Archive for April, 2011
Saturday Morning Reads: What’s the Return on Investment (ROI) of Content Marketing?
As content marketing becomes a continually popular strategy to connect, engage, and hopefully provide value, there is no doubt that the question of return on investment will rear its head.
As you can imagine, content marketing takes time, planning, and effort. It is hard work. How then will content marketing find its rightful and respected place in our short-term, short-patience, short-strategy marketing world?
There is evidence revealing that shortsighted interests— just like with social media—are driving marketers to dive into content marketing with a tool first mindset. Cool tools are fun, sexy, and popular. Who wouldn’t want to be seen as all of that? There is just one little thing to consider, tools are worthless without objectives and strategies dictating which tools are required to meet a set goal.
The tools first philosophy is akin to buying a money pit with the intention to flip in it a down real estate market and then asking what went wrong when it does not sell.
Even More Goodness! Related Posts:
Tags: communications, Content Marketing, Content Marketing ROI, Content Marketing Strategy, Customer Experience Planning, Customer-Centric, Marketing | 
1 Comment »
What Integrated Marketing Is Not (Hint: It’s Not Integrated Tactics)
I just received an interesting comment on my “For Hire” post that asked:
“Are there really any leading authorities – aside from published authors – on integrated marketing and communications? There are a lot of self-promoters who claim expertise in what is usually “the obvious”.
This comment, while obviously an attempt to discredit my experience, made me realized that there are probably many marketing professionals out there that have the same misunderstanding and misperception when it comes to understanding the theory and benefits of true integration.
I want to help fix that.
From the dawn of its time, which would be about 1993, when the “Fathers of Integration” Schultz, Tannenbaum and Lauterborn wrote The New Marketing Paradigm: Integrated Marketing Communications, integration has always been based in customer-centric (putting the customer at the center of the organization) and data-driven marketing. Unfortunately, marketers conveniently ignored the customer-centric, data-driven part of integration. We’ll get to that in a bit…
Even More Goodness! Related Posts:
Tags: customer experience, Customer-Centric, don schultz, IMC, integrated marketing, integrated marketing communications, Jay Galbraith, Ranjay Gulati |
3 Comments »
Saturday Morning Reads: MADD Reading
I was going to read about social media tools that bring customers and companies together, but then I realized digging into that would take more time then I have this morning.
Instead, I am sharing what I have actually read this morning. This week’s reading is so inconsistent compared to how I normally prepare for this weekly endeavor (which to pick a topic and stick with it) that it seems to be a sudden flare up of MADD (marketing attention deficit disorder). Enjoy!
Jason Keath: Sometimes brilliant creative tells the whole story
Proves that smart advertising just might not be dead, just yet…
Mack Collier: Ford CMO Jim Farley: Social media leading to ‘massive cost savings’ for Ford
“As Jim explains above, social media is lowering the amount of money that Ford has to spend on traditional advertising. That’s money that can then be spent on product development, customer service, and other areas that improves the quality of the product, as well as customer satisfaction. Which ultimately…increases sales. So this is another example of social media working indirectly.”
Keep Reading…
Even More Goodness! Related Posts:
Tags: Marketing, social business, Social Media |
1 Comment »
Outside-In Thinking
A simple shift in thinking can have amazing beneficial results for customer and company.
The first time I heard of this story was from PR and communications expert and good friend, Leigh Fazzina. The lesson she shared is a poke between the eyes:
“Sometimes we need to change our strategy. If we always do what we’ve always done, then we will always get what we’ve always gotten.”
What’s holding you back from change?
Even More Goodness! Related Posts:
Dear CEO: Your Customers Really Want You To Know Them
Dear CEO:
The last two years have presented us with a rough economy and no doubt, many people—employees, stakeholders and customers alike—are feeling its tight squeeze and so are you. Layoffs, cutbacks, delayed product and service upgrades, lack of innovation, competitive pressure, unsure stockholders, lost supply chains, and more, likely keep you up at night or at least in the office for countless hours when you would rather be home with your family.
With or without a bad economy, the business tides have certainly shifted over the past five years.
Customers are now more vocal than ever when it comes to your brand and the promises made on its behalf. Yes, even B2B customers.
Keep Reading…
Even More Goodness! Related Posts:
The Harte of Marketing by Beth Harte is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.theharteofmarketing.com. [If you have a question about what you can use from this blog, click on the above Creative Commons link to learn more.]
