Category: Sales & Marketing

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]

ConsumerGeneratedMedia.com: Recently, my colleague Max Kalehoff and I put together a list of “Top Ten Principles of Consumer Consumer Generated Ad Campaigns.” Max added a few additional thoughts on top of this list in his most recent MediaPost column. You may also recall an earlier blog post on this topic in the context of Super Bowl advertising. Key message: by all means test the waters, but keep a good check list in front of you!
1. Connect The Program To Larger Business Goals: Ensure that your strategy aligns with well-defined goals and objectives, and create a measurement framework for program planning, tracking, adjusting and evaluating.
2. Keep It Authentic: Leverage the full creative power of the participants and don’t set narrow guidelines on the creative. .
3. Be Transparent: Don’t play fast and loose with the fact that the brand facilitated content creation.
4. Encourage Advocacy: Don’t be shy about allowing entrants to vote for their favorites and encourage their friends and family to vote.
5. Empower Syndication: Make it simple to upload, simple to share, simple to embed on blogs and other community and video platforms.
6. Tap The Long Tail: Don’t hesitate to leverage non-winners for other marketing purposes. Embrace them as passionate and loyal stakeholders, and use the Web site as a repository for their rich content.
7. Capture The Moment: Capitalize on “great brand moments” when consumers are highly vested and more likely to advocate, such as new product launches, purchases, or actual brand use and enjoyment.
8. Be Consistent: If you create an environment of dialogue and interaction, stakeholders will notice inconsistencies across other customer touch points or company silos.
9. Embrace Criticism And Deprecation: You’ve got to take the bad with the good. While a good strategy will acknowledge and plan for detractors, the reality is that everyone is empowered to publish.
10. Move From Campaign To Platform: Campaigns may have clear beginnings and endings, but there may be dimensions of your program that want to live on forever. Prepare a platform to facilitate and leverage sustained engagement and brand return.
Ten Tips & Principles of Consumer Generated Advertising Campaigns [ConsumerGeneratedMedia.com]

ClickZ: With all the talk about user-generated content (UGC), marketers often overlook one of the most effective ways to exploit this concept: providing a way for your target audience to share their photos on your site. With today’s tools, photo-sharing is easier and more cost-effective than you might think.
As a non-text content, customer photographs allow marketers to tap into social media. Though only a small percentage of users submit their snapshots, these images attract more viewers and others interested in experiencing them in other ways, such as mash-ups. These images can appear on your site, your blog, or photo-sharing and other third-party sites.
Add User Photographs to Your Site [ClickZ]

WiseCamel.com: Like you, I like strippers.
However, I generally find myself leaving the strip club with an empty wallet. Any business that can get you to spend all of your money is a good one to be in.
But while walking out of a club one evening, I realized that a big reason they have such a good business is because strippers are such great salespeople. It is not simply due to the fact that they are selling to stupid, horny men like myself, but because they use a lot of highly effective sales and marketing techniques.
You too can achieve great success by applying sales and marketing techniques of strippers. Here are the 10 sales and marketing techniques I have learned from strippers.
10 Sales and Marketing Tips I learned from Strippers [WiseCamel.com]