Social Marketing Examples

Marketing automation is the intersection of many useful features and functions. It's a proven fact that marketing automation software gives marketers full visibility into aspects of the sales cycle that were previously a mystery. But the sheer number of buttons and tools can seem daunting if they're not old-hat to you just yet.

As you begin to build an effective marketing automation program, you can begin to gain a holistic view of your marketing activities. From there, you can streamline traditionally manual processes (like customer segmentation, email marketing, and campaign management).

Start ...

The recent success of social music platforms, such as Spotify and Songza, has inspired Twitter to expand its reach into the world of arts and entertainment. Primarily used as a collective newsource to share information in 140 character chunks, Twitter launched its music platform #Music last week to support music sharing and promotion. This comes only a few months after the release of Twitter's video support application, Vine, which can be used as further evidence of Twitter's expansion into other forms of communication and sharing.

#Music allows Twitter users to explore popular, emerging,...

In my last post, "Are you Leaving Money on the Table by Manually Merchandising Your Site?", I explained how retailers can take a staggered approach to migrate from manually merchandising their ecommerce site to using automated recommendations.

Also in this last post, I mentioned the importance of not relying on “free” ecommerce platform add-ons. Today we’ll take this idea a step further and focus on how sophisticated product recommendations engines incorporate real-time customer insights with merchant rules to create a truly personalized experience for your customers. 

#5 Way Retail Marketers...

This week I head to Knoxville to attend Social Slam and participate on a great panel discussing strategies to attract and energize an online audience. In preparation for our panel discussion, my esteemed panelists (meet them below!) and I wanted to provide attendees (and those who aren't able to attend #soslam) some actionable tips to help you better engage with your social audience.

Dino Dogan, our fearless leader and moderator. Founder of @Triberr. Lousy martial artist. Recovering engineer. Singer/songwriter. Blogger. Quiet reader. Loud speaker. Global force for badassery. Hi.

Follow Dino: http...

You can have a massive subscriber list and a powerful subject line ready to impress, but without the right email designer, your subscribers will be deleting your email long before they notice the CTA.

A highly skilled email designer is a crucial member of your email marketing team, as ExactTarget Regional Manager, Services (Central Region) Chris Studabaker points out. In a recent column for MarketingLand, Chris argues for six required skills that marketers should consider when hiring a designer for an email marketing campaign.

Be sure your next email designer is the best you’ve ever hired...

March 13, 2013, was a historic day for Kickstarter, the website dedicated to social funding for anything from software development to stage shows and everything inbetween. Ex-hit television series "Veronica Mars" launched a campaign to raise $2 million in financing to produce a motion picture of the cult favorite, hitting its goal in under 10 hours and setting a record for the quickest $1 million to be raised in the site's history.

Fans rejoice at the impending return of their favorite moonlighting private eye, but what does this mean for the film industry? And what does this say about...

March 27 is observed as the festival of colour, Holi, by a large number of Indians across the world. This holiday is a particuarly interesting social experiment, and one I've grown up observing since early childhood.

It’s a day celebrated not just with friends and family, but with pretty much anyone you can get your hands on--neighbour, neighbour's dog, et al. The key is dousing your victim in either coloured water or colourful powder dyes. In fact, it's not unusual for prim and proper suited office workers refusing to get into the spirit of things to be hit with water balloons thrown by school...

It’s March, and we know what that means. It’s time for some Madness. Teams around the country have started punching their tickets to the tournament and several more will do so throughout this week/weekend before the final field is announced Sunday evening. It’s a time of year when college basketball captures the imagination of the country, brackets are filled out, brackets are busted, and fans everywhere are tuning in to witness shining moments.

For many fans, that means watching more than one game at a time. Whether that happens at a sports bar, your home, at work (I would never), or just...

Summer is just around the corner, and for the music industry that means one thing: summer concert tours. And more than that, music festivals throughout the United States are gearing up for their 2013 edition.

Two weeks ago, the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival, hosted in Manchester, TN, announced its lineup for the June 13-16 festival. But unlike typical concert lineups announced online, Bonnaroo chose to turn this announcement into more of a virtual event.

On February 19, as a part of a 3-hour event hosted on the YouTube channel Bonnaroo365, the 2013 festival lineup was announced. In addition,...

Cross-channel marketing. We're all trying to do it, but how many of us are doing it well? When it comes down to it, how do you put together a really successful cross-channel campaign?

Our advice? Build one campaign across email, mobile, and social media!

In this series of blog posts, I'm sharing three easy steps you can follow to accomplish this:

1. Create a Sweepstakes
2. Get a Committment and Follow Through
3. Measure, Refine, and Repeat!

Today, we'll explore the third and final step.

Step 3: Measure, Refine, and Repeat

In order to truly understand the impact of your campaign--and learn from the results--,...

By now, most brands have recognized the value of well-executed cross-channel marketing. But when it comes down to it, how do you put together a really successful cross-channel campaign?

Our advice? Build one campaign across email, mobile, and social media!

In this series of blog posts, I'm sharing three easy steps you can follow to accomplish this:

1. Create a Sweepstakes
2. Get a Committment and Follow Through
3. Measure, Refine, and Repeat!

Today, we'll explore Step 2.

Step 2: Get a Committment and Follow Through

An important goal for any brand on Facebook is to build a loyal fan base. Ask users for a...

I recently read an article on TFB (The Future Buzz) which argued against the principle of using simple communications to reach out to the mass of your customers. I must admit, I wholly agree with assuming that you have a smart base of customers! It is definitely apparent that "dumbing down" messages does not guarantee that they will be engaged with by everyone, especially in today's digital age of smart and service-focused consumers.

The same blog post argues that using generic and simple messaging can portray your brand as "cheap" and "untrustworthy." I am not a businessman, but I am sure...

As a marketer working in today's ever-changing, cross-channel frontier, you're different from the average consumer. You live on the bleeding edge of technology. You brave the wilds of new social networks and mobile apps before you even know what they do. In short, you're an explorer.

Your challenge is this: you must acknowledge and understand the differences between your own online behaviors and the consumers you seek to reach--while continuing to explore new and uncharted digital realms.

When it comes to email, both marketers and consumers have a well-established, stable relationship with this...

Permission-based email has become the foundation of successful one-to-one marketing, and a company's database of email subscribers is one of its most valuable assets.

And with good reason! As our 2012 Channel Preference Survey revealed, 66% of US online consumers report making at least one purchase that was triggered by an offer received via email. And for BtoB marketing, nothing tops email for aiding the customer’s buying decision. In a 2012 article, BtoB Magazine reported that 59% of BtoB marketers say email is their most effective channel for generating revenue.

At the recent 2013 MarketingShe...

Cross-channel marketing is a key focus for many brands right now. But when it comes down to it, how do you put together a really successful cross-channel campaign?

Our advice? Build one campaign across email, mobile, and social media!

ExactTarget client eBags recently executed a highly successful cross-channel campaign called "Bag an iPad." In this series of blog posts, I'll share the three easy steps they followed:

1. Create a Sweepstakes
2. Get a Committment and Follow Through
3. Measure, Refine, and Repeat!

Ready to get started?

Step 1: Create a Sweepstakes

Your current email subscribers are some of your...

Last week I had the pleasure of listening to Lori Wizdo from Forrester Research on a webinar with our own Adam Blitzer. It was a great learning experience, covering how the sales and marketing processes have changed in recent years. Since it's so hard to give up an hour to attend a webinar these days, I wanted to share a few key takeaway from Lori's presentation.

Stat #1: 86% of B2B buyers engage with social media while working

I love this stat, and here's why. As marketers we have two weapons at our disposal: tools and techniques. Most marketers use the same set of tools; it's the techniques...

If there was ever a buzzword in business that defined an era it would have to be “Big Data.” Everywhere you look there’s another article about merging data sets to make more relevant business decisions. To kick off blogging in 2013 I plan to write a few posts about how ExactTarget’s platform helps organizations leverage other technology providers to make more sense of this term. But first, what is Big Data? IBM shares some pretty eye-opening statistics in defining this term:

Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data — so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in...

What happens after your customer engages with your mobile program? Your welcome strategy for any new mobile customer should include a combination of channels—email, mobile, and social—to support consumers’ cross-channel behaviors.

Don’t think of “welcome” as a single message. Whether your welcome strategy covers the first 10 days or two months, as with any relationship, it takes some time to get to know each other.

Here’s a sample step-by-step welcome campaign. We’ll use a retail company’s mobile app as an example, but you’ll see how these basic ideas can apply to almost any industry.

Day 1:...