PRMM Interview #18: Heidi Cohen of Actionable Marketing

Heidi Cohen, president of Riverside Marketing Strategies, has 20+ years experience in direct and digital marketing across diverse product categories encompassing soft goods (such as clothes and uniforms), highly regulated financials services, entertainment-related products, and craft-oriented offerings. Her blog provides marketing related insights grounded in digital and direct marketing. In this installment, Heidi answered some questions via email. You can follow Heidi on Twitter @HeidiCohen. 

1 – Your blog seeks to break down marketing into its simplest form – into actionable bits. What do you see are the main obstacles preventing marketers from getting the most out of their marketing campaigns today?

To clarify, Heidi Cohen’s Actionable Marketing blog makes marketing actionable by taking it from the theoretical and showing marketers how to apply these concepts, strategies and tactics to their real life business challenges.

The main obstacles to effective marketing are:

• 1. Need a marketing strategy tied to the business’ goals.
• 2. Jump straight to tactics because it’s easy. The problem is these may not be the most effective way to achieve the business’ goals.
• 3. Don’t incorporate a contextually relevant call-to-action
• 4. Develop a set of metrics that tie back to their business goals.

2 – How has technology increased this confusion? Simplified it for marketers?

Business must consider how technology has changed how the public consumes information (old media, computers, tablets and mobile), how they communicate and interact with others, and how they shop. From a business perspective, it can be a difficult to choose which newer technologies to use to deliver information and products and how to integrate these systems into a firm’s existing systems. Lastly, businesses must think about how their processes need to change to be most effective with the new technologies.

3 – Marketers are now also content publishers. On your business blog you write nearly every day and have fresh content. What three tips can you share with marketers on keeping their content fresh and plentiful?

To keep content fresh, marketers must:

• 1. Develop a writing habit or get a team to create new content.
• 2. Continually add value to the conversation, not reiterate what others have said. Here are thirteen content tips.
• 3. Must mix up the information and formats.

4 – Finally, we’re almost four months into 2011. What top trend are you seeing in marketing/PR so far and why is this something to keep an eye on?

Here are the marketing trends that are evolving this year:

• 1. Mobile is evolving in the US with increased smartphone penetration.
• 2. Social media is expanding across the corporation.
• 3. Every firm, regardless of whether they participate in the social media ecosystem or not, needs these three social media must haves: Social media guidelines, Brand monitoring and a crisis management plan.