Growing a successful brand presence on Pinterest is not unlike growing a successful garden; both require planning, diligent care and most importantly active, strategic cross-pollination in order to bloom.

For businesses, a thriving Pinterest space inhabited by a fervently connected community relies on a steady supply of visual content and creative user engagement to share it throughout the platform. And like any flourishing garden, while future blossoming may occur somewhat organically, in the beginning it won’t plant and grow itself. Before laying roots on Pinterest, brands need to consider the landscape of the fastest growing social networking site in history and what they can add to it.

-    Determine What to Share

What face do you want to present on Pinterest? Is your target market there (and if they’re female, they likely are)? What do they want to see? How will you show it to them? Plan to consistently deliver visual, informational and high value content

-    Share It Multiple Ways

In order to showcase different facets of your brand and create a rich (but not overwhelming) page, create individual pinboards to align to your brand’s various aspects.

-    Share Your Products/Services

Use pinboards featuring your company’s history and successes to display product images with descriptive captions linked to online ordering pages if possible. If your offering is only available offline or is limited to services, pin photos of your clients, employees, corporate activities such as tradeshows, partners and other images connected to your brand’s message, then use the comment box to engage your audience.

-    Share Your Company’s Personality

Pinterest’s reliance on the sensory experience of exploring imagery means users may initially pin content almost reflexively, without much (if any) conscious analysis. For this reason, it’s considered more “emotion-driven” than other social networks, and is therefore the perfect forum in which to display as much of your brand’s personality as possible.… More

Part 1 of 3: Why Marketers Should Care About the Hype Around Social Media’s Latest Wunderkind

Those of us who’ve not spent 2012 under rocks already know that Pinterest is an “online pinboard” that enables users to “organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the Web” with virtual collections of collect articles, images, videos and other “pinteresting” digital content.

Launched in 2010, the social site’s recent growth has been nothing short of astronomical: Experian Hitwise US reports that in March of 2012, Pinterest became the third largest social network in the U.S., besting Linkedin and Tagged. That same month, Pinterest was ranked No. 58 based on unique visitors by Compete, up 5,468 spots from No. 5,526 one year earlier.

While April’s preliminary numbers suggest a slight decline in users following months of fever-pitch hype, predictions of Pinterest’s continued ascent also factor in powerful audience engagement and retention.

Why Brands Need to Get Pinterested

Brands with stories to tell are finding unique opportunities to do so among Pinterest’s rabid user base. The site offers a new and infinitely more visual option for connecting with users in an object-driven environment designed to be about “things” vs. the friend-focused, communication-centric settings of Facebook and Twitter. Businesses can truly illustrate their stories by pinning images of products, how-to information, designs, infographics and other assorted nuggets of potential inspiration.

In its current form, however, Pinterest isn’t right for every brand. Most popular categories include home, arts & crafts, fashion and food. According to RJMetrics, 17.2 percent of all pinboards are categorized under Home, followed by Arts & Crafts (12.4%), Style/Fashion (11.7%), Food (10.5%, and the fastest-growing category with the most “repins”) and Inspiration/Education (9.0%) – all categories capable of generating the visual content which fuels Pinterest.

If its inherent qualities alone aren’t enticing, consider some of Pinterest’s other attributes:

1.… More

Facebook’s major remodel and what it means for marketers

If you’re a marketer with a current Facebook presence, you already know that last month marked the dawn of a new era for brands on Facebook. How will this new Facebook landscape impact your brand’s presence in the short term, and how will Facebook’s changes today shape your brand’s social media objectives in the long term?

While introducing wide-reaching plans to evolve advertising from straight commercial messaging to an exchange between brands and consumers and simultaneously mitigate risk for ad buyers, Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg told an audience at its first-ever marketing conference in late February “People don’t expect to be talked at anymore; they want to be a full part of the conversation. Today we can’t just talk, we need to listen as well, and that includes for marketers, too.”

Intended to recast advertising as content in service of creating a meaningful dialogue between marketers and consumers, Facebook’s new scheme for commercial pages marries new ad units with a reworked design for brand pages to deliver what Mike Hoefflinger, director of global marketing partnerships for Facebook, calls the “the richest, most customizable marketing canvas we’ve ever built.”

Seen by industry observers as a way to deepen Facebook’s own engagement with users by enticing them to spend more time and share more content ahead of the social network’s much ballyhooed IPO later this year, this “canvas” is woven from a variety of key threads:

Reach Generator
Advertisers can now pay a fixed fee to guarantee that their content is seen by 75 percent of their fans by showing them as ads in the ads sidebar, news feed and logout page.

New Ad Inventory
Facebook will make available first time units targeting the 425+ million users who access Facebook through smartphones or tablets, and on the logout pages of the 37 million people who sign off each day.… More

It’s a timeless scenario we all know: they meet, sense the instant mutual interest and suspect they may have met their ideal match. They could be perfect partners, but one of them just isn’t ready to commit yet.

Indeed, this particular tango is all too familiar to marketers. No matter how great a fit your product or service may be, more than 90 percent of B2B customers aren’t ready to buy right away. According to the 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, the biggest challenge faced by almost half of all marketers is a sales cycle that continues to grow – a challenge exacerbated by shrinking budgets and a troubled global economy.

Until prospects are ready to commit, organizations need to keep the music playing in the background. Staying connected to early-stage leads and – more importantly – keeping them engaged requires an effective lead nurturing program.

By delivering relevant content directly to the prospect, timed to keep apace of key steps in the decision-making phase, lead nurturing can help keep your business top-of-mind while systemically advancing the early-stage lead through the sale pipeline. “Educational” content progressively and consistently delivered to prospects can become the information they need to drive and ultimately finalize their purchasing decision.

Successful lead nurturing campaigns are built on a foundation of the following three elements:

Target

Know who you’re dancing with before the music starts.

Identify your target audience(s), and segment them as much as possible. In what ways are they and/or their sales cycles alike? How are they dissimilar? Where are they in their individual decision-making processes? Understanding which buying behaviors a group of prospects share can help fine-tune the messages they receive from your organization.

Messaging

Be in tune and on beat.

Repeatedly sending the same generic message to all prospects can result in your leads tuning you out.… More

Unless you’re among the lucky few, another difficult year is drawing to a close. While 2011 has seen more than its fair share of economic and business turmoil, there is significant worry that 2012 will not necessarily see the strong revival everyone so badly needs (sorry to be a downer, folks!). Political and macroeconomic uncertainty will likely persist, and critical economic benchmarks such as employment, inflation and business spending will remain under pressure. Business abhors volatility – and we will probably continue to see reticent markets and customers at least though the earlier part of 2012. On the positive side, global negative macroeconomic factors seem to be improving, and the economic screw has been tightened far too much. This gives us good reason to  believe that business spending, corporate employment, and pricing are ready to “pop” on the upside as confidence grows.

Given these conditions, us marketers must once again grapple with how to move the business needle forward. We need to understand what needs to change, what’s not working, and identify the critical marketing-related drivers as we move into a potentially tough new year.

Based on market trends, needs and forces, here are 10 rules I’d suggest as imperatives to consider as we strategize  for 2012. Many, if not all, of these rules have been evolving during the past few years – and some are more permanent than others. However, because of the business climate headwinds we now face, they become essential components of a plan for success in 2012.

Rule 1 > Prioritizing Revenue Streams

The gap between Sales and Marketing is well known – and a painful experience for many of us. If there is one area where Sales and Marketing must come together, it is a common understanding and agreement on the revenue plan. Most sales revenue plans tend to focus on numbers and dollar figures. As a marketing lead, you need to work with your sales leadership to better understand revenue  streams, product SKU prioritization, and how the components of the  product/service suite contribute to the overall revenue plan.… More

For companies already testing the waters in mobile marketing and looking for ways to improve their results, and those who are just starting to consider this option, let’s consider the following best practices for mobile targeted email marketing:

• Subject and from lines – The first clues leveraged by the reader in determining whether or not to open an email are the subject and from lines. In order to pass the credibility test, B2B marketers need to ensure email marketing messages use a consistent and trusted name in the “from line.” For example, it’s often best to avoid marketing messages coming from an account such as sales@companyabc.com. For the subject line, consider keeping the length to 15 characters or less to ensure the subject is viewable on a mobile device. If a longer subject line is required, keep the most relevant information at the beginning instead of the end.
• Formatting – Although most devices enable html email viewing, it is best to send critical email marketing messages as text instead of html allowing the email to be readable on any mobile email client. For added compatibility, consider sending emails in multi-part MIME format. This allows equal viewing on both mobile and computer email clients. To find the optimal formatting for email marketing, dig into analytics to determine what mobile devices are accessing the site most often over an extended period of time.
• Message – A recipient’s inbox is a privileged destination and they would rather keep it clear of non-relevant email. To achieve effective open rates, marketers  must keep messages relevant to the reader or risk having the message deleted.
… More

I recently had a discussion with a non-marketing professional who reminded me that many of his colleagues do not understand what integrated marketing is.

For these 2 reasons, I thought this topic worthy of a blog posting. To succeed in a Demand Generation 2.0 world, integrated marketing is an absolute must.

Without looking up (or linking to) any other definition of integrated marketing, let me define integrated marketing based on my own experience.

What is it?

Integrated marketing (also referred to as Integrated Marketing Communications or IMC) occurs when every activity and communication within a marketing organization is a part of, and blended with, a larger plan or superset plan over a specific product, solution, topic, audience, target, message, etc. To understand this, lets first describe the major segments of a marketing organization. I’ve also included a high level list of their charters (which is not meant to be a complete list):
a) Corporate marketing – branding, messaging, corporate events, analyst relations, public/media relations, website, SEM, collateral, success stories, etc.
b) Product marketing – product requirements, product positioning, product launch, messaging, targeting, product collateral, etc.
c) Demand marketing – lead generation, events, seminars/webinars, trade shows, targeting/segmentation, SEO, social media, analytics, etc.
d) Channel marketing - co-marketing with partners, partner promotion, partner events, partner collateral, lead generation, etc.
e) Field marketing - field support, lead generation, targeting/segmentation, local trade shows/conferences, local events, etc.

As we can see, many marketing activities can overlap. For example, demand generation, channel marketing and field marketing can all execute lead generation. Likewise, adjacent activities can be performed by different parts of marketing. For example, SEM can be handled by Corporate Marketing and SEO can be handled by Demand Marketing.… More

Here are 7 tips to help you be successful interacting with customers in a successful Demand Generation 2.0 environment. These tips are designed with a DG 2.0 philosophy in mind “ that is, these tips take an outside-in view of what Marketing should do. To keep our focus personal, lets call our prospect/customer John.

What Does John Want From You?

(1) John wants to easily find (discover) you when HE needs you. Hence the importance of good brand recognition, a good SEO/SEM strategy, a good website, good media relations, etc.

(2) John wants to be educated about who you are and what you can do to solve his business problems at HIS pace. Hence the need for collateral and nurturing demand generation activities, webinars, seminars, trade shows, conference participation, press releases, articles, a good web site, on-going analyst relations, etc.

(3) John wants you to listen to him and know him. Hence the need for social communities, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, etc.,

(4) John wants to be valued, respected and treated like an individual. Hence the need for enticing Johns collaboration and thought leadership ideas through social communities, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, survey participation, user/focus groups, etc. Also important is the need for segmentation and personalization.

(5) John wants access to you when HE needs it. Hence the important of a world-class call center, good customer support, customer-focused sales representatives and a good customer experience program.… More

1. Collaboration inside the organization > This is the use case that has the largest footprint – and is currently the most prevalent use of social media in the enterprise.  The widespread deployment of this solution is likely because intranets and knowledge management systems were key IT initiatives over the past 10 years as companies started to drive internal organizational efficiencies, and as a result, expanding these wins further by employing social media technologies was certainly the least expensive and lowest risk approach for organizations starting to make forays into enterprise social media realm.  While it is the low-hanging fruit, and certainly offers indisputable advantages to the enterprise, this is also the use case that is most difficult to measure in terms of value, ROI, or tracking results.
2. Brand management, development and tracking > A quick aside – “Brand” is a highly misunderstood term even by marketers.  It is not a company’s logo, signage, taglines etc.  Nor is it what the enterprise wants to project about itself.  The brand of an enterprise is what people (customers, employees, media, etc.) believe about the company – and the values, image and attributes that they, as a collective, confer upon the enterprise.  While I can’t get into a more detailed discussion of “brand”, I felt a clarification on brand was critical to this discussion on social media.  Tracking, managing and developing one’s brand is perhaps the most obvious and valuable use cases for social media for the enterprise.  “Listening campaigns” that follow the “chatter” about the company in social networking forums such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, Yahoo, etc.
… More

No area is more critical to a business enterprise than demand for its products and services in the marketplace and thereby enabling revenue growth. Indeed, enabling market demand has always been the holy grail of business – but enterprises today are faced with a completely new realm of challenges and possibilities – all brought about as a result of the evolution of these new paradigms. Continuing to drive sustainable and accelerating demand in this new world requires newer skills and capabilities – and many of the practices from even a few years ago are no longer effective.  This is DEMAND GEN 2.0

Let’s examine these Demand Gen 2.0 challenges and opportunities in more detail. Three fundamental forces affecting virtually all business are noteworthy – Virtualization, Super-Specialization, and Social Media.

VIRTUALIZATION – Businesses are getting increasingly virtual – geographically, functionally, and organizationally.  Many of today’s organizations are dispersed across multiple locations, indeed, the trend of having more and more critical staff working or located remotely is accelerating. Companies are realizing that technology enables them to hire top talent without being constrained by their place of residence or location.

Even more intriguing and impactful is the trend to virtualize from a functional standpoint – essentially outsourcing. Maintenance and staff functions are being increasingly outsourced to vendors – these include marketing, demand generation, legal and tax functions, human resources and benefits management, finance functions, payroll, IT support, maintenance engineering etc. Companies are realizing that virtualizing these administrative and maintenance functions enables them to dedicate more resources, energy and focus to their core competencies and business.… More