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Discussion: What's your biggest campaign-based traffic driver?

Christopher Penn — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 14:14:00 +0000

We all know that organic search delivers the best long term traffic results for your business. Search remains the killer app for inbound, permission-based marketing. However, sometimes you need to put the spurs to a campaign, to a product, service, or launch. Assuming all your conversion is excellent across the board, what’s YOUR biggest traffic driver for campaign-based bursts of traffic?

Please discuss in the comments. We’ll review a lot of the discussion with commentary on Wednesday’s show.

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Improving Email Deliverability

John Wall — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 01:49:26 +0000

In this Marketing Over Coffee learn :

About Feedburner and Yahoo Pipes, Improving Email Deliverability, and Using Toilet Paper as an Economic Indicator! All this and more…

[audio:http://media.libsyn.com/media/marketingovercoffee/MoC093.mp3]

Direct Link to File

Show length 23:57

Brought to you by our new sponsor HubSpot and Blue Sky Factory

00:32 MOC at Hubspot this Friday! Check out hubspot.tv and the blog post

01:44 Feedburner shifting over to Google Analytics, power moves through Yahoo Pipes

04:45 Pixelated Marketing – Chris does his own virtual conference, and here’s a link to Mitch Joel’s Original Show

07:00 SPF – one of the email verification standards – SPF FAQ, Validator (check to see if your domain has it), and Wizard. More on the other 3 “standards” Sender ID, Domain Keys and Sender Score from ReturnPath.

14:11 DD and TP, and other unorthodox market research

16:44 YouTube on the Wii and PS3, also testing downloads. Use it for Podcast hosting? The first new network, crotch kicks at no extra charge.

20:15 Featured Videos: “Star Wars from Someone Who Has Never Seen It” and “How It Should Have Ended – LOTR, Star Wars

23:00 What are you doing with online video?

Upcoming Event Watch: College Goal Sunday, the Beancast this weekend.

Check us out on LinkedIn: John and Chris

Sign up for this Podcast in iTunes (and don’t be afraid to give us a review) also add the Gigadial Channel for more Podcasts

Our theme song is called Mellow G by Fonkmasters from the Podsafe Music Network.

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Live from Cambridge

John Wall — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 15:12:39 +0000

From Hubspot.tv on friday:

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Slides from MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Mixer

Christopher Penn — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 18:51:21 +0000

Here’s the slides from my MarketingProfs presentation:

Dmm Slides

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

Video will be up later!

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Recession marketing: DIY cup of coffee

Christopher Penn — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 16:39:25 +0000

The folks over at Joffrey’s Coffee sent us Coffee 2.0, their service patch for Coffee 1.0.

In the spirit of blogola, marketing coffee, and the recession, we thought we’d point out how to make a cup of good coffee on the cheap.

You’ll need boiling water and a French press. And coffee.

Step 1. Boil water.

Step 2. While water is boiling, put coffee into carafe. Add a pinch of salt.

Step 3. When water reaches a boil, remove heat and count to 5. Then pour water on coffee.

Step 4. Press plunger so that grinds are just below the water’s surface.

Step 5. After 3 – 5 minutes, pour coffee. You’ll want to pour ALL the coffee; if you let it sit, it’s going to get wicked bitter on you.

Making coffee this way makes a terrific cup, AND it’s a whole lot cheaper than any of the coffee chains. Great coffee, low cost, perfect for a recession.

How did Joffrey’s service patch do? It’s definitely an improvement on 1.0, for those who remember it. 1.0 was too cloying.

2.0 is brighter, with a hint of bitterness to it that’s not bad, but if you love smooth, quiet coffees, this isn’t it. I’d guess this coffee’s origin is somewhere tropical and Caribbean, as opposed to African or Indonesian. I brewed it strong, and it was pretty good. I think it needs a little more heartiness to it – if, in their blend, they threw in a small amount of Sumatra Mandheling to round out the brightness, this coffee would kick some serious beans.

A suggestion to Joffrey’s – please consider putting the components of your grind on your web site. For those of us who are hardcore coffee aficionados, we’d love to know what’s in the bag.

Incidentally, if you’re wondering, always add a tiny pinch of salt to every pot of coffee. The presence of even a minute amount of salt activates an entirely different set of taste buds on your tongue, so you experience the coffee a little more fully.

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More on Goebbels

Christopher Penn — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 21:24:20 +0000

Max over at Alpha Mind wrote:

To his credit, Chris has responded to an email he received from someone who had the same concern about all this that I have. But sadly, his response doesn’t convince me he understands the gravity of recommending Goebbels. In particular, both the podcast and Chris’s response suggest that John and Chris fail to see the distinction between marketing segmentation and the “artificially dividing people into groups” that was the linchpin of Goebbels’s work. Distinguishing between cost-conscious and style-conscious consumers is hardly the same as dividing humankind into a master race and a people worthy to be stuffed into ovens.

Goebbels isn’t about market segmentation as much as it is about using fear to market. That’s a really, really important distinction. Fear is one of the most primal emotions and one of the easiest to market with, as well as one of the easiest to transmute into anger and hatred. That’s what makes understanding his work so important – to know how this is done, so that you know when it’s being done TO you.

Lest we think this is consigned to the dustbin of history, it’s happening right now, all over the world. Georgians vs. Russians, the Janjaweed and Sudanese in Darfur, and even Republicans and Democrats in the United States, if you listen to some of the election rallies when partisans are screaming “Kill him!” about the opposition candidate.

We are always only a small step away from bringing Goebbels out of the grave and making use of his ideas again. If we don’t study them carefully, we’ll all fall victim once more, and the cost will again be unthinkably inhumane.

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Sneak preview: Marketing Over Coffee book intro

Christopher Penn — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 23:26:11 +0000

We don’t even have a title yet beyond the working title, but here’s a sneak preview of the introduction. Obviously, by the time this hits shelves, it may be different, so consider this a beta test of sorts.

Let’s try an experiment in marketing. Read this paragraph, then close your eyes and try to remember it word for word.

“Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. (Approved October 2007)” – American Marketing Association

How did you do? We failed right around the word institutions because we stopped caring.

For the premier marketing association in America, their definition of marketing needs some… well, marketing.

Let’s try this again. Read this paragraph, then close your eyes and try to remember it word for word.

Marketing is the sharing of ideas. – Marketing Over Coffee

Did you do better?

This is a book not about ideas, but about the sharing of ideas. Your ideas. Your company’s ideas. Your customers’ ideas. This is a book about ways your ideas will or won’t spread, and ways to make the former more likely than the latter. Above all else, this is a book that will help you be a better marketer.

Sit back, relax, pour yourself an extra large regular with 9 Sweet & Low, and let’s talk some marketing.

The Marketing Continuum

Every large company seems to have an org chart that looks roughly the same. Advertising. PR. Sales. Marketing. Customer service (outsourced). Business Development. Every large company has these departments, and by and large, the departments hate each other.

“Sales can’t make its numbers because our ads stink!”

“Customer service is swamped because Sales promised the customer something that doesn’t exist!”

“Marketing wants to kill everyone in customer service for creating that mess with a bunch of bloggers who are spewing venom about us on the Internet!”

Sound familiar?

The reason this happens is simple: everyone’s doing the same job, but they just don’t know it.

All of these professions – marketing, advertising, sales, customer service, PR, biz dev – are the same profession. We break them up into pieces because no one human being is scalable enough to do every job at a large company, but the fundamental job is the same:

Communicate skillfully.

Marketing, advertising, and PR all communicate to the outside world, to people who don’t know about our ideas yet, or who know about our ideas but don’t believe in them or in us. Marketing is the sharing of ideas.

Sales & business development communicate to people interested in our ideas and try to convince those people to become stakeholders in our ideas. Sales is the conversion of ideas into actions.

Customer service communicate to the people who already own our ideas and help make those ideas work better for the people, or at the very least fix broken ideas.

All of these forms exist on a smooth continuum with the customer. We break it up for job purposes, but really, who can say what the exact point is when marketing becomes sales? Who can say when the prospect finally convinces himself or herself that they want to partake of your idea? It might be face to face with a salesperson, sure. It might also be at 2 AM while they’re watching the late night special, and your brand finally makes that one impression that puts you over the top.

The vagueness of the continuum is doubly true in B2B marketing, since B2B relationships tend to be stronger than B2C. The business development woman you put at a trade show may be the primary contact for your company throughout the sales process, and depending on the size and importance of the account, may be customer service as well.

Want to improve your marketing? Treat everyone in the marketing continuum as a member of the marketing staff. Invite customer service reps to marketing meetings to get on-the-ground insights. Heck, take some of your managers and put them in service for a couple of days. Bring sales staff to advertising copy and design meetings. Get everyone who is involved in communicating together to share insights.

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LIVE with David Meerman Scott at Podcamp Boston 3

John Wall — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 03:43:33 +0000

In this Marketing Over Coffee learn :

About The New Rules of Marketing and PR, Viral Videos, and The NeoVictorians. Live from Podcamp Boston 3! All this and more…

Show length 41:54

Listen now: [audio:http://media.libsyn.com/media/marketingovercoffee/MoC071.mp3]

Brought to you by Blue Sky Factory and MarketingProfs

01:25 Interview with David Meerman Scott

05:35 On public speaking and using the ladder approach

08:30 How perceptions change as you get more skilled

12:16 His new book Tuned In

14:44 Viral Video and using the Movie Producer / Venture Capitalist approach

17:47 Swedish toilet video (CWS)

24:30 Changing the approach at Podcamp

26:10 Discussing the idea of NeoVictorianism (sparked by an earlier session by Mark Bernstein), Industrial Education and Mass Media as an abberation

32:30 Giving away content for free and why it’s a good idea. Tip for musicians on how to get some huge exposure free.

34:22 Question and Answers – Getting Press Release traffic, tracking PDFs

Chris is up at the Affiliate Summit next, John is in Toronto

Our theme song is called Mellow G by Fonkmasters from the Podsafe Music Network

[audio:http://media.libsyn.com/media/marketingovercoffee/MoC071.mp3]

Direct Link to File

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Evolution of search by Google

Christopher Penn — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 12:43:58 +0000

“Search in the last decade has moved from give me what I said to give me what I want.” – Amit Singhal, Google

The rest of the post is read-worthy, but that quote stuck out.

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Happy Social Media Birthday, John Wall

Christopher Penn — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 12:26:19 +0000

The series of tubes says it’s John Wall’s birthday today, so please wish the better half of Marketing Over Coffee a very happy social media birthday.

Footnote: a social media birthday isn’t necessarily the actual birthday of the person, just when they choose to celebrate and play havoc with databases.

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