Spotlight on IMS – Five Keys Habits to Successful Real-Time Marketing from Leigh George of R2 Integrated

May 17, 2013 by

Practicing real-time marketing is a challenge for many marketers. Leigh George of R2 Integrated shares her advice for successful real-time marketing strategies in this Spotlight on IMS.

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1.    Do Your Research

Doing the appropriate research and relying on big data is critical for implementing real-time marketing. Through analyzing big data and understanding trends that resonate with your target audience, you will be able to gauge what types of content and marketing messages will be best received.

2.    Think Like a Publisher

Marketing is rapidly becoming more like publishing with the rise of social media. It’s important now for marketers to think like a newsroom and hiring individuals with strong storytelling skills. In order to be relevant, you need to offer value and establish a connection with what your audience is most interested in.

3.    Act Like a Person, Not Like a Company

Online interactions from brands tend to be very reactive – customer service complaints, etc. As marketers, taking a proactive approach and searching for the right opportunities to engage with your customers is critical.

4.    Know When and Where to Scale

When the lights infamously went out during this year’s Super Bowl, Oreo took advantage of the trending moment quickly. Knowing when to tap into a trend or an event is critical – having bad timing and saying the wrong thing could result in poor public perception. Make sure that you are natural

5.    Don’t Fake It

Sometimes, brands try too hard to be relevant and will jump at the chance to join a conversation that is not appropriate. Again, research is crucial to ensure that you are involved in trending topics that are meaningful and tactful to your audience.

The Pulse Network is very excited about our upcoming Inbound Marketing Summit is taking place in San Francisco on July 30-31. You can register today for as little as $50 – click here to reserve your spot for this low price.
Check out 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 next show.
Want to continue this conversation? Feel free to Tweet to us and follow @IMS_Conference, @ThePulse, or join in this conversations with the rest of the IMS Community using #IMS13.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Spotlight on IMS: Tips on Reaching Your Email User Base from Mike Veilleux of Dyn

May 15, 2013 by

Check out this Spotlight on IMS as Mike Veilleux, Direct of Email Product at Dyn, shares his advice for email marketers who are trying to provide their customers with valuable messaging through email marketing.

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1.       Evolution of Deliverability

Over the past decade, spam has significantly changed the way people receive emails and engage with them. In the past, nearly all spam emails contained ads for free Viagra and Viagra knock-off products. Now, spam is defined as unsolicited emails from a company, website or individual – emails that customers do not sign up for or don’ want to receive. Since the days of the Viagra spam, however, spam has evolved to the point of outsmarting many filters. Key deliverability aspects emails marketers need to take control of are engagement among email customers and building a strong, credible reputation of your brand, domains and IP address in order to avoid being noted as spam.

2.       Protect Your Brand

Hackers tend to try to impersonate brands and companies digitally in order to phish your recipients.

Sometimes people impersonate you to phish recipients to steal people’s information, including their login credentials and passwords. A new specification for email marketers has been implemented to help email marketers and end-consumers keep their information safe, called DMARC:

New specification called DMARC

  • Domain-Based
  • Message
  • Authentication
  • Reporting &
  • Conformance

3.       Incorporate Transactional Email

Transactional email is one of the least focused email assets in most companies. Transactional emails are emails sent by companies welcoming a new member to their database, confirmation emails sent after a purchase and follow-up mails sent after a product has been delivered. These emails have a statistically higher open rate as they tend to contain information specific to the recipient. There is plenty of valuable space in these emails for companies to explain more about their brand, take advantage of upsell opportunities and cross-sell additional products and services. Marketers should make sure that they are focusing equally on their transactional emails as they are on their brand marketing emails.

 4.       Offer Unique Messages and Content

Providing your email recipients with unique messages and content will help your brand gain value, deliver the highest engagement rate (opens, click-thrus), and assist in deliverability. Your recipients will be more likely to actively participate in your email campaigns if you provide them with value.

 5.       Incorporate Real-Time Information

Providing real-time information is essential to unique messages and content. By developing an infrastructure which drives real-time information from your website, social networks and including timely, relevant industry news, you can position your brand as a resource for current events.

 

The Pulse Network is very excited about our upcoming Inbound Marketing Summit is taking place in San Francisco on July 30-31. You can register today for as little as $50 – click here to reserve your spot for this low price.

Check out 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 next show.

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

Filed Under: IMS New York 2013, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,

The New Era of On-Demand Marketing

May 1, 2013 by

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

 

 

 

As many marketers know, the landscape of marketing is rapidly changing. Over the past years, we’ve moved from traditional to content-based marketing that encourages interactive feedback and conversation with customers.

Now, digital marketing is about to enter even more challenging territory.

smartphonesBuilding on the movement toward consumer power brought on by the digital age and social media that encourages consumers to share, compare and rate experiences, marketing is headed toward being on-demand – not just always “on” but also always relevant and responsive to customers’ desires that cut through other advertising noise with precise delivery.

Mobile devices add a new dimension of “wherever” to the digital climate. Marketers have a great opportunity to be in the pocket of consumers, but need to find ways to take advantage of this opportunity and privilege.

According to a recent study by the McKinsey Institute, as digital capabilities multiply, consumer demands will rise in four specific areas:

1. Consumers will want to interact anywhere at any time. Marketers have already started to take advantage of their customers’ desire for real-time and unique content, but in the new on-demand environment, digital technologies will need to operate behind the scenes to integrate data into all interactions a consumer has across the decision journey and provide insights into the best influence pathways for companies, while also triggering new experiences for customers.

2. Customers will want to do truly new things as more information is deployed in ways that create value for them. Marketing will no longer interrupt an experience that consumers enjoy; it will need to become the experience they enjoy. The challenge will be for companies to look beyond today’s interfaces to create an instantaneous series of interactions that remove the hassle of searching and sharing in multiple places.

3. They will expect all data stored about them to be targeted precisely to their needs. A phone tap or a click will need to instantly personalize offers, using information captured on “likes,” recent travel, income and other targeted information. With each interaction in the new digital age, consumers will be creating new data footprints that can complement existing digital portraits and enhance customer experience for your business

4. They will expect all interactions to be easy. A tap-and-go approach to delivering services and information and streamlining processes will be critical. Interactions can be more inviting, especially on mobile devices, by using touch and swipe to make changes and data in phones to recognize consumers and automatically customize interfaces.

Businesses can improve their approach to marketing by staying ahead of the design, data and delivery requirements of on-demand customers in the upcoming years. In fact, competitive advantage in the future will depend on it.

 

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

Digital Leaders: Tools for Enterprise Marketers

April 26, 2013 by

Debi Kleiman of MITX and Butch Stearns of the Pulse Network speak with Mike Troiano of Actifio about building brands and helpful tools for marketers.

 

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Mike Troiano’s Keys to Building a Brand

  • Developing a product that works as advertised
  • Generating a base of loyal customers
  • Delivering on promises of business results
  • Establishing strong brand advocates

Reference Links

 

Tune in to our next episode of Digital Leaders on Tuesday, May 7th at 11:00 AM. Join the conversation on Twitter using with #DigitalLeaders.

Follow The Pulse Network on Twitter – https://twitter.com/ThePulse
Like The Pulse Network on Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/ThePulseNetwork

Filed Under: Uncategorized

The Pulse Network Solutions – Virtual Event Marketing

August 10, 2011 by

 
This is part two 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.

 

 

When focusing on products that drive your digital marketing mix, one solution that is getting a lot of attention recently is virtual events.

Virtual events are the idea that you can take what works in face-to-face events, but portray it in a much more efficient way. Instead of a client flying all over the country to be at your event, she can sit in her office and view a session online and interact with others via phone, Skype or chat.  The convenience of virtual events not only provide consumers the ability to fit them into their day (by watching replays of the actual event), but also can create behavior that we all want as marketers: interest in learning more about a topic, or product or service – and higher conversions!

Here at The Pulse Network our solution for powering socially-enabled virtual events is our Webinar 3.0 platform.  As illustrated in recent  Webinar 3.0 events what we have created is really a combination of three parts: an in-studio host and production, real-time social interactions, and the  ability to reach both live and on-demand users at their desk or even on their smartphone.  This format also addresses both the engagement challenge (how do we get people actively involved) and reach challenge (how do we fit our content into the time of day and channel of their choice).

Check out our discussion of how Webinar 3.0 fits into the marketing lifecycle and enables a new level of virtual event marketing.  And tune in August 18 when I’ll be doing a special Webinar 3.0 event with Barry Libert.  You can register here.

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Also, if you haven’t seen Part 1 of this series, in that episode we look at our Content Performance Index and how a scalable content strategy should be at the heart of your digital marketing programs.  Check it out!

 

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: business strategy, Communication, Content, Marketing, SEO, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,