Skills: Digital Marketing Strategy, Internet Marketing/Usability, Marketing Communications, Online Marketing, Project Management

What is your favorite aspect of being a consultant?

I truly enjoy the variety of working on different projects with different people.  Working as a consultant challenges me to be flexible and fluid.  Each client’s needs, budget and resources all differ. So, I must be nimble when creating solutions tailored to the needs of the client.  As the saying goes, “Variety is the spice of life!”

Describe your most recent success story/project.

I recently worked with a wonderful nonprofit dedicated to providing support to women survivors of war.  I was able to jump right in, quickly assess their needs and successfully implement solutions within a short time frame.  I also identified and provided solutions for other outstanding needs in the process.

What do you enjoy most about working with McKinley?

As a consultant, I believe having a support system is the key to success.  Managing administrative duties of a project/client can be time consuming.  McKinley manages those details.  This allows me to focus on what’s most important – the client!  McKinley also provides the emotional and mental support to the consultant.  Their status report check-ins let me know as a consultant that I’m supported and ultimately gives me peace-of-mind.

If you weren’t in marketing, what other career would have you pursued?

I can’t see a life without marketing, BUT if I was to pursue another career it would be as a professor.  I had amazing people that supported me through my educational journey.  Their knowledge, expertise and mentorship has helped mold me to the professional I am today.  I would like to give back to others by providing the same type of support and guidance.

The real question companies should be asking is how to boost the results of their email marketing program(s).

Team McKinley has reached out to IMM and email marketing guru, Jeanne Jennings, to learn more about effective email marketing practices.   Jeanne is an interactive marketing strategy and product development consultant with more than 20 years of experience in the online realm.  Jeanne has helped McKinley’s clients execute strategic email marketing campaigns, manage online marketing programs for new products, and manage a brand’s online communications.

Jeanne affirms, “Email remains the top marketing channel, online or offline, delivering the best Return-on-Investment (ROI) according to the Direct Marketing Association.  There are many ways to boost your email marketing performance. One of the simplest and least expensive ways is to optimize your creative concepts for email campaigns.

When creating emails campaigns for clients, I focus on the preview pane view of the email which is roughly the top 300 pixels.  Image blocking is widespread today, so make sure your preview pane view isn’t just one large picture. You want to include a benefit-oriented headline, in rich text format, in this space to engage your readers and pull them into your message.”

What email practice(s) have you implemented for your company to boost performance?

To continue a previous post on the 14 Things You Should Know About McKinley, we would like to add three more tidbits about McKinley to bring us into our 17^th year in business.

1.)    In 2012, Smart CEO magazine selected Bruce Prouty, Chief Financial Officer/COO, as a Smart CXO award winner in the COO category.  The Smart CXO awards recognize executive management team all-stars like Bruce!

2.)    In 2007, McKinley began offering direct hire solutions to meet all our clients marketing needs.

3.)    McKinley’s website was awarded the 2011 Service Industry Advertising Awards Bronze Award for website design.

We’re looking forward to another 17 years of success!

Bruce joined Team McKinley in April 2001 as the company’s controller.  His successful leadership of McKinley’s finance and accounting functions led to his current, expanded role, which includes oversight of operations and administration.  He is a key member of senior management, helping to define McKinley’s strategic direction. Way to go, Bruce!

Skills:   Channel Development, Database Marketing/Business Intelligence, Digital Marketing, Internet Marketing/Usability, Product Marketing, Mobile Marketing

What is your favorite aspect of being a consultant?
I love being in a position to share what I know (and what I THINK I know).  Successful enterprises fundamentally understand their business, so I work to shape my skills around that foundation.  During a project, we often develop a solution together that reveals new insights for the client about their product, market or customer.  I really love that moment.

Describe your most recent success story/project
I just launched a new application with a client that reached #1 in its market through an aggressive, targeted go-to-market plan integrating content marketing, mobile, social and digital media.

What do you enjoy most about working with McKinley?
McKinley acts as an omnipotent matchmaker, pairing client challenges with expert solutions.  It takes a lot to pull that off well and McKinley’s top notch people make it look easy, and that’s invaluable.

What advice do you have for clients seeking marketing help?

Successful companies are good at creating a compelling product and message.  They spend years honing a product-market fit that differentiates themselves from competitors and resonates with customers and prospects.  Where they often struggle is translating their product and message to search, email, mobile, and social platforms.  Specifically, they struggle implementing these tools and building repeatable, track-able processes for these new demand generating channels.

Return on investment with the first iteration can be almost immediate and additional benefits tend to materialize later with subsequent iterations.  It’s usually the third iteration when it starts to germinate with prospects and influence the decision making process.  That’s when you achieve a higher return – the return on influence.  This is how I’ve helped clients become more assertive in their prospects’ decision making process.

1.)    A unique cover page

The 850x315px cover image space can be used to show off a brand’s latest product, promotion or news.  Think free ad space.

2.)    Highlight company/product milestones

Brands have the ability to highlight certain milestones each year with the option to ‘pin’ certain posts keeping it relevant at the top of the page.  On the other hand, administrators are able to easily hide unwanted posts from the wall.

Take a look at the Today Show’s page.  They’ve used this feature to encourage fans to browse the page by creating a ‘Today Timeline Quiz’, testing a fan’s brand IQ.

3.)    Accessibility to easily view recent and prior activity

Tabs and apps are displayed in larger boxes at the top of the page – making sure no function on the page is overlooked.  Fans are able to quickly scan a page to view photos, wall posts, and join in conversations.

Make Note

The timeline format functionality does not accommodate landing pages that are viewed when visitors visit the page.  There may be a way to fix this issue, so stay tuned for updates and guides from Facebook.  In the meantime, an additional tab may be installed for the promotional landing page.

Are you a fan of the timeline for Facebook fan pages? If so, ‘like’ this post!

How can your company avoid hiring the wrong marketing employees? Work with McKinley Marketing Partners who has over 16 years of experience helping company’s assess and identify their marketing needs, to find the perfect candidate with the right skill set, who will fit into your company’s culture.  All candidates are put through an extensive pre-qualification, pre-screening, and reference checking process to ensure they meet McKinley’s highest standards. This will help ensure your company avoids a bad hire.

Christina Cacioppo, an associate at Union Square Ventures, expresses that she is skeptical of resumes because they lack a lot of pertinent information. “We are most interested in what people are like, what they are like to work with, [and] how they think,” Cacioppo states in the article. With high unemployment, nontraditional application methods can also enable companies to narrow down large applicant pools quickly and effectively.

Don’t disregard your resume just yet; traditional resumes are still necessary for certain positions as even innovative companies like Google still depend on resumes as a crucial part of the hiring process.  Moreover, it will be interesting to see how the nontraditional application process evolves with web 2.0.  Will it survive?

Skills:   Acquisition/Loyalty/Retention/WinBack Programs, Customer Relationship Marketing (CRM), Direct Response, Marketing Communications, Marketing Program Management, Marketing Strategy, Partner Management/Marketing, Promotions

Describe yourself in three adjectives:
I would describe myself as focused, creative, and pragmatic.

What is your favorite aspect of being a consultant?
I love that the work is varied and typically intense based on a company’s unique business need(s); and the fact that my experience and skill sets are able to make an immediate and significant impact to help find solutions to those needs.

Describe your most recent success story/project
I most recently collaborated with a top Fortune 500 company project management team to execute marketing initiatives and business analytics to generate customer awareness and usage of self service capabilities and services to help reduce the costs for customer service and to increase customer satisfaction.

What do you enjoy most about working with McKinley?
Day-to-day, I like the autonomy I have to do my work while McKinley manages the administrative details of the consultancy. But more importantly, I like that the McKinley team has an interest in both mine and the client’s needs from making sure the fit is right prior to the engagement, to regular communications and contact regarding how things are going.

If you weren’t in marketing, what other career would you have pursued?
If I were not in marketing, which is a terrific blend of my practical and creative personality, I would probably have drawn on my artistic background and have become a children’s book writer/illustrator.

• Marketing automation 2.0 will arrive in 2012. Marketing automation will expand from primarily email focused to a way to consolidate and accelerate the entire marketing process.  As a result, the increase in social customer relationship management that began in 2011 will continue through 2012.

• It is likely that the new year will also bring the expansion of utilizing “likes” to better predict customer’s preferences.  “Likes” will advance to influence more than just online text content, it will begin to influence digital video content, such as “social TV”, and other social multimedia outlets.

• Despite privacy concerns, location-based marketing will continue to grow especially with mobile devices.

• It is predicted that Facebook will implement social commerce, thus changing how shopping is performed online.  This new shopping platform will bring a whole new social aspect to shopping as customer interaction is inevitable and invited.

• The internet is not only changing how businesses interact with their customers, but also how businesses interact with employees.  The globalization of the workforce will continue in 2012, and virtual teams, which are not rare even today, will begin to become more common.

As you can see, these trends in marketing for 2012 all have common themes.  Online marketing strategies and mobile marketing will continue to be perfected and more targeted.  Customer interaction will also continue to be a crucial part of developing marketing strategies and initiatives in the coming year.