Marketing devotes a great deal of its time and money is spent to creating collateral. Also known as sales collateral and marketing collateral, the term refers to the collection of documents that a company produces in support of a sale. The name derives from the “in support of” or “accompanying” definition of the word “collateral.” When applied specifically to marketing, collateral most commonly consists of product data sheets, brochures, white papers, and similar documents. Marketers also … [Read more...]
Chapter 14 – The Website
It’s funny to think that the Web, which hundreds of millions of people use every day for shopping, dating, gaming, news, and socializing, began as a technology to help improve, of all things, physics research – a topic of interest to only a fraction of the world’s population. Yet today the Web is huge. According to What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly, himself a chronicler of the early days of the Web, it holds more than a trillion pages. Twenty years plus since the first website was created … [Read more...]
Chapter 13 – Advertising
Advertising is the most romantic marketing discipline. The popularity of the television drama Mad Men, set in the nascent days of Madison Avenue, has helped to cement that image. So, who better than Don Draper, the handsome but moody creative director from the series, to define advertising: “Advertising is based on one thing, happiness. And you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car. It’s freedom from fear. It’s a billboard on the side of the road that screams whatever … [Read more...]
Chapter 12 – Events: From Trade Shows to Webinars
Marketers stage events for one overriding reason: to put sellers in direct contact with buyers. This practice has been around for hundreds – some experts claim thousands – of years. The direct ancestor of today’s trade show first emerged in medieval Europe, where produce and craft vendors visited towns to participate in trading fairs, where they would sell and showcase their products and services. In 1851, intent on expanding into new overseas markets to assure its status as a leading … [Read more...]
Chapter 11 – Leads, Opportunities and the Funnel
Peter Drucker’s measure of successful marketing is the point at which the act of selling becomes unnecessary. Some companies have reached the point where their product is so essential or desirable that no one needs to “sell” to their customers, or to consumers in general. They are already sold. In most cases, however, a salesperson from your company or one of your partners is essential for answering questions, alleviating consumer fears, ensuring that your products advantages are understood, … [Read more...]
Chapter 10 – Marketing Lists and Databases
In the previous chapter we discussed how marketers increasingly rely on carefully targeted direct marketing to reach and — ideally — elicit some type of response from prospective customers. Let’s assume you have used your segmentation exercise to identify the appropriate demographic targets for your campaign, and you want to contact them via direct mail or telemarketing. The question you now face is, Where do you get the names and contact information for these individuals? And at a price you … [Read more...]
Chapter 8 – Beyond the Press Release: Product Reviews, Awards, Surveys, and Studies
Customers and prospects are often suspicious of material that was obviously created by Marketing. Today’s marketers are paying the price accrued from decades of marketing – customers have become jaded. This may come as a rude awakening to marketing professionals, but loss of credibility can be an occupational hazard. How can marketers address this problem? As we discussed in the previous chapter, one remedy is to have other people promote your product, service, or organization for you through … [Read more...]
Chapter 9 – Direct Marketing
What might seem commonplace today was actually revolutionary not too long ago. In a famous speech delivered at the Hundred Million Club of New York in 1961, Lester Wunderman drew an important distinction between how most of Madison Avenue marketed and how he and a handful of other upstarts did it. As he explained:The din of advertising becomes louder and louder, and it costs more to make a consumer remember the advertising he saw, heard, or read when he makes a buying decision. Isn’t it … [Read more...]
Chapter 7 – Social Media and WOM Marketing
Every year businesses in the United States pay billions of dollars to agencies to create colorful, clever, attention-grabbing marketing and advertising campaigns.[1] Although these expenditures are essential to success in the modern business environment, the most trusted forms of advertising are far less elaborate; namely, recommendations from personal acquaintances and opinions posted by customers online. According to the “2012 Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey,” 92% of consumers surveyed … [Read more...]
Chapter 6 – The Press Release
The workhorse of public relations is the press release. Written in the form of a conventional news story, a press release alerts the media to an organization’s news and presents it in that organization’s point of view. Newspaper editors and reporters use facts, quotes, and other information contained in releases to flesh out their stories. Given the importance of the press release and the process of creating and disseminating a good one, we’ve dedicated an entire chapter to the topic. We begin … [Read more...]