Why a CIO must draw more and write less | BRAINFOOD

Why a CIO must draw more and write less | BRAINFOOD

15th Anniversary MARKETING WORLD 2014: A Frost & Sullivan Executive MindXchange

Please join us at our 15th Anniversary MARKETING WORLD 2014: A Frost & Sullivan Executive MindXchange, July 14-17, 2014 at the Fairmont Copley Plaza, Boston, MA.

This is a MUST ATTEND event. Here are the top FIVE reasons to REGISTER TODAY.

 1. The Keynote Speaker: Allison Cerra, Vice President, Marketing, Communications & Public Affairs, Alcatel-Lucent will present "Savvy Marketing: A New Way to Think About and Drive Value via Adaptive Analytics."

2. The Attendees: Benchmark and interact with Chief Marketing Officers, Vice Presidents of Marketing and Marketing Directors at companies such as BNY Mellon, Nova Nordisk, and Dow Chemical that represent the industry's best thought leaders and speakers.

3. The Content: Discuss Connecting and Engaging with Your Empowered Customers in three tracks: * The Big Picture: CMO's & Marketing Strategists * Great Ideas for Customer Engagement * Leveraging Marketing Channels

 4. View the full agenda here: http://bit.ly/1b8V7rI

5. The Nonstop Networking: Solutions Wheel, Boston@Night Taste & Tour, nightly networking receptions. The Savings: The Early Bird Savings of $500 OFF expires on March 15, 2014.

Register today with promo code "MARSavings"or email us at events.us@frost.com to experience the only event where the participants drive the agenda and best practices are shared in a collaborative environment.

Check out the website for more information: www.marketingworldevent.com

Activating a Social Media Strategy within an Organization: Frost & Sullivan's Complimentary White paper

A case study of a well-known organization that recognized the opportunity presented by online, brand-related conversations and as a result, developed a social media strategy to implement this successfully.


This organization uses a systematic approach to create and activate a social media strategy throughout the organization. This approach includes:

• Developing the strategy and creating organizational buy in
• Identifying the specific capabilities needed to operationalize the strategy
• Selecting the appropriate talent and channel for the launch
• Providing rules of engagement and training to implement the strategy
• Creating a process to listen and respond to online conversations
• Tracking progress in driving engagement and sales opportunities



Download this complimentary white paper here: http://bit.ly/1gVfFaB

3 Ways Marketers Fall Short of Buyer Demands: By Frost & Sullivan

One of the most critical aspects of successful marketing is understanding buyer preferences and adapting strategies to keep them in line with what potential customers want and expect.

However, while buyers’ preferences are constantly and quickly changing, marketing organizations are often slower to evolve.

Lately, changes in customer behavior have come especially quickly, as trends such as mobile technology and easier access to information along with increased pressures to make smarter and more financially sound buying decisions have altered what customers do during the buying cycle and what ultimately influences their decisions.

To avoid losing business to the competition, marketers should look at three key areas where many business buyers feel their needs aren’t being met:

Time:

These days, people want and expect everything faster, and that goes for their communications with businesses. Marketers need to change their strategies to keep up.

Leads should be contacted soon after they take an action while their interest is still high, Rob Butters, Principle Analyst with Frost &Sullivan, said recently in his marketing tips video blog. Responders who are contacted in the first hour of the first day are typically very receptive to the call, Butters said. After the first day, success rates usually drop by more than 50%.

Buyers are increasingly demanding quick responses, and if they don’t get them, they’ll likely buy from someone else, according to a survey from Velocify and Zogby analytics.

The poll featured responses from 1,000 adults who had submitting queries to get more information about a company’s products or services, including a third who were buying on behalf of a business.

Among the respondents, more than 60% said if they don’t get a response with 24 hours, they feel the company is going too slow. In fact, 29% even expect a response within the hour.

Failure to meet those demands is costing companies business, as 64% of business buyers said a slow response has influenced their purchasing decisions. And 71% said the first company that responds to them has the advantage.

Time becomes less important after an initial contact has been made, according to Velocify. The majority (62%) said they preferred to be contacted by the same salesperson every time even if it meant waiting longer, while the rest want to be called as quickly as possible by whoever is available. However, most still said they aren’t willing to wait more than a day so they can speak with the same person.

Information:

In addition to the speed of contact, today’s customers crave information and content. They’re putting in more effort to be better informed about products and services well before they get in touch with the business.

That’s especially true in B2B sales, according to Velocify. Among business buyers surveyed, 62% said they typically spend three hours or longer researching before submitting an inquiry. In many cases, businesses can improve simply by giving buyers the information they ask for. More than half of respondents in Velocify’s survey said they’ve had an experience in which they’ve submitted an inquiry but never got a response.

Customers also do research on their own, and they expect content from a variety of different sources. Two-thirds of business buyers say they’ve been increasing the number of sources they use to research vendors, according to a recent survey from Demand Gen Report. Therefore, marketers must make sure they’re offering plenty of content in a variety of formats and through a variety of channels.

One area that content should focus on: the financial benefit for customers. Close to half (45%) of survey respondents said they’re conducting more detailed ROI and cost analyses than in the past.

Relevance is also key for customers – business decision makers want to know what a product or service will do for companies like their own. When asked what types of content were important, the top two answers from the buyers surveyed by Demand Gen Report were:

• ·         Articles and resources targeted to my industry (45%)

• ·         Case study examples of other companies similar to mine (27%)

Mobility:

The increasing use of mobile devices is one of the top trends affecting marketers, as those smartphones and tablets are changing the way buyers want to communicate with companies.

As Butters said during a recent webinar, B2C marketers have largely figured out mobile marketing, while B2B marketers lag behind. While specific strategies will vary based on industry and customer base, it’s important that organizations create a mobile strategy.

However, the majority of companies (71%) rate their mobile marketing efforts as average or worse, according to a Frost & Sullivan survey of marketing executives. While some tools such as mobile apps and mobile-optimized web pages and emails are currently being used, businesses are failing to take advantage of other important strategies, including mobile-social integration, text messaging, mobile ads, and location-based targeting.

Insufficient budgets and a lack of a defined strategy are two of the biggest obstacles in the way of more effective mobile marketing, according to survey respondents. But despite those challenges, mobility is critical for marketers, and in fact, it may be even more important for B2B marketing than B2C. According to Velocify’s survey, 63% of business buyers have done a significant amount of their research on a mobile device, compared to 28% of consumers.

The bottom line: Buyers want a lot of information, and they want to be able to access it wherever they are at any given time, with whatever device they have available. Likewise, they expect quick contact and hate feeling ignored by the companies they want to do business with. It’s up to marketers to change their strategies to meet those demands and stay ahead of the competition.

About the Author:

Sam Narisi is the Publications Editor for Frost & Sullivan’s Integrated Marketing Solutions Practice, which helps companies grow their business through all stages of the customer buying cycle. For more marketing information and insight, visit Frost & Sullivan’s IMS Knowledge Center.

Frost & Sullivan: Africa's forecast for the construction industry in 2014

10 Email Marketing Mistakes to Avoid - By Frost & Sullivan

10 email marketing mistakes to avoid: 

More at: Frost & Sullivan’s IMS Knowledge Center.

Email gives marketers a great way to connect with current and potential customers and make one-on-one contact that drives revenue growth. However, email marketing is also a crowded field, and businesses must do their best to stand out and get their messages opened, read, and acted on.

From spam filters to list attrition, there are a number of obstacles that can get in the way of a campaign having a positive impact. Here are some of the most common mistakes that hurt marketers’ chances of success:

1. Focusing on sales, rather than useful content

One way to make sure email open rates stay low and recipients quickly unsubscribe is to constantly blast out nothing but sales-focused content. While recipients do want relevant information about your company’s products or services, few people volunteer their email address so they can be bombarded with sales pitches. Rather, they want and expect useful, interesting, engaging content.

Creating great content requires knowing your customers and their preferences and behaviors. Surveys are a good way to find out what kinds of content people are most interested in.

Another important tactic is to watch what recipients are doing. Keep track of what’s getting opens and clicks and offer more of that content. In addition, try new things and test how they perform so you can expand what kinds of content you are offering.

2. Failing to target the message

As marketers strive to understand their audience and what kinds of content they want, it’s important to keep in mind that not everyone in the recipient list will have the same needs. For some businesses, it might be best to segment the list into specific groups and target them accordingly.

One of the most important steps for marketers to take is to move away from thinking and talking about email campaigns as a “blast” to an anonymous audience. Email is a good way to connect with customers individually, so businesses should think of email as more of a one-on-one conversion tool.

To develop those segmented lists, one strategy could be to ask what people are most interested in reading when they opt in. Some companies also maintain separate lists based on which channel recipients used to sign up.

3. Getting caught in the spam filter

Just because someone signs up to receive your emails doesn’t mean they’ll ever actually get anything that you send. Many emails end up stuck in recipients’ spam filters because marketers don’t understand how those filters work.

And you can hope as much as you want that people will add you to their address book after they opt in to ensure the messages are delivered, but the fact is that most people don’t do that.

Today’s spam filters are complex and it’s easy to trigger them by accident. Marketers should pay particular attention to their subject lines. While all filters have their own algorithms and behave differently, here are some of the most common reasons subject lines get blocked, according to Charles Wallace, Director of Marketing for Frost & Sullivan’s Events Division:

1.       Using too many capital letters compared to lowercase letters

2.       Repeating too many capital letters in a row

3.       Including words with gaps in between letters (for example, “s*a*l*e”)

4.       Repeating letters and/or symbols

5.       Overusing special characters like $, #, %, ?, !, etc.

6.       Using a special character to start the subject line

7.       Using too many punctuation marks

8.       Including too many blank spaces, and

9.       Starting your subject line with a common spam word.

4. Not understanding the laws

In addition to running afoul of spam filters, many email marketers may be unintentionally violating the laws regarding commercial email communication. Regulations such as the CAN-SPAM Act regulate how those messages can be sent, and businesses that fail to comply can face financial penalties.

Here are some of the mistakes that lead to noncompliance, according to the FTC:

·         Using false or misleading header information, including the “from” and “reply to” addresses

·         Failing to honor opt-out requests promptly – the law says you have 10 days

·         Making the opt-out process difficult or confusing – emails should include a clear and conspicuous explanation of how to stop receiving emails, and failing to keep an eye on service providers – even when another company handles your emailing, your business will still be held accountable for violations.

5. Sending too often – or not often enough

Sending too many emails is one way to drive customers away and make them unsubscribe. And if companies send emails infrequently or only sporadically, recipients may forget they even signed up and the business likely won’t be getting enough numbers to get value from the email campaign.

How much is the right amount of email? That depends on a lot of factors, such as the audience and the content. A good rule of thumb: Email as frequently as you can while still offering real value to recipients.

Businesses can watch key metrics such as open, click, unsubscribe, and conversion rates to get an idea of whether or not their recipients think the emails are adding value. It may also be helpful to segment lists by engagement and send more frequently to recipients who are highly engaged.

6. Missing a call to action

Of course, getting the audience to open emails does little good if those recipients don’t actually do anything. Emails should always include some kind of next step, whether it’s making a purchase, downloading a white paper, joining a social media group, etc.

When presenting this call to action, it’s important to create urgency and focus on the value it adds for the recipient. For example, copy such as “Click here to download our email marketing best practices white paper” can be reworded to something like “Take your email marketing to the next level by reading our white paper.”

7. Making it hard for mobile users

One of the keys for great email marketing is that messages must be easy for recipients to read. That was hard enough before with the variety of email clients in use, but now emails are read on totally different devices.

A lot of people read email primarily on mobile devices, and that number is only going to grow. For those recipients, if emails are difficult to read on their device of choice, they simply won’t bother to look at them. That means businesses must optimize their emails for mobile and test on a variety of different devices.

8. Relying on images

While Gmail recently changed the way images are handled, most email clients still block images by default, and many users don’t change those settings. Therefore, marketers should make sure their emails don’t require images in order to make sense or be effective. For example, a call to action link shouldn’t just be an image – it should also be supported by text that all readers will see.

Relying on images is also becoming problematic as more email is being read on mobile devices. Images are harder than text to scale properly on smartphones and tablets, and images may appear too small for mobile readers to comprehend.

9. Neglecting to test and refine

Even if businesses get great results right off the bat, it’s likely that there’s still room to improve. That’s why marketers should always be using response data to tweak their approach and test new strategies.

Some of the elements businesses should test include:

·         Subject lines

·         Frequency of delivery

·         Day and time of delivery, and

·         Types of offers and calls to action.

10. Following others’ lead

Email marketing is a popular strategy, and that means people get a lot of emails in their inboxes and businesses must work hard to stand out. Therefore, one of the top email marketing mistakes a company can make is to sound and look like everybody else, says Gary Robbins of Frost & Sullivan’s Integrated Marketing Solutions practice.

For marketers to stand out, they need to lead, rather than follow. The strategy must go beyond doing what’s worked for other businesses or doing what’s worked for your organization in the past. It’s important to also come up with new ideas and test them to find better ways to connect with your audience and get meaningful responses.

About the Author:

Sam Narisi is the publications editor and lead writer for Frost & Sullivan’s Integrated Marketing Solutions practice, which helps companies through all stages of the customer buying cycle. For more marketing information and insight, visit Frost & Sullivan’s IMS Knowledge Center.