Archives for Business Strategy

Get up to Speed: Marketing Automation

With promises to drive sales conversion through the roof, here comes marketing automation — delivering improved email targeting, real-time triggered messages, customer relationship management integration, and stay-in-touch campaigns. Businesses around the globe are implementing automation with success. Their seeing lower overheads and more customer intimacy. They’re gaining access to useful return-on-marketing-investment (ROMI) metrics, because automation tracks the effectiveness of marketing
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Maximizing Mobile and Marketing Automation for Beauty

With the number of US smartphone owners officially passing more than 50 percent of the population, marketers realize that these devices are shaping consumer behavior and purchase decisions at astonishing rates. Shoppers’ ability to access the internet on the fly affects all stages of the purchase cycle. Consumers constantly reach for their phones for product reviews, price comparisons, coupons, and
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Where to Coupon for Maximum Response

Given the multiple ways consumers can get coupons – through events, in-store sampling, store affinity card programs, etc…we are always curious about what’s most effective for redemption. We discussed it with Associate Professor Leonard Lee of the Columbia Business School, who, as it happens, did his dissertation on “Shopping Goals, Goal Concreteness, and Conditional Promotions.”  The findings are fascinating.
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When Shopper Marketing Backfires…Or Does it?

Brands spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on in-store promotions, often with results that are hard to measure. The provocative title of a new study out of Columbia University suggests that those efforts may not only be ineffective, but actually have a dampening effect on sales.  In the study, titled When Shopper Marketing Backfires, the team coined their findings the
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The Three Gaps that are killing your Digital Strategy

Internal Gaps, Vendor Gaps, Strategic Gaps. Many clients have one or more of these critical gaps in their capabilities, and its keeping them from achieving their marketing potential online. Is this you? You have Internal Gaps How’s your technology and in-house capabilities? Website platforms have evolved tremendously in the last few years providing greater flexibility and actionable insights. You need
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You Like Me, But Are We Friends?

How and Why Brands Should Get Personal in Social Media   I’ve been managing the social media community for one of our brands for a year now – Facebook and Pinterest primarily. My M.O. has always been to represent the voice of the brand–not my own voice. My passion for food drives the content, but I’ve always stayed in the
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Corporate Social Responsibility as a New Way of Marketing

A few blogs ago, we mentioned the HBR study that showed that consumers align with brands that share their values.  Does that translate to revenue?  It’s starting to. A March 2012 Nielson study determined that “46 percent of global consumers are willing to pay extra for products and services from companies that have implemented programs to give back to society.”
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Self Storage Lead Generation

One of the maxims we live by is: “You can’t improve what you don’t measure.”  In self-storage, where marketing and promotion dollars can go quickly, and turn and occupation are the twin drivers of revenue, it’s crucial to be able to track your leads and know what actions are converting to a sale. So what works and what doesn’t?  Here are a
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