Year-end is often a time for reflection on the past year, along with planning for the new year. So why not marketing? How were results measured? What are specific plans for the year ahead? How can you “shake up” your marketing with a focus on results? Your friends at Modern Marketing Partners have some perspective we’d like to share.
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Healthcare marketing efforts throughout the United States remain focused on addressing healthcare literacy in 2019. Large national studies have demonstrated that approximately one third of adult Americans have limited health literacy and describe feeling uncomfortable trying to navigate their medical benefits and the healthcare system. Among younger Americans the percentage is even higher with 56 percent reporting a lack of understanding. Healthcare literacy refers to health literacy, which is an individual’s ability to obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions. Health insurance literacy is another component of healthcare literacy and represents the capability of people to have the knowledge to choose the best health plans and benefit options to fit their circumstances ...
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This year’s holiday season is all about making the social world shoppable. In particular, companies are being given the access and the opportunity to make their content, images and videos shoppable this season. The reason this is big news for companies is this is a trend that interests people. According to PwC’s 2018 Holiday Lookout study, more than 40 percent of Millennials and 25 percent of Gen Z shoppers will purchase through shoppable photos this year. Here’s how social platforms are innovating this season – and you can too right along with them. Instagram just announced three new ways for users to shop while browsing their favorite photos of pets, food, travel, family and friends. The new features help people ...
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There’s a sports adage that many coaches tell their athletes, “let the game come to you.” It may seem like odd advice, because most sports-related activities and matches seem to be all about controlling the tempo and taking charge of the game. However, this different and disciplined approach can yield important benefits for players and professionals alike. For marketing professionals in today’s business climate, it means being patient, not passive, just alert and resolute. And it means letting the customer come to you. You still have to entice them of course, but it may be over a longer period of time. How do you establish visibility and credibility with this approach? By creating relevant content that has more in common ...
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As marketers we like to talk about data. It’s usually in terms of how to access it and harness it to be more beneficial to our business. While data has tremendous value to our organizations, we need to remember with equal vigor to ensure its protection. Let’s face it; privacy hasn’t had a great year. Reports of breaches and mishandled data appear to be occurring daily. The big news hit early when in March the story broke that political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica hacked 87 million Facebook profiles, resulting in Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg having to testify before Congress and the European Parliament. If your audience wasn’t already uneasy, they most likely will be after this year. Companies have to ...
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Email keeps evolving despite naysayers’ warnings that it is going away. Every year email continues to be ranked as an important tool marketers turn to for communicating with prospects and customers. Email marketing progresses as more data points, technology and insights provide a deeper understanding that marketers can channel into their strategies. With over 2.8 billion people worldwide using email as a digital communications tool, it’s worth marketers’ time to stay on top of the latest trends. Both small and large businesses report positive ROI with each of their email dollars bringing in an average return of $44. This is why email beats out every other platform in turns of performance over the past years. Clearly, there is a tremendous ...
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Two main points from our last blog, lead us into our current discussion on personalization. 1. Personalization is about tailoring your marketing tactics to deliver the most relevant product, service and experience to the right customer segment at the right time. And 2., According to recent research, creating personalized customer experiences in particular help many businesses increase their top lines. What does that look like today? According to Segment’s 2017 State of Personalization Report, consumers demand fast action and personalized communication in nearly every channel almost as soon as they choose to identify themselves to a brand. Respondents provided three important reasons for companies to take quick action: 54% expect to get a personalized offer, 63% say it will drive ...
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Personalization in marketing means taking customer segmentation to the next level. It requires tailoring your marketing tactics to deliver the most relevant product, service or experience to the right customer segment at the right time, based on your knowledge of that customer and his or her preferences. That’s a tall order today, because customer touchpoints span across multiple channels including web, social, mobile, and physical locations. So while that makes it tough on the front-end to deliver customized content across all those channels, on the backend it means customers are providing companies with a good deal of information about their preferences and intent. Yet getting at the data from the multiple systems it sits on may be the biggest challenge ...
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Small Business Saturday (SBS) is right around the corner on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, November 24th. It offers businesses the opportunity to capitalize on the momentum of Black Friday and create some excitement of their own. For some companies it will be a way to start off the holiday shopping season, for others, it may be even more important. Small businesses that are more seasonal in nature, especially those with traditionally spring and summer products or services, can use SBS to offer a special promotion for consumers to consider their offerings during a time they otherwise would not. It can play an important role in facilitating business all year long. Not sure if it’s worth pursing? Consider the data from ...
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Product packaging has become more important as changes and challenges continue to reshape how businesses, consumers, and governments deal with sustainability and the shifting demands of ecommerce. Packaging must bridge the crucial connection between consumer trends, behaviors, and values and the innovative role companies must uphold in order to accurately interpret their markets’ unique needs. Packaging today needs to reflect the most forward-looking attitude of a circular society. This year Nestle made an announcement that it plans to make 100 percent of its packaging recyclable or reusable by 2025. Stating that they believe, “plastic waste is one of the biggest sustainability issues the world faces and that there is a urgent need to minimize the impact of packaging on the ...
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Quality digital content has the potential to help B2B marketers cost-effectively reach annual company goals. The key to pulling this off requires a commitment to providing content that puts your audience’s needs first. And it must happen at every point in the selling cycle. A recent survey by Clutch Research finds that 88 percent of B2B audiences read business content online at least once weekly to stay informed, research companies and make purchasing decisions. The report identifies four stages in the sales funnel and the content consumers consider during each phase in the sales conversion. Taking a look at their findings can help companies understand how to interact with B2B audiences and take advantage of opportunities to engage potential customers ...
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Creating the ultimate customer experience today requires a whole organization approach. As it should, and it requires you to expand your thinking to encompass the entire experience. Meaning you care about what happens to or with a customer before, during and after purchasing your company’s product or service. Therefore, from a marketing perspective many businesses have invested time and money to reach customers where they spend most of their time – on their phones. This has meant carefully considering consumer app usage and preferences. As mobile has exploded in growth in recent years, app downloading and usage has grown exponentially as well. Forrester data as well as a 2016 study by App Annie found that users access approximately 30 apps ...
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In our previous blog, we discussed the necessary integration of systems to deliver real-time, meaningful customer interactions. Organizations seem to understand the importance of gathering and utilizing data to help create a seamless customer journey, but are struggling at getting it in the hands of the right people at the right time to be truly impactful. You can see how valuing the customer experience requires an organizational commitment to embracing the concept that customers rule supreme. Clearly, every team member from every department needs to be on board with delivering your brand’s strategy. This will lead to less customer turnover and strengthen your position in the marketplace to continue attracting new customers. To effectively focus on the customer experience though, ...
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Today’s clients are interacting with your company through multiple channels such as your website, your Facebook page, your loyalty program or any number of other ways. And the ways are increasing every year as technology advances, right along with customer expectations right too. So it’s important to create a consistent customer experience across every channel now and for the future. According to Forrester research the customer experience will be more important than price in determining customer purchases and customer retention by the year 2020. Customer brand relationships will require companies to deliver personalized, relevant experiences that empower customer behavior based upon them receiving the right message, at the right time, in the right place. Are companies prepared to do that? ...
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Do marketing and sales really need to be aligned for a company to be successful? The answer today is still “Yes”. While historically any misalignment was often blamed on the nature of organizational structure that supported two different and separate departments. It’s probably not as accurate an argument anymore, as it is now more about how the buying the process has changed over the last 10 years. The Internet offers customers new and numerous ways to gather information. Social media now has its influence in the buying process along with other digital channels too. Customers are inundated with products and services, making the marketplace highly complex to navigate. This is especially true of the B2B market today, where buyers believe ...
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Digital signage is growing in marketing and advertising usage across industries. In 2015, the digital signage market was valued at nearly $17 billion and is expected to continue growing to reach approximately $33 billion by 2023. Multi-screen video walls, free-standing kiosks, tablet devices, and other products can deliver information about a company’s products and services through quality graphics and videos. The very nature of digital signage allows for companies to really showcase new promotions, important announcements, and real-time product descriptions to gain the edge over their competition. You might not even realize how prevalent they are today, but your daily life is full them. Think the mall, grocery store, health club, financial institution, provider office visit, etc. all of which ...
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In the beginning of the year, Forbes ran an article about 10 Great Marketing Jobs for 2018 based on average salary, number of postings for the positions on Indeed.com, and three-year growth percentage. Here are four of the positions – Senior Social Media Specialist, Community Manager, Digital Strategist, and Brand Ambassador. Does your company have those positions? It’s okay if your answer is “no.” Marketing has evolved into this multi-faceted, multi-channeled far-reaching pursuit for brand awareness and market share in a highly information-filled digital world. It requires roles with very specialized skills and the need for strong team leadership to successfully guide marketing organizations’ endeavors. However, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a senior-level marketing executive with all the skills to ...
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No one wants to post the perfect image and caption, only to find that the photo is cropped all funky on Facebook, and crucial details from the caption are out of view. To make sure that all social content displays appropriately, it’s important to know the platform’s ideal dimensions. Here are the ideal dimensions for a variety of content, according to Dreamgrow. Profile Picture: The picture displays at 160 x 160 px. Square images work best. Facebook Business Cover Photos: Ideal size is 828 x 315 px. Facebook Video: The thumbnail image is 1200 x 675 px. Aspect ratio can be either 16:9 or 1:1. The file itself can be as large as 4GB. Characters are as follows: desktop displays ...
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It’s difficult to find someone these days that doesn’t keep their phone nearby. Text messages, in particular, are opened far more often than almost any other marketing channel. With this in mind, why wouldn’t marketers want to use it in their marketing efforts? We’ve compiled some important statistics about text message marketing and its usefulness. Keep reading to discover just how effective a tool text message marketing can be. When Is It Being Used? Understanding how fellow marketers are using text messaging will help you better understand how to use it for your business. For one, marketers like using it for important and urgent messages. It’s also an effective tool when other channels prove ineffective. How Quick is Response? Everyone ...
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Email marketing remains one of the few media where you can engage with customers who signed up to communicate with you and are truly interested in your company. Reaching an audience who has agreed to receive your messages is becoming more and more rare these days. While social media is a necessary marketing channel, you’re not necessarily reaching people who are always interested in you. This makes email marketing an important tool. A recent State of Email Marketing in 2018 survey report by Clutch looks at how and why companies utilize email communication. Taking a look at the results might help other companies consider objectives that fit their organization as well. Almost three-quarters of businesses across most industries utilize email ...
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This post isn’t about us, as in Modern Marketing Partners. It’s about you. More specifically, it’s about your company’s website’s About Us page and why it probably needs some attention. Marketing professionals know (we look at Google Analytics) that About Us pages are some of the most frequently visited pages by customers, or more importantly, potential customers. They are one of the important stops a visitor on your site makes when considering to do business with you. And yet, many About Us pages are poorly written, lack creativity and are just plain boring. Think for a second about the last time you visited a company’s About Us page. You wanted to get to know the people behind the company, right? ...
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Yes, so maybe that headline gives remarketing a bad name. But we’re actually all for it. If done well, there’s real value in remarketing to visitors who have taken time to view your website, PPC landing pages, Facebook page, etc. Since only about 4% of people convert on their first visit, remarketing provides a powerful way to reengage those who have previously interacted with your company. Remarketing requires inserting a small amount of code onto your website and then once a visitor lands on a particular page, you follow them around (with targeted ads you’ve created, of course!) More specifically, once the visitor has left your site and then goes back online, whether to Facebook, into his or her email ...
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Agile Marketing is a relatively new concept in the world of marketing. It takes its name from agile processes used in software development around the late 90s. The real simple explanation of this approach is that marketing teams identify high value projects, usually centered around providing value to the customer, to focus their collective efforts on, work transparently and cooperatively until the task is completed, and then measure the impact/success or failure. Ever-Evolving Marketing Environment This approach is gaining traction because the marketing climate in so many organizations has become so fast-paced and unpredictable it needs some lean and agile principles to follow in order to remain productive and successful. Principles that take into account this volatility and uncertainty, and ...
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Creating a name for you new company may actually be your first foray into the world of marketing, whether you realize it or not. Your name begins the branding process of your organization and is a crucial first step towards its success. You’re setting the tone for how people will initially perceive your company. And remember the old saying, “You never get a second chance to make a first impression.” Everyone is bombarded with thousands of names daily. Only the really good ones are going to stick in anyone’s memory. So if you’re a start-up, you need to put some time and effort into creating a name for your company. You’ve got to hit the right chord in your market ...
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No pain, no gain. Dieting and marketing actually have a lot of similarities. Primarily, success doesn’t happen overnight; it takes place long-term. Finding out what works for the brand and implementing a plan to do those things is key to good business. Check out some dieting idioms and how they compare to marketing below. Set Realistic Goals 10-year high school reunion in September? It’s the end of the summer, so it’s unlikely you’ll be able to drop 50 pounds. 5 pounds? That sounds like a realistic, achievable goal. Same goes for marketing strategy. Your brand won’t achieve 100k new follows over the next month, but 50-100 is definitely doable. Set goals that the company can realistically reach, then take the ...
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