marketing

SIIA’s Third Annual Marketing Survey is Open

October 1, 2013 By Rhianna Collier

SIIA opened its third annual marketing survey to gain insight on marketers’ goals and objectives for 2013.

Asking valuable questions that look into social media use, top marketing focuses, mobile marketing, and marketing communications, marketers will learn the metrics their peers and competitors are watching to determine the ROI of marketing activities and the areas where marketers continue to face challenges.

The previous reports show that technology is playing a significant – and in many cases, growing – role in corporate marketing. While nearly all companies have embraced social media marketing, other platforms, especially mobile, have only limited appeal for digital marketers. Last year, executives had yet to invest significant resources in their digital marketing efforts – though many appear ready to increase their commitment of both time and money. Will this be the year the results shift?

I encourage you to take the survey today and be a part of the ever changing industry. All survey respondents will receive the full comprehensive results and will automatically be entered into a drawing for an Amazon gift card.

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Filed Under: Software Tagged With: marketing, SIIA, survey

SIPAlert Daily – Increase webinar revenue with these tips

August 27, 2013 By Ronn Levine

Here are some tips for expanding your webinar reach. The first five come from consultant Leslie Davidson (pictured here) of Davidson Direct.

1. Your speakers! Ask them to get the social media word out to their customers and prospects. Have them write a blog post for you. Ask for a brief video interview that you can post on your YouTube channel and then on your blog.

2. List exchanges. Do an exchange of lists with a competitor or other company that targets the same or similar audience.

3. Trade associations. Strike a deal with an association whose members you want to reach with your message.

4. Incentivize. Give your speakers an incentive to spread the word by providing an affiliate link for registrants they refer.

5. Social networking. Join LinkedIn groups whose members belong to your target audience and let them know each time you offer a new webinar.

6. Higher price points. One SIPA member increased their webinar prices from $190 to $290 about 18 months ago and never looked back. They’re actually getting more attendance now. They also offer an unlimited site license for about $400 which is also doing well. This way you can also show the true value but still offer lower early-bird pricing. And it also makes it much easier to charge more over time.

7. Panel discussions. SIPA member Bulldog Reporter uses a moderator and panels for many of their webinars. In an upcoming webinar on pitching business and financial media, they have panelists from the Los Angeles Times, Fortune Magazine, Barron’s and San Jose News plus a former Huffington Post reporter. For a half-day webinar on measuring PR ROI, they have “practitioners” from National Wildlife Foundation, Hill & Knowlton, Research Data Insight, University of Miami, Dlvr.it and PRIME Research, among others.

8. Discounts (10-20%) for premium subscribers. If your system can recognize them upon registration and give them the discount automatically, all the better. You will be showing them the value of paying for the publication subscriptions.

9. Bundling. Instead of selling just your webinar, sell an annual or monthly membership to your site that includes the webinar. It’s good road to renewal to be able to start off a membership with that benefit.

10. Know your audience! One audience may like short pauses to have group discussions, another may need more time for Q&As—especially if you have a lawyer speaking. Be sure to survey your registrants to know that you are giving them what they want.

11. Be prepared. Have a good system in place to handle those last-minute desperate calls from people who don’t look at any of your information until the last minute.

12. Recordings. Decide whether the recording is important to your business. A recording link the day after the webinar can often boost sales significantly because you catch all of the people who can’t make it live.

To subscribe to the SIPAlert Daily, create or update your SIIA User profile and select “SIPA interest.”

Ronn Levine began his career as a reporter for The Washington Post and has won numerous writing and publications awards since. Most recently, he spent 12 years at the Newspaper Association of America covering a variety of topics before joining SIPA in 2009 as managing editor. Follow Ronn on Twitter at @SIPAOnline

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Filed Under: SIPA, SIPAlert Daily Tagged With: marketing, Webinars

SIPAlert Daily – Invitation Marketing may be next big thing

August 22, 2013 By Ronn Levine

Elizabeth McGovern plays Cora, Countess of Grantham, on the celebrated PBS show, Downton Abbey. It was recently announced that she will be the recipient of the 2013 William Shakespeare Award for Classical Theater given by Washington D.C.’s Shakespeare Theater Company. She has never performed at the Shakespeare Theatre.

“I thought it’s a nice thing to celebrate not only her successful career as an actress but the fact that she had classical roots to start with,” Michael Kahn, artistic director at STC,” told The Washington Post’s Jessica Goldstein. “And to encourage her to go back to that when Downton is over.”

Kahn also had something else in mind and was not shy to say. “Most of the time [after winning this award] they say, ‘Gee, wouldn’t it be wonderful to work here?’ And then I very often invite them.”

SIPA runs live events and puts on webinars as do many of our members. We try hard to feature our members as speakers—knowing how knowledgeable they are and giving them a platform to shine and become more known in the industry. It’s good for them and good for SIPA. But Kahn’s strategy—of giving an award and then an invitation—deserves a closer look.

Let’s call it Invitation Marketing. I googled this and came up with a post by Mike Shaffer on his blog called The Buzz from a couple years ago. He gave an example of waiting for a car to move in front of him when the light turns green. Shaffer gets upset, while his father used to “calmly ask the driver blocking the way if they are waiting for a ‘personal invitation.’

“As a kid, that always made me laugh. As a marketer, I use it to guide everything I do.

“Yes, it sounds silly, but who wouldn’t want a ‘personal invitation’ to a brand? If you communicate correctly, each in your target audience should feel like the brand is reaching out to them individually, inviting them to join the family. Then, it’s not a purchase you are making, but an investment.”

It’s a bit of a leap to go from inviting Elizabeth McGovern to star in a play to inviting people to purchase one of your bundles. Yet as more and more SIPA companies go the “member” route as a business model, maybe it’s not such a big leap after all. Your “members” are going to require a more personal touch than your subscribers did.

Taking this a bit further, how much personalized, invitation marketing can we afford to do? Maybe more than we think. When we think of personally reaching out to prospective members or speakers, we might immediately dismiss it. “Oh, I don’t have time to do that.” But what can be more important than getting new members and keeping the ones you have? Maybe we should leave time every day to make these types of calls.

Kahn doesn’t have to think that way. He can think in terms of, “Will this person make our theater money?” McGovern would. And there will be times when we think that way as well, when a speaker—say a high-ranking government official or well-known author—can make us money. We will not be worried about their member or subscriber status.

The Post article joked about who else from Downton Abbey Kahn could invite. “How about the hot Turkish guy, Pamuk?” writes Goldstein. “Let’s get Pamuk! Better yet: What are the odds of [the great English actress] Maggie Smith making an appearance in [Washington, D.C.]?”

“Maggie doesn’t even want to do a play anymore,” said Kahn, who obviously had already thought of that possibility (and who knows what type of award). “She said to me, ‘Michael, I’ve done them all. There’s none that I want to do anymore.’” You can just hear her saying that in her best Downton, I-told-you-so accent.

Invitation marketing? Stay tuned.

To subscribe to the SIPAlert Daily, create or update your SIIA User profile and select “SIPA interest.”

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Filed Under: SIPA, SIPAlert Daily Tagged With: marketing, members

SIPAlert Daily: Gamification can be powerful engagement tool

August 13, 2013 By Ronn Levine

Gamification–the use of game elements to promote desired behaviors among customers and employees-does work, and it will be the subject of the Luncheon Keynote at SIPA’s Winter Marketing Conference, Dec. 11-13 in Las Vegas. Joel Rothstein, senior director, eCommerce Platform & Rapid Products Group, Marriott International, will give the talk. Marriott has developed a new gaming app to attract the brand loyalty of millennials.

But gamification’s popularity as a marketing strategy extends far past millennials. Many of us enjoy a good puzzle or contest or entertaining way of doing something not always fun. For instance, Andy Swindler, president of SIPA member Astek (and a speaker in Thursday’s webinar on mobile), wrote last year about a site called Chore Wars that “lets you create a ‘party’ and adventures’ (or chores) for everything that needs to be done around the house.” Access Intelligence’s “min” website poses various fun quizzes and contests to build audience engagement. Even dating sites will now have you pick between two people like a dance contest instead of presenting just one profile at a time to review.

FourSquare got to where they are today because of gamification, although they decided this year to move away from it. But Gamification Corp. blogger Ivan Kuo explains, “Gamification isn’t any service’s endgame; it’s a design construct to engage users further.” There’s that key word for us—engage.

In his very popular Coursera session on gamification, Wharton professor Kevin Werbach lays out a six-step framework:

1. Define business objectives. Why gamify? How do you hope to benefit your business, or achieve some other goal such as motivating people to change their behavior?
2. Delineate target behaviors. What do you want your players to do? And what are the metrics that will allow you to measure them? These behaviors should promote your business objectives, although the relationship may be indirect.
3. Describe your players. Who do you want participating in your activity? Are they prospective customers, employees at your organization, or some other community?
4. Devise your activity loops. Explore in greater detail how you will motivate your players using engagement and progression loops.
5. Don’t forget the fun. This is why it works in the first place. Identify which aspects of the game could continue to motivate players to participate even without rewards.
6. Deploy the appropriate tools. Explain in detail what your system would look like. What are some of the game elements involved and what will the experience be like for the players?

Here are three other recent examples of gamification from the Gamification Corp. website:

- “NASA’s solution is an app called CloudSpotter, created by the Cloud Appreciation Society. Users take pictures of the sky, which are tagged by the phone’s GPS system, and then answer a number of questions about the clouds to determine what type they’re looking at….The combination of crowd-sourcing and gamification makes for a powerful asset for any organization, whether science or business-oriented.”

- Duolingo is a new learning tool that uses gamification to teach and reinforce language learning. It awards points for completing vocabulary exercises and keeps track of the learner’s progress through line scales and level badges along the way.

- There’s even a new app called PromiseUP that gamifies the promises you make so that you keep them. “By serving as a virtual feedback system, PromiseUP helps users keep track on their progress while enabling themselves to be accountable for their actions and promises.”

Las Vegas should be the perfect venue for Marketing Conference attendees to discuss gamification. Rothstein will give us an inside look at what makes Marriott’s programs successful, and I’m sure others will share their experiences as well. It really doesn’t take much to start using gamification. And if you do it well enough, there’s always Gammify, the 2014 Gamification World Championships!

To subscribe to the SIPAlert Daily, create or update your SIIA User profile and select “SIPA interest.”

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Filed Under: Marketing, SIPA, SIPAlert Daily Tagged With: marketing, SIPA

Perfectly Measurable

March 18, 2013 By Jennifer Hansen

Russell Perkins, ICG

Post by: Russell Perkins, ICG

How effective is your search engine marketing? It pays to take a closer look.

An interesting new study produced in cooperation with eBay and sporting the weighty title “Consumer Heterogeneity and Paid Search Effectiveness: A Large Scale Field Experiment,” raises some interesting new questions about search engine marketing (SEM) effectiveness. The study involved eBay actually suspending various types of SEM on specific search engines, and then closely monitoring the results.

SIIA Survey: Marketing Executives Believe Social Media is an Effective Tool; Not Yet Investing Significant Resources

February 8, 2012 By Rhianna Collier

SIIA’s Software Division today released “Marketing in Today’s Economy”— the first SIIA publication to gather business-to-business sales and marketing tactics from leading industry executives. As part of the guide, SIIA joined with Lopez Research to conduct a comprehensive survey of more than 100 marketing executives in North America. The survey focused on their companies’ use of email, mobile marketing and social media to build their brands, gain leads, and improve customer support.

One of the most eye-opening findings from the study is that a gap exists between attitudes towards social media and investment in social media. About 90 percent of marketing executives surveyed use social media marketing, and three quarters believe it has a positive impact on their business. At the same time slightly more than half (54.5 percent) of respondents said their company’s marketing team spends less than 10 hours per week investing in social media. And further, 35 percent said they spend only between one and five hours per week on social media marketing.

Social media has clearly become a widely used tool among B2B marketers and few doubt that it is helping their business. But the survey also shows that marketers may not be dedicating the resources necessary to get the results they want from social media marketing. It is remarkable to see that, despite their strong belief in the power of social media, over one-third of marketers are engaged in it for only five hours or fewer every week.

The survey suggests that marketers do recognize the need to dedicate more resources to their social media efforts going forward. About 65 percent of respondents cited social media as an area in which they would like to invest more spending, and over 70 percent indicated they expect to increase their use of both Twitter and Linkedin in the year ahead. And importantly, marketers are beginning to apply the same ROI metrics to social media that they do for other marketing efforts, both offline and online. For example, 59 percent of businesses are using social media use web traffic as an indicator of social media ROI, while 53 percent are using qualified leads as a key ROI metric.

Social media is still a relatively new method for growing a business, but marketers clearly believe it is has value and will require greater investment. And with more marketers now applying traditional ROI metrics—such as qualified leads—to their social media efforts, they are more likely to get a clear sense of what level of investment makes sense. The maturation process of social media is clearly underway, and we can expect to see significant advancements in the coming years.

The survey looked at wide range of issues, and found a number of other results that are important for marketers—including:

• 75 percent of respondents do not outsource any social media efforts.
• Nearly 60 percent of respondents said that less than 5 percent of their deals began through social network interactions.
• Privacy is the top ethical concern in today’s marketing world.
• Most marketers predict that the biggest trend in 2012 will be greater communication and quantification of value to customers.

The Software Division conducted the survey in conjunction with Lopez Research during the fourth quarter of 2011. The survey interviewed 106 marketing executives, of which 88 percent were business-to-business marketers.

In addition to the survey, Marketing in Today’s Economy features commentary from 16 leading marketing experts whose companies provide technology solutions or services across a spectrum of industries. The authors offer expertise on a wide range of B2B marketing trends and best practices—from social media to search engine optimization and cloud marketing.

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA.

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Filed Under: Mobility, Social Media, Software Tagged With: marketing, publications, social media

SIIA’s Third Annual Marketing Survey is Open

SIPAlert Daily – Increase webinar revenue with these tips

SIPAlert Daily – Invitation Marketing may be next big thing

SIPAlert Daily: Gamification can be powerful engagement tool

Perfectly Measurable

Webinar: 2013 SIIA Marketing Report Overview

SIIA Survey: Marketing Executives Believe Social Media is an Effective Tool; Not Yet Investing Significant Resources

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