Consolidation

There are so many online channels that people can’t possibly keep up with them all. Increasingly, people will seek consolidation with regard to the content they consume. Perhaps people will direct content from multiple sources to go into a single feed so that they can partake of what they find most interesting and relevant. People want the signal, not the noise. So what does this mean for businesses? Marketers will have to strive even harder to create quality content that targets their increasingly choosy audiences.

Blending of Different Marketing Techniques

Marketers will need to leverage a blending of different marketing techniques. The technological factor doesn’t render traditional tools irrelevant. Tried and true traditional tools such as direct marketing will continue to be used, but smart marketers will increasingly combine those tools with high-technology options that extend brand outreach and engagement. All kinds of possibilities exist for combining different types of marketing, and these possibilities will only grow in number as technological developments continue into and throughout the new year.

Emphasis on Branding

As more businesses establish digital presences, the importance of standing out from the crowd becomes pressing. For marketers, this means they must seek, through their online presence and voice, to convey to customers, prospects, and the public what their brands stand for, and not only in terms of products and services. A business’ online presence must also speak to its reliability and trustworthiness. Genuine brand engagement means building and sustaining dialogue with customers and prospects, which tends to result in openness on the part of businesses and brand advocacy on the part of audiences.

The Mobile Market

2011 has seen tremendous growth in the numbers of people who use mobile devices, such as tablet computers and smartphones. In 2012, marketers will need to focus more on the mobile market and leverage tools that allow them to connect with it, such as location-based apps, QR codes, text-message marketing, and PURLs (personalized URLs). Businesses will need to make sure their content is mobile-friendly so as not to lose their potential for outreach. Content marketers will need to put more focus on mobile audiences and on how to engage with them.

In 2012, marketers must continue to strive to provide content which is of value to people, whether through traditional marketing means or high-technology tools. Current trends point to these diverse channels increasingly coming together so that marketing strategies can become ever more seamless and cohesive. Technological developments and the means by which people and businesses creatively leverage these developments will be the prime deciding factor in how marketing will change in the new year.

Project Operations Manager

We are looking for an experienced individual with excellent communication skills to work with senior management in order to oversee the creation, development and implementation of projects throughout our organization. Strong leadership for this position is a must, as are the ability to excel in a highly pressurized environment and extensive knowledge of computer systems. Relocation is preferred but not required; we will consider highly qualified candidates for remote correspondence. For more about this job, including contact information and specific requirements, please click here.

Account Manager

We are also searching for an enthusiastic marketing or writing professional with at least five years of experience to manage accounts, generate business and coordinate strategies for digital media production and social media marketing. Ideal candidates will have agency experience, a professional attitude and the ability to handle whatever pressures the job entails with grace and poise. More information about this position can be found here.

Please note that there is a $500 referral bonus for each of these positions.

Consistency Across Channels

One of the best strategies for cross-channel marketing is maintaining consistency across channels. While specific channels may differ – say, Facebook, pay-per-click advertising, television, or a blog, to name a few – you should strive for consistency across all these channels. The means by which you use a specific platform to connect with customers will, of course, differ from channel to channel, but keep as much as you can the same, for example your business’ logo, your business’ online voice, and your content, as appropriate. This will amp up the recognizability of your brand.

Targeted Marketing Efforts

Your marketing database is also a goldmine of information about your customer’s preferences. What do they care about? What products and services most interest them? Chances are, you can find out a great deal in your marketing database about where your customers like to hang out online and which mobile tools they like to use. With information like this, you can leverage targeted marketing efforts where they’ll do the most good, by reaching customers and prospects. By analyzing information in your marketing database, you can even track how different channels – both traditional and technological – can complement one another in marketing effectiveness.

How can cross-channel marketing boost your business in 2012? When it comes to cross-channel marketing, knowledge is power. The more you know about your customers and prospects, the more you can effectively market to them in a targeted fashion that builds your brand. When customers are recipients of targeted, personalized marketing, they’re more likely to find exactly what they need from your business in a timely fashion. The resultant pleasure and satisfaction people experience from doing business with your company will enhance their customer loyalty.

Have you signed up for our Neighborhood Marketing Campaign promotion? Today is the last day to register to be eligible to win a full-service, $10,000 Neighborhood Marketing Campaign. Click here to find out more about how you can grow your business with us!

How do you grow your business when you’re swamped with the reality of running your business? Try our Neighborhood Marketing Campaign! Using our BDM Toolbox — exclusive to Business Direct Marketing’s HVAC customers — you can create an entire campaign in minutes, from postcards to QR codes, from brochures to social media. Just upload your content, including your logo, and with just a few clicks, your campaign will be on its way to your target audience, and you can be on your way to generating more leads and getting more customers.

Now you can also take advantage of our Neighborhood Marketing Campaign contest. Simply sign up for a brief guided tour of the BDM Toolbox, and you’ll be automatically registered for a chance to win $10,000 worth of Neighborhood Marketing services from us. You’ll need to hurry because the deadline to enter is this Wednesday, February 15th, so head over to the site to sign up!

• Through February 29, 2012, take 20% off all Magnetic Mailers using the Promo Code 022912.
• Through March 31, 2012, all first-time orders on the BDM Toolbox automatically receive 10% off. Promo Code: 033112.*

To take advantage of these offers, simply log on to your account on the BDM Toolbox and place your order. Make sure you enter the promo code(s) to use the discount! Don’t have an account? Click here to register for a personal, exclusive tour of the BDM Toolbox and be automatically entered to win a $10,000 Neighborhood Marketing Campaign!

It’s never been more important to engage in direct marketing to your clients and prospects than now. With the economy still shaky and households still holding tight to their purse strings, you need to offer a compelling story about your business and your service or product offers that will make your company stand out and inspire people to pick up the phone and call you.

If you haven’t already signed up for our Neighborhood Marketing Campaign, now’s your chance to do it. The grand prize is a full-scale Neighborhood Marketing Campaign valued at $10,000, open to all businesses interested in opening up the untapped opportunities that await them within just a mile or two of their target territories.

Registering is easy. All you need to do is sign up for and attend an exclusive, personal tour of the BDM Toolbox, your source for online HVAC marketing tools, and you’ll be instantly qualified to win our unique Neighborhood Marketing Program, complete with cross-media elements. You must register by February 15, 2012, in order to be eligible to win, so sign up now and find out more how you can grow your business with our exclusive BDM Toolbox.

Yard Signs and Door Hangers

No doubt you have satisfied customers in the neighborhoods in which you work. Yard signs and door hangers can significantly increase interest in your services. Ask your customers if you can leave a yard sign in front of their houses. Neighborhoods tend to be comprised of houses that are similar, so there’s a good chance that your customers’ neighbors might soon be needing your services. When they see the yard signs, they’ll be likely to think of your business. Door hangers work in the same way. Satisfied customers who display your door hangers are recommending your services to people who come visit.

Direct Mail

Another important component of neighborhood marketing is direct mail. Once you’ve left yard signs or door hangers with your satisfied customers, you can leverage direct mail as the next step in your neighborhood marketing campaign. Your customers’ neighbors are already seeing yard signs and door hangers that advertise your services, indicating satisfaction. With the BDM Toolbox, you can easily put in the addresses of your customers and generate Radius Mailings that will go to people who live nearby them. When you send direct mail to people who live in the same area as your customers, they’ll likely recognize the name of your business, associate it with customer satisfaction, and you’ll be the one they’ll call when they’re in need.

Power Pack

Want to greatly enhance your potential for lead generation? Try all of the above: yard signs and door hangers, combined with direct mail. At BDM, we call this our Power Pack, and it can be easily ordered through our new BDM Toolbox for HVAC Dealers. With the Power Pack, you can utilize neighborhood marketing components such as yard signs and door hangers for your customers, and then utilize Radius Mailing to market your business to people who live in the same area. The Power Pack is a great way to generate buzz for your business in the regions in which you work.

Now that you’ve learned how neighborhood marketing can grow your business, you might want to check out our new BDM Toolbox for HVAC dealers, which will give you a streamlined, easy way to order neighborhood marketing materials. When you register to learn more about the Toolbox either by taking a tour with one of our marketing specialists or by watching a webinar, you’ll become eligible to win $10,000 worth of neighborhood marketing services. Don’t let too much time pass before you come to sign up. The registration deadline is coming up soon.

Online Conversation

Whether you’re online or not, chances are good that people are talking about your business. So you need to become part of the online conversation. It’s important to know what people have to say about your products and services, and also to gauge the satisfaction level of your customers. When you build an online presence for your business through which you interact with customers and prospects, you’re showing them that you care about their feedback. Over the long term, an online presence helps you build relationships with people and gives them opportunities to engage with your brand.

Customer Acquisition and Retention

The digital age opens up numerous promising avenues to improve customer acquisition and retention. By providing high-quality, attention-getting content through social media that engages people, you can keep them coming back, and in this way, you’ll drive more traffic to your business’ website. If people like what you have to offer them in terms of content, they’re likely to check out your products and services. What’s more, satisfied customers will tend to recommend your business – whether its products, services, or online content – to their friends and families.

Customer Service

By leveraging social media, you open up multiple channels that can be useful for customer service. Whether you blog or you’re active on social networking sites, you can use technological tools to make your business more accessible to your customers, and they’ll appreciate it. The key to effectively using social media to enhance your customer service is to be as responsive to your customers as possible and let them know not only that you care about any problems they’re having but that you’ll do your utmost to help resolve them.

In the age of social media and real time feedback, marketing campaigns must make use of a wide variety of tools, both traditional and high-technology. To market well, you have to utilize channels that reach your customers, wherever they might be. Today, many customers and prospects are online, and in light of the popularity of smartphones and tablet computers, they’re often mobile, too. So the more you can rethink marketing to keep up with current and continuing technological developments, the better you’ll be able to grow your business in the modern age.

Social Media as a Form of Direct Marketing

It’s helpful to realize that social media can be viewed as a form of direct marketing. The dynamics, though, are different from those of, say, direct mail. The power of social media as a form of direct marketing lies in its potential for personalized marketing to a targeted audience as well as in how it lets businesses engage in two-way dialogue with customers and prospects. The “social” part of social media encourages conversations and feedback and can be a great way to enhance your customer service.

Multiple-Channel Approach

Social media and direct marketing work well together via a multiple-channel approach. An obvious example is printing links to your social channels on your direct mail. People who receive your direct mail might want to know about your social channels, especially since those channels represent to your customers and prospects quick and convenient means by which to communicate with your business. Another way to make multiple channels work for you is by printing QR codes on your direct mail which direct people to landing pages on your website or to one of your business’ videos.

The Sharing Factor

The sharing factor helps social media marketing complement direct marketing efforts, and vice versa. Be sure that visitors to your landing pages can easily share your content on their own social networks. Sharing across online channels is the digital age’s version of word-of-mouth advertising, and its power shouldn’t be underestimated. Another way to incorporate sharing into the dynamic that exists between social media marketing and direct marketing is to make your business’ emails easily sharable. Email marketing is a potent tool to grow your business, and it becomes even more so when your email, through sharing, reaches additional people.

People increasingly go online to shop and to seek recommendations for products and services, so to grow your business in the digital age, it’s smart to leverage high-technology tools in combination with traditional marketing tools. Social media and direct marketing work excellently in tandem to extend the outreach of your business on multiple fronts, and the possibilities inherent in combining these various tools are limited only by one’s imagination.

QR Codes

What are QR codes? You’ve probably seen them around already. They’re two-dimensional barcodes that can encode text and hyperlinks. When they’re scanned by reader apps on smartphones, QR codes can send people to landing pages on your website where they can learn more about your services. The great thing about QR codes is that they can be printed on any physical object, making them highly effective in reaching people who are on the go.

Yard Signs and Door Hangers

When you have QR codes printed on yard signs and door hangers that you leave for your customers, you can reach not only people who live in the same neighborhoods but also anybody who visits those neighborhoods. Customers’ families and friends who might be in need of your services will see your business’ neighborhood marketing materials on which your QR codes are printed. People who have QR-reader-enabled smartphones can easily scan the codes to go to your website, where they can get more information.

Direct Mail

Direct mail gives you a powerful traditional marketing tool, since it arrives in homes, where people are most likely to make decisions on their heating and cooling needs. QR codes make direct mailings even more powerful by opening up online channels through which prospective customers can immediately access your business to learn more. You can spread the word far and wide about your services by combining QR codes with radius mail, in which you send mailings to prospects who live in the same zip codes as your customers.

Business Cards

QR codes are also a smart addition to your business cards. When people are happy with your services, they like to keep your business card close at hand to contact you. Include a QR code that directs them to your website, and you’ll speed up their access to your business. When you keep as many channels open to your customers as possible, you’re sending them the message that you’re accessible and that you’re available to serve them whenever they’re in need.

By leveraging creative uses of QR codes for your neighborhood marketing campaign, you greatly widen your possibilities for lead generation. More and more people are using mobile devices like smartphones, and when you have QR codes printed on your business’ neighborhood marketing materials, you create a powerful package that will help you reach customers and prospects, wherever they might be.