By Scott Plamondon, guest blogging for Spark Media Solutions. This article is from an event held by Marketing Transformation Services. It has been cross posted on the Marketing Transformation Services blog.
It used to be that a mention in the New York Times would be worth its weight in marketing gold. But is that still true today in this age of blogs, YouTube, and viral marketing? And how many companies understand how to implement these new technologies to productive–and profitable–use?
Answering such questions about new age media was the task for an expert panel discussion that met at the Computer History Museum on Tuesday March 24. The panel, sponsored by Marketing Transformation Services–featured:
- Anna Fieler, CMO, Tiny Prints
- Mark Wilson, VP Strategic Operations, Sybase
- Kevin Callaghan, President and CEO, Mountain Travel
- Kip Knight, President, Knight Vision Marketing
- David Spark, Spark Media Solutions
- Andrew Holtvedt, Marketing Partner, Heidrick and Struggles
The panel’s insights include:
- Don’t outspend your competitors, outsmart them.
- Videos have suddenly become inexpensive to produce, so add video to every marketing piece you create.
- Strategy still matters: make sure you have the right marketing and sales strategy to match the times.
- An effect sales tactic can be to provoke your customers by giving them something to question and think about.
- In the old days brand managers had total control over their company’s messaging. No longer. Customers now create their own messaging about your company. Embracing customers’ content is the key to today’s brand management.
- Create a blueprint before you launch your marketing campaigns–otherwise you will waste time and effort and have no way to measure results.
- Unknown companies need to think about discovery, which is defined as “how do you get yourself on the map.”
- Remember to make it easy for customers to actually buy your product.
- Look for a distribution channel wave to ride. Example: The presidential campaign.
- Create lots of different media units–video, newsletter, articles, blogs–from one concept.
- Take the content that’s hidden inside your company and expose it. It’s an untapped resource that is highly valuable to customers.
- Many companies mistakenly put marketing analysis in the IT department. That’s a mistake. To succeed, marketing departments must claim ownership over data analytics.
Challenges:
- If viral marketing is so effective why wouldn’t everyone do it all the time?
- Building awareness is not enough, you must also generate revenue.
- Good viral marketing creates something that’s related to your brand.
- Do not be fooled by traffic numbers for traffic’s sake.
- Translating marketing into customers and dollars remains to paramount goal of marketing today
- For further reading: The Ultimate Question.
