If March has a color, it would be green. In its (hopefully) verdant splendor, March ushers in the beginning of spring and is also host to St. Patrick’s Day and Earth Day, providing several seasonal themes you can incorporate into creative QR campaigns. Continuing our monthly blog series providing QR campaign ideas, here’s the March line-up.

While social media continues to gain headway, continuity, or drip campaigns (email, direct mail or a combination) still remain a highly effective approach for nurturing prospects towards increased engagement and interaction with your brand. When coupled with an online element, such as URLs, PURLs or QR codes, measurement tools offered through marketing resource management (MRM) systems can deliver powerful analytics to optimize the sales cycle – providing a wealth of data to improve customer segmentation and content personalization.

Recent research from Chadwick Martin Bailey shows that the top reason consumers scanned QR codes is curiosity (46 percent), and this should give marketers pause. As the novelty of QR codes wears off, marketers will need to find innovative ways to deliver value after the scan.

It is important for marketing to be both tactical and strategic. As a deadline-driven and fast-paced function, however, marketers tend to juggle multiple high priority projects at various stages in the campaign management lifecycle, and it can be challenging to make time for strategic marketing planning and innovation – especially given today’s environment of staffing and budget constraints. Tactical execution without the strategy component will render marketing initiatives less effective, but strategy cannot exist in a vacuum either. Here are five simple approaches for making time to be innovative while gaining better command over tactical functions.

Many marketing departments focus on messaging to prospects to generate sales and then halt communications once the prospect becomes a customer. However, communicating with new customers once the sale has closed is critical. This is when continued relationship-building is more important than ever in order to build loyalty and increase the potential for future sales.

Overseeing brand compliance in communications with customers and prospects can be challenging for any organization, and especially challenging when going to market with a distributed sales force or through third party dealers and distributors, but brand consistency across these channels is critical. Even details that may seem subtle, such as logo size, brand colors and the tone of any messaging communicated with your branding can dramatically impact how your organization is represented by your company’s remote brand ambassadors. With a Marketing Resource Management (MRM) system, you can streamline and automate the process of creating polished, customized brand impressions. Here’s how.

In today’s dynamic marketing environment, it is increasingly important to be able to localize and personalize your marketing messages. Lately, there’s been a lot of marketing buzz about “Big Data” as a means to deliver personalization. If it feels a little nebulous, you’re not alone. A 2011 IBM CMO study (n=1,700) found that 71% of CMO’s feel unprepared for the data explosion.
Many organizations understand the benefits of big data, but don’t have the budget for centralized platforms and advanced analytics. Even when budget is not a barrier, implementing the analysis tools for big data can be complex and lead to long implementation timelines. In the interim, harnessing your organization’s existing data (even if imperfect) with a Marketing Resource Management (MRM) system can be a cost-effective step towards successful localized marketing.

Insurance customers tend to be very loyal but typically only purchase one or two products from their insurance agent. In order to grow customer accounts, insurance companies should engage customers in continuity or drip campaigns to stay top-of-mind between purchases. But, when it comes time for a “sales push”, how do you work with your agents and independent agencies to execute a campaign?

Continuing our monthly blog series providing ideas for integrating QR codes into your marketing initiatives, the following are some creative promotional campaign ideas, organized by theme, that provide relevant reasons to connect with your customers this February. Feel free to use this post as a starting off point for brainstorming your February campaigns, or to apply any themes you especially like in your vertical directly.