Innovative presentation, but consistent quality. That's what my everyday coffee brand tells me I’m getting with its new packaging. It also represents what we hope we’re offering you with the new web site we’re launching today: the same outstanding marketing coverage and insight in a new, more usable digital package. Welcome to the new Chief Marketer web site.
The main change here is far from cosmetic: We’re folding the former Promo standalone site into our content. We feel this better reflects the real practice of marketing today, in which branding’s awareness and promotion’s incentives are often melded with the conversions and measurements once associated with direct response marketing. Marketing campaigns today often combine touchpoints and migrate from one platform to another, buzzing live events on Twitter, offering coupons that increase in value if shared, and using video or music downloads to drive traffic to web sites where opt-ins can take place and leads get generated. If ever there was a time to back up that convergence talk with a web presence as integrated as marketing itself, it’s now.
Go to our new home page and you’ll see that all our content is now organized by channel: promotional marketing, direct, email, web, social and mobile, with additional tabs for database stories, lead-gen and B2B. All those categories bring along their own natural subdivisions as drop-down menus. For example, under Promo you’ll find subcategories such as events, in-store/POP, sweepstakes/contests, incentives and sponsorships. You’ll also find direct links to pages on our Promo 100 ranking of agencies and the PRO Awards, our annual peer-judged competition to name the best recent campaigns in a host of categories. (Both are open for submissions right now—hint, hint.)
Other changes add features or simply make them more accessible from the home page. Our Chief Marketer research, Tip Sheets, webinars and white papers can now be brought up with a single click, as can the online version of the Promo Sourcebook supplier directory. The most recent posts from our Big Fat Marketing Blog will also appear on the home page. And a new multimedia gallery will collect both third-party video that’s worth watching and our own created video content—as soon as we can figure out how to shoot footage that doesn’t look like home movies from an earthquake zone.
We’d like you to kick the tires on this new site, so we’re offering a few inducements to get you exploring. First, starting today and for the next eight weeks, we’re running the “Top Promotional Marketer” on-site game. Register to play, and you can come to our site every day to answer a question about marketing (or occasionally about us) using hints contained in stories we’ve written. Each week a winner will be chosen from the game plays to receive a $100 gift card. Correct answers earn two entries into the drawing, so it pays to play daily and to get as many questions correct as you can. You can also track your weekly performance on our leaderboard.
At the end of the two-month game, an overall winner will be selected at random and awarded the grand prize, an iPad2. So while the “Top Marketer” title may be about as honorific as being mayor of your local Starbucks, the rewards can be very real.
Of course we hope you’ll find our content, served up in this new integrated format, to be the real reward. If you do—or if you have suggestions, critiques or just other features you’d like to see—please take the time to drop us an email at [email protected].
Once again, welcome to our new home. We hope you’ll join us here often.
Network
