Category: Productivity Booster

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Email Marketing Lead Generation Productivity Booster

List Management

For the past couple of weeks it’s been all about the lists. List management is ultimately the blood supply of all your marketing efforts. Anyone doing direct marketing knows that the company usually kneels to the ultimate power of “the house list”. The best part of an organization that grows quickly is being able to farm the list management out to a database specialist. I don’t know too many people that get all juiced up on dumping spreadsheets into database tables, and the arcane arts of ETL (Extracting data, Transforming it to the right format, and Loading it in). I’ve picked up a bunch of ghetto tricks to simplify a lot of this, and thankfully SalesForce.com does a better job of it than anything that’s come before.

If you are going further ghettostyle and don’t have the Salesforce API, there’s a great tool called RingLead that can make your life much easier and your data much cleaner.

Recently I’ve been hunting for names that are very focused and I’ve been able to get lists from individual publications, but another tactic is to use a list broker, someone who rents lists and has a broad range of knowledge about publications. I had favorite vendor here, but some of these folks have been having some trouble making the transition from the world of Magazines to the Web. For example, I couldn’t find a web page for my vendor of choice. Something for me to dig into further this week.

I’ll spare you the rest of the details of these mystic arts… unless you want to hear more?

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Productivity Booster The Marketeer

Product Marketing

Ok, I said I was going to stop complaining about being sick and I am. But I still need more sleep than usual even though I’m feeling 100%.

I notice that many marketing blogs focus on the communications and PR side but this week I was thinking more about Product Marketing. This is the art of making sure that people want to buy your stuff BEFORE you design, build and advertise it. This is the most strategic element of marketing because it can make your job much simpler later on in the cycle, and more importantly – make life easier for the sales guys. And everyone knows life always seems better at a company with happy sales people.

Rather than reinvent the wheel though, I can just point you to Pragmatic Marketing if you want to learn more. Every product manager I know has a copy of their diagram printed up somewhere. I’ve never even been to one of there sessions but the diagram is so good that I’ve used it in presentations – just fill in the blanks with your own campaigns and you at least have some kind of plan.

Good news – Marketing Over Coffee is rolling another episode tomorrow!

addendum -  sorry this is late, I wrote this last night and in my half sleep state forgot to post it.

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Podcasting Productivity Booster

I don’t mean to brag, I don’t mean to boast…

but I like hot butter on my breakfast toast. A $5 Starbucks card to anybody that can place that lyric.

The latest Marketing Over Coffee podcast is up, and I am psyched about our first rave review from Mitch Joel. Mitch’s Six Pixels of Separation podcast is one of my favorites because it gives you tactical advice as opposed to just strategic ramble. If a guy on the management team of an agency says it’s worthwhile then I know we are doing something right.

Looks like drinks will be on me at PodCamp Boston 2!

Categories
Productivity Booster The Marketeer

Jordan’s Furniture and Seth Godin

Seth Godin had a great post last week about performing a show as part of business. It reminded me of the profound advice up on the wall at my local Jordan’s Furniture – “There’s no business that’s not show business”

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Podcasting Productivity Booster

iTunes Sorting and The M Show

Normally this would be my normal Sunday plug for the latest M Show (go listen to it, or better yet – subscribe!), but while tagging the file I found something cool in the newest version of iTunes.

You can now create separate tags such as Artist and Album for sorting in iTunes. You need to be a bit of a compulsive freak or have a huge music library to have seen the need for this (I’ll leave the judgement on me to your discretion). Let’s say you have your favorite artist’s new album and you rip it to iTunes. Then you’re searching by artist and you pull up the album and, Lo and behold, 3 tracks are missing. This often happens if the missing tracks are duets or have a famous backup singer, while you are searching under “Lawrence Welk” the track is actually buried under “The Lemon Sisters and Lawrence Welk”.

I used to just dump the second artist (in many cases I had no idea who the hell they were anyway), but now for those tracks with two famous artists you can choose which one you want to file the track under. Or, for the compulsive, have it in the library twice, once under each artist and still have it show as “The Lemon Sisters and Lawrence Welk”.

Happy Sorting!

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Brain Buster Podcasting Productivity Booster

Gettin’ Funky with Smart Playlists

Greg had kicked this over to me when I did a video on using smart playlists in iTunes. I was hoping to wait until my blog template was updated so I could show it in Revver, but that won’t be for another couple of weeks and I’m tired of waiting.

If you are going to sync podcasts across multiple machines or need to do some other funky stuff, check out: using Juice, Podnova and SmartPlaylists.

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Lead Generation Podcasting Productivity Booster The Marketeer

Return from Podcamp

Too tired… Just posted M Show.

Pictures of Podcamp Toronto

Video of sessions on Getting your company to Podacast Panel

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Podcasting Productivity Booster

Unconference!

Podcamp Toronto is right around the corner and I’m very excited to check out another un-conference. The schedule can be a bit frustrating since it’s always in flux (it stinks when somebody you want to see schedules themselves at the same time as one of your own slots CHRIS BROGAN).

I have to say though that I think I’m starting to lose patience with normal conferences. I seem to learn 3x the material at an unconference and don’t have to deal with as much vendor shilling. More to report as it happens!

Categories
Lead Generation Productivity Booster The Marketeer

Trade Show Wars – Top 10 Survival Tips

March is a busy month for me with back to back trade shows, which I refer to as “The Trade Show Wars”. Trade shows really are blood and guts marketing – do the logistics, execute, get the names, and deliver sales “The Glengarry Leads”. I was horrified to realize today that I’ve been doing shows for over 10 years now.

It’s all about the preparation, I have a bunch of checklists I’ve used for many years, comment or email me if you are interested (I’m not going to bother setting up links if none of you care about this at all).

Here’s some productivity boosters for you:

  1. Shoes – Need to look good, but don’t break them in on the floor. Many hardcore folks like black rockports, I’m an ecco man myself.
  2. Carpet – you don’t need the expensive carpet, but get all the padding you can. It keeps the staff happy and after day 2 people will visit your booth just to give their feet a rest.
  3. Meeting Room – I’ve even done this splitting a 10×20 in half and curtaining off half with a nice table and four chairs. You’ll be surprised, if it’s more than 2 days you’ll have prospects visiting just to sit down and they won’t want to get up once they do.
  4. Water, Mints, First Aid Kit – Everyone’s voice takes a beating, they eat crappy food and get bad breath, and somebody always gets cut handling the booth.
  5. Box Cutters and Extension Cords packed in the booth crate – in the old days I had a toolbag I would bring in myself, these days the absolute last thing you want on your trip home is to get pulled from the airport security line for a box cutter in your bag, but you do need a sharp knife for cutting carpet or boxes excessively taped shut.
  6. Heavy duty tape measure in booth crate – if you need to run an extension cord under the carpet you can pay an hour of labor and wait 3 for it to happen or use your own razor to cut the carpet, slide the tape measure through to the edge and use duct tape to attach the cord and pull it through yourself. This is only for last minute changes dictated by the boss, if possible have this marked on your show diagram and the electricians will do this free if it’s ordered by the deadline.
  7. Spare Bulbs – Pack them with the lights, not the kind of thing you need to look for on site.
  8. GPS – This can save your life, I had a screw up once that I was able to fix b/c I was able to get to the nearest Home Depot, get a hacksaw, pipecutter, and a bunch of plumbing stuff in under an hour.
  9. Ship to the warehouse – Most shows you can ship to the warehouse up to a week ahead, or ship direct to the show floor. Always ship early so you can confirm everything has made it. The bigger the show the greater the probability that boxes will be lost in the two days before the show opens.
  10. Get cell numbers on speed dial for your whole team – Do it before you get there and it will save all kinds of time.

I have a secret 11th that I’m not willing to put in print, if you’re a Ronin drop me a line. Have fun! LOL

Categories
Brain Buster Productivity Booster

Using a 3rd Party Mail Service as Spam Filter

John Federico  scored with a brain buster this week – use Gmail as Spam Filter.

In a close second was Griddlecake Ron pointing me to Pipes.