123 eGuides

1 Minute Advice: Top Marketers Focus on Engaging Customers

Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) at over 200 top U.S. companies are most concerned about "the ability to create sustainable and engaging customer relationships while improving the customer experience," according to a new Korn Ferry Marketing Pulse Survey. That could be a major reason that 80 percent of these senior marketing executives are increasing their spending on content marketing.

While customer engagement is the leading concern, CMOs also cite "connecting marketing to bottom line results" and "staying ahead and taking advantage of the latest digital technology trends" as issues that are important to them. In fact, 57% of CMOs say "the inability to directly connect marketing efforts to tangible business outcomes" is the primary reason for high turnover in the CMO position. 

Something CMOs plan to do a lot more of is measuring results. A large majority (79 percent) of respondents indicate they plan to increase the use of predictive analytics and Big Data tools. 

According to the survey, the top five most popular marketing channels for customer engagement as ranked by CMOs are: Facebook, online advertising, Twitter, events, and customer service.

Take a lesson from the country's leading marketers: customers come first!

Learn more about the Korn Ferry survey here.

1 Minute Advice: What's Not to 'Like,' About Facebook?

You have undoubtedly been exposed to gimmicks, contests and the like which encourage you to "Like" a certain Facebook page. As a wise and experienced marketer, you may have already figured out that using the Facebook "Like" feature for such self-puffery is at best a questionable strategy. Now, though, Facebook is warning users about abusing and inflating "Likes" in blunt terms in its new Platform Policy:

"You must not incentivize people to use social plugins or to like a Page. This includes offering rewards, or gating apps or app content based on whether or not a person has liked a Page. It remains acceptable to incentivize people to login to your app, checkin at a place or enter a promotion on your app's Page. To ensure quality connections and help businesses reach the people who matter to them, we want people to like Pages because they want to connect and hear from the business, not because of artificial incentives. We believe this update will benefit people and advertisers alike."

Social media expert Catharine P. Taylor sees good coming out of all of this. She writes in Social Media Insider, "It's actually a much-needed reset of what used to be advertisers' baseline Facebook currency, a measurement of their worth. ...this is a step in the right direction. When it comes to quantity vs. quality in social media, there has been dawning recognition that it's more important to reach the right people than to reach many more of the wrong ones."

Which only reinforces the basic marketing truth that your brand cannot buy likability -- it must earn it through authentic interactions with consumers.

Back to School Offer: Online Branding Course @ 50% Discount!

The kids will be going back to school soon -- so why not get in the spirit and get a little schooling of your own?

Now you can take a great online branding course, Big Brand Strategies for Small Brands, on-demand and at your convenience, at the special "Back to School Offer" of just $19 -- a 50% discount off the $39 price!

In this comprehensive course, branding expert Barry Silverstein shows you how to apply the same thinking the big brands use to marketing your small brand. Learn the strategies, tactics, and techniques that successful small brands use to break through even on limited budgets. Barry will share a wealth of knowledge based on his more than 30 years of brand marketing experience and show you lots and lots of real small brand examples. Plus, you'll get three of our valuable 123 eGuides free when you take the course: Branding 123, Product Launch 123, and Sales Leads 123.

Don't miss this limited time opportunity to take this engaging online course at a 50% discount. Simply visit www.bigbrandstrategiesforsmallbrands.com, sign up with the discount code School, and gain access to this course immediately for just $19. This offer expires Sept. 30, so sign up today!

1 Minute Advice: How Do You Become a Consumer's "BFB"?

Typical consumers have only five "BFBs" (Best Friend Brands) from which they will repeatedly open emails and buy products, according to new research by Silverpop, an IBM company and leading provider of digital marketing software. The online shopping habits and communications preferences of nearly 4,000 consumers across the U.S., U.K. and Germany were examined in the study.

Brands built relationships with these consumers based on two main things: relevance and trust. More than 70 percent of surveyed consumers indicated they would be more likely to make a purchase if a brand’s initial email outreach was tailored to their likes and preferences, while 64 percent of consumers polled said they would be more inclined to open an email because they already trusted the brand sending the email. The importance of trust was even higher in the U.S. – with 70 percent of respondents influenced by it, nearly 10 percentage points higher than the UK and 5 percentage points more than Germany. 

The research also highlighted the important role email in particular plays in helping brands build relationships with customers. Only 14 percent of respondents worldwide said that email wasn’t important in the communications they received from their favorite brands. But, individualized email is what matters most, with more than half (58 percent) of consumers across the globe saying they wouldn’t open an email if they thought it was irrelevant to them or their needs. 

The research showed people only open half of the emails they get from brands (55 percent) and will only tend to purchase from three brands online within the space of three months. That's why becoming a "Best Friend Brand" in the eyes of the consumer should be a major objective for every brand.

1 Minute Advice: What Can Marketers Learn from P&G's Bold Move?

The marketing world is abuzz about the announcement by Procter & Gamble (P&G) that it plans to sell more than half of its brands. Arguably the greatest consumer brand company the world has ever known, P&G is largely responsible for the manner in which consumer brands have been marketed for over a hundred years.

Here's the key to P&G's action: Profitability. P&G owns around 180 brands, but 70 or 80 of them throw off 90 percent of the company's sales and 95 percent of the company's profits. About 22 of P&G's brands (such as Pampers and Tide) are each responsible for $1 billion or more in sales, according to the company.

P&G is a marketing company through and through, and this decision will surely be painful for the marketers who have worked tirelessly to champion the 90 to 100 brands the company will now try to sell. But P&G recognized that it could no longer be agile and nimble with such a large brand portfolio. A.G. Lafley, who retired as CEO but returned to P&G, told the Wall Street Journal, "I'm not interested in size at all. I'm interested in whether we are the preferred choice of shoppers." Notice the emphasis -- squarely on the consumer.

So what can marketers learn from this extraordinary announcement? Sometimes getting lean and mean is the better strategy. Recognizing where your sales and profits REALLY come from can lead to tough decisions, but it will likely result in a stronger bottom line. Even if, as in this case, that means jettisoning brands, it is probably the right thing to do in the long run.