I have moved the blog to its own domain at www.marketingvalue.net
This makes many improvements possible.
If you follow marketingvalue tweets, they will now refer you to www.marketingvalue.net
No further posts will appear at http://marketingvalue.wordpress.com
Thank you for your visit.
Francois Wolf
Take a stroll through today’s blogosphere. Subscribe to a few tweets, check out some Facebook and MySpace pages, and see how much data you get exposed to, and that’s in addition to all the “regular” websites you pop in on. Everybody has become an author, editor and publisher AND is still somehow convinced that there will be time to be a reader, and do some thinking too.
The time investment required to get to the nuggets hidden in the long tail will just get bigger, Read the rest of this entry »
Moving images have been used for marketing since the dawn of cinema. What’s different now is that everyone can do it. Digital cameras are everywhere, prosumer video editing software is now affordable, broadband is widespread, and YouTube - now part of Google – is the perfect video publishing platform, and it’s free! All this amounts to faster production and lower costs. Studies show that half of all teenagers check YouTube at least once a day. The world is learning to get information in video format. So what’s holding you back?
“Tunnel vision is a medical condition that results in a loss of peripheral vision. As a result, the patient can only see objects from within a circular field.”
Today, “focus” is an almost universally accepted imperative when elaborating a business strategy. But tunnel vision is a risk inherent to concentrating on the pressing objectives of the day. So what happens when focus turns to tunnel vision? What are the signs? How does one resist it?
Clearly, there is a right way to focus, as well as some pitfalls. Read the rest of this entry »
When the good times roll, it is easy to yield to the temptation of experimenting with cutting edge tools.
But when times are tough and budgets and teams get slashed, marketing re-evaluates budget allocation to concentrate on programs that yield the best results. In this recession, email marketing is one of a handful of tools selected to bear a substantial portion of the revenue generation burden.
Why? Here are ten reasons: Read the rest of this entry »
Verticalization is a favorite strategy of small companies because it opens the possibility of upstaging bigger firms on specific markets . It is the classic case of a small force achieving a breakthrough against a larger opponent by concentrating overwhelming firepower on a small section of a long front.
Going vertical can proceed along two very different vectors: Read the rest of this entry »
Verticalization is the ugly neologism that describes a long term trend in which BtoB companies see industries as the operative way of grouping customers . Conversely, verticalization also refers to a strategy of focusing on a specific industry in order to compete more effectively.
So what are the dynamics, and what can be done to maximize the chances of success with a vertical strategy? Read the rest of this entry »
The story goes that when NASA started sending people into space, it encountered the problem that regular pens did not work in a weightless environment. After spending many $100Ks on research, NASA did manage to engineer a special pen that could work in zero gravity. Naturally, the Soviet space program had the same problem but did not have the same resources and technology to solve it. The Russians did find a very effective solution, both technically and financially: they simply gave their cosmonauts lead pencils.
The story rings like a good metaphor for Read the rest of this entry »
This may come as somewhat of a surprise to those who have stayed with the conventional wisdom that “the customer is always right“. But satisfying the request of every customer with the hope that the firm’s reputation for excellence will spread and be the key to riches is a noble but ultimately losing proposition.
Although customers as a group have requests, Read the rest of this entry »
The purpose of the Call to Action (CTA) is to push the prospect further down on the road to becoming a customer. It is the operative component of any piece of external marketing because if the prospect does not perform an action at some point, no sale ever takes place.
As such, the CTA generates as much passion from people in the revenue generation functions as Read the rest of this entry »
