Link This | Email this | Blog This | Comments (0)

Eight Steps to Marketing Smarter
September 9, 2008

Recently, I keep hearing variations on a theme that—in this tough economic climate—ought to be posted over the door of every person responsible for the company’s marketing. “Don’t market harder. Market smarter.” In fact, just today, I think I ran across it at least three times.

Most recently, it was in a free white paper I downloaded from The Peppers & Rogers Group entitled “The One-to-One Future: Are We There Yet?”  On the first page, the company made several points—several of which I’ve made here before but are worth repeating ad nauseum. Although the basic points are from the white paper, I’ve felt free to elaborate on them (as I usually do).

1. Focus on long-term results, not short-term results. It makes you less vulnerable to swings in domestic and global markets.
2. If you have to choose between current and prospective customers, focus on current ones. Get to know them. Which customers spend the most money with you? Which spend the most frequently? Which result in the highest margins?  Know who they are and begin a dialog with them. For more on this, see my column XX.
3. Move away from mass marketing, which suffers from short consumer attention spans and media fragmentation.
4. Focus on relevance, not “personalization.” Personalization is data—plugging data into fields in a document. Relevance can be achieved without personalization. It can be achieved with basic demographic segmentation. Or it can be achieved with a single data point, if that data point is the right one.
5. Not only increase the relevance, but send messages more frequently. It engages the customer, increases loyalty, and keeps you top of mind.
6. Create a dialog—not pepper them with a monolog. Invest in technologies and marketing strategies that enable them to “talk” back to you. Utilize personalized URLs. Capture information on your website. Send them a customer survey.
7. Touch your customer on multiple levels—touch them with multiple media (multichannel marketing), if possible, and with multiple people within the organization. The more touchpoints, the more engaged, loyal, and profitable your customer will be.
8. Become more savvy about monitoring and tracking online. This allows you to update customer data in real time. That data will give you more insights into customer demographics and behavior than you ever thought possible.

Have questions? Comments? I'd love to hear from you. You can email me at info@digitalprintingreports.com. For more information on primers for marketers and small businesses on digital, 1:1, Web-to-print, and personalized URL applications, visit Digital Printing Reports. You can also keep up with all of my posts on EBS, The Inspired Economist ("Greening Print Marketing"), and other blog sites by following me on Twitter.

Posted by Heidi Tolliver Nigro on September 9, 2008 | Comments (0)