Actionable Marketing 101

Here 10 ways to learn more about digital marketing, whether you’re a student or an experienced marketer.

A  marketing offer encompasses more than just price. According to direct marketing experts Bob Stone and Ron Jacobs, an offer has eleven elements. Here’s checklist to help you develop your offer to ensure that it’s in line with your marketing goals. Please read on. …

Content marketing attracts and engages prospects, customers and the public to take further action towards a business goal with useful, well-written information. It takes a longer view to connecting with its target audience by creating an extended interaction. Further, content marketing is at the heart of many social media strategies since it provides the food for social media interaction. Here are the twelve elements of content marketing that distinguish it from other marketing messaging and communications.

Does your firm have social media guidelines outlining acceptable behavior on various social media platforms? Do you think that they’re not necessary because you don’t engage in social media marketing? Think again because your employees are active across the social media landscape and may be representing your company without realizing it. Here are 17 social media guidelines to help you develop a set tailored to your organization’s needs.

Mayday is a boat’s distress signal. To celebrate May 1st, here’s a blogging 911 to give you the answers to the top twenty blogging questions. There’s useful blogging how-tos for both beginning and experienced bloggers.

Defining your target audience is a critical component of your marketing plan and can have a big impact on your media selection. Here are 3 ways to define your target market. Please read on …

The definition of social media continues to evolve as the platforms and technologies continue to change and expand. Here are thirty social media definitions to help clarify these trends. What would you add to this list?

Say PR, as in public relations, particularly during a conversation about marketing and/or social media, and participants are liable to have vastly different perspectives on the topic. Traditionally, public relations referred to the art of getting mentions of a person, company or other organization placed in the media, namely print, radio and television. Here are 31 definitions of public relations or PR to help you.

Digital marketing is any marketing delivered via an Internet, mobile or tablet device. Here’s how to organize your plans and related strategies around the four pillars of digital marketing, content, communication, community and commerce.

Affiliate marketing can be a cost effective way for businesses to expand their reach. Here are 5 reasons to add affiliate marketing to your mix. Please read on …

As part of the DMA 2010′s Annual Conference in San Francisco, I’ve learned some important tops that can help your event marketing. Here are five ways to use social media to extend your event.

From a marketing perspective, taking a trade show booth is an important investment. Here are 3 questions to help you determine whether you should take a booth at a conference and 5 tactics to make the most of your investment. Please read on…

Marketing comes in a wide variety of flavors based on audience, media platform and business in today’s evolving and dynamic marketplace. Therefore, it’s no surprise that marketers define what they do differently. Inspired by the 31 PR Definitions article, here’s a roundup of seventy-two marketing definitions by experienced practitioners across different specialties.

Here’s a blog checklist of 60 items to help you take your blog to the next level. These detailed must-have points will help you achieve blog success.

With limited resources, consistent messages are key. Brands create short hand messages that customers recognize. Here are ten tips to help you create or enliven a brand.

Content marketing is the creation of relevant and useful branded content in one or more formats distributed across owned media, third party media and/or social media, both online and offline, to increase brand awareness, attract and engage prospects, retain existing customers, and expand thought leadership while encouraging further action towards a sale without being promotional. Here are the 5Ws of content marketing.

Content marketing continues to gain traction among marketers, both B2C and B2B because it attracts and invites prospects and customers in without hitting them over the head with price-oriented promotions. Additionally content marketing supplies food for social media, engages prospects at each step of the purchase process, and supports search optimization. To help you, here’s a chart outlining the major 18 content marketing options. [Chart included]

Actionable Marketing 101 Budget season means diving into the numbers behind your marketing. For many marketers, tracking financial results is like speaking a foreign language. In reality, the process can be relatively painless with a little translation, a little planning … Continue reading

As fall begins, many firms enter their corporate budgeting process. An important critical component of budgeting is the sales forecast. For marketers, the revenue forecast is critical since it may become your business goals. Here are 8 steps to help you develop your sales forecast. Please read on …

Communications is a critical component of marketing. An important key to effectively communicate with your target audience is to understand the direction in which messages are exchanged. Here are the three basic marketing communications (aka: marcom) directions. [Chart included.]

How does actionable marketing compare to other forms of marketing?Actionable marketing refers the ability to persuade prospects, customers and the public to engage with your brand, product and/or firm. These three elements distinguish actionable marketing from other types of marketing. Read further for comparison chart.

Chelsea Clinton’s story book wedding to finace Marc Mezvinsky was kept secret. Here are 3 offer-realted marketing lessons from Chelsea Clinton’s wedding. Please read on ….

When the Mad Men roamed boardrooms of major brands, marketing focused on the 4Ps: Product, Price, Place and Promotion. To stand out, Trout and Ries introduced the notion of positioning which they called the battle for your mind. Fast forward to 2010 where digital marketers still incorporate the 4Ps into their plans, social media has altered the nature of the 4Ps. Here’s how…

Why not use this holiday season of giving to extend your relationship with your customers? Here are 9 quick ways to engage your company, regardless of size, in cause marketing which Cone Inc. has shown to improve customer sentiment towards your firm.

Marketing personas are imaginary versions of your prospects, customers and the public that contain in-depth, lifelike character traits including fun names to help develop content and marketing. Personas guide a firm’s marketing and content decisions. To this end, here’s a twelve point checklist to help you develop your firm’s personas.

Twitter hashtags are useful for marketers to expand their audience and/or broaden the reach of their messages on Twitter. Here are five tactics to help marketers use Twitter hashtags to achieve their goals.

Content marketing continues to grow because it attracts consumers on social media platforms like a magnet. To help you think about the different types of content used across a variety of social media platforms, here’s guidance showing the types of content used by social media platform and type of communication. [Charts & data included]

What is actionable marketing? Contrary to what some may think, actionable marketing has nothing to do with the law where actionable means to bring a legal suit. Rather, actionable refers to marketing’s ability to persuade prospects, customers and the public to engage with your firm. Here are the twelve elements that define actionable marketing.

Are you providing opportunities for your competitors without realizing it? Marketers can learn from Sonny Corleone’s illegitimate son, Vincent Mancini, played by Andy Garcia, who says, “Your enemies always get strong on what you leave behind.” in Godfather III. Here are sixteen major categories of competitive information to collect and analyze to ensure that your competitors don’t get strong on business opportunities that you’ve overlooked.

What is marketing?  In today’s ever-evolving marketplace, there are three dominant forms of marketing. They are general marketing, digital marketing and integrated marketing, each of which can be broken into more specialized types. For details, please read on …

Are you always thinking that mobile marketing is going to be the next big thing but maybe you can put off taking action until next year? Given the high growth of web-enabled mobile devices, now’s the time to start your mobile marketing strategy. Here are six basic steps to get your mobile marketing on track.

Do you practice Spaghetti Social Media? Like throwing pasta against the wall to determine if it’s done cooking by whether or not it sticks, Spaghetti Social Media a crude form of social media strategy where a employee tries using social media platforms in hopes that his efforts will succeed in achieving business results without any clear marketing goals because social media is free. Here are seven components of Spaghetti Social Media Marketing and how to fix them to improve your social media strategy.

To reposition Old Spice, Isaiah Mustafa, Old Spice’s sexy brand icon, was featured in 180+ YouTube videos. These humorous social media clips  garnered 35+ million YouTube views. To help you assess the branding impact of your social media campaign, here are 31 questions to determine brand effectiveness. Please read on …

QR Codes connect offline media, packaging and almost any surface with useful information or links to online data. Accessible to anyone with a camera-equipped smartphone and free software, these two-dimensional barcodes are starting to pop-up in the US, so don’t wait to start testing their ability to extend content delivery and connect with untargeted viewers in new ways.

As corporate social media usage increases and expands across functions, organizations are hiring social media managers. Here are 5 tips to help you develop a social media contingency plan.

Cause marketing is the coordinated efforts of both for-profit and not-for-profit (NFP) organizations towards a common charitable and/or social goal. Unlike other forms of marketing, cause marketing has 5 goals and 8 distinct target audiences. (Contains useful research and chart.)

Social media marketing requires metrics associated with the business goals. 7 major categories of measures are examined and an additional 10 social media marketing metrics questions are included. Please read on …

For small businesses and other organizations with limited budgets, social media marketing can be a great equalizer by providing another way of engaging with your target market and the public. Social media marketing on a budget requires thinking through your business and marketing strategy first. Focus your efforts on one form of social media and do it well. Here’s a set of ten questions to help you lay the groundwork and seven options for leveraging social media on a budget.

Search optimization is a critical component of every marketing plan because it extends the reach of online and offline content and interactions. [Here's some SEO tips to start.] Search engines are where consumers go to get their questions answered 24/7 via computers, smartphones and tablets.  To help, here are the suggestions of fifteen search optimization experts with a variety of different approaches to optimizing for search .

Media is content created for a target audience on a regular basis. It may be delivered in different formats.  In today’s connected world, there are three major categories of media; they are third party media (or paid media), owned media (or internal media) and user-generated media.  In addition to defining these different options, the media taxonomy is laid out in a useful chart.

Only 5.4% of Iowa’s eligible voters turned out and voted in Tuesday’s Republican caucus, the first votes cast in the 2012 presidential race. If in this highly publicized race that dominated the news across media platforms for weeks, only a tiny fraction of the eligible voters turned out, what does this mean for your marketing?

Every business needs marketing goals and a plan to achieve them. This article outline the 3 major marketing objectives that every business can use. (Hint: Branding isn’t one of the goals!) Also included are the related metrics to assess your success. Please read on …

To help us understand what marketing means in today’s evolving media environment, where increasingly connected prospects, customers and the public interact with a broad range of businesses, seventy-two senior marketing executives were asked to define their profession. Here are twelve consistent marketing elements that ran across these seventy-two seemingly divergent marketing definitions. (Here’s the original marketing definitions post.)

Yes you are doing marketing, but do you have a marketing strategy? Time and again, I see marketers in companies, agencies and forums, both online and in real life, rush to develop tactics without stopping to think about how these relate to their larger business goals. Marketers compete for consumers’ scarce resources:  attention and disposable income. To this end, it’s important to understand how the following five components are integrated.

PR (also known as public relations) continues to evolve as a business art and science. The objective of PR is to craft messages about a product, brand, individual, business, or organization targeted at a variety of one or more chosen publics. Here are 15 points that answer the question What is PR based on input from 31 PR professionals.

What is social media? Ask any group of social media savvy individuals and it’s likely that they’ll all give you a different answer. Here’s 12 points that define social media based on 30 Social Media Definitions.

NBA free agent, LeBron James, generated a unprecedented amount of fan and media attention regarding from his announcement of his future team. What fan reaction overlooks and marketers can learn from is the fact that, for LeBron James, like your customers, it’s the total offer that matters. Here are 25  questions to ask about your offer. Please read on …

My recent post of marketing definitions with contributions from seventy-two different sources generated a lot of discussion around what marketing is. One interesting topic that arose in these discussions was the question of what marketing is NOT. As with art, examining negative space provides a different view of marketing and how it functions within an organization. Here are five definitions of what marketing is NOT.

Don’t jump in social media without thinking through your marketing plan. Here are 5 business rationales to help get you started. Please read on…

When developing their plans, many marketers focus on the media where they’re placing advertising often without considering the totality of their marketing communications or the implications for related elements.  The reality is that using online and offline promotional media differ in ways affecting a variety of purchase-related tactics. Here are five factors to assess when using online and offline media. [Chart included]

Before starting your personal blog, here are seven reasons to consider. They are closely tied to your goals for your blog.

Search optimization is a critical component of every marketing plan because it extends the reach of online and offline content and interactions. [Here's some SEO tips to start.] Search engines are where consumers go to get their questions answered 24/7 via computers, smartphones and tablets.  To help, here are the suggestions of fifteen search optimization experts with a variety of different approaches to optimizing for search .

Content marketing continues to gain traction among marketers, both B2C and B2B because it attracts and invites prospects and customers in without hitting them over the head with price-oriented promotions. Additionally content marketing supplies food for social media, engages prospects at each step of the purchase process, and supports search optimization. To help you, here’s a chart outlining the major 18 content marketing options. [Chart included]

Only 5.4% of Iowa’s eligible voters turned out and voted in Tuesday’s Republican caucus, the first votes cast in the 2012 presidential race. If in this highly publicized race that dominated the news across media platforms for weeks, only a tiny fraction of the eligible voters turned out, what does this mean for your marketing?

Are you providing opportunities for your competitors without realizing it? Marketers can learn from Sonny Corleone’s illegitimate son, Vincent Mancini, played by Andy Garcia, who says, “Your enemies always get strong on what you leave behind.” in Godfather III. Here are sixteen major categories of competitive information to collect and analyze to ensure that your competitors don’t get strong on business opportunities that you’ve overlooked.

How does actionable marketing compare to other forms of marketing?Actionable marketing refers the ability to persuade prospects, customers and the public to engage with your brand, product and/or firm. These three elements distinguish actionable marketing from other types of marketing. Read further for comparison chart.

What is actionable marketing? Contrary to what some may think, actionable marketing has nothing to do with the law where actionable means to bring a legal suit. Rather, actionable refers to marketing’s ability to persuade prospects, customers and the public to engage with your firm. Here are the twelve elements that define actionable marketing.

Content marketing attracts and engages prospects, customers and the public to take further action towards a business goal with useful, well-written information. It takes a longer view to connecting with its target audience by creating an extended interaction. Further, content marketing is at the heart of many social media strategies since it provides the food for social media interaction. Here are the twelve elements of content marketing that distinguish it from other marketing messaging and communications.

Do you practice Spaghetti Social Media? Like throwing pasta against the wall to determine if it’s done cooking by whether or not it sticks, Spaghetti Social Media a crude form of social media strategy where a employee tries using social media platforms in hopes that his efforts will succeed in achieving business results without any clear marketing goals because social media is free. Here are seven components of Spaghetti Social Media Marketing and how to fix them to improve your social media strategy.

Here’s a blog checklist of 60 items to help you take your blog to the next level. These detailed must-have points will help you achieve blog success.

What is social media? Ask any group of social media savvy individuals and it’s likely that they’ll all give you a different answer. Here’s 12 points that define social media based on 30 Social Media Definitions.

Twitter hashtags are useful for marketers to expand their audience and/or broaden the reach of their messages on Twitter. Here are five tactics to help marketers use Twitter hashtags to achieve their goals.

Digital marketing is any marketing delivered via an Internet, mobile or tablet device. Here’s how to organize your plans and related strategies around the four pillars of digital marketing, content, communication, community and commerce.

The definition of social media continues to evolve as the platforms and technologies continue to change and expand. Here are thirty social media definitions to help clarify these trends. What would you add to this list?

Mayday is a boat’s distress signal. To celebrate May 1st, here’s a blogging 911 to give you the answers to the top twenty blogging questions. There’s useful blogging how-tos for both beginning and experienced bloggers.

As corporate social media usage increases and expands across functions, organizations are hiring social media managers. Here are 5 tips to help you develop a social media contingency plan.

Are you always thinking that mobile marketing is going to be the next big thing but maybe you can put off taking action until next year? Given the high growth of web-enabled mobile devices, now’s the time to start your mobile marketing strategy. Here are six basic steps to get your mobile marketing on track.

For small businesses and other organizations with limited budgets, social media marketing can be a great equalizer by providing another way of engaging with your target market and the public. Social media marketing on a budget requires thinking through your business and marketing strategy first. Focus your efforts on one form of social media and do it well. Here’s a set of ten questions to help you lay the groundwork and seven options for leveraging social media on a budget.

PR (also known as public relations) continues to evolve as a business art and science. The objective of PR is to craft messages about a product, brand, individual, business, or organization targeted at a variety of one or more chosen publics. Here are 15 points that answer the question What is PR based on input from 31 PR professionals.

My recent post of marketing definitions with contributions from seventy-two different sources generated a lot of discussion around what marketing is. One interesting topic that arose in these discussions was the question of what marketing is NOT. As with art, examining negative space provides a different view of marketing and how it functions within an organization. Here are five definitions of what marketing is NOT.

To help us understand what marketing means in today’s evolving media environment, where increasingly connected prospects, customers and the public interact with a broad range of businesses, seventy-two senior marketing executives were asked to define their profession. Here are twelve consistent marketing elements that ran across these seventy-two seemingly divergent marketing definitions. (Here’s the original marketing definitions post.)

Marketing personas are imaginary versions of your prospects, customers and the public that contain in-depth, lifelike character traits including fun names to help develop content and marketing. Personas guide a firm’s marketing and content decisions. To this end, here’s a twelve point checklist to help you develop your firm’s personas.

Marketing comes in a wide variety of flavors based on audience, media platform and business in today’s evolving and dynamic marketplace. Therefore, it’s no surprise that marketers define what they do differently. Inspired by the 31 PR Definitions article, here’s a roundup of seventy-two marketing definitions by experienced practitioners across different specialties.

Content marketing is the creation of relevant and useful branded content in one or more formats distributed across owned media, third party media and/or social media, both online and offline, to increase brand awareness, attract and engage prospects, retain existing customers, and expand thought leadership while encouraging further action towards a sale without being promotional. Here are the 5Ws of content marketing.

Say PR, as in public relations, particularly during a conversation about marketing and/or social media, and participants are liable to have vastly different perspectives on the topic. Traditionally, public relations referred to the art of getting mentions of a person, company or other organization placed in the media, namely print, radio and television. Here are 31 definitions of public relations or PR to help you.

QR Codes connect offline media, packaging and almost any surface with useful information or links to online data. Accessible to anyone with a camera-equipped smartphone and free software, these two-dimensional barcodes are starting to pop-up in the US, so don’t wait to start testing their ability to extend content delivery and connect with untargeted viewers in new ways.

When developing their plans, many marketers focus on the media where they’re placing advertising often without considering the totality of their marketing communications or the implications for related elements.  The reality is that using online and offline promotional media differ in ways affecting a variety of purchase-related tactics. Here are five factors to assess when using online and offline media. [Chart included]

With limited resources, consistent messages are key. Brands create short hand messages that customers recognize. Here are ten tips to help you create or enliven a brand.

Content marketing continues to grow because it attracts consumers on social media platforms like a magnet. To help you think about the different types of content used across a variety of social media platforms, here’s guidance showing the types of content used by social media platform and type of communication. [Charts & data included]

Yes you are doing marketing, but do you have a marketing strategy? Time and again, I see marketers in companies, agencies and forums, both online and in real life, rush to develop tactics without stopping to think about how these relate to their larger business goals. Marketers compete for consumers’ scarce resources:  attention and disposable income. To this end, it’s important to understand how the following five components are integrated.

Communications is a critical component of marketing. An important key to effectively communicate with your target audience is to understand the direction in which messages are exchanged. Here are the three basic marketing communications (aka: marcom) directions. [Chart included.]

Before starting your personal blog, here are seven reasons to consider. They are closely tied to your goals for your blog.

Why not use this holiday season of giving to extend your relationship with your customers? Here are 9 quick ways to engage your company, regardless of size, in cause marketing which Cone Inc. has shown to improve customer sentiment towards your firm.

Cause marketing is the coordinated efforts of both for-profit and not-for-profit (NFP) organizations towards a common charitable and/or social goal. Unlike other forms of marketing, cause marketing has 5 goals and 8 distinct target audiences. (Contains useful research and chart.)

Does your firm have social media guidelines outlining acceptable behavior on various social media platforms? Do you think that they’re not necessary because you don’t engage in social media marketing? Think again because your employees are active across the social media landscape and may be representing your company without realizing it. Here are 17 social media guidelines to help you develop a set tailored to your organization’s needs.

From a marketing perspective, taking a trade show booth is an important investment. Here are 3 questions to help you determine whether you should take a booth at a conference and 5 tactics to make the most of your investment. Please read on…

As part of the DMA 2010′s Annual Conference in San Francisco, I’ve learned some important tops that can help your event marketing. Here are five ways to use social media to extend your event.

Media is content created for a target audience on a regular basis. It may be delivered in different formats.  In today’s connected world, there are three major categories of media; they are third party media (or paid media), owned media (or internal media) and user-generated media.  In addition to defining these different options, the media taxonomy is laid out in a useful chart.

Actionable Marketing 101 Budget season means diving into the numbers behind your marketing. For many marketers, tracking financial results is like speaking a foreign language. In reality, the process can be relatively painless with a little translation, a little planning … Continue reading

Social media marketing requires metrics associated with the business goals. 7 major categories of measures are examined and an additional 10 social media marketing metrics questions are included. Please read on …

A  marketing offer encompasses more than just price. According to direct marketing experts Bob Stone and Ron Jacobs, an offer has eleven elements. Here’s checklist to help you develop your offer to ensure that it’s in line with your marketing goals. Please read on. …

As fall begins, many firms enter their corporate budgeting process. An important critical component of budgeting is the sales forecast. For marketers, the revenue forecast is critical since it may become your business goals. Here are 8 steps to help you develop your sales forecast. Please read on …

When the Mad Men roamed boardrooms of major brands, marketing focused on the 4Ps: Product, Price, Place and Promotion. To stand out, Trout and Ries introduced the notion of positioning which they called the battle for your mind. Fast forward to 2010 where digital marketers still incorporate the 4Ps into their plans, social media has altered the nature of the 4Ps. Here’s how…

Don’t jump in social media without thinking through your marketing plan. Here are 5 business rationales to help get you started. Please read on…

Affiliate marketing can be a cost effective way for businesses to expand their reach. Here are 5 reasons to add affiliate marketing to your mix. Please read on …

Every business needs marketing goals and a plan to achieve them. This article outline the 3 major marketing objectives that every business can use. (Hint: Branding isn’t one of the goals!) Also included are the related metrics to assess your success. Please read on …

To reposition Old Spice, Isaiah Mustafa, Old Spice’s sexy brand icon, was featured in 180+ YouTube videos. These humorous social media clips  garnered 35+ million YouTube views. To help you assess the branding impact of your social media campaign, here are 31 questions to determine brand effectiveness. Please read on …

Chelsea Clinton’s story book wedding to finace Marc Mezvinsky was kept secret. Here are 3 offer-realted marketing lessons from Chelsea Clinton’s wedding. Please read on ….

Defining your target audience is a critical component of your marketing plan and can have a big impact on your media selection. Here are 3 ways to define your target market. Please read on …

What is marketing?  In today’s ever-evolving marketplace, there are three dominant forms of marketing. They are general marketing, digital marketing and integrated marketing, each of which can be broken into more specialized types. For details, please read on …

NBA free agent, LeBron James, generated a unprecedented amount of fan and media attention regarding from his announcement of his future team. What fan reaction overlooks and marketers can learn from is the fact that, for LeBron James, like your customers, it’s the total offer that matters. Here are 25  questions to ask about your offer. Please read on …

Here 10 ways to learn more about digital marketing, whether you’re a student or an experienced marketer.