Marketing with Big Brands: Marketing Update 2/17/12
Posted by David Guerrera on Fri, Feb 17, 2012 @ 04:47 PM
Episode #188 - February 17th, 2012
Intro
- How to interact on Twtter: Include #MktgUp in your tweet!
- On the show today is Karen Rubin (@KarenRubin) and Mike Volpe (@MVolpe)
- As always, all the old episodes are in iTunes. If you like the show, please leave a 5-star review!
- Anyone is welcome to come by the show to watch as part of the live studio audience - 4pm Friday
- Question of the day: What's one tip you'd give event marketers to help keep their efforts inbound?
Headlines
Obama & Jay-Z's Town Hall
- http://www.clickz.com/clickz/news/2153145/sponsored-obama-jay-web-event
- Advertisers were offered sponsorships of an interview with the President and hip-hop mogul Jay-Z on popular video site Vevo that never happened. But before it was canceled, a sales deck offering corporate brands the opportunity to wrap their names around the White House event made its way to big digital ad agencies, and helped convince some to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars with Vevo.
- A Vevo sales deck obtained by ClickZ promoted sponsorships of the interview event with Jay-Z and Obama, which was to be held February 9.
- The President - in the midst of a reelection campaign - recently held a town hall style interview on YouTube, presented by YouTube and Google+. Like a similar town hall interview held in April 2011 on Facebook, the YouTube event served as a branding vehicle for the media outlet hosting it. Google promoted the event on YouTube and even via a rare text ad on Google.com.
- Digital brands like Facebook and Google have garnered credibility in the political world by hosting interviews with President Barack Obama. But the types of sales offerings Vevo made available to corporate advertisers in association with the event are virtually unheard of.
- Was there ever really a town hall scheduled?
- Marketing Takeaway: Stretching the truth can be effective if you do not break people's trust.
Sony Hikes The Price of Whitney
- http://thecelebritycafe.com/feature/sony-apologizes-itunes-price-increase-whitney-houston-albums-uk-02-16-2012
- Shortly after Whitney Houston’s death, U.K fans took to iTunes to download their favorite albums of the iconic legend. Little did fans realize, Sony had ‘hiked’ the cost of Houston’s albums, and today they are apologizing for the “accident.”
- Disgruntled, fans blamed Apple for the initial price hike, before the U.K news outlet, Guardian, first reported that it wasn’t Apple’s fault for the iTunes mistake, but Sony’s.
- According to the site, the change occurred when Sony Music increased the wholesale price of Houston’s The Ultimate Collection. Because of this, it also boosted the cost of other popular albums released by the singer.
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Ace ShowBiz reports that Sony has since apologized, and has released the following apology; “Whitney Houston product was mistakenly mispriced on the U.K. iTunes store on Sunday," When discovered, the mistake was immediately corrected. We apologize for any offense caused."
- Marketing Takeaway: Being 100% capitalist can hurt your brand.
American Express Fast Tracks Small Businesses to Twitter Ads
- http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2012/02/registration-for-twitter-self-serve-ad-platform-opens-for-10000-small-businesses.html
- Twitter has been working up to its more broadly offered self serve ad platform for a while now. To this point, there are about 100 advertisers that have been allowed to use the system but Twitter is about to expand that capability significantly as it looks to make 2012 a big year.
- Starting tonight, American Express cardmembers and merchants can register to use the platform on a first-come, first-serve basis and also receive $100 in advertising credits to put toward bidding on promoted tweets and promoted accounts — hopefully whetting their appetites for more.
- The American Express angle of this whole deal is interesting as well because the credit card company has been pushing hard into the small business world recently. Using Twitter as another springboard will only help to grow this reputation as small business’ friend.
- Debra Aho Williamson, eMarketer’s principal analyst notes “One of the big challenges that Twitter was going to face was keeping rogue advertising or spammers from overrunning the systems, and by partnering with American Express and focusing at first on this small subset, it provides an easier roll-out for Twitter,” she said.
- Marketing Takeaway: Partnerships with big companies are great marketing tool.
B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks & Trends
- http://www.contentmarketinginstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/B2B_Content_Marketing_2012.pdf
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Just as last year’s survey showed, nine out of 10 B2B marketers are using content marketing to grow their businesses, and on average, marketers use eight content marketing tactics to achieve their marketing goals. The most popular tactics are article posting (79%), social media (excluding blogs) (74%), blogs (65%), eNewsletters (63%), case studies (58%), and in-person events (56%).
- Content marketing uptake is high across industries, with no single industry reporting below 70% adoption.
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Just as in last year’s findings, web traffic is the most widely used success metric (58%). However, this year, sales lead quality (49%) is the second-highest used metric (versus direct sales in the previous study).
- B2B marketers dedicate approximately 26% of their total budgets to content marketing initiatives
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As it was last year, the greatest reported challenge is “producing the kind of content that engages prospects and customers” (41% of respondents).
- 20% producing enough content
- 18% budget to produce content
- 40% of marketers consider themselves to be more effective in content marketing than their competitors
- Small- and medium-sized companies report higher adoption rates than the largest companies in a number of categories
- 79% of the largest companies use articles, 85% of medium-sized companies (those with 100-1,000 employees) use this tactic
- 78% of medium-size companies use social media (not including blogs), while only 65% of the largest companies do
- 68% of companies with 10 – 99 employees maintain a blog, though only 55% of the largest companies employ this tactic
- Marketing Takeaway: If content is king, conversion is queen. Use inbound marketing to bring it all together.
Marketing Tip of the Week