SAGE: OUR BLOG
adj: wise through reflection and experience
Categories
Direct Marketing: Science & Art
If you had to prove how your direct marketing programs impact revenue, market share or customer value, could you do it? Measurement and analysis help marketers become smarter, give us the basis to set benchmarks, and ideas to test and optimize. The term “analytics” as early as the 1600s, meant applying logical analysis to discover and communicate meaningful patterns in [...]
Keeping Pace With Your Customer
At one point or another, we marketing professionals are asked to come up with a cross-channel marketing plan. What we propose and how we formulate the proposal is the secret to our success (or possibly our failure). As marketing professionals we never, ever use the F word though. Campaign “F”ailure is always relabeled as testing. And testing is never [...]
Is Inverted Pyramid Style Dead?
One of my teammates held a lunch ‘n learn for our team to highlight lessons she learned at a writing workshop. She mentioned the inverted pyramid style of writing – you know, the one that’s represented by a reverse pyramid to show that the most important information comes first, followed by the second most important facts all the way down [...]
Online video ads continue to propel localized marketing forward
Localized marketing is the customization of a message or materials used to convey a message to a very targeted community or group. If you consider the fact that newspapers in America have been in existence for over 250 years and Yellow Pages for over 110 years, communicating and marketing to the local-level is not new. It is the means [...]
Radio Advertising: To Stream or Not to Stream
Thank you to Joey Taylor-Moon and Amanda Cheese for also contributing to this blog post. There’s no question that the rise of data-driven online advertising has changed the media landscape. While traditional radio is still big and still relevant, the ability to target your audience directly through a streaming service like Pandora or Spotify is hard to ignore. Deciding how [...]
Twitter’s new features present new challenges and opportunities for brands
In honor of the World Cup, and our internationally shared love of all things fútbol, Twitter has joined forces with Bing so users can easily translate tweets and participate in conversations about the same topics, no Rosetta Stone required. Simply click a translate button and BAM! tweets are magically transformed into your native language. How else has Twitter been keeping [...]
WellWorks! Helps Strategic America to Receive Healthiest Employer® of Iowa Finalist Recognition
The Healthiest Employer of Iowa Award recognizes organizations that proactively improve the health of their employees. This award program evaluates employers of all sizes, industries and stages of their corporate wellness program. As a member of the WellWorks! Wellness Committee, I was honored to discover that Strategic America had been selected as a finalist in the Small Business, Central Region [...]
Building Brands
In a former agency, I had a creative director who would respond to every common office greeting like “How’s it going?” or “What are you up to?” with “Building brands. Just building brands, man.” He believed it, too. He believed passionately that every time he had the opportunity to create something that represented a brand, he wanted that piece of [...]
SA Helps with Public Health Initiative: Count the Kicks
In 2008, SA began work on an awareness campaign named Count the Kicks, a public health initiative started by five Iowa women who turned the heartache of losing their baby girls to stillbirth or infant death, into a movement of saving babies' lives. The campaign was officially launched in 2009 and since then, Count the Kicks has grown, continuing to [...]
Corporate Mandates: Do They Help or Hurt Local Marketing?
Governing a franchise or dealer advertising program is challenging for corporate-level marketing departments. Accurately positioning a brand and product or service descriptions is difficult when dealing with entrepreneur-minded managers at the local level. With the intent to protect the entire dealer network, corporate marketing teams often institute rigid product or brand standards related to local marketing. For years, this has [...]
