The hottest buzzword in marketing right now? It may well be content, judging by a new survey done by Junta42.
Of 250 marketers surveyed, 59% plan to increase their spending on custom content, up from 56% last year. And they apparently plan to spend the bulk of it online, according to Junta42, a producer of online content programs.
What’s custom content? It’s value-added information with a soft peddle on selling, everything from recopies to technical articles, even a little humor. Read the rest of this entry »
Hear that rustling sound? It’s the sound of money being shifted from traditional media into digital.
That’s hardly news by itself, but a survey by Alterian shows that it is taking place on several continents, and in large amounts.
Of 1068 respondents in America, Europe and Asia/Pacific, 40% are shifting over a fifth of their budget dollars to digital media, and 21% more than a third. Read the rest of this entry »
How’s this for a miscalculation? Per Annum, a small firm specializing in corporate gifts, eliminated its annual direct mailing last year, and suffered a 25% drop in orders.
“We realized we had made a huge mistake,” Alicia Settle, president of the New York firm, told the Wall Street Journal. The firm has since restored its hand-signed letters program, and is pleased with the results.
That change of heart was one of several uncovered by the Journal in an article titled, “Firms Hold Fast to Snail Mail Marketing.” As the headline implies, the Journal found that “some entrepreneurs who were quick to write off direct mail as too pricey or passé are finding it’s not so easy to dismiss.”
Another was Peter Taffae, founder of ExecutivePerils, a wholesale insurance broker. Customers missed the firm’s colorful postcards based on satirical movie themes—and they let Taffae know it. He, too, has returned to the mails. Read the rest of this entry »
Watch it, TopCat. This is dangerous. A member of one of our LinkedIn groups is wondering about the role of gender in business selling.
“Do you prefer buying from a female or male salesperson (when buying B2B professional services face-to-face)?” he asks. Read the rest of this entry »
It was, to paraphrase Queen Elizabeth, an “annus horibilus.”
If you thought things were bad in the fall of 2008, they got even worse during the early months of 2009. There were layoffs, budget cuts and a pervading sense of gloom.
Here are some of the leading direct marketing stories of 2009. Not all are happy. We’ve saved the best for last. Read the rest of this entry »
Greg Grdodian likes trouble.
That is, he likes it when clients come to him with marketing problems. His job as executive vice president of Edith Roman-ePostDirect’s List Management Data Solutions Group is to help them find solutions.For example, a client was having trouble understanding who its customers were.
“We did a profile, matched it up against our BRAD/BEN database, and helped with the crafting of the HTML,” Greg says. The effort was “sent to the prospects we recommended, and it responded really well, so the client rolled out with a much larger campaign.”
Then there are the clients whose lists have stopped performing. Read the rest of this entry »
Marketing pundits have already posted their annual New Year’s predictions. Some started hitting the eggnog before they did, but a few were sober. Here’s a sampling of what they said:
Sales and Marketing
“2010 will be the year when the practice of allowing sales and marketing to operate as separate, conflicting silos ends once and for all. The problem of “sales-marketing alignment” will disappear, because the urgency to get online and social marketing right, coupled with the challenging economy, will force the issue.” –Steve Parker Read the rest of this entry »
Ad executives have shaken off their hangover. They’re more upbeat about budgets than they have been since the fall of 2007, according to a MediaPost article based on a report by Advertising Perceptions.
MediaPost’s Joe Mandese reports that the “study, which is based on an index of executives who plan to boost their ad spending over the next 12-months vs. those who plan to decrease it, currently stands at a positive difference of four percentage points, the highest level since the fall of 2007, when the index stood at positive eight percentage points.” Read the rest of this entry »