Whether it’s a one-page holiday card sent to 100 people or a comprehensive annual report distributed to thousands of company stakeholders, any creative project your business takes on has its challenges. If your designer goes through several rounds of revisions, not only can there be confusion as to which version is the most recent, but multiple documents can also eat up email or FTP storage space. Executives need to sign off on the creative, but don’t want to be overloaded with the minutiae of daily edits and emails. And every person involved has to adhere to a timeline so that the finished piece is in the hands of shareholders or customers when it needs to be.

Multichannel marketing campaigns leveraging more than one communications channel – such as direct mailers incorporating QR codes and PURLs – can help to shorten the path from campaign to conversion and generate measureable results. Here are some creative ideas for driving new business, goodwill and conversions through your March campaigns.

Theme: Staying in Touch/Upsell Campaigns
Sample Industries: Financial Services, Health Insurance, Life Insurance, Property and Casualty Insurance

With the proliferation of marketing technology comes the build or buy decision. Through our discussions with marketers, we often encounter departments that have built their own systems in-house, and these systems often mimic the functionality of marketing resource managment (MRM) systems. Many companies put these proprietary systems in place before the widespread availability of the numerous marketing technology solutions available today and are considering whether it’s time to buy a new solution from a third party vendor. Here are some thoughts to help guide your marketing technology decision journey.

On-the-go banking is being offered more and more by financial services companies. Although many consumers still favor accessing information from a web browser, a mobile banking study done in January 2012 showed that 48% of mobile banking users downloaded their bank’s mobile banking application. This level of interest opens a door for QR codes in the financial industry to lead users directly to application downloads for mobile banking and making mobile payments. Applying this tactic can enhance and increase mobile commerce.

In parts one and two of this three-part series, we discussed key digital marketing trends that need to be on your marketing radar for 2013. If you’ve decided it’s time for a digital marketing makeover, implementing your marketing technology solution is just the first step. With increasing scrutiny of marketing ROI by Senior Leadership, once your digital programs are rolling, you’ll need to be prepared to refocus your marketing efforts around driving digital value. Here’s how.

In part one of this three-part series on digital marketing, we reviewed four key trends reported in the CMO Council’s
The State of Marketing 2012 Report: Given that the digital marketing makeover is a ‘key transformational mandate’ for marketers in 2013, below we offer a roadmap and ideas for undertaking your own digital marketing makeover this year.

In its recent State of Marketing 2012 Report (n=550 senior marketing executives), the CMO Council has declared 2013 “the year of the marketer.”

Leadership toolset #8: Enterprise Social Collaboration

Marketers have many new technologies at their disposal that increase efficiency, agility and productivity, including marketing resource management
systems, but building the business case for investing in these resources can be difficult. When evaluating any new tool, marketers and business leaders need to look at ROI, but they should also consider the cost of inaction (COI), as reported recently by B2C. Measuring the cost of inaction involves quantifying the opportunity costs of continuing in the status quo, as well as engaging with internal stakeholders to gather the information you will need to create urgency for the proposed change. Here are three steps for making the case for change – and succeeding.

Because they target customers across multiple channels, multichannel marketing campaigns are an effective strategy to breakthrough advertising clutter and capture customer and prospect interest. Multichannel campaigns can also help to generate measureable results through integration with technologies such as PURLs and QR codes. As we move into the New Year, here are some creative ideas to help you get a head start on planning your February multichannel campaigns.