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creative briefs |
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Are you out there reviving old relationships and making new ones? Well, you should be making and maintaining as many connections as you can. You really can only have about 40 truly close contacts. It’s tough to fully maintain more than that. However, with the advent of technology, you can stay in touch with those you’ve known through the years. LinkedIn often puts up roadblocks to connecting and reconnecting with people. So, you should set up a QuickLink invitation page. Here’s mine, and you’ll find a link for setting up your own there, as well.
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Having a strong personal brand and being well connected in the social media space is a good place to start to keep or find a job during tough economic times, but Twittering all day is not likely to get you hired. So says Jason Falls. Social media, he says, will not get you a job in a recession.
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Wouldn’t it be great if you had access to the best business information in the world, filtered by smart business professionals like you? Oh that’s right, you already do. Sign up for BusinessWeek’s Business Exchange. You can easily add topics and like-minded followers with a simple click. Then, your Business Exchange homepage will feature recent activities.
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Random Links:
Here are a few random links you may want to check out.
MatchPoint offers a new approach to media relations, and a 10-day free trial. It allows you to focus your outreach on journalists based on their body of work.
Read why now is a good time to jump onto the email bandwagon.
Comedian Steve Martin says “some people have a way with words and some people have not way.” I think he was talking about corporate people and their jargon. Are you using corporate speak?
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Hello again. Direct marketing and listening have been on my mind lately. Let’s discuss. Oh, if you like this enewsletter, please help me out. Forward it to a friend.
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Creatively yours,
Harry Hoover
harry@my-creativeteam.com |
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| 2009: The Year Of Direct Marketing? |
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By Harry Hoover
There has been a lot of talk about the death of direct marketing. I don’t buy it. Here’s why: Every time the economy softens, marketers are pressured by higher ups to utilize tactics that can be quantified. Direct marketing is on the list in all tough years. Is it on your list this year?
Now, response rates for direct mail and for email marketing have fallen in recent times. But that is not because direct marketing has outlived its usefulness. It’s because of lazy marketers; marketers who won’t develop a plan but instead just bombard consumers with ill conceived and misdirected messages. Let’s review how to improve your direct marketing efforts.
First, you need to develop a plan. It does not have to be as long as War And Peace, but it must include a few key elements so that you can develop a focused, targeted, measurable program that gets results. For our purposes, I’m going to focus on the use of email, but the elements are similar for direct mail:
- Objectives
- Audience Definition
- Key Messages
- Format
- Tactics
- Timeline
- Budget
- Measurement
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| Listening: Marketing’s Secret Weapon |
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By Harry Hoover
Customers know you and your business better than you think, and often better than you. In the many strategic planning projects I’ve done over nearly 30 years in the business, the customer always gives me the nugget that frames a client’s positioning.
Customers will tell you when you are doing something right or something wrong. All you have to do is listen to them. This rarely happens in businesses of any size. And guess what? Chief marketing officers at 500 major corporations know this. A study by the CMO Council suggests,
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...marketers don’t know how to use customer input to improve operations, products and processes. The council, whose study, “Giving Customer Voice More Volume,” surveyed around 500 senior marketers at major corporations, found that only 33% of survey respondents said their companies claim to be good at handling customer complaints. Of the executives who responded to the survey, only 23% said their companies track or measure customer emails, and only 17% use that feedback to identify potential customer advocates. |
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