My colleague/boss (when you’re a neophyte, everyone is your boss), Jeff Chamberlain, will be posting a blog soon on mobile marketing.  Mobile marketing is a new term for me, and I find the topic intriguing.  As such, I wanted to share a few of my own thoughts:

There have been multiple marketing fashions in the past 15 years.  Email, Internet, and Social Media marketing each ruled the world at one point, and still do in many ways.  Their value to marketers and consumers alike remains formidable, yet at the same time, I believe the world is changing.  A new force is entering the world; and it’s stronger and shows more potential than any other marketing tool.  This force is mobile marketing and it could become the king of communication.  So, move over LeBron James.  Other Kings deserve a chance in the spotlight.

Here’s why I think it’ll happen.  Unlike television, internet, email, social media, and other sources of mass communication, mobile phones are literally everywhere.  Cell phones outnumber computers 20:1 in sub-saharan Africa. I imagine that the same statistic would probably hold true for parts of Asia, Eastern Europe, Middle East, and South America.  Mobile phones have infiltrated every region and street corner in the world.   Toilet paper hasn’t even been able to accomplish that feat, yet.

With the prevalence of mobile phones, we have the potential to reach consumers that we previously thought unattainable, and we have the ability to increase brand awareness in more parts of the world that we could not reach before.  In essence, the mobile phone creates a new market of consumers.  No other media has been able to create a new market; they simply have allowed easier and better access to existing markets.  Being able to create a new market surely warrants a ‘King’ title, doesn’t it? 

B2B marketing is going through drastic changes with new information and new tools to support nurture or "drip" marketing.  The challenge, however, is the voracious appetite this creates for content in many forms and for many types of buyers.  How can we build and sustain a content engine?  Here's five steps and one bonus thought that should help.

Step 1 – Identify your “thought leadership” messages…what is unique, what is important about the value you provide your customers?

• Interactive Marketing Campaigns - Replace email blasts that don't work with campaigns that run continuously (24/7), serving up variable highly personalized content in the form of email messages, offers, inbound forms/surveys, microsites (PURLs), etc -- based on an individuals off and online behavior.
• Creative Control - Give Marketers an easy-to-use HTML designer that lets them create professional-quality marketing content for their online communication vehicles while protecting brand standards with templates and reusable content blocks.
• New Communication Devices (e.g., microsites, PURLs) - Reduce dependence on corporate web site team, and allow Marketers to create powerful "weblets" within a campaign to improve customer engagement outcomes
• Demand Generation - Provide controls to manage online marketing tactics or tools  that "sit outside" the 1:1 marketing campaign, but directly affect the outcomes such as search engine management, web analytics, web alerts, and banner ad management. 

If you're like me, you are constantly wanting improve your ROI in marketing. Paid search is one of the many tools interactive marketers use to stay a few steps ahead of the search engine management circus.

But, what does one do when conversion rates start to slip? No matter how well you have your paid search ads crafted, regardless of how well you use all of the technology for marketing tools offered by Google, sooner or later, your ROI will start to lose some of its luster.

Search marketing is a larger-than life project, one that requires major planning and insight. But sometimes, it's the smallest of strategy shifts that produce big results. And, with everyone trying to do more with less, these small optimizing ideas can be golden.

As any PPC guru is well aware, Google Adwords offers a plethora of tools to manage your paid search efforts. Two that are often overlooked are ad scheduling and IP restriction.

Ad scheduling will help search marketers fine tune their paid search campaigns by limiting when their ads appear within Google searches. If, you know that your prospects are going to be searching for you during business hours, does it make sense to run paid search ads on the weekends?  You can dictate when your paid search ads appear from the campaign management tab. 

Another tip would be to restrict your ads based on IP address. This tool can make your paid search budget go even farther and increase your marketing ROI. This easy to use tool is also found in the Tools section. By excluding IP addresses that have low conversions rates, you can focus your precious search engine marketing budget on more lucrative site visitors.

• http://www.aprimo.com/marketingstudio/splash/splash.html (a 3D Marketing Studio splash introduction)

Purpose of Marketing Studio Splash Page

• Blender 3D (blender.org) - create Box Animation: Output Targa
• Adobe After Effects  - import TARGA & animate icons; output FLV
• Adobe Flash - used to embed FLV and actionscript was used for the lights in the background

Challenge

So what's the big deal here? Well, here's what we know - as interactive marketers, we ...
 

• already use a collection of tools to manage paid search, search engine optimization, banner advertising, commercial email, triggered email, social media marketing, microsites, website traffic, lead management and the like.  Basically a bunch of execution tools.  Separate tools.  Disconnected tools.  And you (yes, it's safe to admit it) are the person responsible for meshing all this digital data and  producing intelligent insights (ahh yes, the elusive dashboard). 
   
• live in isolation from the rest of our marketing organization, in part because we're so different (and cutting edge) and in part because we're focused on the new stuff - the online world. 

Now let's be honest with ourselves.  As interactive marketers, we ...
 

• know it's impossible to integrate all these point tools and your customer's experience is falling short of it's potential.

• don't really want to operate as an island disconnected from our marketing mothership, as we fully realize that our online marketing activities have much greater impact when weaved into our offline marketing campaigns (and vice versa) - creating a seamless customer experience.

Yep, I agree it's a big deal - a really big deal!  So let's do something about it.  I invite you to learn about a new and truly innovative solution for managing your world of interactive marketing.  Visit aprimo.com/marketingstudio.  It's interactive.  It's integrated.  It's intelligent.  More importantly, I think it'll make our life a lot more enjoyable and bring a WOW factor to your online marketing. 

• Web Design (all graphical elements behind a website)
• Interactive Flash (interactive objects created using Adobe's Flash)
• Interactive Video (using Canon A1 + Adobe After Effects, Premiere, Flash, Encore, etc)
• Web Programming (everyone loves making forms!)
• Print Media (brochures, booths, flyers. etc)
• Web Analytics, Search Engine Optimization and Traffic
• How we use our Aprimo Marketing Software to fit our Microsite and Email Needs