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Convention & Trade Show
Members of the CMA Content Marketing Show Committee have been busy at work designing a different kind of conference coming up on June 25th, 2013 at the famous Second City Theatre. Enjoy this "Behind the Scenes" preview. Disclaimer: Tony Danza wasn't available. But for the conference Coke, Telus, Lowes, Unilever, The Content Marketing Institute and many more will be available to teach us all about content marketing.
We know that brands are most effective when all their elements – logo, packaging, advertising, retail presence, service experience – come together as a single unique personality. Yet, in today's world of marketing, our means of communicating have never been more fragmented. Thanks to social media, brand messages are literally delivered in bits and pieces: a Facebook comment, a 140-character tweet, a Pinterest image, a LinkedIn update.
In my first post for CMA, I blogged about how loyalty programs are largely becoming a commodity due to their ubiquity and lack of creative differentiation. At a time when consumer demand and expectations are on the rise, program innovation just isn’t keeping up. And the reaction of consumers is a marketer’s worst nightmare … loss of interest.
It amazes me how often even companies selling web marketing services insist you contact them if you want a demo of their products. Even more of them won't even give you an idea of their pricing online.
Yes, I get that pricing may vary depending on the client and its needs (and, let's face it, their willingness to pay). But why waste everybody's time if your prospect has a budget of $1,000 and your entry-level solution costs $10,000?
We know that brands are most effective when all their elements – logo, packaging, advertising, retail presence, service experience – come together as a single unique personality. Yet, in today's world of marketing, our means of communicating have never been more fragmented. Thanks to social media, brand messages are literally delivered in bits and pieces: a Facebook comment, a 140-character tweet, a Pinterest image, a LinkedIn update.
Though few truly understand the inner workings of Big Data, the cause of Bad Data is all too familiar. It's the result of good old-fashioned human error: a dropped keystroke here, a pair of transposed letters there.
It might sound trivial. But for companies who increasingly rely on Big Data to remain competitive, data-entry errors - which hover between four and six percent for consumers - are an increasingly expensive headache in terms of data processing time, manual data cleansing and returned bills. At Canada Post, we regularly see customers impacted after they have incorrectly addressed their critical parcel deliveries.
How many times have you started reading an email on your phone while commuting, and then continued it on your laptop when you got home? Or perhaps you saw a commercial for a new car and then used your tablet to search for the specs and see it in action? If these things sound familiar, that's because they're all part of the new norm in multi-screen behaviour.
Remember the days when marketing was about putting up a billboard, a few radio and print ads and then attributing all increased revenue that quarter to the number of impressions these elements brought in? No one asked, "What was your cost per acquisition? How many leads did you expect? What's the ROI of your social media budget spend?"
Dr. Robin Dunbar invented the Dunbar number. This is the maximum number of people you can maintain a social relationship with. This number is usually about 100-250 people.
According to Wikipedia "Dunbar's number states the number of people one knows and keeps social contact with, and it does not include the number of people known personally with a ceased social relationship, nor people just generally known with a lack of persistent social relationship".
I read with interest from The New York Times that many Asian-Americans, who have benefited from booms in finance and technology, are making a huge difference in philanthropy in the U.S. They are donating large sums to groups focused on their own communities or their home countries. They are also giving to prestigious universities, museums, concert halls and hospitals such as Yale University and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The institutions, in turn, are also increasingly wooing Asian-Americans, who are taking high-profile slots on their governing boards.