Introducing 360° Marketing Blog

Welcome to the 360° Marketing Blog! With the launch of our company’s new website, we are making a commitment to publicly sharing some key marketing and advertising insights that emerge from being on the cutting edge of martech. Would you like to “pick the brain” of the people who designed the ultimate marketing methodology and built the software that implements and automates it? While our clients pay us top dollar to work on their projects, there is plenty of information that can be shared for free. Not just on this blog, but also in our new Facebook group.

Who am I? Why am I starting a blog? Why should you care?

You can read the personal story about myself and my company, but here I’ll just highlight a few extra factoids. I have built and operated marketing software for nearly 20 years, going to the early days of CRM/Marketing Automation, as an early engineer at E.piphany Software. Lots of people in the “startup community” know about that company from the writing and teaching by Steve Blank, one of its founders. Over the last 10 or so years, I have been immersed in the performance marketing industry, working on many projects that did not involve building a public profile. Now with TargetChoice entering its next phase of evolution, this is changing.

By writing this blog I hope to foster a community of people who want to learn how to maximize the power of modern advertising through process and technology. There is no shortage of marketing advice or tips to be found online, but do you really believe that yet another story about “a 19-year old kid who made $XYZ online” is going to help take your business to the next level? There is plenty of low-hanging fruit to be picked, but with too many competing pickers, the game will keep getting harder. Do you want to keep hoping for “that one magic fix” or do you want to build processes and systems that will respond to new challenges? If you have a long-term outlook, you have come to the right place!

Why is it called “360° Marketing Blog”?

Let’s face it, most corporate blogs suck. I know that from personal experience of working on quite a few as a “social media strategist”! It is hard to keep putting out valuable contents if your immediate goal is to DRIVE SALES NOW! You see too many overly sales-y posts or trying to be too cutesy or constantly coming up with junk-y looking Top 10 lists and slideshows. Part of the reason I have not started a marketing blog in so many years is not being sure if I’m willing to commit time and effort to produce something of quality.

That’s why the focus and naming of this blog are beyond just the company and its products & services. We are going to talk broadly about where marketing is heading and how you can take advantage of the trends. Of course, our products & services are designed to take advantage of those trends. But even if you prefer to do it “your own way”, you should still find the content interesting and share-worthy. Now here are the specific reasons and themes for the 360° branding:

Omni-Channel Marketing: 360° represents consistently reaching your customers through the combination of all available interaction channels and touchpoints. If you are only doing Facebook ads or only email or only Adwords or only SEO, you are already in trouble.
Customer Journey: 360° represents taking an end-to-end view of your Customer Journey. Every customer touch is the source of both a great opportunity and a great peril. Is your customer’s path as smooth as a highway or do they keep falling into sinkholes?
Agile Marketing: 360° represents relentless iteration of marketing campaigns and continuous adjustment of strategies and tactics. No single idea is going to work all the time. You have to keep learning about your market as it responds to your messages

Is there some proof that these trends are important, but addressing them is hard? Just look at this CMO survey from a few years back. There is broad consensus that 360° Marketing is necessary, but technology and staffing challenges make it hard to achieve. But, wherein lies a problem, lies an opportunity!

Omni-Channel Marketing is Necessary But Hard to Implement

What kind of content can we expect?

Finally, let’s talk about what you can expect to find on this blog. We are going to talk about the problems and solutions, tips and tricks, opportunities and threats and everything in between. We will make specific references to what is working or not working now. We will translate general discussion of trends into practical tips.

The balance of marketing channel coverage may evolve over time, but we expect to always heavily emphasize Facebook Ads as well as email marketing, and especially their interplay with “everything else”. Of course, our initial focus will be on publishing the cornerstone content intended to explain the key aspects of our process and methodology, but expect really anything relevant to the blog’s goal!

We hope to publish this blog fairly regularly, but with so much work to do, it is hard to make definitive promises about the number and schedule of the posts. Just be sure to subscribe to our RSS and enjoy!

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Dmitriy Kruglyak

President at TargetChoice LLC

Data Geek. Process Fanatic. Growth Hacker

Making Advertising Profitable for Businesses

Building Marketing Tech since 1998