BroadVision Marketing Blog

Advertising claims are not what they appear to be. While we tend to look at ads as ineffective, advertisers know better. While people refuse to admit that they are influenced by ads, sales figures show that a well-designed ad campaign has dramatic affects. What become obvious as we study ads is that a lot of what is working is below the radar and people don’t even realize they are big conned.

In the 1970s Jefferty Schrank (attributions listed at the end of the article) presented a new way of looking at ads and some of the legal ways advertisers tell part of the truth and part that is not while most people don’t get it.

How many of you, business people out there, are confused about the difference between lead generation and demand generation? Raise your hands; don’t be shy. There is a distinct difference between these marketing strategies even though some marketing agencies use them both interchangeably or use the wrong one. Here’s a clue: one is focused on changing your clients’ perspective and the one wants to capture their information for you to follow up with.

There is more to marketing objectives than simply increasing sales, and the key to achieving your objectives is to have a plan or three!

Achieving your marketing objectives hinges on having a solid strategy and a consistent commitment to follow through with your strategy.

The problem that arises for many marketers, however, is that they tend to start the process backwards. In other words, their tendency is to simply start with their proposed budget and use that to dictate what they can or can't do with marketing.

But this is not only unnecessarily limiting, it is short-sighted and focuses on the wrong parameters.

While it is true that your budget will, in fact, be a real determining factor in what tactics you can afford to employ and what resources you can actually make use of, it should not be the overriding factor. Flexibility, creativity, and agility may be required to "do more with less" when it comes to an affordable and effectivemarketing strategy. But without clear cut goals, or objectives, and a clearly defined plan of action and accountabilities, any money you do have will be poorly spent.

Remember, your marketing efforts are not like a pasta kitchen: you cannot afford to simply "throw spaghetti on the wall to see what sticks." You must plan, allocate, monitor and measure everything. And that requires planning beyond simply setting a budget.

Introducing Marketing Strategist Philip Kotler.

This video was part of a talk given by marketing strategist Professor Philip Kotler to the London Business Forum.

Professor Kotler begins his talk by inventing an acronym on the spot: CCDVTP.

He defines that to mean:

Create, Communicate, Deliver Value to a Target market at a Profit.

• Create value-product or service management
• Communicate value-brand management
• Deliver value-customer management
• Product--how do you brand the product

Now a business is really involved in three businesses--product management, brand management and customer management

• Product management  used to take place all your company. Following engineering an idea, you made things and  asked sales to get rid of them. Product management now takes place inside and outside of the company—open innovation

• Brand management used to mean packaging, name, logo. Now it is what business is all about. Brand management inspires everything you do. This is a new direction.  In the past brand management was just mind share and heart share, now brand management includes spirit share. Businesses show that they are more than just concerned about their own interest. They show that they care for rest of world-corporate responsibility.

• Customer management is not just keeping a data base of customer, even with email and direct mail. No, now getting to know customers and know them beyond data base. Asking customers help to co-create products and advertising.

Professor Kotler ends by saying, "This is a radical change in marketing."
For more information:

• Kolter Marketing Group
• Marketing Management, 13th edition, Philip Kotler, Book Information and Review
• Philip Kotler (Author of Marketing Management)

While that may seem to be a bit of an odd construct, it really does make sense. That's because content without a content strategy is ineffective at best.

One of the major failings of any content marketing effort is the lack of a cohesive strategy.

While that may seem to be a bit of an odd construct, it really does make sense. That's because content without a content strategy is ineffective at best.

One of the major failings of any content marketing effort is the lack of a cohesive strategy.

I have been stumbling over the words “internal”, "inbound" and “outbound” for the last few weeks and it seemed that no one could explain why. I have finally figured this mystery out.

There are “internal, inbound and outbound links" and “inbound and outbound marketing”. Links and marketing are entirely different things with the some of the same words just made to trip people up.

Here are the tricks: Links refer to sites that are not on the current blog post. Marketing is about how we send out the message that we have a product or service for sale.

Digital Marketing for Everyone - The New Normal

• "Internal links" are links that go from one of your website pages to another of your own website pages. This week I learned that each blog post is a website page and you are more than welcome to link your current blog post to previous ones that are written along the same lines. You can also link to pages that tell about your website, your services, your contact information, in fact anything at all having to do with your website.

• An "internal link" is different from an "inbound link" which Wikipedia says refers to what we have been calling backlinks—links where someone links to your page, or where you link to someone else’s website. According to Wikipedia,  “Google's description of their PageRank system, for instance, notes that Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. So an inbound link is a vote for your page, whether from another of your pages or from someone else.

• "Outbound links" within your blog are websites that you quote from that are not a part of your website. Yes, this sounds like just what I said for an inbound link that comes from an outside source to you, but in this case you are giving credit within your blog to an outside site, just like I did with Wikepedia. They did not vote for me by leaving a backlink. I used them to give credit from the outside to what I have written to improve the credibility of my blog.

Confused yet?

As all marketers know, the first job of any marketing effort is to gain the attention of your ideal audience. But the main job of any marketing effort is to get your audience to do something! And this is mainly done with a call-to-action, or CTA.

[This article was originally posted in September of 2018. Two years have passed, marketing has evolved, and the world has also gone through a unique period of pandemic and all the fallout from that. So, it is a fair question to ask once again, does blogging still matter for content marketing? With that in mind, we have updated and expanded this post.]

With all the changes in search engine optimization and the vast range of social media platforms available, does blogging still matter for content marketing?