 Your new post is loading...
Your new post is loading...
Perhaps most reflective of this has been the award-winning juggernaut of REI's #OptOutside campaign, which won the Titanium Grand Prix on Saturday. If for some reason you weren't one of its 6.7 billion media impressions, essentially the company closed its doors on Black Friday, encouraging its employees and everyone else to get out into the outdoors. Beyond the ad, starring REI chief exec Jerry Stritzke introducing the idea from a wide-open office, the brand also created a helpful online guide to hiking trails and other outdoor activities around the U.S.
By encouraging us to drop out of the annual shopping day, the outdoor retailer aims for more sales and brand loyalty. The company said the brand's social media impressions went up 7,000%, with 2.7 billion media impressions in 24 hours, while overall the campaign attracted 6.7 billion media impressions, 1.2 billion social impressions, and got more than 1.4 million people to spend the day outdoors. Meanwhile, more than 150 other companies joined REI to close their doors on Black Friday, and hundreds of state parks opened up for free.
If Cannes is the ad and marketing industry's Oscars, than this is arguably Best Picture. The Titanium category is meant to honor work that breaks new ground, crosses boundaries, and pushes the industry forward. The win adds to the campaign's Media and Promotions Grand Prix, picked up earlier in the week, and its run of wins at other industry awards like the D&ADs, and Best of Show at the One Show awards in May....
Marketers are ramping up their technology investments to better understand consumer needs and behaviors. Technologies to power social marketing, digital commerce and marketing analytics are the highest priorities, per July 2015 research.
Gartner surveyed more than 330 organizations in the UK and North America on their 2015 marketing budgets and 2016 expectations. Almost two-thirds of respondents said that social marketing and digital commerce were leading technology investment priorities.
Additionally, 61% of marketers said that marketing analytics were a priority and more than half of respondents were prioritizing tech for customer experience and advertising operations.
Some 58% of respondents said they were more likely to engage with brands online only if “it’s really easy and asks nothing of me.” In addition, 48% of respondents said they’d prefer brands to simply entertain them rather than ask them to do anything at all.
More disturbingly still for attention-hungry brand managers, the report also found that respondents “resent doing anything that appears to benefit the brand more than it benefits them.”
So what’s a lonely brand to do? And how did expectations get so high?...
Most marketers say traditional advertising is the most effective means of influencing buying decisions, yet consumers say advertising is one of the least-trusted influences, according to a recent report from Experticity.
The report was based on data from a survey of 217 senior marketing executives in North America and 300 North American consumers.
The marketers surveyed rank advertising, public relations, and content marketing as the most effective tactics for influencing buying decisions (83% rank each as effective); moreover, 78% of marketers plan to increase their investment in those three areas.
In contrast, less than half (49%) of consumers say they trust advertising from brands.
The buying influences that consumers say they put the most faith in are recommendations from friends and family (83% trust), online reviews (76%), and third-party experts (70%)....
Marketers are trained to put their best foot forward and ignore the downsides of their products. This is about doing the exact opposite: finding your weakest points and showcasing them for all to see.
So how are we to respond? I believe that no matter what your business is, you need to become the CEO of a software company. Software must be your differentiator. Software must be your competitive advantage. Software must be integrated, ingested, and ingrained in every aspect of your offering. Software must become your foundation so that you’re freed to build the rest of your offering, rather than constantly defending against new challenges posed by voracious software.
According to a study by Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs only 38% of B2B companies think their content marketing is effective. The same study also states that only 35% of the companies have a documented content marketing strategy.
My guess is that some of these companies do not even know whether they are effective or not. They cannot say what “effective” really is in regard to content marketing without goals, metrics etc. It would certainly help with effectiveness of content marketing to have a strategy at hand.
Here are 9 essential elements any content marketing strategy should include....
|
Social strategy. Digital strategy. Mobile strategy. Content strategy. Everyday we’re being urged to create a new strategy. But with all the chatter about new channels, it seems we may have lost sight of the concept of an overall Marketing Strategy. And this gap has huge implications for marketing effectiveness. The tactical programs we create need to rest on a single foundation, otherwise we’re just sending dollars out the door. Case in point, the biannual CMO Survey just released by Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, the American Marketing Association and Deloitte revealed that “marketers are expected to nearly double their social media spending in the next five years even though most can't show the impact of social on their business.”
Ya’ll as we say here in Texas, social media, direct marketing, public relations, advertising, etc., are not strategies -- these are tactics, and each of these tactics can potentially be deployed to support any number of strategic options. Marketers, I issue you a call to arms, it’s time to get serious about marketing strategy.
Marketing strategy, not a channel or touchpoint or tactic, is how your organization will achieve its mission. It is the critical link between marketing objectives and marketing programs and tactics. Your strategy selection (and just as importantly what is not selected) provides focus and enables your organization to concentrate limited resources on building core competencies that in turn create the sustainable competitive advantage needed to pursue and secure the best revenue opportunities....
To say native content has grown since last year would be an understatement. In 2014, Pressboard combed through 1,500 pieces of content for our "best of" list -- this year it was closer to 7,000. To give you an idea of how far the space has come, we had to buy VR headsets just to review a couple of the entries.
2015 was the year that native content moved from experimental to fundamental and nearly every major publisher and brand discovered the power of stories, instead of ads. Here are some of the best from the last 12 months...
An idea doesn't have to be unique to be great. In fact, there are some really awesome examples of great marketing out there that you can lean on to inspire your next project. (Austin Kleon calls this concept "stealing like an artist.")
But finding these examples isn't always easy. That's where we come in. We've collected 12 places on the web where you can browse and search for examples of great marketing -- including website design, design in general, email marketing, and social media pages. Check them out, bookmark them, and use them to inspire your own marketing strategy.
Get 50 brilliant examples of website design now by downloading our free flipbook....
Let’s start with the name: Cheese Posties is a genius monicker for a subscription service that delivers grilled cheese sandwiches to your door. That cannot be denied. Only an idiot would try.
But, is it not utterly barmy to send sandwiches through the mail? Dave Rotheroe doesn’t think so. He raised nearly $4,200 (€3,809) on Kickstarter – nearly double his original goal – to create the service, which he says will start shipping at the end of August or beginning of September.
Subscribers will be presented with a series of questions including ‘Sweet or savory?’ and ‘Are you vegetarian or gluten free?’ Cheese Posties will then determine which gourmet grilled sandwich to ship to them that week. Note: They’re planning to send sandwiches to the US, UK and Europe....
A much-ballyhooed Gallup study uncovered some ugly “truths” about social media, including a reputed inability to influence purchasing decisions. According to the study, 62 percent of Americans say Facebook, Twitter and their ilk have no influence on whether they purchase a product.
Although asking consumers to accurately recount the advertising methods that ultimately drove them to purchase is likely a fool’s errand, many marketers who have attempted to correlate standard social metrics to sales and other conversions have struggled to make a connection.
As a result, in many marketing shops the number of likes, shares and retweets a brand receives daily is lessening in importance. But that doesn’t mean social media offers nothing of value — advanced marketers are leveraging social data for reasons beyond direct marketing tactics....
As CMI research shows, marketers with a documented content marketing strategy are more effective than those who don’t have a written strategy. Yet, only 27% of B2C and 48% of B2B marketers have developed a plan.
If you lack a written strategy, a one-page plan is a great place to begin. If you have a detailed strategy but struggle to gain traction, boiling it down to one page will make it easier. A one-page strategy can help you:
- Crystalize your content marketing strategy
- Gain stronger buy-in more quickly from executives or clients
- Keep content producers strategically aligned...
|
Good story. Great campaign. Exceptional content marketing results!