers, improving customer lifetime value, enriching relationships and even acquiring new customers.
Plus, they are invested in their current approach: literally and figuratively. Nearly 80% of survey respondents indicated that their programs and initiatives are effective at retaining existing customers, and a majority thinks they are effective at boosting customer profitability, improving share of wallet, enriching relationships and enhancing the customer experience. And, the majority of respondents plan to increase investments in important components of advanced loyalty, such as customer experience, analytics,...
Subscription services have become popular among online shoppers, but those same shoppers are also abandoning these services.
Through these subscriptions, customers make recurring payments and receive order shipments at regular intervals, and they have become popular because they let consumers refill products they need to replenish often, such as health and beauty products.
These services typically personalize orders based on a shopper's interests and style, which the companies often learn through connected social media accounts and quizzes. This experience mirrors the personalized service customers would get inside brick-and-mortar stores from sales associates.
So interest in these services has remained high, as 10% of U.S. shoppers have enrolled in one, and another 33% would consider doing so, according to the latest UPS Pulse of the Online Shopper report.
But satisfaction in these services is dropping, as 61% of those who have signed up have since canceled. And there are four main reasons why....
On Monday, Gucci will release its latest fashion film, a Gia Coppola-directed spin on the tragic Greek love story of Orpheus and Eurydice, set in present-day New York City and starring Lou Doillon, Marcel Castenmiller, Laura Love, Rocco Di Gregorio, among others. Coppola and stylist Arianne Phillips worked in tandem with Alessandro Michele to capture the dreamy feel of the hot-shot creative director’s Pre-Fall 2016 collection, which the film — shot across five locations and broken into four episodes — was created to promote. Michele even designed a custom pink 10-foot long wedding veil for Doillon’s character.
But while shorts like these are nothing new, the genesis of the film was fairly unorthodox. Instead of tapping its internal marketing team or a traditional agency, Gucci worked with 23 Stories, the branded-content studio launched in January 2015 by publishing giant Condé Nast. Beyond Gucci’s own marketing channels, the film will be distributed through six Condé Nast (US) properties — Vogue, GQ, the New Yorker, W, Vanity Fair and Pitchfork — which, together, attracted a total of about 32 million unique visitors in April 2016, according to Comscore. Beyond their URLs, those six publications boast a cumulative social media following of nearly 67 million. The film will also be promoted via Vogue China and Vogue Japan. Gucci and Condé Nast suggest the project is bigger and more ambitious than anything else either party has previously done in the branded-content space, both in terms of the level of talent recruited and also the scale of the production.
To be sure, the Kering-owned Italian luxury house has the resources and capacity to create video content like this on its own. But Gucci is after Condé Nast’s larger, and presumably more diverse, audience. For instance, Gucci has 8.8 million followers on Instagram while these six titles combined have about 18.5 million. In this deal, Pitchfork’s millennial male followers — an important demographic for Gucci under Michele — are as crucial to the equation as W’s affluent luxury consumer....
Harry Brignull, a user-experience consultant in Britain who helps websites and apps develop consumer-friendly features, has a professional bone to pick with sites that seem to maneuver people into signing up for services they might not actually want.
He even has a name for the exploitative techniques: “dark patterns.” To him, these are debased versions of the typical sign-up, sharing, shopping, checkout and download processes that are standard practice online.
“It’s a term for patterns that are manipulative, that you are doing on purpose to get one over on users,” Mr. Brignull said when I recently called him.
A few years ago, Mr. Brignull started a site called darkpatterns.org to call attention to the practices....
Most inbound marketers spend a lot of time creating content, and it can be a struggle to constantly come up with fresh content ideas. However, the key to creating effective inbound content is to know what you have already in your content inventory. Creating an inventory of effective content means mapping your content to the appropriate stage in The Buyer’s Journey. Once you know what content you already have, you can analyze the entire library to identify opportunities and holes, and then create a new content offer that fills out the gaps in your content library. For those of you up to the task of doing a content mapping yourself, read on! This blog post will cover a three-step process to help you create the content you need to align with The Buyer’s Journey. Let’s get started!...
The way I see it, demand generation is the direct opposite of the old-school cold-calling approach. It's the process of turning cold leads into warm leads, then guiding those warm leads down your funnel towards a sales conversation. And for those who fall out of the funnel, it's the process of establishing regular touch points with them until they (a) become customers or (b) tell you to get lost.
What demand generation is not is a campaign. The goal of demand generation is to establish relationships, some of which can go on for months or even years before the prospect is ready to enter a sales conversation....
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In this post – 5 Steps to Restart, Recharge and Revive Your Marketing Right Now! – I introduced an aggressive initiative to help any business owner struggling to stay on plan with their marketing for the year. The idea is to take the mid-point of the year and get a fresh restart. While the previous post kicked off the idea today’s post 1 of 5 Summer Restart is meant to get us down to business. Ready to cover the five steps to restart your marketing plan for the year? QOh, side note – I love summer – I embrace the heat and here in the Midwest the humidity – so since we are talking about restarting your plan as Summer kicks in I thought I would give this entire series a Summer motif. Thus the watermelon in the image above....
Keyword intent represents the user’s purpose for the search. It’s what the user is likely to do when searching for a particular phrase. Or, to be more precise, it’s what we think the user is likely to do, since we cannot always be sure. Intent is undoubtedly the most important concept when it comes to keyword research. It helps you meet the users’ needs better and match your content and landing pages to their intentions. Analyzing keywords by intent is thus your first step when diagnosing conversion issues when it comes to search referrals....
Q: You have created something called “Progressive Persona Profiling”. Can you elaborate on what this is and how it solves the two issues mentioned above? Levine: At Kern, we created “The Modern Buyer’s 10-Stage Journey” as “Progressive Persona Profiling” tool (see below). Some may consider it presumptuous of us to define all buyer journeys for all products or services into these 10 stages. But what is important is that the journey isn’t linear, and that many of these stages can be traversed in seconds or together in groups. Also, some stages, such as Stage 7: Social Research, can take place at every stage. The more complex the service or solution, such as in large B2B marketing endeavors, the longer the buyer’s journey or buy-cycle will be. The benefit of the new progressive persona profiling is that it integrates a more complete buying journey within a more dynamic tool....
As Big Data matures beyond the hype, organizations are re-evaluating how they approach it. Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, CMO at Mozilla, describes an interesting strategic shift from “Big Data” to “Lean Data”: “For growth-minded companies, collecting customer data for the sake of collecting data is more risk than the rewards can usually justify. Instead, we should be looking for ways to collect less data and go lean. Why? Because our collection tools create expensive overhead and risks that are impacting the trust of our customers in a negative way… “For the most part, compiling bigger and more complex sets of customer data will not lead to the big profit and marketshare breakthroughs that Big Data promises. Instead, we marketers must learn to live and think lean. The twin false gods of Big Data and MarTech will continue to encourage thousands of marketers to gather all the data they can wielding an ever-expanding arsenal of tools to sift through it all, with little discussion about whether the mad scramble to vacuum up customer info is worth the trouble, expense, and risk…...
Corporate chief marketing officers (CMO) should also come to appreciate the connection between authority and accountability. That’s according to a new survey conducted by Accenture Strategy that found the CMO is the most likely member of the executive team to be fired when a company fails to hit its growth target. Is this fair? Absolutely — when you ask the CEO. The survey results reveal 50 percent of CEOs view the top marketer as the primary driver of “disruptive growth.” This involves launching products into new areas, expanding service models or increasing revenue through inventive approaches to data. Yet, the more than 800 CMOs who also participated in the same study spend only 37 percent of their time on innovation. The majority of their effort is focused on managing traditional marketing activities....
Marketers spend a lot of time trying to nail down abstract concepts. They're tasked with turning brainstorming sessions and comments sourced during focus groups into campaigns that sum up everything about a brand's identity in a neat, tidy, and most importantly, interesting way.
But what if a consumer could walk into a room and fully experience your brand with all their senses? Pop-up events offer just that -- the chance for consumers to get up close and personal with their favorite companies in a truly immersive setting.
In their simplest form, pop-up events are temporary retail spaces that give companies the opportunity to sell their products in an environment completely designed and controlled by them. Since they're temporary, they offer a relatively low-cost and low-commitment way for companies to take creative risks, generate buzz, and introduce their brands to new audiences.
Consumers love the lure of exclusivity, and brands love the unmatched opportunity for experimentation. To inspire your next branded experience, we've curated a list of 15 innovative and visually stunning pop-up events....
What’s the difference between The New York Times, and, say, DNAInfo New York? Maybe about $20. The Times, along with outlets like ESPN, Hearst, Discovery Communications, Gannett, Slate, and ABC, all consider themselves “premium” media. That means they can charge advertisers “premium prices,” as compared to the great mass of news and entertainment sites out there, like a DNAInfo, a site covering local news across New York City’s five boroughs. That $20 or so difference is how much more the Times can charge for access to each thousand of its readers (a cost-per-thousand rate, or CPM) as compared to lesser-branded sites. It’s just an approximation but it holds true across major media: Big branded media companies believe that the “context” they provide and their “quality audiences” justifies higher-than-average rates. Their pitch to advertisers goes like this: We’ve got tons of readers, and they’re smart and affluent. They really trust us. And when they’re on our site, they’re paying attention. In a word, their argument is a single word: effectiveness. With the publication of a new comScore study this morning, they just got more justification for their justifying. Entitled “The Halo Effect: How Advertising on Premium Publishers Drives Higher Ad Effectiveness,” comScore puts a few numbers on that effectiveness.Its key word: lift....
... because fake reviews are not only immoral -- but also illegal
It's never been easy to earn customer's favor, especially in terms of explicit public appraisal like an online review. As responsible business owners we all strive (or at least we should) to encourage our clientele to share their experience with our service and product. Unfortunately, waiting for a natural regular inflow of customer reviews is a "plan" that will often bring rather disappointing results.
The thing is You Need a Strategy. A strategy that is better than the one already adopted by your strong competitors. A strategy that will turn your customers into your private brand advocates. It will not take overnight to plan it and execute it but it will make a difference in the long run.
Having your own Review Gathering Strategy is important. So, if you are clueless of how your business could benefit from it, you've finally found out the reason why you suck at securing customer reviews, now you only need to work your way around it....
A one-star rated product listed on Amazon.com Inc.’s site sells better than a product with no reviews or ratings at all, said Chad Brandon, key account manager of Amazon for athletic footwear manufacturer Asics.
When it comes to new products on an online marketplace, reviews matter more than price, said Fahim Naim, founder of e-commerce consulting firm eShopportunity. Those insights were shared at the “Amazon & Me” workshop this week at the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition in Chicago.
Brandon and Nahim both suggested that first-party Amazon sellers, which are manufacturers that sell wholesale to Amazon, utilize Amazon Vine. The Amazon service puts products in front of customers to review. Amazon selects customers based on their reviewer ranks, "which is a reflection of the quality and helpfulness of their reviews as judged by other Amazon customers," according to Amazon. Sellers pay Amazon a fee for the service and can't influence whether the rating is positive or negative. Customers aren't paid to write reviews....
BRANDED CONTENT: A SHORTSIGHTED CON But branded content isn't a long game. There are several reasons why. The first issue is intent. The essence of branded content is deliberately blurring the line between editorial content and advertising. Hiding your true colors is never a good idea. Another issue is the logic behind branded content itself. It’s misleading to use a totally different set of qualities—good stories—to sell a product that has intrinsically nothing to do with these qualities. Hiring a top filmmaker won’t improve the quality of your energy drink. Brands cannot deliver what they advertise. Shoes or coffee can never live up to their brands’ promises—they are just shoes and coffee. You could even say that the better the stories, the more dishonest the companies are being.
A camouflage strategy also complicates an already too complex world driven by hidden agendas. Even well-informed people who are able to both enjoy branded content and take it with a grain of salt will subliminally become accustomed to the new branded content standard—not to mention more vulnerable groups such as kids and adolescents. And what about the stories no one wants to hear, stories incapable of selling something? People are more likely to follow a happy, undemanding brand instead of bonding with real people and real-world problems. A brand will never ask you for help. It won’t confront you with difficulties or opposing views....
Now to be honest, sometimes the resources they send are great, and from time to time I’ll even link to them.
But what would go SO much better would be if someone offered me something, anything related to what I’m working on.
So, in light of this movement towards depersonalization, I’m going to pitch you all on how you can engage with people BEFORE demanding something from them, as well as give you some ideas for what you can offer in that outreach email.
Here are 11 ways to build a relationship before asking for something in return.
Social strategy. Digital strategy. Mobile strategy. Content strategy. Everyday we’re being urged to create a new strategy. But with all the chatter about new channels, it seems we may have lost sight of the concept of an overall Marketing Strategy. And this gap has huge implications for marketing effectiveness. The tactical programs we create need to rest on a single foundation, otherwise we’re just sending dollars out the door. Case in point, the biannual CMO Survey just released by Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, the American Marketing Association and Deloitte revealed that “marketers are expected to nearly double their social media spending in the next five years even though most can't show the impact of social on their business.”
Ya’ll as we say here in Texas, social media, direct marketing, public relations, advertising, etc., are not strategies -- these are tactics, and each of these tactics can potentially be deployed to support any number of strategic options. Marketers, I issue you a call to arms, it’s time to get serious about marketing strategy.
Marketing strategy, not a channel or touchpoint or tactic, is how your organization will achieve its mission. It is the critical link between marketing objectives and marketing programs and tactics. Your strategy selection (and just as importantly what is not selected) provides focus and enables your organization to concentrate limited resources on building core competencies that in turn create the sustainable competitive advantage needed to pursue and secure the best revenue opportunities....
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Think responsibly-farmed salmon and cheaper!