The job of a marketer is more complex than before. Changing consumer behavior and the impact of numerous social media channels require marketers to be more dynamic in their approach. Patrick Hanlon a Forbes.com contributor recently touched on this subject with his article Marketers Master Their Three P’s: Push, Pull and Portal. Navigating a method to get your message across may be a challenge in today’s cluttered media space but as Hanlon points out:

“The need for expertly integrated marketing is greater than ever, as marketers challenge themselves with creating a social imprint. When the social citizen is open and available 24/7/365 you’re either there, or you risk falling short of today’s expectations of what it means to be a brand in our all antennae-up bitstreaming world. Push media is still needed to create brand awareness and purchase intent—but media agencies are finding it harder to achieve reach from one program (or even one platform) alone.  Pull media like advertising is still critical to tell your brand story the way you want it told. Becoming a portal through  owned media is also not a standalone solution.”

Hanlon stresses the importance of all three push, pull, and portal working together across all media channels to facilitate the influential two-way dialogue brands can now have with consumers. This synergy between push, pull, and portal marketing enables brands themselves to become the content and the key to that synergy is a well-constructed narrative.

The chosen narrative allows your brand to become a portal or a go-to place for generated  content which favorably presents your brand values. The portal not only provides those who share your ideals a chance to belong to your community but also a chance to encourage purchase decisions.

How has push, pull and portal marketing influenced your sales and marketing communications? Need help constructing a narrative for your next business development project? Contact us.

A name is just a name – right? Well, it is until you get it wrong – and this may have critical impact on your brand without you even knowing it.

We have all had mail where our name is spelt incorrectly, wrong salutation, wrong title or even worse when it was addressed to our predecessor at a company that left years ago.

How does this make you feel? How does it make you view the company that’s sending the information? It doesn’t instill much confidence does it?

The importance of getting someone’s name and title spelt correctly along with making sure that you have their gender correct is the first step in building a trusted relationship.
Sounds simple right?

You’d think so, but in far too many instances, people assume information and that can be extremely harmful when reaching out to an executive you are looking to build a strong bond with, and it’s the little things that count!!

Below are just a few examples of how things can go wrong

Jerry or Jerri – male or female– well believe it or not most people assume it’s a man, without even checking the gender.

Steven or Stephen, White or Whyte – it’s the little things that can really elevate your profile in an instant.

Many companies believe the information they find from web based research is correct – however with over 15 years experience having conducted 5,000+ business development and marketing projects, we have seen this is certainly not the case.
All too often corporate web sites are out-of-date and have miss-spellings, along with job roles and titles being inaccurate – all starting the cycle of brand and relationship damage – before it’s even started.

The most accurate way to ensure you have this information correct is by personally talking to the company in question, the next step is ensuring that your CRM system is set up to capture these data points accurately, so that it is easily accessible when conducting your marketing and business development outreach.

So if you want to build trust and credibility – the first step is getting the name right!

To find out more how ELEVATE can help you build your trust and credibiltiy with accurate contact details for all your key decision makers, visit www.thinkelevate.com/data_transformation.asp

-Nick

-Nick

As most firms focus on hitting the quarterly numbers – one question that is repeatedly being asked by the Service Line / Business Unit leads is “what is marketing doing to generate actual revenues?”

I was recently discussing this with a CMO from one of the top 10 consulting firms, in particular, how the role of the marketeer has changed over the years and how the demands being put on the marketing function to justify their role in generating business is increasing every day!

Based on this and other similar discussions, I believe that in the next year of so – Marketing Leads will be targeted with actual revenue figures as part of their objectives. Will those who meet these objectives be heroes? And those Marketeers who don’t be a thing of the past?

How do you see the role of marketing changing to meet the revenue demands of the business in a more justifiable way?

To find out how ELEVATE can assist with optimizing leads that actually drive revenue to your organisation, visit www.thinkelevate.com/lead_optimization.asp

-Nick

We all know how to determine our target market – its simple – “we are targeting all the Fortune 1000 companies with 1bn plus turnover and we are connecting with C-suite decision makers” – right?

Correct – however in reality, when you really start to look at the information that you have – is it really complete, accurate and everyone accounted for?

Are you confident that you can touch every single company at the level you require to convey your message correctly?

Based on our experience over, most firms are missing over 37% of their total available market, in addition to this they don’t proactively update their database on a regular basis.

The impact that this has on your marketing efforts is huge – not only is the firm NOT connecting with all the relevant decision makers, the number of these decision makers are constantly diminishing – reducing even further the impact marketing has on this target market.

The key to reaching your Total Available Market is twofold.
- Firstly, identify every relevant organization and decision maker, and
- Secondly to make sure it stays that way – updated
I would be delighted to learn your experiences identifying and reaching your target available market.
If you would like to find out more how ELEVATE can help you in these goals, do not hesitate to contact me directly.

-Nick