7 marketing strategies that will turn a holiday fling into a long-term … – Mashable

As the many big brand holiday advertisements trickle out online (like the highly controversial spot from Bloomingdales), the imminence of the lucrative holiday period has hit hard for many small business owners, sending strategizing into full swing.

Amid the intense focus on scoring sales in a sea of competition, it can be easy to forget what should be the priority — winning a client who sticks around long after the final slice of ham is eaten and the lights come down. If the value of loyalty escapes you, know this: according to Harvard Business Review, increasing customer retention rates by just 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%.

With this in mind, we’ve gathered the top 7 marketing strategies that will win long-term commitment.

1. Give something for nothing

‘Tis the season of giving, but so many brands are too fixated on what they’re going to get to realize that it’s what they give that will win the long game.

One phenomenal example of this is OfficeMax’s on-going Elf Yourself campaign. Nine years on from its conception, the campaign has become a revenue source in and of itself with mugs, mouse pads, and even DVDs of your ‘elfed’ self available for purchase, but its popularity and incredible shares are in large part the result of being a completely free, personalized and relatively unbranded experience.

The much-loved campaign has generated incredible amounts of good will and loyalty around the brand.

2. Use custom content to make holiday searching extraordinarily simple

During a season full of stressful and time-consuming experiences, the number one way you can win a customer’s loyalty is by creating a website experience that is fast and simple. Custom content devoted to gift suggestions and sort-by functions are two simple ways to do this online — they minimize the noise to give the customer only what they really want to see — and the content developed can serve to inform in-store displays for on-the-go shoppers.

Indie online foodie spot Mouth do an amazing job of this online with a dedicated gift section that allows customers to sort by gift type and by price low to high. They offer just the right amount of options — enough to accommodate different tastes, but never so many that the shopper becomes overwhelmed.

3. Build personal connections with data

In a study published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, researchers discovered that waiters were able to increase their tips by 23% simply by offering their customers a second set of mints and framing the act as if it were for them and them only.

The lesson to learn here is that a personal, meaningful connection is essential to getting the most out of people, and the way to achieve this is through customer data.

Even something as simple as collecting data on whether a purchased item is a gift can be used to send a friendly follow-up that offers the buyer something special for himself or herself together with a query about how the gift was received.

4. Make the small print a big deal

During the course of the year, your refund or exchange policy and other fine print like gift voucher expiry dates should exist as a stalemate. Over the holidays, they can become a feature.

This is especially true for the ever-popular gift voucher purchase, where often terms and conditions are murkier territory. Being completely transparent can break down what otherwise might be a barrier to purchase and ensure the buyer and recipient’s experiences are highly positive.

Remember that no matter how transparent you may be, it’s crucial to have a strategy in place for when things go wrong or complaints come in. This will help your team turn a negative experience into a positive one for customers who misread or misunderstood policies.

thewaitinggame

Video: YouTube, kate spade new york

5. Get mileage out of your video

For a small business, video can get expensive. But if you have an amazing idea for video content, you can get extra miles out of it with editing and placements.

Last year fashion retailer Kate Spade created ‘#missadventure‘, a video series starring Anna Kendrick, and made the most of each clip by creating short pre-roll and shoppable formats. They also created 5-second clips made for mobile viewers with short attention spans and shared snippets across social media.

6. Use data to make changes

The increased traffic over the holiday period is a golden opportunity to get a sense of the way customers interact with your business in person or navigate your website, but all of this data is worthless unless you set a plan in place to actively make changes in the new year.

Metrics on where people bounce off your site, comments and complaints on social media platforms and maps of user flow (both online and in store) will help you improve your business. The trick here is in letting people know when you’ve made a change (through social media, email, or in-store) and asking for their feedback.

7. Bring real life, online and vice versa

If you’re still thinking about your business website, social media platforms, blog and real life presence as separate entities with separate strategies: stop. The best marketing strategies live across your brand’s entire presence, creating one cohesive message that shows the world what you stand for.

Starbucks does this incredibly well with each and every celebration. This year’s bizarre red cup controversy is a testament to how iconic the seasonal design tweak really is, and the brand seamlessly integrates this in-store activation online with an Instagram Red Cup Contest which provided content for Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter and a design tweak to bring the festivities to the business website. Despite a surely-enormous marketing budget, Starbucks still heralds simple ideas and consistency across platforms – and strikes success every time.

[Reminder] Live Webcast: Why Agencies Need Marketing Automation – Search Engine Land

It’s clear in today’s market that traditional media companies need to adapt to the digital environment to grow their market share. A major challenge for agencies is to be able to quickly and accurately identify which customers are ready to adopt a digital strategy while insuring their sales team a cost-effective and efficient conversion.

In this webcast, Abid Chaudhry of BIA/Kelsey and George Leith of Vendasta will discuss how marketing automation can help you identify quality leads, help you identify and nurture leads that you may have overlooked and boost your sales team efforts with better information about their prospects.

Register now for “Adapt, Adopt, Automate: Why Agencies Need Marketing Automation to Succeed,” produced by our sister site, Digital Marketing Depot, in partnership with Vendasta.

About The Author

Digital Marketing Depot is a resource center for digital marketing strategies and tactics. We feature hosted white papers and E-Books, original research, and webcasts on digital marketing topics — from advertising to analytics, SEO and PPC campaign management tools to social media management software, e-commerce to e-mail marketing, and much more about internet marketing. Digital Marketing Depot is a division of Third Door Media, publisher of Search Engine Land and Marketing Land, and producer of the conference series Search Marketing Expo and MarTech. Visit us at http://digitalmarketingdepot.com.
(Some images used under license from Shutterstock.com.)

Marketing automation battle for SMBs heats up as Salesfusion raises $13.5M – VentureBeat

Atlanta-based Salesfusion, a marketing automation platform serving B2B small and medium-sized businesses, is raising $13.5 million in a series B funding round. Investors include Noro-Moseley Partners, BLH Venture Partners, Alerion Ventures, Tech Square Ventures, and Hallett Capital.

Marketing automation adoption rates remain highest among B2B enterprises, but interest from the B2C and SMB segments is growing. In fact, every single one of the top five growing marketing automation vendors is focused on either B2C or SMB companies (or both).

Noro-Moseley led the round with that apparently in mind. General partner Alan Taetle said in a statement, “There is enormous opportunity for SMB players to adopt and leverage marketing automation the way the enterprise market has.”

From VentureBeat

How do you get consumers to connect with and engage with your brand flawlessly? This free and interactive web event arms you with the tools you’ll need to get ahead.

However, marketing automation remains a complicated space.

With a variety of features, and vendors that serve a wide set of business sizes and types, knowing which vendors matter most to your business can be a major challenge. And SMB marketers are often the least educated about their options.

Marketing automation vendors segmented by B2B, B2C, enterprise, and SMB.Marketing automation vendors segmented by B2B, B2C, enterprise, and SMB.

Above: Marketing automation vendors segmented by B2B, B2C, enterprise, and SMB.

Image Credit: VB Insight

Salesfusion competes somewhere between Hubspot, Act-On, and Pardot (which Salesforce now owns through the ExactTarget acquisition), each of which has deeper pockets and larger established footprints.

The injection of cash will help the company compete in a market of rapidly growing opportunity and interest, but also strong and growing competition.

The company said it will utilize the funds to launch the next generation of its product, Salesfusion 360x, and to increase its marketing efforts and expand its sales team.

We found in our research on marketing automation that, for marketers at SMBs, the criteria of highest importance is the ability to meet most needs off the shelf — that is, with minimal setup or customization. As companies tend to underestimate the resources required to benefit from marketing automation, it’s critical that smaller companies get their needs met without additional investment, as much as possible.

Salesfusion is betting it can deliver just what SMBs are looking for.

More information:

Salesfusion’s mission is to help marketers attract new opportunities, convert them into customers and nurture them into lifetime relationships. Salesfusion stands out among cloud-based marketing automation vendors for its superior le… read more »

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What you missed in Cloud: Smarter marketing – SiliconANGLE (blog)

Marketing providers managed to hold onto the cloud spotlight last week thanks to a series of major product updates offering to help sales professionals take better advantage of the software-as-a-service model. Demandbase Inc. led the charge with the introduction of a hosted platform for tracking the behavior of customers throughout the different stages of the engagement cycle, a notoriously complicated task that is especially difficult to achieve in the business-to-business segment where its clients operate.

The challenge stems from the fact that corporate buyers are far fewer in number than everyday consumers, which leaves a proportionally smaller margin of error for the behavioral analyses that marketers rely on to target promotions. Demandbase’s new B2B Data Cloud promises to improve campaign accuracy with a homegrown IP lookup engine that is able to identify the company to which a particular website visitor belongs and estimate their role using a profiling capability gained through its acquisition of WhoToo Inc. two months ago. The results can then be correlated with third party information like advertising performance metrics to identify the best way of reaching out to that particular prospect.

Nearly as important as the targeting functionality itself is the fact that the platform enables marketers to carry out the entire process in a unified browser-based environment. A company called Cloud9 IDE Inc. set out to provide the same convenience for the developers who support corporate marketing campaigns behind the scenes last week with a new edition of its namesake coding platform that has been specially adapted to Salesforce.com. The integration makes it possible to create custom extensions for sub-components of the customer management service such as the Desk.com support app, which received an update of its own against the backdrop of Cloud9’s announcement.

Care representatives can now quickly access account details when fielding a complaint from a customer to gain a better understanding of their problem and thus hopefully solve the problem faster. Salesforce.com Inc. sees the functionality coming particularly useful when dealing with high-value users who might be more inclined to make additional purchases later down the road if their requests are handled in a timely manner.

Image via Geralt
Maria Deutscher

Maria Deutscher

Maria Deutscher is a staff writer for SiliconANGLE covering all things enterprise and fresh. Her work takes her from the bowels of the corporate network up to the great free ranges of the open-source ecosystem and back on a daily basis, with the occasional pit stop in the world of end-users. She is especially passionate about cloud computing and data analytics, although she also has a soft spot for stories that diverge from the beaten track to provide a more unique perspective on the complexities of the industry.
Maria Deutscher

George Washington’s basketball star is marketing the school, and himself – Washington Post

George Washington University needed a few photos of athletes to decorate the side of a building this fall; the task of choosing those photos fell to a senior sports marketing intern, sitting in his temporary desk on the third floor of a Foggy Bottom row house. He thought it might be a good idea to highlight some of the men’s basketball team’s role players, and so he selected some possibilities.

“Well,” the intern’s supervisor said, attempting to be kind. “In this case, I think that we should use you there.”

“It’s like, ‘Okay,’” said a resigned Patricio Garino, who is both that marketing intern and the school’s most marketable athlete. “‘I’m not trying to be cocky or anything. But if you want me to, I’ll do it.’”

In this era of athletes who flock to sports management programs, it’s not unusual to find a basketball or football player interning inside an athletic department. But Garino — the 6-foot-6 wing who will attempt to lead the Colonials to a second NCAA tournament berth in three years — has more than a passing interest in the field.

He served on the board of the school’s Colonial Army fan club last season, going to weekly meetings and bringing posters into dorms to help promote student enthusiasm and better understand fandom. He met with the school’s golf coach last week, and is now the department’s point person for the golf program’s rebranding efforts. He runs weekly social-media reports for all of the school’s athletic teams, trying to figure out which accounts are performing best and why. He designed the online sign-up form for local grade schools that want to attend the Colonials’ Nov. 24 matinee — “just to tell us how many teachers are coming, if they want to order a pizza, if they’re bringing outside food,” he explained.

And he and the athletic department’s director of marketing and sales already have a half-serious succession plan worked out. When Garino’s professional basketball career is over, they figure, the director of marketing and sales will take over the head sports marketing position, while Garino slides into Chris Monroe’s current role. Yes, the school’s career leading scorer. That Chris Monroe.

Of course, Garino also thinks his current 12-hour-a-week internship might come in handy after he graduates in May, when he expects to turn pro.

“I think that would be a great pitch for a team if they want me: if you need some [help] in marketing …,” he said. It wasn’t clear if he was joking.

The 22-year old Argentine was already among the most prominent athletes on campus last spring, when he led the NIT-bound Colonials in scoring and made the Atlantic 10’s all defensive team. The offseason didn’t exactly hurt his profile. Garino accompanied Argentina’s “B” team to the Pan American Games, where he was hoping to “maybe get a couple minutes, feel the experience.” Instead, after an injury to his team’s captain, Garino was inserted into the starting lineup.

That put him in the mix for the ensuing Olympic qualifying tournament, where he was “just going for the experience of the training camp.” Instead, Garino made the team and wound up starting in seven of 10 games, as the Argentines locked down a bid to Rio.

Now, you have to understand what this meant to Garino. He was 11 years old when the country’s Golden Generation — Andres Nocioni and Manu Ginobili, Luis Scola and Fabricio Oberto — stunned the U.S. at the Olympics, and went on to win the title. He said he can “distinctly remember being in bed at 4 in the morning, crying, because they got the gold.” Now he was practicing against Scola and Nocioni — the two veterans on the qualifying roster — and being asked at a team dinner why he wore the number 29.

The reason was because his usual number — 13, in honor of Nocioni — was being worn by, you know, Nocioni.

“It’s very hard to describe,” Garino said of the experience. “Seeing them walk around, it shocks you a little to see you’re wearing the same gear as them, you’re getting ready for practice with them, you’re taking shots next to them. It’s kind of crazy.”

Garino logged the third-most minutes on the team during qualifying — behind just Scola and Nocioni. He guarded 2014 No. 1 overall draft pick Andrew Wiggins during a win over Canada. He averaged 8 points a game, despite being the second-youngest player on the roster. He now talks frequency with Scola, exchanges messages with Nocioni, went to Verizon Center to see Ginobili when the Spurs visited the Wizards, and figures to at least contend for an Olympic roster spot next summer.

The experience left Garino more eager than ever to play basketball full-time, but it didn’t damper his enthusiasm for his fall semester internship. He had entered George Washington hoping to study international business, before realizing “I totally hate politics.

“Being from Argentina,” he said, “our politics are incredibly bad right now, so I kind of took a step back from that.”

Which led him to consider athletics as a post-basketball career. He now talks with wonder about watching the ticket office print this year’s season tickets, and about helping them label the season-ticket envelopes. He got to choose the photographs to display in the rowing, swimming and cross-country offices; “that was pretty cool, I took pride in that,” he said. And he just received his first independent task: to serve as the marketing liaison for the golf team.

That means working on “marketing collateral” for the team’s golf tournament, measuring the dimensions for “environmental branding” in the team’s locker room, and meeting with the team’s coaches to discuss their motivational displays.

“I think they were a little surprised,” Garino said, describing his arrival at that meeting. “I know the coaches and everything, and they were like ‘Oh, can we help you?’ I was like, ‘No, I’m with the marketing department.’”

There was another double-take when a member of the golf team spotted the school’s best-known athlete.

“He walked in, and Patricio was feverishly taking notes, and it was like, ‘What’s going on here?’” said Nicole Early, the school’s assistant AD for marketing. “I realized very early on that the workload I thought he was going to be able to get through in his time here, he could get done in half the time. He’s taken on more than I even anticipated he would when he first got here.”

Garino’s working schedule will become less regular now that the season has started. In addition to his work with the golf team and the social media project, he’ll also remain involved with basketball marketing. Ask him about any highlights this fall, and he’ll immediately point to Monday’s home game against No. 6 Virginia.

“We’ve been marketing that game for so long,” he said. 

Of course, once the game starts, Garino’s role will change. He’s valuable to the school when he chooses photos for campus displays, labels envelopes and monitors Twitter accounts. Helping the Colonials knock off a top 10 team would offer a different sort of marketing.

What is affiliate marketing & why do you need it? – Econsultancy (blog)

No doubt you’re all sick of hearing about ad blocking by now, but it has opened up some interesting conversations around alternative ways for publishers to make money. 

Affiliate marketing is one such method, and it is also a way for retailers to sell more products with relatively little up-front investment. 

In this post I’m going to cover everything you need to know if you’re new to affiliate marketing, whether you’re a retailer or a publisher.  

In basic terms, affiliate marketing is when a publisher drives traffic to an ecommerce site in return for commission if those visitors take a specific action within a set timeframe. 

Usually the desired action is buying something, and the publisher will get a share of that sale in return for directing the customer to the product page. 

How does it work?

The process is split between the following four participants (I’m sure there’s a better word for it than that, but bear with me):

  • The merchant
  • The network
  • The publisher
  • The customer

The merchant

Otherwise known as the retailer or advertiser. A brand is looking to increase sales but all those content campaigns ate up its marketing budget and it certainly doesn’t want to shell out for more staff. 

So the brand researches how to achieve this seemingly impossible feat and comes across affiliate marketing as an option. 

‘What’s that? We can get other people to do all the work creating content and attracting customers and we only have to pay them once we actually make a sale? Where do I sign?’

Again, this is an extremely simplified version of events, but generally this is how it works from the retailer’s point of view:

  • The merchant gives a publisher a trackable link to its site.
  • The publisher includes the link in its content.
  • If someone follows that link to the retailer’s site and buys something within a certain timeframe, the retailer pays that publisher a percentage of the sale. 

The network

Some retailers, such as Amazon, have their own affiliate programmes. But many will go through affiliate networks. 

These networks effectively act as the middle man between multiple merchants and publishers. So a publisher could sign up and get access to any merchants that network is working with, and vice versa. 

(Note: these types of affiliate display ads obviously won’t get past most ad blockers)

Working in this way ultimately makes life easier for the merchant, but it does mean they give up a certain amount of control over where their products are advertised. 

The publisher

These are the guys that include affiliate links to retailers on their sites and promote the products of said retailers in the hope that people will click the links and buy something when they get to the other side.

If that does happen, the publisher will get paid a percentage of the sale.

Either that or they’ll get paid for each click or action the customer takes, depending on the arrangement they have with the link provider.

Some publishers include affiliate links in their everyday content, while other sites are dedicated to producing content with the specific goal of selling affiliate products. I’ll cover both types in the example section below. 

The customer

This is the consumer who clicks on the links on the publisher’s site and hopefully purchases something when they get to the merchant’s site at the other end.  

Different compensation methods

Around 80% of affiliate programs use revenue sharing to compensate, i.e. the affiliate gets a percentage of any sales that result from their affiliate links. 

But there are other payment methods available, such as cost-per-action (CPA), which could be used when the brand in question isn’t actually selling physical stock. 

Then there is cost-per-click (CPC), where the brand is simply paying the affiliate for traffic.

A couple of examples…

If you’re still not 100% sure what affiliate marketing is after my earth-shatteringly brilliant explanation, perhaps these two examples of slightly different approaches will help enlighten you. 

Smart Passive Income

This is an example of a site where the publisher built up a following and then started using affiliate links to gain additional income. 

The products are ones the author regularly talks about anyway, and his/her readers trust his/her opinion, so there is an opportunity to make money by using an affiliate link.

smart passive income affiliate marketing

As you can see from the image above, this particular author is very honest about the fact that he gets commission when people follow the links and make a purchase.

This is because he doesn’t to damage his audience’s trust.

Kitchen Faucet Divas

Some sites are specifically designed to make money through affiliate links, such as the example from Kitchen Faucet Divas below. 

This site is full of content related to kitchen faucets, including blog posts, buyer’s guides and how-to articles, with plenty of affiliate links to Amazon included. 

Kitchen Faucet Divas affiliate marketing

Kitchen Faucet Divas doesn’t explicitly say it makes commission from the links, but by only linking to Amazon pages that are completely relevant to the content, it is likely to avoid annoying its readers. 

Conclusion: an additional revenue stream requiring relatively low investment

Whether you’re a retailer or a publisher, affiliate marketing, like anything in the digital marketing world, is not going to fix your dying balance sheet all by itself.  

What it can do, however, is add another revenue stream without the need to expend masses of effort or money. This is particularly important for publishers with the rise of ad-blocking. 

But brands that go down the affiliate marketing route need to remember that it is effectively a form of advertising, and there are certain responsibilities that come with that.

Namely: protecting the trust in your brand or products.

Green Reit to start marketing new developments in early 2016 – Irish Times

Green Reit’s move into development is progressing well, the property investment company said on Monday, noting that it is now on site in four of its five development projects, with marketing for some, including Central Park in south Dublin, expected to commence in early 2016.

In an interim management statement the property investment company said that it has increased its annual rental income by € 1 million and reduced overall vacancy rate from 2 per cent to 1 per cent in the period from July 1st 2015.

Pat Gunne, chief executive, at Green Reit’s investment manager, said: “We are making good progress on our development programme against a background of rising rents and our focus continues to be on delivering as early as possible into the development cycle to reduce our exposure to market risk and rising construction costs. Our asset management has also been a great success with our estate at almost full occupancy.”

Other moves during the period included the renegotiation of the lease to its fourth largest tenant (by passing rent), Pioneer Investments, increasing the term certain by ten years to 2027 at a rent of € 51 per square foot;

With respect to specific developments, Green Reit said that its office project at Central Park in Dublin 18 is “progressing well”, and is on schedule to complete by December 2016. It will formally commence marketing the building in early 2016.

On Dawson Street in Dublin’s city centre, Green Reit has demolished its building at 13-17 Dawson Street. It expects marketing of the new building to take place from mid-2016, with an expected completion date of Q3 2017.

In Cork, the development of an office block at One Albert Quay “is progressing well”, the company said, and the overall letting level of the building is now at 68 per cent (by income), following Investec’s agreement to lease 3,717 square feet of accommodation on the ground floor for 15 years with a tenant break option in year 10 at a rate of €25 per square foot.

Honda finds marketing rhythm – Automotive News
Massive music effort targets hard-to-reach millennial buyers

Massive music effort targets hard-to-reach millennial buyers

Sponsorship of high-profile music festivals such as Austin City Limits is part of a massive marketing effort aimed at millennials.
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Automotive News

November 16, 2015 – 12:01 am ET

AUSTIN, Texas — It’s a hot October afternoon at the annual Austin City Limits Music Festival, and revelers have found shade anywhere they can: the few trees dotting the park where the event is held; a camp chair from home with a built-in awning; and the Honda HR-V parked on a small stand next to the festival’s artist-signing shack.

Honda, as it turns out, also wants to be cool — cool enough to make an impression on the hundreds of thousands of millennials who pack the park for two weekends every fall. Hence the HR-V on-site and the massive Honda Stage it faces, where popular acts such as The Weeknd, Alabama Shakes and alt-J perform.

Honda’s presence in Austin is part of a massive marketing effort that uses music to attract the fleeting attention of millennial car-buyers. The push, which started in June 2014, includes sponsorship of three high-profile music festivals — Austin City Limits, Governors Ball in New York and Music Midtown in Atlanta. Honda also partners with Live Nation, Sean Combs’ REVOLT TV cable network, iHeartRadio, Vevo and YouTube to aggregate videos of its live shows on the Honda Stage YouTube channel.

Fans visit the Honda-sponsored artist-signing shack at Austin City Limits.

So far, Honda says, it’s been a success, generating some 2 billion impressions (marketing speak for the number of times a tweet, video or advertising of any kind has been seen by consumers) since launching.

The effort is aimed at reaching those picky, digitally oriented millennials, especially the ones ages 18 to 25. They’re the kind of buyer that every automaker wants to pull in while they’re young and then keep as their needs and budgets grow.

And they’re harder than ever to reach.

Peyton: Part of an emotional experience

“It wasn’t long ago we’d be buying lots of MTV and CW airtime,” Tom Peyton, associate vice president of advertising and marketing for American Honda Motor Co., told Automotive News. “Now, the ratings aren’t there like they used to be.”

Today, automakers must think outside the traditional media box or risk losing out on an audience that’s critical to their brands, even if that audience isn’t buying vehicles today.

“If you’re an automaker who’s not doing this, you’re definitely behind the curve,” said Eric Lyman, vice president of industry insights at TrueCar.com. “This is where we’ll see more automakers move, into this kind of experiential and lifestyle marketing.”

Using something as emotional as music — and experiences that involve music — was what attracted Honda to this effort.

“You become an integral part of an emotional event,” Peyton said. “It’s rare that a sponsor can be part of that emotional experience.”

The Honda Stage video channel piggybacks on the established success of the Honda Civic Tour, which has been around since 2001 and has featured acts such as One Direction, Maroon 5, blink-182 and The Black Eyed Peas.

Fans of the bands flock to their videos online, and by tapping into their popularity, Honda says it saw video views for Civic Tour content jump tenfold to 18 million in one year, thanks in part to the tour’s featured artist, One Direction.

“They’re not on your playlist, they’re not on my iPod,” Nick Lee, national brand manager for Honda, said of the U.K.-based boy band. “But the people whose playlist it is on — 18- to 25-year-olds, skewed heavily female — that’s a really good audience for us to reach.”

This narrow approach also has risks. Since the marketing is specifically targeting members of a single age group, if it doesn’t grab their attention, it won’t grab anyone’s. “It’s like a rifle shot versus a shotgun blast,” Lyman said.

Even if that rifle shot does land, is it actually selling more cars to younger buyers?

“We believe it does correlate,” Lee said. Honda estimates that along with auto shows, when people are likely into the purchase funnel already, events such as the Honda Civic Tour generate some of the highest response rates from consumers.

Honda declined to specify how many sales its music marketing efforts influenced or how much it was spending on them, but the numbers are big enough to justify the “significant” costs, Lee said.

Some of the marketing and launch budget for each featured Honda vehicle is earmarked for the Honda Stage avenues. Honda generally favors pushing its cheaper, youth-oriented models in advertising linked to its music efforts, primarily the Fit, HR-V and Civic.

Despite recent successes, Honda executives know they’re now chasing a moving target.

“What worked last year won’t necessarily work the same way the next year,” Peyton said. “It wasn’t like that when media was media.”

Panera Bread: Marketing Flows Through Cost Of Goods Sold – Seeking Alpha

Summary

Panera released another update indicating their progress in transition to cage free eggs and pigs that are free of crates.

Investors may occasionally be worried about the impact of the cost of sales for Panera Bread.

The cost of sales is increased by using more expensive ingredients, but the use of those ingredients is a selling point for Panera.

Despite that, the cost of sales is still very competitive with other fast casual restaurants.

If you haven’t read Panera’s update on their Animal Welfare program and new commitments, you might want to check it out. Panera Bread (NASDAQ:PNRA) isn’t the only company advocating for the ethical treatment of animals, but they are one of the first restaurants to push so aggressively against the common practices.

By pushing against these commonly accepted practices Panera is able to generate goodwill with their target audience. That goodwill serves to bring in customers in much the same way as marketing expenditures. This is a recurring expense, but it is important to Panera Bread’s ability to bring in customers.

Panera Customers

I am a very frequent customer of Panera. I fit well inside their target demographics, and I regularly pay a premium for cage free eggs. I love bacon, but I don’t want to support inhumane treatment of pigs. Panera Bread pays a premium to support their stance on food and it works. I’m a more frequent customer because I feel that my purchase is voting for ethical treatment of animals. This may be a fairly common sentiment today as popular opinion has been changing.

Popular Opinion

There has been a shift in public thinking as people learned about the use of gestation crates. These pigs are in cells that are dramatically smaller for them than jail cells are for people that actually committed crimes.

This was a cost-efficient way to manage the pigs and lower cost production allows for the final product to be sold at lower prices. When Panera refuses to purchase hogs that are raised in the cheapest manner, they are forced to pay higher prices. I believe that this cost is material, but I also believe that Panera is making the right fiscal decision.

Financial Implications

Panera Bread’s commitment to better treatment of animals leads to higher costs showing up in their “cost of sales”, but it also serves as another type of marketing for the brand. I couldn’t care less how many commercials Panera Bread tries to use to reach me, but I do remember the ethical practices of the company and it does influence me to choose Panera over other options. Essentially, part of Panera Bread’s marketing campaign is flowing through the cost of goods sold. The costs of treating animals ethically will appear to be a continual drag on earnings, but marketing functions in precisely the same way.

When Companies Cut Marketing

How often have you seen a company indicate that they will “cut expenses” by not advertising? It’s fairly rare, and the one time I’ve seen it turn out remarkably well was when Monster (NASDAQ:MNST) pulled the move. I saw the decline and thought they were about to fall apart and slapped a bearish rating on them. Shortly after that shares rallied hard when it was announced that Coke (NYSE:KO) had acquired a huge chunk of the brand. Their decision to reduce their advertising commitments made perfect sense when it was revealed that they would be modifying their strategy to take advantage of Coke’s distribution system.

Essentially, what I’m suggesting is that marketing is a very important expense for the company, regardless of how the cost is recognized. The one time when it appears to be okay to slash marketing budgets is when Coke is buying a huge chunk of your company. Otherwise, investors should view a cut in marketing as a sign of pumping short-term earnings by not reducing the costs in the current period while the drop in sales will be spread across a couple periods.

Not That Expensive

When you look at the margins for Panera Bread, the impact on their cost of goods sold is not that substantial. I put together the following chart from the latest earnings release:

As a percentage of sales, the cost of goods sold is slightly over 30%. This is quite within reason and demonstrates that Panera Bread has been able to leverage their ethical stances into getting a premium on the products they sell.

Comparing Panera Bread with a few peers allowed me to create the following chart:

The comparison companies are Texas Roadhouse (NASDAQ:TXRH), Bloomin’ Brands (NASDAQ:BLMN) which owns Outback Steakhouse as well as a few other brands, and Kona Grill (NASDAQ:KONA) which offers up a mix of an American grill, sushi, and alcohol.

For the sake of fair comparisons, the two steakhouse brands are suffering higher costs in recent periods from the impact of beef prices moving materially higher during the year and their costs may shrink back down by a couple percentage points. In the case of KONA, I believe selling alcohol is a distinct advantage.

Arguments Against These Initiatives

There have been some arguments made against companies “pandering” to “animal lovers”, but this is simply Panera finding an intelligent and ethical way to target to their core demographics. The pricing power they have achieved is enough to keep their cost of goods within line with peers and that cost of goods is effectively wrapping in part of their marketing expenses. Overall this is a very well designed plan and the theory that Panera Bread is sacrificing shareholders to fulfill other goals is simply inaccurate. The shareholders are benefiting from the very strong sales figures.

Those Sales are Great

When QSR magazine compiled their annual statistics on restaurants, they found that Panera Bread was tied with McDonald’s (NYSE:MCD) for third place in average sales per restaurant. While McDonald’s is doing it with remarkably small footprints and effective drive-through service, Panera Bread’s ranking at third on the list is still fairly solid.

Conclusion

Panera Bread is announcing more progress and goals on their ethical treatment of animals and it may cause some shareholders to worry that they have been forgotten. Rather than getting bent out of shape by Panera’s commitment to animals, those shareholders may want to appreciate how effectively Panera Bread has been able to utilize their commitments as a marketing edge that allowed them to drive strong sales per restaurant and to keep a pricing premium that limited their cost of food to less than 31% during a period when many peers are struggling with higher costs.

New analytics sequence enhances marketing and business education – Vidette Online

Marketing as a discipline is constantly evolving, and in today’s society, becoming less reliant on traditional marketing research as it responds to the industry’s continuous changes is key.

As the field moves away from relying on consumer satisfaction surveys for marketing research, a newer, crucial skill begins to take the forefront: marketing analytics. To embrace this change, the College of Business recently added a new marketing sequence entitled Advanced Marketing Analytics, where students will learn to measure and analyze market performance.

After discovering no other universities offered a marketing analytics major, the faculty decided to offer this program to Illinois State University undergrads. Chiharu Ishida, an associate marketing professor, said after “big data” became a buzzword in business, research into the sequence began.

“We thought there was a big opportunity here to make our graduates more attractive, have better résumés, and this is what it’s all about,” she said. “We want to prepare our students for jobs that are in demand.”

Woojung Chang, an assistant marketing professor, said several companies collect large amounts of analytical data, but don’t have employees possessing the skills or ability to handle it.

“Those types of analytical skills can make a difference, and then will distinguish our students in the job market — that is our strong belief,” Chang said.

Students going through the new sequence are geared toward making a difference in their regimen and within the job world.

“Analytics is kind of where we’re headed as a market,” Ishida said. “There are multiple sources of information available whether it’s history purchase data, or what people were saying about a brand on social media.”

By enrolling in the analytics curriculum, students are guaranteed to fit within any situation where traditional marketing jobs use analytical skills to make smart decisions.

“That’s what marketing is all about, to be more efficient, to be more responsive,” Ishida said. “So even if we have specific degrees in marketing analytics, it doesn’t mean you go into a marketing analyst, or you know titles that have analyst in it, but you could go into any marketing job. You could be five steps ahead of everyone else because you know how to analyze data, sort and take actions.”

With the marketing analytics degree, professional opportunities could lie within several areas, including online media managing, or retail.

“Companies need somebody who handles, monitors, listens and engages with customers on social media,” Ishida said. “It could be in retailing. They want to use customers’ historical purchase data, customers’ transaction data, use other sources of data to kind of predict and demand for the future, or segmenting customers.”

Despite its recent launch, 26 students have already declared enrollment in the analytics curriculum. To spread these skills even further, the curriculum is available to non-marketing students as a minor.

“Size of the sequence is one thing. What we really want to focus on is quality. One thing we need to focus on is job placement, and we were talking about mentorship program,” Ishida said.

“We’re also doing some work in terms of internships and job shadowing. So we’re planning all of these things ahead before we get a surge of demand if it happens.”

Chang anticipates students becoming less skeptical about tackling big data through this sequence.

“My recommendation is to not be afraid of the data or big data types of things,” Chang said. “If you are interested in those topics and see some kind of opportunity in this area, just try it, and then after taking the basic courses, they can figure out the path. We have a lot of opportunities.”

Gianna Annunzio is a features reporter for The Vidette. She can be reached at vidette_gmannun@ilstu.edu. Follow her on Twitter at @G_Writes.

5 tips for upping your Twitter marketing game – Tech in Asia
Roy Simangunsong, Country Business Head, Twitter Indonesia, speaks at Tech In Asia Jakarta 2015 conference.

Roy Simangunsong, country business head at Twitter Indonesia, speaks at the Tech In Asia Jakarta 2015 conference.

It’s happened so often that we don’t even realize just how unusual it is: a story breaks first on Twitter before it hits the usual media channels. With increasing regularity, we’ve seen the knee-jerk reactions of the rich and famous explode on Twitter, before gossip columnists create entire stories around this 140-character exchange.

“Twitter is conversational,” says Roy Simangunsong, Twitter’s business head for Indonesia, at the recently concluded Tech In Asia Jakarta 2015 conference. “Twitter is talking about what’s happening now, live. If you want your product to be known, it has to be live and open to the public.”

If you’re a bootstrapping startup looking to get the word out with a barely-there marketing budget, chances are you’ve been trying to leverage the power of Twitter at the lowest possible cost (free). Luckily, Roy was on stage in Jakarta to share some key marketing tips on how to up your Twitter game when it comes to engaging with a huge audience.

1. Twitter is live and public

Twitter is live in public

Picture credit: James Cridland

Twitter is most powerful when there’s an open and public discussion. This works both ways though, as complaints tend to get amplified as well. But in order to create the most reach, the best thing you can do is engage your audience in an unrestricted and live discussion.

“There are two patterns we see in Twitter conversations; one is continuous conversations that happen every day and impressions are mostly level. The other is the sudden peaks that occur based on live events or trending topics,” explained Roy. “For example, the continuous conversation for everyday fashion sees around 80,000 to 88,000 impressions per day in the US, but for the dress viral phenomenon that happened earlier this year, we saw up to 267,000 impressions in a single day.”

2. Piggy back off conversations already happening

Not everything you try on Twitter is going to end up going viral. But you don’t have to try to either. A much easier way is to piggy-back off of existing conversations.

Two years ago, Oreo did the exact same thing, by inserting their brand into the existing conversation around the blackout at the Super Bowl.

Power out? No problem. pic.twitter.com/dnQ7pOgC

— Oreo Cookie (@Oreo) February 4, 2013

It’s this sort of thing that Roy encourages marketers to exploit. 

“Conversations are already happening everyday,” says Roy. “You just have to figure out how to add to the conversation with your brand in the middle of it.”

3. Be involved with major events

Sometimes you can predict certain trends before they happen.

“Ramadan is a huge conversation in Indonesia. With 8.2 billion impressions, it is the second largest contributor of impressions worldwide. One-fifth of the total global conversation during Ramadan comes from Indonesia. Is your brand part of this conversation?”

It’s a salient question Roy asks, that perhaps many brands do not fully consider. From my own experience on working in advertising in the Middle East, media consumption skyrockets when people fast, just so that they can get their mind off of their hunger. But does Indonesia have any other events that marketers can build on?

“Independence Day is also big. This year, 440,000 tweets came on August 17 (Indonesia’s day of independence) and it was the second most trending topic globally,” says Roy. “In Indonesia specifically, 76 percent of people use Twitter daily, and 81 percent of them through their smartphones. Indonesians love to have conversations online, and Twitter is helping facilitate that in real time.”

4. Veni, Video, Vici

Twitter is beyond text

Picture credit: Raffaele Esposito

Twitter is not just text though. While the service began as a 140-character platform, it has since grown to include video, GIFs, viral video via Vine, and live streaming via Periscope. In short, video is a key growth driver for the company while also pushing up engagement with users.

Roy explains that mobile video is to grow 13x by 2019, and that Twitter experienced 150x video views growth in the last 12 months alone. “The emotional response towards video is much higher. It’s the same as receiving a personal letter. We’re seeing established publishers use Periscope to review products and conduct interviews. With six times more retweets than photos, video is not just being watched, but is engaging people to flock to brands to unlock more content.”

5. One brand, one voice

Overall, probably the most important piece of advice Roy distilled to the room of over 100 people was that branding is extremely important when it comes to connecting with an online audience. It helps to build an online persona and makes it easier to have a conversation with your fans online.

”It’s difficult to push performance without establishing a brand,” says Roy. “It can be done, but it’s much easier to do so after you have built trust with your audience and they are willing to listen to you.”

Twitter is, after all, a one-to-one conversation, and even if you are a brand, you have to communicate with a single voice in a personal way.

Do you have any Twitter hacks to share with the community? Any Twitter success/horror stories from your past? Let us know below!

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