Balancing Traditional and Digital – A Marriage Made in Marketing Heaven
In a world full of advanced technologies in every aspect of our lives, we sometimes forget about, or at least don’t pay enough attention to, basic tools at our disposal that can be very effective. If you spill some popcorn on the floor, you can initiate the launch sequence of your $250 robot sweeper-vacuum-cleaner to zigzag across the floor for 10 minutes which you will eventually have to empty into the garbage can anyway, or you can use a $10 broom and a $2 dustpan and get the mess taken care of in 30 seconds.
In the marketing realm, for example, we are obsessed with chasing digital breadcrumbs to profile buyers and hiding behind the corner of innocent-looking content in order to smack an unsuspecting prospect upside the head with remarketing ads and popup forms everywhere they go online. These are important and necessary in many cases, but we would like to remind you of a few other marketing “techniques” you should keep sharp:
Not your father’s business card. Yes, despite digital communications, business cards still count and thrive! And today’s business cards do not have to be the old and boring standard size white cardstock. Cards come in many sizes and shapes. There are also many choices of materials, thicknesses, printing techniques and coating textures to choose from.
Let your voice be heard. Emails, texts and social media dominate our business communications… in other words, this is what everyone does. Stand out by picking up the phone and calling your customers every now and then, and for that matter do the same with your prospects. Ask them how they are and what you can do to exceed their expectations. Don’t wait to call them only when there is a problem.
Off-line meetings. Online meeting spaces, conference bridges, and video conferencing are great. They save money and improve efficiency. Every so often, go out and meet your clients in person, shake their hand, and look them directly in the eye… not through a digital lens. Find a way to make it happen, even if they are in a different city or a different country.
You are gifted. Who doesn’t like to receive a gift and be told they are appreciated? Gift your clients occasionally and let them know how important they are to you. Gifts don’t have to be expensive or the same to all customers… Gifts can be almost anything including practical and tangible items, services, trips, tickets to a game, pizza delivered to their office… really – just about anything!
Obviously, there are more non-digital marketing actions you can take, but we wanted to remind you of some that, even though they are simple and easy to do, we all tend to forget how impactful they can be. At Fractional CMO & Marketing we pursue the gamut of marketing efforts, from basic to the most sophisticated digital wizardry for our clients, depending on their needs and budgets.
Lastly, it is important to point out, that even the non-digital marketing efforts mentioned above must be properly implemented to be worthwhile and impactful. If you’d like to ask for our advice or help pursuing those or any other marketing efforts, we’ll be happy to discuss without any obligations on your part.
Duke Merhavy, MBA, Ph.D.
President & Chief Marketing Officer
What Is Fractional CMO & Marketing?
Fractional CMO & Marketing is ‘Your Smart Marketing Formula’ when you need expert marketing leadership and marketing services to accelerate growth and improve profitability, but you’re not quite ready to hire a full-time Chief Marketing Officer or your own marketing department Our unique arrangement is the most efficient, innovative, and cost-effective formula for you. Click on the image on the right to watch a short video.
Where Did #Hashtags Come from?
By Polly Stroup, Editor and Copywriter
We’ve all seen them – #BigData, #startups, #innovation. Hashtags are used regularly by millions of social media users. How did this seemingly simple idea become the most mainstream organizational devices for online content? The first hash symbol was used on Internet Relay Chat (IRC) to label groups and topics that were available across the entire network.
Twitter’s early days were considered a free for all – the wild west of content! Looking for a solution to this problem, social technology expert Chris Messina was inspired by IRC and posted the first Twitter hashtag. He came up with the hashtag to gather online exchanges regarding Barcamp, a technology unconference spanning worldwide.
@chrismessina
how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups?
As in #barcamp [msg]?
12:25 PM – Aug 23, 2007
Twitter founder, Evan Williams wasn’t sold on the idea – he called it too “nerdy”.
However, Messina saw another opportunity to get it noticed. During the San Diego Wildfires of 2007 “SanDiegoFire” was being used as a tag on Flickr. This inspired him to suggest the use of #SanDiegoFire on all relevant tweets. The tweets became so well known that Twitter users started using hashtags to group relevant content.
In 2009, Twitter finally embraced them and introduced a search tool for users to see who else was using a particular hashtag. From there, hashtags were adopted by other platforms and became part of the internet lexicon.
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