So, as Contently.com co-founder Shane Snow explains in his recent blog post for Mashable.com, a whopping 95% of companies will at some point pull away from their keyboards and abandon their blogs. He makes the point that few CEOs would cease blogging if they used several readily-available tools to track the return on their thought leadership investments. Why?

First, building brand awareness and generating sales leads with the help of branded content takes time to deliver results. That’s the frustrating part. On the flipside, he explains that marketing is gradually shifting away from costlier forms of brand promotion such as advertising, to companies publishing their own branded content and disseminating it to their target audience with the help of social media tools. He outlines several ways that business owners, managers and marketers can track ROI on their content marketing efforts without having to focus on tired metrics such as readership and ad revenue. Check out the full post here

An array of challenges tends to result ranging from slashed budgets to reduced headcount when your company’s CFO looks at the books and asks hard questions about the value of marketing’s various activities.

But sometimes those returns are difficult to quantify because they simply haven’t materialized. That’s because many marketers buy into their own hubris and lose sight of what will truly appeal to their target audience, be they consumers, non-profit or government organizations, or companies ranging from small-to-medium-sized firms to members of the illustrious Fortune 500.

I have to admit that even we’ve been guilty of making this mistake on a couple of occasions here at McLoughlin Promotions. After all, it’s easy to lose perspective on what matters to your target clientele when you spend every hour of every day nurturing your brand.

That said, here are five damaging myths (there are many others) that marketers embrace, which often compromise the success of their marketing initiatives:

Digital impressions count as meaningful metrics to track ROI—Nothing could be further from the truth. While tracking impressions for everything from web pages to digital ads can be a useful way to analyze traffic and gauge brand awareness, impression metrics tend to be deceiving. They paint a very incomplete picture of the success of a digital marketing initiative and should only be used in conjunction with other relevant metrics.

People will engage with our brand out of the goodness of their hearts—Marketers often trick themselves into believing that their latest campaign will be so compelling that people will embrace their call to action and drive sales leads based on the campaign’s messaging or creative alone. Wrong. Target audiences—be they consumers or business people—take action when they’re given an incentive. That could be a discount or a free consultation, for example, or perhaps the promise of a benefit offered by a new or improved product or service. People engage with brands when—and only when—they’re given a very good reason.

Word-of-mouth promotion is a sure thing—The truth is that just because you happen to be marketing a product or service doesn’t mean people will discuss it with their friends, family or colleagues and deliver the kind of market buzz that sees marketing initiatives take on a life of their own. The harsh reality is that yours is just one of millions of products or services competing for attention from a specific group of customers who are already being bombarded by other companies looking to make a sale. To stand out and gain that word-of-mouth buzz, marketing initiatives need to be unique, relevant, interesting and dynamic.

Marketing through one channel will suffice—Remember when buying print ads in one major newspaper could help drive a company’s sales through the roof? Those days are long gone. Nowadays, customers’ attention tends to be diffused across multiple channels, most of them digital. Putting all of your marketing eggs in one basket will no longer suffice.

People care about your brand—Your brand is your baby. You spend (at least) 40 hours per week (but likely far more) working to build, grow and defend it in a crowded marketplace. How could your target clientele not love our brand!?! The answer is simple: they don’t have any emotional attachment to your products or services and therefore only care to hear your marketing pitch if it can a) makes them money b) saves them money or c) solves a major problem they may be experiencing (and then helps them achieve goals a and b). Anything else is just noise. Even companies such as Apple, which enjoy huge brand loyalty, are only a few quarters of innovation stagnancy from seeing fickle customers shift their attention elsewhere.

I’ve learned one very good lesson over the years—if you want customers to care about your brand, you have to give them a great reason to pay attention, then continue innovating and being creative to keep them coming back for more. Otherwise, you risk losing them for good.

Want to know more about how to build a winning brand using an effective marketing strategy? Stay tuned for more tips in future blogs.

David McLoughlin, CEO

That shortcoming isn’t limited to junior staffers—even at the most senior levels within organizations, countless dollars are shelled out on everything from promotional items to major promotional events with little or no attention paid to the return on those very substantial investments.

Needless to say, this is a big problem. Why? When companies are making money, few executives worry about how the marketing department is spending its often substantial budget. But when times are tough—think the recent recession, or even periods of perceived economic or industry uncertainty—many CFOs slash marketing budgets without a second thought.

The main factor guiding their budget-cutting strategies: an inability to quantify the business-building return on their organization’s marketing investment.

In the coming months I’ll be outlining useful tactics that marketers can implement to stage successful—and quantifiable—marketing campaigns and initiatives. To kick-start this new series, here are four key starting points to help track your company’s marketing return on investment:

Understand the end goal—For a marketing campaign or initiative to be successful, set clear goals from the outset that establish the key achievements or milestones needed to reach your strategic goals. Of course, those goals need to be set both at the primary and secondary levels at a minimum to ensure yours is a campaign that achieves a series of small successes before eventually reaching its main objective.

Prepare a hyper-specific brief—It’s one thing for a senior executive at a company to set out objectives for a marketing initiative, but it’s a far greater challenge to prepare a brief that also outlines how it will unfold, when, who is responsible for its success and what success will look like. Executing a vague marketing brief is a sure-fire way to derail your firm’s chances of success from the outset.

It’s time to worry when they don’t ask for ROI—As I mentioned earlier, executives tend not to worry much about marketing return-on-investment when the company is making money, its coffers are full and it has plenty to spend. When the economy tanks and sales slow, however, marketing expenses are often the first line item to be sacrificed in the name of budgetary prudence. To avoid seeing half of your marketing department—or, in a worst-case scenario, your own job—axed by just those types of cuts, be sure to measure returns on marketing initiatives and set bench marks for future campaigns. At least then you’ll have ammunition to justify your marketing department head count and initiatives when the boss comes looking for savings.

The campaign is just the beginning—All too often, marketers plan their initiatives to the point of execution, pull off a campaign and then pat each other on the back for a job well done. While it’s true that execution is the main part of a marketer’s job, so, too, is analyzing the results to glean real value and shape future marketing or sales initiatives to help your organization grow.

These are just a handful of tips on making marketing programs work. Stay tuned for a lot more detail in the weeks and months to come. Until then, spend your marketing dollars wisely,

David McLoughlin

Here at McLoughlin we have been following since late 2010 when it first emerged as the first extremely popular open-source offline-online technology and are proud to say that at that point it was searched around 100,000 times worldwide on a monthly basis according to Google Keyword Tool. Today, that number is 2.24 million worldwide and 110,000 a month in Canada.

Offline and online technology allows for both an interconnected and traditional media experience all in one promotional product.

Contact us if you would like more information at info@mcloughlin.ca

KPMG released their Consumer and Convergence Report of 2011 recently on “The Converged Lifestyle” representing the Canadian telecommunications, media and technology sectors across a range of sectors including advertising, retailers, content providers, mobile operators and banks. This post will underline all of the latter sectors.

Advertising and Data Privacy

While Jennifer Stoddart, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada said that businesses must stipulate how they track personal data at the Marketing and the Law conference in December, according to the KPMG report 47-50% of Canadians were willing to have their online usage tracked if it provided value or a payoff, versus 62% internationally. Canadians also showed to have less of a concern towards the security of their information at 84% versus 90% globally. 63% also say they trust their financial institutions with the data versus 56% globally, but trust secure payment sites like PayPal less at 25%, versus 30% globally.

You can check out the rest of the study here on Techvibes.