Anderson Marketing Blog

I don’t know about you, but I trust my gut on most things. But what I don’t take chances with is my clients’ or my company’s money. Gut decisions can drive great insights into what to test, when to test and where to test, but these need to be calculated decisions. Decisions made with consideration to the overall risk to your business.

When it comes to marketing today’s complex products and services, less can be more.

This is the first in a series of articles recapping interesting sessions that our staff attended at the 2013 SXSW (South by Southwest) Interactive Festival. Anderson Direct Marketing (ADM) made the investment to send three team members to Austin, Texas, to learn about interactive marketing ideas that we could apply to solutions for our clients. This session was a discussion about the use of new technologies to reach your customers and includes notes and video clips from the session to share our knowledge.

Where does great creative begin?

Not with the writer or the designer. Not with a brainstorm or a concept, an image or a message. When it comes to driving response, great creative starts with a good creative brief. And a good creative brief starts with the customer or prospect.

Marketing strategies and tactics are often defined by Segment (B2B or B2C), Channel (Email, Direct Mail, Social, etc.) or Industry. However, one of the most important categories to understand is Target Audience and one of the most commonly marketed target audiences are High Net Worth Individuals (HNWI’s)… also known as millionaires, rich or wealthy. HNWI’s have $1,000,000+ of investible or liquid income/assets (excludes Real estate, IRAs, durable/consumable goods, collectables) and represent 3.35 million households in North America*. These households collectively have approximately $11.4 trillion in investible or liquid income/assets and they account for more than half of all consumer spending.

SXSW (South by Southwest) Interactive Festival is an annual conference to learn about emerging technologies, network with cutting-edge vendors, and attend training sessions from some of the brightest minds in the Interactive arena. For SXSW Interactive 2013, Anderson Direct Marketing (ADM) sent three team members to the festival to attend sessions about social media, mobile marketing, direct marketing, email marketing, engineering viral videos, using emerging technologies, trending web design techniques, seamless customer experiences across multiple screens, gamification, augmented reality advertising, and much more.

You thought everyone was using email? Think again. There are still people out there who have never used this method of communication. In fact, according to the Direct Marketing Association, email usage is expected to continue to increase through 2015. What does this mean to you as a savvy e-marketer? It means you have new prospects to engage. Yet, you will also need to find ways to capture the attention of email veterans. Here are three trends to keep in mind when executing your email marketing efforts.

Congratulations to the winners of Anderson Direct Marketing’s Presidents’ Day Blog Scavenger Hunt.

Admittedly, it’s not brain surgery. And it won’t solve world hunger. But the practice of transforming a corporate litany of product or service features into dynamic, can’t-live-without-‘em benefits can often mean the difference between generating a qualified lead...and suffering the deafening silence of non-response.

Reading blogs is like Christmas shopping... your goal is to find a variety of specialized items to match several unique needs on your list. When shopping, do you prefer driving to 20 specialty stores or would you prefer to visit one superstore with all the products that you want? When reading blogs or news sources, would you prefer to go to 20 different websites or have all of those sites available in one single location? With an RSS reader, it's like shopping in Santa's Workshop with all the gifts in one location!