Digital marketing discussed

How good is your promotions know how? Take our quiz to find out

May 17th, 2012 by

Matt Butcher, director, PIMS-SCA

I regularly sit down with marketers reviewing and advising on their promotions and more often than not, clients are surprised by our expectations of the likely results. So it’s no surprise to me when the Institute of Promotional Marketing’s Marketing Gap Study confirms what my company already knows; that what marketers think consumers do fails to measure up to reality. As one example, marketers tend to vastly overestimate the degree to which consumers abuse the use of money-off coupons.

Getting redemption estimates wrong can be costly, particularly if promotions are uninsured. Our business relies upon an intimate knowledge of how consumers respond to promotions, using a database built over 25 years. Armed with this knowledge, I invite you to take a lighthearted test to see how you shape up!

The following are based on actual promotions that took place in recent years. Check your answers at the bottom.
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Listen and learn

May 4th, 2012 by

Daniel Hansen, director, Questback

Consumers are increasingly empowered to make their voices heard, and it is often disgruntled individuals who shout the loudest.

Feedback can come from various sources, whether it be customer surveys, consumer reports or increasingly, social media streams. Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, recently commented that “the strength of social media is that it empowers individuals to amplify and broadcast their voices.” This social change is having a serious impact on business strategy as a whole and in particular, marketing departments. Read the rest of this entry »

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Watch out for the top five “don’ts” in marketing metrics

April 26th, 2012 by

Fergus Gloster, managing director EMEA, Marketo

B2B marketers should share just two categories of metrics with senior management if they want the respect of the CEO and CFO: revenue metrics and marketing programme performance metrics, which document the impact of effort and investment and directly link it to revenue and profit.

These kind of metrics enable marketers to speak the financial language of business.  When it comes to marketing metrics, there are five key areas where things can often go awry and complicate forecasting….. Read the rest of this entry »

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Awakening brands to the power of social media

April 13th, 2012 by

Jon Gunn, social brand editor, Gutenberg Networks

Increasingly over recent years, brands large and small have awoken to the reality that they need to engage with the emerging environment of social media. Some have accepted this because they see others doing the same and don’t want to lose their competitive advantage. Others recognise the expansion of permission based marketing and the shift in consumer behaviour from one of passive involvement to active engagement. Read the rest of this entry »

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3 ways to wade out of the sticky margin jam

April 10th, 2012 by

Peter Colman, director, Simon-Kucher & Partners

Most marketing professionals in B2B and B2C use segmentation in various guises, but relatively little segmentation takes willingness-to-pay into account. The latter is therefore rarely used for managing prices and margins. This approach to segmentation can help to double the contribution margin from high-value customer segments. And what marketer would want to miss such an opportunity? Read the rest of this entry »

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A recipe for success

March 26th, 2012 by

Sarah Stratford, strategy director of Ais.

Being the sort of people who, and I don’t think I’m going out on a limb here, enjoy celebrating on a Friday night after another hard week of communications strategising and marketing matrix plotting, no doubt you’ll have seen in your hostelry of choice recently that gin is weirdly fashionable right now.

Yup, what was once ‘Mother’s ruin’ has emerged from golf club stuffiness to become the most cutting-edge drink being imbibed across Britain, a veritable playground for ‘mixologists’ (also known as Tom Cruise in Cocktail wannabes) to strut their stuff. Read the rest of this entry »

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Three golden rules for lead generation

March 12th, 2012 by

Fergus Gloster, managing director of revenue performance management specialists, Marketo:

Marketing automation is one of the greatest inventions of the last 20 years and probably the best thing that’s happened to the lead-generation process. Marketing automation lets you connect faster and more efficiently with your prospects, understand your campaign’s lead generation effectiveness, and leverage drip lead nurturing techniques. With technology and tactics changing rapidly, it’s worth reminding ourselves of some golden guidelines for successful lead management.  Read the rest of this entry »

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