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The New Marketing Strategy

August 10, 2009 By 6 Comments

new social media marketing strategy

  1. Develop strategies based on the dynamics of online search, content marketing (brand journalism) and social media
  2. Create great content that helps answer your target audience’s questions and solve their problems
  3. Publish content on the web and across social media channels
  4. Promote content using search engine optimization, permission based e-marketing and social media
  5. Manage, maintain, review, update and archive content on an ongoing basis
  6. Collect, measure and analyze marketing data to assess engagement, conversion rates, leads and sales

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Filed Under: Inbound Marketing, Marketing, New Marketing, Strategy Tagged With: , , , , ,

New Marketing Snakes & Ladders

June 20, 2009 By Leave a Comment

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New Marketing Snakes and Ladders

New Marketing Snakes and Ladders

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Filed Under: New Marketing, Visual Marketing Tagged With: , ,

The New Target Market

January 16, 2009 By Leave a Comment

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By Mark Smiciklas

New Marketing should prompt small business to re-think the way they reach their target markets.

Old marketing is based on mass targeting – spend ad dollars and use mass media to push your message out to as many people as possible.

The idea: If you spend enough, spread your marketing messages far and wide and target the masses, people will eventually buy your product or service.

Old marketing asks questions like:

  • “Can you really afford not to target as many people as possible?”
  • “How much business are you passing up by not maximizing you advertising reach?”

New marketing is based on niche targeting – create content and use search engines/social media to engage interested people in your product or service.

New marketing poses questions like:

  • “How many passionate customers do you need to run a profitable business?”
  • “Are 100 truly interested prospects more valuable than 10,000 people who don’t really care?”

New marketing can be scary because it may not work the way you expect it to. It’s also harder than than old marketing because it forces you to:

  • Focus – “Who are my customers?”
  • Come up with content that adds value to your relationships and helps solve your target audiences problems

What do you think works better….Mass or Niche? Why?

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Image Note: The document portion used in the image above is attributed to Tim Morgan

Filed Under: Marketing, Online Marketing, Target Market Tagged With: , , ,

What are Your Small Business Objectives for 2009?

December 20, 2008 By Leave a Comment

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It’s the dawn of a new year and I’ve been thinking about some of the goals I would like to achieve in 2009. I’ve set objectives before, bet never in a public forum…I wonder if publishing my targets online will help me focus more and improve my odds of success?

Most of my strategies for 2009 revolve around building my personal/small business brand through New Marketing and social media. Here is my list (in no particular order):

  • Present my ideas and build brand awareness through public speaking. This will involve the following:
    • Develop one or two presentation topics
    • Blog about my presentation ideas and get feedback from my social network
    • Build a PowerPoint presentation and post it to SlideShare
    • Book at least two speaking engagements (paid or unpaid)
  • Write and self publish a small business book. If your thinking about writing a book you need to check out Seth’s advice for authors
  • Start using FaceBook. I’ve been really committed to LinkedIn and just started feeling my way through Twitter…I don’t want to do this half-assed so it’s a big step for me from a time perspective.
  • Publish 75 blog posts. My goal when starting the blog was 1 post per week – that’s been manageable for me a good fit with my publishing objectives. This year I want to challenge myself to write more.
  • Publish 100 comments on other people’s blogs. I read about 50 blogs, so 2 meaningful comments per week should be a reasonable goal.
  • Publish 4 YouTube videos. I have  a couple of ideas, but this will definitely be a challenge!
  • Schedule a minimum of 6 networking meetings. I really enjoy the process of building relationships – making a commitment to find the time to get tuned in with stakeholders will be a priority.

I’d love to get inspired by your list – If you feel like sharing, please post a comment. Thanks, and all the best for 2009!

Photo Credit: randihausken

Filed Under: Personal Branding, Strategic Planning, Strategy Tagged With: , , , ,

FREE is Recession Proof

November 2, 2008 By 2 Comments

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In times of economic uncertainty are internet users less likely to trade a permission asset i.e. name. phone number, email address, etc. for content?

In a recent study conducted by Marketing Sherpa, 64% of paid content web publishers were either experiencing or expecting to feel the effects of the recent downturn in the economy.

Trends and user attitudes affecting paid content may also be applicable to gated content. I think we all know that cash flow starts to tighten in a negative
economy, but how about information flow?

When the economy is slumping and people are less interested in being “sold to”, will users presented with gated content
be even more reluctant to give up their permission asset? Will more and more organizations adopt The New Rules of Marketing and PR as best practices and start offering free content?

What do you think?

Filed Under: Free Content, HR, Marketing, Organizational Culture, Public Relations Tagged With: , , ,

The New Marketing

October 5, 2008 By 7 Comments

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I took some time recently to listen to a great social media marketing podcast by David Meerman Scott, Paul Gillin and Mike Lewis. The idea that I found really intriguing, particularly from a small business marketing perspective, was “brand journalism”.

Brand Journalism and The Dynamics of New Marketing

Before the web, companies had to either buy advertising or convince journalists to write about their products or services (many organizations still use this approach). One component of New Marketing focuses on brand journalism – the idea that creating great content will help your small business publish it’s way to brand awareness.

The dynamics of New Marketing are based on web search and social networks. The argument for creating great content is based on the fact that the first place most people turn to solve a problem is the search engine community i.e. Google, Yahoo!, etc. Paul Gillin discusses an informal poll taken during one of his speaking events – the results highlight the importance of search in solving consumers’ problems:

The approximate number of people that use the following forms of marketing to help research or solve a problem they have:

  • Direct Mail (find a solution by reading a flyer or postcard) – 10%
  • Mainstream Media (find a solution via a TV, Radio, Print ad) – 20%
  • Tradeshows (going to a tradeshow to solve a specific problem) – 5%
  • Google (use Google to research a solution to a problem) – 100%

Companies Turning into Publishers

Scott and Gillin talk about the fact that your target market doesn’t analyze the source of content – as long as your organization has the right content to solve your audience’s problem, they won’t distinguish the difference between you and any other major media outlet. The ability for an individual or any sized organization to develop and distribute great content online has virtually eliminated the distinction between your small business and major information sources such as the Globe and Mail or The Wall Street Journal.

Social Networks

The other key ingredient in the New Marketing are social networks – Meerman Scott states the fact that “people love to share cool FREE stuff”. His latest free e-book has been downloaded over 300,000 times and he has repeatedly shared the amazing story of how Cindy Gordon, VP of New Media and Marketing Partnerships at Universal Orlando Resort, spread the news of the “Wizarding World of Harry Potter” theme park to over 350 million people (virtually for free) by telling 7 bloggers!

On a (MUCH) smaller scale, I can also attest to the power of how free content can spread over social networks. Using a group discussion thread on LinkedIn, I recently posted a request asking for feedback and reviews on my new e-book…over the next two days my website experienced a 400% increase in traffic!

The New Marketing works…take some some time to think about what kind of free content your small business could create to solve your target audience’s problems (e-book, white paper, research metrics, etc.) and start spreading the word. It doesn’t matter what industry you are in, if your content can help solve a problem, your customers and prospects will use it and talk about it. As Paul Gillin says…”There are very few industries where word of mouth doesn’t work”.

Filed Under: Branding, Marketing Tagged With: , , , , ,