Schwab is investing millions of dollars in the RIA Stands for You online campaign.  It is an opportunity for clients of Schwab Advisor Services to put the marketing muscle of Schwab to work for their own firms.

By focusing the campaign online, Schwab is validating the power and growing importance of digital and social media channels and marketing programs to attract new clients and referrals. The beauty of the web: it is measurable and trackable.

One of the major challenges of attracting the attention of prospects online is fresh content.  And Schwab is providing a great deal of this (educational documents, logo, videos and more), for RIAs to customize and integrate to enhance their own online marketing efforts.  Plus there is a dedicated website and a social media presence.

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At the FutureM/IMS Keynote – “Advice from a CMO: How to Avoid Digital Fads and Focus on Things That Work“, Marty St. George, SVP of Marketing and Commercial Strategy at JetBlue shared a top-10 list.  How does this apply to your business?

1.Know what you stand for and how the program fits in
2.It has to fit the logo (e.g. could not swap the logo with a competitor logo and have it work)
3.If it has been done before, it’s not that special
4. If it doesn’t shape culture and conversation, we are not interested
5. If it fits in a standard TV spot ad or banner ad, it doesn’t fit
6. Must work across all media
7.  We want ideas that leverage multiple channels simultaneously and sequentially
8. Ideas of the future don’t fit into containers of the past
9. Ideas must be customer centric
10. Fix your problem while also solving my problem (for the agency).
#futurem  #ims12

Judy Gern, Revenue Architects Senior Client Partner, recently published this article in EContent,  a leading authority on the businesses of digital publishing, media, and marketing.

Here is an excerpt (click the image below to launch the full article)

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By John Nielsen

Lead scoring is the process of evaluating and assigning points to prospects and leads using marketing automation tools. Points are distributed based on the attributes associated with a qualified lead.  It is important to understand whom you are marketing to when managing a campaign, sending irrelevant content to your followers is a quick way to lose.  To make sure this doesn’t happen to you, below are a few tips one can easily follow to update your contact lists and help identify priority focus using lead scoring.

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There are a range of terrific CRM solutions out there and we have tried several for both client installations and our own team’s use. We settled on Salesforce.com based on the richness of functionality, the level of demand we see with our own clients and some excellent integration opportunities.

In addition to integrating fully with our marketing automation solution to pass through inbound marketing leads and see lead scoring, we have implemented Cirrus Insight as a browser widget for contextual integration with Gmail. We like Cirrus a lot, though until recently, we were a little bit frustrated by how it co-exised with Rapportive – another fantastic solution recently acquired by LinkedIn. That problem has now been solved!!

Check Out Cirrus Here! (this is an affiliate link which would earn us some brownie points with Cirrus and you might get a discount!)

 

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Since the private equity business is dependent on relationships with a finite number of LPs, executives and entrepreneurs, you need to be sure you can identify every potential opportunity to engage with your target audience.  With 3 out of 4 Americans using social media, various platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook have become an extremely cost-effective way for a firm to broaden its reach and strengthen its corporate relationships.  Surprisingly, however, when BackBay Communications surveyed the private equity market for its Private Equity Brand Equity II report, published last fall, only 7 percent of responding professionals said their firms were using social media regularly.

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