Thursday, March 26, 2015

Lessons From Pet-Care Firm's Content Marketing

We help many pet care and animal welfare clients with direct marketing, and we'll be expanding our knowledge of market needs at the upcoming Animal Care Expo, March 29-April 1 in New Orleans. So we thought it especially timely to highlight a recent Direct Marketing News article about the content marketing success story of PetRelocation, a pet moving and travel service. After trying generic keyword and pay-per-click campaigns, PetRelocation decided to set up a content forum, using tools from Oracle Marketing Cloud, to address pet owner concerns, explains the DM News story. Great for customer relations, but it did a lot more. The marketing team culled popular answers from the forum to post directly on the website, for a boost to organic search results. The increase in online traffic and leads actually allowed the company to eliminate its pay-per-click ad spending. The content forum also gathered valuable testimonials that spurred lead-to-conversion. With the majority of annual revenue tied to online marketing, primarily content marketing, PetRelocation's success story should intrigue pet care marketers and B2C marketers in general. To read about it, go to http://www.dmnews.com/petrelocation-uses-content-marketing-to-drive-sales/article/404010/

Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Optimistic on Economy, CMOs See Budget Growth

If you're a marketer optimistic about the economy and planning to boost spending this year, you're like the CMOs of top U.S. companies. The CMO Survey found that chief marketing officers at Fortune 1000 and Forbes Top 200 companies are more optimistic about economic prospects so far this year than they've been since the start of recession in 2008, per a recent MarketingProfs report. The surveyed CMOs also expect marketing budgets to grow by 8.7% on average in 2015, the biggest increase since 2012. The digital marketing spend is expected to lead budget growth, forecast to rise by 14.7% this year, compared with an expected 1.1% drop in traditional advertising spend. Mobile marketing continues its charge, with mobile forecast to triple its share of marketing budgets from the current 3.2% to 9% in the next three years. Meanwhile, social media hovers at an average 10% of marketing budgets, even though the majority of surveyed marketers admit that they can't quantify results and have poor integration of social with overall marketing strategy. For details, see http://www.marketingprofs.com/charts/2015/27218/how-cmos-feel-about-the-year-ahead