Tag Archives: marketing

Channel Marketers–The Ninjas of the Marketing World

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Channel Marketing is such a specialized marketing challenge. I’m not a career channel marketer, I’ve only dipped my toe in that world with a couple of companies. I think in the world of all marketing professionals, the channel marketers are the ninjas. They are the stealthy ones convincing companies with all different goals, strategies, locations, and customer types to pay attention to their product and adopt their programs to sell more of their products. Also, as new trends come up like showrooming, big data usage, or mobile shopping, channel marketers are the ones standing at the bottom of that proverbial hill that the poo rolls down. They have to interpret how those trends affect not only their products but understand how it is affecting dozens of types of resellers and retailers and then determine how to respond. Whew!

So now what? We’ve all agreed that the ninjas of the marketing world deserve a fist bump, but in the ever changing world of technology and marketing, are there strategies that can help them? In a word, yes. The channel marketers newest weapon of choice to consider is affiliated exclusive discounts.

marketing ninjas use sheeridNote I didn’t say “affiliate discounts” that’s completely different. I’m talking about offering a discount for your products to pre-defined groups of consumers that your resellers can attract to create new and loyal customers. Instead of looking at your resellers existing customers and speaking to them, look outside of that to where new customers could be coming from. Here are a few examples, then we’ll talk about how you turn this strategy into a channel marketing program:

Businesses

Um duh, that’s covered. But what if you broke down businesses and offered discounts to the target markets you wanted. Create special programs for specific SIC codes, or for women- or minority-owned businesses, or specifically small businesses. Or better yet, offer the verticals to your resellers, let them decide who the program targets.
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Exploring Twitter Keyword Targeting to Advertise Student Discounts

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Last week Twitter announced the launch of Keyword Targeting for Promoted Tweets. If you currently advertise on Twitter using Promoted Tweets or Promoted Accounts, you already know that you can target your paid content by targeting by interest categories like stage of life, education, etc. or by targeting specific users’ followers.

So to create a campaign to inform college students about a new student discount using Twitter’s previously existing tools, you could use a combination of interest categories and users whose followers are likely to be college students. Your targeting might look something like this:

Odds are good that using these techniques you’d reach an audience that was mostly college students.

With Twitter’s new keyword targeting you can insert your branded tweets into the conversation that Twitter users are currently having about student discounts by displaying ads to people who have included your keywords in their recent tweets, or tweets users engaged with through retweeting, favorites, or replies.

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Using Facebook Partner Categories to Create Targeted Ad Campaigns

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If there’s one thing you can count on in the magical world of social media advertising, it’s change. As soon as you’ve zeroed in on a platform, type of ad, and budget that’s working for you, you can bet that an algorithm is going to change, a platform will push updates, or the social media network of your choice will introduce fancy new options that make your head spin. Case in point- last week Facebook launched partner categories for Facebook ads, and this week Twitter introduced keyword targeting for promoted tweets (but that’s another blog post…coming soon).

The beauty of Facebook’s new ad option is that it offers marketers one more way to create more targeted marketing campaigns. How does it work? I’m glad you asked.

Using offline data from Acxiom, Epsilon, and Datalogix, Facebook has created 500 partner categories based on demographics and spending to segment its one billion+ users and allow more narrowly targeted advertising. As an example, let’s pretend your company is launching a new, exclusive military discount for veterans and military families during Military Appreciation Month in May. This discount is deeper than anything you’ve offered before, and you want to spread the news to the military community using Facebook ads. Let’s also say you’re using SheerID to verify that only eligible veterans, active duty military, and military dependents can redeem your discount, which means you’re not worried about your discount going viral. You can use your ad spend to reach your target audience, not broadcast the discount to people who aren’t eligible to use it and drive up your cost if you’re paying per impression.

So you log into the Facebook’s power editor to create your ads, create the content, and you use Datalogix demographics to target 3,123,300 families in the United States with veterans in the household.

If your goal is to create even more buzz and brand awareness around your military-friendly business, you can also add 7,012,200 Facebook users who donate to veteran’s causes to your audience using Epsilon’s Lifestyles and interests data.

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Big Data- what is it and how is it used?

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Here’s the thing about Big Data. Thinking about it kind of makes my head hurt. Trying to wrap my brain around Big Data is like trying to visualize the scale of the universe or imagining how many millions of bacteria are living in my kitchen sponge.

I’ve read that the amount of information on the internet doubles every three years and that every single day we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data.  I had to do a Google search to find out how big a quintillion is. Apparently, if you made a carpet of pennies, quintillion pennies would cover the surface of the Earth. Twice. The mind boggles.

Luckily, what’s interesting about Big Data isn’t the actual data itself. It’s what we can do with it when we use apps, API’s and software to crunch those numbers and facts, chew all of the flavor out of them, and then spit out something interesting and useful. For example, our API bumps elbows with Big Data everyday as it compares consumers’ provided information against our authoritative data sources and returns a yes or a no to SheerID’s clients to tell them whether or not their customer qualifies for an exclusive offer. Because retailers can verify that only qualified customers can redeem protected offers, they can offer their customers deeper discounts and better deals. So the next time you use Shindigz military discount or buy the academic version of Norton’s anti-virus software for your computer, you should actually thank Big Data for the extra cash lining your pocket. It blows your mind, doesn’t it?

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Students’ Video Message to Retailers

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Be honest. How long has it been since you’ve actually been in college? 5 years? 10 years? 20 years? Yeah, us too. Being a college student now is a lot different than it was a decade or two ago. So while it’s perfectly acceptable to reminisce about the good old days with your fraternity brother or college roommate, thinking back on your own college experiences isn’t going to help you market to the class of 2015.

That’s why we teamed up with Kevin Brett’s PR class at the University of Oregon to interview their fellow students and provide old fogies like us with some insights into the shopping behavior of college students. Without further ado, here is the final product.

Clearly, one of the most effective ways to reach college students is with a student discount that you can market far and wide. And to do that, you need a protected discount that only college students can redeem. See where we’re going with this? That’s right. We can help by verifying that only enrolled college students can use your discount. Go team!

The Best Super Bowl Ad of 2013

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While the Niners fans in the office today are licking their wounds and mumbling about bad calls, and the Ravens fans are crowing triumphantly, there’s one thing we can all bond over by the water cooler, no matter what our team allegiances may be… the Super Bowl XLVII ads. There were the good (Budweiser’s Clydesdale spot is always a favorite), the gross (oh GoDaddy…), and the funny (nice work, Tide). But our unanimous favorite is Jeep’s 2 minute commercial honoring our military troops.

Partnering up with the USO, Jeep has taken the ad campaign to the next level, elevating it beyond a memorable Super Bowl ad to a full on movement, Operation S.A.F.E. Return (OSR), aimed at actually helping returning service members and their families as they come back home. In addition to sponsoring a day of service this week at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, donating vehicles to USO centers, and donating $1 to every time the hashtag #joinOSR is used on Twitter, Jeep has made a commitment to honor our troops every day by offering $500 cash back to active duty military and retired veterans.

Jeep is one example of a brand that is going the extra mile to thank our Armed Forces for their service and sacrifices. One of our goals is to make it easy for every company in the US to offer a military discount or some other token of appreciation to military and their families. Give us a call today so we can help you give back to the military community.

Deals, Not Debt

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Enjoy the first guest blog post of the year, by Ms. Dallas Abraham. Thank you Dallas for giving us the perspective of a current college student.

I am a unicorn of the student world: rare and wonderful. I will graduate from college soon with no student debt. None. Not a single dollar owed.

It has not been easy navigate this path. I have scrounged for scholarships, served in the military, and hoarded every penny that I use for tuition. I’ve saved on vacations by beaming a bright light on myself while playing a free MP3 of ocean sounds. Graduating with no debt has been my mission, and I’m almost there.

As a debt-free unicorn, I have learned a thing or two about finding a deal –information that every student in every financial situation could learn from me. What is this great wisdom that has helped me stay debt free? The frequent use of the Epic Student Discount.

The purchasing decisions of a demographic that cannot work a full-time job is predictable. We need to find the product that will do what we need and cost the least. There are so many choices in software todya. Knowing who has the best student discount often becomes the deciding factor. Some of the most expensive software purchases I’ve made were based on the lower cost of upgrading the software even if you purchased it with a student rate. This means that I will never have to pay the full freight price since I will always be upgrading my student version. Pricing options like that make it impossible to not spring for the purchase.

If you’re interested in offering a student discount to reach this valuable market and cultivate brand loyalty among college students, we can help.

Build a Great Body (for Effective Email Marketing)

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That carefully crafted subject line you wrote last week is guaranteed to get someone to open your email, but now it’s up to the body of your newsletter to keep them from trashing it. How can you inspire your customers to take action after reading your e-newsletter? I thought you’d never ask.

Offer strong content. If you’ve planned ahead, you already know what’s going in your email, now you just need to type it up and lay it out. Can you guess what I’m going to say? That’s right. Keep your content short and sweet. In every A/B test I’ve ever done except one, the shorter email had a higher conversion rate. A good rule of thumb is to aim for 400-500 words. Of course, you could be the one exception to the rule, so it won’t hurt my feelings if you do your own A/B test to see if a longer or shorter email performs better for you. In fact, I encourage it. If you wrote your clever subject line before your content, don’t forget to include the highlights you promised.
Include a strong call to action. Ah, the CTA. Your designers probably hate the ugly “Learn more” and “Buy now” you keep insisting on adding to all their landing pages and email designs, but that’s not a good enough reason to stop using them. No copywriter or editor wants to admit this, but the sad truth is, the people who are reading our carefully crafted email messages aren’t exactly hanging on our every word. The truth is they’re probably just skimming the content, looking for that one thing that initially caught their attention in your subject line. The call to action needs to be bold, clear, and preferably, above the fold. Don’t let your designers convince you to hide it within an image that may or may not load, or worse yet, skip it altogether. In this case, usability trumps aesthetics.

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Crafting Compelling Email Marketing Subject Lines

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So you did your homework from last week, your calendar is all filled in, and the content is bullet proof. Fast forward to January.

You’re working on the first actual email in the queue. If you want to know how to get customers to open emails, the secret to success is a great subject line. But oh the pressure! You know you only get one shot to make a good first impression, and your email is competing with every other email in your customer’s inbox for their attention. But every time you stare down that mockingly blank subject line field, instead of feeling inspired, you feel like taking a nap. Let’s break it down together. What makes a good subject line? I’ve pulled a few examples of actual subject lines from real life marketing emails that I’ve received in the last month to give you some inspiration

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Planning Your Email Marketing Content

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I am an organizational junkie. There is a special place in my heart for Google Docs and calendars. My fondness for planning makes me especially well-suited for managing effective email marketing campaigns. If schedules don’t make your own heart go pitter-pat, this blog post is for you. We’re going to figure out how to make it painless for you to create e-newsletters that are chock full of juicy, irresistible content.

For starters, don’t just recycle old news because you don’t know what else to put in this week’s newsletter. Plan ahead. In my past life I was an email marketer for a family owned craft business that sent weekly emails for their quilting, knitting, and tole painting brands (yes, tole painting is a thing. Google it.) I planned our content at least eight weeks in advance to coincide with our six week print catalog cycle. Maybe you don’t send your emails weekly, or maybe you’re tied to an awkward schedule; it might make more sense for you to plan quarterly or monthly. I’ll admit, planning in advance can be tricky, and you may have to stay flexible so that you can make adjustments based on inventory, revenue goals, or unforeseen circumstances.

The glorious benefit to planning ahead is that it gives you time to create strong content or to figure out how you can incorporate existing content from other marketing campaigns into your email marketing. You can also use email marketing as a tool to ramp up sales during slow periods if you can predict them using year-over-year trending by scheduling sales, product launches, or special promotions during slow times.

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