With the publication of Beyond the Collateral (our late 2007 research initiative with FRC), we sounded the call for marketers to move away from a sole focus on sales support to accept more responsibility for strategic leadership at their firms. While our recent update of that research hints that progress is being made, we still see financial marketers being “dogged” by too many challenges in their quest to earn the “right to lead.”

This includes a lack of formal planning (while a bit more than half have a written marketing plan, few move beyond a tactical to-do list), little if any continuing marketing training (less than one-third of firms offer any) and a “tail-chasing” quarterly work cycle that not only distracts an outsize percent of marketing’s “human capital” but has the unintended consequence of reinforcing the reactive v. strategic stereotype that pervades the space.

If SwanDog is to be a thought leader in this new financial marketing paradigm, how can we do so without overloading the system? For the answer, we gathered our partners together with a single objective–wouldn’t it be cool if we could find a way to promote strategic marketing in a meaningful but short, fresh and entertaining way. The result is the DailyDog, a one-of-a-kind marketing planning widget that offers financial marketers of all levels a new marketing thought or idea every business day of the year.

We call these bite-size ideas “marketing consulting atoms.” The “less is more” trend has its roots in the progressive content standard of breaking content into ever smaller kernels as a way to foster greater readership and more meaningful information, adding oomph and effectiveness to your SEO efforts (see Rock The Boat Marketing).

From our research, we’ve categorized each DailyDog posting into one of six categories: Plan, Engage, Analyze, Budget, Train and Warnings (a way to alert you to important actions, news and must-read articles). You’ll even hear occasionally from SwanDog’s own poet laureate—Nipsy “Jack” Russell! The DD is designed for marketers of all levels. As such, we hope you’ll find something for everyone and recommend it to your marketing peers and friends.

Go fetch the widget now and follow the installation instructions. In minutes, you’ll find marketers’ new best friend.