Marketing Articles

Online communities can deliver outstanding ROI, but they rarely produce value without significant investment, professional management... and consistent, intelligent, and engaging interaction. more

Hugging your customers--at least in a virtual, figurative sense--can increase engagement and boost positive word-of-mouth. Here are six ways to get customers to embrace you and market for you. more

In today's social climate, influencers are more important than ever in shaping impressions and customer actions. Connect with those powerful voices. Learn three steps to locating and engaging your key influencers. more

Running your small business is a labor of love, but promoting it with new, targeted efforts is necessary to connect with customers. Learn how to keep things fresh and stay connected when marketing your business. more

Online marketers have a dirty little secret. They've got no idea what to do once they've earned enough social media "likes" to reach their goals. Here are five ways to turn those fans and followers into brand advocates. more

Your customers will soon wield more and more power, becoming the most powerful communications channel. Are you ready for the new world of marketing? Learn the five keys to building a crowdsourced future.. more

Many companies have referral programs, but how many can say theirs converts at about three times the rate of other online campaigns and brings in over 500 product sales each month? Learn how one company did just that. more

When executed well, a VoC program can provide insight about customers and what is important to them. Besides the obvious reasons why that's important to know, there are business benefits to making this type of investment of time and money. more

Everywhere you look, people are talking about "communities"--how to find them, how to join them, and... if you're lucky, how to successfully sell your products and services to their members. Here are five steps to engaging online communities and finding and maintaining your fanatics. more

Simply slapping up social media content and hoping it works to build brand awareness and drive sales is not enough: "Social" is not the same as "sharing." And social content works best when it's shared. Here's how you can activate viral sharing of your content. more

Most prospects are not experts in purchasing the types of products and services you offer. So what do they do? They turn to testimonials because testimonials are readily available and because they hope to learn from others' experiences. more

Some of the funniest comedy skits have been spoof TV spots--and they closely follow proven DRTV principles to make their sketch more believable and more poignant: They grab your attention; they frame a problem that needs to be solved; they state their offer as the solution; they show the product ... more

Welcome to the power of the testimonial: A potent plug can make people as much as seven times more likely to buy or try than if they saw a paid advertisement. Email-based testimonials can be just as persuasive, but the key is to maximize their power. Here's how to do ... more

If you're like many professional service providers, you get a lot of business from referrals. You get them because you're an expert and you provide excellent service. Nevertheless, that's not enough. Several things need to happen first: In fact, the referral process parallels the buying process that prospects use to ... more

It's a global trend: Consumers want to buy from, employees want to work for, and other businesses want supplies from, socially responsible enterprises. Small-business owners can use the corporate social responsibility trend to improve their own businesses and stand out from competitors by taking the following steps. more

Customer loyalty matters, because selling more to current customers is easier and cheaper than finding and selling to new ones. Loyal customers tend to buy more, more regularly. And frequently they will recommend your business to others. Here are 10 tips for you to consider to deepen relationships with customers. more

Is it your job to listen to and analyze social-media messages and direct customer feedback about your product, brand, or service? Effective listening and insights analysis allow you to track not just the volume but also the meaning of online conversations across a complex web of consumer-interaction channels. more

Conversation marketing. Engagement marketing. Social media. Earned media. Consumer-generated media. User-generated Content. Crowdsourcing. Outsourcing. Co-creation. No matter what you call it, the evolution of the way brands reach and interact with consumers has led to mass experimentation with the alluring, yet often hard-to-execute marketing tactic: the video contest. more

With social media a hot ticket item and social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube making it easy to share, people are spending a lot of time offering free advice and sharing knowledge publicly, yet they are not asking for anything in return. But it's OK to ask. more

Unhappy customers are typically more vocal than satisfied customers, which means that new prospects coming to the market will more likely hear negative things about your brand. Here's what you can do. more

In online marketing, when it comes to lists, the email-marketing list reigns supreme. But for most email marketers, continual email-list growth is the Achilles' heel of email marketing. more

Plan A, which calls for pouring dollars into advertising, rarely increases profitability. Sometimes it doesn't even boost sales, and it certainly doesn't guarantee improvements in marketing effectiveness or ROI. Enter Plan B: taking a closer look at the basic marketing strategy fundamentals that drive tactical decisions. more

The notion that you can manage your brand by making and distributing messages and materials that you want "out there" is becoming quaint. And though the new age of extreme participation is a challenge, you as brand manager haven't lost all control--and you CAN influence what you can't control. more

What can marketers learn from the smallest of small businesses, a hair salon? You might be surprised: Here is a story of an integrated-marketing and client-service approach that any business would do well to emulate. more

Want to get started with an effective earned-media marketing program? Here are three tips for launching, measuring, and monetizing a low-cost earned-media program that will drive a surge in online word-of-mouth traffic about your brand. more