Recently I attended an interesting marketing workshop hosted by
The lady sitting next to me asked about how to track marketing campaigns' effectiveness. Of course I talked to her about Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Using Microsoft Dynamics CRM you can create marketing campaigns, track the campaign’s costs through marketing activities, build marketing lists, track the campaign responses, track what leads are assigned to sales, see what opportunities get created, and record what sales close. Sorry about the run-on, but Microsoft Dynamics CRM does a lot of stuff! And, it is designed in such a manner that all this marketing data is all tracked automatically without someone having to update this information manually each step of the way. If you want to learn more about Microsoft Dynamics for marketing automation, you can read our earlier “It’s Year End – Do You Know Where Your Marketing Dollars Are? You Do with Microsoft Dynamics CRM” blog.
Anyway, here are some highlights from each speaker’s session during the What’s Working in Marketing Workshop:
1) Mark Young of
Mark had a lot more interesting ideas and tips to share, but I don’t have room here to share them all. However, I would like to share his closing thoughts because they are near and dear to my heart as a Sales and Marketing Director. Mark noted that advertising is accounted as an expense according to accounting rules, but in actuality it should be viewed as an asset. When people buy companies, they buy the intellectual property and the brand. Marketing and advertising build a firm’s brand and thus the value of the company.
2) Matt Friedman of
Radio is still holding their own. News/talk is still getting consistent ratings and NPR is doing really well. Morning drive time is still really good for business-to-business. If you want to get radio coverage you have to message succinctly, time it for the maximum hook, and reach out to the news people directly. Fortunately for companies with a message they want to get out in the press, the internet has made news reporters more accessible than ever.
3) Anita Mitzel of
- Train the booth staff on how to engage and qualify.
- Have an ice breaker.
- Follow-up with the attendees.
- If you can’t afford a nice display, then don’t bother to exhibit.
“The #1 problem at tradeshows today is the booth staff spending more time looking at their phones than at the attendees,” Anita emphasized. “Put your best foot forward and be available to attendees. No talking among yourselves and put away your phones.”
4) Paul Chambers of
He also said that Facebook is mostly for personal use, Twitter is most useful for business, and LinkedIn is very business oriented. There are also several emerging trends that Paul highlighted including the death of boring static webpages (new sites will have more dynamic content like Amazon) and text based online advertising will be going away.
This was an excellent workshop hosted by the Walsh Institute of Walsh College as part of their Hot Topics Workshops. For more information about their workshops please visit
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by The TM Group, Michigan Microsoft Dynamics CRM Partner