In This Issue
Also This Week
Social Media in the Job Search
I've written and article and done an online chat session with Green Bay Press Gazette readers on how to leverage social media in their job search. If you know someone seeking employment, help them out and send them this link!
Check out the Green Bay Press Gazette Chat »
NEW! Northeast Wisconsin Social Media Survey Results
These survey results represent the state of social media in Northeast Wisconsin. If you're a Wisconsin or Midwest marketer, you'll find some valuable data an insights in this report.
Get the Survey Results »
This guide to using social networking for marketing was created for the American Marketing Association. You can download your copy here.
DOWNLOAD »
This is easily one of the largest maps we've ever created. It's meant to be used as a diagnostic tool to determine which marketing channels you're currently using when undertaking a brand reinvention. Print on 11x17 paper.
DOWNLOAD »
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Quick Marketing Tip
#4: Your signature says a lot about you.
What do you have in your email signature? Pithy quotes or a link to your newest product, latest program or most popular service?
I've used email signatures across an entire company to drive everything from thousands of new email newsletter subscribers to increasing attendance at a trade show booth. Use your signature wisely, and make sure your whole company is doing the same.
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Tuesday July 7, 2009
Real Thought Leaders Constantly Reinvent Themselves
Many brands do reinvent themselves after some time in order to get back in touch with their original identity, however, as a thought leader, always listening intently to the market, you know in advance what issues are on the horizon that will affect your clients’ efficiency, effectiveness, and competitiveness in the near and long term. Just as we hold teachers, elected officials and other public stewards to a higher standard, thought leaders are held to a higher standard by the market in that both clients and competitors look for them to respond to and ideally lead change in the marketplace.
I call these reinvention opportunities “thought leadership moments”. These are moments when you recognize that change is afoot and take into account the meaningful insights that the market provides to reshape and reinvigorate your strategy.
How then does the emerging thought leader even know when to reinvent? How do we know what to listen to in order to stay out in front? Here are two examples with great lessons that we can learn from marketers who’ve used reinvention to stay out in front. Read the full article and find out...
Read the Entire Article on Thought Leadership Marketing»
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NEW! 6 Week Virtual Marketing Coaching Series
The MarketingSavant University is officially open! I'm taking some of the best materials from the dozens of marketing seminars, courses, workshops, learning from and private training's that I've done over the past several years, putting it all into a 6-week soup-to-nuts marketing strategy, tactical planning and execution virtual coaching series and offering it to the world.
Here’s our topics roadmap for the six-week marketing coaching series (keeping in mind that we’ll deal with the subjects that are top-of-mind for our members each week, as well):
- Week one – July 28th, 2009: Setting your marketing goals, your marketing foundation; STP, differentiation and go-to-market strategy
- Week two – August 4th, 2009: Creating your marketing plan and planning your marketing milestones
- Week three - August 11th, 2009: Conducting your first promotions, obtaining publicity and awareness and creating a focused plan for each of your target markets
- Week four – August 18th, 2009: Zeroing in on what’s worked, what’s not and what you need to change. Conducting a website evaluation for each participant and creating a checklist to get your ‘public facing presence’ up to par
- Week five - August 25th, 2009: Internet marketing, social media and how to fit the newest marketing technology into your marketing strategy
- Week six – September 1st, 2009: Working through the marketing cycle, how to know what to change and when, doing your first course corrections on the marketing plan
Learn more and sign up for MarketingSavant University! »
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Marketing Classics: Strategic Windows
By now you've likely figured out that MarketingSavant really just means "marketing geek." I love classical marketing work and today's foundational piece of knowledge from a 1978 Journal of Marketing paper is no different.
"Strategic Windows" was a concept birth by Derek F. Abell, a then Harvard professor who illustrated that marketers should be keenly focused on the limited windows of opportunity where the key requirements of the marketplace align well with the unique competencies of the firm and leverages their ability to pursue the window of opportunity (so to speak...).
There are four key factors that Abell pointed to which can signal a window of opportunity for a firm.
1. The development of new primary demand opportunities - different marketing challenges presented by new market segments (Gillette once explored the cassette tape market, but didn't enter).
2. New competing technologies which cannibalize existing ones - (Watchmakers saw competition from digital components manufactures due to microchip downsizing).
3. Market redefinition caused by a change in how the product is defined - (Word processing no longer means typewriters but rather computers, same with graphic design & the advent of computers).
4. Channel changes - (Changes in the wholesale/retail relationship - supply chain compression & expansion)\
This is an easy to read, easy to understand piece of marketing history that will serve you well to reference in your future marketing strategy sessions.
DOWNLOAD The original Strategic Windows paper »
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Cool Resource: URL Shorteners (now with tracking!)
 URL shorteners have been around for several years, but with the advent of social media tools like Twitter, where you only have 140 characters to express your message, it's become critically important to link, but with fewer characters.
URL shorteners, such as tiny.cc, tinyurl.com, bit.ly and others have evolved from simple tools to make mammoth URL's look tiny and friendly to customizable, brandable and trackable media for exchanging links. Here's why you want to have these in your toolkit.
1. Short URL's are imperative for Twitter and other services. They can take a huge URL like this - http://www.marketingsavant.com/2009/07/real-thought-leaders-constantly-reinvent-themselves/ and turn it into this - http://bit.ly/tlmreinvent.
2. You can now put custom suffixes, as you saw with the "tlmreinvent" at the end of the bit.ly URL above.
3. Finally, you can track who and how many are using the link when using services such as bit.ly. With things like online word of mouth, re-tweeting and other social media phenomena, it's good to know how your links are being used.
Learn more about URL shorteners »
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