Thursday, April 16, 2015

Spring-Clean Your Event Marketing for Higher ROI

Part of your marketing department's spring cleaning should be a thorough review of event marketing plans to remove dusty, worn-out strategies and tune up for higher ROI. A recent MarketingProfs post helpfully lays out six drivers of event marketing ROI, and we suggest you check to make sure all are in place and running smoothly. First, make sure that all stakeholders are using the same playbook, with common goals and metrics for success. Executives may want increased lead quality, but an on-site team focused on maximizing contact forms regardless of quality isn't going to deliver. Next, plan how each event will engage its audience in a way that compels action and achieves goals, whether the aim is audience data collection, sales or brand message sharing. Just being there isn't enough. Third, make sure event strategy includes lead-capture best practices; namely, throw out those paper forms and embrace digital apps and auto-uploads for more accurate and timely data collection and database entry. Timely post-show data analysis, data distribution and follow-up with new and potential customers should be a top priority; marketing automation tools for e-mailing coupons, incentives and follow-up messages are one way to boost responsiveness. Also, benchmark results against competitor events and your own past events in terms of leads, sales, social profile, engagement, site traffic, brand awareness, etc., and adjust future strategies. Finally, debrief with stakeholders who were at the event to identify issues behind the data--such as booth location, technology glitches, audience feedback and even inclement weather--and fine-tune plans moving forward. For the complete article, go to http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2015/27463/six-drivers-of-roi-in-event-marketing

Tuesday, April 14, 2015

Study Reveals the 7 Habits of Successful Marketers

If you want to lead the market, you'll need to market like the leaders. There's no arguing with the results: Companies with more advanced marketing and sales capabilities have 30% greater revenue growth than the average firm in their sector, according to a recent benchmarking study by McKinsey & Company. Per a report by The Economist Group, the McKinsey analysis looked at more than 140 leading B2B and B2B2C global businesses and identified the seven marketing and sales hallmarks of the top-tier firms. The seven ingredients of the market-leaders' secret sauce: 1) view marketing and sales as an investment, not an expense; 2) know what needs to be fixed based on detailed marketing comparisons against best-performing peers; 3) target the capabilities that matter most, so that while there may be 40 marketing and sales skills impacting growth and profitability, the best companies focus on improving only about six; 4) don't try to do too much at the same time; 5) tailor improvement in marketing capabilities to current stage of development, whether the performance challenge is growth, profitability or both; 6) think about institutional capabilities and priorities, not just individual skills; 7) have an operating model with specific, measurable goals, embedded in a culture of review, incentive and leadership. For more on the study's "seven habits" of successful marketing and sales, read http://www.economistgroup.com/leanback/the-next-big-thing/mckinsey-study-revenue-growth-marketing-leadership/