Stay better informed as a marketing professional with this monthly series highlighting the latest developments in all things marketing. Get caught up with the May Marketing News Snapshot.
May 2013 Monthly Marketing News Snapshot
May 29, 2013
Tags: branding, marketing news, online marketing, google, Twitter, Tumblr, B2B, Yahoo, B2C, content marketing, USPS, advertising, May, email marketing, social media, marketing technology
Executives hate to hear the S-word. The very sound of it is abrasive to their business sense, and hearing it tossed around the office is an affront to the culture they’ve tried to build. That word, of course, is “silos” – the word used to describe the extent of divisions between functional departments within the organization.
Tags: branding, silos, blogging, brand advocacy, employee engagement, marketing, content development, content marketing, brand consistency
In our April Marketing News Snapshot, we shared this article from Direct Marketing News. It features Susan Wojcicki, SVP of Advertising at Google, discussing five trends shaping the future of digital advertising. While they all warrant monitoring, these three in particular jumped out at me, coming from a marketing technology background. For deeper explanations of the trends, be sure to read the article by Ryan Joe. To see how the future of digital advertising compares to that of digital marketing, and the role marketing technology plays in that future, keep reading below!
Tags: branding, digital marketing, online marketing, google, online advertising, advertising trends, marketing, scalability, digital advertising, marketing trends, creative production, collaboration, brand consistency, marketing technology, personalization
Building Internal Brand Advocacy
May 14, 2013
Last Thursday, DocuStar and the Cincinnati American Marketing Association teamed up to host a panel
discussion featuring executives from the Cincinnati region. Participating in the event were Jerry Kathman, President and CEO of LPK; Chris McNamee, Vice President Marketing, Hobsons; Ed Burghard, CEO & Manager at The Burghard Group; and Heather Adkins, Vice President, Chief Strategy and Mission Officer, The Christ Hospital Health Network; and moderating was Dan Knowles, President of Brand Ubiquity.
Tags: branding, ROI, executive leadership, buy-in, MOL, brand advocacy, Cincinnati AMA, employee engagement, marketing, c-level, human resources, Marketing Organizational Leadership
Engaging Employees as Brand Ambassadors
Apr 18, 2013
The proliferation of information has empowered consumers like never before. There are all kinds of third-party resources at their fingertips for them to get the skinny on brands, products and services, and more ways than ever before for them to share their own experiences and opinions about those same brands, products and services as well. The scary thing about this for marketers and CEOs isn’t that so much information as out there, it’s that this information is unregulated and unfiltered. They feel they’ve lost control of their message, and to a point, they have. But the real issue managers and leaders should be concerned with isn’t control- it’s communication.
Consumers no longer have to go on your word as a business, but that doesn’t render your word meaningless. According to the Edelman 2013 Trust Barometer, the way businesses need to communicate their message has changed greatly. Influence no longer takes place as a fixed monologue dictated by the few with goal of control. Instead, it’s flexible dialogue co-created by many that is all about empowerment.
Tags: branding, trust, messaging, brand advocacy, employee engagement, MRM, marketing technology, marketing resource management
Think like a human, not like a company
Tags: branding, silos, messaging, organizational leadership, brand image, marketing, communication, customer relations, MRM, marketing technology, marketing resource management
Depending on the size and age of your company and the market it competes in, it can be difficult to build and establish a strong, meaningful corporate brand. It’s hard to create perception, and almost twice as hard to change it, but one group is attempting to do just that, and they’re doing it on a very macro level.
Denyse Ferguson and Nicole Ball are Director and Marketing Director, respectively, of BrandHUB, a branding initiative geared toward changing the image not of a company, but of a whole city – Cincinnati, Ohio, to be specific. The effort is driven by the Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber, which champions economic development in the area, and aims to promote the city as a bastion of branding expertise.
“The term ‘BrandHUB’ is quite literal for us,” Ferguson says. “Cincinnati is home to 60,000 brand development professionals, and 40 percent of the top 100 most valuable global brands are tapping into that talent. Until now, the city has never been able to successfully pull these resources together to benefit local business and spur economic development of the region.
Tags: branding, Cincinnati, rebranding, brand experts, marketing, young professionals, The Brandery, social media
Whether it’s trust in the product, trust in the brand, trust in the content or trust in the person making the pitch, trust is the vital element upon which nearly all deals are made. But as statistics show, trust is hard to come by these days. So where do consumer attitudes toward businesses stand, and what can businesses do to change those attitudes?
Trust issues
Tags: branding, internet marketing, risk, trust, rapport, messaging, credibility, marketing campaign, financial services marketing
Leadership Toolset #10: Social Media & Content Marketing
The concept of social media – a reach of millions, limitless targeted messaging, free to all – is a marketer’s dream. Yet many business-savvy professionals just don’t see its value and, if they do, still don’t know how exactly to squeeze that value out of it. But whether understood or not, social media is changing the business landscape, and failure to adapt could have implications that stretch beyond the marketing department. Adaptation requires knowledge of the technology and the willingness to reach out across department lines to build true organizational success.
We invited Alan See, the third most-followed CMO on Twitter according to Social Media Marketing Magazine, to share insight he’s picked up from 25 years of experience helping businesses develop profitable marketing strategies that drive sales and growth. He has served in senior roles at MindLeaders, AT&T, Seapine Software, AberdeenGroup, Teradata, SAS Institute, Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, and NCR Corporation in addition to facilitating courses on marketing and management theory as an associate faculty member for University of Phoenix. He has recently started a new business, Alan See CMO Temps, LLC. Alan’s perspective on the subject of social media marketing is as comprehensive as any you’ll find, and he held nothing back in sharing that perspective with us.
Tags: branding, executive leadership, social media marketing, facebook, online marketing, CMO, Twitter, sales, LinkedIn, buy-in, silos, organizational leadership
The wallet goes digital
As smartphones take an ever-more prominent role in our daily lives, there’s one emerging trend that financial institutions should pay particular attention to. The concept behind the “mobile wallet” is, on its simplest level, the idea of storing digital versions of credit and debit cards on a smartphone instead of carrying hard copies in a bulky, physical wallet. If a consumer wants to purchase something using their Google Wallet app, they simply tap the back of their phone on an NFC terminal (basically a scanner) at the point-of-purchase and the transaction is complete.
While the real upside of mobile wallets is yet to be truly realized (like automatically selecting the card with rewards points you didn’t even know were available for purchasing a particular item), the technology is far enough along that key players in the tech industry are moving in on what should intuitively be financial and banking market share. According to a study by Carlisle & Gallagher Consulting Group, Level-Up, Square, PayPal, Google and Apple are the tech giants best-poised to beat major banks and credit card companies to the proverbial profitable punch.
Tags: branding, mobile marketing, mobile wallet, financial services marketing
