If you Google the term, you find different results ranging from company names, book titles to people who attempt to define it… including Biz Stone, Co-Founder of Twitter, who says what it means to him in more than 140 characters.

At this year’s DMA Conference in Boston, Stone was one of the Keynote Speakers. His presentation, titled: Open, Informed & Engaged: A Changing Communication Landscape, covered what he believes is the “Meaningful Market.”

In a time when consumers’ expectations are higher than ever before, it is important for brands and companies to be human. 

This means “Dropping the PR shield,” as Stone noted, and using social media to interact with consumers. The Meaningful Market happens when you invite consumers to be a part of a conversation by asking them what they want to see or hear, creating calls-to-action and deepening the relationship that a consumer has with a brand or company online.

This also involves listening in social media networks.  Find out who is talking about your brand, or just as importantly your brand’s competitors, and reach out to them.

Create two-way communication. Social media isn’t just a way to reach out to more consumers.  It’s also a way for more consumers to reach you. In the Meaningful Market, the terms B2B or B2C Marketing are irrelevant.

We are entering the age of B↔B and B↔C Marketing. Because in the end, the Meaningful Market is all about being thoughtful, meaningful and creating a unique experience for your consumer.

Check out Stone’s entire speech and the Q&A afterwards, or jump to the 10:30 mark to hear Stone talk about the Meaningful Market.

What an inspiration to reinvigorate our own blog and our LinkedIn page!  Please share your thoughts with us, so we can make our conversation more meaningful to you and your business.

Tell us what’s important to you and what challenges you’re facing.  Tell us what you need to know to make your marketing job easier and more profitable. 

We can even give you examples – via the blog and INTouch, our quarterly newsletter – of how to integrate and apply traditional and digital marketing tools. 

When we hit on something meaningful to you, share it with a friend.  No matter how experienced, every marketer could use a little help in growing their business!

I’m back from my West Coast trip spent visiting clients in LA and, of course, attending the DMA 2010 in San Francisco.  

For me, the biggest take-away from this year’s conference was a big affirmation that ICS is on the right track with our product/service mix and integration of online and offline marketing tools… and that we’re probably leading the crowd when it comes to integration. 

It seems to me everyone agreed that integrating your online marketing and traditional marketing is critical to growing your business.  But, not everyone had a clear understanding of HOW to do it – especially when it came to social media. 

The most insightful thing I heard presented on social media was this:  “Think of social media as a friend.  If you can’t communicate back and forth as you would with a friend, then social media is not for you.” 

Now don’t get me wrong.  I think social media has its place in our marketing toolkits, but the successful marketer will be selective on where and how to use this latest, shiny new tool. 

In fact, we’ve had great results in integrating social media as one online element (in conjunction with paid search that is driven by keywords and is geo-targeted and targeted online advertising).  We’ve combined these online tools with offline tools to target qualified prospects and motivate them to register online for automotive ride and drive events.  Results have been excellent. 

So, I’m just saying that social media makes sense in some situations, but not in all… and maybe all of this attention to the new shiny tool is a bit out of proportion with the real-world.

My advice:  Stay on the forefront.  Know the latest, cutting-edge tools available to you.  Clearly understand your customers, potential customers and your business challenges.  Then, decide which online and offline tools within an integrated strategy make sense for you.

Check-out these 5 pitfalls to help you to…

• drive qualified prospects to your site
• improve click-through rates
• be more strategic about your bidding
• lower your costs-per-click

I like Target Marketing Magazine’s research summary overviewing the growth factors in SEM, SEO, online advertising (a.k.a., Pay-Per-Click) and Email Marketing which are among the listed 16 online marketing trends.

More than 80% of marketers are using paid search and SEO and plan to expand search into more segments. As consumers search more online, Google’s AdWord inventory continues to grow.  All music to marketers’ ears as you expand your paid search and SEO efforts. 

Online advertising, “performance-based” media buys and integrated email marketing are also slated for substantial growth through 2014.

Sometimes the most targeted campaign is still missing something.

By: Adam Henige

While more and more organizations have at least begun to dip their toes into the world of search marketing, some still fail to see how it will fit into a traditional marketing campaign or precisely how it supplements more traditional methods.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have this discussion in-person with a variety of audiences. It’s been well documented how successful email marketing and direct marketing campaigns can be, particularly when built on excellent lists.

Add onto your mail/email marketing with traditional media buys in print/radio/television with highly targeted demographic ads and you’ve really covered your bases, right? Well, from a push marketing perspective, you sure have (and we’re not even getting into newer media like blogs, Twitter, and Facebook). 

But, what about those people whom you just can’t seem to target?

There will always be a group of people who want what you’re selling, but either don’t know they can get it, or don’t know that you provide it. But when they finally decide to look for a solution, how will they find you?

Well, think about it yourself. How do you find things? Conservative studies have shown that from a retail perspective over 42% of people find Web sites by using search engines. More importantly, compared to the other forms of advertising, a Web site provides you with a stationary audience.

The more complex, innovative or differentiated your product is, the more important it is to provide a detailed and immersive Web experience. Companies who get this have integrated their marketing strategies - using traditional media as a vehicle that often supports a strategic Web experience that captures and maintains the interest of potential customers, hopefully for multiple visits.

So while traditional media can certainly be an effective tool to finding your target audience and generating leads and sales, online search helps widen the net.

Especially in this day and age — it’s just not an option to leave money on the table by missing customers who may literally be heading to Google and asking for your product, which is why digital marketing makes more and more sense as a piece of the marketing mix.

Adam Henige is Managing Partner of Netvantage Marketing, a Strategic Partner of ICS located in East Lansing, Michigan.

While email response rates are continuing to be challenged, Triggered Communications are a key component to adding relevancy to the communications.   And just like any form of communications, the more relevant and engaging, the more likely it is that you will get your message not only opened, but responded to.

A new conversation can be triggered from almost any customer touch point:

• External factors – website forms, shopping cart abandonment, customer service, etc.
• Messages – email activity (opens, clicks, unsubscribe, etc.), address change, etc.
• List – subscribe, profile update, and address change
• Link – specific link in email message

Once the “customer or prospect event” is captured, you can set a communications cadence around the key attributes of this event.  These campaigns allow you to communicate with each subscriber individually based on his or her behavior or response.  Because the messages are related to the specific action taken by the recipient, the conversations are natural and progressive, not sporadic and interruptive. 

For example, a prospect clicked on an email to find out more information on your product, but did not take advantage of the offer.  In the case of triggered communications, we can capture all “like prospects” and design communications cadences specific to this marketing situation. 

These automated campaigns can be structured to follow up in a period of time after their initial response, or even so many days before the offer expires.   Content can be specific to the link they clicked, or specific to the fact that they opened the email and didn’t click on a link.  Testing strategies can be easily incorporated into the process as well.

According to Forrester Research’s US Interactive Marketing Forecast 2009-2014, marketers are taking on a more strategic leadership role in organizations because of their close connections to customers and prospects.   Transactional, triggered email communications are on the rise because they improve open, click and conversion rates dramatically.  

This builds off from the marketing foundation that a “handraiser” is one of your most effective prospect segments (from a percentage basis).  Adding relevant and engaging follow-up communications will nuture leads through the sales cycles to drive more sales.  

Give one of our account managers (or myself) a call to discuss triggered communications in more detail.  

It struck me that the author overlooked some important points to keep in mind when setting-up a profitable paid search budget.

In many cases – including ICS’s – the company has a diverse product / service mix.  So when thinking about what to spend on key paid search terms, don’t just look at the price tag of the search term and the profit margin of the product / service you’re marketing.  Consider search terms that may provide cross-over sales opportunities as well.

Also, ask yourself if you’re using the best possible search term that would provide the highest quality sales leads at the best price… and if you can get some cross-over marketing into other areas of your products and services, then even better.

Chances are there are some lesser cost (and higher sales value) alternatives to that high price search term that could blow your budget’s profitability.

And don’t forget to keep a close eye on your paid search program.  Don’t just set it and forget it.

The great thing is… if your initial keyword selection isn’t giving you the results you thought it would, then you can always adjust your program immediately based on what your response data is telling you.

http://www.dmnews.com/Set-your-search-budget-to-be-based-on-its-profitability/article/139312/

But how do these new marketing tools really compare to the fundamentals in the Digital Services arena like Search Engine Optimization.  As Adam explains below, this is more of a longer term investment and very analytically/metric driven.  While the new social networking tools have their place, SEO has proven to be a constant contributor to targeted digital lead generation in the long run.  Take a read through his thoughts below:

We live in an instant gratification world anymore, and it somehow manages to become even more instantaneous with each passing day. Twitter is a perfect example of this.  If you haven’t “tweeted” yet, you’re probably going to be considered unhip by teenagers and the tech savvy, and you’ll also be left out in the dark as to what everyone you know is doing at every second of the day.  Businesses, of course, have jumped on this bandwagon and are courting followers and fans through these channels and (some better than others) promoting products and services and attempting to build brand loyalty.

Some of us who earned our stripes in more traditional online marketing (does anyone remember SEO, pay per click and banner advertising?) are going to have to continue to get better at selling the value of a service that often seems to be getting no results, or moving at a snail’s pace.  Social media appeals so well to the instant gratification crowd, as you can get huge blasts of traffic through to your site from Digg, Reddit and Stumbleupon, but often this success is fleeting.  Twitter can be a great tool to engage customers and prospects, but still lacks a great ability to target.

I’ve spent months, and sometimes years on sites to finally get that high ranking that starts driving the “dream traffic” you want to your site.  The hard part is trying to keep someone paying for this service, when all you can show them is an increased ranking…but no revenue.  The truth is, even for highly targeted terms, being on page one of search results simply isn’t good enough to get a significant portion of traffic.  If you’re not in the top three listings, you’re still not even playing the game.  In competitive markets, getting from 15th to 1st can be incredibly difficult, and may take months or years.  But depending on what product or service that keyword relates to, getting to the top can mean literally thousands of visitors coming through to your site who have already expressly stated they want what you have.

Let’s put it this way, if you sold coffee, this would be the equivalent of magically appearing in front of someone right after they decide, “I need a cup of coffee.”  No trip to Starbucks, or the grocery store to look at competitive products, they ask for coffee and you’re there, and you have the first opportunity to sell.  How much is that worth?  And can you afford not to make that investment?  The truth is, if you don’t, someone else will, and those who do won’t be worrying about jumping on the next digital marketing bandwagon, at least not with the same urgency.

Adam Henige is a Managing Partner at Netvantage Marketing, an ICS Strategic Partner specializing in paid search management, SEO, and web analytics.

While I am sure the economic climate is an element here (isn’t it the blame for everything these days?), I think the “trends toward the use of electronic mail” are an even greater longer-term issue for the USPS.  And as they are forced to raise prices, it will not make matters any better.

Clearly, companies are having to look at every dollar these days.  Utilizing the most customer-effective and cost-effective communications is certainly an area that nearly all companies are reviewing.   And as most things go, technology continues to bring new solutions to the table that enable the small- to mid-sized companies to do what only the larger companies could do in years past.

What do you look for if you are one of those companies evaluating your customer communications?  

• Likely you will want a partner to help navigate the increasing complex data management issues that come with multi-channel marketing integration
• The organization should also have deep expertise across traditional and digital channels (both technical and strategic)

We see the continuation of these trends (lower mail volumes, stronger use of electronic communcations) for the forseeable future.  And yes, a continuation of the increases from USPS.