Tales from the (marketing) Darkside (Part Deux)

So we come from newspapers to collectibles... and now its time to move to multichannel agency marketing. As the Director of Account Management, I supervised a Marketing team to handle the multichannel market efforts of a portfolio of niche luxury clients.... that's right- LUXURY.

What I have learned a long time ago is that it does not matter what you market, its how you market. So the same foundation of direct marketing basics apply whether you are selling a $30 collectible or a $5000 Steuben crystal vase. In the context of my role in helping my clients achieve success, I would like to highlight some key things that worked for Kenneth Cole a few years back.

Kenneth Cole was a great client. Au courant and trendy, they embraced the online space much more so than other clients. Their demographic skewed younger and so the ability to communicate to their buyers in their medium was vital. One key driver was email. Developing a email contact strategy was vital, so KC had subscriber lists by frequency and by content. They collected customer info such as month of birth so that they could email special offers on their Birthday. They collected monthly online customer surveys and used that metric as a barometer for their stores' ability to manage customer service. They were challenged by the costs of the offline catalogs, but these online efforts were measurable and cost-effective. While I do not know how their marketing efforts are today, I can say they did embrace online channel more so than other clients within my portfolio and tried to use the email in particular to connect with them in a relevant, meaningful way.

So fast forward to today. I spoke a bit about my time in the credit reporting industry a few posts ago. Today, I run the web marketing for Knewton.com.

Currently, I am working on all the key elements that make successful web acquisition possible:

• Creatives - Testing of the elements that successfully convey the utility of the product is critical to getting good prospects.
  
• SEO and SEM - Paid and Organic traffic are intertwined.... Get the keywords that matter to customers and make sure the pages are optimized to them. Google Analytics and Adwords has been vital to getting this learning.
• Display Media - Very difficult channel but another source for prospecting leads. Watch the metrics and negotiate CPMs or even CPCs if at all possible.
  
• Affiliate Partnerships - Get others to distribute the message -- especially if bandwidth is tight internally. BTW, my Linkshare offer will be live soon so any interested pubs should check out my offer.
  
• Email marketing - Critical to keeping you top-of-mind with prospects... regular, relevant and consistent contact is key.