Let’s face it—with all of the information crossing our devices, desks, and computers on an hourly basis, and as much time as we spend online, it is easy to grow impatient with text heavy content and kludgy navigation.

As marketers we need to remember that we are not the only suitors engaging our target prospects.  We are competing against endless channels of information feeding into their inboxes, handhelds, news feeds, social networks, so on and so forth.

What can you do to spruce up your content?

Content will always be king but it also important to compete on a visual level. Every customer-facing asset, be it your website, whitepapers, datasheets, email blasts, newsletters, business cards, blogs, etc., should be formatted to invite, entice and motivate. Think of it as visual ergonomics for your brand and collateral.

You can start by taking a hard look at your existing marketing arsenal of campaigns and assets and try to pinpoint areas (and we all have them) that could benefit from a little simplification and refinement. Pay extra special attention to  text-heavy sections and try to find ways to translate some of the content into visual media, such as a  2-3 minute video, a well-designed diagram, or a nice stock image. As the old adage goes, “a pictures says a thousand words”.

Other ways to sharpen your content include bulleting whenever possible, and incorporating attention-grabbing headlines.

Don’t forget the Golden Rule!

As marketers we work hard to understand and anticipate the needs of our existing and future customers. But when it comes to getting their attention, we mustn’t forget to “treat other’s as you would like to be treated”. You can do this by incorporating YOUR own tastes and tendencies into the design process. Consider your answers to the following questions:

• When you visit a website, what navigational elements typically catch your eye?
• What navigational elements typically annoy you?
• What color schemes and graphics catch your attention?
• What elements of a datasheet make it interesting and scannable for you?
• At what point do you lose interest in a vendor’s video?
• What makes you choose to trash certain emails over others?
• Do you have a personal aversion to pop-up ads?

We’re more alike than we think

At the end of the day, we are all consumers of information. And what we choose to consume goes beyond just an interest in a topic—a lot of the time something beckons our attention and makes it easy for us to grasp the gist within a few precious moments. Once you take a step back and evaluate your own behavior as an information consumer, you’ll find that you have more in common with the audience you’re trying to reach. Treat them to the same design elements that pique your interests.

For additional tips, check out  How to Train Your Content to Get Your Audience’s Attention on Search Engine Guide.

I stumbled across a couple of interesting polls this week pertaining to social media marketing.

Pivot Conference surveyed a group of brand marketers targeting the 18-34 demographic and revealed that more than 87% of them will increase social media marketing spending in next 12 months. While the overall results indicate that these marketers are enjoying positive results with social campaigns, the general sentiment is that more time, energy, and money is required to expand reach and measure results.

On the other side of the fence, Jacob Morgan of CMSWire referenced a recent study from the Brand Science Institute in his post on why so many social media strategies fail. The BSI report polled 563 marketers across 12 European countries and exposed alarming statistics that include 81% of companies do not have a clear social media strategy while only 7% understand the value of customer interactions.

What can we gather from these polls?

These studies are interesting because they reveal how little we marketers really know about how social media works and how to measure it. For example, you have those who are largely invested in social engagement but are still wary about where to go and how to achieve measurable ROI. Then there are those who simply get lost in the social circuits and fail to effectively engage with their target audience.

Overall, as marketers we are faced with the dilemma of how to build a ‘strategy’ around something that is constantly evolving and requires frequent evaluation.

So, You’ve got the drive. You’ve got the budget. Now what do you do?

Social media strategies are unique to each organization. What may work for some might not work for others. However, the key to devising a successful strategy is to first establish a mission for your program. This involves identifying the pain points of your target customers and generating discussions in social forums.

Staying focused and committed is also very critical. As Morgan points out, your social media strategy should be built-in to your overall business plan. Make your approach and expectations official by establishing a company-wide policy around social engagement.

And finally, don’t forget to keep an eye on the Jones’. By staying up to date on social trends and practices, you can find new and creative ways to spruce up your social effort.  The beauty of social media is it has infinite possibilities especially as more tools and platforms are added to the pot. Just remember to stay consistent, focused, and informative.

A recent blog post by Caroline Ruggiero, the Customer Enablement Manager at Marketo, has challenged me to ‘re-think’ my approach to email marketing. In her post, Ruggiero brings up a good point regarding the ideal time to send an email blast – if there is such a thing. Marketers past and present have devised their own theories regarding the best time to blast – with consideration to the best day of the week and the optimal timeframe to accommodate the many times zones.

My Preconceived Notions

I have (and currently continue) to faithfully ascribe to the gospel of never blasting out on Monday mornings for fear of getting lost in the email onslaught that greets a new week, or on Fridays for fear of getting overlooked in the end of week wrap-up before the weekend.

A Reversal of Thought

My rule of thumb has always been Tuesdays, Wednesdays or Thursdays, preferably at 7:00am Pacific Time so as to not interfere with lunchtime on the East Coast. And never, ever, ever on weekends because your hard work will definitely go unnoticed and it will all be a wasted effort.

Or will it? As Ruggiero points out – the information that crosses our desks daily has increased – so have the channels that bring it in. People actually bookmark (we’ve seen this ourselves) or store incoming mail for future reading because there isn’t enough time in during the workday to consider every email and newsletter that crosses the screen.

Why Reconsider Your Scheduling Strategy?

An organization’s mailing list is one of the most valuable marketing assets and should be treated with respect and concern. Email blasts can sometimes fall by the wayside as other social media platforms provide faster and immediate ways of staying connected. However, your database consists of people who have gone out of thee way to opt-in to your world. They deserve direct contact and consideration. Maybe we’ll be doing our valuable contacts a favor by lessening their email load in the middle of the workweek.

Challenge Your Current Approach

Perhaps it is time we rethink our preconceived notions about the best time to blast. A/B testing, as Ruggiero suggests, is a great way to gauge one day against the other. Also, before scheduling that next campaign, I encourage you to consider your own email consumption habits and when you prefer to be pinged with new content.

This past Spring, we started doing a couple of interesting multimedia projects for our clients where we repurposed their webinar content into small, bite-sized snippets that could be easily shared across social media channels.

The projects were so successful, that we’ve decided to launch our ‘webinar repurposing’ as a service called MarketPlane Webinar Concentrate. Although it’s just been a few weeks since we launched, we’ve been pleasantly surprised at the response and interest from B2B technology companies.

Continue reading Repurpose Your Webinar Content with Webinar Concentrate

Thanks to the many avenues of social media integration, we now have more direct conduits to our prospects, clients and industry experts than ever before. And when nurtured consistently and strategically, this diverse group of individuals can help contribute valuable content for our business resources. Continue reading Turn Your Content Creation into A Community Affair

Virtualized and dynamic cloud infrastructures present operational challenges to IT teams whether in enterprise organizations or cloud-based service providers. Not only are these virtual infrastructures transient and dynamic – making them harder to monitor and control, they also compel IT organizational silos and processes to interplay in ways that were never required in traditional data center architectures.

Traditional Data Center Management

Traditional data center architectures favored single applications deployed on physical hardware operated at low rates of utilization. Server and application provisioning often took days, if not weeks. Hardware capacities were optimized for peak load with additional safety margins for risk factoring. Continue reading Operations Management for Cloud Infrastructures: 5 Strategies to Consider

For many, SEO is a four letter word referring to a daunting and painstaking process. The truth is it doesn’t have to be. I enjoyed a recent Duct Tape Marketing podcast called “Is SEO Copywriting Just Good Copywriting?” with Brian Clark, founder of copyblogger and Scribe, which offers  interesting ideas about effective SEO copy. Here are 5 recommendations to tweak your SEO approach: Continue reading 5 Ways to Help Take the Sting out of SEO

This week’s article "Virtualization Management: Time to Get Serious" on Information Week is a great read. It covers many important topics, raises key questions, and provides good background data that any IT Management executive building virtualization tools will find useful. Here are some interesting points to consider –

Continue reading Virtualization Management: Driving Opportunity and Innovation

First a few words on MarketPlane. The last year has been great, but 2010 promises to be even better. We have worked across multiple markets and dimensions - commercial and open source software, SMB and Enterprise, traditional media and new Social media, and  from strategy to demand generation. No doubt we have learnt a lot of new things on the way and delivered some excellent results.

Now to the topic that the next quest on the IT Management front is really about making things simpler. Enterprise IT tools have gotten big, complex and bloated. In a way, CIO’s and IT executives are looking to drive down that complexity through automation, correlation and even new business models – like open source software. When enterprise IT Management tools configuration cost millions of dollars of professional services for each effort, it’s the vendor and system integrators that laugh their way to the bank – not the customer. Continue reading Making IT Management Simple – The Next Quest

In a move that will reverberate in the strategy think tanks of the other Big 5 Enterprise Systems and Network Management vendors (HP, IBM, BMC and latest entrant EMC) – CA announced the acquisition of privately held NetQoS. NetQoS’s technology provides CA the smarts to detect individual application level traffic, diagnostic and response data based on deep packet inpection (DPI) technology. It also provides a strong NetFlow reporting solution that will most likely replace the weaker capability that CA acquired as part of its Concord Communications acquistion in 2005. Similarly it will also beef up CA’s VoIP management offerings - along with the experienced development team that NetQoS had picked up enmasse from a NetIQ restructuring some years back.

Continue reading NetQoS Acquired by CA