Blog Archives

Photograph by yusunkwon.

Who’s in your marketing hall of fame?

In the history of direct marketing, arguably the consumer goods industry sets the bar: Who’s buying our tobacco? Who’s buying our shirts? Early on, they became expert at identifying and catering to innumerable customer segments, seemingly always asking, “Who aren’t we selling to?”

Later, the banking sector arguably most advanced the state of the art by introducing such concepts as house-holding and segmentation: Who has money in the bank? What’s our client’s value? Can we better profile clients and group them into segments to target them with more effective offers? For example, if your client is a 50-year-old baby-boomer, you want to make sure you try and sell him or her a jumbo mortgage or retirement fund, not a student loan.

Marshaling Marketing, Sales and Service

Over time, marketing success or failure has come to mean working with your sales and service counterparts to gather and track all required information to run effective campaigns and events, identify and nurture the best leads, track leads throughout the sales process, and know exactly which marketing activities resulted in sales, to quantify the marketing group’s contribution to the bottom line.

If that is the theory of—or goals behind—creating an effective marketing program, many organizations struggle to achieve this vision, or to understand “what comes next?” for improving their marketing program.