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| Volume 9, Issue 8 |
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In This Issue:
 B2B viral campaigns that delivered: 6 examples
 Smart presentations: So what do you practice?
Three words can make or break a sale for women
Smart sales: A few of my favorite quotations
Stop blaming the economy!
 Serving customers in the downturn
Experts critique business logos
 Should a marketing pitch be focused or comprehensive?
 In email, emphasize quality, not quantity
Take off your Twitter goggles: Why marketers still need a blogging strategy
What's the color of your personal brand?
 Why we only listen to what we want to hear
 Big brands, lil' [iPhone] apps
Why I like red meat and potatoes marketing
Three inspired [company] social media profiles
 Best iPhone apps for creativity
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B2B viral campaigns that delivered: 6 examples
SUMMARY: We want to put the best B2B viral marketing campaigns in the spotlight next month at our 2009 B2B Marketing Summit -- which means we’re still looking for nominations for this year’s Viral Marketing Hall of Fame. So we thought we’d give you some inspiration. We’ve collected six B2B campaigns that were honored
in our Viral Hall of Fame to demonstrate how the tactic can apply to your lead generation strategy. Each write-up includes a description of the campaign’s goals, seeding strategies, results, and tons of creative samples...
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Smart presentations: So what do you practice?
When people say, "You need to practice your presentation beforehand," exactly what you should be doing to best prepare yourself may not be so obvious. Here are a few ideas to fill in the blanks:...
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Three words can make or break a sale for women
Speaker and entrepreneur Kelly McCormick's insider secrets on women and sales increase selling success on both sides of the counter. Frequently quoted in national media, Kelly offers insightful and entertaining presentations. Her "How to Sell to
Women and Selling Skills for Women" sessions are a hit with corporations, businesses, franchises, and associations, both nationally and internationally.
Women have come a long way in business. Who would have considered that more women than men would graduate with college educations and that women would pursue professional careers in numbers far surpassing most expectations?
The majority of demographers didn't see it coming. But even as optimistic as women have been about their own success, very few report feeling comfortable in their skins when it comes to selling. This becomes especially evident when women have to talk about money.
Three Words Can Change Everything
Three simple words can catch even the most seasoned female seller off guard—and I am not talking about "I love you." The seemingly innocent words that send many female sellers reeling are rarely spoken aloud. These success-sabotaging statements include...
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Smart sales: A few of my favorite quotations
I've always gleaned real value from other people's insights, especially when they aren't in sales.
Quotations bring things out of my own sales-centric world and provide me with the potential of seeing things from a truly different perspective. Over the years I've collected many quotations that I've used in my writing, speaking, and coaching. Here are a few of my favorites:...
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Stop blaming the economy!
Once the experts started to whisper "recession," you could almost hear the collapse of sales funnels everywhere.
Account managers continue to complain about how difficult it is to close business in this slowing economy. This doesn't come as a big surprise. Less than half of today's business-to-business sales professionals have ever weathered a true economic downturn. These folks learned how to sell in the nifty 90s, which was one of the
longest business expansions in U.S. history. Hey, it's not that hard to hit quota with double-digit market returns and huge growth in the number of new jobs. But what should you do when the economy taps—or slams on, in this case—the brakes?...
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Serving customers in the downturn
Smart companies will continue to spend on their best, high-margin customers. It'll help boost profits, improve retention, and offer a chance to poach from penny-pinching rivals.
Companies everywhere have reacted to the recession by lowering revenue projections and tightening their belts: delaying purchases, canceling nonessential travel, reducing payroll, freezing or shrinking the R&D budget, closing underperforming operations, slowing production, trimming inventories, reducing perks. And such
actions are usually necessary and appropriate in hard times. But executives also can overdo the cost-cutting, compromising one of their most valuable assets: their relationship with their best customers. Key relationships must continue to be nurtured and grown. The tough times will end. If a company's best customers jump
ship during the downturn, the company may never win them back. This is a universal truth that applies to virtually all businesses, in any country. Customer service, in both good times and bad, is the great intangible that can make or break a business. When others are cutting in this area, the wise executive will consider spending...
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Experts critique business logos
Logos can bring a business glory (Nike) or shame (Tropicana). That's why, before attempting to design a logo for your company or product, you need a clear understanding of exactly what the logo should convey.
What is your story? Your selling point, brand attitude, competitive edge, and place in your industry? Do you want to fit in with the market, or do you want to set yourself apart? After you have nailed down your business identity, consider where your logo will be seen. A logo that works well on packaging might not look so spiffy online or on a billboard. You want the look of your logo to be consistent, no matter where it is. Most important,...
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Should a marketing pitch be focused or comprehensive?
What's the best strategy for a sales pitch when there are many services available?
Q: We offer multiple services, including hold messages and Web design. In our marketing materials and sales pitches, should we promote all of our services or focus on one?
Amir Watynski
President
Watt Media
Coral Springs, Florida
A: Research shows...
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In email, emphasize quality, not quantity
Email marketing has rapidly become all about quality: the quality of the sender's content and the quality of the sender's email addresses.
It simply doesn't work to quickly throw together content and send to a large list of non-opted-in email addresses. Keeping the content simple and valuable is the key to crafting a quality email message. Trying to cram useless information into a message will leave the recipient with little choice but to abandon it with a quick
click of the "next" or "delete" button, or even worse—the dreaded spam button. Below, a few tips for boosting quality when creating email marketing content...
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Take off your Twitter goggles: Why marketers still need a blogging strategy
Twitter may be the all the rage, but it's not yet time to pull the plug on your corporate blog and stop monitoring all the blogs where people talk about your brand.
The emergence of Twitter as a hyper-popular social-media tool for marketing is not the death knell of the conventional blog; if anything, it highlights just how necessary blogs still are. Communicating in short, 140-character bursts has its own advantages—namely that brands can get their point across quickly and efficiently to
a key group of followers. But classic blogs offer a different, and still important, medium for marketers looking to connect with customers, partners, and the wider public. In fact, every marketer today should be using a two-pronged blog strategy:...
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What's the color of your personal brand?
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Adapted from "True Colors: Using Color to Build Your Brand," a previous MarketingProfs article (August 2004) by William Arruda.
As a marketer, you are likely aware of the psychological impact of color.
Color is one tool in our branding toolbox to help express brand attributes and create emotional connections with constituencies. But color is not just for large corporations or products on the grocery-store shelf; it's an important aspect of your personal brand as well. We all have opinions about color. We select colors for
our clothes and the walls of our house. But this article is not about choosing colors to highlight your skin tone or create a certain aesthetic in your home. It's about choosing colors reflective of your unique promise of value that you can use consistently in your career-marketing tools. To get in the right mindset for
selecting a color (or colors) for your brand, let's look at how companies use color...
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Why we only listen to what we want to hear
It might help to explain why you wrap up a meeting only to discover half the people around the table have come to completely different conclusions about what they are supposed to be doing to everyone else. It's because, in a world now awash with chatter and communication, we tend only to listen to the messages we want to hear and filter out the rest.
A study of more than 500 people by corporate training body VitalSmarts has argued that problems with remote colleagues are significantly more difficult to solve and last longer than those with on-site colleagues. What's worse and even more challenging for managers is that the most common means of coping with the effects of
distance tend not only to be destructive to working relationships but can also be destructive to overall productivity, it argued. When people faced challenges with a colleague who worked in a different location, they either tended to...
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Big brands, lil' [iPhone] apps
Today's mission: to see how a few of my favorite big brands are using iPhone apps.
As you might expect, I found a ton of great branded apps, both free and paid. My three top picks are below and share a common theme--they make life a little easier for their devoted followers...
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Why I like red meat and potatoes marketing
I actually don't like red meat that much, but I do love Omaha Steaks. I like them for the food--specifically the sole stuffed with crab--but I like them even more for their extremely smart email marketing.
I know, I know: we all like to grouse about email being dead. But for those who really understand how to work the email channel, it's very much alive and well and probably making them some real money. Back to Omaha Steaks, they first hooked me with a (gasp) direct mail letter. It contained a ridiculous offer for something like 40lbs of various meat products for $50, and they threw in a free one-handed salt and pepper shaker. Sold. We loved the food and I loved what came after even more...
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Three inspired [company] social media profiles
You've read the big social media blogs, followed the pundits' advice and tweaked your social media profile to your heart's content.
Make your social media presence even more engaging with ideas from these 3 inspired social media profiles:...
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Best iPhone apps for creativity
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Pack your phone with an easel, darkroom, notebook, crooning robot and more.
When I was a kid, our art teacher had a magical cart of craft supplies that she'd wheel into the classroom, a mobile art laboratory loaded with treasures for our grade-school masterpieces. Construction paper, googly eyes, glue, markers, scissors, paints, beads, ribbons--the cart had every raw material that we young Picassos might
have required. Decades later, I'm no longer on intimate terms with glue and glitter, but the idea of that art cart still holds strong appeal, a roaming studio that's at the ready when inspiration strikes. The iPhone is like a modern-day art cart, full of apps that let you write, make music, take photos, paint or create interactive
stories. These apps let you conjure your own grown-up version of a well-stocked art cart with just a tap of the screen. I have selected a collection of apps that are not overly complicated, giving preference to simple tools that let you express your ideas with ease and, often, a spirit of lighthearted play...
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