Market-NOW! - A blog for B2B marketing today

A Strong Corporate Identity is a Marketing Goldmine

When you hear the term 'corporate identity' you most likely either wonder what exactly it means, or know that your company has a strong or a weak one. Your corporate identity is vital today because it lets others know what your company stands for. Whether you are in marketing, or any other business, your corporate identity sets you apart from all the rest, and gives everyone in your company something to believe in. It is important because it reflects every aspect of your company. It represents not only customer interaction, but also the role your employees play in your company, and how they feel about it.

Dan Vivian, joint managing director of Design Group, has some great advice for those looking to create or strengthen their corporate identities. “You need to decide what is the core proposition of the company — what you do and what you sell,” he said. “If you don’t know what the company stands for it is difficult to create an identity. If you have no vision or proposition for the company, it will fall apart.”

Here are a few tips from Vivian on working up the most powerful corporate identity possible:

• If you don't know what your company stands for, have a brainstorming session with a few key colleagues from different departments and really hash out your ideas.
• The Goal: Come up with an image and message that will lodge in people's minds.
• Your identity should be as consistent as possible. Imagine it as one loud voice shouting from a rooftop instead of a lot smaller voices, which could get confusing.
• One key goal is to get everyone in your company backing the identity. Make sure your entire company is motivated by the identity, and that no one is confused by it.
• Identify your reasons for change. The reasons could be many or few, and can range from entering a new market to realizing new competition to simply becoming more visible in your sector.
• Once your identity is in place, commit to maintaining it and check in on it regularly to be sure that everything is still relevant and 'working.'

Click here to read the full article by the Times Online.

Multi-Touch Marketing Increases Campaign Performance

Have you ever wondered what exactly is a multi-touch marketing campaign? For those not in the know, a multi-touch marketing campaign utilizes multiple methods of reaching out to prospects in order to maximize the effectiveness of a campaign. An example would be a campaign that combines calling efforts with direct mail, email, and a webinar.

Though it may seem overwhelming, a multi-touch marketing campagin may be more simple to deploy than you think. We wanted to share some of our first-hand knowledge with you, so here are a few steps and tips to get you moving forward with your first (or 100th) multi-touch campaign.

• Brainstorm and research the best ways to connect with your prospects. Would a webinar be useful to them and present you as thought leader, or perhaps a direct mail campaign would allow you to advertise a special deal or upcoming event.
• Determine your budget beforehand so that you do not get sidetracked by ideas that you can't afford to implement.
• Have a follow up procedure in place if you are intending to use direct mail or email of some sort. Calls placed to the recipients of direct mail and email can tell you if your tactics are being recieved, and if so what the response to them may be.
• Think outside the box. A good brainstorming session with some colleagues may produce some interesting ideas for unique campaigns that may prove more effective than the same messaging you have used in the past.
• Be Consistent. If you are utilizing multiple tactics such as email and direct mail, be sure the recipient will know they are part of the same campaign simply by looking at them.
• Be flexible. If you are finding that the response to one of your tactics isn't as good as you had hoped, focus on the parts of your campaign that are doing well and put more time and energy into those. You may even consider doing away with the part of your campaign that is less effective altogether.

Multi-touch marketing is becoming more and more popular as companies strive to increase awareness. You may very well find that your most effective campaigns involve a multi-touch approach, but you will never know unless you try!

Create Eye-Catching Marketing Collateral

When creating collateral for your company, be it a one page newsletter or a multi-page document describing your top offerings, it is important to keep design aesthetic in mind. While the content is surely the most important part of your documents, you will experience much greater readability if you follow a few simple 'rules' when it comes to collateral layout and design.

• Utilize White Space! This is one of the best things you can do to create professional looking marketing collateral. Less is more, so don't cram all of what you have to say close together. Use more pages if necessary, or make your body text more concise.
• Be consistent in the Font that you choose. Use up to 2 different fonts per piece - remember that you can choose different variations of those fonts like Bold and Italic, or use different font sizes to increase interest.
• Choose a font other than the default. When you consciously decide to be more creative in your font choice, it conveys to your reader that you put thought and intention into your work (just be sure the font you choose is easily readable).
• Add Pictures! To avoid the 'yawn factor', add relevant and tasteful photos or imagery into your work to break up the text. Images can also be useful for creating sections in your work, allowing you to highlight different ideas or topics. Stock photos are a good choice because you will own the rights to use the images. Stock Imagery can easily be purchased online where you can browse through thousands of choices.
• Choose a color palette and stick with it. It is best not to use every color of the rainbow in your collateral - instead, choose a main color to use for your headlines and highlights, and then choose another color to use as a compliment if you wish. Muted colors often go well in marketing collateral, and using your company colors is a good option as well.

Creating an eye-catching collateral piece doesn't have to be overwhelming.  Just keep your style consistent, keep it simple, and when in doubt, leave it out.

Marketing Sherpa B2B summit - save $700!

This October, Marketing Sherpa will be hosting their annual B2B Summit and TSL Marketing is proud to announce our sponsorship of this event. At this event, learn how to:

• Architect a successful social media strategy
• Use Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to drive leads
• Accurately score, nurture and measure leads
• Align marketing and sales strategies
• Optimize PPC, SEO, email and landing pages
• Develop strategies to grow your list
• Generate B2B content your audiences will value
• Manage multichannel campaigns
• Market effectively to Fortune 500 companies
• Accelerate leads through the funnel

What makes this event unique:

You'll listen, learn and interact with B2B marketing experts over two days through an intriguing blend of instructional formats, custom tailored to provide value to marketers of all skill levels. Whether you're looking for intensive how-to training, interactive audience-led panel discussions or real-life case studies to add to your arsenal, B2B Marketing Summit '10 has it all. To receive a $700 discount,

 

More about the event:

The dual coast event dates and locations are:

• Parc 55 Hotel, San Francisco, CA - October 4-5
• Westin Waltham, Boston, MA - October 25-26

Click Here to download the event agenda

Join us! We would love to see your there and share some of the top insights for B2B marketing in 2010.

Social Media Marketing - Defined!

So you don’t know the difference between Digg & Delicious? You aren’t the only one! With all of the hype around social media, you might be feeling overwhelmed.  You know you need to ‘do’ social media, that isn’t the question, but it’s hard to get your mind around what it all means if you don’t understand the terms being used. Having a basic understanding of common terminology is your foundation to getting the most out of social media marketing.

We recently read the ‘Social Media Marketing Directory: 101 Terms to Know’ compiled by HubSpot, and thought that we would share some of the most common (and more obsolete) terms to help you feel more comfortable with social media marketing.

·       Delicious - Delicious is a free online bookmarking service that lets users save website addresses publicly and privately online so that they can be accessed from any device connected to the Internet and shared with friends.

·       Digg- Digg is a social news website that allows members to submit and vote for articles. Articles with the most votes appear on the homepage of the site and subsequently are seen by the largest portion of the site’s membership as well as other visitors.

·       Google Documents - Referred to as 'Google Docs' is a group of web-based office applications that includes tools for word processing, presentations and spreadsheet analysis. All documents are stored and edited online and allow multiple people to collaborate on a document in real-time.

·       LinkedIn- LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking site, mainly used for professional marketing. As of June 2010, LinkedIn had more than 70 million registered users, spanning more than 200 countries and territories worldwide

·       News Reader - A news reader allows users to aggregate articles from multiple websites into one place using RSS feeds. The purpose of these aggregators is to allow for a faster and more efficient consumption of information.

·       Social Media Monitoring - Social media monitoring is a process of monitoring and responding to mentions related to a business that occur in social media.

·       StumbleUpon- Free web-browser extension which acts as an intelligent browsing tool for discovering and sharing web sites.

·       Twitter- Twitter is a platform that allows users to share 140-character-long messages publicly. User can “follow” each other as a way of subscribing to each others' messages. Additionally, users can use the @username command to direct a message towards another Twitter user.

·       Yelp- Yelp is a social network and local search website that provides users with a platform to review, rate and discuss local businesses. Over 31 million people access Yelp's website each month, putting it in the top 150 U.S. Internet websites.

This report is brought to you by HubSpot.
To read the full social media directory Click Here.

 

 

Social Media: The Revolution

Is Social Media a Fad? This is what many people are asking across the world. As businesses become more inundated with the need to adopt and adapt social networking, there is still that question on whether or not social media will fizzle out. We recently ran across a video on youtube that I would like to share with you. Not only does the video speak of the revolution known as social media, but it also backs up this theory with a number of statistics; thus proving social media to be not only on the rise, but also too large to fizzle out. For example, social media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the web. While this is a funny number to mention, it also proves that search engine has become more about networking than personal use. Here are some additional highlights I pulled out:

• By 2010 Generation Y will outnumber the baby boomers: 96% of them have joined a social network
• Facebook added 100 million users in the last 9 months (the majority of facebook users are over 35)
• If facebook were a country, it would be world's 4th largest
• 80% of companies are using linkedin as their as their primary tool to find employees
• 80% of twitter usage is on a mobile device (imagine what that means for bad customer service)

As this article will note. Social media is not a fad, "it's a shift in the fundamental way we communicate." Check it out for yourself:

Happy Memorial Day from TSL Marketing!

TSL Marketing would like to wish a Happy Memorial Day to our American readers. We hope you all have a safe day and remember those who have served in your honor:

Happy Memorial Day from TSL!

Lead Nurturing: How do you measure up?

At the recent Marketing Profs event, lead nurturing was a hot topic many people were discussing. One of the things that caught our eye was how many people are not utilizing lead nurturing or are not currently happy with their companies lead nurturing efforts. We would like to bring this question to you and see, how do you measure up?

 

After collecting these results, we will be posting a new blog on our findings and determine if lead nurturing is getting the attention it deserves!

TSL is Sponsoring the Upcoming MarketingProfs B2B Forum

This coming week TSL Marketing will be sponsoring the MarketingProfs B2B Forum. We are excited for the event, and if you are planning on being there stop by booth 17 to say hello. 

These are a few event highlights...

• Get a comprehensive B2B marketing education
  
• Sharpen your B2B skills overnight
• Use social media to grab more attention
  
• Learn from your peers in the interactive discussions

If you want to view full agenda for the Forum, click here.
 
We definitely are looking forward to hosting the Wii station at the Forum, it should be a fun way to see everyone between sessions, seminars, and speakers. If you are planning on attending, stop by and enter the raffle for a chance to win the Wii at the end of the day on Wednesday.

If you are unable to attend the forum, check back in the coming weeks and we will be sure to share some of the new information, marketing trends, and sales advice we will learn about while we are there.

Event details can be found by logging on to the MarketingProfs website, or by clicking here.

 

TSL Marketing is sponsoring tonights "Sales Playbook!" networking event

TSL Marketing is pleased to annouced our sponsorship of Paul Castain's first official Networking Event for the LinkedIN Group, “Sales Playbook!”

The group recently surpassed the 10,000 members milestone, Sales Playbook! has evolved into a community that embraces the most value add discussion threads on LinkedIN, while remaining a spam free zone!  Sales and Marketing pros sharing best-practices and ideas, a group that fosters collaboration amongst peers with a common goal of achieving Mastery of our trade.   

Paul Castain will be presenting more about the group’s history, how it started, where we are today and where it’s going!  The event is free, you’ll be able to make lasting personal and professional connections.  With such camaraderie amongst group members, it is exciting to finally put a face and voice to the name.  We all spend so much time growing our Social Network, and we sometimes neglect the real value afforded to you when you convert that network into real life. 

The event attendance is Free of Charge and all are welcome to come and participate in this event!  See below for more details.

The event is today, Tuesday, March 23rd @ 6:30pm EST until 9:30pm EST. 
 
Revolution Rock Bar
200 High St., Boston, MA 02110
Phone: 617-261-4200
Website: http://www.revolutionrockbar.com/
 
Subway Stop: Blue Line – Aquarium
 
Parking Options:

• 1 International Place: Parking Entrance on Atlantic Ave. $6 per ½ hour – after 2 ½ hours is $34.
• Propark America Garage @ 99 High St.: $6 per ½ hour - $36 max
• 225 Franklin St: $22 per hour - $37 max
• Pilgrim Parking @ 265 Franklin St.:  $6 per ½ hour - $32 max
• Street Side: Some parking is available on side streets, bring quarters for parking meters. (Parking is Limited)
  

 
Dress Code: Trendy/Casual, Business Casual, No Sports Wear Allowed

 

Look forward to seeing you there!