November 2010 Archives

I spoke at the Johnson & Johnson (J&J) Digital Marketing Connections Conference yesterday, together with an interesting line of speakers. I was particularly interested in Tim Dunn's presentation on mobile which I'm sure will be the big focus for innovation in 2011.

Tim presented some compelling evidence to argue that 2011 has a good chance of being the year of the mobile and has moved a long way from the days when mobile marketing was all about SMS.

Tim argued that 'mobile is becoming the remote of your entire life' and outlined some specific tactics that brands can use to take advantage of the opportunity:

1. Apps - there are now apps for everything with evidence that these services are delivering  enormous benefit. In the J&J world, for example, this includes the use by consumers to check and keep track of health as well as what to eat when! Research indicates that 31% of consumers are willing to incorporate an application to keep track of their health.

2. The mobile web - by 2013, there will be more mobile browsers than desktop browsers and Tim showed some research indicating that 25% of consumers would never visit a mobile site again if they had a bad experience.

4. Ad response - short codes on TV and press adverts is a good way to benefit from the fact that many people, for example, watch TV and surf the web. According to Tim, an estimated 50% of adults admit to doing this. This tactic can be used to engage consumers with a brand relatively quickly, for instance, offering a free sample. Colour Catcher received 34k sample requests against a target of 4k when they tried this approach.

Brian Caroll, at the recent Marketing Sherpa event, offered some guidance through a process called huddling. His argument is based on the the idea that works in sports, where the team review their past performance and then use this feedback to adjust their game. In other words, although it may not always seem the case in some organisations, sales and marketing teams have the same end goal: to win new business. Technologies have helped a great deal to bring teams in large organisations closer together, but are there to enable the process. In other words, the technology won't do the thinking (yet) and will only be as useful as the people using it.

An interesting survey from MarketingProfs and Junta42 on the trend of content marketing, defined as 'the creation and distribution of educational and/or compelling content in multiple formats to attract/and or retain customers'.

The survey aimed to discover how important content marketing is to B2B marketer's plans today; what types of content are used and how effective they are. Three key higher level insights are:

* marketers do consider content to be key to their marketing mix: 9 in 10 organisations use
  content as a tactic

* 51% of marketers plan to increase their spend in content marketing over the next 12 months
  - the picture of course varies by industry. For example, 63% of respondents from the 
  software industry use content marketing for lead nurturing, versus 37% on average

* marketers on average spend over 25% of their budgets on content marketing

You can access the full report: B2B Content Marketing: 2010 Benchmarking, Budgets and Trends report here.