Category: Marketing

Can You Recite Your Marketing Plan in a Few Sentences?

With all the choices available to marketers in 2019, it’s no surprise to me that many business and marketing professionals are feeling a bit overwhelmed or confused about their marketing efforts.

It can be helpful to review four basic questions of marketing:

Market: Who are you trying to reach?

Message: What are you trying to communicate to them?

Media: How are you attempting to reach them?

Measurement: How do you know if it working?

I call this the four M’s of marketing. If you can succinctly answer these four questions, you are well on your way.

It seems so simple… until you try it. Don’t get too bogged down on question 3.

If you have these 4 in a good place, next weave in your statement about schedule and budget. What’s consistent year over year and what are you testing?

 

 

Improving Conversions and the Tracking of Customer’s Experiences

Most companies want to use digital marketing intelligence to improve conversion and identify opportunities like shopping cart abandonment or other behavior-based events to improve their potential customer’s digital experience.

Perhaps you are looking for more from your customer experience tracking software?

Glassbox, a leading enterprise Digital Customer Management solution provider, announced today that a patent for their technology to record web sessions was approved by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

Among other things, this technology may be used to help marketers optimize the customer journey to maximize experiences that convert. The platform allows users to “capture, index, search, retrieve, replay and drive real-time machine learning-driven insights from data related to digital customer journeys.”

The technology also enables Tealeaf customers to migrate to Glassbox Cloud without losing any visibility into their production environments. (Tealeaf is IBM’s digital solution to customer retention issues.)

While admittedly, I don’t pretend to understand how it works, this appears to be a new breakthrough tool in the marketer’s toolbox.

When Technology Moves Faster than Company Culture

When technology moves as fast as it does, sometimes it is hard to keep up.

Sometimes many of us want to dig our heels in and just say “slow down or stop.”

I think acceptance of the new technologies takes a certain mindset and openness that is important to embrace. Most change is met with resistance.

Other times there is change just because someone feels “we should!” I see this all the time in marketing. Chasing the bright and shiny new thing.

In fact, I can think of so many “cutting edge” technologies that have come and gone. At times, when a new technology rolls out, a lot of people have rotten things to say about it. I’m remembering the grouching about fax machines, answering machines, and email.

Each one of those technologies were taken down by spam… marketing spam too. Mass faxing, robo calling and email blasts. Ugh! Using one to one marketing methods as a mass media is so annoying to the receiver that the response rates drop like someone’s junk mail into the trash.

When copy machines first became available all over the workforce, I can’t tell you how many jokes would be photocopied… or people’s face, or hands or… Seems silly now.

Communication changes like dial-up internet moved to DSL over the phone lines, then internet over cable lines and wireless and fiber and satellite. Each time the equipment became quickly outdated and it took some time for the software to get updated and in sync. Sometimes it feels like some companies are still on DSL (I doubt dial up?! right??)

With each new change there are so few standards and a lot of silos!

With the more recent artificial intelligence and virtual reality there is new “leading state-of-the-art” technology (or maybe that is OLD news and I’m really behind) there are new challenges. 5G and driverless cars still seems out there to me.

Even blogging seems so 90’s to many. Podcasting, will also well established, is still a mystery to many. Social media seems ubiquitous, but not to everyone. Other’s have tried it and moved on.

Meanwhile marketing a company, a product or brand continues to be a challenge. You must meet your target market with the right message using the media that they embrace (not you embrace) and constantly measure to make sure you’re hitting the mark.

This week I learned how to use a new application. GLIP. When I first heard about it, I felt my resistance.

Isn’t this just like (fill in the blank) slack, basecamp, campfire, flock, evernote, doodle, zoom, skype, drive and so on? Well, yes and no. One important difference. My new client uses GLIP. So I downloaded GLIP and learned it. Because that is the right reason to do it. Meet the customer where the customer is. Not where I am or we are. Right?

I’m sure we all find it increasingly difficult to meet the challenges of answering clients on email, text, phone, or through various social media like direct messages on Facebook Messenger, LinkedIn Messaging, Direct Twitter or connecting thru their favorite Zoom/Skype/Duo/FB video chat app.

Sometimes I feel I am not as productive as I used to be. And I’m more sensitive about not being timely in getting back to people. I think I have acquired a bit of ADHD just so I don’t miss an important message or call. I know I’m not the only one struggling with this.

What do you do to stay current?

Here’s a website that I like to follow: https://www.controlaltachieve.com/ It is more education focused than marketing focused, but definitely links to cool resources and new technologies that I can use everyday to stay current.

And another to keep my perspective and a sense of humor! https://marketoonist.com/

 

Google Apps – the Pros and Cons

I bet you love the Google Apps as much as I do.  (And, maybe like me, you at times hate them?!?)

I especially love the popular ones  the Google apps. Gmail. Drive. Alerts. Search. Analytics. Images. Calendar.

There are many that I personally (and professionally) use every day. I hate when I rely too much on them. With all the power and nuances of apps within the apps, it’s easy to make them part of your daily work process. Do you use the features inside Drive with Docs, Presentation, Sheets and more. Docs is how I was able to write my Branding & Marketing book called Simple Steps, Big Results. It made it so simple to collaborate!

I want to embrace them all. But I have to continue to remind myself that there are downsides to these FREE apps as well.

  • “If it’s a free service, YOU are the product.” I think we are all familiar with this concept. Sometimes just giving your email to get a white paper or article and instead, you realize you’ve downloaded the “lead magnet”.   Using a product or service is even more. But RELYING on it. Well, that leads me to the next downside:
  • Sometimes free services sometimes dry up and go away. Who remembers Google Wave? Buzz? Google Places? Google Local? Feedburner? (This one refuses to be discarded!)
  • Sometimes the Google version isn’t nearly what other free competitors provide. (Google Sites, Google’s Blogger and BlogSpot, vs WordPress.) Getting used to working with a Google app makes it harder to switch to something that is actually better. I started this blog in Blogger in 2006 and moved it 2 1/2 years later into WordPress. I’m thankful that I did, but it was definitely a process to move all those posts and photos at that time! (Now it’s much easier with import/export!)

I am reminded that in just a few days, Google Plus will be a thing of the past. Of course I have a G+ account. One for me professionally, one personally, one for the business… etc. Hmm. I found that it never grew like say Linked In or Twitter. But because it was Google, I filled out the account and posted.

Since Google Plus shuts down April 2, this becomes just the latest Google app to be discontinued. If you have a lot of content, you’ll want to beat the rush and start on March 31 to download and offload your content.