By Jeff Campbell
Gap? What gap?
In a previous post (Mind the gap) I described the gap that exists between marketing and sales. You know, the one where marketing measures campaigns by direct engagement with materials and by customer actions on the web whereas sales measures activity of salespeople and the state of opportunities. Because these are two different units of measurement along the continuum from awareness to closed sale, it is difficult to accurately gauge a return on the marketing investment and to forecast.
You may also recall how this makes the sales manager’s job a critical one in terms of translating the sales measures into a reliable forecast. The marketing manager, meanwhile, must reconcile marketing measures in the context of forecast and revenue to demonstrate a return on the marketing investment. In other words, “mind the gap.”
Read More
By Alexandra Reid
As a regular feature, we provide our readers with a roundup of some of the best articles we have read in the past week. On the podium this week are Social Media Explorer, TopRank, Financial Post, Forrester, Forbes, Copyblogger, and Startup North.
How data hype is destroying your social media ROI
We are all looking for the latest nugget of data that will help us optimize our social media strategies for success. Every time we see a post with an infographic about the best time to tweet or what social networks our audience is using we get excited thinking it’s just the right information to help us take our social media strategy to the next level. That’s why you see so many status updates hyping the data because it’s finally the answer we’ve been looking for … or is it?
Read More
By Francis Moran
I changed internet service providers this month and, while I was at it and since it was the same company, also cancelled my cable television service. It’s not something I did on a whim. I have been dissatisfied with the quality of the internet service I was receiving, and have long despaired of my provider’s customer service.
But that’s not why I switched. I’ve never been tempted to move from one ISP to another because, short-term promotional offers aside, the two major alternatives in my neck of the woods offered pretty much the same quality of service for pretty much the same price. And neither is any great shakes when it comes to customer service.
However, I recently learned of a local, independent service provider that offered far faster service for a lower price. Like in many other households, watching television for our family these days is much more a matter of streaming content from both paid and free sources on the web, and twice now I have bumped into the what once seemed to be a rather generous bandwidth cap with my current provider. In addition to the much higher speeds and lower cost, the cap with my new provider is more than three times higher.
Read More
By Leo Valiquette
A couple of weeks back, I expressed my firm belief about the portability of strong writing skills between disciplines, with particular reference to journalists who make the career transition into public relations or marketing. Here’s my promised followup on the importance of not forgetting your roots in the newsroom when it comes to writing copy and placing a story.
(DISCLAIMER: Everything I am about to say stems from the assumption that you are great at what you do. And, frankly, most writers are not, but that’s a subject for another time.)
Strong writing remains at the core of effective public relations and marketing activities and this has become even more apparent with the rise of content marketing. From the ubiquitous and often maligned media release, to blog posts ghost-written for CEOs and thought leadership articles placed with leading trade and industry press, the lessons learned as a journalist remain relevant. In addition to my points below, you might also want to read Alex’s post from a couple of months back, 5 tips content marketers should take from journalists.
Read More
By Alexandra Reid
It is commonplace to see businesses participating on social media, but many are failing to achieve the delicate balance between self-promotion and providing value.
Worse, businesses are misunderstanding what promotion on social media entails. They’re shouting at their audiences while failing to provide any reason for them to listen.
Imagine walking into a cocktail party and, without listening for even a moment to the various conversations taking place, shouting at the top of your lungs about your latest company promotion to no one in particular. If it’s an exceptionally valuable deal like, “We’re giving away free Macbook Pros tomorrow at noon,” you might get some attention because the guests will quickly recognize how it benefits them. However, your less-than-charming approach will not leave the most positive and lasting impression about yourself or your company.
Read More
-
Mind the gap between marketing and sales
September 17, 2012 by Jeff Campbell
This is a familiar phrase to all those who have used the tube to get around London. It may also be familiar to those who continue to try to reconcile the information we often use to measure marketing effectiveness with the sales forecast. In other words, trying to […]
Read more... -
Great articles roundup: Content marketing, rebranding, journalism, social media, and team building
September 14, 2012 by Alexandra Reid
As a regular feature, we provide our readers with a roundup of some of the best articles we read in the past week. On the podium this week are MarketingSherpa, Fast Company, MarketingProfs, SocialTimes, and Jeremiah Owyang […]
Read more... -
-
New ventures are cultivated everywhere
September 12, 2012 by Francis Moran
Those of you who are regular readers of this blog will know that I am passionate about entrepreneurship and a huge fan and supporter of startups. So it’s not unusual to find me at almost any event where startup entrepreneurs gather […]
Read more... -
Podcast with Gini Dietrich: Marketing in the Round
September 12, 2012 by Alexandra Reid
Following the release of her latest book, Marketing in the Round, I sat down with award-winning marketer Gini Dietrich to discuss the new push for businesses to break down organizational silos and adopt a “round” approach to marketing operations […]
Read more... -
-
Neck ties not allowed, sandals optional
September 11, 2012 by Leo Valiquette
As Francis will blog about later this week, Victoria Lennox and the team at Startup Canada were back in Ottawa last week and my brief showing at one of the events left me with plenty of food for thought […]
Read more... -
Your cheating brain
September 10, 2012 by Bob Bailly
Mistakes were made, but not by me, a book by Carol Tarvis and Elliot Aronson, explores the very human tendency to deflect blame, to admit error begrudgingly and to avoid responsibility. They explore the notion that too often we hear the self-justifying, “There was […]
Read more... -
-
Great articles roundup: Personas, branding, content marketing, simplicity and social
September 07, 2012 by Alexandra Reid
As a regular feature, we provide our readers with a roundup of some of the best articles we read in the past week. On the podium this week are Velocity, Forrester, TopRank, The Washington Post, and Econsultancy […]
Read more... -
You don’t have sources anymore, you have clients
September 06, 2012 by Leo Valiquette
There’s a quote that I am fond of from journalist and author Gene Fowler, who passed in 1960: “Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.” I could only wonder what he would say […]
Read more... -
By Jeff Campbell 
Twitter
Tweets by @FrancisMoranRecent Comments
The Future of A&R – Walabe : [...] http://francis-moran.com/marketing-strategy/top-10-questions-every-strategic-communicator-should-ask... [...]
Traditional Marketing is Dead – Long Live Bikini Waxer Marketing | Scalexl : [...] pointed out by Alexandra Reid on the Francis Moran website content marketing is becoming more and more like journalism. So, it is not just about the content, [...]
It’s Summertime…and the Networking is Easy? | THE MERRAINE BRAIN : [...] In fact, summer is perhaps one of the times least used to network, yet at the same time has shown to be the most productive time to network. People tend to be in a brighter mood compared to during the gloomy winters-especially where I am from in England! Networking needs to be fun and not approached as another chore, like mowing the lawn. (http://francis-moran.com/marketing-strategy/social-media-strategy-why-meeting-in-the-real-world-matt...) [...]