Online Marketing for Marketers

I spent much of May and June on the road in eight cities with the Online Marketing Summit
Whistle Stop tour. It was great to get out and meet with many of you, and other smart digital marketers.

Here’s seven observations/trends:

1. Email rocks. It’s still a very important part of the online marketing mix. In fact, email this year has been elevated to a sort of celebrity status. Lots of executive attention due to the low cost and high return. It’s the biggest revenue driver in the toolkit.

2. No amount of celebrity can trump the realities of lean budgets. (Darn!) Marketing budgets do not seem to be growing, but the investment continues to be strong with email and search, where the immediate revenue and return is. For email, there isn’t so much innovation as preservation: Preserving our jobs and our team, growing our database assets, tying the various eCRM elements together (even loosely) and maintaining our list hygiene and deliverability budgets. Read more

My good friend, Aaron Kahlow, posed an interesting question during the Online Marketing Summit yesterday afternoon in Portland, OR. Aaron asked:

If a client came to you with $1 million to invest in a single Internet marketing channel, which one would you choose?

Obviously, the question is a bit ridiculous (given that there’s no additional detail provided), but it’s designed to elicit an “off-the-cuff” response to a challenging scenario. The answer, of course, is “it depends” - and therein lies the rub. On what does it depend? Well… That’s what I hope to answer with this blog post. My goal is not to solve the issue for an individual campaign, but from a very strategic level - asking questions like “where is the company today and where does it want to get to?” then applying those answers to the selection of marketing opportunities. Let’s start by defining the macro-level channels themselves, then examine how we’d reach the right conclusions. Read more

In the soft and squishy science that is marketing, it doesn’t take much to declare a trend. My own rule of thumb is to say that two seemingly related data points drifting past me in the cultural flotsam within one week of each other are enough to declare a full-blown Mega-Trend. And so I declare the trend of Influencer Demystification, whereby we marketers finally admit that we have glutted ourselves on an idea that, while tasty and filling, may be half-baked, and is therefore causing some gastrointestinal distress. I refer to the idea that mass marketing has now been replaced by the much more refined business of targeting key influencers. Read more

In a recent blog post, Dell revealed that it has generated more than $2 million in revenue from @DellOutlet, one of its many Twitter sites. Late last year, there were some headlines about Dell crossing the $1 million mark via Twitter and it’s only gotten bigger since then.

How did they do it? With a coupon code! Read more

I am a big fan of Kohl’s. In 20 years they’ve risen from just 66 to more than 1,000 stores. Since the beginning of the decade, their stock has outperformed competitors’, increasing 28% to Target’s 6% and Wal-Mart’s decrease of 28%. And, they’ve demonstrated a very admirable commitment to our environment, having recently been named by the EPA as the number one purchaser of green power among retailers. Plus, I like their stores and apparel!

So if I “expect great things” from Kohl’s, it’s only because they themselves have set the bar so high. This is why I was disappointed to learn about the lack of transparency exhibited by one of their marketing executives and an agency exec on Kohl’s Facebook Fan page. Read more

In the spirit of my most recent post on Beers that Twitter, here’s a quick look at some more active wine brands that Twitter. What’s interesting to me is that twinos (Top 12 wine twitterers) seem to get a lot more traction than the wine brands themselves.

Wines that Twitter… Read more

This morning I stumbled upon an article on Adage.com that specifically addresses that brand awareness is only half the battle.

We all know the brand name Aflac. We all know that their mascot is a duck with a distinguishable message… “quack.” But how many of us actually know what the brand represents?

Aflac has been taking a new approach to marketing their brand in the past few months. After bringing in a new CMO and coming to terms with the general public’s inability to channel Dr. Doolittle in their reading and interpretation of the “quack” proclamation of our Alfac feathered friend, their newly refined messaging identifies the duck with an insurance company, rather than a sound effect from the farm. Read more

You know the situation, we have all been there. The sales numbers for the month or quarter are down, and the VP of Sales just walked in your office and said, “Our numbers are down this period, we need to get them up quick, send out an ‘extra’ email to our house file and prospects.” You know that typically a single email will generate $20,000 in profits, pushing your sales number above the quota.

How do you respond? There are two ways to look at this dilemma – short term and long term.

Read more

Takeaways on a speech by C. K. Prahalad speaker at the World Innovation Forum.

So we are beginning to see the impact of current economic crisis. The bad news is there is going to be significantly more regulation in the future but the good news is there is a tremendous access to global talent like we have never seen before. New competitors who we did not think could play on the global stage from India, China Brazil etc are coming online. In fact for the first time 4 billion people will be connected - that’s going to have an impact. 4 billion people who want to be part of the market! Read more

We all use Twitter. So do all our prospects and customers.

I made that argument to our CFO and CEO the other day and was met with a rousing chorus of guffaws and comments about teenagers and people with too much time on their hands.

But it turns out, that is the critical importance of Twitter, we are all users, just not in the way you might think. Read more