Catching up on some reading today I came across this article from the ITSMA - an interview with the excellent Brian Carroll. It offers the following common sense advice to improve your lead management:
All good stuff - you can read the full article here.
I recently came across this list from Chris Brogan that looks like a one-stop IDP on Social Media for IBM Marketers! Frankly there are many aspects here that I simply don't understand - but it's clearly full of some crackerjack practical ideas for us marketers. Jeremiah Owyang at Forrester has then taken this list and grouped them under 5 objectives which I think helps the list become even more practical. These objectives are:
Powerful Stuff - check it out.
Was just reading the following post from the excellent David Meerman Scott on his Web Ink Now blog entitled OK smarty-pants, why don't you show us? Announcing Project Dogfood!
As part of the event preparation for the New Marketing Summit in Boston in October, he and his collaborators (Chris Brogan and Paul Gillin) have opened up "the development of the event Web site to your scrutiny, advice, and comments. The main thrust will be a revamp of the New Marketing Summit site to transform it from the current one-way placeholder "brochureware" into a social media driven interactive site."
I think Project Dogfood is a great Web 2.0 experiment that will be interesting to follow...
If you want to grow your business, you either need to sell more to people who've bought from you previously, or identify more people to buy from you. I think that's obvious.
Equally obvious is the requirement to identify growth markets and invest in those.
But if you're the marketing exec responsible for an existing mature market, and your sales force would rather just develop opportunities from within their existing clients. You're already struggling to get someone in sales to pick up the leads that you're generating outside of the core clients.
Sound familiar? Have you got experience with these challenges? What did you do? What were some of the challenges?
To be honest, much of the day was a little disappointing. However as always there were a couple of interesting elements outside of the opportunity to network with peers. For myself the highlight was a presentation from Rob Watt at Avenue A / Razorfish who opened my eyes a little more to the use of cookies in marketing campaigns. His fundamental question was "would you consider paying a £300 cost per thousand (CPM) for display media?" Of course not, I hear you say. But he then went on to expand upon how, if you could use cookies and other digital techniques to target your customers and prospects, and ONLY your customers and prospects, then all of a sudden this starts to become a really good deal.
We all appreciate that cookies can be used to track return visits to our websites in order to pick up additional behavioural information from repeat visitors without having to present additional annoying registration forms.
But consider the following: our prospects are blending their work and home online personas. Increasingly people will look at Facebook and SkyNews and the website for their favourite football club during the day, and similarly will look at their work-related sites during evenings and weekends. The two spaces are not as distinct and separate as was the case just a few years ago. And Rob's contention was that to place "work-related" advertising (provided it's relevant, of course) in front of this person within Facebook or the Liverpool website, would not be considered inappropriate.
So here's the thought. If I capture a "pool" of cookies for my prospect from my digital activities (web, RSS, podcast, widgets etc) and then pass this cookie pool over to one of the adserving networks, I can ask for my display ad to be served whenever the adserving network detects the presence of that specific cookie, irrespective of the specific media. So in other words, the adverts are triggered by cookie presence rather than by media selection. I hadn't come across this concept before, and it seemed to me to be very powerful.
And furthermore, once you have a critical mass of prospects being targeted in this way, you would be able to do some propensity modeling to infer what web titles your target market is spending time in, and hence use this to refine your overall media planning.
Sounds to me like a really interesting approach. Anyone got any experience of doing this?
I've often spoken about how I feel that the 2 qualities that I consider that the best marketers possess are PASSION and CURIOSITY.
Passion is infectious - if you feel strongly about something then it's obvious. You talk with enthusiasm, you're excitement shines through, and you inspire others.In my work life my two main passions are lead nurturing and social networking. Lead nurturing has become a passion because I realised that a focus on improving the dialog that we have as marketers AFTER we've run the event or sent the email campaign could have a profound effect on our performance. And my passion for social networking is driven by the hope that technology could finally be used to help unite people both at work and in their broader lives.
If you can't find something in your job to get passionate about, then perhaps you should think about trying some other job - your days must just drag along with monotony and mediocrity
Both of these passions have been developed as a result of Curiosity. Twelve months ago I did not feel as excited by either of these areas. However by exploring what is possible and taking an informed view on what could work for me (and what couldn't right now) by passion is stronger. Consequently I feel I could not operate without RSS and the world of Blogs, but am less enthused (for now) about Twitter, Facebook and SecondLife - however I will remain curious.
Last week I came across this 5 minute video featuring Seth Godin via a colleague. For me, what he says about Curiosity resonated very powerfully.
By the fact that you're even looking at this, I guess your demonstrating that you're at least somewhat curious!
