Compelling content & creative marketing
It’s Friday….my inbox is overflowing with mail from threads sent to large groups of people. As the email notifications flash up on my screen, I become more and more frustrated with the ever-growing size of my inbox. Finally, I tweet:
And in email, reply all:Continue reading “Why aren’t your email threads blog posts?”
This has not been an easy post to write. In the end, I realised I didn’t have enough Pinterest knowledge or 
experience to write about why it was useful, useless or anything in between. Never one to be left behind when it comes to social media trends, I joined Pinterest towards the end of 2011 but hadn’t really explored its uses.
So I jumped in and Continue reading “Pinterest for the B2B tech marketeer: Part I: Think about your customers & prospects”
I’ve been tweeting about Social Media Week London (#smwldn) for the past few weeks am I’m really excited to be attending several of the events next week. If you haven’t registered with the site and selected a few of the mainly free events, it’s not too late to do so.
I hope to see you next week! PS – I’ve got two spare tickets to Twittamentary which is now sold out. Please contact me if you’d like one.
No, I don’t work for Reuters, I promise 🙂 But today I got an invite to their next complimentary webinar and I thought it was well worth posting about. 
I often get asked what some of my biggest marketing challenges are. Aligning sales and marketing is one that I used to often list, but these days it’s definitely all about keeping the content machine going whether it’s written content or video clips and webinars.
I find that with the extra volume expectation placed on me by social media channels, the biggest marketing challenge becomes feeding these channels with unique content. Continue reading “How to Fuel Your Video Content Machine and Keep it Running (Reuters Webinar)”
Reuters’ new social media hub, the “Social Pulse” is well worth checking out.
I’m all for social media hubs that I can visit while doing my morning RSS reading sweep, and this hub allows you not only to see what Reuters’ deems as “hot”, but also the tweets of the people Reuters’ actually *follows*.
The Facebook activity panel on the right side of the screen seems a bit out of place however, and the “Most Social CEO’s” panel isn’t really specific enough to catch my interest (CEO’s tend to write about their businesses, and like everyone, my business interests are specific).
The best feature by far has to be the Twitter directory of all of Reuters’ tweeting journalists.
Don’t want LinkedIn to use your name and picture in their advertisements? Follow the instructions in the LinkedIn mail I received from a colleague today:
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Date: 1/30/2012 Subject: FW: LinkedIn changes privacy settings On 01/29/12 5:46 PM, wrote: I received the following message from a contact and I am forwarding it for your awareness and consideration. Without attracting too much publicity, LinkedIn has updated their privacy conditions. Without any action from your side, LinkedIn is now permitted to use you name and picture in any of their advertisements. Some simple actions to be considered:Continue reading “Latest changes to LinkedIn’s Privacy Settings” |
1. Your company website: the home of your digital content. Your campaign should occupy a prime location on your site. 
2. The web-based form: for more specific prospect details, make your the content in your campaign conditional – ask prospects to complete a “request for download” form.
3. Your blog: use it to promote your campaign. Are there other blogs that will feature your links?
4. Email marketing: Market to your database by using creative email marketing to point prospects to your campaign content on your website.
5. Google ads: Create a new ad to point clickers through to your campaign.Continue reading “Your digital marketing campaign channel checklist”
I’d suggest asking for a 1-2 month free trial of your preferred CRM system before making any sort of licence purchase. This will allow you to run use cases and ensure the CRM works to meet all the needs of your organisation.
Configuring your CRM data infrastructure (and indeed, the data itself) properly is critical to effective database marketing. If you do it properly, you’ll be able to run reports or queries within the CRM that bring back relevant data which you can use to form contact lists for specific, targeted marketing campaigns.
Here are ten questions to consider when looking at the data you have, and the infrastructure you’ll create within your CRM to house and access that data:
1. Do you have a variety of products? Are some prospects/customers focused on particular products? If so, it’s essential that you consider products at the company level within your CRM infrastructure because companies may opt out of your digital marketing efforts if they are receiving marketing that is focused on products that do not concern them. Addressing this may be ask simple as featuring a dropdown against companies that lists all products (so that you can select and report on the products relevant to that company). You should also be considering whether your CRM has the ability to Continue reading “Part II: 10 CRM data infrastructure questions companies should consider before going ahead with a CRM system”
By selecting and implementing several CRM systems for companies over the years, I’ve learned quite a bit along the way. My intention with this series is not to promote or recommend any specific CRM system, but simply to lay out what I feel are the logical questions, steps and tips that I hope will make your CRM selection and implementation successful.
As is not likely a surprise, many of these steps were learned the hard way!
Take a minute and answer the ten questions in the list below, and share them with the relevant people in your organisation. You may be suprised with the conversation that is generated.
1. Which parts of the business are set to use the CRM? Is it just sales and marketing, or will support staff be using the CRM to manage support and customer service requests and bug fixes?
2. Does the business use (or has it ever used) a CRM system?
3. (a) If yes: why is the business looking to change the CRM system, or, why did the business stop using the CRM system?Continue reading “Part I: 10 questions companies should ask before choosing a CRM”
1. You have a multi-author blog that is contributed to widely across your organisation.
2. Senior management not only approve of the blog, but also actively encourage all employees to blog about relevant topics and to make blogging a part of day to day work.
3. When the company looks to hire new employees, their blogging and social media participation is considered a serious and relevant part of a role’s skill set.
4. When a “star blogger” decides to leave the company and take on a new opportunity, the blog does not suffer because new content is not reliant on one or two motivated individualsContinue reading “10 signs your company has a “blogging culture””
