5 Reasons Real-Time Marketing Isn’t Just for the Big Brands

June 7, 2013 by

by: Victoria Fields, Copywriter for Momentum Telecom, a cloud-based communications provider

Content marketing today is all about delivering the right message to the right person at the right time. Relevant ideas must be developed in minutes, rather than days or weeks, and messaging has to center around real-time events or feedback from customers around events that happen.

By now, most marketoreoers have heard about recent feats in the new trend of real-time marketing like Oreo’s Dunk in the Dark Super Bowl image, a tweet at the Oreo team sent out during this year’s Super Bowl power outage that earned more than 16,000 retweets and was covered in countless news stories and marketing blogs.

Most small businesses that aren’t working with a big agency or have a large marketing team at their disposal may feel left in the dark when it comes to real-time marketing. It can be hard to stay on top of trends and have the resources to create relevant messaging quickly with just a few marketers on your team.

In reality, you don’t need the resources of a giant consumer brand like Oreo to become a successful real-time marketer. What you do need is to change the way you think about your marketing strategy.

Here are 5 reasons that real-time marketing can be utilized by businesses of any size:

1. The Tools Don’t Need to Be Expensive. They Just Need to Be Used in the Right Way. In general, small businesses don’t have the resources to hire a large team or purchase expensive software to track and manage relevant brand conversations on social media. But the tools you can use for real-time marketing don’t have to be sophisticated; you just need to use what’s available appropriately. Use Twitter to search for mentions of your brand, set up notifications and create a list of key influencers, customers or prospects that follow you and then retweet and engage in other ways.

2. No One Has Real-Time Marketing Completely Figured Out. You Just Need to Get Going. Don’t be overly concerned about making a misstep or two when you’re getting used to producing content and engaging with customers so quickly. Develop a business culture that encourages speed over sloth, and be open and transparent about what you’re doing and why. Your competitors are already on social media and getting immersed in real-time marketing; you need to be doing the same.

3. Real-Time Isn’t Only About Speed. It’s Also about Listening. Real-time doesn’t only mean instant. You still need to remember that you’re engaging in a conversation by responding to things your customers are saying or inserting yourself into events that matter to your customers. Traditional marketing was about taking at your customers. Now you need to be sharing an experience with them and listening to what they have to say. That’s something any SMB can do, regardless of size.

4. Develop a Personality Online. It’s Easy to Humanize Your Brand that Way. In a world where social media is increasingly important, we judge the brands we interact with and purchase from by their personality online. We would all rather patronize a business that is friendly and knows our name, right? No matter what industry you’re in, customers want a brand to acknowledge them. Here’s a rule of thumb: If a human being wouldn’t say what you’re posting, neither should you when you’re posting on behalf of your brand.

5. People Love to Share Their Opinions. Give Them a Way to Engage. Most people tell a friend about a great experience with a business (or a terrible one). If you have happy customers, you want to make it easy for them to share their feedback. Facebook Pages and Communities can be a great place to start, but even Twitter chats with hashtags can be helpful for giving customers an outlet to share about your brand. If a customer has had a bad experience, you want to be able to address it directly, and it’s important that they have a transparent way to give feedback as well.

Filed Under: Content Marketing 360 Tagged With: , , , ,

5 Reasons Why Content Marketing is Here to Stay

May 24, 2013 by

As with any popular trend, skeptics of content marketing have begun to rear their heads and discuss why they think content marketing is just another bubble that will burst. This satirical blog from the Huffington Post indicates that the population of content marketing experts is surging out of control. It may seem that content marketers are popping up everywhere, but that is because of the increasing need for content marketers. Here are five reasons why content marketing is here to stay and, most likely, will continue to expand.

1.       Companies Need It

People wonder why notable companies spend money on advertising and marketing campaigns. One example of an organization that usesbruins content marketing (despite their lack of inventory) is the Boston Bruins. Right now, the Bruins are in the playoffs and if you look at the Bruins’ website you will notice that the playoff games are all sold out. So why is the Bruins’ marketing team busy creating content for their website and for television spots, when there is no inventory left to sell? The purpose of this content is to engage fans throughout the playoffs and to create shareable content to excite them.

But what about during the summer months, when the team isn’t playing? Season tickets are sold out for years to come – fans have to join a waiting list to buy them. But, the Bruins marketing will continue to market and promote the team throughout the off season to keep the fans excited for the next 142 games.

The Bruins use content marketing year long to keep their fans engaged and informed about their team, and the fans love it, which leads to the next point:

2.       Consumers Love Content

People love having an inside scoop on what’s going on within a company. They also love to see that the people behind the brand are actually people with dynamic personalities.  Aside from the humor and entertaining forms of content marketing, however, there is a business-focused type of content, particularly for B2Bs, that consumers also look for. Reading whitepapers written by successful CEOs of large companies and attending webinars hosted by industry-leaders are an insightful method of connecting with customers.

mayhemAll State Insurance Company executes content marketing with an incredible sense of humor. Their “Mayhem” campaign (click here to view the Mayhem Facebook page) takes a comical approach to storytelling that their audience loves.  Fans of the Mayhem Facebook page are constantly engaging with the posts, videos and video content shared on the page, very little of which actually advertising the insurance solutions that All State offers.

 

3.       Consumers Are Skeptical (and rightly so)

B2B consumers demonstrate skepticism when answering a sales call or hearing a sales pitch from a company they know very little about. If a consumer types a company’s name into a search engine and only finds a poorly designed website, the chances that they will continue with the buying process are slim. On the other hand, a prospective customer who search for a company and finds a plethora of information created, distributed and syndicated surrounding the company; they will have a considerably different buyer experience.  Creating content increases credibility.

4.       Your Customers Want to Be Heard

In the past, marketing walmartand advertising was always a brand selling a product to consumers. Commercials and print ads spoke to their audiences directly promoting their product, and that was that. But now, the explosion of social media and technologies have provided not only multiple platforms for consumers to view a brand’s messages, but they have provided thousands of outlets for customers to share their experiences – and boy do they. Consumers take to platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ to share their most positive experiences and speak out against companies and products they view negatively.

The conversations sparked by customers involving customer service issues and complaints can be seen by just about anybody with an account, and some brands try to react by either deleting negative comments or banning members from the page. Taking a more proactive approach to content marketing on social media tends to be received in a much more optimistic way by the customers. The platforms are here for conversations, so talk to your customers.

 

5.       Content Marketing is Truly Measurable 

In the past, many marketers struggled to accurately prove their ROI. Placing a billboard at the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel going into beatlesManhattan from New Jersey may mean that your advertisement is seen by millions of people each day, but how do you verify the conversion rate from those views? You can’t click on a billboard. Print ads can be placed in magazines and distributed to millions, but can you prove how many people saw your advertisement and bought your product because of it? Once again, you can’t click on a print ad in a magazine.

New technologies and new methods for sharing marketing methods have eliminated this issue for content marketers who use online tactics. Links are trackable, “likes” and “follows” can be counted. Analytics tools can break down individual users and their web habits on your site and can prove the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

That might just be the best art about real-time analytics for content marketing: proving the effectiveness of your efforts. In doing so you can gauge your audiences’ response quickly and pivot when necessary.

Despite skepticism around the terminology, content marketing is here to stay. Companies now need to market through content in order to establish relationships with their customers and open up the conversations.

 

 

Want to learn more about content marketing? Check out CEO Jim Howard of Crownpeak spoke at IMS NY this past April, and delivered a great presentation about content marketing. Click here to see Jim’s presentation, “What the Hell is Content Marketing?”.

 

Filed Under: Content Marketing 360 Tagged With: , , , , , ,

What’s Next: Increased Marketing Spending on Digital

March 26, 2013 by

Marketing companies of all shapes and sizes are allocating more and more of their budgets to digital.  In fact, a recent Gartner study indicates that digital commands 25% of marketing budgets. But why the shift in spending strategies?

Butch Stearns and Debi Kleiman discuss the trend of increased spending in digital, and explain why the measurability and agility of digital marketing are just two of many reasons for this fundamental shift.

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To stay caught up with the latest edition of Digital Leaders, click here.

 

Filed Under: Content Marketing 360, Digital Leaders, The Pulse on Marketing Tagged With: , , , ,

Spotlight on IMS New York 2013: Jennifer Wong of HasOffers and 5 Things to Stop Doing in Your Inbound Marketing Efforts

March 20, 2013 by

Jennifer Wong of HasOffers takes a different approach in this Spotlight on IMS as she shares five things that marketers should stop doing in order to make the best use of their time and see better results.

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Key Takeaways:

1. STOP talking about attracting demand.

Focus on attracting demand with the content you publish socially, the content on your website and your SEO efforts. Creating relevant content and being more likeable will help attract customers to your business.

2.  STOP creating content for the sake of creating content.

Understanding buying personas, your target audience, and the relative buying cycle can help you create authentic, exciting content for your audience. Polls, surveys and video are all fun ways to engage your audience.

3. STOP treating SEO, content and social separately.

These three pillars of inbound marketing are great complements to one another, and implementing an integrated strategy will help you leverage each of these tactics and see the best results.

4. STOP obsessing over Fans and Followers.

Rather than focusing on the number people in your social media audience, shift your attention to who your audience is. Doing so will help you find the best ways to engage with them, and ultimately convert them into customers.

5. STOP making decisions based on the wrong metrics.

Marketers have access to tons of key metrics and data to create reports for making decisions on what is and what is not working for your organization. Utilize this data to make better decisions and achieve greater results.

 

The Pulse Network is very excited about the Inbound Marketing Summit. We hope to see you there. Still need to register? It only takes a minute to reserve your spot today.

Check out the rest of our Spotlight on IMS New York series, featuring some of the brightest minds from the IMS Community, as we roll them out over the next few weeks leading up to the show.

Want to continue this conversation? Feel free to Tweet to us @IMS_Conference, @ThePulse, or join in this conversations with Jennifer Wong and the rest of the IMS Community using #IMS13.

Filed Under: Content Marketing 360, IMS New York 2013, The Pulse on Marketing Tagged With: , , , ,

IMS Boston – highlights and roundup of blog coverage

September 16, 2011 by

Here’s a quick roundup of some of the coverage, commentary and blog posts from this week’s Inbound Marketing Summit. This year’s Boston event broke new records in terms of attendance, rock-star speakers (see our press release), exhibitors and general good-vibes about the state of social and inbound marketing.

TPN contributor and video know-it-all Steve Garfield also broke his record for the most people shooting video at the same time (how cool is that).

 

It’s all about…content!

So, what were some of the prominent themes? Personalized content, storytelling, and video content were at the top of my list. Along with integration and how consumer social and enterprise social (CRM, CMS, video, mobile) are coming together.

In fact this is how we are thinking about organizing our next IMS – in New York at the end of January – around a content marketing track and an enterprise technology track. We’d love your inputs as well. And to all who made #IMS11 a big success – thanks!

So, on to some of what others were saying and pondering while at IMS this week:

  • “Professor Youngme Moon talked about brands that we feel passionate about, and used Mini as one of the examples, including some of their powerful advertising. More so, she shared her own feelings about the brand and how the story related to her. These tales give us more to consider than simple numbers and data points.” – TPN advisor Chris Brogan, on his blog
  • “A panel on Social CRM reinforced the idea that marketing & sales is about the individual. No longer are reps able to sit in the office of a sales lead and see the diplomas on the wall, pictures of kids on the desk or other mementos that helps build a relationship. Instead, there is social media. A good CRM will make it easier for a good salesperson to integrate their calendar, contacts, emails and deal history into one source. If your only interaction with a customer is over the phone, you need every piece of information you can get to develop rapport quickly and perhaps most importantly, authentically.” – inbound strategy blog – read post
  • “Social media “scientist” Dan Zarella is a different kind of marketing guru. He eschews head-nodding maxims like “be part of the conversation” and puts commonly held notions to the test. With a mix of scientific method and just enough statistics to be dangerous, Zarella recently shared his own version of Mythbusters at the Inbound Marketing Summit (#ims11) in Boston, Ma – The Contest Strategist – read post
  • “Brian Halligan (founder and CEO of HubSpot) was really good. He really talked about how the next wave of marketing will be the personalization of the web.” – PointBlank, Direct Capital blog – read post
  • “How much better does it get for online marketing geeks? Former Apple chief evangelist and author Guy Kawasaki spoke about his book Enchantment this morning. His updated take on How to Win Friends and Influence People gives a fresh take on how to connect offline as well as online in a digital world. He definitely models his first premise: Be Likable!” – New PR Words and Music blog – read post

 

Filed Under: The Pulse on Marketing Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Social Media Contests – Quizzes & Polls

September 12, 2011 by

This is part four of a five part series between Tyler Pyburn, host at The Pulse Network, and Allen Bonde, Chief Marketing Officer at The Pulse Network, as they break down social media contest models and how they compare.

In the first three parts of our discussion, we’ve looked at the various types of social media contests and promotions, running sweepstakes and most recently social deals.  This time we’ll look at Quizzes and Polls, one of the easiest – and most effective ways – to drive engagement on your Twitter feed or Facebook page.

 

Types of Social Media Contests

 

Quizzes and polls are an easy way to get people to participate with your organization via Facebook and Twitter.  For example, we post simple polls on our various ‘PulseOn’ community pages that pertain to topics or content featured in recent shows.  Polls can also be a great way to gage the temperature of your fan base, where participation (and seeing what others think) is basically the prize.

Quizzes and Polls on Facebook

When I looked at the use of polls and quizzes on Facebook earlier this year for an article I did for Social Times, I found that half of the top 25 brands on Facebook have some sort of poll or two-way contest on their Facebook page.  Smart brands use polls or quizzes as a simple way to engage – and also start going down the path to qualifying prospects and even spotlighting related products on the way to social commerce.

Fan feedback can also be valuable to brands, especially for product planning in advance of rolling out a new product line, for example.  Feedback from social channels is not only authentic, but potentially in context, if it is captured directly in the stream of conversations that are going on within a community.  It’s also easy to embed polls right on your Facebook wall so visitors can vote on and add either a Like or a comment directly beneath it.

On Twitter, the model is more oriented to quizzes.  For example, you can send out a tweet saying that the first (or tenth or 100th) follower to tweet out the right answer to a linked quiz wins a prize.

Learn more about all of these models by watching the segment below.  And next time we’ll look at one of the most popular contest models on Facebook – the Photo Contest.

 

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Allen Bonde is the CMO of The Pulse Network and can be found on Twitter or email,abonde@thepulsenetwork.com.

Tyler Pyburn is a host at The Pulse Network and can be reached on his twitter or e-mail, tpyburn@thepulsenetwork.com

Filed Under: General Tagged With: , , , ,

The Pulse Network Solutions – Executive Brief 3.0

August 12, 2011 by

This is part three of a five part series between Butch Stearns, host at The Pulse Network, and Allen Bonde, Chief Marketing Officer at The Pulse Network, as they explore the lifecycle of digital marketing and the new solutions offered by The Pulse Network.


At the Pulse Network we’ve developed a solution that is designed to capture, produce, and deliver a months worth of proactive, C-Level content with just one hour of your executive’s time.  As someone who struggles to find time to do all my writing, it’s a pretty cool idea.  And it’s the idea behind our new Executive Brief 3.0.

It seems like just yesterday that marketers were struggling to convince our CEOs that we needed to expose our business to social media.  Now that everyone understands the concept of social media, and knows it’s essential to be engaging on social channels to reach customers where they congregate, we face a different challenge: getting these same executives to make the time to blog, and tweet and create posts so they can stay in touch and (especially in B2B) reach influencers.  The irony of course is that the people who are most equipped to tell the company’s story, and represent the brand on social channels, have the least amount of time to do so!  This is where Executive 3.0 steps in and provides a practical solution.

As I’ve  discussed, effective social marketing starts with a good story.  And blogging is a core way that executives can tell stories, start discussions and articulate a point of view.  Your corporate blog is the voice of the company, and needs to be authentic, informed and informative!  Yet, it takes a good half a day to write a good post, when you include the time to read, research, get links, and distribute it.  Multiply this by 4 or 5 – since it’s good practice to have each contributor doing at least one new post per week, and we are talking 2+ days a month just for blogging!

Executive Brief 3.0 breaks this bottleneck by building an outline/rundown for a blog ‘series,’ capturing the executive’s perspectives, thoughts and examples in one 30-minute video interview, creating 5 segments of content, post producing the output, and creating video blog posts, vignettes, transcripts, and even sound bites that can be easily cleaned up by your PR or marketing folks and turned into a month’s worth of social content.  What’s it look like?  This is how I created this post!

 

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Using TPN’s video engine and production capabilities, our social media know-how, and managing the process end-to-end makes it all work.  It’s a great way to tap your best storytellers, and create valuable, repurpose-able content assets.

Also, in case you missed Part 2 of this segment, I talked about virtual event marketing and how our Webinar 3.0 can benefit your business as well. Thanks for reading!

Allen Bonde is the CMO of The Pulse Network and can be found on Twitter or email,abonde@thepulsenetwork.com.

Butch Stearns is the COO of The Pulse Network and can be found on his Blog, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Filed Under: CEO Corner, The Pulse on Marketing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Marketing Funnel, Why it is Important

August 9, 2011 by

 

This is Part One of a Five Part Series with Butch Stearns, Chief Operating Officer at The Pulse Network, and Stephen Saber, Chief Executive Officer, as they converse on function of the marketing funnel in business.
 

 

The Marketing Funnel

There is a lot of chatter on the internet about the sales funnel being no more due to things like the complexity of the marketplace now with social media and web search.  The point I feel everyone is missing is that the funnel is a discipline.  The steps in the funnel help one break down their sales process to simple, manageable, system for the sales team in order to increase revenue.  I illustrate the importance of the sales funnel for Butch in this part of my series and go into greater detail on what I mean of the funnel being a discipline.

 

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In Part Two of the Series Butch and I formulate the Sales Funnel starting with the first step, awareness.

 

Stephen Saber is the CEO of The Pulse Network and can be found on his Blog, Twitter, and LinkedIn.  Butch Stearns is the COO of The Pulse Network and can be found on his Blog, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

 

Filed Under: The Pulse on Marketing Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Driving Revenue – Face To Face Events

August 2, 2011 by

 

This is Part Three of a Five Part Series Featuring Colin Bower, Chief Revenue Officer at the Pulse Network, and Butch Stearns, Chief Operating Officer at The Pulse Network Discussing the Topic of Generating Revenue.

If you put on events, it’s certain that you’re thinking of generating revenue through attendees and exhibitors.  But there are revenue streams beyond the people at your event.

At The Pulse Network, we treat our events as another source of content, and consider how best to turn that event into revenue, as we would with any other piece of content.  At Inbound Marketing Summit, The Pulse will be creating a three day event alongside Hubspot which will allow the layperson as well as professional marketers to understand how to create strategy in the digital space, all the way through to delivery.

In this video, we discuss how Inbound Marketing Summit is a 360 degree event that exists not just as a face to face event, but as a piece of content on-demand.

 

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If you’re interested in seeing some of the video content from IMS San Francisco, be sure to check out the IMS San Fran Show Page on The Pulse Network.

Part Four of this series will focus on generating revenue from virtual events, paying special attention to The Pulse Network’s Webinar 3.0.

Filed Under: The Pulse on Marketing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Email marketing, E-mail Content

July 29, 2011 by

This is part two of a five part series featuring Stephen Saber, Chief Executive Officer of The Pulse Network, and Butch Stearns, Chief Operating Officer of The Pulse Network, in which they discuss the changing landscape of e-mail marketing.

In a survey done by Hubspot, they discovered the more content you put through your channels the more click through you will receive.  A simple tweet from your corporate account can easily get lost in a marketplace filled with over 180 million unique visitors a month so how do stay away from simple guerilla marketing?  I give my two cents in this part of the series of how to make your content king.

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In part three of the series we will go into the how and where of e-mail marketing.

Also check out part one of the series on how e-mail marketing has changed.

Stephen Saber is the CEO of The Pulse Network and can be found on his Blog, Twitter, and LinkedIn.  Butch Stearns is the COO of The Pulse Network and can be found on his Blog, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

 

Filed Under: The Pulse on Marketing, The Pulse on Tech Tagged With: , , , , ,