Consider these simple methods for your upcoming marketing projects.

• Understand how you will define success. Keep your objectives simple, measurable and quantifiable. If your campaign objective is to increase qualified leads, determine what value a qualified lead brings to your company and how many you will need to have in order to make this a successful venture. Know what and when you’re going to measure and what action you’ll take based on the results. This approach, which we call unified marketing, is a way to optimize strategies based on data for an improved ROI.

• Know your key stakeholders, and define roles.  It is important to know who on your internal team needs to be involved in a project and at what level. Set your team expectations and roles early and identify a decision-maker who will filter feedback and discuss solutions with your agency. A RASCI document can be enormously helpful in setting expectations amongst your internal team. 

• Communicate schedules, but be flexible. Identify potential schedule needs and conflicts ahead of time. This will help to ensure the project is delivered within your scope and budget. If you need two weeks to secure approval from the Board of Directors, share this upfront so it can be accommodated. Tight project schedules often mean compromises to meet deadlines. If a proposed schedule doesn’t work for you, let your project manager know what you would prefer. Flexibility and communication will help produce the most viable schedule for you and your team.

• Share information. Arm your agency with as much qualitative and quantitative information as possible – include research, website analytics, customer testimonials and even your budget. A good agency will take this information and determine the best solutions to reach your objectives, even if your budget is limited. Some of the most creative solutions come from tight constraints.

• Be honest. This applies to everything from feedback on project deliverables to invoices. Honesty truly is the best policy and most agencies welcome a conversation. If something doesn’t feel right, don’t get upset. You don’t need that stress. Give your agency a call and have a conversation about it. Open dialogue and curiosity are encouraged.

• Close the loop. Analyze results to improve future projects and interactions with your audiences. For ongoing marketing efforts, review data often and use it to inform the next steps of your unified strategy.

Implement these steps to improve your relationship with your agency and, ultimately, the impact of your marketing dollars.

For more information on getting more business impact from marketing, download our latest white paper.

Elen and John will provide attendees with the ability to:

• Understand the differences between disparate marketing -> integrated marketing -> unified marketing
• Plan for how to audit and assess current marketing/communication channels for immediate measurement opportunities
• Map out a hypothetical cross-channel strategy
• Create a long-term roadmap to transition marketing channels into a truly unified marketing platform – one where marketing intentionally interacts with customer behaviors and provides measureable outcomes at every juncture

Interested in attending? Register on the Minnesota AMA website.

In the past, PR was stuck in a silo. Now the modern agency must infuse PR in an unbreakable chain of communications and marketing that affects the ultimate measurement – sales.

PR is part of an ecosystem that delivers a story through a channel – unpaid media. It’s a channel that receives and uses content developed by experts who know how to tell a brand’s story – whether through words or visuals. The result is compelling content that engages a target audience and moves them toward action. The same content can also be used in social media, email marketing and online ads. The mix of channels is customized based on research indicating how and when targets best receive communication.

This approach is called unified marketing, and is a way to strengthen all of your channels to an improved ROI. Not only do the channels speak the same messages (that’s integration), but they speak at different intervals, times and in ways that can be measured and optimized. It’s the new survivor of the recessionary storm, and one of the great byproducts of the search for a better way of marketing.

Are you ready for a unified marketing approach? You may be if you don’t know the answers to the following questions:

• What is your cost per lead?
• What are your channels doing for your business?
• What do your web analytics tell you?
• Do you have detailed information about your target audiences in a CRM system?
• How are you harnessing the power of content to market your company?

To learn more about unified marketing and how it can help improve your business results, download our latest white paper.

Marketers should be aware of the pros and cons of each channel, but shouldn’t decide exclusively between Facebook or a blog. Rather, examine where stakeholders are online and determine the content they’re seeking.

If you’re considering Facebook or a blog, think about how each aligns with business objectives, delivers customer solutions and measures reliably – we call this unified marketing.

A blog establishes a company as a thought-leader and improves search ranking.  Before starting a blog, consider:

• Do you have something to say?
  A blog’s purpose is to deliver quality content to your target audience, not to promote products. Quality content could be a post that solves a common pain point, information about a new industry law, a video tutorial, etc.
• How will you get people there?
  A blog won’t do anything for your business unless your target audience reads it. Think about how existing marketing channels (Twitter, printed materials, email) drive traffic to the blog.
• Do you have a call to action?
  A blog post without a call to action (CTA) is a missed opportunity. A CTA can be as simple as asking the reader to sign up for your e-newsletter or download a white paper.  A CTA converts readers into leads.

Facebook humanizes brands and allows for one-on-one conversations and visual storytelling. Before starting a Facebook page, consider:

• How are your stakeholders using Facebook?
  Examine how your stakeholders interact with brands on Facebook. If they’re already interacting with brands and sharing industry information, then it is an effective channel.
  
• Can you monitor?
  Facebook is a conversation tool – you must be a great talker and listener.  In addition, you must be available to monitor and respond promptly. 
  
• Do you have visual content?
  Facebook users expect visual content, especially in the timeline format. Compelling photos of customer solutions and videos of products in action are a must.

So here’s our take on the great debate: There isn’t a right answer. The best marketing channel connects a company with its target audience, while satisfying business objectives. To learn more about aligning business objectives with marketing strategy, download our latest white paper. See what we did there?

Here’s a look at the strategies you tell us you need most.

Adaptive content and channel plans

You see socially-connected consumers driving brand actions more than ever-before. They weigh in on Facebook and Twitter about bad product or customer service experiences, and demand what they expect from brands. This requires you to listen to what your customer base needs, and adapt your messaging and channel plan to change both what you offer consumers and how you communicate with them. To do this, build nimble marketing plans tethered to business goals that operate on a closed-loop planning cycle – meaning you test messages and channel strategies in real-time, analyzing results and modifying future strategies based on data.

Better way to measure ROI

You need a better way to demonstrate the impact your marketing programs are having on business growth. Measuring ROI has never been easy, but there are new ways to approach your marketing program to enable meaningful measurement. Look for new tools and information to measure critical data, such as an increase in sales, conversion rates and engagement with your brand over time.

Closer alignment between sales and marketing

To truly measure the return on your marketing investment, you need a solid partnership between sales and marketing.

• Arm your marketing team with information about revenue targets for products and services along with insight on which accounts will likely see the greatest growth. This allows them to tailor strategies to support the areas that will see the most significant upticks in revenue.
• Identify where leads come from and analyze which activities have been most successful in generating the most leads.
• Follow leads and prospects throughout the sales funnel, and communicate with them in ways that help nurture them to a sale.

Unified marketing programs are nimble, results-oriented and connected to sales. For more insights about what this means and how you can continue on a unified path, read our recent white paper.

Read the job posting and complete the application here.

The Partners in Preservation – Twin Cities communications campaign was honored with the 2012 Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) award from PR News. LaBreche’s partnership with American Express and the National Trust was deemed the most powerful nonprofit/corporate partnership CSR campaign of the year based on its creativity and – most importantly – its ability to align strategic objectives with end results.

To shed light on the importance of historic preservation, the program provided $1 million in funding to historic sites in the Twin Cities area. LaBreche rallied hundreds of thousands of community members to engage in a Facebook-based voting contest, which determined where the preservation funding would go. A combination of social media, local partnerships, event marketing and media relations all played key roles in the campaign’s success.

To learn more about our Partners in Preservation – Twin Cities communications campaign, hear our own Tami Kou talk about the work or read the full case study.

Understand your marketing efforts will not be the same from region to region. The need to customize and deliver messages within unique buying processes and business cultures is paramount. This means each region and target audience will likely have a different marketing strategy with different messages and communications channels.

As with any marketing program, start by defining your business objectives within each region. This will help to understand what measures should be taken to reach your end goal. Know what and when you’re going to measure and what action you’ll take based on results. This unified marketing approach ensures your efforts are tied to a strengthened ROI.

Consider these tips to optimize your global marketing efforts:

Select an agency partner that has established, proven relationships with other agencies in your regions of interest. These agencies will have the resources and expertise you need to reach your audiences with the right messages. Be cautious if agencies want to simply translate and distribute information into other markets from the U.S., or if they scramble to choose a partner just to meet your needs.

Commit to research your audiences within each region. Learn how they communicate, what they’re interested in hearing and how they prefer to be reached. This will help determine the appropriate mix of channels.

Share your international business intelligence with your agency partner. This includes the different sets of competition, industry standards and regulations, and levels of product category acceptance. With this knowledge, the agency can customize each region’s marketing approach and messaging strategy to best engage with target audiences.

Build collaboration into the internal and external global marketing team. This can be done through collaborative technical tools, an annual marketing summit, or by connecting your marketers and agency teams with sales people – the best barometers of how marketing within their territory is working.

Act unified. Collect and house data from marketing efforts in a centralized spot. Use this information to understand customer preferences so what you give them on every channel is timely, beneficial, and drives them to a measurable call to action. This is the heart of unified marketing, and what ultimately drives an improved ROI.

To see a global marketing campaign in action, read this case study.

Speaking of international marketing, follow Beth LaBreche on Twitter May 2 – 7 as she travels to Helsinki to meet with our global network of agency partners.

Ten years ago, creating a video meant hiring a professional crew and setting up three-point lighting. It also required a big budget. Today, there’s a strong likelihood you have the equipment you need on a mobile device or simple flip camera. Distribution is much easier, too. Today’s technologies and social media provide a number of cost-effective ways to share your content with the right people.

As with any marketing program or channel, start by defining your business objective and how you’ll measure success against it. Know what and when you’re going to measure and what action you’ll take based on the results. This approach, which we call unified marketing, is a way to strengthen all of your channels, keep them working in harmony with each other and ensure you’re tying your efforts to ROI.

Here are some considerations for using video effectively within a unified strategy:

• Demo your product. It’s true what they say – a picture is worth a thousand words. When one of our manufacturing clients discovered their product helped to substantially reduce noise, we recommended they capture the difference on camera. They did, and it worked.
• Have a presence on the number two search engine, YouTube. Upload your video to YouTube with a compelling title, a short description and applicable tags to help your search rankings. Remember to include a clear call to action at the end of your video. Make it something you can measure like an invitation to attend a webinar or request for a product sample.
• Tie it together. House your video on YouTube, but drive audiences to it from multiple channels. Feature it in your next email campaign. Use it to accompany thought-leadership pieces. Consider where it might make sense to appear on your website.
• Analyze, improve and unify. YouTube provides demographic and behavioral information about your viewers. Analyze this information to help improve future interactions with your audience and shed insight on your other marketing efforts – both online and offline. How did everything come together on key dates? Did your new video increase your web traffic and help drive additional inquiries to your sales team? Use this data to inform the next steps of your unified strategy.

For B2B marketers, video is more than pretty pictures. It’s a compelling, powerful tool that can help unify your marketing efforts and drive your business to the next level. Contact us today to discuss how you might include video in your unified marketing strategy.

We’re talking about “calls to action (CTAs)” – an image or text that prompts your audience to do something, such as view a product demo, download an article or subscribe to a newsletter. CTAs should lead to a form where you collect contact information in exchange for high-value content not available anywhere else. Feed the contact information into your lead database and, voila, you have a measurable action.

Why CTAs are important
Driving people to your website and tracking the number of visitors is an expensive exercise in basic arithmetic. Instead, turn your site into a powerful marketing engine. Drive target audiences to the pages most relevant to them (this doesn’t always need to be your home page), give them high-value content and then ─ this is what makes the difference ─ ask them to do something.

Five tips for effective CTAs
1. Focus. You’ve driven your target audiences to your site to find or read a specific piece of content. Why stop there? Use a compelling CTA to move them to the next stage of the sales cycle. For example, remember the email you sent announcing a new product? Next time, try linking it to a page inviting the visitor to sign-up for a demo webinar.

2. Provide context. CTAs are most effective when provided within the context of other page content. Let your audience take action in the moment. An invitation to download a research report should reside with page content speaking to the same topic. A demo sign-up form should show up where content focuses on product benefits.

3. Use active language. Words like “subscribe”, “sign-up” and “attend” inspire immediate action and give a sense of what will happen next. By the way, the overused “contact us” and “click here” aren’t strong CTAs. In many cases, they’ve become white noise on the page. “Contact us” asks the visitor to take an action without a promise of anything in return. That’s just bad manners.

4. Make CTAs visible. Oftentimes, CTAs are buried as links in the middle of a paragraph. Make sure they’re above the fold on the page and they’re visibly distinctive from the rest of the content. That doesn’t mean adding a large button to the page. Work with a designer to advise you on how to make your CTA stand out in a way that works with how site visitors will scan your page content.

5. Respond. We’ve seen many CTAs fall flat when it comes to fulfillment. Make sure to have mechanisms in place to provide the promised content as well as for following up at a later date. If you use a customer relationship management system (CRM), use it to automate the process. If you don’t have a CRM, you can – and must – still respond to your audiences in a timely manner. It may mean putting some manual processes in place. Don’t let that deter you. The benefit of focused communication with targeted audiences is worth the effort.

Whether on your website, in your email signature line or as part of a presentation, ask customers to engage with you in a way that’s meaningful to them and to your company. Ask for the action.

Speaking of CTAs, have you read our latest white paper, “How to get more business impact from marketing?” Download it here.