• §  Data is King:  OK, I know this isn’t a revelation, but I am continued to be amazed at how few marketers have really thought through how this impacts their marketing efforts.
• §  A recent IDC study found that digital information is doubling every two years.   This is not only true about the data you keep on your customers, it is also true on prospects we are looking for.   No longer can we assume that the best and most relevant prospecting sources are from brand name compiled lists.   Often, the best prospecting sources are from new internet-based sources that may not have even been around a few years ago.  

How has increased data insight changed your marketing strategies?  2012 Action Item:   Develop performance-based data source testing plans for your recruitment efforts.   

Marketing Technology – Increasing capabilities while decreasing costs:   Today’s marketing technology brings capability to the small and medium-sized companies that could only be afforded by the big companies 5 years ago.   Significant advances have been made in key areas:

• §  Marketing Automation / Triggered Email:  New toolsdrive industry-best performance in multi-channel lead management … and is “always on”. 
• §  Real Time Metrics:  You don’t have to wait to evaluate marketing performance.   Know now!
• §  Multi-channel Marketing Data Warehouses:  Increase your marketing success through increased customer Intelligence.   Good news; Today’s technology doesn’t make this a multi-million dollar effort.  

Where does your company stand in leveraging today’s capabilities?  2012 Action Item:   Audit where you are at with your technology position.   Dedicate time to explore options in weak areas.

Multi-channel Integration increases your marketing performance:   However, smart approaches in this area have to be thought through and “performance-based”.

How are you using Integrated Marketing in your marketing plans for customer and prospect lead generation?   2012 Action Item:   Evaluate how your marketing plans leverage Integrated Marketing.   Develop testing strategies in this area and compare results to your current marketing efforts.

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.

One or all of these 5 tips may help you get out of a rut in your direct mail design, packaging and copywriting. 

Just remember:  Without relevency and getting the recipient to “stop and see what’s in it for me,” your awesome layout, packaging and copywriting might just be perfuming a pig.

We’ll show you how easy it is to set-up behaviorally triggered email messages that deliver the right message to the right subscriber at the exact moment he or she is most engaged and likely to respond using Listrak’s automated event triggered messaging solution.

You will learn how to:

- Add a powerful, automated email responder system to your integrated marketing mix

- Trigger specific email responses according to your customer’s behaviors or targeted events

- Have one-on-one conversations with each of your customers and prospects

- Increase your email’s relevancy, open rates and your sales

Participation in this webinar is free, but space is limited. So, reserve your seat today.

While we’re putting the finishing touches on our webinar, here are five tips from Target Marketing Magazine for Triggered Communications success.

• Thoughtfully defining your triggers – this is the heart of your program
• Prepare your sales team to handle these leads – without making customers feel like “they’re being stalked.”  You want to your customer to be loyal to your brand and feel, “Hey, this company really gets me and understands my needs.”  That’s a big difference from a creepy, “I’m-being-watched feeling!”
• Put contact frequency in your process so you don’t bug your best customer and burn-out your sales team
• Continually improve your triggered-based program using feedback from your best sales people

I’m excited about what Triggered Communications can do to grow our clients’ businesses and I’m looking forward to meeting you online on April 15 for the Webinar!  I hope you can join us!

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.

What’s the Difference? As marketers, we can get into a rut with our buzz words and even use some words interchangeably. This can inadvertently affect our strategies.

For example, you’re going to tackle your Web site very differently if you’re thinking about attracting qualified leads and how to manage those leads versus trying to get the most possible “hits” to your site.

More Leads, Better Qualified, Now What? Well, if you were opening a storefront, you would make sure that everything was organized and setup properly before flipping-on the “open” sign. The same is true for your Web site. You need to make sure that you’re ready to handle those online leads once they’re in your “door.” Make sure your sales funnel structure is ready to handle the leads properly – or you can loose that prospect forever.

Also, I can’t say it enough – INTEGRATION. To get the most out of your Web site and online marketing, you need to integrate across all of the channels that touch your customer – both online and offline.

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.

2009 Direct Marketing Association's Annual Conference Oct. 17-21

I can’t remember a year where we have had as much change in our marketing world.  With the economy struggling, this alone has had significant impact.  Add onto this the evolution of new digital tools such as Search, Social Media and Mobile and this year’s Direct Marketing Association’s national convention is bound to be interesting. 

Yet my initial day at the conference reinforces much of what I thought.  While  new tools and mediums evolve, much of the foundation for targeted marketing remains the same:

• Test, test, test:   Continues to be the foundation for targeted media.  With today’s powerful analytics, you can set up your testing strategies to optimize your marketing efforts whether it is your direct marketing acquisition effort, search or your web site. 
• Permission-based:  Permission-based marketing comes in the form of many names now (i.e. opt-in, preference centers, social media invitations), but a constant thread has been forming in marketing for over a decade.  Today’s marketers realize that putting the consumer in the driver’s seat of their communications is the key in today’s world.  Now there are just more targeted consumer options to opt-into than ever before.
• Technology Centric:  Technology continues to drive our advances on many fronts.  More user friendly tools to use without tapping the IT department.  Increased abilities to personalize the medium to known customer attributes, easier and lower cost tools to manage all these efforts.
• Integration:  A couple of decades ago, it was integrating targeted marketing with mass media to deliver improved performance.  Today, these integration points are still important, but can be taken much further.  Web site integration, retail point of sale, digital targeted media campaigns are now all thrown into the mix as well. 

My point in all this is that while times are changing, likely 99.9+ percent of what we see at this year’s DMA will be based on the foundation already set.   Should be an interesting time to see how the industry is doing and where the experts see it all going.  From my first day in attendance, what is being touted as “new” looks very familiar.

In our opinion, one of the easiest ways for organizations to address these new complexities is to create a replicated marketing database driven from your enterprise customer data management tools.  Rather than trying to make your enterprise tools something that they are typically not meant to be, creating a replicated marketing database provides the security and fully functioning marketing features for integrated electronic and traditional communications to your customer base. 

While you may be concerned about costs, we find that this approach provides significant advantages:

• Typically costs much less than trying to customize your own enterprise system
• Can be launched much quicker and with less hassle than changes to your own system. 
• Immediately offers more features (i.e. Landing pages for customer email and general updates, customer preference centers, activity reporting, demographically enhanced customer data) that would require even more costs and development time if done internally

Given the growing demands for integrated marketing communications, you are likely looking at this area if you haven’t already set a strategy for your organization.  We recommend that you consider this approach when you do.

Feel free to give us a call to discuss options in this area, or listen to our recent webinar How Changing Communications Trends Drive Integrated Marketing ROI for more concrete Direct Marketing Association facts in this area.  You will also find an overview of ICS’s Integrated Communications Platform (ICP) which may be consideration for your business as well.