Category: Sales & Marketing

Entrepreneur Daily: When you’re designing your company’s next marketing campaign, why not take a look at YouTube first? That’s what McDonald’s did, and the results are paying off. Since McDonald’s has started airing a commercial featured on YouTube created by two Chicago men rapping about chicken nuggets, they’ve already seen increased sales in their nugget meals. “The buzz that has been generated has been substantial,” said Ken Ebo, McDonald’s Corp.’s New York marketing director. “I’ve heard radio station DJs chatting about it. You can’t pay for that.”
Before McDonald’s found it, the video was a YouTube hit with tens of thousands of viewers. The men who filmed the skit, also aspiring comedians, said they put the rap ditty together for the fun of it. Somehow, the YouTube video got forwarded to Ebo, and the rest is history. This commercial is a good example of the advertising world catching on to the advantages of viral marketing. It definitely saves in production costs, and it’s more of a sure thing. Before using the video clip, McDonald’s knew it was already a hit with the very audience they were hoping to target.
McDonald’s Viral Marketing Buzz [Entrepreneur Daily]

CNNMoney.com: Web-enabled game consoles are giving marketers new ways to target those elusive young males with money to burn. Cadillac tried a novel approach last year to get young male car buyers excited about its tricked-out V-Series Collection luxury vehicles. Rather than make its pitch through magazines, TV commercials, or online display ads, the automaker took its campaign to the Xbox 360.
Through an arrangement with Xbox Live, gamers were invited to download and put through their paces three virtual V-Series cars in a popular high-speed driving game called Project Gotham Racing 3. In less than six months, more than 240,000 players snagged the game. All told, they raced the cars more than 1 million times.
At a time when advertisers are struggling to get the attention of the mass audiences they used to reach so dependably through broadcast and print media, successes like Cadillac’s offer a beacon of hope.
Games advertisers love most [CNNMoney.com]

Entrepreneur: Sometimes choosing the best marketing tactics is like going to a restaurant with an unlimited menu. Even entrepreneurs with tight budgets or small niche markets have dozens of options. And it can be hard to separate the best from the rest. A great tactic meets three criteria:
It reaches your most qualified prospects.
It puts your message in the right context.
It gives you enough space/time to tell prospects what to do.
A business that specializes in cabinet refacing, for example, could run local cable TV spots during home-remodeling programs, including kitchen design shows. The spots would reach a qualified target audience in the appropriate context–when they were in the right frame of mind and most likely to be receptive.
Every great marketing tactic allows space or time for a call to action. This can be as simple as a toll-free number on a billboard or as complex as a direct-mail package with multiple offers. But an effective tactic always tells prospects what to do next. Can’t come up with a group of tactics?
Here’s a virtual smorgasbord of ideas to get you started. Outdoor media, Online advertising, Direct marketing, Broadcast advertising, Print advertising. Low-Cost Marketing Tactics would be Local Search, Podcasts, Blogs, Online Advertising, Expanding to Global Markets.
Smart Marketing Tactics to Boost Sales [Entrepreneur]

BizReport: With the increasing number of blogs and consumer review sites on the web many marketers are concentrating all of their efforts with these kinds of word-of-mouth efforts. And with 66 million adults sharing information online it is understandable why online may take precedence. However, marketers need to be just as aware of how their products and brands are faring offline. Though the online influencers may seem to have cornered the market on advice, the report explains that traditional advertising can actually influence the influencers.
These influencers are 64% more likely to begin researching products online after hearing an ad on television or the radio. Compare that to the only 30% who begin researching products because of seeing online ads.
Offline as important as online WOM efforts [BizReport]

BizReport: The report, called “U.K. Online Advertising”, puts broadband penetration, mobile Internet access, ad-serving technology and a healthy U.K. economy as the key drivers fuelling the growth of online advertising.
Online ad spending in the U.K. is forecast to reach 18 percent of total advertising spend this year, over double the percentage in any other European country, or even the United States. In fact, the U.K will account for just over 50 percent of all European Internet advertising this year and that figure is expected to rise to 52.6 percent in 2011.
U.K. online ad spending on the rise [BizReport]