So what’s on the horizon for digital media in 2012 and what does it mean to marketers?

Three marketing experts shared their forecasts last week at a program sponsored by the American Advertising Federation – Cleveland, Ohio. Adele Pellicane, Senior Director, Agency Services, Traffiq Inc., New York, Larry Weissman, Managing Director, Top Line Revenue, Inc., Atlanta, and Scott Chapin, Senior Vice President, Digital Strategy, Marcus Thomas LLC, Cleveland, were panelists. Michael DeAloia, Partner at Emerging Chefs Cleveland, moderated for AAF-Cleveland.

Here’s what these digital media pros see in their crystal balls and some insights for using digital media in your smart marketing strategy.

What Digital Media is – and Why it Matters

Chapin defines digital media as “anything that’s driving traffic to digital content: Paid media, social media, or other media that drives traffic to a digital source.” 

Marketers need to embrace digital media, says Weissman, because “it’s quickly becoming mainstream” and it’s reshaping the traditional sales funnel. “The sales funnel is now dramatically different and much more complex because of digital media,” he notes.

The Next Big Trend: Mobile + Social + Local

Last year’s big trend was mobile marketing, says Chapin. Advertisers spent over $1 billion in mobile marketing ads in 2011.

“What’s coming is the convergence of social, mobile, and local – that’s the hot trend right now,” he states. “Facebook and Google are both going in this direction. Every marketer’s goal is to figure out how to communicate their brand to customers when they’re on the go.”

Pellicane agrees. “The convergence of mobile, social, and local is the next big trend in digital media. It’s about the where and when. This will continue to grow, especially in the retail space,” she predicts. “It’s crucial for branding and driving sales.”

Weissman says local social media marketing platforms like foursquare are important to retail marketers, but “the local marketing space is extremely crowded and there’s a consolidation coming. Amazon and eBay are getting ready to launch these types of products. Foursquare will need to stay innovative to thrive in this environment.”

7 More Digital Media Trends to Watch

1. Real-time engagement: Chapin sees marketers continuing to move people from traditional to digital media in real time via such tactics as QR codes. “Everybody’s trying to figure out ways to make this transition easy for people,” he says. Another example is the plan by Shazam, developers of the innovative iPhone and Android sound recognition apps, to link audio via tags from this year’s Super Bowl ads to advertisers’ websites, as recently reported in Adweek.
2. QR codes: Though advertisers are rapidly adopting QR codes in marketing campaigns, panelists agreed that widespread use of QR codes by consumers won’t take hold until smart phones have built-in QR reader apps. “Using QR codes will grow exponentially when apps are pre-installed on smart phones,” Pellicane predicts.
3. The power of video: “Mobile marketing plus video is a huge trend in general, but especially for tweens,” notes Weissman. “It’s how they consume media – and it’s not on the TV in the living room.”
4. The growth of Google+: “Social is a huge part of Google’s strategy,” says Chapin. “It’s being integrated into nearly every Google product. Google+ will slowly gain in relevance and eventually we’ll be discussing it in the same vein as Facebook and Twitter.”
5. Easier ways to influence others: “‘Share this’ buttons are creating digital versions of kitchen-table conversations between a few people and many people,” Weissman notes.
6. Co-watching: Viewing a mobile device or tablet computer while watching television is a growing trend. “Marketers are trying to figure out how to integrate this and drive cross-device connectivity,” Chapin observes.
7. Measurability: Weissman says new tools are on the horizon to measure audience access via the web, which may create a way to buy digital media based on gross rating points. “Marketers want the ability to measure and analyze a consumer’s path from traditional to digital, to track the user’s experience from end to end, such as from an app to a website,” Chapin explains.

Tips for Planning a Digital Media Strategy

How should you use digital media in a smart marketing strategy? Chapin recommends that marketers ask these questions to determine a digital media marketing plan:

• Is your audience mobile? In most cases, the answer is an easy yes. Half of phone users now have smart phones, so penetration of smart phones in your market is probably a given.
• What content do you have?  You need something to pay off a mobile marketing campaign, like a mobile website or app. “If you don’t have this, spend your money here first,” Chapin advises. “Mobile users have even shorter attention spans than web users, one second instead of five. You must answer the user’s question instantly.”
• When and where is your audience? A mobile user can be literally anywhere in the world. Figure out the mobile usage patterns of your audience and connect to them then and there. “For example, during the week, Google Maps users are on desktop computers. On the weekend, they’re on phones,” Chapin notes.
• Can you do geo-targeting to a specific local market and near a retail outlet?

Pellicane advises marketing agencies and consultants to focus digital media marketing strategies on goals and metrics. “Don’t get hung up on the ‘shiny new object’ syndrome just to show your clients you can do it,” she explains. “Ask yourself, ‘what’s the goal of the marketing campaign and what metrics will be used to measure success?’ Do you want to build community? Drive sales? That will drive the decisions about devices and tactics in digital media.”

Think about this list for a moment: These are TV spots people chose to watch online, by the millions. That’s an advertiser’s dream.

But what makes these ads so popular? Why did the Darth Vader Volkswagen spot get over 45 million YouTube views? Why did 25 million people view the Royal Wedding dance ad for T-Mobile?

It’s not crazy gimmicks or over-the-top production techniques, though some of the ads on the YouTube Top 10 list have spectacular visual effects.

I think it’s about storytelling. The most watched ads of 2011 engage viewers in a compelling story.

Here’s why storytelling is such an effective advertising technique and how to tell stories in your smart marketing strategy.

Why Stories Work in Marketing

Storytelling is fundamental to every culture. Stories work in marketing because everyone understands what a story is about. When the story is highly relevant to the needs and interests of the audience, it’s a powerful and persuasive way to convey information.

Stories have a plot, characters, and a narrative point of view. The mostly highly viewed YouTube ads – the Volkswagen and T-Mobile spots, Jennifer Aniston creating a video for Smartwater, or Chrysler’s “Imported from Detroit” campaign – combine these elements brilliantly.

7 Characteristics of Effective Advertising Storytelling

As a marketing strategist, I believe there are seven characteristics of a great advertising story:

1. It’s engaging: The viewer is immediately drawn into the scenario. Something interesting is happening and you want to know what it is.
2. It’s emotional: The best advertising stories make you feel something: Empathy, humor, joy, tension, excitement.
3. It’s memorable: You get it and can’t forget it.
4. It’s easy to retell: You can describe the basic scenario in one sentence.
5. It has a plot: There’s a beginning, middle, and end.
6. There’s an element of suspense: You have to stick with the ad to see how the story will turn out.
7. Most important, the product plays a pivotal role: The product is woven into the story so well that the story couldn’t be told with it.

Lessons for Your Smart Marketing Strategy

Storytelling can be a smart marketing tactic for almost any marketer and great stories don’t have to be told just on TV.

One example is the excellent Avis marketing campaign on the front page of the Marketplace section of The Wall Street Journal. Avis uses real letters from grateful customers to tell stories about the company’s commitment to customer service.

To create dynamic marketing stories like these, I advise clients of my marketing consulting firm to think about the following:

• How are your products or services used? What stories might your customers tell? Plot out the scenarios and explore how to make these scenarios interesting to prospects.
• Who are your customers? What type of character is your customer? Use real-life case studies to showcase customers as themselves or create similar characters prospects can relate to.
• What emotions do people feel when they use your products or services? Do your customers feel confident, safe, happy, relieved, excited, satisfied, proud? Capture these emotions in the stories you tell.
• What is your product’s role? How does your product enable your customers to achieve success? Build your stories around the benefits of what you sell.

A final tip: Don’t make the mistake of telling such a great story that the product gets lost in the narrative. See my prior post about the Kevin Bacon ad for Logitech.

What stories do you think made the most compelling advertising campaigns?

A great website is the foundation of a smart marketing strategy. It supports your brand promise and differentiates you from competitors. It delivers high-value information that demonstrates your capabilities and makes people want to do business with you. And if you’re a business-to-business (B2B) marketer, it’s probably also your best tool for lead generation, according to new research by Demandbase and Focus Research on eMarketer.

So how do you create a great website? It’s all in the planning.

Here’s the planning guide we use when creating new websites for clients of our Cleveland marketing agency.

Your Goals

• Why is a website important to your business?
• What are your goals for the site and how will you measure its effectiveness?
• What role does your website play in your sales and marketing plan? Brand awareness and positioning? An information resource for buyers and specifiers? A storefront? A lead generator? Community building?

Your Brand

• What does your brand stand for? What do people expect from their interaction with your brand and how can you meet those expectations on your website?
• How are you communicating your brand in other marketing channels? What types of images and messages should be integrated into your new site for branding consistency?

Your Market

• Who are the most important audiences for your website? Why do these people come to your site? What are they looking for?
• Are they typically first-time visitors or repeat visitors? Do they already know you or do business with you or are they trying to learn about you?
• Where do people go on your current site? Which pages get the most hits and most engagement?

Your Marketing Strategy

• What is your overall marketing strategy? What channels and tactics are you using to promote your company and products?
• How can your website integrate with and support your other marketing initiatives? For example, can your site be a response channel for direct mail and email marketing campaigns? Serve as the repository for content you share via social media? Promote events? Highlight special offers?

Content

• What content belongs on your site to convey your capabilities and the value you provide to your customers?
• What’s the best way to deliver that content on the site? Explanatory text? Case studies? Testimonials? How-to information? Product demos? Newsletters? Video? Photos? Charts? Diagrams? Presentations? A blog? Podcasts?

Search Engine Optimization

• Which keywords will you use to drive search engine rankings and content creation?
• Are there specific products, services, or geographic regions that should be the focus of text?
• How will you add content in the future to continue your SEO initiatives?

Offers and Engagement

• What can you offer site visitors to generate a response and get their permission for future communications?
• How can you spur visitor engagement? Think of actions you can measure, such as requesting information, sharing your site with others, posting a comment, following you on social media, subscribing to your blog, or signing up for your RSS feed.

Functionality and Navigation

• What actions will visitors want to take on your site, such as ordering products, chatting with a representative, getting more information, finding a dealer or retail location, or logging into their account? Which of these actions should be prominently featured on your home page?
• Do you need to provide password-protected access for customers?
• What inbound and outbound links belong on the site?
• How will your site look and function on a mobile device?

Sources of Site Traffic

• How do you plan to drive traffic to your site? Social media? Pay per click? Promotion in other media? Organic search?
• How will you use marketing to bring people to your site?
• What can you do to encourage return traffic?

Your Competitors

• Which of your competitors are doing web marketing well? What aspects of their sites do you like?
• Which competitors should you track for comparative search engine rankings?

Marketers: What other questions should be part of the website planning process? Share your ideas here.

Thanks to Barb Cagley of EXP for valuable contributions to this post.

These aren’t just idle comments. Misconceptions about social media can hurt your brand and hamper your ability to compete in your marketplace by limiting your company’s participation in the social media dialogue.  And if the people who hold those misconceptions also control the marketing budget, alarm bells should be ringing in the marketing department.

Here’s how to get your company onboard with social media marketing and help everyone understand why social media is a powerful element of a smart marketing strategy.

• Educate. Create training sessions to help others at your company understand how social media works and why your company should be part of the social media conversation. You may need to begin with the basics for those who are unfamiliar with social media. Profile social media use in your industry, especially by your competitors. Share examples of effective social media marketing campaigns by organizations like yours.
• Ask for ideas. Encourage everyone, from the CEO on down, to suggest ideas for social media content and customer engagement and to follow your company on social media. Create an easy way for people to share ideas with the marketing team. If you have a company blog, ask for help with content.
• Partner with other departments. Reach out to customer service, tech support, product development, and other units for help in preparing prompt, accurate responses to product-based comments and questions on your social media pages.
• Keep score. Create and distribute a regular social media “scorecard” to report the results of your social media marketing and track competitors’ social media efforts. Keep it simple, straightforward, fact-based, and user-friendly.
• Equip your sales team. Everyone who has direct contact with customers and prospects should have easy-to-use tools, such as branded premiums or sales collateral, to share your company’s social media addresses.
• Keep social media visible. Ongoing high visibility for your company’s social media efforts will help others recognize how much emphasis you are placing on social media in your marketing plan. Put your social media links and information on all your marketing materials and company communications.
• Plan for negative comments. Develop a plan for rapid response to any negative comments that are posted on your social media pages. Share the plan widely to reassure those who worry that social media will expose your company to criticism.
• Establish a company policy on social media. Employees should know your company’s views on appropriate social media behavior and understand who can and cannot speak for your company in social media, especially in response to a complaint.

Help Your Company Succeed with Social Media

As a marketing consultant, I believe that social media marketing should be among your top marketing priorities, whether you sell to businesses or consumers.

Get your company excited about social media so you can become a visible, active, and engaging participant in the social media conversation in your industry and connect more effectively with your customers and prospects.

But having permission to market to someone isn’t a license to bombard them with marketing messages. In fact, not knowing when to shut up is a classic marketing mistake.

Here’s how over-marketing can kill a customer or prospect relationship and 7 ways to avoid this costly error in your smart marketing strategy.

We’re Not Friends Any More

If marketing is about building relationships with customers, over-marketing is the best way to kill the relationship and send the customer or prospect heading for the door.

The Social Break-Up, a fascinating study by ExactTarget, provides clear evidence of what happens to customer relationships when the marketer comes on too strong:

• 91% of consumers have unsubscribed from permission-based marketing emails;
• 81% of consumers have either “unliked” or removed a company’s posts from their Facebook news feed.

The biggest reason people break up with companies? Too much marketing. The study showed that:

• 54% of consumers unsubscribe when emails come too frequently;
• 63% of customers have “unliked” a company on Facebook due to excessive postings.

The Cookies are Great, But Enough

I often send gifts to colleagues and clients of my marketing consulting business in Cleveland, including Cheryl’s Cookies. Cheryl’s is an Ohio firm and their cookies are great, so I’ve been a repeat, though not a frequent, customer.

But last week, I blocked their emails. I was fed up with receiving promotional emails multiple times a week, even though I only order a few times a year. The messaging was out of proportion with the relationship.

7 Ways to Avoid Over-Marketing in Your Smart Marketing Strategy

How do you know when you’re marketing too much? It can be a fine line, but here are some principles to guide your marketing planning:

1. Ask your customers. The best way to understand how customers and prospects feel about the frequency of your promotions is to ask them. If most tell you the frequency is “about right,” you’re on target.
2. Measure your opt-outs. Count the number of people who are cutting off their dialogue with you by unsubscribing to emails, unfollowing you on Twitter, and unliking you on Facebook. If the numbers are escalating, over-marketing could be why.
3. Understand your customer relationships. A customer who orders rarely or sporadically has a different relationship with your business than one who orders all the time. Regular customers might welcome frequent promotional emails with special deals, but sporadic customers are more likely to be turned off by too much marketing.
4. Follow your own firm and see how it feels. Opt-in to your own promotions to put yourself in the customer’s or prospect’s shoes and find out what it’s like to be on the receiving end of your promotional messages. If even you get tired of hearing from your company, you’ll know it’s time to turn down the volume.
5. Deliver more value and less promotion. People may opt-in in hopes of getting deals from you, but a lasting relationship between a brand and a customer goes beyond special promotions. When you deliver content, insights, access, and other exclusive advantages that only those who have opted-in can receive, you create real reasons for the relationship to flourish.
6. Coordinate your efforts. If you have multiple units in your company sending emails, Tweets, and Facebook posts to customers and prospects, lack of internal coordination can create permission-based chaos. Set some boundaries and coordinate your efforts to avoid over-promoting.
7. Compare your permission-based marketing to your competitors’. Review the marketplace to gauge the pace of permission-based marketing in your industry. If you’re marketing much more frequently than your competitors, you could be the smartest marketer in the bunch or the one people hesitate to start a relationship with because you talk too much.

The Bottom Line: Treat Permission to Market as a Gift

People opt in because they want to hear from you. But if you disrespect the relationship by coming on too strong, customers and prospects will flee. Treating your customers and prospects well is common courtesy; treating their permission to market to them as a gift is a smart marketing strategy.

But what’s most fascinating about this new research is the window it opens on the habits of the 46 million Americans who check social sites several times a day.

Who are these habitual social media users? And what can marketers learn from their extraordinary level of engagement with social networks?

Here’s what this important study shows and three takeaways about social media for your smart marketing strategy.

Facebook Dominates, Twitter Gains Ground

According to the research, which was presented at BlogWorld on May 25 by Edison’s Tom Webster, more than half of Americans ages 12+ have a profile on a social networking site and 51% of Americans are on Facebook.

Facebook is by far the dominant way people connect with brands and companies on social media. It also is the leading social network for influencing buying decisions.

Though Facebook’s supremacy is clear, awareness of Twitter is extremely high and the level of engagement with Twitter is growing rapidly. In 2010, 47% of Twitter users posted status updates daily; in 2011, 70% did.

The Mobile Phone as “First Screen”

The study showed that nearly all social network users – 91% – have mobile phones. Even more important, for frequent social networkers, a smart phone is their “first screen.” Sixty-four percent of those surveyed would keep their smart phone over their TV. Edison says that “for those with the social habit, the mobile phone is a true convergence device.”

On Social Media, All the Time

But what I found most interesting as a marketing strategist were insights into the millions of social media users who check social networking sites multiple times a day. According to this research, habitual social media users:

• Skew younger and more female, though about a third are aged 35 or older;
• Own smart phones and use their phones to update their status;
• Contribute more content through social media;
• Are more likely to connect to brands and companies on social networks;
• Are more likely to be activated by mobile promotions;
• Are three times more likely to use Twitter.

Here’s another important fact: The number of habitual users is climbing fast. Just two years ago, 18 million people reported using social media sites several times a day. Today, the number is over 46 million.

3 Takeaways for Smart Marketers

As a marketing consultant who helps clients develop marketing strategies, I see three key takeaways from this study:

1. Social media is where engagement is happening. The depth and frequency of engagement is what’s driving social media’s importance for marketers. Habitual users not only check social media sites more often, but they are more connected to brands, more responsive to promotions, and contributing more content.
2. Smart phones are the gateway to the most engaged social media users. If you’re targeting a demographic with high social media use, you need to be using mobile marketing. Your website and social media pages should be designed to deliver a great experience – and offer meaningful ways to interact with your brand – on a mobile device.
3. Social media belongs in every smart marketer’s strategy. The widespread use of social media and the growing number of habitual social media users proves without a doubt that every marketer needs to be using social media in their marketing plan.

Click here to see the full presentation  from BlogWorld.

But as a marketing agency president, I’ve learned the hard way that not all prospects should become clients.

Even if you’re a marketing agency looking to grow, sometimes it’s smarter to walk away from prospective new business than enter into a bad relationship.

How do you know when to stay or go?

Here are 7 warning signs that a new prospect could become a bad client for your marketing agency:

1. Extremely short timeframe: Successful marketing campaigns are rarely done overnight. Avoid prospects with a timeframe that makes it nearly impossible to complete a marketing project effectively.
2. Limited understanding of the value of marketing: If a prospect seems skeptical about marketing or wants you to convince them why marketing is a good idea, you can expect the client to challenge or doubt everything you recommend.
3. Internal dissent: If a company’s executives disagree about the role of marketing or the need for marketing, that dissent is sure to continue throughout your assignment. Be especially leery if sales and marketing disagree, which can be a recipe for disaster.
4. Unrealistic expectations about results: When a prospect expects a marketing campaign to produce an unrealistic number of leads or sales, ask if they’ve gotten results like this in the past. If not, help them understand what they can expect and that marketing is an investment with a long-term payoff. Otherwise, any campaign you create is sure to fall short in their eyes.
5. Can’t describe an ideal customer: A client should be able to tell a marketing agency exactly whom they are targeting with their marketing campaigns. If the client can’t describe an ideal customer, they probably don’t have a good understanding of their current customers. That makes it very hard for a marketing agency to recommend the right media or develop creative marketing messages that resonate with prospects.
6. Committee approval of creative concepts: Be cautious about clients that have a complex creative review process. If a big committee has to approve creative concepts, creative is likely to go through many rounds of revisions and ideas may get watered down to the point of ineffectiveness.
7. Negotiating price in the first meeting: Money is the trickiest part of any discussion between a prospective client and a marketing agency. Clients usually have a budget in mind and smart clients ask for a ballpark idea of the cost to develop a marketing plan or campaign. But if they start trying to negotiate price before you’ve written the first word of your proposal, you can expect disagreements about rates, fees, and invoices throughout the project.

When It’s Worth Staying in the Game

Creating a smart marketing strategy requires a real partnership between a marketing agency and a client.

While most companies have good intentions when they seek guidance from an external marketing expert, some have such a limited or misinformed understanding of marketing or the role of an outside marketing resource that they are unable to gain real value from engaging a marketing consultant.

Yet in my experience, such prospects have the potential to become good and even great clients if they:

• Show a sincere willingness to understand how to use marketing effectively;
• Are open to new ideas and excited about trying new marketing approaches;
• Have a cohesive team, a great product or service, and excellent customer relationships;
• Are willing to invest the resources needed for skilled external marketing expertise;
• View their marketing agency as a valuable partner.

One of the best ways to gauge the value of a customer is to perform a recency, frequency, and monetary value (RFM) analysis of your customer data.

Here’s how RFM analysis works and seven ways you can use insights from RFM for a smart marketing strategy.

How RFM Analysis is Done

RFM analysis looks at all the transactions in your customer database in a specific time period, usually the last two to three years. The purpose of the database analysis is to determine the value of your customers based on how much they buy from you, how often they buy, and how recently they’ve made a purchase.

With RFM, you assign a value to the recency of the transaction (the more recent, the better); the frequency of transactions in the analysis time period (the more frequent, the better); and the monetary value of those transactions (the higher the monetary value, the better).

Once the analysis is complete, you have a measure of each customer’s profitability, so you can rank cusotmers from most profitable to least. You can then divide this ranked list into ten equal customer groups (deciles).

The top two deciles (top 20%) are your best, most profitable customers, the ones who have bought from you most recently, who buy from you most often, and who purchase at the highest dollar amounts. Deciles 3-7 are your next best customers. Deciles 8-10 are your least valuable customers.

7 Ways to Use RFM for a Smart Marketing Strategy

Here are seven ways to use RFM to target your marketing campaigns more precisely and utilize your marketing resources more effectively:

1. Understand your best customers. Once you’ve identified your best customers, you can create demographic profiles to gain insights into the characteristics they share. You also can append data to their records, such as company size or NAICS code, for an even fuller picture.
2. Find the low-hanging fruit among your next-best customers. Take a careful look at the customers in deciles 3-7 whose demographic profiles are similar to your best customers. This is likely to be your best upselling opportunity.
3. Target the right prospects on rented mailing lists. Armed with information about the characteristics of your best customers, you can be extremely selective about the names you rent on commercial mailing lists, which can cut your costs and increase response.
4. Reallocate sales support. RFM can help you reassess the level of sales support appropriate for each customer based on their value and potential. Your goal should be to deploy your most expensive sales resource – your sales team – on customers who already generate the most profit or have the highest potential to buy more.
5. Develop tiered direct marketing campaigns. Focus high-end direct marketing campaigns on your highest-value customers and mail less expensive campaigns to lower-value customers. You might send best customers a personalized direct mail package with a product sample, for example, while others get a simple selfmailer offering a free product sample on request.
6. Test a high-end marketing campaign to high potential customers. Once you’ve identified customers in deciles 3-7 with the same demographics as your best customers, test a more elaborate direct marketing campaign to these customers to try to increase their profitability.
7. Decide which customers to drop from marketing. Customers in deciles 8-10 probably should be dropped from your mailing lists and marketing campaigns because of their low value. It may be costing you more to sell to them than they’re worth.

Why Marketing Strategists Can’t Live by RFM Alone

Knowing your best (and worst) customers can give you important insights for a smart marketing strategy. As a marketing consultant, I’ve used RFM analysis for several business-to-business marketing clients, including a large bank in Ohio and a major retail merchandising company near Cleveland.

But although RFM is a great tool, smart marketers know not to rely on RFM alone when developing a marketing plan. You also need to consider input from your sales team, feedback from your customers, and the results of prior marketing initiatives to decide how best to market to your current customers and targeted prospects.

But too many advertising and marketing campaigns recycle the same, tired creative themes and copy phrases over and over and over.

This is more than annoying. It’s a guaranteed audience turn-off and a misuse of the marketer’s resources.

Here’s the 2011 edition of my annual list of the most overused creative themes in marketing. Sadly, many appeared on last year’s list, too, which underscores my point about their overuse.

How many do you recognize?

1. Got _________? You probably do, because just about everyone else does.
2. You need a ______ that works as hard as you do.  And you need a marketing agency with a better ideas.
3. It’s that time of year again: ______________ Oh no, is it? I hate that time of year.
4. [I am/we are] ___________. Yeah, and so is every other marketer who uses this theme.
5. The best just got better! It did? Again?
6. _______ you can believe in. And a marketing team you can’t.
7. When is a ________ [more than/not] a ____________? When everyone else says the same thing.
8. _________, so you don’t have to. Should I be thanking you?
9. [Making/building/creating] a better ______, one ______at a time. Unfortunately, this often doesn’t apply to marketing campaigns.
10. ______never [had it/tasted/looked/sounded, etc.] so good. Well, never since the last time, anyway.
11.  _______ doesn’t get any better than this. It doesn’t? Really?

What to Do if Your Campaign is on This List

If you’re using one of these themes in your marketing campaigns, it’s time for a new creative approach and maybe a new creative team.

Look for a marketing agency or creative consultant with a solid track record of developing new ideas that get attention and deliver a high-impact message. Your marketing team should be able to demonstrate how their creative approaches supported a marketing strategy and achieved the marketer’s objectives. They also should be excited about the challenge of coming up with something completely new for your marketing plan.

If not – or if you see any of these tired, old themes in the marketing campaigns in their portfolio – that’s your clue to look elsewhere.

Add Yours to the List

Do you agree that these 11 overused creative themes should be sent into retirement? Which ones would you add to the list?

One way to find out is to conduct a top-to-bottom review of your entire marketing plan to determine what’s working and what isn’t.

This process is sometimes called a marketing audit. I’m often asked to guide audits as an independent marketing consultant and I recently shared advice on how to do an audit effectively.

What specific factors should you assess in a marketing audit?

Here are 40 questions I recommend for evaluating the effectiveness of your marketing and developing a smarter marketing strategy.

Brand

1. Does your brand clearly communicate what you are about and convey the highest value you deliver?

2. Does your brand effectively differentiate you from every other supplier in your marketplace?

3. Is your brand promise well understood and consistently executed at all levels of your organization?

4. Is your brand identity being properly used in all media?

Market

5. Do you know your most profitable customers and are you targeting prospects that look just like your best customers?

6. Do you understand the factors buyers consider when selecting your product or service and are you focusing your marketing campaigns on those factors?

7. Have your customers changed the way they find, buy, or use your product or service and have you adjusted your marketing plan accordingly?

8. Are you actively upselling and cross-selling products and services to your current customers?

Messages

9. Do you have three to five key marketing messages that you’re consistently delivering in all media?

10. Do your marketing messages resonate with your target audience? Are you talking about the things your customers and prospects care about?

11.  Do these messages match the experience customers have when they interact with your staff?

12.  Are you tailoring messages to specific market segments when you have the opportunity to do so?

Marketing Channels

13.  Are traditional marketing channels – such as advertising, direct marketing, and public relations – still delivering enough value to warrant the investment they require?

14.  Is it time to shift some – or more – of your marketing to new channels such as social media and mobile marketing?

15.  Are you maximizing the value of the proprietary channels you control, such as newsletters, invoices, product packaging and inserts, vehicles, and buildings?

Marketing Tactics

16.  Do you know which marketing tactics are generating the best results – leads, conversions, or sales – at the lowest cost?

17.  Can you cut the cost of any of your tactics by changing formats?

18.  Are you integrating social media into traditional marketing tactics like direct mail and advertising?

19.  Can you create a mobile app to promote your product or connect with your audience?

Creative Approaches

20.  Is your creative attention-getting? Does it stand out in a crowded marketplace?

21.  Does your creative engage the prospect immediately in your sales message and enhance the delivery of the message?

22.  Is the call to action loud and clear? Does the prospect know exactly what to do next after reviewing your marketing materials?

23.  What will people remember most after seeing your marketing: your clever creative approach or your product?

Offers

24.  Is your offer resonating with prospects? Are more and more people saying yes?

25.  Does your offer showcase your product?

26.  Does your offer deliver real value to the prospect?

27.  Are you tailoring offers to specific market segments or types of buyers?

Collateral and Sales Tools

28.  Are your sales brochures, displays, and sales demonstration tools accurate, complete, and up to date?

29.  Are your sales tools integrated with your brand and your marketing campaigns?

30.  Do you need new tools to educate prospects about your industry or product?

Data

31.  Are you capturing customer and prospect data to build a robust marketing database?

32.  Are you compiling email addresses for an ongoing sales dialogue?

33.  Are you tracking and recording response and transactional data to create full profiles of your customers and their behavior so you can target future promotions?

34.  Is your customer and prospect addressing data accurate and complete and ready for the new USPS standards for mail deliverability?

Website

35.  Is your website built around the needs and interests of your visitors?

36.  Is your site easy to navigate, with most information available in three clicks or less?

37.  Are you delivering high-value content that establishes your credibility?

38.  Are you inviting visitors to engage with you via blogs, podcasts, RSS feeds, and social media?

39.  Is your site fully optimized for search engines?

40.  Are you regularly adding new content and inbound links to increase your SEO rankings?

After You’ve Answered the Questions

Once you’ve completed your marketing audit, you should have a better understanding of how your marketing is working and what you need to do to achieve your objectives. Use this knowledge to craft a smart marketing strategy that delivers a higher return on your investment.

Here’s more advice on how to conduct an effective marketing audit.