#there are untapped themes in this book that are worth exploring

[isfjmel-phleg]

I'm trying to wrangle all the TSG research into some kind of outline that makes sense, and a few thoughts have come up.

There were a lot of adaptations of The Secret Garden in the late 1980s and 1990s, coinciding with the book's coming into public domain in 1987. This died down for a while, but there's been a resurgence of adaptations and retellings within the past decade or so. These responses to the story would thus have come from people who were likely to have been influenced by such well-known adaptations as the 1993 film or the 1991 musical.

The adaptations of the 80s/90s tended to emphasize gothic elements, like the eerieness of the manor, the tragedy of lost parents, and an interpretation of Colin as the agency-less damsel in distress victim of villainous/misguided adults. They also tended to downplay the more down-to-earth elements, such as the influence of the Sowerbys and Ben Weatherstaff and the practical side of the children's recovery. Mrs. Sowerby, who is the book's personification of ideal parenthood, is notably absent from most of these adaptations. Since these adaptations were so well-known, they have had an impact on many people's understanding of the story, to the point that inventions of these adaptations are often treated as if they come from the book. (For the last time, everyone, Mary's uncle is not a lord, and Burnett never wrote the "whole world is a garden" line or anything like it.)

Therefore, we can look at the more recent adaptations and retellings as responses to not just the book but to earlier adaptations as well. And the influence of these adaptations has probably been a factor in these versions' reframing the story as about traditional grief rather than emotional neglect. It fits in better with the gothic perception of the story, which is more about the Tragedy and Loss and Drama. The elements that were downplayed in 80s/90s adaptations are also either downplayed or entirely omitted in recent versions. For instance, despite Mrs. Sowerby's prominence in the text, she or an equivalent does not appear/plays no meaningful role in such works as The Humming Room, The Misselthwaite Archives, The Secret Garden (2020 film), The Secret Garden on 81st Street, The Edge of In Between (maybe--I need to reread this one to confirm), The Secret Garden of Yanagi Inn, and A Bit of Earth, all of which date from 2012-2023. Without a positive maternal figure as a point of comparison and a force for good, the narrative is not interested in examining the effects of failed parenting versus successful parenting, and the themes have to go elsewhere. These are not necessarily "bad" adaptations or poorly done works in their own right! But their themes and priorities often significantly differ from those of the original text. Recent adaptations/retellings have tended to turn into a translation of a translation, and in the process some of the original's essence has been lost.

[mozillavulpix]

The Importance of the Great Saiyaman

I was thinking about the Great Saiyaman mini-arc in Dragon Ball Super - probably the one and only time we’re going to see that costume in Super in a significant way, if the events of those episodes are to be believed, and thinking about what purpose those episodes served suddenly made me understand the relevance of the Great Saiyaman not only to the story Dragon Ball Super was attempting to tell, but to Gohan’s character in general.

In that I’d say the Great Saiyaman was in fact one of the most crucial parts of Gohan’s character once he ‘grew up’, which helped make him a protagonist that we could legitimately find compelling to watch (even if his stint as protagonist was brief).

People say the Great Saiyaman ruined Gohan? No. I think the Great Saiyaman saved Gohan.

First, some background knowledge. From an interview by Akira Toriyama in Daizenshuu 2.

And then the Cell arc ended. Did you think that everyone felt you would put Gohan into the leading role?

I intended to put Gohan into the leading role. It didn’t work out. I felt that compared to Goku, he was ultimately not suited for the part.

Now, everyone normally focuses on the second part of that quote: that Gohan in the leading role didn’t work out because Toriyama thought he wasn’t suitable. But the first part of that quote is perhaps just as important. Intended. Meaning some points in the series were being written with the intention of Gohan being the lead character.

The question as to when Toriyama changed his mind and why is another story altogether, and one that isn’t really relevant to this discussion. But the most important thing to note here is that, most likely during the sections where Gohan was being the Great Saiyaman and preparing for the tournament, the story was revolving around the idea that he was the protagonist.

Pictured: Gohan ready for high school, in the same page of the Muten Roshi explaining that this boy was now taking Goku’s place.

Now, if Gohan was to be the protagonist of the story, we needed to understand him. We knew he was like as a fighter, and as the child who normally hid under his father’s wing, but we didn’t know what he’d be like as an independent 16-year-old who no longer had father-figures who surpassed him in strength by a wide margin.

But there was one thing we did know about Gohan: he was generally a pretty morally upstanding guy.

Unlike Goku, Gohan was always willing to jump in to do the right thing driven by a pure altruistic motive. He didn’t necessarily like the thrill of a fight and most likely wouldn’t allow a threat to the planet to get stronger for the sake of a better challenge. Assuming he wasn’t consumed by anger, that is.

And while that did definitely separate him as a different character to Goku, it also left a bit of a problem. Gohan as a character could be seen as a little bit too...clean.

If he was always going to do the right thing, and step up when he saw innocent people in danger, he wouldn’t be Son Goku. Instead, he’d be...basically Superman. Or any sort of American-style superhero, who would be ready to use their powers at a minutes notice to do everything from stopping criminals to helping citizens escape from a major natural disaster.

But Dragon Ball was never a superhero story, and in fact, that kind of logic would actively hinder the more individualistic themes of fighting for self-improvement that pervaded the entire series. And, in particular, it would also harm Gohan as a character.

Come the start of the Majin Buu arc, once Gohan was written as a teenager who was also a Super Saiyan, his earlier role as the child with the massive amount of untapped power who followed the heroes along with the hope of being able to wield it one day no longer applied. He wasn’t really a child anymore, nor was his massive potential underutlised once he used it to save the world from Cell. The other biggest defining trait of his as a character was in fact that altruistic, self-sacrificing nature, and that would thus be something worth exploring to keep his character consistent and with a sufficient number of personality traits to stop him from being bland.

The issue with that, though, is that...always morally-upstanding heroes are kind of boring. Especially in Dragon Ball, where we enjoy seeing our characters get stronger due to their intrinsic motivations and hard work. If Gohan only acted like a morally-correct hero who always saved the day and, due to his personality, would probably do that all the time, it could start feeling a little bit formulaic. How could we find Gohan as a leading character sufficiently compelling if all we really saw of him is the hero who always shows up to admonish the villains for being evil and then beats them up because of it?

Now, that kind of protagonist does work. It can work. But it’s seen mostly in superhero stories.

So...if Gohan as the protagonist would be acting like a superhero...why couldn’t they just make Gohan a superhero?

Enter the Great Saiyaman. Gohan, seeing all the crime rampant in the world and especially around his new high school, dons a costume and a secret identity, and goes around helping people and stopping villains wherever he can.

But the important thing about the Great Saiyaman, the thing that shows that this is Dragon Ball and not an American comic book, is that it’s mostly played as a parody. Gohan’s costume looks intentionally ill-matched and overblown, and in-universe, besides Bulma, Goten and Gohan himself, everyone thinks that the escapades he puts on are ridiculous.

What makes this especially brilliant is what it does for the story and Gohan’s character. The Great Saiyaman essentially detaches Gohan as a person from Gohan as the morally-righteous hero. We know he as a character is going to do the right thing and try to help others, but those motives are then filtered through the lens of the Great Saiyaman persona. It no longer defines him as an individual. The morally-righteous hero is in fact the Great Saiyaman, leaving the character of Son Gohan to be something else, no longer bogged down by these heroic traits.

It allows us to get to see Gohan in situations where he’s not trying to save people. Like true secret identities, the superhero persona is used to separate his life being a hero from his life being a teenage boy. When he’s no longer in costume, we get to see him as a teenage boy. We see him struggle with high school, girls, keeping his power a secret, and trying to train his brother and get back into shape before the tournament. Not only that, but we get to see him as a martial artist - someone who also fights to improve himself as a fighter. Perhaps that’s not his only motivation, but he does have that motivation still. That’s something a superhero would never really show. It’s what makes it uniquely Dragon Ball.

Come the business with Majin Buu, Gohan is actually fighting the threats with the costume of the Great Saiyaman, but without any hint of disguise - his bandana and sunglasses discarded earlier on in the day. Because of this, he’s not fighting because he’s a superhero. He’s fighting because he’s a Super Saiyan. And that in itself allows us to see him as more than both the good guy hero and as just another Saiyan. He’s both. And we see both. Just like how we see his two identities.

And if we jump many years later ahead to Dragon Ball Super, we can see that’s essentially the same role the Great Saiyaman serves in Episodes 73 and 74. These episodes were almost a domestic drama focused around a jealous, insecure big-name actor attempting to destroy Gohan’s home life.

If you hear that synopsis, you might think “that sounds like a ridiculously-cheesy concept for an episode of Super.” And it is. But those episodes are also episodes of Gohan as the Great Saiyaman. He fights Barry Karn in that exact outfit, and, crucially, keeps his disguise to the onlooking spectators the entire time. And through this, these episodes, this very cheesy and somewhat predictable story, becomes a superhero story. The costume changes the genre entirely. When that happens, it becomes a lot easier to accept as a feasible story. Like the spectators and movie crew, we see this fight as one superhero fighting one monster, ready to be shot for a movie. And in this case, the movie is in fact one that is shown in-universe, a movie in which the protagonist itself finds boring.

And, crucially, it allows Gohan without the costume to shine as more than just “that guy who really cares about his family”.

It’s why I don’t really agree with people who say Gohan is bland. He’s bland only if you treat something like the Great Saiyaman as all his character has to offer. But if you look under that ridiculous helmet, you’ll realise those aren’t the only moments we see him on-screen. And it’s in fact the contrast between him in-costume and without-costume that makes him more than just the boring parts of Superman.

[glenmenlow]

10 Brand And Business Book Recommendations

Every year I am sent hundreds of brand and business books to review. Collectively they cover the most important concepts shaping the business world today. With help from my colleagues at The Blake Project, we dive in and take a close look at each of them. The most useful quickly emerge and we read the entire book.

Prompted this week by a client looking for book recommendations, here are ten of the brand and business books I recommend for Digital Strategy, Brand Strategy, Brand Management, Brand Storytelling, Innovation, Behavioral Science, Brand Purpose, Customer Experience, Marketing and Finance and Business Strategy.

I think you will find that each offer a great deal of actionable insights and are well worth your time.

1. Digital Strategy: Think Like Amazon By John Rossman

“What would Jeff do?” Since leaving Amazon to advise start-ups and corporations, John Rossman has been asked this question countless times by executives who want to know “the secret” behind Amazon’s historic success. In this step-by-step guide, he provides 50 ½ answers drawn from his experience as an Amazon executive―and shows today’s business leaders how to think like Amazon, strategize like Bezos, and beat the competition like nobody’s business. Learn how to:

•Move forward to get back to Day 1―and change the status quo. •Become a platform company―with the right platform strategy. •Create customer obsession―and grant your customers superpowers. •Experiment, fail, rinse, and repeat. •Decentralize your way to digital greatness. •Master the magic of small autonomous teams. •Avoid the trap of past positions. •Make better and faster decisions. •Use metrics to create a culture of accountability and innovation •Use AI and the Internet of Things to reinvent customer experiences.

In addition to these targeted strategies, you’ll receive a rare inside glimpse into how Jeff Bezos and Amazon take a remarkably consistent approach to innovate, explore new markets, and spark new growth.

Get your copy here: Think Like Amazon, 50 1/2 Ideas To Become A Digital Leader

2. Behavioral Science: The Behavior Business By Richard Chataway

If you are in business, you are in the business of behavior – and unless a business influences behavior, it will not succeed.

In the last 50 years we have learned more about how we behave than over the previous 5,000. This book shows how behavioral science has revolutionized our understanding of how people really think (or don’t) – and how we can use those insights in our businesses to influence behavior and gain competitive advantage.

Get your copy here: The Behavior Business

3. Brand Management: The Brand Bridge By Jerome Conlon

Marketing’s role is to create a brand out of the product, and transform it into a symbol. By translating the product’s tangible and intangible benefits into symbolic meaning, images, and feelings, marketers create a brand bridge that is loved and wanted, one that is willingly traversed to get to “the other side.” The meanings, images, and feelings that advertising attaches to branded products create the attractive (or preferably irresistible) symbolic identity as experienced by consumers. This is the brand bridge.

Get your copy here: The Brand Bridge – How to Build a Profound Connection Between Your Company, Your Brand, and Your Customers

4. Brand Strategy: Brand Hacks By Emmanuel Probst

Brands that succeed are the ones that help us find meaning. In this process, the brands become meaningful in and of themselves. Brand Hacks takes you on an exploratory journey, revealing why most advertising campaigns fail and examining the personal, social, and cultural meanings that successful brands bring to consumers’ everyday lives.

Most importantly, this book will show you how to use simple brand hacks to create and grow brands that deliver meaning even with a limited budget. Brand Hacks is supported by in-depth research in consumer psychology, interviews with industry-leading marketers, and case studies of meaningful brands, both big and small.

Get your copy here: Brand Hacks: How to Grow your Brand by Fulfilling the Human Quest for Meaning

5. Brand Storytelling By Miri Rodriguez

Despite understanding essential storytelling techniques, brands continue to explain how their product or service can help the customer, rather than showcasing how the customer’s life has changed as a result of them. Brand Storytelling gets back to the heart of brand loyalty, consumer behavior and engagement as a business strategy: using storytelling to trigger the emotions that humans are driven by. It provides a step by step guide to assess, dismantle and rebuild a brand story, shifting the brand from a ‘hero’ to ‘sidekick’ mentality, and positioning the customer as a key influencer to motivate the audience.

Written by the award-winning storyteller Miri Rodriguez at Microsoft, Brand Storytelling is a clear, actionable guide that goes beyond content strategy, simplifying where to begin, how to benchmark success and ensuring a consistent brand voice throughout every department.

Get your copy here: Brand Storytelling: Put Customers At The Heart Of Your Brand Story

6. Brand Purpose: Grow The Pie By Alex Edmans

What is a responsible business? Common wisdom is that it’s one that sacrifices profit for social outcomes. But while it’s crucial for companies to serve society, they also have a duty to generate profit for investors – savers, retirees, and pension funds. Based on the highest-quality evidence and real-life examples spanning industries and countries, Alex Edmans shows that it’s not an either-or choice – companies can create both profit and social value. The most successful companies don’t target profit directly, but are driven by purpose – the desire to serve a societal need and contribute to human betterment. The book explains how to embed purpose into practice so that it’s more than just a mission statement, and discusses the critical role of working collaboratively with a company’s investors, employees, and customers. Rigorous research also uncovers surprising results on how executive pay, shareholder activism, and share buybacks can be used for the common good.

Get your copy here: Grow The Pie, How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose And Profit

7. Business Strategy: Connected Strategy By: Nicolaj Siggelkow And Christian Terweisch

What if there were a way to turn occasional, sporadic transactions with customers into long-term, continuous relationships–while simultaneously driving dramatic improvements in operational efficiency? What if you could break your existing trade-offs between superior customer experience and low cost?

This is the promise of a connected strategy. New forms of connectivity–involving frequent, low-friction, customized interactions–mean that companies can now anticipate customer needs as they arise, or even before. Simultaneously, enabled by these technologies, companies can create new business models that deliver more value to customers. Connected strategies are win-win: Customers get a dramatically improved experience, while companies boost operational efficiency.

In this book, strategy and operations experts Nicolaj Siggelkow and Christian Terwiesch reveal the emergence of connected strategies as a new source of competitive advantage. With in-depth examples from companies operating in industries such as healthcare, financial services, mobility, retail, entertainment, nonprofit, and education, Connected Strategy identifies the four pathways–respond-to-desire, curated offering, coach behavior, and automatic execution–for turning episodic interactions into continuous relationships. The authors show how each pathway creates a competitive advantage, then guide you through the critical decisions for creating and implementing your own connected strategies.

Get your copy here: Connected Strategy: Building Continuous Customer Relationships For Competitive Advantage

8. Marketing And Finance: Financial Dimensions Of Marketing Decisions By David Stewart

Long overdue insights for the marketing community are found in this book about linking marketing activities and their outcomes to the financial performance of the organization. The theme of the book is that the marketing function must justify its activities and use of resources in terms of its financial contributions to the firm. More specifically, the book focuses on how marketing activities generate cash flow, growth, and other financial benefits for the organization. This perspective provides a framework for long-term investments for purposes of evaluating and ranking the funding of proposed projects.

Get your copy here: Financial Dimensions Of Marketing Decisions

9. Innovation: Costovation By Steve Wunker And Jennifer Law

Costovation solves the dilemma of how to spend less and innovate more. The book’s revolutionary approach broadens the definition of innovation beyond products to the business model itself. With Costovation, you let go of assumptions, take a fresh look at the market, and relentlessly focus on what customers really want.

Packed with examples and interactive exercises, the book explores cost innovation strategies that work for big and small companies alike. From open innovation and cost-sharing to simplifying products and turning waste into new offerings-readers learn how rivals are carving out niches, protecting positions, and dominating industries.

Innovation and cost-cutting are not opposites. Combined, they expose untapped opportunities to outsmart and underspend competitors.

Get your copy here: Costovation

10. Customer Experience: Building Brand Experiences By Darren Coleman

Retaining brand relevance is fundamental to organizational success, and an increasing challenge that high-level marketing professionals now face. In the past, many have responded with product or price-based competition, yet this can only propel a brand so far when it comes to retaining long-term relevance. Research shows that consumers are in fact driven by emotion and positive brand experiences have the power to drive engagement, while simultaneously offering countless options for competitive differentiation. Building Brand Experiences enables managers and executives to realize this and create tailored, relevant experiences that will appeal to consumers and drive brand performance.

Practically structured around The Brand Experience Blueprint, Building Brand Experiences provides a step-by-step guide to the process of building effective brand experiences based on tried-and-tested tools, templates and informed research. Combining expert insight and real-world examples in an anecdotal and digestible way, Building Brand Experiences is the essential guide to crafting relevant experiences that consumers will love, to improve brand engagement and drive results.

Get your copy here: Building Brand Experiences

At The Blake Project we are helping clients from around the world, in all stages of development, redefine and articulate what makes them competitive at critical moments of change through online strategy workshops. Please email us for more.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

from WordPress https://glenmenlow.wordpress.com/2020/04/22/10-brand-and-business-book-recommendations/ via IFTTT

[joejstrickl]

10 Brand And Business Book Recommendations

Every year I am sent hundreds of brand and business books to review. Collectively they cover the most important concepts shaping the business world today. With help from my colleagues at The Blake Project, we dive in and take a close look at each of them. The most useful quickly emerge and we read the entire book.

Prompted this week by a client looking for book recommendations, here are ten of the brand and business books I recommend for Digital Strategy, Brand Strategy, Brand Management, Brand Storytelling, Innovation, Behavioral Science, Brand Purpose, Customer Experience, Marketing and Finance and Business Strategy.

I think you will find that each offer a great deal of actionable insights and are well worth your time.

1. Digital Strategy: Think Like Amazon By John Rossman

“What would Jeff do?” Since leaving Amazon to advise start-ups and corporations, John Rossman has been asked this question countless times by executives who want to know “the secret” behind Amazon’s historic success. In this step-by-step guide, he provides 50 ½ answers drawn from his experience as an Amazon executive―and shows today’s business leaders how to think like Amazon, strategize like Bezos, and beat the competition like nobody’s business. Learn how to:

•Move forward to get back to Day 1―and change the status quo. •Become a platform company―with the right platform strategy. •Create customer obsession―and grant your customers superpowers. •Experiment, fail, rinse, and repeat. •Decentralize your way to digital greatness. •Master the magic of small autonomous teams. •Avoid the trap of past positions. •Make better and faster decisions. •Use metrics to create a culture of accountability and innovation •Use AI and the Internet of Things to reinvent customer experiences.

In addition to these targeted strategies, you’ll receive a rare inside glimpse into how Jeff Bezos and Amazon take a remarkably consistent approach to innovate, explore new markets, and spark new growth.

Get your copy here: Think Like Amazon, 50 1/2 Ideas To Become A Digital Leader

2. Behavioral Science: The Behavior Business By Richard Chataway

If you are in business, you are in the business of behavior – and unless a business influences behavior, it will not succeed.

In the last 50 years we have learned more about how we behave than over the previous 5,000. This book shows how behavioral science has revolutionized our understanding of how people really think (or don’t) – and how we can use those insights in our businesses to influence behavior and gain competitive advantage.

Get your copy here: The Behavior Business

3. Brand Management: The Brand Bridge By Jerome Conlon

Marketing’s role is to create a brand out of the product, and transform it into a symbol. By translating the product’s tangible and intangible benefits into symbolic meaning, images, and feelings, marketers create a brand bridge that is loved and wanted, one that is willingly traversed to get to “the other side.” The meanings, images, and feelings that advertising attaches to branded products create the attractive (or preferably irresistible) symbolic identity as experienced by consumers. This is the brand bridge.

Get your copy here: The Brand Bridge – How to Build a Profound Connection Between Your Company, Your Brand, and Your Customers

4. Brand Strategy: Brand Hacks By Emmanuel Probst

Brands that succeed are the ones that help us find meaning. In this process, the brands become meaningful in and of themselves. Brand Hacks takes you on an exploratory journey, revealing why most advertising campaigns fail and examining the personal, social, and cultural meanings that successful brands bring to consumers’ everyday lives.

Most importantly, this book will show you how to use simple brand hacks to create and grow brands that deliver meaning even with a limited budget. Brand Hacks is supported by in-depth research in consumer psychology, interviews with industry-leading marketers, and case studies of meaningful brands, both big and small.

Get your copy here: Brand Hacks: How to Grow your Brand by Fulfilling the Human Quest for Meaning

5. Brand Storytelling By Miri Rodriguez

Despite understanding essential storytelling techniques, brands continue to explain how their product or service can help the customer, rather than showcasing how the customer’s life has changed as a result of them. Brand Storytelling gets back to the heart of brand loyalty, consumer behavior and engagement as a business strategy: using storytelling to trigger the emotions that humans are driven by. It provides a step by step guide to assess, dismantle and rebuild a brand story, shifting the brand from a ‘hero’ to ‘sidekick’ mentality, and positioning the customer as a key influencer to motivate the audience.

Written by the award-winning storyteller Miri Rodriguez at Microsoft, Brand Storytelling is a clear, actionable guide that goes beyond content strategy, simplifying where to begin, how to benchmark success and ensuring a consistent brand voice throughout every department.

Get your copy here: Brand Storytelling: Put Customers At The Heart Of Your Brand Story

6. Brand Purpose: Grow The Pie By Alex Edmans

What is a responsible business? Common wisdom is that it’s one that sacrifices profit for social outcomes. But while it’s crucial for companies to serve society, they also have a duty to generate profit for investors – savers, retirees, and pension funds. Based on the highest-quality evidence and real-life examples spanning industries and countries, Alex Edmans shows that it’s not an either-or choice – companies can create both profit and social value. The most successful companies don’t target profit directly, but are driven by purpose – the desire to serve a societal need and contribute to human betterment. The book explains how to embed purpose into practice so that it’s more than just a mission statement, and discusses the critical role of working collaboratively with a company’s investors, employees, and customers. Rigorous research also uncovers surprising results on how executive pay, shareholder activism, and share buybacks can be used for the common good.

Get your copy here: Grow The Pie, How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose And Profit

7. Business Strategy: Connected Strategy By: Nicolaj Siggelkow And Christian Terweisch

What if there were a way to turn occasional, sporadic transactions with customers into long-term, continuous relationships–while simultaneously driving dramatic improvements in operational efficiency? What if you could break your existing trade-offs between superior customer experience and low cost?

This is the promise of a connected strategy. New forms of connectivity–involving frequent, low-friction, customized interactions–mean that companies can now anticipate customer needs as they arise, or even before. Simultaneously, enabled by these technologies, companies can create new business models that deliver more value to customers. Connected strategies are win-win: Customers get a dramatically improved experience, while companies boost operational efficiency.

In this book, strategy and operations experts Nicolaj Siggelkow and Christian Terwiesch reveal the emergence of connected strategies as a new source of competitive advantage. With in-depth examples from companies operating in industries such as healthcare, financial services, mobility, retail, entertainment, nonprofit, and education, Connected Strategy identifies the four pathways–respond-to-desire, curated offering, coach behavior, and automatic execution–for turning episodic interactions into continuous relationships. The authors show how each pathway creates a competitive advantage, then guide you through the critical decisions for creating and implementing your own connected strategies.

Get your copy here: Connected Strategy: Building Continuous Customer Relationships For Competitive Advantage

8. Marketing And Finance: Financial Dimensions Of Marketing Decisions By David Stewart

Long overdue insights for the marketing community are found in this book about linking marketing activities and their outcomes to the financial performance of the organization. The theme of the book is that the marketing function must justify its activities and use of resources in terms of its financial contributions to the firm. More specifically, the book focuses on how marketing activities generate cash flow, growth, and other financial benefits for the organization. This perspective provides a framework for long-term investments for purposes of evaluating and ranking the funding of proposed projects.

Get your copy here: Financial Dimensions Of Marketing Decisions

9. Innovation: Costovation By Steve Wunker And Jennifer Law

Costovation solves the dilemma of how to spend less and innovate more. The book’s revolutionary approach broadens the definition of innovation beyond products to the business model itself. With Costovation, you let go of assumptions, take a fresh look at the market, and relentlessly focus on what customers really want.

Packed with examples and interactive exercises, the book explores cost innovation strategies that work for big and small companies alike. From open innovation and cost-sharing to simplifying products and turning waste into new offerings-readers learn how rivals are carving out niches, protecting positions, and dominating industries.

Innovation and cost-cutting are not opposites. Combined, they expose untapped opportunities to outsmart and underspend competitors.

Get your copy here: Costovation

10. Customer Experience: Building Brand Experiences By Darren Coleman

Retaining brand relevance is fundamental to organizational success, and an increasing challenge that high-level marketing professionals now face. In the past, many have responded with product or price-based competition, yet this can only propel a brand so far when it comes to retaining long-term relevance. Research shows that consumers are in fact driven by emotion and positive brand experiences have the power to drive engagement, while simultaneously offering countless options for competitive differentiation. Building Brand Experiences enables managers and executives to realize this and create tailored, relevant experiences that will appeal to consumers and drive brand performance.

Practically structured around The Brand Experience Blueprint, Building Brand Experiences provides a step-by-step guide to the process of building effective brand experiences based on tried-and-tested tools, templates and informed research. Combining expert insight and real-world examples in an anecdotal and digestible way, Building Brand Experiences is the essential guide to crafting relevant experiences that consumers will love, to improve brand engagement and drive results.

Get your copy here: Building Brand Experiences

At The Blake Project we are helping clients from around the world, in all stages of development, redefine and articulate what makes them competitive at critical moments of change through online strategy workshops. Please email us for more.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

[servaxo]

Data-driven marketing strategies steer you toward success

More than ever before, data-driven marketing plans are proving to be invaluable for leveraging the insights you’ve gleaned during the past several months or year, and the latest promotional products can help. After all, that’s what will drive your marketing strategy: a plan that gets results because it’s based on your customers, your goals and your data.

But where does this data come from? And how do you even begin to use it? In this Blue Paper, we’ll explore some tips for identifying the information you have at your fingertips that will help drive your future marketing strategy. Let’s get started!

Data and marketing: the undeniable value of annual planning

The question of how to spend your promotional budget is a big one, and it can feel overwhelming, particularly in those moments when you’re facing a deadline. A thoughtful, well-planned strategic approach can really take the pressure off to help you feel confident in your choices.

That’s where annual planning comes in. If you haven’t had time to do annual planning in the past—don’t worry! You’re most certainly not alone. It’s an approach worth considering, one which can really help you engage customers at a key touchpoint. Even better, with annual planning, you can say goodbye to the stress of—surprise!—running low on budget mid-year, just when you need unique promotional products for conversation starters at a trade show.

Admittedly, knowing which tactics will give you the biggest return on your investment is tough. After all, there are so many ways to spend your marketing budget. Should you focus on online marketing and social media? What about mainstream media: newspapers, radio or television? What about the classics: brochures, billboards and flyers? Or, the new wave: apps? And where do the latest promotional products for events, trade shows or other customer touchpoints fit in?

It can be overwhelming, which is why placing the pieces carefully will help ensure you have even more of that rich data you need to put together a killer plan.

The rearview mirror: reflections on marketing at the micro level

It’s time to take a look back at the highs, the lows and everything in-between on your marketing calendar. As you review your marketing efforts over the past year, to what degree did they help your organization accomplish its business goals? Did they achieve your marketing objectives? This overview is great, but you’ll want to get at the micro level to make the most of your learnings.

Most importantly, you’ll want to ask yourself this key question: How well did specific tactics perform among your target audience?

This is the sweet spot where data can help you formulate next year’s plan and make truly informed decisions about where to focus your marketing and promotions resources. Even if you don’t think you’ve sufficiently tracked outcomes and findings along the way, it’s possible you have a lot of untapped knowledge at your disposal. (Pro tip: If you notice gaps, this is your chance to close them with your marketing strategy, so you have even more data a year from now!)

Here are some tips to identify the data you have, so you can use it to choose your direction for the coming year.

Leveraging data in your strategic marketing planning process to drive sales

Capturing data throughout the year is essential to support your marketing goals. But where to get started? Let’s begin with the traditional purchase funnel.

The purchase funnel is a model of your customer’s journey: from the first time they gain awareness of your brand, move through the consideration phase, and finally purchase your product or service. Here’s where your sales staff can provide qualitative and quantitative research for your plan development. By collaborating with your sales team, you can find out what matters most to move those valuable leads through the purchase funnel.

How can you leverage data to inform your marketing strategies to drive customers through the purchase funnel? Here are three ways.

Brand awareness

Meet Andrea Lewis, event and marketing director for Adams Publishing Group LLC, or APG Media of Ohio. The organization oversees publishing for 63 community newspapers, 18 advertising shoppers, 20 specialty publications and 81 affiliated websites. Many of the group’s publications are community newspapers in areas not served by other media, so they are an essential resource for spreading the word about what’s happening in those regions. When it comes to effective branding—and how to choose the latest promotional products for events—Lewis is unquestionably savvy. In her role, she helps host about 18 events every year, from community gatherings and magazine launches to large-scale fundraisers. Lewis also plans launch parties for the organization’s specialty publications, such as visitor guides or anniversary community books. Finding ways to reach target markets and engage audiences is key to marketing success. So Lewis starts by developing a marketing plan for each event.

“My marketing plan always starts with what’s the mission and purpose of the event,” Lewis said. “If the purpose is to gain customers, a targeted group, it’s very different than if the mission is to have as many people in a small area as possible for a free community event. Starting with that mission and purpose is a key piece. Because you can’t start with the giveaway.”

Why is this important? By staying grounded in the mission and purpose of the event, she says, you’ll be able to choose how to spend your promotional products budget more wisely. Lewis also recommends factoring in audience and audience size. Of course, you want unique promotional products that resonate with your crowd, but you also want to check your crowd size, as that drives budget.

“It puts in motion everything else you can do for that customer, how you reinforce your brand for that customer and how you reinforce the impression of your brand that they take away,” she says.

But most importantly, it’s important to remember the goal at the heart of it all. The best promotional giveaways remind people about the quality experience and service they had from the company.

“The purpose of the giveaway really exceeds the value of what the item is. For a Mardi Gras–themed party, Lewis ordered custom 14 oz. Mood Hurricane Cups. “So when they’re sitting in their pool drinking iced tea, they remember the event, and they think, ‘That was awesome.’”  Lewis says, “You want whatever item to have staying power in someone’s home, but you want that brand to remind them of the service you gave them that day.”

Now that you’ve taken steps to raise brand awareness, whether through thoughtful giveaways, well-coordinated events or other marketing efforts, what should you measure to determine direction in coming years? Here are some possibilities to consider:

Share of voice—This is an online advertising practice that limits the number of ad spaces on a site, known as “ad noise,” to increase the likelihood a particular ad will be seen by target audiences. What is your share of voice where you advertise online?

Brand recall—This is a measure of consumer opinion on how well your brand name is connected to the product or services you provide. It is frequently measured through interviews or surveys. Have you explored recall for your brand?

Email open rates—When you send out group emails, do you track open rates as well as other engagement, such as click-throughs? This can give you a good handle on how effective this channel is for engaging with your target markets, whether you should continue to invest in it or if it’s time to explore other options.

Website traffic—Your website traffic analytics can give you great insights into what your target markets want and how they go about finding it. There are various web traffic tools—some paid, some free—that provide you with a wealth of data. Depending on the data you find most valuable for your strategic marketing plan development, it may be worth a monetary investment to get even more specific for quality data.

Social media engagement—Ever wanted to be a fly on the wall? Here’s your chance. Through social listening, you can track conversations that include phrases, words or brands you’ve identified. From there, you can extract insights from social conversations and apply them to your marketing strategy. Themes and trends emerge in ways that are easier to understand. Just imagine what you could “overhear” to change your approach, or validate what you’ve suspected all along.

Advertising impressions—When you advertise, particularly online, the outcomes can seem nebulous. When you track advertising impressions, you get a better picture of the reach and impact of your online advertising. What kind of impressions are your ads getting? Is it time to tweak that strategy for greater impact?

These represent just a few of the ways you can gather data about your customers and your brand to hone your marketing plan for the coming year.

Lead generation

In the world of sales, the outcome of the marketing efforts point to lead generation. So what could you measure to get that data? Here are some possibilities.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM): A CRM system allows you to keep tabs on your organization’s interactions with customers and prospects at every touchpoint. The goal of CRM is to improve business relationships by gathering data about customer history and retention, but this same data can be applicable and valuable to your promotions and marketing strategy.

Sales data: Sales and marketing analytics and trends give you a peek into the future. For example, check out “The Ultimate List of Marketing Statistics,” from HubSpot.com, which has so much data on SEO and consumer behavior, you’ll feel like you won the data lottery. If you knew B2C companies that blog more than 11 times a month got more than four times the leads of those who blogged half as much, would that change your marketing strategy related to blogging? What if you knew four times as many customers would rather watch a video than read about a product? Mine sales data like this for new ideas and emerging trends, and watch for signs that some marketing channels are fading.

Website leads: Your website should be working just as hard to generate leads as your sales staff, if not harder. But how is your conversion rate? A conversion audit could tell you whether there are problems or shortcomings you might want to address before your next marketing campaign. Then you can focus on strategies to raise that conversion rate itself.

There are many other lead sources to consider as well, depending on your product or service line. You may want to look carefully at all lead generation sources to determine what data is available and what data you’d like to access to move forward. Remember the key when pulling data related to lead generation: Determine how your marketing strategy is making an impact by driving leads through the purchase funnel to the sale. Use data on outcomes to further hone that strategy.

Customer sentiment

To get a handle on how customers feel about your brand, measure customer sentiment. What does that mean? Every decision a consumer makes in relation to your brand has an emotional state tied to it, and by tracking customer sentiment you can understand at least three metrics to factor into your marketing plans.

Customer Satisfaction: how happy the customer is with your product or service.

Customer loyalty: how likely the customer is to shop again or to recommend you to a friend.

Engagement intent: how likely the customer is to engage with your brand in the future. 

What should you measure to determine customer sentiment? Consider the following.

Net promoter score (NPS) and overall customer satisfaction: Word-of-mouth recommendations are the most effective way to gain new customers. Are you measuring how likely a customer is to recommend you? NPS offers a measurement of customer loyalty, a strong indicator of how you will measure up compared to your competitors. With NPS, you can learn: whether customers are referring business to you; whether they are passive, but satisfied, and could be won over by the competition; and whether they are detractors (unhappy and potentially damaging to your brand).

Social media: Social listening technology is important. You’ll want to monitor conversations to gauge reactions to campaigns, shares and mentions, the comment velocity and the tone of comments.

In-app ratings: If your brand has an app, customer reviews and ratings prompts throughout the app experience can help you monitor the pulse of your target market.

Direct customer feedback: How do your customers engage with you directly? Are you using that to track your customer sentiment?

Customer retention: Being aware of customer attrition rates, knowing when and why you lose them, and understanding how that fits into the big picture is data that can influence your marketing (if not operations and sales) strategy in coming years.

Gathering even more data for your strategic planning marketing process

Now you know about multiple channels for mining data. But what if you still have unanswered questions? And what if the answers to those questions would change the direction of your marketing strategy completely?

Brendan Ley, brand manager at auto detailing specialists Detail King, said his company recently made a change to gather more meaningful information from customers. While they had offered customers a three-question survey at the end of the purchase process, the data they were gathering wasn’t helpful. It was time to regroup and gather some usable data.

“We added more questions about social media, and did it affect their purchase, so we know where they were coming from,” Ley explained. In addition, they incentivized customers to complete the brief survey, offering them one of the latest promotional products, a free custom Dual Bottle Opener Key Light for their time.

“It was something that we thought, maybe it will work, but it actually turned out to be a lot better than we expected,” Lay said. “We were really surprised by how many people started answering it.” Lay estimates as many as half of the customers responded by filling out the survey. “It’s definitely changed how we are doing things. Now, we wouldn’t think about not giving out a gift with a survey.”

The resulting data has had a direct impact on the organization’s marketing efforts.

“We’ve noticed with the responses we’ve been getting, a lot of the people that are making purchases either for the first time or trying things they haven’t purchased in the past, are people that are watching YouTube® videos,” Ley said.

Leaders at Detail King could track the customers influenced through their videos as a result of the survey at purchase time. The data helped them refine their marketing strategy to focus on video, a medium which was effectively engaging their target market and driving sales.

“The intel that we’re gathering is helping us get sighted in on what we’re doing next year: a lot of video and segmentation to specific interests of people,” Ley said. That includes video advertisements and videos for their social media platforms as well.

The survey strategy and promotional gift offer have been incredibly successful. But sometimes a marketing strategist just has a few more questions. When more info is needed, Ley says he’ll even call customers directly to gather the data he needs. They’re often stunned at first, then grateful for the personal touch. Now that’s data mining at a micro level! (Not to mention, good PR as well!)

Putting data to work for your organization’s marketing strategy

You’ve poured over the data: the brand awareness, the lead generation and the customer sentiment information. You’ve examined the trends. You’ve reached out to customers directly to fill the gaps. You have hard numbers in front of you, as well as qualitative data, to drive your marketing strategy. You’re now in a powerful position to create a strategic marketing planning process that’s more responsive, more knowledge-based and more in tune with your target audiences than ever before.

When done, you can enter the next marketing plan with confidence, rooted in the knowledge that you’ve got the numbers to back up your killer marketing strategy, and the latest promotional products to support your efforts. The results are sure to follow.

The post Data-driven marketing strategies steer you toward success appeared first on 4imprint Learning Center.

Data-driven marketing strategies steer you toward success published first on http://ift.tt/2vTEVjv

[servaxo]

Data-driven marketing strategies steer you toward success

More than ever before, data-driven marketing plans are proving to be invaluable for leveraging the insights you’ve gleaned during the past several months or year, and the latest promotional products can help. After all, that’s what will drive your marketing strategy: a plan that gets results because it’s based on your customers, your goals and your data.

But where does this data come from? And how do you even begin to use it? In this Blue Paper, we’ll explore some tips for identifying the information you have at your fingertips that will help drive your future marketing strategy. Let’s get started!

Data and marketing: the undeniable value of annual planning

The question of how to spend your promotional budget is a big one, and it can feel overwhelming, particularly in those moments when you’re facing a deadline. A thoughtful, well-planned strategic approach can really take the pressure off to help you feel confident in your choices.

That’s where annual planning comes in. If you haven’t had time to do annual planning in the past—don’t worry! You’re most certainly not alone. It’s an approach worth considering, one which can really help you engage customers at a key touchpoint. Even better, with annual planning, you can say goodbye to the stress of—surprise!—running low on budget mid-year, just when you need unique promotional products for conversation starters at a trade show.

Admittedly, knowing which tactics will give you the biggest return on your investment is tough. After all, there are so many ways to spend your marketing budget. Should you focus on online marketing and social media? What about mainstream media: newspapers, radio or television? What about the classics: brochures, billboards and flyers? Or, the new wave: apps? And where do the latest promotional products for events, trade shows or other customer touchpoints fit in?

It can be overwhelming, which is why placing the pieces carefully will help ensure you have even more of that rich data you need to put together a killer plan.

The rearview mirror: reflections on marketing at the micro level

It’s time to take a look back at the highs, the lows and everything in-between on your marketing calendar. As you review your marketing efforts over the past year, to what degree did they help your organization accomplish its business goals? Did they achieve your marketing objectives? This overview is great, but you’ll want to get at the micro level to make the most of your learnings.

Most importantly, you’ll want to ask yourself this key question: How well did specific tactics perform among your target audience?

This is the sweet spot where data can help you formulate next year’s plan and make truly informed decisions about where to focus your marketing and promotions resources. Even if you don’t think you’ve sufficiently tracked outcomes and findings along the way, it’s possible you have a lot of untapped knowledge at your disposal. (Pro tip: If you notice gaps, this is your chance to close them with your marketing strategy, so you have even more data a year from now!)

Here are some tips to identify the data you have, so you can use it to choose your direction for the coming year.

Leveraging data in your strategic marketing planning process to drive sales

Capturing data throughout the year is essential to support your marketing goals. But where to get started? Let’s begin with the traditional purchase funnel.

The purchase funnel is a model of your customer’s journey: from the first time they gain awareness of your brand, move through the consideration phase, and finally purchase your product or service. Here’s where your sales staff can provide qualitative and quantitative research for your plan development. By collaborating with your sales team, you can find out what matters most to move those valuable leads through the purchase funnel.

How can you leverage data to inform your marketing strategies to drive customers through the purchase funnel? Here are three ways.

Brand awareness

Meet Andrea Lewis, event and marketing director for Adams Publishing Group LLC, or APG Media of Ohio. The organization oversees publishing for 63 community newspapers, 18 advertising shoppers, 20 specialty publications and 81 affiliated websites. Many of the group’s publications are community newspapers in areas not served by other media, so they are an essential resource for spreading the word about what’s happening in those regions. When it comes to effective branding—and how to choose the latest promotional products for events—Lewis is unquestionably savvy. In her role, she helps host about 18 events every year, from community gatherings and magazine launches to large-scale fundraisers. Lewis also plans launch parties for the organization’s specialty publications, such as visitor guides or anniversary community books. Finding ways to reach target markets and engage audiences is key to marketing success. So Lewis starts by developing a marketing plan for each event.

“My marketing plan always starts with what’s the mission and purpose of the event,” Lewis said. “If the purpose is to gain customers, a targeted group, it’s very different than if the mission is to have as many people in a small area as possible for a free community event. Starting with that mission and purpose is a key piece. Because you can’t start with the giveaway.”

Why is this important? By staying grounded in the mission and purpose of the event, she says, you’ll be able to choose how to spend your promotional products budget more wisely. Lewis also recommends factoring in audience and audience size. Of course, you want unique promotional products that resonate with your crowd, but you also want to check your crowd size, as that drives budget.

“It puts in motion everything else you can do for that customer, how you reinforce your brand for that customer and how you reinforce the impression of your brand that they take away,” she says.

But most importantly, it’s important to remember the goal at the heart of it all. The best promotional giveaways remind people about the quality experience and service they had from the company.

“The purpose of the giveaway really exceeds the value of what the item is. For a Mardi Gras–themed party, Lewis ordered custom 14 oz. Mood Hurricane Cups. “So when they’re sitting in their pool drinking iced tea, they remember the event, and they think, ‘That was awesome.’”  Lewis says, “You want whatever item to have staying power in someone’s home, but you want that brand to remind them of the service you gave them that day.”

Now that you’ve taken steps to raise brand awareness, whether through thoughtful giveaways, well-coordinated events or other marketing efforts, what should you measure to determine direction in coming years? Here are some possibilities to consider:

Share of voice—This is an online advertising practice that limits the number of ad spaces on a site, known as “ad noise,” to increase the likelihood a particular ad will be seen by target audiences. What is your share of voice where you advertise online?

Brand recall—This is a measure of consumer opinion on how well your brand name is connected to the product or services you provide. It is frequently measured through interviews or surveys. Have you explored recall for your brand?

Email open rates—When you send out group emails, do you track open rates as well as other engagement, such as click-throughs? This can give you a good handle on how effective this channel is for engaging with your target markets, whether you should continue to invest in it or if it’s time to explore other options.

Website traffic—Your website traffic analytics can give you great insights into what your target markets want and how they go about finding it. There are various web traffic tools—some paid, some free—that provide you with a wealth of data. Depending on the data you find most valuable for your strategic marketing plan development, it may be worth a monetary investment to get even more specific for quality data.

Social media engagement—Ever wanted to be a fly on the wall? Here’s your chance. Through social listening, you can track conversations that include phrases, words or brands you’ve identified. From there, you can extract insights from social conversations and apply them to your marketing strategy. Themes and trends emerge in ways that are easier to understand. Just imagine what you could “overhear” to change your approach, or validate what you’ve suspected all along.

Advertising impressions—When you advertise, particularly online, the outcomes can seem nebulous. When you track advertising impressions, you get a better picture of the reach and impact of your online advertising. What kind of impressions are your ads getting? Is it time to tweak that strategy for greater impact?

These represent just a few of the ways you can gather data about your customers and your brand to hone your marketing plan for the coming year.

Lead generation

In the world of sales, the outcome of the marketing efforts point to lead generation. So what could you measure to get that data? Here are some possibilities.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM): A CRM system allows you to keep tabs on your organization’s interactions with customers and prospects at every touchpoint. The goal of CRM is to improve business relationships by gathering data about customer history and retention, but this same data can be applicable and valuable to your promotions and marketing strategy.

Sales data: Sales and marketing analytics and trends give you a peek into the future. For example, check out “The Ultimate List of Marketing Statistics,” from HubSpot.com, which has so much data on SEO and consumer behavior, you’ll feel like you won the data lottery. If you knew B2C companies that blog more than 11 times a month got more than four times the leads of those who blogged half as much, would that change your marketing strategy related to blogging? What if you knew four times as many customers would rather watch a video than read about a product? Mine sales data like this for new ideas and emerging trends, and watch for signs that some marketing channels are fading.

Website leads: Your website should be working just as hard to generate leads as your sales staff, if not harder. But how is your conversion rate? A conversion audit could tell you whether there are problems or shortcomings you might want to address before your next marketing campaign. Then you can focus on strategies to raise that conversion rate itself.

There are many other lead sources to consider as well, depending on your product or service line. You may want to look carefully at all lead generation sources to determine what data is available and what data you’d like to access to move forward. Remember the key when pulling data related to lead generation: Determine how your marketing strategy is making an impact by driving leads through the purchase funnel to the sale. Use data on outcomes to further hone that strategy.

Customer sentiment

To get a handle on how customers feel about your brand, measure customer sentiment. What does that mean? Every decision a consumer makes in relation to your brand has an emotional state tied to it, and by tracking customer sentiment you can understand at least three metrics to factor into your marketing plans.

Customer Satisfaction: how happy the customer is with your product or service.

Customer loyalty: how likely the customer is to shop again or to recommend you to a friend.

Engagement intent: how likely the customer is to engage with your brand in the future. 

What should you measure to determine customer sentiment? Consider the following.

Net promoter score (NPS) and overall customer satisfaction: Word-of-mouth recommendations are the most effective way to gain new customers. Are you measuring how likely a customer is to recommend you? NPS offers a measurement of customer loyalty, a strong indicator of how you will measure up compared to your competitors. With NPS, you can learn: whether customers are referring business to you; whether they are passive, but satisfied, and could be won over by the competition; and whether they are detractors (unhappy and potentially damaging to your brand).

Social media: Social listening technology is important. You’ll want to monitor conversations to gauge reactions to campaigns, shares and mentions, the comment velocity and the tone of comments.

In-app ratings: If your brand has an app, customer reviews and ratings prompts throughout the app experience can help you monitor the pulse of your target market.

Direct customer feedback: How do your customers engage with you directly? Are you using that to track your customer sentiment?

Customer retention: Being aware of customer attrition rates, knowing when and why you lose them, and understanding how that fits into the big picture is data that can influence your marketing (if not operations and sales) strategy in coming years.

Gathering even more data for your strategic planning marketing process

Now you know about multiple channels for mining data. But what if you still have unanswered questions? And what if the answers to those questions would change the direction of your marketing strategy completely?

Brendan Ley, brand manager at auto detailing specialists Detail King, said his company recently made a change to gather more meaningful information from customers. While they had offered customers a three-question survey at the end of the purchase process, the data they were gathering wasn’t helpful. It was time to regroup and gather some usable data.

“We added more questions about social media, and did it affect their purchase, so we know where they were coming from,” Ley explained. In addition, they incentivized customers to complete the brief survey, offering them one of the latest promotional products, a free custom Dual Bottle Opener Key Light for their time.

“It was something that we thought, maybe it will work, but it actually turned out to be a lot better than we expected,” Lay said. “We were really surprised by how many people started answering it.” Lay estimates as many as half of the customers responded by filling out the survey. “It’s definitely changed how we are doing things. Now, we wouldn’t think about not giving out a gift with a survey.”

The resulting data has had a direct impact on the organization’s marketing efforts.

“We’ve noticed with the responses we’ve been getting, a lot of the people that are making purchases either for the first time or trying things they haven’t purchased in the past, are people that are watching YouTube® videos,” Ley said.

Leaders at Detail King could track the customers influenced through their videos as a result of the survey at purchase time. The data helped them refine their marketing strategy to focus on video, a medium which was effectively engaging their target market and driving sales.

“The intel that we’re gathering is helping us get sighted in on what we’re doing next year: a lot of video and segmentation to specific interests of people,” Ley said. That includes video advertisements and videos for their social media platforms as well.

The survey strategy and promotional gift offer have been incredibly successful. But sometimes a marketing strategist just has a few more questions. When more info is needed, Ley says he’ll even call customers directly to gather the data he needs. They’re often stunned at first, then grateful for the personal touch. Now that’s data mining at a micro level! (Not to mention, good PR as well!)

Putting data to work for your organization’s marketing strategy

You’ve poured over the data: the brand awareness, the lead generation and the customer sentiment information. You’ve examined the trends. You’ve reached out to customers directly to fill the gaps. You have hard numbers in front of you, as well as qualitative data, to drive your marketing strategy. You’re now in a powerful position to create a strategic marketing planning process that’s more responsive, more knowledge-based and more in tune with your target audiences than ever before.

When done, you can enter the next marketing plan with confidence, rooted in the knowledge that you’ve got the numbers to back up your killer marketing strategy, and the latest promotional products to support your efforts. The results are sure to follow.

The post Data-driven marketing strategies steer you toward success appeared first on 4imprint Learning Center.

Data-driven marketing strategies steer you toward success published first on http://ift.tt/2vTEVjv

[servaxo]

Data-driven marketing strategies steer you toward success

More than ever before, data-driven marketing plans are proving to be invaluable for leveraging the insights you’ve gleaned during the past several months or year, and the latest promotional products can help. After all, that’s what will drive your marketing strategy: a plan that gets results because it’s based on your customers, your goals and your data.

But where does this data come from? And how do you even begin to use it? In this Blue Paper, we’ll explore some tips for identifying the information you have at your fingertips that will help drive your future marketing strategy. Let’s get started!

Data and marketing: the undeniable value of annual planning

The question of how to spend your promotional budget is a big one, and it can feel overwhelming, particularly in those moments when you’re facing a deadline. A thoughtful, well-planned strategic approach can really take the pressure off to help you feel confident in your choices.

That’s where annual planning comes in. If you haven’t had time to do annual planning in the past—don’t worry! You’re most certainly not alone. It’s an approach worth considering, one which can really help you engage customers at a key touchpoint. Even better, with annual planning, you can say goodbye to the stress of—surprise!—running low on budget mid-year, just when you need unique promotional products for conversation starters at a trade show.

Admittedly, knowing which tactics will give you the biggest return on your investment is tough. After all, there are so many ways to spend your marketing budget. Should you focus on online marketing and social media? What about mainstream media: newspapers, radio or television? What about the classics: brochures, billboards and flyers? Or, the new wave: apps? And where do the latest promotional products for events, trade shows or other customer touchpoints fit in?

It can be overwhelming, which is why placing the pieces carefully will help ensure you have even more of that rich data you need to put together a killer plan.

The rearview mirror: reflections on marketing at the micro level

It’s time to take a look back at the highs, the lows and everything in-between on your marketing calendar. As you review your marketing efforts over the past year, to what degree did they help your organization accomplish its business goals? Did they achieve your marketing objectives? This overview is great, but you’ll want to get at the micro level to make the most of your learnings.

Most importantly, you’ll want to ask yourself this key question: How well did specific tactics perform among your target audience?

This is the sweet spot where data can help you formulate next year’s plan and make truly informed decisions about where to focus your marketing and promotions resources. Even if you don’t think you’ve sufficiently tracked outcomes and findings along the way, it’s possible you have a lot of untapped knowledge at your disposal. (Pro tip: If you notice gaps, this is your chance to close them with your marketing strategy, so you have even more data a year from now!)

Here are some tips to identify the data you have, so you can use it to choose your direction for the coming year.

Leveraging data in your strategic marketing planning process to drive sales

Capturing data throughout the year is essential to support your marketing goals. But where to get started? Let’s begin with the traditional purchase funnel.

The purchase funnel is a model of your customer’s journey: from the first time they gain awareness of your brand, move through the consideration phase, and finally purchase your product or service. Here’s where your sales staff can provide qualitative and quantitative research for your plan development. By collaborating with your sales team, you can find out what matters most to move those valuable leads through the purchase funnel.

How can you leverage data to inform your marketing strategies to drive customers through the purchase funnel? Here are three ways.

Brand awareness

Meet Andrea Lewis, event and marketing director for Adams Publishing Group LLC, or APG Media of Ohio. The organization oversees publishing for 63 community newspapers, 18 advertising shoppers, 20 specialty publications and 81 affiliated websites. Many of the group’s publications are community newspapers in areas not served by other media, so they are an essential resource for spreading the word about what’s happening in those regions. When it comes to effective branding—and how to choose the latest promotional products for events—Lewis is unquestionably savvy. In her role, she helps host about 18 events every year, from community gatherings and magazine launches to large-scale fundraisers. Lewis also plans launch parties for the organization’s specialty publications, such as visitor guides or anniversary community books. Finding ways to reach target markets and engage audiences is key to marketing success. So Lewis starts by developing a marketing plan for each event.

“My marketing plan always starts with what’s the mission and purpose of the event,” Lewis said. “If the purpose is to gain customers, a targeted group, it’s very different than if the mission is to have as many people in a small area as possible for a free community event. Starting with that mission and purpose is a key piece. Because you can’t start with the giveaway.”

Why is this important? By staying grounded in the mission and purpose of the event, she says, you’ll be able to choose how to spend your promotional products budget more wisely. Lewis also recommends factoring in audience and audience size. Of course, you want unique promotional products that resonate with your crowd, but you also want to check your crowd size, as that drives budget.

“It puts in motion everything else you can do for that customer, how you reinforce your brand for that customer and how you reinforce the impression of your brand that they take away,” she says.

But most importantly, it’s important to remember the goal at the heart of it all. The best promotional giveaways remind people about the quality experience and service they had from the company.

“The purpose of the giveaway really exceeds the value of what the item is. For a Mardi Gras–themed party, Lewis ordered custom 14 oz. Mood Hurricane Cups. “So when they’re sitting in their pool drinking iced tea, they remember the event, and they think, ‘That was awesome.’”  Lewis says, “You want whatever item to have staying power in someone’s home, but you want that brand to remind them of the service you gave them that day.”

Now that you’ve taken steps to raise brand awareness, whether through thoughtful giveaways, well-coordinated events or other marketing efforts, what should you measure to determine direction in coming years? Here are some possibilities to consider:

Share of voice—This is an online advertising practice that limits the number of ad spaces on a site, known as “ad noise,” to increase the likelihood a particular ad will be seen by target audiences. What is your share of voice where you advertise online?

Brand recall—This is a measure of consumer opinion on how well your brand name is connected to the product or services you provide. It is frequently measured through interviews or surveys. Have you explored recall for your brand?

Email open rates—When you send out group emails, do you track open rates as well as other engagement, such as click-throughs? This can give you a good handle on how effective this channel is for engaging with your target markets, whether you should continue to invest in it or if it’s time to explore other options.

Website traffic—Your website traffic analytics can give you great insights into what your target markets want and how they go about finding it. There are various web traffic tools—some paid, some free—that provide you with a wealth of data. Depending on the data you find most valuable for your strategic marketing plan development, it may be worth a monetary investment to get even more specific for quality data.

Social media engagement—Ever wanted to be a fly on the wall? Here’s your chance. Through social listening, you can track conversations that include phrases, words or brands you’ve identified. From there, you can extract insights from social conversations and apply them to your marketing strategy. Themes and trends emerge in ways that are easier to understand. Just imagine what you could “overhear” to change your approach, or validate what you’ve suspected all along.

Advertising impressions—When you advertise, particularly online, the outcomes can seem nebulous. When you track advertising impressions, you get a better picture of the reach and impact of your online advertising. What kind of impressions are your ads getting? Is it time to tweak that strategy for greater impact?

These represent just a few of the ways you can gather data about your customers and your brand to hone your marketing plan for the coming year.

Lead generation

In the world of sales, the outcome of the marketing efforts point to lead generation. So what could you measure to get that data? Here are some possibilities.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM): A CRM system allows you to keep tabs on your organization’s interactions with customers and prospects at every touchpoint. The goal of CRM is to improve business relationships by gathering data about customer history and retention, but this same data can be applicable and valuable to your promotions and marketing strategy.

Sales data: Sales and marketing analytics and trends give you a peek into the future. For example, check out “The Ultimate List of Marketing Statistics,” from HubSpot.com, which has so much data on SEO and consumer behavior, you’ll feel like you won the data lottery. If you knew B2C companies that blog more than 11 times a month got more than four times the leads of those who blogged half as much, would that change your marketing strategy related to blogging? What if you knew four times as many customers would rather watch a video than read about a product? Mine sales data like this for new ideas and emerging trends, and watch for signs that some marketing channels are fading.

Website leads: Your website should be working just as hard to generate leads as your sales staff, if not harder. But how is your conversion rate? A conversion audit could tell you whether there are problems or shortcomings you might want to address before your next marketing campaign. Then you can focus on strategies to raise that conversion rate itself.

There are many other lead sources to consider as well, depending on your product or service line. You may want to look carefully at all lead generation sources to determine what data is available and what data you’d like to access to move forward. Remember the key when pulling data related to lead generation: Determine how your marketing strategy is making an impact by driving leads through the purchase funnel to the sale. Use data on outcomes to further hone that strategy.

Customer sentiment

To get a handle on how customers feel about your brand, measure customer sentiment. What does that mean? Every decision a consumer makes in relation to your brand has an emotional state tied to it, and by tracking customer sentiment you can understand at least three metrics to factor into your marketing plans.

Customer Satisfaction: how happy the customer is with your product or service.

Customer loyalty: how likely the customer is to shop again or to recommend you to a friend.

Engagement intent: how likely the customer is to engage with your brand in the future. 

What should you measure to determine customer sentiment? Consider the following.

Net promoter score (NPS) and overall customer satisfaction: Word-of-mouth recommendations are the most effective way to gain new customers. Are you measuring how likely a customer is to recommend you? NPS offers a measurement of customer loyalty, a strong indicator of how you will measure up compared to your competitors. With NPS, you can learn: whether customers are referring business to you; whether they are passive, but satisfied, and could be won over by the competition; and whether they are detractors (unhappy and potentially damaging to your brand).

Social media: Social listening technology is important. You’ll want to monitor conversations to gauge reactions to campaigns, shares and mentions, the comment velocity and the tone of comments.

In-app ratings: If your brand has an app, customer reviews and ratings prompts throughout the app experience can help you monitor the pulse of your target market.

Direct customer feedback: How do your customers engage with you directly? Are you using that to track your customer sentiment?

Customer retention: Being aware of customer attrition rates, knowing when and why you lose them, and understanding how that fits into the big picture is data that can influence your marketing (if not operations and sales) strategy in coming years.

Gathering even more data for your strategic planning marketing process

Now you know about multiple channels for mining data. But what if you still have unanswered questions? And what if the answers to those questions would change the direction of your marketing strategy completely?

Brendan Ley, brand manager at auto detailing specialists Detail King, said his company recently made a change to gather more meaningful information from customers. While they had offered customers a three-question survey at the end of the purchase process, the data they were gathering wasn’t helpful. It was time to regroup and gather some usable data.

“We added more questions about social media, and did it affect their purchase, so we know where they were coming from,” Ley explained. In addition, they incentivized customers to complete the brief survey, offering them one of the latest promotional products, a free custom Dual Bottle Opener Key Light for their time.

“It was something that we thought, maybe it will work, but it actually turned out to be a lot better than we expected,” Lay said. “We were really surprised by how many people started answering it.” Lay estimates as many as half of the customers responded by filling out the survey. “It’s definitely changed how we are doing things. Now, we wouldn’t think about not giving out a gift with a survey.”

The resulting data has had a direct impact on the organization’s marketing efforts.

“We’ve noticed with the responses we’ve been getting, a lot of the people that are making purchases either for the first time or trying things they haven’t purchased in the past, are people that are watching YouTube® videos,” Ley said.

Leaders at Detail King could track the customers influenced through their videos as a result of the survey at purchase time. The data helped them refine their marketing strategy to focus on video, a medium which was effectively engaging their target market and driving sales.

“The intel that we’re gathering is helping us get sighted in on what we’re doing next year: a lot of video and segmentation to specific interests of people,” Ley said. That includes video advertisements and videos for their social media platforms as well.

The survey strategy and promotional gift offer have been incredibly successful. But sometimes a marketing strategist just has a few more questions. When more info is needed, Ley says he’ll even call customers directly to gather the data he needs. They’re often stunned at first, then grateful for the personal touch. Now that’s data mining at a micro level! (Not to mention, good PR as well!)

Putting data to work for your organization’s marketing strategy

You’ve poured over the data: the brand awareness, the lead generation and the customer sentiment information. You’ve examined the trends. You’ve reached out to customers directly to fill the gaps. You have hard numbers in front of you, as well as qualitative data, to drive your marketing strategy. You’re now in a powerful position to create a strategic marketing planning process that’s more responsive, more knowledge-based and more in tune with your target audiences than ever before.

When done, you can enter the next marketing plan with confidence, rooted in the knowledge that you’ve got the numbers to back up your killer marketing strategy, and the latest promotional products to support your efforts. The results are sure to follow.

The post Data-driven marketing strategies steer you toward success appeared first on 4imprint Learning Center.

Data-driven marketing strategies steer you toward success published first on http://ift.tt/2vTEVjv

[servaxo]

Data-driven marketing strategies steer you toward success

More than ever before, data-driven marketing plans are proving to be invaluable for leveraging the insights you’ve gleaned during the past several months or year, and the latest promotional products can help. After all, that’s what will drive your marketing strategy: a plan that gets results because it’s based on your customers, your goals and your data.

But where does this data come from? And how do you even begin to use it? In this Blue Paper, we’ll explore some tips for identifying the information you have at your fingertips that will help drive your future marketing strategy. Let’s get started!

Data and marketing: the undeniable value of annual planning

The question of how to spend your promotional budget is a big one, and it can feel overwhelming, particularly in those moments when you’re facing a deadline. A thoughtful, well-planned strategic approach can really take the pressure off to help you feel confident in your choices.

That’s where annual planning comes in. If you haven’t had time to do annual planning in the past—don’t worry! You’re most certainly not alone. It’s an approach worth considering, one which can really help you engage customers at a key touchpoint. Even better, with annual planning, you can say goodbye to the stress of—surprise!—running low on budget mid-year, just when you need unique promotional products for conversation starters at a trade show.

Admittedly, knowing which tactics will give you the biggest return on your investment is tough. After all, there are so many ways to spend your marketing budget. Should you focus on online marketing and social media? What about mainstream media: newspapers, radio or television? What about the classics: brochures, billboards and flyers? Or, the new wave: apps? And where do the latest promotional products for events, trade shows or other customer touchpoints fit in?

It can be overwhelming, which is why placing the pieces carefully will help ensure you have even more of that rich data you need to put together a killer plan.

The rearview mirror: reflections on marketing at the micro level

It’s time to take a look back at the highs, the lows and everything in-between on your marketing calendar. As you review your marketing efforts over the past year, to what degree did they help your organization accomplish its business goals? Did they achieve your marketing objectives? This overview is great, but you’ll want to get at the micro level to make the most of your learnings.

Most importantly, you’ll want to ask yourself this key question: How well did specific tactics perform among your target audience?

This is the sweet spot where data can help you formulate next year’s plan and make truly informed decisions about where to focus your marketing and promotions resources. Even if you don’t think you’ve sufficiently tracked outcomes and findings along the way, it’s possible you have a lot of untapped knowledge at your disposal. (Pro tip: If you notice gaps, this is your chance to close them with your marketing strategy, so you have even more data a year from now!)

Here are some tips to identify the data you have, so you can use it to choose your direction for the coming year.

Leveraging data in your strategic marketing planning process to drive sales

Capturing data throughout the year is essential to support your marketing goals. But where to get started? Let’s begin with the traditional purchase funnel.

The purchase funnel is a model of your customer’s journey: from the first time they gain awareness of your brand, move through the consideration phase, and finally purchase your product or service. Here’s where your sales staff can provide qualitative and quantitative research for your plan development. By collaborating with your sales team, you can find out what matters most to move those valuable leads through the purchase funnel.

How can you leverage data to inform your marketing strategies to drive customers through the purchase funnel? Here are three ways.

Brand awareness

Meet Andrea Lewis, event and marketing director for Adams Publishing Group LLC, or APG Media of Ohio. The organization oversees publishing for 63 community newspapers, 18 advertising shoppers, 20 specialty publications and 81 affiliated websites. Many of the group’s publications are community newspapers in areas not served by other media, so they are an essential resource for spreading the word about what’s happening in those regions. When it comes to effective branding—and how to choose the latest promotional products for events—Lewis is unquestionably savvy. In her role, she helps host about 18 events every year, from community gatherings and magazine launches to large-scale fundraisers. Lewis also plans launch parties for the organization’s specialty publications, such as visitor guides or anniversary community books. Finding ways to reach target markets and engage audiences is key to marketing success. So Lewis starts by developing a marketing plan for each event.

“My marketing plan always starts with what’s the mission and purpose of the event,” Lewis said. “If the purpose is to gain customers, a targeted group, it’s very different than if the mission is to have as many people in a small area as possible for a free community event. Starting with that mission and purpose is a key piece. Because you can’t start with the giveaway.”

Why is this important? By staying grounded in the mission and purpose of the event, she says, you’ll be able to choose how to spend your promotional products budget more wisely. Lewis also recommends factoring in audience and audience size. Of course, you want unique promotional products that resonate with your crowd, but you also want to check your crowd size, as that drives budget.

“It puts in motion everything else you can do for that customer, how you reinforce your brand for that customer and how you reinforce the impression of your brand that they take away,” she says.

But most importantly, it’s important to remember the goal at the heart of it all. The best promotional giveaways remind people about the quality experience and service they had from the company.

“The purpose of the giveaway really exceeds the value of what the item is. For a Mardi Gras–themed party, Lewis ordered custom 14 oz. Mood Hurricane Cups. “So when they’re sitting in their pool drinking iced tea, they remember the event, and they think, ‘That was awesome.’”  Lewis says, “You want whatever item to have staying power in someone’s home, but you want that brand to remind them of the service you gave them that day.”

Now that you’ve taken steps to raise brand awareness, whether through thoughtful giveaways, well-coordinated events or other marketing efforts, what should you measure to determine direction in coming years? Here are some possibilities to consider:

Share of voice—This is an online advertising practice that limits the number of ad spaces on a site, known as “ad noise,” to increase the likelihood a particular ad will be seen by target audiences. What is your share of voice where you advertise online?

Brand recall—This is a measure of consumer opinion on how well your brand name is connected to the product or services you provide. It is frequently measured through interviews or surveys. Have you explored recall for your brand?

Email open rates—When you send out group emails, do you track open rates as well as other engagement, such as click-throughs? This can give you a good handle on how effective this channel is for engaging with your target markets, whether you should continue to invest in it or if it’s time to explore other options.

Website traffic—Your website traffic analytics can give you great insights into what your target markets want and how they go about finding it. There are various web traffic tools—some paid, some free—that provide you with a wealth of data. Depending on the data you find most valuable for your strategic marketing plan development, it may be worth a monetary investment to get even more specific for quality data.

Social media engagement—Ever wanted to be a fly on the wall? Here’s your chance. Through social listening, you can track conversations that include phrases, words or brands you’ve identified. From there, you can extract insights from social conversations and apply them to your marketing strategy. Themes and trends emerge in ways that are easier to understand. Just imagine what you could “overhear” to change your approach, or validate what you’ve suspected all along.

Advertising impressions—When you advertise, particularly online, the outcomes can seem nebulous. When you track advertising impressions, you get a better picture of the reach and impact of your online advertising. What kind of impressions are your ads getting? Is it time to tweak that strategy for greater impact?

These represent just a few of the ways you can gather data about your customers and your brand to hone your marketing plan for the coming year.

Lead generation

In the world of sales, the outcome of the marketing efforts point to lead generation. So what could you measure to get that data? Here are some possibilities.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM): A CRM system allows you to keep tabs on your organization’s interactions with customers and prospects at every touchpoint. The goal of CRM is to improve business relationships by gathering data about customer history and retention, but this same data can be applicable and valuable to your promotions and marketing strategy.

Sales data: Sales and marketing analytics and trends give you a peek into the future. For example, check out “The Ultimate List of Marketing Statistics,” from HubSpot.com, which has so much data on SEO and consumer behavior, you’ll feel like you won the data lottery. If you knew B2C companies that blog more than 11 times a month got more than four times the leads of those who blogged half as much, would that change your marketing strategy related to blogging? What if you knew four times as many customers would rather watch a video than read about a product? Mine sales data like this for new ideas and emerging trends, and watch for signs that some marketing channels are fading.

Website leads: Your website should be working just as hard to generate leads as your sales staff, if not harder. But how is your conversion rate? A conversion audit could tell you whether there are problems or shortcomings you might want to address before your next marketing campaign. Then you can focus on strategies to raise that conversion rate itself.

There are many other lead sources to consider as well, depending on your product or service line. You may want to look carefully at all lead generation sources to determine what data is available and what data you’d like to access to move forward. Remember the key when pulling data related to lead generation: Determine how your marketing strategy is making an impact by driving leads through the purchase funnel to the sale. Use data on outcomes to further hone that strategy.

Customer sentiment

To get a handle on how customers feel about your brand, measure customer sentiment. What does that mean? Every decision a consumer makes in relation to your brand has an emotional state tied to it, and by tracking customer sentiment you can understand at least three metrics to factor into your marketing plans.

Customer Satisfaction: how happy the customer is with your product or service.

Customer loyalty: how likely the customer is to shop again or to recommend you to a friend.

Engagement intent: how likely the customer is to engage with your brand in the future. 

What should you measure to determine customer sentiment? Consider the following.

Net promoter score (NPS) and overall customer satisfaction: Word-of-mouth recommendations are the most effective way to gain new customers. Are you measuring how likely a customer is to recommend you? NPS offers a measurement of customer loyalty, a strong indicator of how you will measure up compared to your competitors. With NPS, you can learn: whether customers are referring business to you; whether they are passive, but satisfied, and could be won over by the competition; and whether they are detractors (unhappy and potentially damaging to your brand).

Social media: Social listening technology is important. You’ll want to monitor conversations to gauge reactions to campaigns, shares and mentions, the comment velocity and the tone of comments.

In-app ratings: If your brand has an app, customer reviews and ratings prompts throughout the app experience can help you monitor the pulse of your target market.

Direct customer feedback: How do your customers engage with you directly? Are you using that to track your customer sentiment?

Customer retention: Being aware of customer attrition rates, knowing when and why you lose them, and understanding how that fits into the big picture is data that can influence your marketing (if not operations and sales) strategy in coming years.

Gathering even more data for your strategic planning marketing process

Now you know about multiple channels for mining data. But what if you still have unanswered questions? And what if the answers to those questions would change the direction of your marketing strategy completely?

Brendan Ley, brand manager at auto detailing specialists Detail King, said his company recently made a change to gather more meaningful information from customers. While they had offered customers a three-question survey at the end of the purchase process, the data they were gathering wasn’t helpful. It was time to regroup and gather some usable data.

“We added more questions about social media, and did it affect their purchase, so we know where they were coming from,” Ley explained. In addition, they incentivized customers to complete the brief survey, offering them one of the latest promotional products, a free custom Dual Bottle Opener Key Light for their time.

“It was something that we thought, maybe it will work, but it actually turned out to be a lot better than we expected,” Lay said. “We were really surprised by how many people started answering it.” Lay estimates as many as half of the customers responded by filling out the survey. “It’s definitely changed how we are doing things. Now, we wouldn’t think about not giving out a gift with a survey.”

The resulting data has had a direct impact on the organization’s marketing efforts.

“We’ve noticed with the responses we’ve been getting, a lot of the people that are making purchases either for the first time or trying things they haven’t purchased in the past, are people that are watching YouTube® videos,” Ley said.

Leaders at Detail King could track the customers influenced through their videos as a result of the survey at purchase time. The data helped them refine their marketing strategy to focus on video, a medium which was effectively engaging their target market and driving sales.

“The intel that we’re gathering is helping us get sighted in on what we’re doing next year: a lot of video and segmentation to specific interests of people,” Ley said. That includes video advertisements and videos for their social media platforms as well.

The survey strategy and promotional gift offer have been incredibly successful. But sometimes a marketing strategist just has a few more questions. When more info is needed, Ley says he’ll even call customers directly to gather the data he needs. They’re often stunned at first, then grateful for the personal touch. Now that’s data mining at a micro level! (Not to mention, good PR as well!)

Putting data to work for your organization’s marketing strategy

You’ve poured over the data: the brand awareness, the lead generation and the customer sentiment information. You’ve examined the trends. You’ve reached out to customers directly to fill the gaps. You have hard numbers in front of you, as well as qualitative data, to drive your marketing strategy. You’re now in a powerful position to create a strategic marketing planning process that’s more responsive, more knowledge-based and more in tune with your target audiences than ever before.

When done, you can enter the next marketing plan with confidence, rooted in the knowledge that you’ve got the numbers to back up your killer marketing strategy, and the latest promotional products to support your efforts. The results are sure to follow.

The post Data-driven marketing strategies steer you toward success appeared first on 4imprint Learning Center.

Data-driven marketing strategies steer you toward success published first on http://ift.tt/2vTEVjv

[servaxo]

Data-driven marketing strategies steer you toward success

More than ever before, data-driven marketing plans are proving to be invaluable for leveraging the insights you’ve gleaned during the past several months or year, and the latest promotional products can help. After all, that’s what will drive your marketing strategy: a plan that gets results because it’s based on your customers, your goals and your data.

But where does this data come from? And how do you even begin to use it? In this Blue Paper, we’ll explore some tips for identifying the information you have at your fingertips that will help drive your future marketing strategy. Let’s get started!

Data and marketing: the undeniable value of annual planning

The question of how to spend your promotional budget is a big one, and it can feel overwhelming, particularly in those moments when you’re facing a deadline. A thoughtful, well-planned strategic approach can really take the pressure off to help you feel confident in your choices.

That’s where annual planning comes in. If you haven’t had time to do annual planning in the past—don’t worry! You’re most certainly not alone. It’s an approach worth considering, one which can really help you engage customers at a key touchpoint. Even better, with annual planning, you can say goodbye to the stress of—surprise!—running low on budget mid-year, just when you need unique promotional products for conversation starters at a trade show.

Admittedly, knowing which tactics will give you the biggest return on your investment is tough. After all, there are so many ways to spend your marketing budget. Should you focus on online marketing and social media? What about mainstream media: newspapers, radio or television? What about the classics: brochures, billboards and flyers? Or, the new wave: apps? And where do the latest promotional products for events, trade shows or other customer touchpoints fit in?

It can be overwhelming, which is why placing the pieces carefully will help ensure you have even more of that rich data you need to put together a killer plan.

The rearview mirror: reflections on marketing at the micro level

It’s time to take a look back at the highs, the lows and everything in-between on your marketing calendar. As you review your marketing efforts over the past year, to what degree did they help your organization accomplish its business goals? Did they achieve your marketing objectives? This overview is great, but you’ll want to get at the micro level to make the most of your learnings.

Most importantly, you’ll want to ask yourself this key question: How well did specific tactics perform among your target audience?

This is the sweet spot where data can help you formulate next year’s plan and make truly informed decisions about where to focus your marketing and promotions resources. Even if you don’t think you’ve sufficiently tracked outcomes and findings along the way, it’s possible you have a lot of untapped knowledge at your disposal. (Pro tip: If you notice gaps, this is your chance to close them with your marketing strategy, so you have even more data a year from now!)

Here are some tips to identify the data you have, so you can use it to choose your direction for the coming year.

Leveraging data in your strategic marketing planning process to drive sales

Capturing data throughout the year is essential to support your marketing goals. But where to get started? Let’s begin with the traditional purchase funnel.

The purchase funnel is a model of your customer’s journey: from the first time they gain awareness of your brand, move through the consideration phase, and finally purchase your product or service. Here’s where your sales staff can provide qualitative and quantitative research for your plan development. By collaborating with your sales team, you can find out what matters most to move those valuable leads through the purchase funnel.

How can you leverage data to inform your marketing strategies to drive customers through the purchase funnel? Here are three ways.

Brand awareness

Meet Andrea Lewis, event and marketing director for Adams Publishing Group LLC, or APG Media of Ohio. The organization oversees publishing for 63 community newspapers, 18 advertising shoppers, 20 specialty publications and 81 affiliated websites. Many of the group’s publications are community newspapers in areas not served by other media, so they are an essential resource for spreading the word about what’s happening in those regions. When it comes to effective branding—and how to choose the latest promotional products for events—Lewis is unquestionably savvy. In her role, she helps host about 18 events every year, from community gatherings and magazine launches to large-scale fundraisers. Lewis also plans launch parties for the organization’s specialty publications, such as visitor guides or anniversary community books. Finding ways to reach target markets and engage audiences is key to marketing success. So Lewis starts by developing a marketing plan for each event.

“My marketing plan always starts with what’s the mission and purpose of the event,” Lewis said. “If the purpose is to gain customers, a targeted group, it’s very different than if the mission is to have as many people in a small area as possible for a free community event. Starting with that mission and purpose is a key piece. Because you can’t start with the giveaway.”

Why is this important? By staying grounded in the mission and purpose of the event, she says, you’ll be able to choose how to spend your promotional products budget more wisely. Lewis also recommends factoring in audience and audience size. Of course, you want unique promotional products that resonate with your crowd, but you also want to check your crowd size, as that drives budget.

“It puts in motion everything else you can do for that customer, how you reinforce your brand for that customer and how you reinforce the impression of your brand that they take away,” she says.

But most importantly, it’s important to remember the goal at the heart of it all. The best promotional giveaways remind people about the quality experience and service they had from the company.

“The purpose of the giveaway really exceeds the value of what the item is. For a Mardi Gras–themed party, Lewis ordered custom 14 oz. Mood Hurricane Cups. “So when they’re sitting in their pool drinking iced tea, they remember the event, and they think, ‘That was awesome.’”  Lewis says, “You want whatever item to have staying power in someone’s home, but you want that brand to remind them of the service you gave them that day.”

Now that you’ve taken steps to raise brand awareness, whether through thoughtful giveaways, well-coordinated events or other marketing efforts, what should you measure to determine direction in coming years? Here are some possibilities to consider:

Share of voice—This is an online advertising practice that limits the number of ad spaces on a site, known as “ad noise,” to increase the likelihood a particular ad will be seen by target audiences. What is your share of voice where you advertise online?

Brand recall—This is a measure of consumer opinion on how well your brand name is connected to the product or services you provide. It is frequently measured through interviews or surveys. Have you explored recall for your brand?

Email open rates—When you send out group emails, do you track open rates as well as other engagement, such as click-throughs? This can give you a good handle on how effective this channel is for engaging with your target markets, whether you should continue to invest in it or if it’s time to explore other options.

Website traffic—Your website traffic analytics can give you great insights into what your target markets want and how they go about finding it. There are various web traffic tools—some paid, some free—that provide you with a wealth of data. Depending on the data you find most valuable for your strategic marketing plan development, it may be worth a monetary investment to get even more specific for quality data.

Social media engagement—Ever wanted to be a fly on the wall? Here’s your chance. Through social listening, you can track conversations that include phrases, words or brands you’ve identified. From there, you can extract insights from social conversations and apply them to your marketing strategy. Themes and trends emerge in ways that are easier to understand. Just imagine what you could “overhear” to change your approach, or validate what you’ve suspected all along.

Advertising impressions—When you advertise, particularly online, the outcomes can seem nebulous. When you track advertising impressions, you get a better picture of the reach and impact of your online advertising. What kind of impressions are your ads getting? Is it time to tweak that strategy for greater impact?

These represent just a few of the ways you can gather data about your customers and your brand to hone your marketing plan for the coming year.

Lead generation

In the world of sales, the outcome of the marketing efforts point to lead generation. So what could you measure to get that data? Here are some possibilities.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM): A CRM system allows you to keep tabs on your organization’s interactions with customers and prospects at every touchpoint. The goal of CRM is to improve business relationships by gathering data about customer history and retention, but this same data can be applicable and valuable to your promotions and marketing strategy.

Sales data: Sales and marketing analytics and trends give you a peek into the future. For example, check out “The Ultimate List of Marketing Statistics,” from HubSpot.com, which has so much data on SEO and consumer behavior, you’ll feel like you won the data lottery. If you knew B2C companies that blog more than 11 times a month got more than four times the leads of those who blogged half as much, would that change your marketing strategy related to blogging? What if you knew four times as many customers would rather watch a video than read about a product? Mine sales data like this for new ideas and emerging trends, and watch for signs that some marketing channels are fading.

Website leads: Your website should be working just as hard to generate leads as your sales staff, if not harder. But how is your conversion rate? A conversion audit could tell you whether there are problems or shortcomings you might want to address before your next marketing campaign. Then you can focus on strategies to raise that conversion rate itself.

There are many other lead sources to consider as well, depending on your product or service line. You may want to look carefully at all lead generation sources to determine what data is available and what data you’d like to access to move forward. Remember the key when pulling data related to lead generation: Determine how your marketing strategy is making an impact by driving leads through the purchase funnel to the sale. Use data on outcomes to further hone that strategy.

Customer sentiment

To get a handle on how customers feel about your brand, measure customer sentiment. What does that mean? Every decision a consumer makes in relation to your brand has an emotional state tied to it, and by tracking customer sentiment you can understand at least three metrics to factor into your marketing plans.

Customer Satisfaction: how happy the customer is with your product or service.

Customer loyalty: how likely the customer is to shop again or to recommend you to a friend.

Engagement intent: how likely the customer is to engage with your brand in the future. 

What should you measure to determine customer sentiment? Consider the following.

Net promoter score (NPS) and overall customer satisfaction: Word-of-mouth recommendations are the most effective way to gain new customers. Are you measuring how likely a customer is to recommend you? NPS offers a measurement of customer loyalty, a strong indicator of how you will measure up compared to your competitors. With NPS, you can learn: whether customers are referring business to you; whether they are passive, but satisfied, and could be won over by the competition; and whether they are detractors (unhappy and potentially damaging to your brand).

Social media: Social listening technology is important. You’ll want to monitor conversations to gauge reactions to campaigns, shares and mentions, the comment velocity and the tone of comments.

In-app ratings: If your brand has an app, customer reviews and ratings prompts throughout the app experience can help you monitor the pulse of your target market.

Direct customer feedback: How do your customers engage with you directly? Are you using that to track your customer sentiment?

Customer retention: Being aware of customer attrition rates, knowing when and why you lose them, and understanding how that fits into the big picture is data that can influence your marketing (if not operations and sales) strategy in coming years.

Gathering even more data for your strategic planning marketing process

Now you know about multiple channels for mining data. But what if you still have unanswered questions? And what if the answers to those questions would change the direction of your marketing strategy completely?

Brendan Ley, brand manager at auto detailing specialists Detail King, said his company recently made a change to gather more meaningful information from customers. While they had offered customers a three-question survey at the end of the purchase process, the data they were gathering wasn’t helpful. It was time to regroup and gather some usable data.

“We added more questions about social media, and did it affect their purchase, so we know where they were coming from,” Ley explained. In addition, they incentivized customers to complete the brief survey, offering them one of the latest promotional products, a free custom Dual Bottle Opener Key Light for their time.

“It was something that we thought, maybe it will work, but it actually turned out to be a lot better than we expected,” Lay said. “We were really surprised by how many people started answering it.” Lay estimates as many as half of the customers responded by filling out the survey. “It’s definitely changed how we are doing things. Now, we wouldn’t think about not giving out a gift with a survey.”

The resulting data has had a direct impact on the organization’s marketing efforts.

“We’ve noticed with the responses we’ve been getting, a lot of the people that are making purchases either for the first time or trying things they haven’t purchased in the past, are people that are watching YouTube® videos,” Ley said.

Leaders at Detail King could track the customers influenced through their videos as a result of the survey at purchase time. The data helped them refine their marketing strategy to focus on video, a medium which was effectively engaging their target market and driving sales.

“The intel that we’re gathering is helping us get sighted in on what we’re doing next year: a lot of video and segmentation to specific interests of people,” Ley said. That includes video advertisements and videos for their social media platforms as well.

The survey strategy and promotional gift offer have been incredibly successful. But sometimes a marketing strategist just has a few more questions. When more info is needed, Ley says he’ll even call customers directly to gather the data he needs. They’re often stunned at first, then grateful for the personal touch. Now that’s data mining at a micro level! (Not to mention, good PR as well!)

Putting data to work for your organization’s marketing strategy

You’ve poured over the data: the brand awareness, the lead generation and the customer sentiment information. You’ve examined the trends. You’ve reached out to customers directly to fill the gaps. You have hard numbers in front of you, as well as qualitative data, to drive your marketing strategy. You’re now in a powerful position to create a strategic marketing planning process that’s more responsive, more knowledge-based and more in tune with your target audiences than ever before.

When done, you can enter the next marketing plan with confidence, rooted in the knowledge that you’ve got the numbers to back up your killer marketing strategy, and the latest promotional products to support your efforts. The results are sure to follow.

The post Data-driven marketing strategies steer you toward success appeared first on 4imprint Learning Center.

Data-driven marketing strategies steer you toward success published first on http://ift.tt/2vTEVjv

[servaxo]

Data-driven marketing strategies steer you toward success

More than ever before, data-driven marketing plans are proving to be invaluable for leveraging the insights you’ve gleaned during the past several months or year, and the latest promotional products can help. After all, that’s what will drive your marketing strategy: a plan that gets results because it’s based on your customers, your goals and your data.

But where does this data come from? And how do you even begin to use it? In this Blue Paper, we’ll explore some tips for identifying the information you have at your fingertips that will help drive your future marketing strategy. Let’s get started!

Data and marketing: the undeniable value of annual planning

The question of how to spend your promotional budget is a big one, and it can feel overwhelming, particularly in those moments when you’re facing a deadline. A thoughtful, well-planned strategic approach can really take the pressure off to help you feel confident in your choices.

That’s where annual planning comes in. If you haven’t had time to do annual planning in the past—don’t worry! You’re most certainly not alone. It’s an approach worth considering, one which can really help you engage customers at a key touchpoint. Even better, with annual planning, you can say goodbye to the stress of—surprise!—running low on budget mid-year, just when you need unique promotional products for conversation starters at a trade show.

Admittedly, knowing which tactics will give you the biggest return on your investment is tough. After all, there are so many ways to spend your marketing budget. Should you focus on online marketing and social media? What about mainstream media: newspapers, radio or television? What about the classics: brochures, billboards and flyers? Or, the new wave: apps? And where do the latest promotional products for events, trade shows or other customer touchpoints fit in?

It can be overwhelming, which is why placing the pieces carefully will help ensure you have even more of that rich data you need to put together a killer plan.

The rearview mirror: reflections on marketing at the micro level

It’s time to take a look back at the highs, the lows and everything in-between on your marketing calendar. As you review your marketing efforts over the past year, to what degree did they help your organization accomplish its business goals? Did they achieve your marketing objectives? This overview is great, but you’ll want to get at the micro level to make the most of your learnings.

Most importantly, you’ll want to ask yourself this key question: How well did specific tactics perform among your target audience?

This is the sweet spot where data can help you formulate next year’s plan and make truly informed decisions about where to focus your marketing and promotions resources. Even if you don’t think you’ve sufficiently tracked outcomes and findings along the way, it’s possible you have a lot of untapped knowledge at your disposal. (Pro tip: If you notice gaps, this is your chance to close them with your marketing strategy, so you have even more data a year from now!)

Here are some tips to identify the data you have, so you can use it to choose your direction for the coming year.

Leveraging data in your strategic marketing planning process to drive sales

Capturing data throughout the year is essential to support your marketing goals. But where to get started? Let’s begin with the traditional purchase funnel.

The purchase funnel is a model of your customer’s journey: from the first time they gain awareness of your brand, move through the consideration phase, and finally purchase your product or service. Here’s where your sales staff can provide qualitative and quantitative research for your plan development. By collaborating with your sales team, you can find out what matters most to move those valuable leads through the purchase funnel.

How can you leverage data to inform your marketing strategies to drive customers through the purchase funnel? Here are three ways.

Brand awareness

Meet Andrea Lewis, event and marketing director for Adams Publishing Group LLC, or APG Media of Ohio. The organization oversees publishing for 63 community newspapers, 18 advertising shoppers, 20 specialty publications and 81 affiliated websites. Many of the group’s publications are community newspapers in areas not served by other media, so they are an essential resource for spreading the word about what’s happening in those regions. When it comes to effective branding—and how to choose the latest promotional products for events—Lewis is unquestionably savvy. In her role, she helps host about 18 events every year, from community gatherings and magazine launches to large-scale fundraisers. Lewis also plans launch parties for the organization’s specialty publications, such as visitor guides or anniversary community books. Finding ways to reach target markets and engage audiences is key to marketing success. So Lewis starts by developing a marketing plan for each event.

“My marketing plan always starts with what’s the mission and purpose of the event,” Lewis said. “If the purpose is to gain customers, a targeted group, it’s very different than if the mission is to have as many people in a small area as possible for a free community event. Starting with that mission and purpose is a key piece. Because you can’t start with the giveaway.”

Why is this important? By staying grounded in the mission and purpose of the event, she says, you’ll be able to choose how to spend your promotional products budget more wisely. Lewis also recommends factoring in audience and audience size. Of course, you want unique promotional products that resonate with your crowd, but you also want to check your crowd size, as that drives budget.

“It puts in motion everything else you can do for that customer, how you reinforce your brand for that customer and how you reinforce the impression of your brand that they take away,” she says.

But most importantly, it’s important to remember the goal at the heart of it all. The best promotional giveaways remind people about the quality experience and service they had from the company.

“The purpose of the giveaway really exceeds the value of what the item is. For a Mardi Gras–themed party, Lewis ordered custom 14 oz. Mood Hurricane Cups. “So when they’re sitting in their pool drinking iced tea, they remember the event, and they think, ‘That was awesome.’”  Lewis says, “You want whatever item to have staying power in someone’s home, but you want that brand to remind them of the service you gave them that day.”

Now that you’ve taken steps to raise brand awareness, whether through thoughtful giveaways, well-coordinated events or other marketing efforts, what should you measure to determine direction in coming years? Here are some possibilities to consider:

Share of voice—This is an online advertising practice that limits the number of ad spaces on a site, known as “ad noise,” to increase the likelihood a particular ad will be seen by target audiences. What is your share of voice where you advertise online?

Brand recall—This is a measure of consumer opinion on how well your brand name is connected to the product or services you provide. It is frequently measured through interviews or surveys. Have you explored recall for your brand?

Email open rates—When you send out group emails, do you track open rates as well as other engagement, such as click-throughs? This can give you a good handle on how effective this channel is for engaging with your target markets, whether you should continue to invest in it or if it’s time to explore other options.

Website traffic—Your website traffic analytics can give you great insights into what your target markets want and how they go about finding it. There are various web traffic tools—some paid, some free—that provide you with a wealth of data. Depending on the data you find most valuable for your strategic marketing plan development, it may be worth a monetary investment to get even more specific for quality data.

Social media engagement—Ever wanted to be a fly on the wall? Here’s your chance. Through social listening, you can track conversations that include phrases, words or brands you’ve identified. From there, you can extract insights from social conversations and apply them to your marketing strategy. Themes and trends emerge in ways that are easier to understand. Just imagine what you could “overhear” to change your approach, or validate what you’ve suspected all along.

Advertising impressions—When you advertise, particularly online, the outcomes can seem nebulous. When you track advertising impressions, you get a better picture of the reach and impact of your online advertising. What kind of impressions are your ads getting? Is it time to tweak that strategy for greater impact?

These represent just a few of the ways you can gather data about your customers and your brand to hone your marketing plan for the coming year.

Lead generation

In the world of sales, the outcome of the marketing efforts point to lead generation. So what could you measure to get that data? Here are some possibilities.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM): A CRM system allows you to keep tabs on your organization’s interactions with customers and prospects at every touchpoint. The goal of CRM is to improve business relationships by gathering data about customer history and retention, but this same data can be applicable and valuable to your promotions and marketing strategy.

Sales data: Sales and marketing analytics and trends give you a peek into the future. For example, check out “The Ultimate List of Marketing Statistics,” from HubSpot.com, which has so much data on SEO and consumer behavior, you’ll feel like you won the data lottery. If you knew B2C companies that blog more than 11 times a month got more than four times the leads of those who blogged half as much, would that change your marketing strategy related to blogging? What if you knew four times as many customers would rather watch a video than read about a product? Mine sales data like this for new ideas and emerging trends, and watch for signs that some marketing channels are fading.

Website leads: Your website should be working just as hard to generate leads as your sales staff, if not harder. But how is your conversion rate? A conversion audit could tell you whether there are problems or shortcomings you might want to address before your next marketing campaign. Then you can focus on strategies to raise that conversion rate itself.

There are many other lead sources to consider as well, depending on your product or service line. You may want to look carefully at all lead generation sources to determine what data is available and what data you’d like to access to move forward. Remember the key when pulling data related to lead generation: Determine how your marketing strategy is making an impact by driving leads through the purchase funnel to the sale. Use data on outcomes to further hone that strategy.

Customer sentiment

To get a handle on how customers feel about your brand, measure customer sentiment. What does that mean? Every decision a consumer makes in relation to your brand has an emotional state tied to it, and by tracking customer sentiment you can understand at least three metrics to factor into your marketing plans.

Customer Satisfaction: how happy the customer is with your product or service.

Customer loyalty: how likely the customer is to shop again or to recommend you to a friend.

Engagement intent: how likely the customer is to engage with your brand in the future. 

What should you measure to determine customer sentiment? Consider the following.

Net promoter score (NPS) and overall customer satisfaction: Word-of-mouth recommendations are the most effective way to gain new customers. Are you measuring how likely a customer is to recommend you? NPS offers a measurement of customer loyalty, a strong indicator of how you will measure up compared to your competitors. With NPS, you can learn: whether customers are referring business to you; whether they are passive, but satisfied, and could be won over by the competition; and whether they are detractors (unhappy and potentially damaging to your brand).

Social media: Social listening technology is important. You’ll want to monitor conversations to gauge reactions to campaigns, shares and mentions, the comment velocity and the tone of comments.

In-app ratings: If your brand has an app, customer reviews and ratings prompts throughout the app experience can help you monitor the pulse of your target market.

Direct customer feedback: How do your customers engage with you directly? Are you using that to track your customer sentiment?

Customer retention: Being aware of customer attrition rates, knowing when and why you lose them, and understanding how that fits into the big picture is data that can influence your marketing (if not operations and sales) strategy in coming years.

Gathering even more data for your strategic planning marketing process

Now you know about multiple channels for mining data. But what if you still have unanswered questions? And what if the answers to those questions would change the direction of your marketing strategy completely?

Brendan Ley, brand manager at auto detailing specialists Detail King, said his company recently made a change to gather more meaningful information from customers. While they had offered customers a three-question survey at the end of the purchase process, the data they were gathering wasn’t helpful. It was time to regroup and gather some usable data.

“We added more questions about social media, and did it affect their purchase, so we know where they were coming from,” Ley explained. In addition, they incentivized customers to complete the brief survey, offering them one of the latest promotional products, a free custom Dual Bottle Opener Key Light for their time.

“It was something that we thought, maybe it will work, but it actually turned out to be a lot better than we expected,” Lay said. “We were really surprised by how many people started answering it.” Lay estimates as many as half of the customers responded by filling out the survey. “It’s definitely changed how we are doing things. Now, we wouldn’t think about not giving out a gift with a survey.”

The resulting data has had a direct impact on the organization’s marketing efforts.

“We’ve noticed with the responses we’ve been getting, a lot of the people that are making purchases either for the first time or trying things they haven’t purchased in the past, are people that are watching YouTube® videos,” Ley said.

Leaders at Detail King could track the customers influenced through their videos as a result of the survey at purchase time. The data helped them refine their marketing strategy to focus on video, a medium which was effectively engaging their target market and driving sales.

“The intel that we’re gathering is helping us get sighted in on what we’re doing next year: a lot of video and segmentation to specific interests of people,” Ley said. That includes video advertisements and videos for their social media platforms as well.

The survey strategy and promotional gift offer have been incredibly successful. But sometimes a marketing strategist just has a few more questions. When more info is needed, Ley says he’ll even call customers directly to gather the data he needs. They’re often stunned at first, then grateful for the personal touch. Now that’s data mining at a micro level! (Not to mention, good PR as well!)

Putting data to work for your organization’s marketing strategy

You’ve poured over the data: the brand awareness, the lead generation and the customer sentiment information. You’ve examined the trends. You’ve reached out to customers directly to fill the gaps. You have hard numbers in front of you, as well as qualitative data, to drive your marketing strategy. You’re now in a powerful position to create a strategic marketing planning process that’s more responsive, more knowledge-based and more in tune with your target audiences than ever before.

When done, you can enter the next marketing plan with confidence, rooted in the knowledge that you’ve got the numbers to back up your killer marketing strategy, and the latest promotional products to support your efforts. The results are sure to follow.

The post Data-driven marketing strategies steer you toward success appeared first on 4imprint Learning Center.

Data-driven marketing strategies steer you toward success published first on http://ift.tt/2vTEVjv

[servaxo]

Data-driven marketing strategies steer you toward success

More than ever before, data-driven marketing plans are proving to be invaluable for leveraging the insights you’ve gleaned during the past several months or year, and the latest promotional products can help. After all, that’s what will drive your marketing strategy: a plan that gets results because it’s based on your customers, your goals and your data.

But where does this data come from? And how do you even begin to use it? In this Blue Paper, we’ll explore some tips for identifying the information you have at your fingertips that will help drive your future marketing strategy. Let’s get started!

Data and marketing: the undeniable value of annual planning

The question of how to spend your promotional budget is a big one, and it can feel overwhelming, particularly in those moments when you’re facing a deadline. A thoughtful, well-planned strategic approach can really take the pressure off to help you feel confident in your choices.

That’s where annual planning comes in. If you haven’t had time to do annual planning in the past—don’t worry! You’re most certainly not alone. It’s an approach worth considering, one which can really help you engage customers at a key touchpoint. Even better, with annual planning, you can say goodbye to the stress of—surprise!—running low on budget mid-year, just when you need unique promotional products for conversation starters at a trade show.

Admittedly, knowing which tactics will give you the biggest return on your investment is tough. After all, there are so many ways to spend your marketing budget. Should you focus on online marketing and social media? What about mainstream media: newspapers, radio or television? What about the classics: brochures, billboards and flyers? Or, the new wave: apps? And where do the latest promotional products for events, trade shows or other customer touchpoints fit in?

It can be overwhelming, which is why placing the pieces carefully will help ensure you have even more of that rich data you need to put together a killer plan.

The rearview mirror: reflections on marketing at the micro level

It’s time to take a look back at the highs, the lows and everything in-between on your marketing calendar. As you review your marketing efforts over the past year, to what degree did they help your organization accomplish its business goals? Did they achieve your marketing objectives? This overview is great, but you’ll want to get at the micro level to make the most of your learnings.

Most importantly, you’ll want to ask yourself this key question: How well did specific tactics perform among your target audience?

This is the sweet spot where data can help you formulate next year’s plan and make truly informed decisions about where to focus your marketing and promotions resources. Even if you don’t think you’ve sufficiently tracked outcomes and findings along the way, it’s possible you have a lot of untapped knowledge at your disposal. (Pro tip: If you notice gaps, this is your chance to close them with your marketing strategy, so you have even more data a year from now!)

Here are some tips to identify the data you have, so you can use it to choose your direction for the coming year.

Leveraging data in your strategic marketing planning process to drive sales

Capturing data throughout the year is essential to support your marketing goals. But where to get started? Let’s begin with the traditional purchase funnel.

The purchase funnel is a model of your customer’s journey: from the first time they gain awareness of your brand, move through the consideration phase, and finally purchase your product or service. Here’s where your sales staff can provide qualitative and quantitative research for your plan development. By collaborating with your sales team, you can find out what matters most to move those valuable leads through the purchase funnel.

How can you leverage data to inform your marketing strategies to drive customers through the purchase funnel? Here are three ways.

Brand awareness

Meet Andrea Lewis, event and marketing director for Adams Publishing Group LLC, or APG Media of Ohio. The organization oversees publishing for 63 community newspapers, 18 advertising shoppers, 20 specialty publications and 81 affiliated websites. Many of the group’s publications are community newspapers in areas not served by other media, so they are an essential resource for spreading the word about what’s happening in those regions. When it comes to effective branding—and how to choose the latest promotional products for events—Lewis is unquestionably savvy. In her role, she helps host about 18 events every year, from community gatherings and magazine launches to large-scale fundraisers. Lewis also plans launch parties for the organization’s specialty publications, such as visitor guides or anniversary community books. Finding ways to reach target markets and engage audiences is key to marketing success. So Lewis starts by developing a marketing plan for each event.

“My marketing plan always starts with what’s the mission and purpose of the event,” Lewis said. “If the purpose is to gain customers, a targeted group, it’s very different than if the mission is to have as many people in a small area as possible for a free community event. Starting with that mission and purpose is a key piece. Because you can’t start with the giveaway.”

Why is this important? By staying grounded in the mission and purpose of the event, she says, you’ll be able to choose how to spend your promotional products budget more wisely. Lewis also recommends factoring in audience and audience size. Of course, you want unique promotional products that resonate with your crowd, but you also want to check your crowd size, as that drives budget.

“It puts in motion everything else you can do for that customer, how you reinforce your brand for that customer and how you reinforce the impression of your brand that they take away,” she says.

But most importantly, it’s important to remember the goal at the heart of it all. The best promotional giveaways remind people about the quality experience and service they had from the company.

“The purpose of the giveaway really exceeds the value of what the item is. For a Mardi Gras–themed party, Lewis ordered custom 14 oz. Mood Hurricane Cups. “So when they’re sitting in their pool drinking iced tea, they remember the event, and they think, ‘That was awesome.’”  Lewis says, “You want whatever item to have staying power in someone’s home, but you want that brand to remind them of the service you gave them that day.”

Now that you’ve taken steps to raise brand awareness, whether through thoughtful giveaways, well-coordinated events or other marketing efforts, what should you measure to determine direction in coming years? Here are some possibilities to consider:

Share of voice—This is an online advertising practice that limits the number of ad spaces on a site, known as “ad noise,” to increase the likelihood a particular ad will be seen by target audiences. What is your share of voice where you advertise online?

Brand recall—This is a measure of consumer opinion on how well your brand name is connected to the product or services you provide. It is frequently measured through interviews or surveys. Have you explored recall for your brand?

Email open rates—When you send out group emails, do you track open rates as well as other engagement, such as click-throughs? This can give you a good handle on how effective this channel is for engaging with your target markets, whether you should continue to invest in it or if it’s time to explore other options.

Website traffic—Your website traffic analytics can give you great insights into what your target markets want and how they go about finding it. There are various web traffic tools—some paid, some free—that provide you with a wealth of data. Depending on the data you find most valuable for your strategic marketing plan development, it may be worth a monetary investment to get even more specific for quality data.

Social media engagement—Ever wanted to be a fly on the wall? Here’s your chance. Through social listening, you can track conversations that include phrases, words or brands you’ve identified. From there, you can extract insights from social conversations and apply them to your marketing strategy. Themes and trends emerge in ways that are easier to understand. Just imagine what you could “overhear” to change your approach, or validate what you’ve suspected all along.

Advertising impressions—When you advertise, particularly online, the outcomes can seem nebulous. When you track advertising impressions, you get a better picture of the reach and impact of your online advertising. What kind of impressions are your ads getting? Is it time to tweak that strategy for greater impact?

These represent just a few of the ways you can gather data about your customers and your brand to hone your marketing plan for the coming year.

Lead generation

In the world of sales, the outcome of the marketing efforts point to lead generation. So what could you measure to get that data? Here are some possibilities.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM): A CRM system allows you to keep tabs on your organization’s interactions with customers and prospects at every touchpoint. The goal of CRM is to improve business relationships by gathering data about customer history and retention, but this same data can be applicable and valuable to your promotions and marketing strategy.

Sales data: Sales and marketing analytics and trends give you a peek into the future. For example, check out “The Ultimate List of Marketing Statistics,” from HubSpot.com, which has so much data on SEO and consumer behavior, you’ll feel like you won the data lottery. If you knew B2C companies that blog more than 11 times a month got more than four times the leads of those who blogged half as much, would that change your marketing strategy related to blogging? What if you knew four times as many customers would rather watch a video than read about a product? Mine sales data like this for new ideas and emerging trends, and watch for signs that some marketing channels are fading.

Website leads: Your website should be working just as hard to generate leads as your sales staff, if not harder. But how is your conversion rate? A conversion audit could tell you whether there are problems or shortcomings you might want to address before your next marketing campaign. Then you can focus on strategies to raise that conversion rate itself.

There are many other lead sources to consider as well, depending on your product or service line. You may want to look carefully at all lead generation sources to determine what data is available and what data you’d like to access to move forward. Remember the key when pulling data related to lead generation: Determine how your marketing strategy is making an impact by driving leads through the purchase funnel to the sale. Use data on outcomes to further hone that strategy.

Customer sentiment

To get a handle on how customers feel about your brand, measure customer sentiment. What does that mean? Every decision a consumer makes in relation to your brand has an emotional state tied to it, and by tracking customer sentiment you can understand at least three metrics to factor into your marketing plans.

Customer Satisfaction: how happy the customer is with your product or service.

Customer loyalty: how likely the customer is to shop again or to recommend you to a friend.

Engagement intent: how likely the customer is to engage with your brand in the future. 

What should you measure to determine customer sentiment? Consider the following.

Net promoter score (NPS) and overall customer satisfaction: Word-of-mouth recommendations are the most effective way to gain new customers. Are you measuring how likely a customer is to recommend you? NPS offers a measurement of customer loyalty, a strong indicator of how you will measure up compared to your competitors. With NPS, you can learn: whether customers are referring business to you; whether they are passive, but satisfied, and could be won over by the competition; and whether they are detractors (unhappy and potentially damaging to your brand).

Social media: Social listening technology is important. You’ll want to monitor conversations to gauge reactions to campaigns, shares and mentions, the comment velocity and the tone of comments.

In-app ratings: If your brand has an app, customer reviews and ratings prompts throughout the app experience can help you monitor the pulse of your target market.

Direct customer feedback: How do your customers engage with you directly? Are you using that to track your customer sentiment?

Customer retention: Being aware of customer attrition rates, knowing when and why you lose them, and understanding how that fits into the big picture is data that can influence your marketing (if not operations and sales) strategy in coming years.

Gathering even more data for your strategic planning marketing process

Now you know about multiple channels for mining data. But what if you still have unanswered questions? And what if the answers to those questions would change the direction of your marketing strategy completely?

Brendan Ley, brand manager at auto detailing specialists Detail King, said his company recently made a change to gather more meaningful information from customers. While they had offered customers a three-question survey at the end of the purchase process, the data they were gathering wasn’t helpful. It was time to regroup and gather some usable data.

“We added more questions about social media, and did it affect their purchase, so we know where they were coming from,” Ley explained. In addition, they incentivized customers to complete the brief survey, offering them one of the latest promotional products, a free custom Dual Bottle Opener Key Light for their time.

“It was something that we thought, maybe it will work, but it actually turned out to be a lot better than we expected,” Lay said. “We were really surprised by how many people started answering it.” Lay estimates as many as half of the customers responded by filling out the survey. “It’s definitely changed how we are doing things. Now, we wouldn’t think about not giving out a gift with a survey.”

The resulting data has had a direct impact on the organization’s marketing efforts.

“We’ve noticed with the responses we’ve been getting, a lot of the people that are making purchases either for the first time or trying things they haven’t purchased in the past, are people that are watching YouTube® videos,” Ley said.

Leaders at Detail King could track the customers influenced through their videos as a result of the survey at purchase time. The data helped them refine their marketing strategy to focus on video, a medium which was effectively engaging their target market and driving sales.

“The intel that we’re gathering is helping us get sighted in on what we’re doing next year: a lot of video and segmentation to specific interests of people,” Ley said. That includes video advertisements and videos for their social media platforms as well.

The survey strategy and promotional gift offer have been incredibly successful. But sometimes a marketing strategist just has a few more questions. When more info is needed, Ley says he’ll even call customers directly to gather the data he needs. They’re often stunned at first, then grateful for the personal touch. Now that’s data mining at a micro level! (Not to mention, good PR as well!)

Putting data to work for your organization’s marketing strategy

You’ve poured over the data: the brand awareness, the lead generation and the customer sentiment information. You’ve examined the trends. You’ve reached out to customers directly to fill the gaps. You have hard numbers in front of you, as well as qualitative data, to drive your marketing strategy. You’re now in a powerful position to create a strategic marketing planning process that’s more responsive, more knowledge-based and more in tune with your target audiences than ever before.

When done, you can enter the next marketing plan with confidence, rooted in the knowledge that you’ve got the numbers to back up your killer marketing strategy, and the latest promotional products to support your efforts. The results are sure to follow.

The post Data-driven marketing strategies steer you toward success appeared first on 4imprint Learning Center.

Data-driven marketing strategies steer you toward success published first on http://ift.tt/2vTEVjv