In our November E-newsletter, The Reel, we talked about using Linkedin to help build market share for your business. I came across an article in The 60 Second Marketer that provides five specific tips you can use to grow your business through Linkedin. No matter how small or large your company may be, this is powerful tool that will contribute to increased marketing ROI.
Here are the five steps the article’s author Linda Lindsey suggests that you follow:
1. Be the Face of Your Brand.
2. Think of Linkedin as a part of your Loyalty Marketing Strategy.
3. Use Offline Marketing Tactics to Drive Your Customers and Prospects to Join Your Linkedin Group.
4. Advertise on Linkedin.
5. Get Connected to Linkedin.
The importance of using social media marketing to build business is increasing almost daily. It has become an important channel in the marketing platform. B-2-B tools like Linkedin can benefit your efforts. You just have to take the time to leverage their power.
If you’re looking for additional information about social media marketing, I suggest your read my friend Shailesh Ghimire’s blog, Social Media Wiz. He talks about the business of social media and offers great insights that I find very beneficial.
I think the one positive outcome of our current economic crisis is that it’s forcing everyone to find new ways to increase marketing ROI with less dollars. Channels like Linkedin provide a benefit for today and tomorrow.
In my last post I talked about Seth Godin’s new book, Tribes. We Need You to Lead Us. Yesterday’s historic election of Barack Obama was the embodiment of Godin’s premise that, “The secret of leadership is simple: Do what you believe in. Paint a picture of the future. Go there. People will follow.”
One needed only to look at the scene in Grant Park and from other locations around the country to see first-hand how people followed.
In today’s Ad Age, they summarized it this way: “Nov. 4, 2008, will go down in history as the biggest day ever in the history of marketing. Take a relatively unknown man. Younger than all of his opponents. Black. With a bad-sounding name. Consider his first opponent: the best-known woman in America, connected to one of the most successful politicians in history. Then consider his second opponent: a well-known war hero with a long, distinguished record as a U.S. senator. It didn’t matter. Barack Obama had a better marketing strategy than either of them. “Change.”
The lesson here for all marketers is that capturing the “leadership” position in a market when it is seemingly impossible is very much possible. It takes vision, a willingness to form and shape opinion, and to have a plan others follow willingly and enlist others to do the same.
All politics aside, it was the ultimate case study for achieving stratospheric marketing ROI, and an historic occasion that we can and should learn from.
I read a great article today on the Manage Smarter Web site. The article’s focus was one of the primary things we talk to clients about all the time … tap into the power of your satisfied customers to increase sales without increasing your marketing costs.
I went to a prospective client meeting yesterday to discuss opportunities for growing their membership base. One of my first questions was to ask about their data capture strategy. Not surprisingly, Read the rest of this entry »
This is not a partisan post, but rather an observation on what we can learn about gathering data and then leveraging it to produce maximum ROI. The Obama campaign recognizes the power of data, and uses it to build their brand, involve supporters in a dynamic experience and create a highly intelligence-based approach to understanding their supporters.
Here is the first page that comes up when you go to Obama’s Web site. Pretty simple, yet a well crafted data-collection tool. It’s a good illustration of how to develop an personal conversation with your target.
There was an informative article on cnn.com today from Leslie Sanchez entitled, “Obama’s high-tech edge in presidential politics.” A self-identifed Republican, Sanchez was director of the Bush White House Initiative on Hispanic Education from 2001 to 2003 and is the author of “Los Republicanos: Why Hispanics and Republicans Need Each Other.” She is not a paid consultant to any current candidate. Sanchez is CEO of the Impacto Group, which specializes in market research about women and Hispanics for its corporate and nonprofit clients. It’s a good read and offers further insight into how the Obama campaign is taking data and using it in ways here-to-fore not used in political campaigning.
As marketers search for strategies to improve their overall ROI, I think there’s a lesson to be learned here. Take a few minutes and see if you can identify all of the opportunities the Obama campaign gives visitors to share information … just like the hidden pictures in Highlight’s Magazine. That dates me.
As marketers work to increase their overall ROI, they are faced with a huge challenge … staying fluent in the ever expanding number of ways they can connect with their audiences. I liken it to drinking out of a fire hose.
One of the ways marketers are improving their online ROI efforts is through behavioral targeting. Here’s a great video from The 60 Second Marketer that I use with clients to help them grasp more quickly what we are proposing to them. Enjoy.
I’m probably dating myself through this post’s title. I’ve always interpreted the phrase to mean putting forth the necessary effort to get something done. And I’ve just experienced first-hand how colleges are getting it done when it comes to understanding their audiences. Read the rest of this entry »
I get excited when I see what’s happening with the evolution of social media marketing. The biggest challenge remains how to monetize it and measure the marketing ROI. Procter & Gamble is taking a big step forward in that effort.
Brand Week reported that the Cincinnati-based giant is launching a campaign targeting You Tube fans asking them to submit videos giving their tag line ideas for the new Wintergreen Ice toothpaste.
It’s a brilliant example of the new age of advertising … where digital marketing and social media are allowing the consumer to drive the content as opposed to the advertisers.
And this will allow P&G to measure ROI on many levels. And that’s what excites me.
Think of ways you can apply this example to your business. What would you ask your customers to do?
For years, Cadillac’s focus was to affirm the buying decision of those who purchased one of their vehicles. Here’s an old ad that speaks about the women who drive a Cadillac. Read the rest of this entry »
I read a recent study on the Marketing Charts Web site that addressed the effectiveness and efficiency of companies’ on-line lead generation efforts. The results revealed that: the proportion of company respondents who believe that their organizations are effectively exploiting online lead generation to grow their business-to-consumer (B2C) customer base has decreased from 44% in 2007 to 41% this year.
A multi-channel lead generation strategy is essential to achieving maximum return on investment. And, well-designed “on-line’ component can be integral to delivering more qualified and cost-effective leads.
High Beam Research has an excellent article about “the mix” you can download as part of a free trial. It addresses the basics and even for seasoned direct marketers it is a good reminder of what’s important to a successful lead gen strategy.
It’s time to fully leverage on-line lead generation and use it to drive your overall CPl dowward.
