Blog

Apr 02
1

Have you Been Buried by the Marketing Technology Explosion?

By | B2B, Integrated Marketing, Web/Tech | No Comments

Recently I’ve seen a slew of articles about “modern” marketing and the explosion of marketing technology and data-driven systems.  These two images below show the sheer magnitude of the issue facing “modern” CMOs.  And it seems to be accelerating as evidenced by the fact that every week someone on my team sends me PO for some new must-have software/system/tool. I did an inventory and found that we use well over 120 different things [by way of background we’re a $500M company with 20+ in marketing]. So on a regular basis my small team [mainly creative/content folks] has to install, configure, use, monitor, analyze and update over one hundred systems.  And that’s just the table stakes since the real trick is to integrate these systems together and extract the insights we need to run our programs, measure our ROI and optimize our efforts.

So as a “modern” CMO you need to ask yourself the following questions:

  • How many different systems do you have installed? How many do you use?  What does right look like?
  • How do you integrate the various systems across your channels and down your funnel?
  • Do you have the right people on your team with the right skill sets?  How/where can you find employees with these new skills?
  • How do you get accurate, quality data and insights out of the systems in order to make good decisions?

marketing technology landscape

marketing tech 2

Jan 05
0
new reachlocal website

Starting 2015 in Style with a New Brand & Website

By | B2B, Brand, Web Marketing, Web/Tech | No Comments

And boom goes the dynamite — just a few minutes ago we launched our brand new website, the culmination of months of hard work.  I’m incredibly proud of the entire team for creating this gem of a B2B lead generation website.  From architecture, to design, to content, to dev, to QA we built it 100% in house. I am truly humbled by the creativity, dedication and drive by this special group of people. After a glass of champagne to celebrate they’ll finally get to go home and get some very well deserved rest.

ReachLocal Marketing Team

P.S. Note to self:  never, ever, ever launch a new brand and website during the holidays

Apr 09
0

The Launch and Marketing of Microsoft Vista

By | B2B, Integrated Marketing, Web/Tech | 2 Comments

Msft_vista_3





The
"Good" – developing and executing the marketing plan for one of the
biggest new product introductions in history … WOW 😉

I
attended an interesting presentation about how Microsoft launched Vista and Office 2007. John Roskill, Microsoft’s US
Business and Marketing Officer gave an overview of the marketing plan (audio,
video and slides can be found here).  As you can imagine with a launch of
this magnitude the marketing team faced many challenges including:

  • Reaching
    and persuading an incredibly wide range of customers from novice consumers to
    developers, IT gurus and business decision makers in the largest enterprises
    and governments. (B2C, B2G, and B2B)
  • Covering
    a wide range of product lines with an extremely broad value-proposition
    (Windows Vista, Office desktop, Office System Server, and others).
  • Managing
    the timing of multiple staggered launches on a global basis.
  • Competing
    against a large and determined group including Apple, Open Office,
    Apache/Linux.
  • Overcoming
    the "good enough" mentality of current Windows owners.
  • Managing
    a wide array of partners including hardware vendors, software developers,
    systems integrators, VARs and resellers.
  • Changing
    market perceptions such as "its been a long time coming" and
    "weak security."

The
launch objectives are similar to what you and I have written in numerous
marketing plans … Ready the channel, Build awareness, Create enthusiastic
advocates, Generate revenue opportunities / sales pipeline, and drive
partner-customer connections.  However, the execution of the plan was
anything but business as usual as they "touched" over 100 million
consumers in less than a month in the U.S. alone and developed 15 million
enthusiastic advocates that spread the message. 

Mr.
Roskill shared great insights on the strategy which are too lengthy to describe
here, but one thing that I took away was the need to move beyond transactional
marketing to relationship marketing.  Microsoft has finally gotten it and
this launch marked their shift from…

  • Point
    in Time Marketing to Continuous Conversion
  • Single
    Product to Solution Stack
  • Hitting
    the Masses to Targeting/Sub-segmenting/Measuring
  • Generic
    Call-to-Action to Customized Call-to-Action
  • Disconnected
    from Sales to Connected with Sales/Partners/Services
  • Offline
    to Online (blogs, wikis, reviews, etc.)

These
are good points to keep in mind as we develop our own marketing plans.
Its easy to stay true to the old way of doing things, especially since
relationship marketing is a lot more work.  But, as professionals we must
continually look for ways to take our game to the next level.  If we
don’t, our competitors will!

Mar 24
0

Did you know?

By | Web/Tech | No Comments

The "Bad" – trying to apply current/old marketing approaches to rapidly shifting markets

Not my normal type of post, but this video really made me wonder how I can keep up with the pace of change and how markets and marketing will be impacted.