Steve Bork's blog

Search advertising has become such a huge industry that many Business-to-Business companies are either unaware of or have forgotten the cost effective way to gain additional leads based on organic product and service searches.  Pay-Per-Click or Pay-For-Performance models have seemingly buried the notion of exhausting natural ranking efforts first.  The latter term describes methods used to get your website ranked for targeted key phrases in search engines.
 

A recent issue of BtoB Magazine cites Rick Segal, Worldwide President of GyroHSR: “…a paradigm has shifted, (and) b2b marketing is not only obsolete, but it may well be very much dead.”  In creating a context around this statement, Segal explains the impact that mobile devices are having, as they transform individual people into communications network nodes.  As a result, this is changing the work and personal life balance that business people have t

Every company has an elevator pitch – the very brief description you give when asked what your company does.  Your response should describe the true essence of your company or brand – those characteristics that make it unique in the market. Thus, it is very important for your company to have a very carefully crafted “elevator pitch,” or as we call it, a Brand Franchise Statement.  

No matter where you are in the development of your 2011 marketing plan, or what approach you may use to arrive at your budget, I recommend you take a step back first to review some basic marketing planning strategies, along with a number of “new” considerations.  There are more tactics available than ever before, but success still relies on the ability to match the right combination of tactics to the business objectives you have set forth.  Here are a few ideas to keep in mind throughout the process.

The Study…

The Direct Marketing Association recently published an update to their annual study - The Power of Direct Marketing: ROI, Sales, Expenditures and Employment in the U.S. (2009 -2010 edition).  The results of the study compiled for DMA by author Global Insight indicate the following:

If you are like most sales and marketing professionals I know, every day you are besieged with companies selling products and services that pertain to lead generation, CRM systems, cultivating leads for conversion to sales and many other aspects of managing the Sales Funnel.  Here are just a few of the many types of companies and services I’m sure you’ve encountered:

Are your brands out of whack?  That is, do they have clear interrelationships?  Or do you intend for them to have  no interrelationships at all?  Is there an overall brand strategy that dictates which approach you are taking?  And, if there are interrelationships, are the brands properly positioned and leveraged to maximize their overall value and brand equity?

Given the growing importance of brands and brand equity today, it is surprising how poorly many brands have been developed or how often company brands are truthfully ignored.  Maybe this is in some way due to a lack of understanding what Brand, Brand Development and Branding are all about.

When I hear marketers talk about their companys’ branding, they generally speak to the subject with bragging rights.  They consider their brand valuable, and they know they need to continue to promote their brand with the right messaging.  However, they rarely speak of their brand value in accounting terms, and yet this is one of the largest assets owned by a company.