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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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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Businesses are in the business of engaging customers. That requires having your thumb on the pulse of the marketplace and being ready to act at a moment’s notice. It means having a workplace culture that emphasizes flexibility and agility, while understanding the importance of utilizing technology and social media to build relationships and loyalty. Author David Meerman Scott’s book Real-Time Marketing & PR, provides marketers with the impetus to pick up the pace. With use of his examples below, organizations can determine why they need to be ready to respond quickly to unfolding events in today’s online environment, and why it’s sometimes even important to be the first to go there. The Value of Being First Starting the conversation early ...
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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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Live broadcasting offers businesses a way to give customers an inside look at their brand and tell their story in a little more interesting and engaging way. Companies of all sizes and social media budgets need to consider taking advantage of live streaming’s unique capabilities to provide timely content that captivates followers. This type of content is where all the growth is expected to happen over the next couple of years and therefore, stands to reason that it will boost a company’s growth strategy on social media as well. What is Live Broadcasting Live broadcasting can be done through these main social media platforms: Facebook Live, YouTube Live, Instagram Live or Twitter’s Periscope. Live broadcasting allows for real-time conversations with ...
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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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We are swimming in a sea of information today. Companies are racing to provide content that engages and motivates their audiences. They are also constantly battling to prove their worth to clients, stakeholders, and even funding sources. All the while, statistics show that people are bombarded with up to 10,000 brand messages a day, have an attention span of just eight seconds, and are spending more than half their day consuming media content. It makes it tough to be seen in the marketplace. This is especially true if you need to present numbers and statistics, which often are pretty dull and boring. Into the spotlight steps, infographics, which offer a unique way to tell a visual story through numbers and ...
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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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Sure, telling a buyer what your business can do for them is important; but it’s also important to prove that your words are more than just words. Case studies are a great form of proof that tells a potential customer what your business has already done in a compelling way. It also gives a customer a better sense of what can be accomplished for them and establishes a level of credibility and trustworthiness. Here’s everything to know about case studies and creating and marketing one of your own. 4 Benefits of Case Studies Why a case study? Here are 4 important reasons. Evergreen Content Case studies, for the most part, are evergreen. Even if marketing practices have changed, it offers ...
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Millennials are the most connected generation to date. And as marketers, that’s something we need to remind ourselves of every day. The reason being – they use that connectedness as a tool in their shopping and purchasing decision-making process. Our job is to find ways to leverage that characteristic in our marketing efforts. An interesting strategy for reaching Millennials to increase brand awareness and relationship development is to create a campaign on Instagram. Fifty-nine percent of Millennials currently use Instagram and about one-quarter say they plan to spend more time on it over the next year. Furthermore, a survey by Bustle found that 80 percent of those polled said social media is the best way to reach them, and of ...
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Please take a minute and check out your website’s speed at Google’s PageSpeed Insights. It really does only take a minute or two and it is paramount to your business’s success. (And also consider a more in-depth, free website analysis for more actionable tips to improve your complete online visibility.) Why? Page speed is and always has been important to how your website gets ranked in organic search from desktops because people care about how quickly they can find answers to their questions. Now as more people have moved their searches to mobile devices, this metric is now becoming imperative to searches of this nature as well. This was the impetus behind Google’s mobile-first index, which prioritizes how your website ...
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Creating the ultimate customer experience is a goal that organizations across all types of industries are talking about. In fact according to Gartner by 2018 more than 50% of businesses will focus their efforts on customer experiences. Healthcare organizations should be at the top of the list, working to make their practices positively connect with their patients. Healthcare marketing clearly revolves around patients’ needs and wants and as they have moved more online, so must marketing to reach and engage them effectively. And they are looking for help with everything including education, option evaluation, condition management, and so on. To serve patients better, marketers need to step-up their role and consider implementing these six strategic marketing tactics. Re-imagined Patient Portal. ...
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The movement towards building a customer centric company is leading marketers to consider a shift toward experiential marketing. Experiential marketing or engagement marketing puts the customer and their needs squarely on center stage. It is a strategy that immerses the customer and engages them to experience a brand in creative and unique ways. This helps customers form memorable, emotional connections with a company’s products and services, creating strong customer loyalty. It also allows for customers to have a conversation with a brand rather than just have messages pushed at them. The event or experience may be offline, but that doesn’t mean it can’t generate online content. You might not think that it can create dialogue, but according to the 2016 ...
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As more and more marketing moves toward a digital strategy, companies need to continue to delight and entice customers during their online experience. A pervasive and persuasive tactic happening during online shopping are pop-ups that feature promotion codes. Those great quick offers like – Use 4ofJuly at checkout for $20 off your order over the Fourth of July Weekend. Consumers are even going and looking for promo codes on sites such as RetailMeNot or coupons.com, if they’re not provided one. They offer value to marketers to help consumers feel like they’re getting the best deal around. They also offer companies a way to track the ROI of their campaigns. And there is definitely a psychology behind using promotions/coupons. According to ...
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It’s important for all marketers to stay on their toes and adapt to the ever-changing marketing climate. At the very least, it’s critical for their survival against rivaling companies; if they aren’t adopting the newest practices, they can easily fall behind. At the very best, marketers can spot a new way to gain an edge over competitors. So, what is the next big thing in marketing? We explore some possible theories. Voice Search Alexa, Google Voice, Siri – voice search is becoming widely adopted, and quickly. Consider that the trend is one of the most quickly adopted trends in history. 40% of US adults are using voice search at least once per day, and 60% of those have only started ...
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Search engine optimization (SEO) is evolving in 2018 as Google now says 100 percent of its queries are processed through its artificial intelligence (AI) program, RankBrain. RankBrain was actually introduced in October of 2015, but it wasn’t until last year that Google confirmed it is among the top three most influential ranking factors in its overall larger algorithm. What is RankBrain Rankbrain is an AI-powered tool designed to try and understand user intent, to understand what a user is really searching for and present those results. RankBrain is all about making the user experience more relevant. It looks at every user’s search terms, then compares these to billions of other searches and assumes the intent or the interpretation of what ...
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Don’t miss out on an important marketing tool…..your email signature. Yes, this often underrated feature included in every email is a powerful vehicle for establishing your corporate identity and company brand to a range of diverse stakeholders. To get a handle on why email signatures are imperative to good business communication, let’s consider the following statistics. According to Radicati Group’s 2017 Study, just over 3.7 billion email users send 269 billion emails each day worldwide. That marks continued growth from 2015 numbers that had about 205 billion emails being sent daily. The Study also forecasts an annual growth rate of 4.4 percent over the next four years, estimating that by the end of 2021 a little over 4 billion email ...
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Companies with strong sales and marketing alignment grow revenue at a 64% greater rate than those a little more fractured. It shouldn’t come as a surprise. In order for a company to be truly successful, you’ll want everyone – from HR to IT to Marketing – to be on the same page. If each department has separate goals, how can they work cohesively towards the company’s vision together? Marketing and Sales, in particular, rely on each other heavily. Marketing’s communications lure the customer in, and Sales ensures they commit to the final purchase. Without Marketing, there are no leads, and without Sales, there are no transactions. Because of their close reliance on one another, it’s important that they work together ...
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Demographics, although important, don’t provide you a complete understanding of your target audience. It’s often their interests, values, beliefs that act as explanations for consumer behavior. That’s where the collection of psychographics come in. What are psychographics? If demographics describe who your target audience is, then psychographics explain why. The “why” will tell you what consumers are expecting and looking for, giving you the opportunity to fulfill these needs. Demographic information often includes: Age Gender Race Employment Status Location Salary Psychographics, on the other hand, explore very different categories of information: Activities (work, hobbies, entertainment, etc.) Interests (fashion, food, etc.) Opinions (politics, culture, future, etc.) Psychographics greatly enhance your understanding of your customers, allowing you to improve your strategy. This ...
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Google recently released a new feature that will allow searchers to take actions, like making a reservation, right from the search results page or Google Maps. If you you own or work for a website or mobile app which offers restaurant reservations, appointment booking, online ordering, or other similar services which can be directly reserved or booked online by end users then you should leverage these actionable links. Here are instructions for implementing: How to Add Local Business URLS Your Google My Business listing can include links to specific actions which will appear with your listing within Google Search and maps. You can add your own URLs for the following actions: Placing an order Booking an appointment Reserving a table ...
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If you think having an app is only for big name brands and Snapchat, then you’re wrong. Creating an app as part of your marketing strategy is one of the biggest trends this year and it’s recognized among all types of businesses. Even celebrities are creating their own apps. If there is a part of your life you wish you could make easier (or more fun), then there’s always an app for that. Almost everyone with a smartphone has a slew of apps that they’ve downloaded for a reason. All marketers need to do is give the customers a reason for downloading your app. Here are 5 tips for promoting your app. Feature the App in a Blog and ...
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Stephen Covey published the hugely popular self-help book, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” in 1989. 14 million copies later, a number of copy-cat topics have surfaced across all disciplines, and you know marketing is on this bandwagon! Nevertheless, we think there is still an opportunity for another perspective. Perhaps a modern marketing filter? Thanks in advance for indulging. Of course, to begin such an assignment, a Google search quickly identifies several attempts at the subject. The search also results in some more focused topics like 7 habits of effective digital marketing, content marketing, and inbound marketing. During this exercise, I found, not surprisingly, an email marketing software vendor identifying data and CRM software as highly effective marketing habits. ...
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What is big data? It’s hard to say when it’s an evolving term in an evolving industry. Big data can be used in a number of different ways, which can be complex for a company with a massive volume of data. Each industry has it’s own structured and unstructured data to analyze, but as the marketing industry has transformed over the years, new software and technology has given businesses of all sizes the ability to reach an audience at lower costs. However, it takes a certain skill in analyzing big data and strategically reach the right customers at the right time.
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