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Best of 2007: Articles and Blog Posts on Strategy and Branding


The first step in crafting a marketing plan is to determine overall strategy, and among the first questions to ask when thinking about the strategy are "What do I want my brand to stand for?" and "What are best ways to communicate my brand message?"

Here are a collection of the best online articles and blog posts to help you think about the big picture and answer the big questions about brand-building and marketing strategy.

All-in-One Guides: Marketing strategy by TechTarget

A comprehensive guide for B2B marketers with advice on everything from preparing a marketing plan and using marketing automation technology to designing and executing effective marketing campaigns.


Marketers Can Buy Buzz by MediaPost Online Spin

Max Kalehoff of Clickable presents some interesting findings on the (highly positive) correlation between media spending and word-of-mouth "buzz." While the research was focused on commercial packaged goods, the findings likely apply across a broader range of B2C and B2B products and services. The bottom line, according to Kalehoff: "traditional media strategies are not dead, and buzz tactics can’t necessarily live on their own in a vacuum. Neither is right or wrong, but they are both part of a complex communications and customer landscape."


Small Business Marketing Rules of Thumb by Smart Marketing

Blogger and author Jay Lipe offers three highly useful "rules of thumb" for small business marketers in this brief but valuable post.


Trash Talk & Delete Buttons: A Candid Letter from Your Prospective Customer by Selling to Big Companies

Jill Konrath, blogger and author of Selling to Big Companies (the book and the blog) lays it on the line here with a post written from the perspective of your target customer: "In your well-intentioned but misguided attempts turn me into a 'prospect,' you fail woefully to capture my attention. I'm going to be really blunt here: I could care less about your product, service, solution or your company." Ouch! Fortunately, she also serves up guidance on how to effectively cut through your prospective buyer's clutter of emails, phone calls and endless meetings: "Occasionally a savvy marketer or seller captures my attention, gets me to raise my hand asking for more information and even entices me to request a meeting. What are they doing? They're completely focused on my business and the impact they can have on it."


A Little Advice On Presenting and Selling by MediaPost Online Spin

In this excellent companion piece to the post above, Cory Treffiletti advises sales people and marketers to do a bit less talking and a little more listening: "The best presentations are simple; they are the ones where you talk little, listen a lot and provide solutions aimed at meeting the challenges of the person you are talking to."


Quit using Email to train your leads to ignore you by Marketing Interactions

Marketing strategist and blogger Ardath Albee lays out a detailed, step-by-step guide to creating an effective email marketing campaign, as opposed to the spam-like programs too often created even by marketing pros who should know better. "The (marketing emails) that really irritate me are the offers that get sent repeatedly with the exact same messaging. If it doesn't catch my eye the first time, why would they think I want to see the same thing 5 more times in two days?" Follow the advice in this post and you'll avoid that fate.


Rethink your brand Saturn by The Origin of Brands Blog

Best-selling author Laura Ries tells the painful story of how General Motors first successfully launched then just as successfully screwed up the Saturn brand, and how the proper marketing and product strategy could have given the tale a much happier ending. As Laura astutely diagnoses, GM's problem was on the strategic side, not the creative: "In 1994, the S series Saturn outsold the Civic by 7 percent. In 2004, the Civic outsold the S series replacement (the Ion) by 197 percent. In 2002, Saturn tapped Goodby, Silverstein for some new advertising. Sales continued falling to 212,017 in 2004, its worst performance since 1992. Despite the poor sales results, Goodby’s work won lots of advertising awards and accolades and did plenty to reaffirm the shop as one of America’s premiere creative agencies. But it did nothing for the Saturn brand." A cautionary tale for almost any company.


Selling the Benefit: Duracell by Marketing Genius from Maple Creative

Blogger Skip Lineberg praises a Duracell campaign that creatively and effectively focuses on product benefits in crucial situations—such as in heart monitors and fire alarms—to differentiate a commodity product.


Can you buy customer loyalty? by Loyalty Marketing Blog

Jonathan Treiber makes the case that customer loyalty can't be bought, only earned. Coupons, promotional pricing and discounts can help induce trial, but over the long run, superior customer service is what produces customer loyalty. "Providing active customer service is a way to listen to your customers’ needs and solve their problems (before they occur). This, in turn, will build customer loyalty over time because your customers will know that you are focused on meeting and exceeding their expectations."


Never Give Another Lead to Sales by Marketing Interactions

In another interesting post, Ardath Albee very correctly points out that "Sales doesn't need leads, they need opportunities," then goes about providing a strategy for effectively linking marketing activities to sales processes to increase revenue.


Time To Plan by THINKing

The brilliant Harry Hoover outlines a process for developing a marketing strategy for the new year, taking into account audiences, messaging, and a review of communications plans.


Search and the Pareto Principle by Search Engine People

Blogger Jeff Quipp demonstrates how the 80/20 rule applies to planning and execution for SEO and SEM, for example, "20% of content is responsible for 80% of site traffic and/or links."


Organic SEO vs. PPC? by WebProNews

A bit tactical, and somewhat elemental, this article presents a video discussion between SiteLab Executive Vice-President Dana Todd, a regular speaker at Search Engine Strategies Conferences, and Jeremy Schoemaker of Shoemoney Media Group. Dana sums it up best: "everybody can benefit from organic SEO...(each form of) Advertising has a completely different place in your media mix. We would never recommend...that you do one or the other; you always do them both wherever possible."

Previous articles in this series:

Best of 2007: SEO Analysis Tools
Best of 2007: SEO Keyword Research Tools
Best of 2007: News Articles on Social Media Marketing
Best of 2007: Blog Posts on Social Media Marketing
Best of 2007: Articles and Blog Posts on SEM
Best of 2007: Articles and Blog Posts on Google AdWords
Best of 2007: Articles and Blog Posts on SEO (Part 1)
Best of 2007: Articles and Blog Posts on SEO (Part 2)
Best of 2007: Website Design
Best of 2007: Blogging for Business
Best of 2007: Marketing Research
Best of 2007: Interactive PR
Best of 2007: SEO Copywriting

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Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom

Comments

Anonymous said…
What a useful list of articles! So much great information, I could spend all day just studying it.

Ardath Albee's article on misuse of email as a marketing tool really caught my interest because my company has a piece of software that keeps in touch with leads through email, fax, and phone calls in a highly interactive manner--you would never see the same ad 5 times! Hahaha--you still may not want the product, but at least you wouldn't be bored. :) The best feature of the software is that it is integrated with dialers so that when people enter their contact info in your webform they can immediately be called.

All Time Greats

7 Reasons Every Business Needs to Twitter

This post has been moved to 7 Reasons Every Business Needs to be on Twitter on the Webbiquity blog. ***** technorati tags: Twitter Dell Zappos customer service influence-the-influencers market intelligence Tony Hsieh b2b Twitter del.icio.us tags: Twitter Dell Zappos customer service influence-the-influencers market intelligence Tony Hsieh b2b Twitter icerocket tags: Twitter Dell Zappos customer service influence-the-influencers market intelligence Tony Hsieh b2b Twitter Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom

Getting More Out of Each Click with "Post-Click Marketing"

With the economy now officially in a recession (as if we didn't know that), marketers are under increasing pressure to do more with less. On the interactive marketing side, few marketers will get budget increases enabling them to drive more clicks. The challenge, then, is to maximize marketing productivity—to get more leads out of the same number of clicks. This is the first of two posts that will look at how to improve conversion rates to get more value from each click. One answer to this challenge is provided by "post-click marketing," a.k.a. lead automation management vendors. While the specifics of each service vary, all of them essentially: automate the process of extracting visitor IP information from your log files; match the IP address to an organization; filter out ISPs; and map the company name to one or more external databases to provide additional information (company size, industry, key contacts etc.). The better services also use geo-location filte

How to Use SEO: Leverage SEO To Be Found Online and Boost Your Online Marketing

All businesses that want to attract customers online, no matter the business size or age, have few options other than Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  SEO In The Box™ by Results Driven Marketing®, LLC There are roughly 1.8 billion websites online, and basic SEO allows Google to find and index or catalog your webpages.  After that, Google serves you up to searchers in the organic section.  The question remains: where they list your site, on page one or page 22 or further back? SEO controls your positioning. Do you want to be found online or not? If your business is online or you want your product or service to be found online, then Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a must, and knowing how to use SEO to leverage the power of the internet is vital. Arguably, an effective SEO strategy gets you on the organic results section of the search engine results pages (SERP). Organic traffic is highly valuable and requires high-quality SEO. But even businesses that use l

Book Review: Website Optimization

This post has been moved to Book Review: Website Optimization – Speed, Search Engine & Conversion Rate Secrets on the Webbiquity blog. ***** technorati tags: Andrew B. King, Web Site Opimization LLC, Website Optimization: Speed, Search Engine & Conversion Rate Secrets, book review, Wordtracker, SEO insights, social networking, Marketleap.com link popularity tool del.icio.us tags: Andrew B. King, Web Site Opimization LLC, Website Optimization: Speed, Search Engine & Conversion Rate Secrets, book review, Wordtracker, SEO insights, social networking, Marketleap.com link popularity tool icerocket tags: Andrew B. King, Web Site Opimization LLC, Website Optimization: Speed, Search Engine & Conversion Rate Secrets, book review, Wordtracker, SEO insights, social networking, Marketleap.com link popularity tool Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom

Top Notch Digital Marketing Tip: Google AdWords and PPC

MARKETING: 101 Looking for some online marketing strategy or social media tips to grow your business? Well, you’ve come to the right digital marketing resource! Web Market Central has been doling out the proper digital marketing advice for years. And as you already know, marketing to customers online is 100 times easier than using dated, expensive and traditional marketing tactics. Like seriously, who uses billboards in 2019? But you already know how effective digital marketing can be in the modern age. So now that you're totally convinced of what you already knew, let’s give you today's top-notch digital marketing tip! The Pure Unfettered Power of PPC (Pay-Per-Click) and PPC Campaigns Just like optimizing your site to rank for keywords, you can use our online marketing tips to pay to run advertisements on Google so that your business is shown on the first page of search engine results. Ranking this way is instantaneous whereas SEO (Search Engine Optimizati

Feedback Friday

Give us some feedback on how we are doing! We would love to hear how we can improve our website and the advice we dish out to our readers. And while you are at it, check out some of our favorite articles from the past few weeks: https://www.digitalrdm.com/5-components-successful-branding-strategy/ https://www.paulandpaul.com/what-are-the-different-types-of-trademarks-and-trademark-laws https://www.lawfirmmarketingcompany.com/content-marketing http://saffwein.com/concussions-car-accident/ http://www.newsworld.site/space-force-future/ http://www.newsworld.site/what-to-do-if-you-are-involved-in-a-forklift-accident/ http://www.newsworld.site/trump-sanctions-russia-election-meddling/ http://www.newsworld.site/bracket-busted-no-13-buffalo-upsets-no-4-arizona/ http://www.newsworld.site/candidate-alvin-de-levie-demands-change-and-transparency-at-psu-board/

Email Campaign, Newsletter and Banner Ad Click-Through Rates (CTR)

When planning online advertising and email promotion budgets, it's critical to calculate the likely ROI upfront whenever possible, as well as to establish campaign benchmarks. The first step is understanding the average and likely range of CTRs for various programs. The growth in online advertising, the proliferation of enewsletters, the emergence of new forms of information delivery such as RSS and the emergence of social media sites have all affected CTR, so planning based on current data is crucial. It can be challenging to find current statistics, but based on several studies, these are typical CTR ranges for email newsletter ads, email campaigns (blasts or internally-produced enewsletters), and banner ads. Email newsletter advertisements Open rates range from 28-40%, with an average of about 33%—meaning that roughly one-third of the subscriber base is likely to see your ad. The Advertising Is Good For You blog tracks these statistics from DoubleClick . The average CT