During Cincinnati’s recent BrandHUB launch, we had the opportunity to hear Guy Kawasaki speak. His second pillar of enchantment, trustworthiness, struck a chord of relevance with us, especially to building brand trust. Whether you’re an individual or a business, trust is integral to success. To build trust, you first need to extend trust; then, follow it up by modeling trust through authentic and transparent customer communications. Here are three guidelines:

As marketers embrace growing volumes of customer data, variable data printing (VDP) is a way to make that data come to life and to help prospects and customers make an emotional connection with your brand. While it may sound complex, campaign personalization via VDP is within reach and can be executed at varying levels of sophistication with your Big Data efforts. Whether you are just beginning to put structure around your customer data for the first time or are further down the path, variable data printing can be an effective approach to personalizing marketing campaigns. Here’s your quick guide to making big data connect – no matter the sophistication of your customer data.

According to iMedia Connection, it is estimated that manufacturers invest $50 to $520 billion dollars in co-op marketing programs annually. In comparison to the estimated total U.S. advertising spend this year of $153 billion, reports iMedia, that translates to a lot of money available for co-op programs, but much of this funding is “left on the table.” According to the article:

The maxim, “Work smarter, not harder” has never been more relevant than in today’s resource-pressed marketing environment, and multichannel marketing is becoming essential to shortening the path from campaign to conversion. According to a recent study conducted by Forrester Research on behalf of Sitecore (n=226), “86% of marketers surveyed either agree or completely agree (Top 2 answers on a 5 point scale) that successfully integrating multiple channels under a single integrated marketing strategy is critical to their long-term success.”

Last week, we shared 7 signs that could mean your marketing technology vendor isn’t measuring up. If you’re facing any of those challenges you may have decided it’s time to roll up your sleeves and change marketing resource management technology vendors. Here are some guidelines to help ensure a successful transition.

In our previous blog, The #1 Reason Marketing Technology Implementations Fail, we discussed how marketing service providers can stand in the gap between your marketing technology solution and your biggest challenge – finding time and resources to manage the solution you deployed. However, if your marketing technology vendor isn’t able to go the extra mile in the trenches to help you realize the full benefits of your marketing technology solution, then it may be time to change vendors. Here are 7 warning signs that something is amiss.

Just like a new political candidate on the campaign trail, marketing technology solutions make many promises and often don’t deliver. We want to believe in what the solution promises, but the reality is that the solution cannot be decoupled from its environment. If your marketing organization is already stretched thin, marketing technology alone won’t fix that, and you need to understand in advance all of the components required to manage a successful end-to-end marketing technology implementation. Here are some guidelines to help you make your marketing technology fly.

The insurance vertical faces several industry-specific challenges such as long sales cycles as consumers use the Internet to evaluate multiple vendors during pre-purchase, customers typically only buying one or two products from the total portfolio, and agent turnover. Marketing technology systems can help to combat these challenges by simplifying the process of coordinating insurance marketing initiatives with dedicated or independent agents.

Just as in the Olympic Games, marketing technology implementations don’t always go as planned. A spectacular dive might be ruined by a big splash on entry, or a rough landing on a triple axis might compromise an otherwise perfect performance. Likewise, marketing technology solutions that seem great at first don’t always deliver. Your ROI could be negated if you end up growing your staff to support the technology or spend more than expected in incremental support costs. Whether searching for a marketing technology solution for the first time or looking to replace a solution that has fallen short, here is a checklist of considerations you need to address up front to avoid marketing technology pitfalls.

In part one of this series, we discussed how marketing resource management systems can be used to enable Sales to demonstrate thought leadership and help nurture leads through to close. In part two, we discuss strategies for getting your distributed sales channels engaged in using marketing technology systems to their full potential.