Destinations around the globe are struggling with a single question:
What the hell do I do now? Do I advertise or go dark and save dollars.
Here is our answer.
...This week RSW/US released its New Year Outlook 2020 Survey Report and based on the content, I think smaller, independent and/or specialist agencies will need to step up their biz dev game and learn to Sell Greatly this year or get left behind. Let’s talk about why. Clients Plan To Shrink Their Agency Rosters Charts …
How a DMO can Sell Greatly by programming or influencing a first time visitor’s destination experience to maximize the value for both the visitor and the destination marketing organization.
...What do you do when you’re in the car, or on the treadmill? Maybe you make phone calls or listen to the radio. These days, a lot of people are finding new audio entertainment in the form of podcasts. In fact, podcasting has exploded. The latest stats report over 600,000 podcasts are available and over …
Measuring the true sales impact of social media efforts his hard and sometimes downright impossible. In the early days of social media that was ok. Social media was the bright shiny object that everyone wanted and few understood. Social media gurus would quip, “what’s the ROI of your mother?” and folks actually took that as …
As I embark on yet another Fat Tuesday, I can’t help but flashback a decade (yes, it’s been 10 years since I first invited you to experience Mardi Gras via my Tweetstream) and marvel at the power of Social Media to build brand perception. Back then, my little experiment was novel (no one had ever …
In November 2016, CNN plunked down a reported 20 millions dollars to purchase Beme, the video-sharing app started by YouTube star Casey Neistat. CNNÂ hoped to fashion it into an independently operated daily online news program that would appeal to today’s digital centric consumer. By January 2018, Neistat was out and the effort became a glaring …
A few weeks ago Tom had a chance to sit down with Luke over at Toucan Advertising to talk about how ad agencies, pr agencies and frankly anyone in the consulting world, can turn conversations into customers. The podcast, Briefly, is about 30 minutes long and they covered a number of topics including: How …
According to just released data from Pew…. YES… Â Millennials are far more likely than their elder brethren to be searching for God via the Internet. In fact, they’re almost 5 TIMES more likely to seek the Almighty on the web then Baby Boomers and this might be the most important marketing stat you’ll read all …
You can’t sell if you can’t persuade. We all know that. But what you probably haven’t figured out yet is that digital content is the most persuasive tool in your sales & marketing toolbox and you’re not using it correctly. In my 2014 Content Marketing World talk — Using Content as Your New Sales Force — I talked about …
Travel planning is entirely different today than say even 10 years ago. Today’s travelers are invisible prospects to you and your marketing team, often until after they’ve made their vacation destination selection. Combine that with a consumer whose needs are more complex, stresses more numerous and media choices that have literally exploded over the last …
If you’re looking for an opportunity to change up your digital marketing or to give your readers a different way of experiencing your content, podcasting can be an easy, inexpensive option. Podcasting is the regularly scheduled production and distribution of audio content. While podcasting is a commonly overlooked marketing medium, podcasts offer a number of …
What if I told you I could create a 161% change in consumer perception by simply changing the background of a headshot photo? Would you believe me? Would you believe that something so small could cause such a massive improvement in your consumer marketing programs? And not just any perception, a meaningful one — the …
I was reading an interesting statistic this morning that “almost 69% of online shopping carts that contain at least one item are later abandoned, according to the Baymard Institute, an e-commerce consultancy based in Copenhagen which analyzed 31 studies over the past few years. That is up about three percentage points from 2012, says Christian …
Back in 1950, psychologists Leon Festinger, Stanley Schachter, and Kurt Back launched a study to investigate how friendships developed among students at the new Westgate Complex at MIT. They found that the strongest friendships developed between students who lived next to each other on the same floor. Where friendships developed between students who lived on …
Mardi Gras has, and continues to be, one of the most well known, interesting and misunderstood free festivals in the world. An enormous content marketing and digital marketing opportunity for brands — think brand activation, content creation, brand awareness, social media opportunities and good old fashioned sales incentives trips — Mardi Gras offers it all. …
Recently the super smart Jeff Rohrs of ExactTarget/Salesforce wrote a great post about the lack of CTA’s (Call to Action) in Super Bowl ads. You can read it here. In it, Jeff makes the argument that Super Bowl advertisers that fail to place a mobile friendly CTA in their ads are guilty of “marketing malpractice” …
Everything you once knew about marketing and sales prospecting is wrong. Or at the very least, social selling is quickly rendering it obsolete. Once upon a time, companies treated information about their product as sacred. After all, information is power. The traditionally held belief was that a company’s marketing efforts should force prospective customers to call and …
Content marketing is a widely recognized driver for effective, inbound sales lead generation programs. While largely heralded as a way to drive inbound leads there is another, even more powerful reason that ad agencies should develop a consistent content marketing program. The Traditional Benefit of Content Marketing Content drives all digital marketing lead generation programs. …
Today I read a piece in Ad Age where the CMO of a major restaurant chain said, “In the past, over 80% of the marketing plan would be executed the way you originally planned. Now, it’s like 20%,” so you better be agile.” I have to say – I completely disagree with this point-of-view and …
What do you do when you’re not getting as many leads from your website as you think you should? Should you advertise more? Should you activate PPC (Pay-Per-Click advertising) or should you focus on creating outstanding content marketing to drive inbound marketing leads? It’s a classic chicken and egg discussion — one that I just …
Yesterday I was having a really interesting conversation with a company that is new to social media. Like most smart companies, they are struggling to understand this new space and determine the ROI of their investment. And like most companies that are new here, they keep trying to move directly to sale even though they …
Have you ever thought about how hard it is to sell services? Hotels, banks, law firms, CPAs, software companies, auto repair shops, doctors, hospitals, museums, even schools; they all share an important set of product traits. Each is selling an intangible and/or technically complex service. A service that the consumer can’t touch, experience before hand …
Unless you’ve been living under a rock lately, you probably have heard the #motrinmoms flap that started on Twitter and led to Motrin’s pulling of a nationwide ad campaign. I chose to focus my latest Ad Age post on the topic and think you might find my research interesting. I’ve reprinted the entire post below. Do …