7 Min Marketing With Pam Didner

Marketing Plan 2-pager: Part 1  Let’s talk about a marketing plan 2-pager.  For this episode, I want to touch on the first part of a 2 pager.  Then, I’ll address the last part of the 2nd pager in the next episode. I’ve presented hundreds of marketing plans to senior mgmt.  The lesson I’ve learned was that it’s important to have 1-2 summary slides to ground senior management about the plan before diving into details. Senior management tends to go from meeting to meeting and their minds run at 180 miles a hour. Before you do a deep dive into your plan, it’s important to have 1-2 summary slides to ground them and set the expectations up front.    What should be included in your summary slides which I call a 2-pager? Slide 1: Sales goal and business objective Marketing objective Marketing strategy  Slide 2: Personas Marketing Tactics Success metrics For this episode, let’s talk about slide 1, starting with ‘Sales goal and business objective.’ Goals refers to the revenue or growth goal of a company.  Well, if

The question of the day: Should I listen to the data or my gut when it’s time to make marketing decisions? Here are some thoughts that I want to share with you: For anything Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and search related, I tend to follow the data.  I make an effort to understand the keyword lists and how my audience searches and use the data to guide content creation.  However, I don’t let keyword and search dictate my writing or creative approach. For that, I follow my gut, then I use AB testing to validate my gut decision. To buy facebook ads or not buy Facebook ads, that is the question. At a conference I attended, an agency was promoting their Facebook campaign app. They noted that, with over 2B people on Facebook, the people you want to reach are there and it’s just a matter of finding them and reaching out to them with relevant content, creative copywriting and strong calls-to-action. They even had data to back it up. I think they are right to some extent.  But you need to consider whether FB is a

Question: What are the differences between planning and plans? -- Nathalie This topic came up while I was talking to one of my clients the other day.  I asked how she is doing. She told me that she is stressed because the company started planning for 2018 and she has a lot of work to do get ready.  I am recording this podcast on July 18th, 2017 and she is already starting to prepare for the next planning cycle.  In general, a lot of big and well-established corporations do that.  They kick off the planning and start gathering industry and marketing information early so that they can get ready for the planning cycle. Here is the thing that frustrates my client: no matter how much effort she puts into creating a solid marketing plan, it’s subject to change. The budget might get reduced or product launch might get delayed, causing the marketing plan she put so much time and effort into to become out-of-date?  But was it useless? Does this mean we should not plan? Frankly, planning is in our DNA. We plan our wedd

Question: “I lead a virtual marketing team.  Everyone seems to have his or her ideas on how to do things. How do I lead the team to consensus?” -- Melissa I know how hard it is to lead a virtual team. If you work in a big corporation, you know what I mean. There’re a lot of initiatives which are cross-functional. Here are three rules I follow: Do my homework and define what I want first. Let the team Tear Apart My Ideas Get the team’s recommendations and input to refine the plans When I was an operations manager, I was tasked with organizing a winter party for 200 people with help from a committee of 10 volunteers — all with different backgrounds and opinions. Had I opened the floor to suggestions from the get-go, I would have got at least 30 ideas thrown at me that I’d have to narrow down over numerous meetings, while juggling my full-time job.  So rather than asking the volunteers, “What do you want?” I did some homework and defined what I wanted. I searched online; I talked to event vendors; and I met wi

Question: “How do I make the transition from a traditional marketer into a digital marketer?” -- Elaine I’m going to talk about my own personal journey of making that transition. I started out as a marketing operations manager. I did mostly back-end stuff, meaning I set up tools, processes, vendor sourcing, training etc.  Then I moved into event marketing, and from there I worked on print ads. My first encounter with digital was banner ads.  I remember tinkering with various different shapes of banner ads: square, rectangle (vertical and horizontal). Sometimes we’d run into glitches, like the ads were not working properly. Mostly I just remember that anything digital was a lot of work to get right in the beginning. From there, I moved to a strategist role. As a strategist, I was tasked to create global Go-To-Market (GTM) plans for our local marketing teams to help build their campaigns. Even though I worked closely with social media, paid media, events, search, and even creative services, my knowledge of the

Applying content marketing to sports marketing Question: How does content marketing apply to sports marketing? -- Jake Let’s start with the content marketing definition first. Here it goes:  “The process of developing and sharing relevant, valuable, and engaging content to target audience with the goal of acquiring new customers or increasing business from existing customers.”  In other words, content marketing is about creating and sharing content to help, challenge, educate, entertain your audience or facilitate their buying process.  Modern sports marketing is no longer confined to big stadiums or fun events. Sports fans follow their teams and share their passion and frustrations digitally.  With the always-on social media, sports teams and fans are not limited to interacting with their team only during the regular season. Teams need something to engage the audience during the off-season.  Content is that “something," a means to sustain that continuous momentum and emotional connection. Speaking of the typ

Question: How do we deal with marketing burnout? Let me speak from my personal experience.    After 20 years at a big corporation, I decided to work for myself. It sounds romantic but, when you are in the trenches trying to make it work, there is nothing glamorous or romantic about it. I am my own secretary, IT, sales, marketing and HR. When I just started, I didn’t really have the luxury of turning down jobs.  I provided multiple services from creating strategies, e-mail campaign even down to beautifying presentations for senior management as long as their quotes met my expectations.  At the same time, I needed to promote myself. Between client work and marketing myself, it’s like having two full-time jobs.  I work all the time. Here is how I deal with stress and burnout.  Have a plan. Even when I just started out and was a one-person shop, I still did formal annual planning. I had my planning meeting with myself.  I identified 2-3 new initiatives that I want to do, set up sales goals (realistic and stretch