What’s the Future for Marketing in the Media Industry?

Like any business, the media industry evolves in cycles. In the past, there have been few job openings at media companies, but now, as content converges and more media companies are looking for ways to branch out and reach larger population bases, there is an increase in the availability of highly coveted marketing positions. However, the availability of new technologies and new developments in the media industry have created a demand for new kinds of experience, cultural knowledge and skills sets that candidates must be aware of if they wish to vye for such a position.

8 Collateral Marketing Items Every Small Business Needs

What's Your Story?

To remain competitive, you need to provide information about your company to employees, investors, existing and potential clients, media, and the general public on an ongoing basis. Your company's success depends on how well you communicate what you have to offer.

This, in turn, may depend on how well you prepare collateral items (brochures, newsletters, fact sheets, press releases, and other electronic and printed promotional materials), ranging from company and product fact sheets to biographies of key team members.

Every business should always have the following eight items on hand, ready to distribute.

Should You Cut Your Marketing Budget During a Recession?

Oh my, the sky is falling and we are in an economic downturn. It’s on the news and it is in the papers. Everywhere I turn we hear of the downward spiral of our economic state. I know what you are thinking; it's time to cut that marketing budget. Signs of recession are all around us. Let's start slashing costs and marketing is the first to go. Makes sense, right? No! Let me explain.

Don't you dare cut your marketing budget. That is one of the first mistakes businesses make during times of economic crisis.

It's time to get smarter about your marketing dollar and spend it to bring results. Sounds good doesn't it? However, I can hear you - how do you do it? If ever customer intelligence was important it's now.

Five trade show mistakes to avoid

Mistake #1: Not having a pre-game plan.

Trade shows are one of those things that sneak up on you. You’re going to have to be out of the office for a few days, you need everything shipped in advance and you’re juggling your regular work. But the prep work should be done months in advance, which you can still take action on the ideas you think will give you the bang for your buck.

You should have an action plan for pre show, the show itself and post show. Most people put some thought into the actual event but rarely do anything in advance to get attendees to their booth. You can do something traditional like an attendee bag insert or you could get creative and do something in the lobby of the hotel most attendees will be staying at. But do something.

Τα δεδομένα στο marketing χθες και σήμερα

Εν όψει της αυξανόμενης πολυπλοκότητας, της αδυσώπητης οικονομικής πίεσης και του ακόμη δυσκολότερου οικονομικού περιβάλλοντος, οι marketers προσπαθούν να αξιοποιήσουν τα νέα μέσα επικοινωνίας και να μετρήσουν τις επιπτώσεις τους μέσω νέων προσεγγίσεων και εργαλείων ανάλυσης. Οι περισσότεροι σημειώνουν πρόοδο. Ωστόσο, υπάρχει σταθερή ανάγκη να απαντήσουμε σε δυο φαινομενικά βασικά ερωτήματα. Αυτά τα ερωτήματα, που περιγράφονται στο παρόν άρθρο, πηγάζουν από την ουσία της αναζήτησης για την απόδοση των δαπανών μάρκετινγκ.

Τι ακριβώς επηρεάζει τους καταναλωτές σήμερα; 

Develop Your Annual Marketing Plan

In January many businesses sit down to revisit their business plan, but pay no attention to their marketing plan. There is never a better time than the end of the year or beginning of a new year to sit down and reflect on what worked for you and what didn't. It's also a great time to develop a marketing calendar for the upcoming year.

An annual marketing plan will assist you in figuring out what it is that you need to do, how to do it, and when to do it. This marketing plan should go hand-in-hand with your business plan and development.

How Brands Build Trust

Trust is the most critical component in building and maintaining a strong, emotionally driven and enduring brand. However, in a world of promotion-driven-marketing tactics, many brand owners forget that building trust is the only thing holding the relationship with the customer together.

Most marketers are in business to create demand and sell more stuff. They are rewarded on their skill and ability to help organizations sell. For most customers, selling is not a very trustworthy practice. Nobody likes to be sold, but people sure do love to buy. More than ever customers buy from brands they trust. At the beginning of any relationship, trust is the most difficult component to establish.

Big Brands Need to Understand Word of Mouth

“…the average American talks each day about roughly ten brands, and that the typical brand conversation lasts between three and five minutes. More that two thirds of these conversations involve a recommendation to buy, consider or avoid the brand,” from The Face-to-Facebook, Ed Keller and Brad Fey, 2012

“Typically, messages passed within tight, trusted networks have less reach but greater impact than those circulated through dispersed communities,” quoted by Keller & Fay from a 2010 McKinsey study on Word of Mouth.

The impact of positive word of mouth about products and services on purchase decisions and opinions is growing. This has been a disputed trend for some time now.  Some simply say that word of mouth has been around since the dawn of time and there’s nothing much new to respond to. Others claim that the efficacy of traditional marketing has forever slipped off of a cliff never to regain its footing. The truth lies in the middle – things have changed, word of mouth is more important today.

5 Social Media User Types and Tips For Marketers To Connect With Each One

When I make new connections on social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn I get excited because 9 times out of 10 I have either made a new friend with a similar interest or have found someone that I can either learn from, or help guide.

All too often we forget that the connections we make online are very similar to those we make offline.  If you are introduced to “Tim CEO”  in a business meeting and you can recognize that he doesn’t offer information freely and needs to be drawn out, then you’lllikely optimize your approach in a way that makes him at ease and gets him talking. Similarly, social media users with different personalities and proficiencies will require that little extra optimization to interact.

Common Forum Marketing Mistakes

Forum marketing is a solid and respectable way to meet people interested in your industry and then to share your knowledge with them. In the process you’ll likely (hopefully) make contact with individuals who will later become paying clients.

But there are some mistakes common to forum marketing. Here are the top eight:

1. Getting Offended
So another member disagrees with you and has clearly made you look the fool. You could engage in a never ending argument about why you’re right (or why your product is the best, etc.) but they won’t change their mind. People seldom do. And you certainly won’t be accomplishing your objective.

Strategic Marketing of Managing Expectations

“Happiness is in expectations management.”

Let’s try to apply this wisdom to Product Marketing and Marketing Strategy. For example, your company expects a product to generate specific and positive cash flow over a period of its life, and your customers expect the product to reliably perform functions you have promised them in your marketing communications.

I would like to pose that pro-active management of  your customers expectations will dramatically improve the probability of your product’s success.

It is important to take a look at the entire cycle of creation and management of expectations process:

Catch People in the Act of Doing Things Right

I'd like to say I was surprised by the wave of commentary triggered by my most recent HBR post, but I had a feeling it would get a big reaction. In the post, titled "It's More Important to Be Kind than Clever," I told the story of a touching gesture by a store manager at Panera Bread toward a customer undergoing chemotherapy, described the huge social-media phenomenon the gesture unleashed, and posed two simple questions: "What is it about business that makes it so hard to be kind? And what kind of businesspeople have we become when small acts of kindness feel so rare?"

Η εξίσωση του marketing, το περιεχόμενο και ο ρόλος του

Η κατανόηση των αναγκών και των προτεραιοτήτων του περιεχομένου marketing, για κάθε κανάλι, είναι σήμερα ιδιαίτερα κρίσιμο γεγονός για τη διαδικασία της αναδιάρθρωσης του marketing budget. Ενώ λοιπόν είναι απαραίτητος ο καθορισμός του περιεχομένου που χρησιμοποιούμε στα διάφορα κανάλια, θα πρέπει πάντα να προσεγγίζονται με στρατηγικό τρόπο και με ορίζοντα τους συνολικούς στόχους του marketing. Την ίδια στιγμή δεν μπορεί να αγνοηθεί το γεγονός ότι κάθε νέο ψηφιακό κανάλι φέρνει μαζί του νέες τεχνολογικές αλλά και δημοσιονομικές απαιτήσεις.

Communicating your Brand’s Story through Marketing Automation

You can use the fanciest of tools marketing automation has to offer (and most of you do), but if your brand isn’t being showcased as a part of your messaging, you’re missing the mark. The question then becomes, how do you tell a story that speaks to buyers but also conveys what your brand’s personality really is? Look around at some of the companies who are marketing to you.  Likely there are some you identify with that have a strong sense of who they are, while others, not so much.  Recently we saw an interesting battle of brands – Apple vs. Samsung.  Now that battle had nothing to do with public opinion, but as the two squared off you could certainly see the contrast between the two organizations.  Apple markets its products under the umbrella of its brands perception – and wins because of it.  Samsung, well, I simply don’t know what that perception is as they haven’t communicated their brand story quite as well.  How buyers see your organization matters, and for that reason we still have to consider brand – even in modern day conversational marketing.

The 5 Main Secrets of Social Business Marketing

Most organizations currently use the traditional business set up, which gives the executive ultimate control over business operations. That means that the executive makes all the critical business decisions alone. This is a relatively good business strategy although for it to function excellently; the executive has to be exceptionally good and experienced. A much better business strategy however, is social business. Instead of the executive holding complete control over an organization, social business distributes the management and operational powers to all the organization communities. These communities include employees, employers, customers, consultants, volunteers, customers, etc. They are all collectively involved in making the critical decisions in a company and running it. This is a very beneficial business strategy especially when it comes to marketing.

There is no social success without openness and transparency

Social marketing changes every day – new tools, new strategies, new best practices. So I had a chat with Adam Metz, VP of Business Development at The Social Concept, to talk about the state of social today. Adam has consulted with nearly 200 companies on how to acquire, manage, monetize, and retain customers from the social web. His first book, There Is No Secret Sauce, has sold or downloaded over 3000 copies, and his second, The Social Customer, recently hit #1 on the Amazon marketing charts.

Everyone is always talking about important social media is for brands and retailers but, in your opinion, has anybody really figured out a way to effectively measure social?

A Data-Driven Reality Check for Your Marketing Budget

In their book Sexy Little Numbers (Ogilvy & Mather with Crown Business, a division of Random House Inc., 2012), Dimitri Maex and Paul B. Brown explain ways to use data analysis to help grow your business. In the edited excerpt below, they take a data-driven approach to explaining why it can make sense to increase marketing budgets during an economic downturn.

When economic insecurity grips the world, the first question marketers often ask is, “How much do I need to spend on marketing right now?” In truth, they usually put it more like this: “How much can I cut my marketing budget?!?”

5 Ways to Incorporate the Human Element Into Your Marketing

Personality makes a brand stand out from the crowd.

How do you create the personal feel in a digital world? You create interaction and relationships with consumers that have the potential to be a customer. Consumers still buy from those they like and trust. If they don't know you, if your brand has no personality how can they relate to you?

It does not matter whether you are selling to the direct consumer , businesses or you are a not-for-profit looking for a way to increase donations - you must incorporate the human element.

Marketing Communication - How Much is Too Much?

Can we over communicate with clients and customers?

My short answer is yes. We used to have to worry about the number of emails that we sent out to ensure that didn't bombard those interested in our products or services to the point that they would unsubscribe. We tried to measure how much is too much and how often did our subscribers want to hear from us. Now, while this is still something we all must be concerned with when it comes to marketing over communication has become even more of an issue. Technology has made us more efficent with our marketing, but perhaps it's time to consider that maybe it's made us less effective.

Social Selling Blurs the Line Between Marketing and Sales

In the past, marketing and sales had distinct roles. Marketing generated leads while sales converted those leads. Social media has blurred these separate responsibilities because applications like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter have given every salesperson the potential to be an individual marketer. Innovative companies are seizing this social selling opportunity by implementing a new type of collaboration between marketing and sales. This collaborative method can be seen in a social selling pilot by IBM, which reported a 400 percent sales increase.