5 marketing approaches from Harry Gordon Selfridge that still matter today
I've been following the Selfridges TV series and, although it's great, there's something that really bugs me about it. It feels like, as marketers, we spend a lot of time re-learning how to do marketing well? In case you've not seen it, the simplistic take on what Harry Gordon Selfridge believed is to… build your business (and so your promotion of it) around the customer.
Are we lost?
Over 100 years ago, retailers such as Harry Gordon Selfridge and John Wanamaker - credited with being the inventor of advertising and a marketing genius, alongside pioneering advertising men such as Claude C Hopkins who wrote Scientific Advertising in 1923 - seem to have had marketing licked. Browse popular marketing sites today though, and you'll see these lessons being shared as…
No pain. No gain... Take time out to create an effective contact management plan
From working in different sizes of organisations, it is clear that ‘Contact Management Strategy’ is still an unmet aspiration, often accompanied by other buzzwords like ‘Channel Strategy”, “Multi-Channel Strategy” and “Customer Journey Mapping”.
Why solid contact management plans are needed
From what I see, it’s questionable if the planning or implementation of contact management is as effective it could or should be across many organisations. It seems that while the need is recognised, time is not set aside to create a contact management plan, integrated across customer touchpoints. In this post, I'll reference what is needed, that is, to create a framework and planning tool to plan and roll-out the communication strategy, aligned to the business goals which may include conversion, gaining more customer…
S**t happens...
There's a lot of discussion in the press after the hacking of Burger King's Twitter account, and more recently the same has happened to Jeep, as it has many brands before. What are the implications?
It's time for brands to step up
The talk now of course is about security, protecting brands that use Twitter enabling multi-factor authentication (as Facebook do) and so on. We need to make it *safe*. Haha - Are you kidding me, aren't we missing the point? Do brands need armbands and guarantees before they feel safe in the murky and uncontrollable world of social media? This issue of security is symptomatic of the bigger problem, I feel.
Let's be clear here, it's not Twitter's 'fault', they provide a free service for us all to use, if they can provide additional free features, then great (paid ones if we want…
Ideas to improve the effectiveness of marketing using social media marketing platforms
Social media marketing is important; enough has been said on the matter. On the surface, many facets of social media marketing through platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ seem simple. But effective marketing goes deeper than that. Executing this marketing is a more nuanced affair. It isn't simply a matter of "doing it," there has to be a clear goal in mind, with an overarching ethos and objectives that align with that.
It’s not always a matter of avoiding doing it “the wrong way.” Doing the “right thing” the wrong way can be just as worthless, so let’s let's look at some common misconceptions about how to go about marketing on social media.
1. Myth: update constantly
A social channel with nothing on it is a dead one, and nobody will want…
Buyometrics’ success formula for 7% click rates on daily emails
Email campaigns with unique open rates of 30% and unique click rates of 7% beat email marketing benchmarks and represent great performance that any campaign manager would be happy with. Now try doing that for a daily email across your entire customer database...
That’s harder, but it’s a reality for the Buyometric Daily Deal campaigns. Buyometric are letting me lift the lid on their success formula.
The corner-stone is using highly dynamic and automated deal content targeting driven from a predictive algorithm which factors in several signals about what will most likely appeal to subscribers.
It starts with collecting user preference information after signup. Providing preference information is optional after the signup, yet Buyometric get a massive 78% of new signups to complete this optional step. Its all down to the incredibly smooth user experience, I’ve previously posted about how this works…
How do you bridge the gap between email's value and the failure to recognise this value?
As a marketer, what do you associate with email marketing?
The traditional media impression is one of an ageing Labrador: reliable, steady, still capable of doing a good job, but not really where the action is these days.
And then there's the go-getting reality.
Here are some key numbers that popped out of the UK DMA's recent National Email Client Report, which surveyed 250 brand marketers on how they feel about email marketing and its role, how they use it and what results they're getting…
Is email still relevant in a multichannel, mobile and social world?
89% said email marketing is "important" or
"very important" to their organisation.
It’s just about those traditional generic promotions and newsletters, though?
One-size-fits-all…
It’s a perennial dilemma for email marketers, what's our best tactic to boost revenue?
For some companies, the only way they are increasing revenue is growing the size of the email list to give a corresponding rise in revenue. While an increase in subscribers will undoubtedly improve revenue, we all know that only growing your database can lead to a declining scale of effectiveness over time as open rates drop and the number of inactive subscribers grow.
So what are the alternatives?
This article will look at those key practices for improving returns from email marketing that should be on every marketers list:
Database growth
Deliverability improvements
Open Rate (OR)
Click Through Rate (CTR) & Conversion Rate (CVR) and show you where your time and budget should be spent.
So let’s start by taking a look at a fairly standard situation and see what effect on the bottom line each tactic has.
We’ll start from this baseline: a retailer makes £38,880…
Using social media monitoring to evaluate the success of your digital marketing campaigns and reach your goals
When planning your digital marketing strategy or campaigns, you probably have a range of targets and goals for social media in mind that you are hoping to achieve, and that will help you measure your success. But how do you assess whether you are reaching these goals in practice? In this post I will outline the type of goals to consider and tools and techniques to assess success.
For example, you might consider one or a combination of the following as goals when approaching integrating social in your business:
Increase in followers/fans
Increase in requests for information
Increase in leads
Increase in sales (of a specific product/service, or of everything, or perhaps in a specific market).
Social media monitoring allows you to add another string to your bow, so to speak, by allowing you to…
The Age of Context - our Anticipatory and Personalised future
A great reminder from tech commentator Robert Scoble speaking to a recent conference showing how digital marketers should create experiences in context.
According to Scoble, context is…
Knowing your customer in deep detail
A personalised experience based on where you are
A new way to work, do more faster
Midem Visionary Monday: The Age of Context from Robert Scoble
One specific trend he pulls out is, integrating Wearable Computing which he predicts will combine:
Big Data
Computation
Sensor Data
Social Network Data
Location Data
It was interesting to see this example of social context available specifically for brands working in the winery industry from Vintank.
Thanks to @Jas…
LinkedIn Answers and Events are no more, giving new impetus to Quora?
Importance: [rating=3]
A couple of relatively small changes in LinkedIn to be aware of if you use LinkedIn as a B2B marketer or for professional development. The two closures which were not announced by the blog since not positive news, but hidden away in the Help Centre are:
LinkedIn Answers - this closes at the end of January 2013. I personally haven’t used it so much recently and wonder whether the better categorisation, filtering and rating in Quora have been the death-knell. A reminder to take a look again at Quora - which has high levels of activity in some areas, for example SEO.
To help Answer Digital Marketing Questions try the Smart Insights Answers forum and Smart Insights LinkedIn Group where we have Q&A across the full range…
