Dedicate a portion of your marketing budget for this specific purpose – retaining your existing, loyal customers. That will allow you to target and measure the rest of you budget on converting new customers.

How in the world can these negative stories offer your company an opportunity to shine? Take a look at your company — what it does and who it serves. Is there a way to position it in a positive light based on the profusion of negative stories?

If you own a hardware store, position yourself as the expert source on home DIY. If the housing market continues to slide, people are going to be in their current homes for the foreseeable future. It should, therefore, be the home of their dreams…and it can be, with a little help from you.

Do you sell breakfast cereal through grocery store chains? Use publicity to reinforce how important breakfast is and the low cost of eating breakfast at home. Or suggest including cereal in healthy, inexpensive snacks for children.

The television world is still trying to recover from the writer’s strike last year that put a dent in ratings for all networks. The estimated recovery time from this strike is over a year! Digital Video Recorder (DVR) usage continues to grow and evolve. We learn each month new and different ways people are using this new technology. While DVRs are still only in one of every five homes in the US, this rapid growth is expected to continue. Satellite radio and sync technology have changed the way we listen to music in our cars. The latest PPM data from Arbitron show that radio listenership is dropping in ways no one anticipated. Dish TV penetration is up while wired cable penetration is down, making it harder and harder to be effective in cable.

What does this mean for your media buys? Change is happening and it’s important to know how that change affects your ability to reach your consumer. No one needs to throw the baby out with the bath water – but evolution, change and refinement are a must for any smart media plan.

Employee communications is a key component in the marketing mix. It is important to create programs that allow employees to feel as if they are a part of the process, and that they have a stake in the success of a product or service.

This can be accomplished through employee events to introduce an idea, contests that solicit their input, regular communication updates, and in some cases, utilizing their passion for a company or product in marketing materials.

Every single employee, from the mailroom clerk to the CEO, is a potential salesperson.

As the World Wide Web was pioneered commercially in the early going, the universe of those who used it and understood it and its vast potential was a fairly small group.  We could use terms and create terms to define new, never-before-done activities.  As more and more people gravitated to the Web, terms that many of us felt were fairly well defined morphed into something completely different.  Some might offer that the terms evolved.  I believe they were compromised.  I chalk it up to the fact that the Web was and is still new.  The lack of definition spurred its growth but also left room for misinterpretation.

Case in point: around 2000 or so, the Web became a place where experiences were chronicled in great detail with each new leg of a journey, or experience, as part of a larger event. Each new entry was carefully logged in great detail.  They were diaries.  The purpose was for entertainment, education, or even preservation of history.  They were called “blogs,” or short for Web logs.  The best and most vivid example that stands out in my mind was a blog called “Where Is Raed?”—a web log where the bombing in Baghdad was carefully chronicled in great detail that tightly gripped all those who read it and waited with great anticipation for the next post.

It would seem that the people who liked the buzz word (one of those words that’s fun to say, or maybe has a hipness to it) created alternative meanings for it and the original meaning has now been lost.  No longer are blogs web logs that chronicle an experience; they are no longer diaries.  They are ecolumns of a sort.  While most readers would read this post and consider it a “blog”, I generally consider this post an ecolumn.  Perhaps that’s being old school, but I prefer to preserve the meanings of terms.

It is important to retain meaning and context around the terminology that drives what is still a very new medium.  Last week, I attended and spoke at the Digital Dealer Conference in Orlando, Florida.  As I listened to one speaker, she defined behavioral targeting in a way that is not even close to the meaning that most digital marketers represent as being behaviorally targeted advertising.  I cringed.

Behaviorally targeted advertising, she would lead us to believe, is synonymous with demographically targeted advertising.  I looked around the room at the 600 plus people in attendance and shook my head.  Now those 600 plus people had an incorrect perception of what behaviorally targeted advertising really is.  Perhaps the speaker didn’t understand behaviorally targeted advertising.  Perhaps companies who don’t provide a means for behavioral targeting need to hijack the term to convince advertisers that they offer something that they don’t.  I’d like to think that the error was a lack of understanding.

True behavioral targeting tracks behaviors of users in a group and aligns advertising to the actions the users are taking.  The best behaviorally targeted advertising is tied to a registered user.  Frankly, the numbers of media outlets that provide true behaviorally targeted advertising are not that great in number—perhaps less than five.

I hope that somewhere along the way, the 600 plus misperceptions that were created are corrected.  I know I’ll be doing my part to preserve the terminology and understanding of what behavioral targeting means.

A smart way to dramatically improve your marketing success is to allocate a portion of the marketing budget to customer retention. There are innumerable ways to accomplish this. However, the easiest and highest-ROI way is to keep an ongoing communication with customers. This should be done via a regular email program, using direct mail to target only those who don’t have email. Use the data you have on your customers to talk to them about things that interest them. Make the emails as personal as possible (use a database to automate this). You will find that simply talking to your customers as regularly as once per month will make a huge improvement in customer retention.

This will allow you to focus the rest of your marketing budget on acquiring new customers, which is where it should be.

My son, sweet and innocent boy that he is, has painstakingly crafted an essay detailing how much he loves to walk the dog with the family…how “exuberant” it makes him feel.  My daughter on the other hand, an advertising account executive in the making, has written that (surprise!) going to Olive Garden is her favorite family activity (!)  because of their “delicious soups” and “excellent service” and, well, because “when you’re here you are family”!

I’m pretty sure the folks at Olive Garden will see through her thinly veiled attempt at currying favor but, in reviewing her essay before I shipped it off, it dawned on me how much my kids – and a lot of their friends – speak and think in “Ad Speak”.  My kids frequently spout off ad slogans and hum ad jingles.  Lots of times when we see a certain store or corporate logo, both are quick to sing the corporate jingle…or repeat the corporate slogan.

I guess that’s a good thing.  I mean, companies spend millions of dollars to sear their respective brands into the minds of the buying public.  And it would probably warm many a CEO’s heart to hear 10 and 12 year olds singing the company line….after all, they’re future customers!

We hear about companies being chastised for targeting children in their advertising.  How they’re manipulating kids for cash.  But as a parent of two who watch very little TV,  I can tell you messaging is EVERYWHERE…and people are picking it up – whether they know it or not.

Clients often complain that they don’t think the advertising is working because they don’t see immediate results….but maybe the ads are effective in a different way.  Adults may not respond immediately because they’re too distracted with other things…BUT every adult who’s gone past a fast food restaurant, movie theatre or toy store with children in tow knows that kids know EXACTLY what’s going on with advertising and hounds that adult until he or she breaks down and buys something.

I wonder if this was what the Law of Unintended Consequences was all about…