Is Print Dead?

Author and magazine designer Brian E. Young has created this infographic to show the sorry shape of the print industry. On it he shows jobs by sector, print reading trends, tablet PC purchase intent, print advertising, book and e-book sales.

You may also be interested in Why Newspapers Are Failing.

Social Media Is Not Free - Measuring ROI

I have always preached that for Interactive Marketing, if you can't measure it then it's not worth doing.

Survey results released this week by Alterian found that "Thirty-seven percent of respondents said they are not able to measure ROI when it comes to the socialization of their brand, and 42 percent reported to be only somewhat able to measure ROI."

A year ago eMarketer reported that "84% of respondents said they don’t currently measure the ROI (return on investment) of their social media programs."

Measuring the ROI of social media activities is difficult because there are so many factors to measure and track. Below is a slide show by Olivier Blanchard that does a great job of explaining what ROI is and how it relates to Social Media.  Spoiler Alert! Although this story has a happy ending, your results may vary.

Olivier Blanchard Basics Of Social Media Roi

View more presentations from Olivier Blanchard.

See also:

• Can Social Media Help Small Biz?
• Industrial Marketers Shift To Online Marketing
• How The Mayo Clinic Uses Social Media

Why Newspapers Are Failing

Industrial Marketers Shift To Online Marketing

Acquiring new customers and generating leads and during the economic downturn remains both a top goal and a top challenge for industrial marketers, many of whom are turning to online marketing tactics to find new prospects and ways to generate revenue, according to the fourth annual survey of marketing and sales executives and managers in the industrial sector conducted by GlobalSpec.

The report, “Trends in Industrial Marketing 2009: How Manufacturers are Marketing Today,” says that 44% of respondents stated that customer acquisition is their primary marketing goal, with another 29% choosing lead generation. An additional 13% of respondents selected customer retention as their primary goal, up from 5% in 2008.

While lead generation is a key initiative for industrial marketers, lead quality outranks lead quantity when deciding where to allocate marketing budget. The survey also found that three out of the top four marketing channels for generating quality leads are all online.

The proven ability for online marketing to deliver high quality leads has encouraged many industrial marketers to shift to online marketing. Forty-eight percent of respondents reported that online is a greater portion of their marketing budget in 2009 than in 2008, and nearly one-third surveyed said they will be spending more than 50% of their marketing budget online. At the same time, 30% of respondents are reducing trade show attendance and 28% are reducing print ads.

Despite the increased shift of marketing dollars to online media, respondents still face a number of challenges in their marketing efforts. More than half of all respondents selected "too few marketing resources" as one of their top three marketing challenges in 2009, with "generating enough high quality leads for sales" and "need to improve my marketing ROI" rounding out the top three.

Other top findings from the Survey include:

• 63% of respondents will closely evaluate the performance of marketing programs and reduce or eliminate those that don't perform well
• 43% will expand marketing efforts to reach new industries
• 88% of respondents will spend the same or more on online marketing in 2009, as compared to 2008

About the survey: The fourth annual survey of its kind was conducted among US marketing and sales executives and managers in the industrial sector. Of the 555 survey respondents, 66% hold management positions in sales or marketing and 12% indicate they are a president/CEO. The respondent pool represents a variety of company sizes, with annual marketing budgets ranging from less than $50K to more than $1 million.

“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.”

Those words of wisdom come from Mike Tyson, the “baddest dude on the planet”.
A new documentary film, Tyson, tells the rags-to-riches-to-prison story of the former heavyweight champ. Hmmm... I wonder how many similar stories will be written about Wall Street whiz kids and mortgage bankers.

Strategic marketing is an essential element of any business plan. But what happens when you are punched in the face by the unexpected? While you can’t have a plan for every contingency, you can have a fit, well trained, disciplined team to react and turn the unexpected into an opportunity. After all, if everyone in your industry is on the ropes, the one who responds to the new market realities quickly and efficiently can gain the upper hand. An effective team with a depth of real life experiences and instincts can come out punching while the competition is down.

After all how many times can you get head-butted before you lose your focus and bite off someone’s ear?

Top 10 Triggered E-mail Programs

Ed Henrich has a great article in ClickZ on how to reach out to your most engaged e-mail subscribers in a relevant way. "Segmentation works, but often a faster, easier way is to develop a set of triggered marketing programs. These "lights-out" automated programs work while you sleep. You can reach out to your customers when they most want to hear from you -- when they're actively engaged."

His examples of trigger-based e-mail programs include:

1. Welcome E-mail Program
2. Cart-Abandonment Program
3. Transactional Messages
4. Referral Program from Net Promoters
5. Win-Back Campaign
6. Pre-Trip Countdown/Post-Trip Relationship
7. Browse Program
8. Special-Occasion Reminder Program
9. In-Stock Notifications
10. Automated Refill-Reminder Service

In this article Ed provides the purpose and benefits for each of these e-mail strategies.

Email Marketing Is The Most Effective

Datran's third annual survey of over 3,000 top marketers reveals that 80.4% still feel that email marketing is the most effective for their company, followed by search (56.8%) and online display (42.1%).

Many executives plan to increase spending in 2009 on these tactics in 2009 while decreasing spending in direct mail and offline media.

What is Needed is an Integrated Marketing Plan

In a recent survey, 56% of decision makers plan to increase their content marketing spending for 2009. The top six content tactics are social media (other than blogs), e-newsletters, blogs, case studies and online video.

Joe Pulizzi, the survey’s author says, "More and more marketing professionals now realize that tomorrow's marketing is all about developing a conversation with customers. Without valuable, relevant and compelling content, that's pretty much impossible. The numbers show that."

So should you follow the pack and put your resources into the new social media marketing? Your team may want to because they are busy Twittering, Facebooking, MySpacing and living in a virtual world. But are your customers?

In the old days we would talk about full-contact marketing or 360-degree marketing. It was all really just following the principles of reach and frequency to optimize the message delivery to compel customers to take the most desired action and to achieve business objectives.

Today, organizations are no longer in a position to just push the message at the consumer and determine when the message will be delivered and how. Many, but not all, customers are now self-serving, choosing to access information when and where they want via a range of channels – from online to offline, from social media to video.

What is needed is an integrated marketing plan that optimizes the mix of customer contacts with a consistent message in alignment with business objectives. The results must be measurable to ensure that business results are delivered and not just outstanding creative designs or fun new ways to communicate.

By managing the marketing process holistically it facilitates the development of best practices that not only ensures consistency, but also drives down the cost and time required for devising and managing new campaigns across the organization.

To Improve is to Change

Favorite quote of a quote from the new Sandy Carter book, The New Language of Marketing 2.0: How to Use ANGELS to Energize Your Market

"As Winston Churchill once remarked, 'To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.' Hence the most important challenge for today's marketer is how to keep pace with and take advantage of change."

10 Harsh Truths About Web Sites Of Large Organizations

Paul Boag on Smashing Magazine has a great article on the common mistakes that large organizations make running their Web sites. It includes 10 points. I've highlighted one below.

1. You Need A Separate Web Division
In many organizations, the Web site is managed by either the marketing or IT department. However, this inevitably leads to a turf war, with the website becoming the victim of internal politics.

In reality, pursuing a Web strategy is not particularly suited to either group. IT may be excellent at rolling out complex systems, but it is not suited to developing a friendly user experience or establishing an online brand.

Zeldman urges organizations to create a separate web division. Marketing, on the other hand, is little better. As Jeffrey Zeldman puts it in his article Let there be Web divisions: "The Web is a conversation. Marketing, by contrast, is a monologue… And then there’s all that messy business with semantic markup, CSS, unobtrusive scripting, card-sorting exercises, HTML run-throughs, involving users in accessibility, and the rest of the skills and experience that don’t fall under Marketing’s purview."

Instead, the website should be managed by a single unified team. Again, Zeldman sums it up when he writes: "Put them in a division that recognizes that your website is not a bastard of your brochures, nor a natural outgrowth of your group calendar. Let there be Web divisions."

Even better, manage Web sites, online and offline marketing as one integrated marketing strategy.

Long or Short Copy on Web Sites?

Jacob Nielsen addresses whether a site’s content strategy should use longer or shorter content.

The best answer: As long as it needs to be.

Dr. Nielsen founded the "discount usability engineering" movement for fast and cheap improvements of user interfaces and has invented several usability methods, including heuristic evaluation. He holds 79 United States patents, mainly on ways of making the Internet easier to use.