What Marketers Need to Succeed – Infographic
eCornell breaks data down from four reputable sources to show why marketing professional development is necessary for success and increased profitability. Click here to view the Marketing Infographic.
What We Follow Friday – July 19, 2013
On Fridays, we highlight some of the most interesting articles we’ve been reading from around the web. Articles feature news, strategies, and tools focused on marketing strategy, data mining and analytics, conjoint analysis, customer segmentation and targeting, and market response modeling, and a few others for fun. If you come across an article you think we should be reading, tweet it to us, post it to our facebook page, or leave us a comment at the bottom of the page.
This week, we’ve found some great pieces from quite a few of our favorite news sources: IBM, Forbes, and more. Enjoy!
Data Scientist: Consider the Curriculum
“Data science’s learning curve is formidable.Read More
Using Porter’s Five Forces to Defeat Unseen Threats
When we think about competition in business, we usually refer to other businesses who directly fight with us for customers. After all, it’s these companies who are the biggest barriers in the way between you and world domination. However, helping your company to reach its potential isn’t as simple as having a better product or message than your competitors. In fact, the biggest threats to many companies are the ones that they’re simply not thinking about.
The Marketing Myopia
Theodore Levitt’s marketing myopia highlighted a very basic, but powerful point. Companies don’t just compete with other companies – instead, they compete with other industries. Read More
Why Your Agile Marketing Strategy is Doomed to Fail
So What is Agile Marketing?
Agile marketing is all the buzz lately. Marketing teams are scrumming, sprinting, and pivoting with a renewed energy to improve speed, transparency, and adaptability of their strategies. Read More
Using the Three Cs to Create Value for Your Customers
Marketing often seems like an overwhelmingly confusing proposition, but really it’s quite simple. At its core, the marketplace can be distilled to its three core elements – your company, your competitors and the customers. You may recall Omhae’s Three Cs from your Marketing 101 class, but don’t dismiss this as just another clever acronym. Everything you do in marketing should incorporate these three Cs. After all, marketing basically is finding a way to position your company so that customers choose it over the competition. The bigger question, though, is how to do this.Read More
Simple A/B Testing for Results
If you’re using a website to sell products or services, or to draw supporters to your cause, you want it to be the best it can be. Split, or A/B, testing provides the data you need to make better decisions about how to achieve this.
A/B testing is a simple experiment: You create two different versions of your website, randomly split your site traffic to each, then sit back and watch what happens. What happens depends on your goals. For most businesses, these goals are related to maximizing sales, customer engagement, ad spending, or optimizing product features.Read More
How Effective is your Marketing Dashboard?
We recently had the chance to sit down with two professionals from the hospitality industry who frequently initiate new media marketing campaigns and evaluate their impact. Lauren Levin, Vice President of Interactive Marketing for Sbe Entertainment, and Greg Bodenlos, Marketing Manager for Revinate discuss how they determined the success of their efforts for the brands they were serving. Last week we featured their answers on how they measure their marketing performance. Read More
Conjoint Analysis and Big Data
Recently, the team at eCornell had the chance to sit down with Marco Vriens, Managing Director of Strategic Analytics and SVP Methodology at The Modellers and ask for his insights on marketing research using conjoint analysis. Marco has also appeared in eCornell’s Ask the Expert segments for our newest certificate Advanced Marketing Research.
How do big data relate to conjoint analysis?
So nowadays there’s a lot of talk about big data, and obviously big data has an incredible potential Read More
Measure Your Marketing Performance
Clearly, new media marketing can serve a range of functions for your organization. This is one of the reasons why deriving concrete returns on these efforts—such as marketing campaigns intended to simply raise awareness of a brand—can be challenging.
We had the chance to sit down with two professionals from the hospitality industry who frequently initiate new media marketing campaigns and evaluate their impact. Lauren Levin, Vice President of Interactive Marketing for Sbe Entertainment, and Greg Bodenlos, Marketing Manager for Revinate discuss how they determined the success of their efforts for the brands they were serving.Read More
How Staff Efforts at the Property Level Can Increase Your Website Performance
All hoteliers would like to see an increase in the amount of revenue contributed from their website. After all, direct bookings are the most profitable. Here are some quick, easy and fun ways to get your hotel staff to positively influence your website performance.
Re-market On Property
Remarketing is a favored strategy in Search Engine Optimization (SEM). If a customer visits your website without making a booking, effective remarketing will continue to serve up ads about your hotel as the customer continues to browse the internet.
While guest are at your hotel, you should continue these re-marketing efforts at the hotel level. There are guest touch points all over the property. Remember not all guests at your hotel booked their stays through your website. They may have found your hotel in the yellow pages or was recommended by a friend. They may have booked their rooms by calling the property or used a travel agent. So, it’s important to share your website’s URL and inform your guests that they can find the best deal there. This effort does two things; (1) increases awareness to your website, and (2) incentivizes guests to think of your hotel again when they return to your city. Here are several ideas how you can implement this at your hotel:
- Create posters, flyers, door hangers, tent cards , etc. and display these in guest rooms, elevators, breakfast rooms, and lobby.
- If you’re taking advantage of digital marketing boards, feature a screen capture of your website
- Have your website URL printed on guest receipts
You want to continually remarket your website to your guests in an effort to influence their future purchasing behavior by constantly reminding them to visit your website for future stays. For guests who did book on your website, the on-property marketing will reinforcing that behavior.
Local Relationships
Local businesses and attractions are a great place to get referral traffic to your website. Building partnerships or relationships will help increase referral traffic to your site. Ask local attractions and businesses to list your hotel on their website with a link back to your hotel’s website. You can offer these businesses an incentive to list your hotel on their site by giving and exclusive discounted rate. For area attractions such as theme parks or golf resorts, an incentive could be helping them sell tickets through your hotel concierge or front desk. Referral traffic can convert into a direct website booking just as easily as search traffic.
Socialize Your Staff
Social signals are playing an increasing role in SEO. Effective search engine strategies require the use of Social Media. Are you leveraging your hotel staff in social efforts? Here are several ways you can encourage your hotel staff to promote your hotel on social media channels and increase your fan base:
- Feature your staff members on your Facebook page
- Ask your staff for provide “locals’ tips” they can share with current and potential guests to help them learn about the best places to eat, park, things to do in and around your city.
- Share these tips on social channels and highlight the staff that provided the tip.
These tips may seem basic and possibly even old-school, but getting back to basics can improve performance. Educate your staff on how their efforts on property play into your online success.
By: Heidi Bitar, Director of Client Services, Milestone Internet Marketing. Anil Aggarwal, CEO, has appeared in eCornell’s Ask the Expert segments for our New Media Course for Hospitality Professionals.
*This is reposted from the Milestone Internet Blog.