If you’re a business-to-business (B2B) marketer, sponsoring your industry’s trade show can deliver high visibility for your brand. But trade show sponsorship can be a big investment. Sponsorship packages for some national shows are topping six figures and even smaller sponsorship options can be costly. Before you spend valuable marketing dollars on a trade show sponsorship, here are 10 guidelines for choosing sponsorships that are worth the marketing investment.
A marketer has a few seconds at best to engage the audience in an ad or marketing message. But many marketers forget this simple fact when they develop marketing campaigns using elaborate or confusing creative concepts.
When the audience’s reaction to an ad is “Huh?” instead of “Wow!,” it’s a painful waste of marketing resources. Here are three examples of advertising and marketing campaigns that fail the “Huh?” test – and three tips to avoid making mistakes like this in your smart marketing strategy.
Every advertising and marketing agency is in a constant search for new business. 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.
When an advertising campaign is so bad it makes you groan out loud, there’s usually a simple reason: It’s not believable.
The worst offenders are campaigns that attempt to portray real-life situations. The dialogue often is so forced or the setup so phony that your only reaction is to roll your eyes and think, “Yeah, right.”
But lack of believability in advertising is more than annoying. It’s a waste of the marketer’s money.
Here are two ways to achieve believability in your advertising and two examples of smart marketers, including one in Northeast Ohio, who are doing it right.
What’s the best way to maximize the return on your marketing investment? Take a step back from your day-to-day marketing projects and conduct a marketing audit.
A marketing audit is a top-to-bottom assessment of your entire marketing program, from branding to tactics. The beginning of a new year or the start of a new budget period is an ideal time to do it.
How do you conduct a marketing audit? And how can an audit help you develop a smart marketing strategy? Here are some answers.
If you’re a business-to-business marketer who uses trade shows to get leads for new business, you probably send direct mail and email marketing to prospects after the show to convert prospects to customers.
Lead generation via trade shows can be an important part of a smart marketing strategy, but if leads aren’t well qualified at the outset – and frequently re-qualified if they stay on your prospect database over time – your post-show direct mail and email campaigns could be a waste of your marketing resources. Here’s a case study in how NOT to do it.
Many marketers are jumping into Facebook with both feet, but others are hesitating. Should Facebook be part of your marketing strategy? Here are five factors to consider when taking the first step – a company Facebook page — and helpful resources to do it right.
Welcome to Smart Marketing Strategy, a new resource to help you develop and execute more effective marketing plans and campaigns.
I’m Jean Gianfagna, president of Gianfagna Strategic Marketing in Cleveland, Ohio. I’ve spent more than 30 years developing marketing strategies and creative marketing campaigns for some of the nation’s top business and consumer marketers.
During that time, I’ve seen [...]
