Why is it that within most companies “Marketing” and “Sales” are competing disciplines that seldom (if ever) work together? We don’t believe in it. We believe, and have proven, that when Marketing and Sales join forces they can move prospects through awareness to consideration and, ultimately to the purchase decision.

The first step is to recognize that the process is a continuum and not linear because prospects are constantly defining and redefining their own needs. They choose to embrace or discard the marketing or sales message on their own terms.  Consequently, Marketing must be increasingly relevant, preference-driven and channel-neutral and Sales must be adaptive to changing conditions.

This is accomplished through a complete understanding of the prospect’s purchase process, as well as the marketers’ own sales process. The target audience defines the purchase process, and the sales process is defined internally. Marketing must develop communication strategies that serve each master based on how people buy and how their own Sales team sells.

If, after an initial contact, it’s determined that the target is a prospect, but not yet ready to buy, then it’s important for Marketing to continue the nurturing process and allow Sales to focus on the next best opportunity.

This means that Marketing must appreciate the time and process involved by people and companies who make purchase decisions.  And Sales must appreciate that contacting the prospect once is not the end of the consideration cycle.

To learn more, contact me and I’ll be happy to show how this will work within your company.

Consumers are in the driver’s seat today. And it is the Web that has put them there.

Today’s savvy consumers engage with brands on their own terms – when they want and the way they want. They also connect with brands through multiple channels – researching, comparing, and buying as they choose – on the Web, through the mail, over the phone, and in brick and mortar stores.

And they behave in many different ways. Some shop at 2:00 p.m., others shop at 2:00 a.m. Some do their “pre-shopping” on the Web and then buy in brick and mortar stores, while others pre-shop in brick and mortar stores and then buy on the Web.

The most successful marketers are the ones who recognize and adapt to this new reality that relationships with today’s consumers occur at the consumer’s discretion. The brand no longer calls the shots.

As marketers, we must be relevant and accessible in all channels – wherever the consumer wants to engage. Since more and more consumers are engaging with brands in several channels, our marketing efforts must be integrated.

And therein lies the challenge. Not only must the customer experience at all levels be consistent, but customer data must now be gathered, analyzed, and leveraged across channels. Customer databases need to provide a single view of customer behavior and relationships so we can deliver measureable marketing results.

The new realities of consumer marketing require a new kind of agency. Not a traditional media agency, not a direct marketing agency, and not an interactive agency, but an agency that can seamlessly link marketing in the traditional offline world to marketing in the online world. And it can deliver consistent, branded experiences and messages across all channels. The new kind of agency also takes a 360° degree view of consumers and their behavior across all channels. And the new kind of agency understands when media and channels complement each other and when they compete.

Catalyst Direct is that new kind of agency. Founded as a traditional direct marketing agency, Catalyst began preparing for the new realities in consumer marketing more than three years ago.

Today, our work is integrated across multiple channels. The databases that we develop for clients, our systems, and our tools provide a holistic view of customers and their behavior.

In 2006, we significantly increased our ability to analyze and work with customer data when we acquired the data and marketing analytics company, Equient. The company, which had been owned by General Dynamics, specialized in customer profiling, segmentation and modeling. The data analysts and statisticians who came with the acquisition greatly enhanced our ability to provide clients with insight and knowledge about how their customers behave.

Then, in 2007, we acquired Auragen Communications, a leader in strategic interactive services. The acquisition allows us to combine the targeting and one-to-one communications of traditional direct marketing with the engagement and interactivity of the Web.

And we recently reorganized Catalyst Direct, blowing away the traditional media vs. interactive silos so we can efficiently provide and measure integrated, multi-channel programs.

Mobile marketing (cell phones, not cars with billboards attached :-) is probably the most exciting new frontier in direct marketing. With the cell phone being the most personal, the most context sensitive, and the most attended-to communications channel in the media landscape, it clearly represents a big opportunity to reach customers effectively.

Mobile marketing is about immediacy, intimacy, and context. Messages must be important enough to interrupt audiences’ social lives (the center of which is often a cell phone), and must be relevant enough (timing, subject, response method) to call the user to act — immediately (do YOU reread TXT messages a second time?).

Whatever your political affiliation, you should appreciate Obama’s latest foray into mobile marketing. As highlighted in the Mobile Industry Review, Obama has announced that he’ll send his VP pick out by mobile phone first–before a press release, before the media finds out. Obama’s strategy here is brilliant: he’s building a permission marketing asset which may plan a major role on election day.

I know a little bit about political campaigns, and one of the most important parts is the “Get Out The Vote” (GOTV) effort on election day. Democrats in particular focus on GOTV efforts as a major push–and they dread it when election day showers dampen voter turnout. (Republican voter turnouts are, strangely, less affected by the weather.) Obviously, reaching voters via cell phone on election day would be ideal.

Since mobile phone directories don’t exist, Obama’s campaign had to build its own; using the VP pick as an opt-in lure. With these mobile phone numbers, Obama is actually building the ultimate GOTV machine: the mobile phone numbers of his supporters allow him to contact them immediately, on the day of the election day, and ask them to vote, bring friends to vote, and make a call or two on his behalf. Since marketers like Obama can depend on users ALWAYS carrying their cell phones, it’s a sure bet that they can be reached before the polls close.

Election day is a Tuesday, and it just might rain. Imagine if you could reach out to all YOUR customers on a rainy Tuesday and tell them that your bays are open, there are open tables, that hard to find items are in stock, or that something’s on sale. The immediacy of mobile brings an entirely new perspective to the marketing landscape: watch Obama use it, and then use it for yourself.

The process of putting your life online, in aggregate, has been called “lifestreaming,” so it’s inevitable that brands (having personalities all their own) would join in: Here’s a good introductory article on lifestreaming for brands.

An Excerpt: “It’s fairly obvious why companies want to get their brand out into social media sites like Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and then wrap it up into feeds. It’s to get their brand out beyond their website, to engage users and entice them into discussions about their products.”

While this article implies that lifestreaming for brands is particularly focused on lifestyle products, we’ve already recommended it to some of our non-profit clients.  For organizations who wish to build a feeling of “membership,” a lifestream can be just the thing to keep people involved but do so at little or no cost.

Kodak, one of our largest customers, is ahead of the curve here.   You can view (and subscribe!) to the Kodak stream here.  (BTW, kudos to Kodak for using off the shelf tools like FriendFeed, Twitter, and Flickr… they are doing it right!)

Please note: This post was originally written using the term “brandstream,” but I have since learned that that term was trademarked by Fricken Company in 1998.  Kudos to them for identifying such an important trend so early on!   Fricken does business as “Brandstream Inc.” and was founded by Scott Bedbury, the author of A New Brand World.

For years, I’ve talked about the importance of scannability in any online presentation. (My coworkers are definitely sick of hearing me talk about scannability AND exploration.)

I’ve written and edited my share of thousand-word articles, don’t get me wrong. But the more I watched Web traffic reports and usability testing, the more I evangelized scannability (and specifically, short bulleted lists).

Michael Agger has a piece in Slate that cleverly summarizes the arguments for and the importance of scannability. (Although in general I have negative feelings about overuse of the sentence fragment and … within a paragraph. So I take exception to that suggestion.)

He also makes an excellent point about reading speed and font. (Although, again, I prefer to stick with Arial because it scores best across both online and offline platforms.)

Anyway, it’s definitely worth a read: “Lazy Bastards: How we read online”

I’ve written before (on my other blog, etailology) about the power of “service communications” in the etail and direct marketing landscape. To put it simply, people pay more attention to shipping confirmations, bills, and other administrative communications than they do “marketing messages.”  So… the real trick is ensuring that service communications do all of the following:

• communicate critical service information
• demonstrate your value proposition and your latest offers
• show your desire to continue and expand the customer relationship
• embody and express your brand difference

These opportunities are routinely overlooked.  We haven’t all gotten 300-page phone bills, but most of us have faced over-complex, poorly organized, and often-wrong billing statements.  (I once got a letter from Citibank telling me that my HELOC application had been turned down because I was a foreign-national, even as my all-American self received a box of checks for the same account!)   Colleen Jones at the UXMatters blog has an excellent overview of dos and don’ts for billing statement design.   It’s worth a look.

If billing statements don’t excite you, what about shipping notifications?  Nothing gets me more excited than a UPS tracking number.  I read those emails!  And even post-purchase follow-ups and surveys get my attention far quicker than a standard “acquisition” communication.  (My Saab dealer sends three post-service messages asking for feedback… and the next order.)

The point is this: direct marketing is the process of translating a moment of consumer attention into a lifetime of Brand Membership.  Service communications represent moments where consumer attention is extremely focused on your brand.  Do more than get it right … make it exceptional!

I attended the Advertising 2.0 conference in NYC on Wednesday. The keynote was Susan Decker, President of Yahoo. She talked about the state of online display advertising and compared it a bit to search.

Search is King

For the last five years, search advertising has worked well because it’s exceedingly simple to translate a search query into the ultimate intentions, goals, and desires of the user.

Since search-intentions are clear, investments and technologies have been focused on improving the serving and delivery of the search ads themselves (e.g. Adwords, Panama, and bid management systems like Omniture’s). Nowadays, very sophisticated platforms exist to drive search campaigns and the efficiencies are staggering.

Unfortunately… The Kingdom is Tiny

The problem? Ninety percent of all online advertising inventory isn’t search based. And this enormous display ad (e.g. banner) inventory is fragmented and inefficient. Susan is predicting a renaissance in display advertising. I think instead it’s facing a revolution.

The online display-advertising inventory is fragmented because it is structured largely on the ancient ideas of content ownership and subscriber profile. That is, online display ads are sold in nearly identical fashion to offline display advertising – a system that was established literally a hundred years ago or more. Revolution is needed.

It’s important to note here that even though these online ads are inefficient, they are so much cheaper than offline ads that the vast inefficiencies involved are easily hidden by agency or media planner or even by clients themselves. (These ads essentially get “fewer miles-per-gallon,” but each gallon is cheaper to buy.) A little better, certainly easier, but not the permanent solution. Frequency works after all, and online ad frequency keeps getting cheaper all the time.

Two Variables! Lowering Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)

The real problem is not how much less you could be paying for the same impressions (lowering the “C”), it’s how much targeting and reach and response you’re missing out on (increasing the “A”). As a rule, “old fashioned” marketers will be excited by the ever-shrinking-C in CPA. Direct marketers will instead be excited by the ever-increasing-A. Why? Because as direct marketers, we look beyond campaign metrics like CPA to look at lifetime customer value; each missed acquisition represents enormous opportunity losses.

Susan Decker also cited statistics that suggest that in 2012 Internet advertising will be second only to direct marketing and will exceed all print and TV. She spoke with enthusiasm about the vision of Yahoo’s freshly minted display advertising platform – hoping it will deliver on the idea of writing an ad once and publishing it to 500 million users.

Again, I agree with her sentiment, but her choice of words belies an “old fashioned” approach. First, by separating “Internet Advertising” from “Direct Marketing” I think that Sue is participating in the propping up of out-of-date mass-market-mentality about marketing and advertising – the very attitude that created the fragmentation she’s trying to solve! Revolution is needed.

The long tail – of both products and the markets they target – is the single most important concept to understand in this new media landscape. As targeting efficiencies improve (the ultimate promise of improved display ad platforms like those from X+1, Tacoda, and RevenueScience), marketers will find greater opportunities and lower costs through increased segmentation. (That would be the complete opposite of sending the same ad to 500 million people). Products, being sold directly to niche markets of consumers, through one to one marketing methods, will define the display advertising landscape… and that’s direct marketing.

As Seth Godin put it so well almost 10 years ago: “the Internet is the ultimate direct marketing medium.”

At the Direct Marketing Association’s (DMA’s) annual meeting (October 13-17 in Chicago) I participated in a number of sessions that addressed marketers’ growing desire to integrate interactive and traditional direct marketing methods into cohesive and tightly coordinated campaigns. A new form of direct marketing is afoot. Clearly, marketers who embrace multi-channel communication strategies quickly realize the powerful effect these channels have on delivering results and revenue. These clients and agencies are the ones embracing Direct Marketing 2.0, and they are quickly reaping the benefits. All the different talk tracts (Strategy, Creative, and Data and Analytics, across both B-to-B and B-to-C) delivered observations, case studies, and best practices that included interactive marketing as a key and critical component of direct marketing. Let me share a personal example.

Prior to rejoining Catalyst Direct this past August, I was working in the corporate marketing department for Kodak’s Graphic Communications Group, a leading provider of innovative solutions for conventional, digital and blended print production environments. Obviously, delivering the message to corporate marketers that “print is alive and well” was a major priority. Kodak’s “Print Is…” campaign was designed to demonstrate Kodak’s commitment to driving demand to its customers’ printing presses?a challenge, considering all the attention we’ve seen given to interactive. Pitching print might seem a bit old-fashioned. So we did it in a new-fashioned way.

First, Kodak declared that “print is the new interactive” and asserted the power of Variable Data Print (VDP) to communicate as personally as a Web site. Second, the campaign emphasized the prowess and physicality of print as a powerful and interactive customer experience. Third, we executed the campaign through an integrated approach, leveraging both online and offline channels to great effect. The campaign used traditional techniques, such as print ads and direct mail. But these traditional methods were augmented by banner ads, a video stream and a powerful Web site, www.printambassador.com. This program provided Kodak with an opportunity to leverage their brand strategy and provide a value-add for those who rely on print every day. And it’s the blend of traditional and interactive methods that is driving the results. Heck, if a company that sells printing presses can see and understand the value of integrating online channels into their direct marketing efforts, shouldn’t we all?