Simple brand association in design

Pre trade show marketing provides and opportunity to create brand association. Forming a memory before an event. Through direct marketing and a flow of exposures this planting of an association can increase recall at the point of sale.

Targeting Perceived Value

Here is an interesting promo offer I have prepared as part of my current contract. This company does nil to no promotion. And the work I have done in building their CRM is getting nearer to doing some direct marketing. So here is a draft promo that requires an understanding of targeting perceived value. Many studies have shown that a customer will buy on perceived value. And it has often been proved that improving a customer's perceived discount value can increase the average sale value significantly. Up selling the average sale from $380 to $1800 has to be a motivation when a discount value is shifted by only a few percentage points.

Developing Content Marketing

This new year will be a milestone in content marketing and business intelligence. In this post I am introducing an outline for the development of a content marketing program. Here are the main points I will cover briefly in future posts.

• Plan: Create a strategic structure for your content marketing
• Team: Assemble the group to manage your content marketing operation
• Ideas: Generate a steady flow of ideas for your content
• Production and Distribution: Assemble your content and distribute it across the web
• Audience Development: Generate traffic to your content
• Conversion & Nurture: Convert visitor to leads, nurture them to opportunities
• Measure & Optimize: Analyse and improve performance

Data Intelligence Evolution

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

It is my view that a number of trends in 2012 is set to see the development of some advances in business intelligence in 2013. Databases have started to proliferate and many new entrants into data presentation have formed unique market offerings. Data visualization and data discovery are  growing in demand and are about to become a new technology product category. Web-based analytical tools are connecting to web-based data. And everything’s becoming mobile. This is the beginning of an acceleration of data intelligence in 2013.

These trends build upon the amazing developments of 2012. Databases proliferated, startups formed, visualization and data discovery became increasingly recognized as their own categories. Web-based analytics tools are connecting to web-based data. And everything’s mobile.

Here are some of the changes that are coming:

• Unstructured data will grow from a promising test into a mainstream analytical tool
• BI will, finally, find a happy home in the cloud.
• Visual analytic's will move from a polishing-prerogative to a business-imperative.
• True mobility, an age of analytic's where anyone anywhere with a question can use data and BI.
  

KEY BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE EVENTS FOR 2013

The Future of Pinterest

If you think that publishing is going through an evolution then photography is experiencing a revolution. There are happy snappers everywhere. The smart phone with the inbuilt high definition camera is turning everyone into a photographer. Add some software technology with Instagram filters and an ordinary photo is becoming a piece of art. Sites such as Pinterest are also allowing us to share this visual art form in glorious color, creativity and ease just by pinning images from the screen with a couple of clicks. Competitors such as The Fancy.com are  taking these concepts of visual pinning even further into the realm of social commerce and have announced that they have reached a whopping one million users already.

The Rise of Social Mobile Commerce

The Fancy has introduced a few new features into its mobile app offering, most notably the ability to buy products (they are reportedly making an average of $50,000 each week from users snapping up the products they fancy). Up until now users could only collect images they fancied, but now you can buy them with one-click purchasing directly from your iPhone or iPad. This revolution is changing the way businesses perform commerce online.  Online vendors are realizing that the habits and practices of  buyers online are changing rapidly and that tablet and smartphone users are much more likely to impulse buy with the convenience of one click shopping.

The heart of business systems

Good technical writing is a great asset when it comes to developing business systems and procedural documentation. In my current role I have found procedures in disarray. The first step is to create a documentation system inclusive of document, procedure and file indexing. But what amazes me most of all is how procedures drafted by staff responsible for them don't make any sense. Too much knowledge of the procedure without technical writing skills makes for bad and hard to follow procedures. 

Selling is the death of content marketing

The attempt to bring selling techniques from other fields to content marketing is a big mistake. But it is hard for old school managers to understand new technology and the consumer behaviour it inspires. Readers don't want to be convinced or persuaded or treated like a sale through direct marketing copy. This approach will actually kill of any potential for a relationship or a shared experience around a brand. Content marketing is like a long term investment and requires a farming and nurturing mentality. Don't let anyone with a sales junket head near your content development. I find the best content is to talk about the experiences a reader can have around a product and brand - life based daily solutions and experiences that inspire and deliver value.