Is email relevant anymore?

As Facebook releases its initial public offering, over 900 million people use the social network monthly. Twitter has over 140 million active users. LinkedIn has over 160 million members, with two new members joining every second. Pinterest has over 4 million daily unique visitors.

With all this online socializing going on, is anyone even reading email anymore?

Yes, absolutely. Let’s look at the trends over the past two years.

Econsultancy’s 2010 “How We Shop” survey (from Econsultancy’s Email Beginner’s Guide) revealed that in the UK over 60% of consumers rated email as the best way to receive advertisements for sales and special offers. Only 28% felt that way about postal direct mail. The survey claims similar numbers for the USA.

Marketers have responded. According to Econsultancy’s 2011 email marketing census, email marketing represents 18% of advertising budgets and this number continues to grow. 72% of companies rate email marketing as “excellent” (26%) or “good” (46%), higher than for any other marketing channel save SEO (73%).

Marketing Sherpa’s 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report says that fully 67% of companies expect to increase their email marketing budgets by at least some amount, and nearly 20% of company email marketing budgets will increase by 30% in 2012. Another B2B survey cited by Marketing Sherpa listed email marketing as one of the top three investments in B2B marketing budgets.

Marketers have also learned that it is not enough to simply blast emails out to as many people as possible. These days, email marketing is not a numbers game. It’s a quality game. There’s simply too much competition for recipients’ eyeballs. If an email is not perceived as uniquely relevant to the individual receiving it, that email will be ignored. Worse, the company that sent it may be viewed in a poorer light than before.

So, marketers have to take advantage of the latest database and automation technology to deliver emails that are personalized, relevant and targeted with pinpoint accuracy to each and every individual recipient. When they do so, recipients feel more special, and respond more favorably not only to emails but also to the companies that send them.

Why you need email marketing.

• It’s still the primary way we like to receive information – and this projected to only grow, not decline.

• It will help you build customer relationships by providing informative and emotionally compelling content that people like to receive.

• It will help you drive initial sales, conversions and repeat sales, as well as cross-sell and up-sell.

• It can also help you retain customers, which costs far less than gaining new ones.

• It is a remarkably cost-effective way to reach an audience, with near instantaneous sending, receiving and response. It costs a whole lot less than postal mail.

• Email augments a multichannel campaign’s power to boost brand awareness and customer engagement.

Get ready for mobile.

In 2010, Morgan Stanley forecasted that by 2014 more users will connect to the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs (See the report). They were probably being conservative in their estimates. These days, more than a third of smartphone users (and there are over 130 million of them in the U.S. alone) are checking emails on their phones (according to research conducted by digital agency Steel – see their report). This will only increase. For many people, the mobile device is becoming the primary way to read emails.

This makes it more important than ever to design our emails with:

• Short, simple copy – people typically scan, not read emails

• A clear offer and call action that readers see right away

• Graphics that load FAST

• Links/buttons that can easily be tapped with a thumb

Next

In subsequent posts, we’ll talk more about good design practices for emails, both desktop and mobile. Meanwhile, if email marketing doesn’t yet figure prominently in your marketing strategy and budget, now is the best time to start.

Here’s to the marketing champion in all of us. See you in the next post.

A lot has been said about the almost ubiquitous QR (“Quick Response)” code – some of it complimentary, some of it not so much. (Learn more about what QR codes are here »)

On the complimentary side, QR codes are still trendy, visual, scan-able, convenient and cool.

On the not-so-much side, QR codes are ugly, gobble precious real estate in graphic designs, require a mobile app to scan them, often lead to boring web pages that weren’t worth the effort to scan, and sometimes simply don’t work.

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, QR codes, like many things, can be absolutely marvelous if used properly. And the rate of smartphone users scanning them has steadily increased, making it all the more imperative that we learn how to take advantage of them. According to a recent comScore report and December 2011,

• Over 20% of smartphone users scanned a QR code, with the majority scanning for product information.

• Over 55% of Americans are now smartphone users. That means nearly 35 million people scanned QR codes in the last quarter of 2011.

• 20% of scans were done in a retail store.

• 57% of scans were done in the home, versus on the go.

• One third of scans were in response to a coupon or offer.

• One quarter of scans were to get event information.

Clearly, the QR code has established itself as a standard and commonly understood way for mobile users to access content and marketing promotions.

In this post we’ll give you some quick tips for getting great results from using QR codes, as well as the common mistakes to avoid.

Common Mistakes with using QR codes.

• QR code for QR code’s sake – when QR codes burst on the scene a few years ago, marketers started slapping them on everything in an effort to appear cutting edge. Problem was, most of these QR codes linked to – a home page. Ugh. Why would people want to go the trouble of scanning a code just to view a home page on their mobile phone?

• Web pages not optimized for mobile – Imagine scanning a code and being taken to some company’s home page, which is still in large monitor format. Imagine the joy of trying to read this on your 3.5-inch iPhone screen (or just slightly larger Android phone screen). Another ugh.

• Too small to scan – if a QR code is less than an inch square, many cell phone cameras and apps may have trouble scanning them, leading the mobile user – nowhere. Ugh again.

• Nowhere else to go – if the QR code doesn’t work for some reason, or, the user decides he/she would rather view the code on a PC monitor, it sure would be nice if there were a web URL listed as an alternative. Many marketers forget this simple point.

• No instructions – there are still some smartphone users who may not know how to scan a QR code yet, much less why they might want to. Some marketers simply forget to have some simple instructions about why to scan the code, and where to download an app to scan the code. Yes, including these instructions can clutter up a design. But adoption rate will certainly increase by taking this simple step.

• QR codes in ridiculous places – Ever tried to scan a QR code on a billboard, on the freeway, from your car, while driving? Believe it or not, some marketers think this is a brilliant place to put a QR code. Until the 20-car pile up, that is. Or how about putting a QR code on a web page? Hmm…why would I scan the code on a page when I can just click on a link instead? Oops, no link is listed. Ugh.

The best way to use QR codes.

• Use them to make the user’s life easier – Say you’re running a promotion, and your users will learn about it on the go, so being able to access the promotion from a mobile phone would be ideal. That’s the perfect application for a QR code. Make it obvious where the QR code will take the user. And provide an awesome benefit for scanning the code. Any way you can save users from having to type any text to gain access to this awesome benefit makes users’ lives easier. They’ll appreciate you for it.

• Provide an awesome benefit for scanning the code – scanning the code should provide an immediate, specific benefit to the user. After all, it still takes effort to launch the scanning app and scan the code. Use the code to provide a short cut to accessing specific information, an instant savings coupon, limited time special offer, price and product information (if scanning a product package in a retail store), maps and directions to get to a desired place, an event schedule, an educational or entertaining video, link to a home virtual tour on a real estate sign, contest entry, etc. Can you think of other great specific, immediate benefits you could provide?

• Test scan your QR codes before releasing them into the wild – try scanning the codes with a variety of different cell phones to ensure they work, and make sure they take the viewer to the right web page!

• Optimize linked content for mobile viewing and interaction – this one is self-explanatory. You’ll want to work with a web developer with specific experience building mobile pages. For more information on designing web pages for mobile viewing, please see this article »

• Make it easy once they land – make it as simple as possible to enter that contest, get that coupon, view that video, etc. The fewer clicks (or taps actually) and keystrokes required the better. Make the mobile web page super clean and uncluttered so it’s very easy to see what to do and how to do it.

• Track scanning analytics – there are QR code generator tools, which also provide analytics as the codes are scanned. Some are free, and others are reasonably priced. ROI tracking should be part of every marketing program.

Take your QR codes to the next level.

QR codes, used properly, provide a more convenient way for users to gain a benefit from you. The easier you make it for a user to interact with you, the more likely they’ll do it. From this standpoint, QR codes offer huge potential for marketers. On the other hand, when used improperly, QR codes actually impede customer interaction, which can in turn reduce engagement and erode trust in your brand.

Follow the guidance in this post. Spend just a little more time learning about best practices with an easy Internet article search. Then implement QR codes to make things easier for your customers – and reap the benefits.

Here’s a good article to start your best practices survey. GO »

Here’s to the Marketing Champion in all of us. See you in the next post.

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In our previous post, we talked about the importance of the Sales Department using a “Sales 2.0″ approach – consultative selling – to help nurture leads alongside Marketing’s lead nurturing program.

In this post we’ll talk about “customer nurturing.” Marketing can’t stop after a deal is closed. Now that you have a brand new customer, it’s time for your company to prove itself. This is the critical time when a customer will closely evaluate your company and your offering to confirm he or she made the right choice by purchasing your product or service.

Nowadays, everyone is talking about “delighting” customers. At the risk of being cliché, delighting is exactly what you want to do at every step after the sale is made. It’s the way you’ll grow and sustain a great relationship with your customer, who will in turn evangelize about your service to other potential customers.

Give ‘em a great start.

The first step in your Customer Nurturing Program should be to make it as easy as possible for your customers to begin using and benefiting from your offering. The lengths you’ll need to go to ensure this will depend on the complexity of your product or service, but here are the essentials:

• Great Documentation – This should be concise but comprehensive, and simple to understand. Make it easily accessible by PDF or on the web, and make it easily searchable so the user can find needed information right away.
• Training Program – Design a multi-step program that trains the customer on every aspect of using your offering – essentially, a curriculum. Make it interesting, fun, informative and intuitive. This can include face-to-face training, phone calls, webinars and videos. Design it so users can take training modules in sequence or “à-la-carte.”
• Implementation – If your product is more complex, like a robust online software package or on-site equipment, devote staff to helping the customer install and test it. Give customers the assurance that you are at their side at every step to ensure their success.
• Keep it going – some companies offer training and implementation for a limited time, such as “the first 90 days.” Don’t be one of those companies. If you want to frustrate a customer really quickly, tell him/her that it’s “day 91 and you’ll have to start paying for support.” It’s better to just keep providing excellent support (and build this into the overall pricing, rather than “nickel and diming” things like support after the sale).

Do this for your customers, and they’ll rave about your company to their colleagues and counterparts at other companies. You’ll have validated all the great things you promised during the marketing and sales process. Your customers will feel nurtured and your relationship will be off to an awesome start.

Keep the love flowing.

The customer is feeling great about your company. Keep it that way. Here are some simple ways to do it.

• Live Chat – When a customer has a question, he/she wants an answer now. Everyone loves instant gratification. With today’s online live chat capability, it’s easy to help multiple customers at once, right from your corporate website, to provide the answers they need, when they need them. Just do a web search on “live chat” to see a list of providers.
• Pick up the phone – If a customer calls, he/she really needs your help as quickly as possible. Do what you can to always have a knowledgeable staffer available to respond quickly.
• Invest in your customer service people – Employ people who are articulate, passionate about helping others and who can really learn your offering inside and out to be able to provide great answers to customers the first time they call.

It’s far easier to keep customers than win them.

Everything we’ve been talking about in this post is really just basic common sense, and this point is no different. It’s much easier to keep a customer than to win a new one. All it takes is some care, feeding and love. What’s more, happy customers can become some of your best salespeople. Conversely, angry customers will be more than happy to persuade their colleagues NOT to choose your company.

So, if you’re going to spend all the marketing effort to convince prospects why your company and your offerings are great for them, and all the sales effort to make them feel comfortable with choosing your offerings, it only makes sense to commit your resources and your culture to delighting customers on a daily basis. This is also marketing, plain and simple. The bottom line is, nurturing doesn’t stop at the sale. In fact, it should never stop at all.

Here’s to the Marketing Champion in all of us. See you in the next post.

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Contributed by Ron Marcus, ZUZA Marketing Cheerleader

Let’s assume that you’ve already put a lot of time, effort and cash into building an inspiring brand, setting up a robust lead nurturing program and building solid relationships with prospects, guiding them gently but surely through the marketing funnel toward first contact with your sales team. Awesome, right? All that carefully curated effort is about to pay off with warm prospects who are very receptive to being assisted by your sales team.

Or is it?

What if your sales people, well, mess it up?

How can this be, you ask? Aren’t we all on the same team?

Sure we are. But, while marketing has advanced to Marketing 2.0 (i.e., lead nurturing — building trusting relationships before the sales process begins), in many companies, sales teams are still selling by the Sales 1.0 model. And sadly, the Sales 1.0 model doesn’t work today. Which means that all that lead nurturing effort you spent on the marketing side will go completely to waste as soon as Sales gets involved.

In other words, no marketing program, no matter how well executed, can withstand bad contact from sales. Another way to put it: it can take weeks, months, even years to build a good relationship with a prospect, and just minutes to destroy it.

Let’s repeat that, because it is critical: It can take weeks, months, even years to build a good relationship with a prospect, and just minutes to destroy it.

The bottom line: marketing doesn’t stop when the sales process begins. It simply passes the marketing baton to the sales team. It’s then up to Sales to continue the lead nurturing process, maintaining the prospect’s trust and good feelings toward your company. Sales is marketing too.

Sales 1.0 vs. Sales 2.0

We all know the Sales 1.0 model. A smooth talking, pushy, “don’t take no for an answer” salesperson who knows how to overcome all objections grinds you down until you plead for mercy and sign the contract just to make him go away — not unlike the experience of buying a new car at a dealership — or being sold a timeshare. This salesperson doesn’t really care about helping you solve a problem. He doesn’t care about what you need. He needs to make the sale. Period. There is nothing remotely nurturing about his/her approach.

More often than not, when we’ve given in to such a sales process and made our purchase, we feel a bit icky after, and wonder if we really made the right decision.

Contrast that with the Sales 2.0 approach. The Sales 2.0 salesperson doesn’t want to sell you anything. Rather, she wants to explore your needs with you, then see if there’s something she offers that can truly help meet your needs. She doesn’t want to “close” you and move on. She wants to build a relationship with you and help you for life. She doesn’t want to be your order taker. She wants to be your friend. She wants to earn your trust and keep earning it every day. She doesn’t want to push you. She wants to help you.

What does a Sales 2.0 type process look like?

• The salesperson talks with you only when you’re ready to talk.
• You do the talking. The salesperson listens. At this stage, she does not offer you a solution, and certainly doesn’t talk about pricing.
• Together, you identify a core need you have.
• The salesperson describes how she may be able to help you, and lets you tell her if your organization is truly in need of such a solution. She’ll also ask if your need is great enough to warrant pursuing this solution now or if it’s less urgent. She doesn’t try to convince you that it’s urgent. She sits back and just listens to you.
• If indeed you believe your need is urgent and she has a viable solution, she’ll then offer to go deeper with you, moving at your pace and letting you drive the discussion. (She’ll simply stay in touch at regular intervals to confirm you’re still interested in proceeding.)
• Eventually, when you’re ready, the process will enter the terms and pricing stage, and finally the contract stage — all on your terms, at a pace that is comfortable for you.
• The whole process is painfully free of such gimmicks as “we’ve got a great discount but only if you act today…” Again, there is no pressure in the Sales 2.0 model. The salesperson is here to help you, not push you.

After such a process, how can you not feel good about your decision to purchase? You’ve done your due diligence and made your choice in a very comfortable environment. The salesperson listened to you and never pushed you. You felt nurtured.

It’s a pity more companies haven’t adopted a Sales 2.0 sales culture. These companies don’t realize that in this age of the empowered buyer, with lavish information available to the buyer pre-sale over the Internet and through social media, the “smoke and mirrors” approach of the Sales 1.0 model simply doesn’t work anymore. Buyers are a heck of a lot smarter than that. They don’t want to be closed. They want to be nurtured.

Here’s a real world example from my own recent experience to make the point.

A personal story: How Sales 2.0 won my business.

I recently led an internal effort to evaluate and select an online platform for marketing. We looked at five different companies. Two made our short list. One of these is the “800 pound gorilla” in this space — well funded, spending gobs on marketing, and executing an awesome content marketing / lead nurturing program like a well oiled machine. Indeed, I spent a lot of time on this vendor’s site and downloaded several excellent white papers from them which convinced me of their thought leadership. I had also received several referrals from industry colleagues vouching for this vendor’s size, popularity, years in business and stability — all points in this vendor’s favor.

So I contacted the company directly and requested a sales pitch and demo (a salesperson’s absolute dream!). Let’s call them Vendor #1. Vendor #1 set us up with a call with two of their staff, one technical, one sales. Immediately, the Sales 1.0 model kicked in. The salesperson continued to emphasize why this vendor was clearly the leader in this space, and spoke with the attitude that the demonstration was really just a formality; how could we NOT choose Vendor #1? I had the feeling throughout that this person assumed the sale was “in the bag” already. He also immediately offered (though we hadn’t yet asked) that his company could “get aggressive on pricing” to ensure that they could win our business. He then asked to see if we would be willing to make a decision within a week if the pricing were right.

This demo call lasted about an hour. Immediately after this one and only call, I received a price proposal. Vendor #1′s discounted pricing was on par with the normal pricing of Vendor #2 on our short list — but we quickly realized that this vendor was actually more expensive in the end because certain required functions were extra cost items, while with Vendor #2, these functions were included. Further, Vendor #1 required a 12-month commitment, whereas Vendor #2 offered a month-to-month arrangement with no long-term commitment required, taking risk out of the equation.

The sales demo from Vendor #2 couldn’t have been more different. There was no time pressure to make a decision. There was no offer to “get aggressive on pricing to win our business.” The courteous sales rep, who kept claiming he wasn’t a technical person, proceeded to speedily answer all of our very specific technical questions quite comprehensively, addressing all of our needs in a consultative fashion. He was friendly, low key, passionate about his product, and eminently patient. He never once asked for the sale.

We determined that Vendor #2 went toe-to-toe with Vendor #1 in terms of functionality and ease of use. Vendor #2′s all-inclusive pricing and no-risk month-to-month subscription model made its offering a little more attractive than Vendor #1′s. But what really tipped the scales was Vendor #2′s sales approach — a Sales 2.0 approach (low-key, no pressure, consultative, nurturing) which ultimately sealed the deal. We went with Vendor #2.

Meanwhile, I had the unenviable task of breaking the bad news to Vendor #1. When I explained our choice, the salesperson strongly expressed his disappointment, at one point actually telling me our choice was a mistake, and then advising me to be skeptical of any claims made by the competitor. He then kept asking if there was anything he could do to change my mind and that he really didn’t want to lose this sale — as if that means anything to me. I politely thanked him for his time and offered that if for some reason things did not work out with Vendor #2, we would revisit evaluating Vendor #1, and I would be happy to share my experience of Vendor #2 with him.

A few minutes later, I received an email from this salesperson requesting a conference call with his boss to discuss why they lost the sale — which I had already amply explained to him. I politely declined but repeated my explanation in a comprehensive email — which I provided solely out of courtesy because I really didn’t have time to be spending on this. I thought this would be the end of the discussion, but the next business day, I got an email request from his boss asking if I’d get on the phone with him to discuss what had happened. Again, I politely declined, but this time I added that Vendor #1′s sales process had been a bit too arrogant and urgent for our tastes. In response, the boss wished me well — finally.

Is your sales culture a lead nurturing culture?

You want to be a marketing champion. But how do your sales people view being sales champions? Do they see this as meeting heroic quotas and closing deals at any cost? Or do they see it as continuing to nurture prospects by truly seeking to help them? This is critical. Marketing does not exist in a vacuum. Sales and marketing must be in alignment, or the buyer will immediately feel the disconnect and leave you. If you’re lucky, the buyer will call you and let you know that you were not selected, as I did with Vendor #1. More likely, you’ll just never hear from the buyer again, and never have your calls returned from that point forward.

So remember, if you truly want to have a successful lead nurturing program, make sure your sales team is on board as well. Sales is marketing too.

Here’s to the Marketing Champion in all of us. See you in the next post.

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Using Technology To Automate Brand Compliance.

In another blog post we talk about how brand consistency is critical to building and maintaining customer loyalty and trust.

But if you market and sell through a distributed organization, you may find it difficult to maintain brand consistency. As in many organizations, you may find your distributed sales and marketing staff are taking matters into their own hands, creating their own marketing collateral, promotional pieces and ads to meet their immediate sales needs. This leaves all kinds of opportunity for your corporate brand to be mis-applied, creating myriad interpretations of your brand. Logo colors can shift; tag lines can change, fonts can be substituted, off colors may be chosen, incorrect verbiage may be used — the list goes on. This lack of consistency undermines all the hard work you’ve done at the corporate level to connect with customers and cultivate their trust with a uniform brand experience.

We can represent the brand consistency challenge with a formula.

Brand Consistency Challenge Formula:

( A x B x C x D ) / E

Where:

A = Number of sales access points in your organization (reps, channel partners, distributors, retail outlets, franchisees, etc.)

B = Number of marketing assets in your marketing program (brochures, flyers, ads, direct mail, point of purchase, etc.)

C = Obsolescence rate of marketing assets (how often new assets must be produced to service evolving offerings)

D = Number of unique target markets you are serving (each with a need to customize assets at the local level with relevant offerings and messages)

E = The number of internal staff hours available to ensure brand consistency (i.e., personally overseeing the creation and distribution of all marketing assets).

In other words, the larger and more distributed your organization, the more assets you have, the more often assets change, and the more markets you’re serving, the more likely your brand can and will be misapplied.

You can mitigate this by insisting that only your internal team can produce marketing assets — but this will be limited by the number of staff hours you can make available for this task. The fewer staff you have, and the more busy they are with other tasks, the less time they will have to keep control of asset production and brand application — and the more likely your outside staff in the field will resort to creating their own assets and misrepresenting the brand.

What we need then is a technology that automates the production of marketing assets, enabling your distributed sales and marketing staff to get the assets they need quickly and at the same time preventing misapplication of the brand.

Happily, that technology exists. It’s called Marketing Asset Management, or MAM for short.

MAM Puts Your Brand on Cruise Control

MAM is the generic industry term for a system that protects corporate brand elements while allowing your distributed staff, or “users,” to customize market assets themselves, with no intervention from your internal team required.

Here’s how it works. Your MAM provider will help you convert your marketing assets into templates. The templates contain both variable and locked fields. Corporate branding stays in the locked fields. Variable fields allow your users to insert whatever information is relevant for their sales efforts.

Some examples of variable fields:

• Contact information
• Specific products, including descriptions and photos
• Pricing and discounts
• Campaign messaging
• Graphics

The beauty of the MAM system is that you have full control over just how variable each variable field is. For instance, while the field for contact information may be left completely free form, you can restrict the choices of products, descriptions, and photos; pricing and discounts, canned messages, graphics, and more using pull-down menus or check boxes, presenting only the choices you allow. For instance, you might only allow discounts from 5% to 20%. You might provide a choice of four different campaign variations, such as “Winter,” “Spring,” “Summer” and “Fall.” You could provide a choice of five approved graphic backgrounds for post card designs. And so on.

Meanwhile, essential brand elements like logos, tag lines, font choices and common graphic elements can be locked so users can’t alter them. Or, you can provide certain amounts of access based on the users’ role in the organization using rule-based permission setting built into the MAM system.

Variable elements like products, photos, descriptions, graphics, etc., are all stored in a digital asset library as part of the MAM system, available for use in templates according to rules you set. As your offerings evolve, it is relatively easy to update templates and replace assets in the digital library to ensure users have access to the very latest elements.

Once the templates are created, they are stored in an online portal that users can access with any common web browser. Users are free to log in at any time, select the templates they want, customize the variable fields to meet their sales needs, and order just the quantity they want on demand for delivery as either PDFs or printed pieces. The system then provides PDF downloads or sends the order to a printer for production and delivery to users.

The online portal is self-serve. Users do all the customization and ordering themselves. Your internal team members no longer need to be involved, because the MAM system automates the production of brand-compliant marketing assets.

With a MAM system, the Brand Consistency Challenge Formula becomes null and void. No matter how many users there are, no matter how many assets there are, no matter how many markets there are and no matter how often assets must be revised, the MAM system can still fully protect your brand for you while allowing users to fulfill their own asset requests immediately. The number of internal staff hours is no longer a gating factor.

Just the Ticket For Many Industries

A wide variety of industries meet the criteria in the Brand Consistency Challenge Formula for benefiting from automated brand control. Here are some:

• Restaurant chains
• Franchises
• Retail chains
• Manufacturers selling through dealer/distributor networks
• Pharmaceutical companies
• Healthcare organizations
• Health insurance
• Real estate groups
• Insurance providers
• Financial institutions and broker/dealer networks
• Membership organizations with multiple chapters
• Educational institutions

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It Goes by Many Names

Have you heard of Marketing Asset Management (MAM) before? Those who haven’t are not alone. The industry is still relatively new, having emerged in recent years to meet the burgeoning need for brand control in this age of increasingly complex multichannel marketing. And it goes by many names at this stage. You may see it alternatively described as:

• Brand Asset Management
• Digital Asset Management
• Marketing Supply Chain Management
• Marketing Resource Management

Or just, “Technology for automating the customization, production and delivery of branded marketing assets for _______ [insert industry here].”

However, the term that has become the industry standard for this type of automation is Marketing Asset Management. As the industry grows toward maturity, you’ll hear more and more about this enabling technology under this name.

Is MAM for You?

If your organization scores high in the Brand Consistency Challenge Formula, maybe MAM is just the thing to help you automate your brand control. ZUZA is one of the providers of MAM, and is well qualified to assist you. ZUZA also provides a single vendor solution for MAM, putting the portal, printing, mailing services and fulfillment under one roof. If you are interested in learning more about Marketing Asset Management in general and the ZUZA offering in particular, we would be happy to talk with you.

Here’s to the Marketing Champion in all of us. See you in the next post.

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Contributed by Ron Marcus, ZUZA Marketing Cheerleader

Boy, how times have changed.

When I was getting my undergraduate degree in marketing some two decades ago (oops, just gave away my age!), the way we marketed was a whole lot different from how we do it today. At that point, it really hadn’t changed much for decades, and would remain pretty much unchanged until the mid 1990s, when the internet started to impact commerce and the availability of information worldwide. Contrast that today, when everything is changing almost daily.

I graduated in 1989. I studied the basics — target marketing, the 4 Ps (Product, Price, Place, Promotion), the USP (Unique Selling Proposition), statistics, market research, consumer behavior, marketing communications and marketing management. Marketing strategies and tactics were very traditional — conduct surveys, establish target markets, place ads, hand out collateral, send out mailers, go to trade shows, create a nice retail presence, test, evaluate, repeat. Ads were conceived and placed weeks in advance and run for several months at a time.

The marketing world back then looked like this:

• Consumer research was done with pen and paper surveys and face-to-face focus groups.
• Advertising media was composed of TV, radio, print publications, direct mail and trade shows.
• Faxing was the way you got documents around the world quickly.
• Email was a brand new form of communication. (“You’ve got mail!”)
• There were no PDFs.
• There were no laser printers. (Remember dot matrix printers?).
• There was no broadband. (I still remember my first 1200-baud modem.)
• Buyers got their information primarily by talking with sales people. Advertising was used primarily for brand building.
• CRM didn’t exist yet.
• Lotus 123 was the spreadsheet of choice, on PCs.
• There were no commercial web pages yet.
• There were no search engines either.
• There was no such thing as “online video.”
• Video production was prohibitively expensive.
• Cell phones were used to make calls. They were not capable of any other functions.
• Mp3s did not exist. Nor did iPods. We listened to music on compact disc, and watched video on VHS tapes. There was no such thing as a “podcast.”
• ROI of marketing campaigns was tricky to measure. Direct response marketing was the most trackable, but tracking was still a manual and laborious process.

Today’s Marketing World

If I were getting my undergraduate degree in marketing today, I suspect that the curriculum would be very, very different. The foundational concepts would be similar — the 4 Ps, the USP, target marketing, consumer behavior. But the media, buying cycle and the ways buyers interact with brands have changed completely. As a result, the rules and methods of marketing have had to shift accordingly.

The marketing world today looks like this:

• Broadband Internet is widespread.
• People are connected to the Internet virtually wherever they are all the time — by PC, tablet, mobile phone, even their TVs.
• Comprehensive information about pretty much everything is available instantaneously.
• Social media — particularly Facebook and Twitter — have given ordinary people the power to topple governments and control the reputations of companies. It has taken control of the flow of information away from marketers and given it to the buyers — what they consume, and when and where they consume it.
• Buyers are very well informed long before they ever talk to a salesperson.
• There has been a literal explosion of media choices for buyers. Buyers can curate very specific content channels for themselves. The days of mass marketing are largely gone. Today it’s all about pinpoint marketing on a mass scale, a seeming paradox that savvy marketers much now master.
• Though marketers now have to contend with a dizzying array of marketing channels, they’ve also gained an advantage: today’s media are electronic and very easily trackable. Marketers now have access to an incredible amount of consumer behavior data that the students of my day could barely dream of.
• The flip side of the above bullet is that marketers must learn how to sift through the piles of data to perform meaningful analyses and make good conclusions.
• The flip-flip side is that marketers today have access to some incredible Sales and Marketing Automation Tools that do most of the heavy lifting for us. These powerful tools give the kind of comprehensive marketing insight that until very recently only the largest companies could afford to collect. Now, even the smallest businesses have access to affordable and amazingly powerful tools for data gathering and campaign automation.
• Buyers are hungry for good content that either entertains or educates them. The Internet is their worldwide library for content. Today’s marketer needs to be a publisher of good content to win the trust and loyalty of buyers. As a result, a whole new discipline called Content Marketing has emerged that has fast become the basic currency of effective marketing.

The New Marketing

If I were a marketing professor today, I would make sure my students learned:

• How to deal with rapid change — technology and consumer behavior seems to change almost daily these days.
• How to interact with and grow trusting communities in social media.
• How to create, implement, and measure marketing campaigns using sales & marketing automation tools.
• Why content marketing is critical to a successful marketing program and why marketers must think as journalists, not masters of advertising spin. Content includes documents, video and webinars.
• How to use today’s digital tracking tools to gain comprehensive customer insight.
• The similarities and differences between B2C and B2B sales and marketing.

For us B2B marketers, the new marketing paradigm today is to implement what I’ll call the “trifecta of marketing empowerment.”

• CRM – Customer Relationship Management tool — such as salesforce.com — for full visibility and tracking of sales opportunities (a.k.a. deals)
• Business Information tool — such as Hoovers, ZoomInfo or Data.com — for getting rich prospect information segmented with comprehensive demographics.
• MA – Marketing Automation tool — such as Pardot, Marketo or Eloqua – automating outbound marketing campaigns, lead nurturing campaigns and the tracking and qualifying of prospects.

In addition to the trifecta, there is another form of marketing automation, Marketing Asset Management (the type of solution that our company provides), which helps marketing departments provide custom on-demand marketing communications assets, both print and digital, at the local level with minimal effort and practically infinite scalability. This tool helps solve the paradox of pinpoint marketing on a mass scale that we mentioned above.

Today’s media mix includes (but is far from limited to):

• Traditional TV, print, radio, direct marketing and live events.
• Social media, including Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and now Pinterest.
• Email and Internet campaigns.
• Mobile platforms including smartphones and tablets.
• Webinars and virtual trade shows.
• Online video channels.

It’s a Great Time to be a Marketer.

The methods of marketing have shifted dramatically in just the past few years, and continue to evolve almost daily. This means as marketers we must never settle for the status quo, we must remain nimble, and we must be constantly learning about the latest channels, tools and best practices to engage our buyers. Today’s marketer is in school every day, and the Internet is our campus. The same rich information that is available to buyers is available to us marketers too! And while today’s media have allowed buyers to control the way we engage with them, today’s tools allow us to engage with them the way they want while letting us easily track all of our interactions with them to assess our marketing success.

I believe this is what is essential for today’s marketing school students to learn, and indeed, for all of us to embrace.

This blog post has touched on several topics we’ve discussed in previous blog posts, including:

• Marketing Automation »
• Lead Nurturing »
• Content Marketing »
• Marketing Asset Management »

In future posts will dive more deeply into these and other essential topics for us marketers.

Here’s to the Marketing Champion in all of us. See you in the next post.

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