Top 5 New Year’s Marketing Resolutions
January 1, 2009 by OA Group · Leave a Comment
With the beginning of a new year I thought it timely to suggest my top five marketing New Year resolutions for 2009:
- ROI, ROI, ROI! There may be some great sounding marketing tools coming out this year, just remember that the only thing that matters with a marketing campaign is that you make more money than you spend!
- Stay true to your brand’s mission. Do you remember the reason you launched your company? Return to your roots and your clients / customers will thank you for it.
- Create Raving Fans out of your customers. This can be accomplished by obsessively executing on what advertise.
- Work ON your business instead of IN your business. It’s easy to get caught up in the fast to day issues of your company. However to truly develop your business into a thriving organization you will have to develop looking term strategies that fuel innovation and growth.
- Always remember to not sweat the small stuff, and then remind yourself that it’s all small stuff.
Multi-Channel Marketing
December 22, 2008 by OA Group · Leave a Comment
Many organizations struggle to optimize online and offline marketing campaigns across an ever increasing number of new marketing channels. Silos of information reside in separate channel-centric technologies, and distributed marketing efforts, from both internal groups and external relationships, add organizational challenges to managing multichannel marketing efforts. Most of all, the proliferation of sales and marketing channels has made multichannel campaign performance difficult to track and monitor.
According to a new study published by Aberdeen, Best-in-Class companies are 1.5-times more likely to address these challenges by utilizing next-generation solutions that enable cross-channel optimization across an enterprise.
The report reveals how top performing companies currently execute multichannel campaigns to extract maximum value from their marketing investments. By combining organizational capabilities and marketing technologies, Best-in-Class companies are able to positively affect return on marketing investments and customer profitability.
“Traditional multichannel marketing is largely a function of delivering multiple separate campaigns across multiple channels,” explains Ian Michiels, Research Director at Aberdeen. “Best-in-Class companies are executing structured, collaborative cross-channel campaigns, and they are deriving extraordinary results from these tactics.” The top challenges organizations face when implementing a multichannel marketing campaign are data integration problems created by disparate systems, the lack of technology to centralize multichannel management, and the organizational challenges associated with department silos. “The challenge of executing, measuring, and optimizing multichannel marketing has far reaching implications that affect marketing performance, measurement, and customer retention and acquisition.”
How to Thrive During a Challenging Holiday Season
December 1, 2008 by OA Group · Leave a Comment
Ahhh, the holiday season is here. From the exuberant faces packed into the malls during ‘Black Friday’ to the hopefulness of New Years, this is traditionally the best time of year for brands and retailers. However the current market uncertainty has frightened the everyday consumer, and scared shoppers into frugal individuals. Essentially every major research agency is projecting the worst retail season in years, and these reports will most likely come to fruition. So am I saying to pack it in? Of course not.
Even though the season may offer several obstacles not seen in previous years, there is still plenty of opportunity for brands to emerge victorious over the next thirty days. Below are my three tips for having a successful holiday marketing campaign:
- Take a lesson in logic and live by Occam’s Razor, which states that the simplest answer to a problem is usually the best option. In other words, do not try to take drastic branding action over the Holidays in order to drive consumer awareness. When considering where and how your advertisements will be shown, live by the phrase: keep it simple stupid.
- If you have an established presence in the marketplace, continue to build deeper relationships with preexisting clients. Strong market research has shown that it is ten times as expensive to capture a new customer as to retain a previous client. So RIGHT NOW is the time to start hitting your email list, you very well may have a goldmine at your disposal of new sales from old clients.
- Cut all unnecessary spending and reevaluate all existing vendor relationships. You may be paying four services that have cheap of even free alternatives. A good example of this principle in action is CRM software. I have worked with organizations that pay thousands of dollars on services like Salesforce when web applications such as Zoho are completely free for small businesses and extremely cost effective for large enterprises.
It may not be easy, but if you stay smart this Holiday season your business can still flourish.
Reinventing Your Brand
November 24, 2008 by OA Group · Leave a Comment
I have previously discussed how important it is for a brand to strive to be different from its competition, not simply “better”. And I just reviewed a case study this morning that bolstered my belief in this principle. The perspective came from Jim Stengel, the former marketing head of Procter and Gamble, when he spoke at the Association of National Advertisers this past month. In his exhortation Stengel described how P&G’s Old Spice product had been stagnant for years, and had been consistently been losing market share to Axe for years.
But Old Spice has recently made a strong surge and has been robbing consumers from Axe like never before. So what h has Old Spice done to trigger the momentum shift? Stengel says the keys to success were two actions: Deep introspection, Switching ad agencies And what did P&G discover when they analyzed their brand? They realized they had no true market image, Old Spice needed a new image. Unless you have been hiding under a rock you have seen the result of Old Spice’s evolution.
I have placed an image from one of their latest commercials, Old Spice has successfully become the “older brother”of American males 14-25. This strategy and brand positioning has reborn the Old Spice product, and most importantly translated into market share ownership for Old Spice. So if you are looking to take market share from a competitor, do not look outside for your solution, take a page from the Procter and Gamble playbook, and look inside.
How to Achieve the “Cool” Factor for Your Company
November 19, 2008 by OA Group · Leave a Comment
I am sitting at a hipster themed coffee shop at the moment writing this post, and one question is dominating my thoughts:
What makes a brand have the “cool” factor?
The answer is that there are many ways to make a product or brand “cool”, the secret sauce is maintaining a laser focus on your objectives. Know thyself, know thy audience You can ask any marketing executive, “Cool” is a fickle and many times a cruel master. What I have discovered is that the top prerequisite for a brand establishing a sleek public image is to fully understand its target audience.
Let us take the case study of Apple and the iPhone. The iPhone has undoubtedly set the precedent for the “cool” factor as it relates to technology. It has achieved international mass market appeal and revolutionized the mobile industry. From day one Apple marketed the iPhone as the first mobile phone that had the full suite of features previously only available on traditional computers.
But the best marketing campaign in the world will not create the “cool” factor by itself, it takes a solid product offering. And the iPhone delivered (and then some). The device gave consumers:
- An unbelievable user experience
- Innovative hardware performance (touchscreen, Wii- like controls, etc.)
- Infinite functionally possibilities (the app store)
Also, Apple has successfully created an entire ecosystem that did not exist only a few short years ago with users, developers and advertisers seamlessly interacting together. And it is the combination of all these factors that create the “cool” factor for products. Put simply, the secret sauce of effective brand marketing is to never lose sight of type audience. If you can successfully maintain your focus on the pulse of your target consumer, you will consistently achieve the “cool” factor.
A Time for Performance
October 9, 2008 by OA Group · Leave a Comment
We are witnessing history right now, the past six consecutive days have seen three digit drops in the dow each day. Because of this I’ve received countless emails from friends asking if we’ve seen a decrease in ad buys, and my answer is: yes AND no. We have seen drops in traditional marketing (tv and radio) and traditional display (CPM banners). However our gross revenues and profit are up by over 30%. How is this possible? Companies are starting to migrate their advertising budgets to performance based campaigns. Performance based marketing campaigns consist of:
- Cost per Click
- Cost per Lead
- Cost per Action.
And since these marketing mechanisms are low risk to the advertiser, they are actually getting one of the highest return on their marketing investment in years! Regardless of how poor the economy is, companies still need to make sales and in order to make sales they need to market their product and brand. In an effort to ensure our clients remain profitable with their ad campaigns, we have progressively been moving our clients to performance campaigns. Right now is the time to be smart with your marketing dollars and there are plenty of outlets for you to cost-effectively reach new customers.
Going Viral
September 8, 2008 by OA Group · Leave a Comment
I’m on the bike at the gym right now, blogging from my blackberry (what can I say, life’s been busy since the transition). And I wanted to talk about viral marketing. Here at OAG we’ve done our fair share of traditional media buys on every platform you can imagine (TV, Radio, billboards, Search Engines, et al), however very few things excite me as much as a well executed viral marketing campaign. So what factors determine whether a viral campaign is successful?
Here are three prerequisites you have to have:
1. Timing and Targeting Positioning you viral campaign at the write time is vital if you want it to catch on. Examples of this are: Santa Claus pranks during the holiday season or new product launches during New Years. Targeting is also very important, keep in mind that there are more online video sites than Youtube. Some of the best viral campaigns I’ve seen have started on Vimeo and Break.com.
2. Entertainment level If the video is boring, NO ONE IS GOING to watch it, much less send it to their friends. Make sure your campaign is either funny or extremely intriguing.
3. Clarity You viral campaign could be shown to the right audience at the right time, however if the message isn’t clear it will simple be ignored. One of the companies that did a great job of this recently was ZAGG. ZAGG manufactures protective iPhone and iPod cases, and they produced a great viral campaign that spread all over the web, one of the clips is below.
Obsessive Agency Group Companies
