By Jerry Rackley

A business that doesn’t have a social media strategy is like an actor that goes on stage without a costume. It’s ridiculous not to have either. Still, I confess to wondering how to measure the impact of social media or any marketing strategy. This has been the bane of a marketer’s existence – showing some kind of ROI for the things we do.  We’ve discussed this matter before in this blog.

Demand Metric now has over 20,000 members, a one-third increase in membership in just six months, and the company is on track to approach full-year membership growth of 100 percent by the end of 2012.

Whenever your company has a conference, be it is just a meeting or if it is a weekend corporate event, it is important to make sure you keep on task so that the event can move ahead as scheduled. The easiest way to do this is to use a conference timeline checklist.

One of the primary challenges that smaller businesses face today involves their marketing campaigns. Typically these challenges revolve around the lack of proper marketing alignment, meaning that companies do not coordinate their marketing messages with their target audiences. The reason improper marketing alignment occurs is because either the right message is delivered to the wrong audience, or the wrong message is delivered to the right audience.

When it comes to selecting the right CRM vendor for your company, it can be easy to get lost in all of the choices you have. The best way to go about choosing who you should use for your CRM software is to use a vendor evaluation matrix.

With a vendor evaluation matrix, you can put all of the information about the different vendors into a tool, and it will evaluate to determine which one is the best fit for your company. This is a valuable tool to have if your company wants to get started with a CRM program.

By Jerry Rackley

I recently attempted to dialogue with a journalist who was doing a story about out-of-the-box marketing ideas. I haven’t yet seen the story, but I was bold enough to make a prediction to her in my email:

"I suspect you'll get fewer, quality ideas than you'd like because the companies that are really good at coming up with these ideas use them to gain a competitive advantage. They're unlikely to pull back the curtain and let everyone see what they've got and how they do it."

While many companies create goals and objectives for individuals entire department, some businesses also encourage employees to set similar objectives for themselves. The reason for this is that these personal objectives can help employees perform their job better and better contribute to a company.

Marketing Communications Budget - Use this tool to create a marketing communications budget, and chart of the budget breakdown by category.

Marketing Communications Plan Template - The purpose of this tool is to help you develop a Marketing Communications Plan. The Marketing Communications Plan template was designed to summarize key exercises from our report: Plan Multi-Channel Marketing Communications.