Personalized Content is Something Consumers Want, but there is a Fine Line…

Mobile Marketer recently covered an interesting GfK MRI panel study-that shows the majority of tablet consumers want personalized ads- and the ability to buy products they are interested directly.

“Seventy percent of tablet magazine readers wish that digital magazines included tailored advertising, showing the need for more personalized experiences, according to research from GfK MRI iPanel.”

Why Is Consumer Engagement so Hard?

We know that consumers are empowered, and we know that they are not static targets to be blasted by the same messaging.  Yet companies continue to treat consumers as a mass of eyes, ears and wallets – forgetting each consumer’s unique experience with their brand.  With the proliferation  of channels and devices, customers may actually touch brands hundreds of times between purchases.  And the fact is any of those touches could cause the consumer to become frustrated and disengaged. 

The ABCs of ROI

ROI. Return on Investment. If you are even a casual reader of the marketing press, you will find yourself flooded with recommendations, tools and strategies that you “must use” if you are to achieve this holy grail. But before you become a lemming, you might want to consider what’s behind those three little letters, because it’s probably not what you (or those marketing articles) think. This is not child’s play.

DMA in Boston - What's Trending in Direct Marketing

Last week thousands of marketers met right here in Boston at the 2011 DMA Conference and we were there.  So what was everyone talking about?  There were 2 key, recurring themes that we noticed.

Your Customer is Not a Number. Using Persona Development to Breathe Life into Otherwise Deadly Dull Marketing Statistics.

To a lot of marketers, statistics are just about dull, one-dimensional numbers. If they see any nuance to them, it’s in varying shades of gray along a black-white scale. So many marketers struggle to make effective use of stats in their efforts to move past the limited and limiting world of statistical gray-scale. The ones who “get it” of course, are thinking not about numbers but about the humans behind the numbers. And no, I am not talking about the overreach of behavioral targeting-I’m talking about persona development, one of the most difficult, yet (ROI) rewarding strategies a marketer can master.

The Google+ ‘A-ha!’ Moment: We’re All Relearning What Database Marketers Already Know: Segmentation Stops Training People to Ignore You

It seems like it took forever, but social media is finally catching up with something that database and direct marketers have known for years: consumers aren’t all alike.

As social networks continue their march toward world domination, a big part of their appeal is that they allow people to share their thoughts and opinions with an ever-increasing number of friends (think Facebook) as well as strangers (think Twitter). And while social media may have brought simplicity to sharing, the truth is, it hasn’t really brought the best marketing smarts to the equation. Facebook and Twitter both default to a scatter-gun approach when it comes to messaging. This doesn’t work incredibly well for engagement on a personal level, and from a marketing perspective, the leading social nets intrinsically ignore some of the strongest components marketers hold dear — like timely, relevant messaging.

Social Media Marketing or Traditional Marketing? It Depends...

One question I constantly get from CMOs and other marketing pros these days is “How much of my spend should I be shifting to social-media marketing?” I’ve read a ton of stuff lately about this topic and I’m happy to recommend an excellent thread on Quora entitled “How would you measure the ROI in social media?” To date, 42 contributors have supplied answers to the question, along with links to many great additional resources. But what’s perfectly clear is that the answer is more or less “It depends.” It depends on what your program objectives are (e.g., cost savings in customer service vs. revenue enhancement?), and as importantly, it depends on what your tactics are to achieve those objectives. So that’s just it, it depends.