Marketing’s 5 Best Weekly Articles

This week’s top 5 articles cover the thought-provoking aspects of the good ol’ marketing some of us tend to forget, from sending a mail to someone’s mail box to getting a local community to support your retail location. We can learn something from these articles even as marketers for large digital corporations. Enjoy.

Online Lenders Rely on Old-School Marketing

Banks aren’t the only ones lending money, and no I am not talking about black markets and likes, I am talking Peer 2 Peer lending. Lending Club, Propser, and many other marketplaces are services that offer individuals a direct channel to lend to other individuals. This platforms are booming as people find this method as a way to enjoy a steady income on their savings while avoiding risk. This “fintech” companies are devoting most of their marketing resources to the traditional personal mail effort, for example in July 2015 alone Lending Club mailed 33.9 personal loan offers according to Mintel Comperemedia research. I am talking hard paper old fashioned mail and not the electronic version of it. The article, by Peter Rudegeair, also discusses the downside and upside of this method and reminds us that good ol’ paper can actually work!  

Is mobile marketing destined to be deleted?

Our phone vibrates and rings, we glace at the screen, we got a text message and it’s a commercial. Or we get a call from a blocked number, we answer and hear a recorded voice offering the next best thing. Did these things happen to you? Well many of today’s mobile users personal numbers found their way into the advertising companies list of potential customers and this phenomena is growing. According to Salesforce research, 46% of marketers are using mobile marketing, despite its apparent intrusive nature it is failing at capturing the user’s attention. The logical outcome is that if mobile marketing is not timely and relevant, it will go the way of email spam, which is declining because we have learned to filter it out and there are already a variety of apps doing just that. The best thing about this article by Joanna Goodman, is it generally discusses the issue of attention when it comes to advertisements and offers on the mobile and how marketers can capture that.  

Retail’s new marketing buzzword: ‘Community’

Marketing agencies have many ways to measures success in selling a product, but the favorite one is community – a group of devoted individuals who sell the product for them. The article explores the power of brands and how it fuels two major trends in recent years: authentic storytelling and cross-channel capabilities. 92% of all transaction still takes place in physical retail store locations and that it why communities of supporters must be used to market this stores and keep them busy with customers. In this article, Hilary Milnes explores just that and offers innovative market strategies for stores. The author even offers insights on how to combine the digital realm with the physical store place.  

What Agile marketing is… and what it’s not

Agile marketing, is it the “next thing in marketing.” ?  You never heard of it? Me neither. Time to read this article and fully understand it. In a nutshell it is simply rearrangement of your marketing and teams and processes to be more dexterous. It is some kind of an overall strategy that makes your marketing offer a lot more for a lot less. Although it is still unpolished it is still a great read.  

5 Powerful and Easy Ways to Product Success

“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.” – Peter Drucker, Management Consultant Each day countless numbers of new products enter the market. What determines their success or failure has a lot to do with proper planning and marketing.  These five simple tips will give you a great basis for developing your next launch.