November 19th 2008
The first step in designing your ad campaign is to define your customer. You need to be very specific about the age, gender, marital status, geographic location, religion, political affiliation, occupation, educational level, and so on so that you can buy the proper ad placement. Continue Reading »
July 16th 2008
A contact plan describes in specific detail how you will contact prospects and customers over a period of time to meet your specific goals. Each contact plan should contain the following sections:
Your contact strategy spells out your goals and describes how ongoing customer communication will be used to meet those goals. When thinking about your contact strategy, be sure to consider the online service imperative. What are you going to offer your existing and prospective customers in exchange for giving you permission to contact them? When Wegmans Food Markets developed its contact strategy, it focused on extending the service and customer-oriented approach that you’ll find in its retail stores to email communication. It has developed a contact strategy that is focused more on delivering relevant content and information than on selling. Its goal is to ensure that it provides its customers with notification of special produce, recipes, health tips, and more in order to simplify their grocery shopping and food preparation tasks. Continue Reading »
July 16th 2008
What kinds of things will trigger contact? In some instances you’ll plan and schedule your contacts far in advance (such as annual sales). Others times you’ll be responding to one of the following situations:
July 5th 2008
Forget thinking about your role as a marketer as a day job. When your website is up, or you send out an email, customers expect you to be open for business. They expect to be able to tell you what they want and get a response right away. The engaged organization actively communicates with and responds to customers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And real time is the only time. As the marketing function moves away from the onetime campaign focus of the past to the continuous communications focus of the Internet, the new marketer has to be able to demand real-time access to data, information, and results. To be successful, online companies are trying to support the new demands of 24-7 marketing—and the effects are rippling across entire organizations. Here’s what customers expect and the impact of these expectations on your engaged organization. Continue Reading »
June 12th 2008
My business plan should include how I intend to approach the complicated issue of advertising. The issues that should be addressed include:
It’s the rare business that can build beyond a meager beginning without advertising. At the very least, most businesses should have a presence in the Yellow Pages. At the other end of the spectrum, entertainment firms such as nightclubs or movie theaters have to spend a good portion of their start-up money getting out the word that they’re in town. Continue Reading »
March 19th 2008
‘If you want a place in the sun, prepare to put up with a few blisters.’
Your message may seem trite and boring to you because you are so close to your product. However, the rest of the world doesn’t know about your great product story. When you have a clear idea of who you are, what your product is and what it has to offer the market, don’t give up. Keep on offering it until your prospects notice it as well.
The first time you put your product message in a covering letter say something like, ‘May we introduce you to…?’ The second time around, you can say, ‘May we remind you that…?’ The third time you could state, ‘Again, may we call your attention to…?’ The fourth time try, ‘We would like to remind you…’
Never give up on your basic, central message. You are exactly who you are. Present your product or service continually and without much deviation. If you deviate, you may confuse that tiny bit of the one per cent that is listening to your message and you will be the loser. Continue Reading »
March 14th 2008
Data security and encryption: Data security is one of the central issues of digital marketing. Because the Internet is a public highway, the information which travels through it can be picked up and read by anyone who has the knowledge and capability to do so. If security measures have not been taken to scramble the data, or code it, the information is totally unsecured. In many cases, people don’t care about data security. When you send an e-mail message to a friend, you usually don’t care if someone intercepts it. It’s no different than someone at the post office opening up your letter, or someone listening to your conversation on a cellular telephone scanner. You take that risk. But when you want to send a confidential e-mail to someone in your company, or give someone your credit card number on the Internet, it’s a different matter. You want to send a secret message which only the recipient can unravel and read. That’s where data encryption comes in. Continue Reading »
February 13th 2008
Not all of these formative impressions are under the direct control of the supplier, but that does not make them less powerful. Think about what is said in the press by industry observers or about word of mouth from friends or colleagues and how all of these affect a product’s or company’s credibility. That is why endorsements and testimonials are such powerful tools and why market leaders frequently showcase their most prominent and prestigious customers.
Glance through the press releases of market leaders and you would fine numerous references to other market-leading companies. Siebel Systems counts Schwab and IBM among its customers, and IBM makes it known that it not only is United Parcel Service, Inc.’s, supplier of choice but also is scooping up contracts with several new companies in the e-business field.
For market leaders to construct a larger-than-life market presence, their messages have to resonate with customers. Customers may understand your value proposition, appreciate how you are different, and accept your credibility on the basis of your well- respected customers. But unless they feel that you are committed to their well-being, they may still not pay attention to you. Continue Reading »
February 6th 2008
Spammers work hard to understand why their messages are not read and find methods to avoid being blocked. Here, legitimate e-mail marketers are much like the spammer, since they and their suppliers also need to understand what is stopping their messages getting through and identify solutions to this. There are four general points where spam or legitimate permission-based e-mail is identified, and which can stop e-mail being read by the recipient:
1. Inbox identification by the user. The simplest way that spam is identified is by the recipient; if it looks like spam from the header, it will be quickly removed using the delete button. Alternatively, recipients can report spam to their anti-spam software and, if enough people do this, there is the danger that may be added to a blacklist. Continue Reading »
February 4th 2008
