Marketing Wisdom for 2006

Business-research company Marketing Sherpa recently released its fourth annual "Wisdom" report, which features more than 100 marketing stories and lessons learned by companies and nonprofits around the world.

In the downloadable PDF copy of the report below, you'll find firsthand accounts of how these organizations faced various marketing challenges, from general advertising to email, Web-search, and Web-site marketing.

Among the trends Marketing Sherpa has identified from these self-reports:

• Tailored copy appeals to more people. "Many contributors described testing copy changes on Web sites, emails, search campaigns, and other marketing vehicles," the company reports. "Although the particulars of each campaign varied widely, the end result was the same. The more broad the copy was, in a misguided attempt to appeal to more people, the less it appealed to anyone."
• Segmented email campaigns yield better results. "If you segment a list as small as 5,000 names into even smaller chunks, the segments [are] ten times more likely to open and five times more likely to click through than they would have been in a generic campaign to the whole list."
• The more search listings you have, the better. "If you've got top listing in organic results for your Web site, you should still invest in PPC [pay per click] ads against the same exact search terms," Sherpa Marketing reports. "As many readers pointed out ... if you dominate the search results with multiple listings you'll get far better results.

These findings, along with other real-life accounts of experiences with viral marketing, email campaigns, blogs, Web-traffic results, RSS feeds, and more can help your nonprofit benefit from other organizations' marketing triumphs and learn from their mistakes. Be sure, too, to share your own marketing adventures in the Discuss This thread below.