Alberta Business Marketing

As long as I can remember, brands have organized their marketing initiatives into distinct campaigns. Each season or product launch or celebrity endorsement was treated as their own separate campaign. Brand managers developed the strategy, creative teams made beautiful ads, media teams spread it across appropriate channels, and finally everyone measured its success. After all was said and done, the key findings were used to improve the next campaign and the whole cycle started again.

This process made sense in a world of mass media, but it is quickly becoming obsolete. With the rise of digital marketing, each step along the lifecycle of a campaign was changed as knowledge of the consumer increased and targeting options multiplied. Yet the concept of the campaigns still persists, though is now executed at a more granular level.

The start of the move to digital proved effective because it allowed marketing messages to be much more relevant to the individual consumer. Marketers didn’t have to think of their consumers in broad groups based on demographics, but could instead use far more detailed information to reach the right person with the right message.

I believe that the next iteration in this development will bring about the end of the campaign.

Marketing will become more fluid taking the shape of an ongoing relationship between brands and their consumers instead of distinct campaigns. Ad targeting and optimization technology will improve so that each consumer will receive their own message customized based on a multitude of factors.

Many direct marketers are already doing versions of this. The emails I get from Amazon are based on books that I have said that I like - things like my age, gender, and occupation don’t matter. This makes their marketing message more relevant to me than any TV commercial I have ever seen.

How do you prepare for a post-campaign marketing world?

The skills required from marketers will change. Data mining and optimization will become more important. Technology will drive more marketing dollars. Creative will always be important, but will have to become more flexible.

And the way you think about your brand will change too. Brands will become more conversational and rely more on earned media than paid media. Instead of thinking in campaigns, brands will think in terms of relationships.

Yet the fundamentals of your brand - the promise you make to your consumers - should stay the same. The end of the campaign should be an opportunity to make that more promise more meaningful to your consumers as you can customize its execution. It will be hard, but it will benefit consumers and brands alike it if is done properly.

Ben Wise

Tags: Branding, Digital, Direct Marketing
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The biggest challenge for the marketer is to get prospects to actually pay attention and read what you are sending them. It does not matter if your list of Twitter followers is 100,000 or your email list has 10,000 if no one reads what you send.

The easiest (well not real easy) way to get people to read is to send something that is personal.

I never cease to be amazed at the people who use the standard Linkedin "I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn." with no additional comment. Adding a simple, "Jim, we met at such and such show..." would go so far in making me click the connect.

Recently I have been promoting a book I contributed to called "Entrepreneurial Effect". I have been sending dozens of emails saying "Sue - I would appreciate your help by tweeting this...." (that is a blatant hint, please tweet it for me) And if I have something personal like "How is your son", I add that too.

So why is this not easy? It is, but is takes a lot of time. Personal emails often evoke personal responses that again need action. And just the time to personalize them can take a minute each so it is tough to do that to a 10,000 person list.

Being personal has a secondary advantage. I tend to develop and keep relationships with people that I personally correspond with.

The mail equivalent of this is the simple hand written note on the mailing. This is a highly effective technique for getting things read (and improving your handwriting muscles).

This is the age old marketing dilema. Quality (the personal touch) vs Quantity (worst case would be straight spam). Quality gets response (I get 80-90% of the people I send a personal email to, to respond) where just sending emails to a list often evokes only a 1-2% response. Personal can be 40-90 times as effective.

For true results - try personal.

Jim Estill

Tags: Direct Marketing
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Rosalie McGovern created a lot of buzz in a post last year about the evolution of Direct Marketing and new definition for it, which was developed by CMA’s Direct Marketing Council with input from the broader marketing community.

Direct Marketing is the use of media to directly engage targeted audiences to drive profitable business results that can be tracked, recorded, analyzed and stored for future retrieval and use.

Marketers needed an updated framework for understanding a changing industry, particularly with the increased use and effectiveness of online and digital media, a shift toward insights based marketing as well as changes in consumer preferences and access to information.

To accompany this new framework, CMA’s DM Council put together a series of best practice documents (13) that cover the most common channels and media found in a comprehensive marketing plan. These documents are concise and include only the most important learnings; the tried tested and true direct marketing practices, written by DM subject matter experts.

The best practices are organized into three sections:
1. The Basics (recently published on the CMA website) – covers Direct Marketing Analytics, Offers, Branding from a Direct Marketing perspective, Creative, and Privacy Management.

2. Media and Channels - focuses on both traditional and emerging DM channels: Email Marketing, Direct Mail, DR Media, and SEM.

3. Improving Effectiveness - helps direct marketers leverage the basics to their greatest effect with complimentary tactics like Contests, Word of Mouth Marketing, Community Involvement and Cross-selling.

The DM Council has brought these practices together in a “Direct Marketing Digest”. Our target audience? Those direct marketers early in their career.

The complete DM Digest will be distributed to all attendees at CMA's Direct Marketing Conference September 21 in Toronto. Come and get yours and/or pass it on to a junior on your team.

Martha Turner

Tags: Analytics/Measurement, Digital, Direct Marketing, Strategy
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The age-old question of what keeps a marketer up at night rears its ugly head again.

Let’s face it. Direct Marketing has evolved. With the explosion of social networks, large-scale penetration of smart phones and increased investment overall in various different digital channels – the tools in a DM handbag have changed.

Response rates are lowering.
Privacy concerns are skyrocketing.
Email deliverability is decreasing.

What’s a Direct Marketer to do?

These are just a few of the issues that personally keep me wondering, researching and eternally trying to solve. Same goes for my colleagues in the Canadian Marketing Association’s Direct Marketing Council.

Our mandate is to report on trends and best practices across all one-to-one response generating channels including direct mail, print, online, email, DRTV and mobile. We look at the marketplace challenges and gather best in class solutions as well as keep our finger on the pulse of future opportunities.

In order to continue to provide education and leadership in the ever-changing world of Direct Response Marketing, we’d love your feedback.

What issues and trends do you think faces the modern Direct Marketer?
How can we help YOU address these challenges?

Let us know. We aim to please!

Robin Whalen

Tags: Direct Marketing
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Interest-based marketing is a huge step forward from traditional mass-media advertising on TV and radio. I have posted previously on this blog about the merits of interest-based over demographic-based marketing.

However, interest-based marketing still has two important limits of which you need to be aware.

Why are you interested?

The expression of a customer’s interest is usually done in 1-3 words. That is pretty concise. I don’t know about you, but I would have a lot of trouble explaining my interests in so few words. Therein lies the problem – people may share the keywords but still view their interests in a very different way.

Imagine people with an interest in blogging. They could:
? Read celebrity gossip blogs or financial analysis blogs
? Read blogs only or write their own blog
? Read multiple blogs every day or read one every few weeks
? Write a personal blog as a hobby or write a professional blog to earn a living

As you can see, the nature of someone’s interest in ‘blogging’ can vary immensely and you can’t tell the difference based on one or two words on their Facebook profile.
Interest-based marketing is doing better than traditional channels, but still needs some work to get to the level of detail and accuracy that would be most effective.

Are you sure those are your interests?

Any market researcher will tell you that what people say and what people do can be quite different. The ability to accurately articulate what you are interested in is a skill that surprisingly few people actually have.

These inaccuracies can lead you to market to the wrong people and/or miss the right people.

What is a brand to do?

Don’t get me wrong, interest-based marketing is a significant improvement but we are far from the Holy Grail. As a marketer, you need to continually test different target segments to make sure you are reaching the right people, don’t simply take their word for it!

Ben Wise

Tags: Digital, Direct Marketing, Research
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