Marketing process

idc-FORBES-ReliabelSurveys

Forbes Agency Council Panel: 12 Tips for Customer Surveys

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Your Most “Dialed in” Indiana Marketing Firm Offers Tips to Grow Your Business

Check Out These 12 Tips to Develop Reliable Customer Surveys!

Include everyone!

Here, my fellow experts and I discuss survey etiquette to achieve the best results from surveys. As an agency owner and member of the @Forbes_Agency Council, I am honored to be invited to participate in expert panel discussions.

This pane ltopic? Reliable Customer Surveys.

Here’s my take:

Include Them In The Findings.

Look at each engagement with your valued customers as a chance to deepen the partnership. Acknowledge that the customer is taking time out of their busy lives to help you be a better partner. Not only thank them for their time but offer to include them in the findings. Sharing this data provides a chance to feel ownership and a potentially elevated status as a valued customer. –

Check out the full article here.

If you have any questions or would like to learn more about how idc marketing and e-commerce can help your business (or, if you have a product for the food industry, NewPoint), please reach out to the idc marketing team — interested in other marketing tips marketing? Please visit our “How We Think” page or check out my book on food marketing: Moving Your Brand Up the Food Chain.

Founded in 1972, idc-marketing is the coolest, most resourceful, and oldest advertising firm in Lafayette, Indiana. We are a full-service agency that helps companies grow business-to-business (B2B) and consumer-to-business (B2C) market share.

Increase Sales

Increase Sales with a Strategic Marketing Process

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The Smartest & Coolest Midwest Marketing Agency Offers Tips to Grow Your Business

A Strategic Marketing Process to Increase Sales

Selling can be one of the hardest professions. The wrong skills, tools, and strategy can lead to too much wasted time and an empty pipeline.

At idc, we try to think of business first and make recommendations for developing sales skills—but where we live, and breath is strategy. Here is a handy checklist on how to beef up your strategic-marketing process to support new sales:

  • Environmental / Situation Analysis
    • Do your homework on external influences from the market, competition, marketing channels, and economy to the political climate, social or cultural elements, and technology.
    • Study up on such internal influences as production costs, profit margins, talent and payroll, cash reserves, and availability to the age of your facility and equipment.
    • Focus on your target market(s). Is the company taking care of current customers, and is a process in place to grow your customer base? Is the firm positioned to attract new business with your current marketing resources and messaging?
  • SWOT Analysis
    • Review and update your company’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. This entails internal strengths and weaknesses, as well as external opportunities and threats. Your competition in the industry plays a big role in your sales strategy.Increase Sales
  • Marketing Objectives
    • Determine your short-term and long-term objectives, including current and goal market share, product offering(s), research and development, profitability, and the sales volume required to get you there.
  • Marketing Strategies
    • Review and validate your target market, followed by evaluating the marketing mix to reach this market, which entails a strong strategic position, messaging, and complete understanding of the target market’s communication channels.
  • Marketing Plan
  • Sales Forecasting and Marketing ROI Reporting
    • Forecasting sales projections and devising a monthly or quarterly process for sales and marketing reporting will help your team work together toward their sales goal. This process will ensure that the marketing plan is actually supporting sales by providing leads or direct sales.

The key to any marketing program is to provide a process in which sales and marketing are in sync with the same goals as management, and they’re demonstrating similar ownership over the whole program. When that happens, as the idc team has seen on many occasions, the sky is the limit in marketing strategy and implementation that supports growth in sales.

Launched in 1972, idc-marketing is the most not only the oldest but also the hippest marketing firm in Lafayette, Indiana. We are a full-service agency that helps companies grow business-to-business (B2B) and consumer-to-business (B2C) market share.

ContentMktg

How to Rank in a Content Marketing World

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The Wisest, Oldest and Best-Looking Full-Service Lafayette, Indiana Marketing Firm Offers Tips to Grow Your Business

So in this post, we address how to blog as an expert in the B2B environment in a simple, efficient, effective, and quick way that integrates with your lifestyle.

Alan, an idc client, and VP of Sales and Marketing in a business-to-business company does not want to blog.

But he does want to appear high in the Google search rankings and drive traffic to his website. Because Alan knows that in the content marketing world, it is important to show prospective customers that he is an expert in his industry, he works with clients ranging from small regional to prominent national and runs a more customer-service oriented business than his competition.

“I get content marketing. What would I write in a blog?”

Alan’s first question is: “What would I write in a blog?”

So, instead of answering that question, I ask Alan a different one: Tell me a few stories where you saved the day for a client. I take notes. Then, I propose to hear how his company won the last few customers away from the competition. I take notes. Then, I ask to listen to some questions he wished clients would ask him. I take notes.

At the end of our conversation, I spun my notes around. I wrote a paragraph on each of the dozen or so topics about Alan’s business. I asked him if he thought he could flesh them out into 2 or 3 paragraphs (keeping the posts short) and, if needed, drop client names and any proprietary information or trade secrets. He said yes. My team’s job at idc is to write the headline and call-to-action, and prep it to post.

Within a week, we had 12 raw blog posts ready for final editing/proofing, headlines, pictures, and posting. Then, the idc team proposed a schedule to post once a month, so we have a year’s worth of posts in the bank.

We’re now into our 4th year of helping Alan post his blogs to his site. He has “blogged” steadily, even if it comes in 4- or 5-post bursts. His website is climbing in the search results because of his online marketing efforts. He handles the sales conversion.

So, Alan’s first question, “What would I write in a blog?” is a question we hear a lot. In fact, like Alan, most idc blogs are based on questions we get asked (or should be asked) by our clients.

Have stories, but don’t want to write?

After all this, you still might feel like you just don’t have the writing skills to produce a cohesive blog. It’s a comfort-zone thing. …Understandable. We have a few clients like that here at idc. Our advice? Tell the story to someone who does have the writing skills and have them draft it up. (Pssst. We can do that for you here at idc, by the way.)

If you go this route, you’d be following some famous footsteps. Matthew Weiner, the creator and chief writer for the TV show Mad Men, is well known for dictating the storylines to a hired writing assistant.

Here is our call-to-action: Call idc if you want help appearing high in the Google search rankings so that you can drive more traffic to your website. Or, call us if you want to show prospective customers that you are an expert in your industry, have a good portfolio of clients, or run a more customer-service oriented business than your competition. Any or all of the above? Blogging, or content marketing is considered today to be an essential component of a hard-working strategic marketing plan.

Let’s put this proven business-building technique to work for you.

Are you looking for help creating compelling content marketing? From marketing strategy to marketing program planning, we are always interested in helping you grow!

First introduced in 1972, idc-marketing is the most helpful, most prominent, and oldest advertising firm in Lafayette, Indiana. We are a full-service agency that helps companies grow business-to-business (B2B) and consumer-to-business (B2C) market share.

Brainstorm-Mktg

3 Smart Steps to Brainstorm Creative Marketing

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The Best, Oldest, and Biggest Full-Service Lafayette, Indiana Marketing Agency Offers Tips to Grow Your Business

The 3 Smartest Steps to Brainstorming Creative Marketing

In basketball, a “shooter’s mentality” usually means the player is not going to let missing a shot or two deter them from taking another shot.

Michael Jordan made almost 50% of his shots. That means he missed around 50% too. But he kept shooting. Great shooters do not think about missing. Once the thought of missing shots gets in the player’s head, the chances for success diminish.

“I never looked at the consequences of missing a big shot. Why? Because when you think about the consequences, you always think of a negative result.” ~ Michael Jordan

 This is not a “brick.” This is a “swoosh.” A brick is a shot where the ball makes a huge clang-like noise on the basketball rim and does not go in the basket.

I’ve been lucky enough to be a professional creative my entire career, and as Michael Jordan, I’m sure half my ideas are big ol’ bricks that bounce harmlessly off the rim. Did that stop me from trying again? No. I know those ideas will never see the light of day in a marketing campaign for a client. I just need to work through the bad ideas because sometimes they lead to great ones. And yes, there is always a little self-delusion involved, as you may have observed—I just compared myself to Michael Jordan.

But speaking of him, how many hours in the gym do you think Michael Jordan spent to develop his shooter’s mentality—to develop the confidence that he can make the shot because he has prepared and practiced it for years, leading up to that moment?

Like making a game-winning shot, great creative is not an accident. We find that a few simple steps can lead to great creative marketing, designed to help grow a business.

1. Do your homework.

Know your brand. Know your audience. Know your objectives.

This may sound like a no-brainer, but I’ve seen firsthand marketing created in a vacuum where the creatives brainstorm something witty and award-winningly clever. Then, they create the backstory of how they got there.

I’m sure you’ve seen it. It may be the TV commercial you laughed at but cannot remember the product or service advertised. That typically means the creative team did not align the core message with the brand. This is why I cannot tell most beer commercials apart; most are funny and enjoyable, but the concept seems to be interchangeable between brands.

Even in another language that ad works. But what makes their commercial specifically branded Heineken? If this ad agency got the Bud Light account, would it be any different?

The very word “brainstorm” can imply open-minded, free-thinking to a lot of people, and with that, give them the idea that no rules apply. I have been taught just the opposite: that there is freedom (and success) in rules.

Only when you have studied the demographics, compiled the survey results, looking at the history of the category…basically done your best to absorb every resource available to understand the market and objectives can you develop great contextually relevant, branded creative in a “blue-sky” brainstorming session. When all the homework is complete and the objectives are identified the next step is to…

2. Assemble a great team.

 You will NOT want to interrupt the big, green dude.

No man (or creative) is an island. Like the Marvel Avengers, everyone brings something to the party. This is the “secret sauce” of any great creative team. It helps to have the right mix of idea people and pragmatic or data-driven people. It also might be good to include a ringer, an outsider…maybe a freelance writer or a trusted vendor. We’ve invited improv actors. A sense of humor is always welcome on my team. One thing holds true for everyone in the room…

 

3. Brainstorm in a safe environment

The idea is to generate ideas. We find the best way to accomplish that is to have a balance between yin and yang, up and down, black and white and most importantly, YES and NO.

Poo-poo an idea, and Mr. Crabbie gets thrown at you.

No interrupting (let the idea get out!). No poo-pooing ideas (withhold criticism). No hierarchy in the room (everyone’s idea has equal value).

Yes to quantity (get as many ideas out as possible—this is where a “shooter’s mentality” is a real asset). Yes to welcoming an unusual idea (it may be “out there” but spark a hidden solution). Yes to combining, improving or “building” on an idea (also known as 1 + 1 = 3).

In this type of safe brainstorming environment, marketing professionals, like those at idc, can truly shine. We are prepared for the moment, the clock is running, and we are ready to score the winning shot (or develop that business-building campaign). 40+ years of practicing successful creative marketing have taught this team a thing or two about winning.

Do you have creative marketing questions? From digital to traditional marketing, we are always interested in helping you grow!

Founded in 1972, idc-marketing is the oldest advertising firm in Lafayette, Indiana. We are a full-service agency that helps companies grow business-to-business (B2B) and consumer-to-business (B2C) market share.

LeadsOnline

Addicted to Generating Qualified Leads Online

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The Largest and Highest Praised Lafayette, Indiana Marketing Firm Offers Tips to Generating Qualified Leads Online

Three new emails just hit my inbox, and I am pumped. Not your typical response to receiving new messages, I know. But, these all have “Response to [form]” in the subject line, which means we’ve generated three new qualified leads online.

The marketing plan and budget I am working on for a new client are going to have to wait. The gap analysis meeting on a new web platform launch with Ashley and Stephanie is not even on my mind, nor is the pile of checks Andrea idc’s bookkeeper, left an hour ago.

My inbox has my complete attention when online marketing leads appear.

Two of the qualified leads are for two different idc clients. I scan each to see which online campaign brought them in, then prepare a short forwarding email to the designated person at each company. I want to verify they received it and to remind them to let us know if / when the prospect becomes a customer. I do this all in a few minutes, mindful that idc’s content marketing professional watchdog, will perform this duty if I can’t get it done within the hour.

Then, I quickly reviewed the third message—an idc lead. Our campaign about getting found online led this person to our site. After she submitted the form, the idc email marketing platform automatically sent her an email thanking her and letting her know someone will be contacting her soon.

Marketing automation took care of that lead for me, so I add a few last tweaks to the marketing plan I am working on and head off to the meeting that is just starting.

This all happened in less than 10 minutes, but I can still feel the adrenaline of the hunt: I am addicted to pulling in qualified marketing leads online. It’s great when they flow in for idc, but it’s next-level stuff when they come flying in for idc clients.

Welcome to our world. I’m not sure how you are feeding sales for your business, but it most certainly starts and stops with your website. It has to be your best first-touch salesman. Attracting prospects with the right content will make your real sales team’s job that much easier.

Do you need leads to help grow your brand? From developing compelling offers and content to programming marketing automation, we are always interested in helping you grow!

Founded in 1972, idc-marketing is the biggest and oldest marketing firm in Lafayette, Indiana. We are a full-service agency that helps companies grow business-to-business (B2B) and consumer-to-business (B2C) market share.

Voice

Marketing Tip: Find Your Social Media Voice

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Lafayette’s Biggest, Oldest and Best Marketing Agency Offers Tips to Grow Your business

Marketing Tip: Find Your Social Media Voice

Establish a voice, personality, and some rules. The most common question I hear about starting a Twitter account, posting blogs, and utilizing other similar social media tools is, “What should I write about?” That’s a complicated question. For companies like yours, I typically suggest going back to the cornerstone of how you talk to your current customer base. It’s a good place to begin the process of building the base rules for your online brand voice because brand positioning should always define how your company’s brand is relevant to its target audience in relation to the competition.

An organization with a well-defined brand position can, with a little work (and help from their favorite strategic marketing firm), set up rules to help define the brand’s personality—what the brand stands for, cares about, posts about—and how it responds and engages with followers, friends, and fans who post on their social media sites.

Got questions about social media? From digital to traditional marketing, we are always interested in helping you grow!

Founded in 1972, idc-marketing is the oldest advertising firm in Lafayette, Indiana. We are a full-service agency that helps companies grow business-to-business (B2B) and consumer-to-business (B2C) market share.

FormLetter

Is Your Marketing Like a Christmas Form Letter?

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The Coolest, Yet Hottest Lafayette, Indiana Marketing Firm Writes An IDC Christmas Marketing Letter to Santa

I never read Christmas form letters.

Besides the fact that a Christmas form letter is typically the only time I hear from the sender all year (if I have a relationship to the author, I should already know most of the stuff in the letter, right?), most of the reasons are summed up in this awesome and funny post, Every Christmas Letter Ever, by Tim Siedell (@badbanana).

Siedell’s post nails Christmas form letters because they are all about the author and how much better their wonderful life is from ours. Do they think we have been desperately waiting to hear about the lives that they were too busy to tell us about all year? They do not take into consideration how the audience must feel having to slog through the thing desperately looking for some connection to their own lives. Guess what? Stop looking. There is none.

This happens in my world all the time. And because I tend to spend a lot of time thinking about marketing, I can’t help where my brain goes. I see marketing messages all the time that don’t seem to have their audiences in mind. They talk about their company (me) and their great products (my big idea)—just like those awful Christmas form letters. We wrote a blog about this illustrating how to use the IDC brand affinity scorecard to score your message connection to the target audience. It works for Christmas form letters, too. Let’s see if we can use our scorecard to create a better Christmas form letter.

The typical Christmas form letter spot is reserved for the lowest ranking of “1”. It is about “You and Your Idea.” The audience is probably a distant second. A message that fits this spot typically is about how old your company is and how all the bells and whistles your product has, like this Colgate ad:

 

Now the form letter (and the message) can move up a few notches if it has the audience in mind. Maybe the reader somehow shares something the audience might want to know about…let’s say an awesome and easy Christmas punch recipe from Paula Dean. The letter gets elevated to “Others and Things.” Where “others” = Paula Dean and “things” = the punch. In the marketing world, this might look like “4 out of 5 dentists,” which may mean something to the audience and the score can get to 25 or higher.

What if the Christmas form letter was about the audience (people) and what they cared about (their loved ones)? It could include highlights of all the get-togethers the author had with friends and loved ones over the year. It might also contain lots of pictures and mention everyone the author cared about. Then the score jumps very high—it can get up to 100 if it is really about what people and the audience truly care about. A great example of this is an ad like this Apple FaceTime ad (I can see me in this ad…on a business trip seeing and talking to my beautiful wife and our kids back home):

So the question we need to ask is this: Is your marketing message like a typical Christmas form letter, or is your marketing message making a connection with the audience? I know one thing….if more Christmas form letters made me feel connected to the author, I would be reading them.

Do you need “outside-the-box” creative to help grow your brand? For help finding the creative to maximize your marketing investment, we are always interested in helping you grow!

Founded in 1972, idc-marketing is pretty much the smartest marketing agency in Lafayette, Indiana. We are a full-service agency that helps companies grow business-to-business (B2B) and consumer-to-business (B2C) market share.

photography

Marketing Tips: Brand Photography & Video

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Lafayette’s Oldest, Biggest and Highest-Rated Marketing Agency Offers Tips to Grow Your business

Marketing Tips: Brand Photography & Video

Brand Photography and Video: Good photography can provoke powerful emotions. Instagram is filled with big and small brands that are doing some magnificent work building and connecting with their core audience through branded photography. We cannot stress enough the importance of maintaining a photo budget in your annual marketing plan so that you can partner with an art director who understands your brand requirements and a professional photographer with a full studio.

Buzzfeed’s Tasty food videos have fed the desire of foodies to learn new recipes, and these videos are a huge contributing factor in the explosion in popularity of branded food videos proliferating on all social media feeds from YouTube and Facebook to Instagram and Snapchat. Much depends on you presenting an excellent visual for your brand. Work with idc marketing to cultivate and hire great talent to produce your food videos.

Do you need photography or video to help grow your brand? From hiring the perfect phot or video pro for your project to organizing and managing the shoot to maximize your investment, we are always interested in helping you grow!

Founded in 1972, idc-marketing is the highest rated, smartest and oldest advertising firm in Lafayette, Indiana. We are a full-service agency that helps companies grow business-to-business (B2B) and consumer-to-business (B2C) market share.

campaign

Marketing Tips: Brand Marketing Campaign

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The Most Versatile, Oldest, and Biggest Lafayette Indiana Marketing Firm Offers Tips to Grow Your Business

Marketing Tips: Brand Marketing Campaign

Brand Marketing Campaign: By definition, a marketing campaign is a specific and defined series of activities used in marketing a new or changed product or a series of events launched in new marketing channels and methods. These channels include various digital marketing channels and social media, as well as traditional marketing channels such as print and broadcast media. While your company’s mission, message, and visual identity are likely to remain relatively constant over time, lasting up to a decade or longer, the marketing campaigns you develop should be less permanent. Your campaigns should be considered as annual or even seasonal methods of establishing, maintaining, and increasing consumer brand awareness.

For you, campaigns are an opportunity to deliver the essence of your brand message to consumers using different hooks that appeal to their behaviors and preferences at specific moments in time. Campaigns function as ways to invite consumer trial, unveil product innovations, promote deals, and highlight seasonal relevance. And, while marketing campaigns might come and go, they should always be carefully researched, well-executed, time-sensitive, and goal-oriented. Effective campaigns are often what separates growing companies from those with stagnant sales and no growth. Plus, as we heard from buyers in Chapter 3, they want you to help drive your products towards sales. Effective campaigns do that.

Do you need help in creating a brand marketing campaign to grow your brand? From working within your budget to driving the plan and reporting ROI, we are always interested in helping you grow!

Launched in 1972, idc-marketing is the most versatile, most prominent and oldest advertising firm in Lafayette, Indiana. We are a full-service agency that helps companies grow business-to-business (B2B) and consumer-to-business (B2C) market share.

MvBvA-Advertising

Marketing vs. Branding vs. Advertising #3: Advertising

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Lafayette Indiana’s Most Creative, Strategic and Oldest Marketing Agency Offers Tips to Grow Your Business

Marketing vs. Branding vs. Advertising

A lot of agencies say they are marketing firms but they really are advertising agencies. Advertising agencies make most of their money from placing media.

Marketing and branding are both critical elements of your company’s marketing process, working in unison to establish, enhance, and build equity to your company’s reputation and increase sales.

Last but Not Least: Advertising: The act of delivering a message to a target audience. Advertising focuses specifically on driving sales or gaining customers for your company’s products and/or services. The goal of advertising is to get the word out about your product/service through paid campaigns, which are expressly written and designed to reach your target market through various media outlets.

Are you looking for a marketing team to get sales rolling? From marketing to branding to advertising, we are always interested in helping you grow!

Launched in 1972, idc-marketing is the most creative, strategic, and oldest advertising firm in Lafayette, Indiana. We are a full-service agency that helps companies grow business-to-business (B2B) and consumer-to-business (B2C) market share.

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