Marketing Article Index » More marketing articles
- Turnkey Marketing Clouds Fall Short, Here's How You Can Build Your Own
Multichannel automation, content personalization, social sharing tools, analytics... a marketing Cloud makes it possible to juggle the numerous tools necessary for today's marketing. But do you get a turnkey solution, or do you build your own?
When corporations mess up, the online outrage and media recrimination seem devastating. But, these days, the result is often increased brand awareness. What does a business have to do to really fail?
Many companies find themselves asking the same question: How do we authentically engage with customers throughout their entire buying journey to keep them satisfied and buying more? The answer, up until now, has been complicated.
Social marketing is different because your audience talks back—immediately, directly, and sometimes not in your favor. If you're developing a social advertising strategy the way you would for PPC ads or email, you're missing a huge opportunity to capture market share.
An effective B2B email marketing strategy has much less to do with email, per se, than you might think. The best programs nurture and engage leads while also working to close deals. Which is where managing your contact database comes into play.
If you're able to make even a small increase in your conversion rate for second-time purchases, you'll see serious revenue growth. It's time to shift some of your marketing focus from finding and engaging new customers to nurturing and convincing your existing customers. Here's how.
What is the secret to an engaging headline? Everyone has an opinion... but what does the data say? After analyzing 100 million headlines, we found that the essence of an engaging headline comes down to a few core principles.
The Millennial market: such a tempting conquest, yet so frustrating to conquer. Connecting with this elusive and lucrative demographic is not easy. Here are four major insights to help you market to—and win over—this tough crowd.
It's a multibillion-dollar problem that's shaking the confidence of thousands of marketing decision-makers. But what is it, exactly, and why is it leaving CMOs fed up and frustrated?
Imagine graduating from college with a marketing degree and being able to immediately function as a marketer in most any company or situation. Education has forever grappled with the the "theory vs. practice" problem. Here's how to balance the two approaches.
Drawing inspiration from some of the brightest B2B content marketers, here are five ways to help solve the problem of planning your content marketing and elevating the content experience of your customers to meet their evolving expectations.
In today's consumer environment, we marketers must take risks, otherwise we risk getting lost in the clutter and sinking into irrelevance. Success lies in understanding the difference between taking risks... and being risky.
The point of sale (POS) has evolved from the cash register to the online cart and now to voice-activated devices—and soon to virtually anywhere, anytime, in myriad automated ways. The one constant for marketers: user experience.
Developing new products and services in today's economy requires adaptive innovation—an ability to adjust to the fast-changing needs of target markets. Three fundamental steps are necessary to support that process.
Indecision, internal squabbles, poor protocols, and fear of finishing and "shipping" can paralyze marketing initiatives. But your content program doesn't have to go down that rabbit hole. Here are tips for quickly instituting a content marketing program.
Marketers have lately been talking much more about how augmented reality and virtual reality will change marketing. It's time to take a step back and put a practical spin on AR and VR—on what is likely to happen and what is simply hype.
Budgets aren't sexy, but they are vital for high-performing marketing organizations. If you can master these three keys, you'll create a best-in-class marketing budget—and you'll be well on your way to marketing success.
From raising awareness, to educating prospects, to completing the transaction, to enhancing customer service and beyond, predictive analytics can help you anticipate customers' needs and desires throughout their circuitous buying journey.
Do email newsletters still work, or are they a thing of the past? See what 17 successful digital marketers have to say about the effectiveness of email newsletters for online stores.
The potential power of the press release is sometimes misunderstood by marketers who aren't studied PR practitioners. Acting on those false beliefs, however, can be fraught with problems, so here are some best-practices regarding press releases as marketing tools.
The appeal of some products is obvious; they practically sell themselves. Other, "boring" products? Not so much... There is hope, though. Here are 11 powerful ways to market products that, on the face of it, seem totally unsexy.
Why in this digital world would you operate your digital marketing communications without a solid strategy and plan? Set your foundation on the right footing now, and you'll save time (and money) later. Here's how.
Marketing attribution is becoming a business imperative, but focusing on measurement is a new competency for many marketing teams. So how do you prepare? What initiatives do you need to think through? Here's how to kick-start your attribution efforts.
Influencer marketing grew out of celebrity endorsement, but with nearly everybody now on social media... it turns out that relatively ordinary, down-to-earth people are often the best influencers. But how do you find the influencers most suitable for your business?
Businesses resistant to new tech and ideas have often fallen behind or lost the ability to compete. VR and AR may still feel out of reach, but the technology will quickly become more accessible both to creators and to users.
From rules such as think big but start small and with the basics, to take an action-based approach, pick your battles, and beware of small sample sizes... in this article you'll get sound advice about data-driven marketing.
B2B mobile usage is intensifying throughout the entire buying cycle. Here are four ways B2B companies can use mobile marketing to keep pace with the customer journey.
If you've never done it, working with a B2B digital marketing agency can feel like a bold exploration of unknown territories. To make sure you don't lose your way, ask these 10 questions of your potential marketing partners.
Just because B2C brands cater to a different type of audience doesn't mean you can't pull a page from their playbook for your B2B marketing. In fact, doing so may bring a little more clarity—and a little more bang for your buck.
As an email marketer, you test subject lines and calls to action for optimal performance, but are you submitting your copy to the ultimate test? If you're not testing it for readability, you may be missing out on clicks, conversions, and revenue.
You lost your prospect to a competitor you've been enviously watching win again and again. What's happening? And how can you stop it from happening yet again?
Content is still one of the best ways to engage your customers—but you must rethink it... It's not about beautiful stories about your brand; it's about high-value, behavior-changing content about, and for, your customers and their aspirations.
In today's digital world, marketers manage thousands of images and videos. What's the best way to manage your marketing materials? Here are five best-practices to consider.
Communication matters. In organizations without effective communication, leaders can't lead, products don't sell, and projects don't get funded. Which presents a paradox: if it's that important, why does most communication fail?
To stay competitive post-IPO, Snap needs to not only maintain and grow its user base but also convince marketers of the value of using the platform for marketing and advertising. Here's what it has going for it.
If customer lifetime value is not your top marketing metric, or at least one of the top metrics, you're missing out on a massive opportunity to grow revenue quickly and easily—and profitably.
We now live in the Testimonial Economy, where what we say about ourselves doesn't matter, what others say about us is what sways opinion, and bad reviews can override even the best marketing plan and the most strategic sales plan.
To join the growing number of businesses using the proven power of influencer marketing—to the tune of a $6.50 return on each dollar invested—take these 5 steps to ensure a successful influencer marketing campaign.
You want your customers and potential customers to think of your content less as annoying advertisement and more as valuable, useful, or enjoyable marketing. Consider these seven types of content proven to help you increase leads and optimize conversion rates.
Learn how we marketers can graduate from the tried-and-true daily blast email to take a more personalized, targeted approach—and why it is so critical to our businesses that we do so.
Just because freelance writers aren't employees doesn't mean they aren't a valuable part of your marketing team. Here's how to seek out those who are right for you and bring them on board, and what signs to look for that they might not be working out.
Sometimes, your content crashes and burns. That might mean no one reads your article, it doesn't get shared, or you get bombarded with nasty comments. But, all that's OK. In fact, it might be for the better.
When a brand story is crafted correctly, consumers will be proud to associate with and represent your brand, and they will market it of their own volition via word-of-mouth.
Branding is vital in today's crowded marketplace of companies, ideas, and products. And though most of us understand visual branding with images, colors, logos, etc., few understand that sounds and music can align perfectly with brand attributes—and set your brand apart.
Videos are one of the most effective types of marketing content around. But using the right type of video for each marketing goal is key.
Black Friday might seem like it's a long time away, but some of the most worthwhile holiday marketing activities require months of planning. If you want to build out a micro-influencer program for the holiday season, this 5-month plan will get you started.
Copywriters know that creativity doesn't always come right when you need it. Here are four common causes of creative block—and ideas for overcoming them.
Before salespeople can convince a prospect to buy, they have to convince that buyer of the need for change. Facts and figures that are devoid of emotion often fail to persuade, but stories based on these four plots often succeed.
The Web continues its march toward becoming more image-centric, and any e-commerce site not willing to invest in product photography or video is already being left behind.
Brand tracking—collecting data from a static group of consumers on a regular basis—can assess and scrutinize shifts in KPIs and consumer attitudes and behaviors. You can track and benchmark everything from brand awareness to customer satisfaction to the effectiveness of an ad campaign.
A hook is the initial sentence (or single word) that grabs the attention of readers and entices them to keep reading. Here are six ways you can approach writing a tantalizing hook.
Most e-commerce businesses are still being run on email service providers (ESPs) and a patchwork of point solutions, leading to disconnected marketing, fragmented customer experiences, and no way for marketers to understand why and how customers are shopping.
Today's marketing software landscape is flooded with thousands of solutions offering myriad features and benefits. It can be nearly impossible to find the right software for you. But fear not, here's some help.
Rather than sticking to time-tested basics, marketers sometimes jump into channels they know little about. After all, what if that shiny new platform is the one you've always dreamed about? In the end, though, you're only hurting yourself.
Today's survey tools allow marketers to add more flourishes than ever to customer feedback surveys. But, it turns out, less is more when asking customers for input. See which top 3 feedback misconceptions most need busting.
Email is a highly effective channel for delivering loyalty program content and experiences that get your first-time shoppers to stick around—and drive up your customer lifetime value.
As Google's deep-learning algorithm assesses what is the most relevant and authoritative Web content, LSI keywords will continue to become more important. Jump on the bandwagon now to stand out before your competition does.
2017 is nearly halfway through, and you may already be feeling you're behind your 2017 revenue goals. No need for your anxiety to turn into a midyear panic attack, however. Instead, keep your eye on some key strategic areas and avoid these three mistakes.
Determining which technology pieces matter to your marketing team can be daunting. You need tools that help you navigate omnichannel shopping behaviors, meet customers where they are, and deliver useful experiences. Here are three essential tools road-tested by leading retail brands.
Digital video's best-practices are becoming increasingly apparent—and, with them, ROI performance is improving. Digital video is moving from a branding to a sales and branding tool. Here's what you need to know.
Marketers know: The need to create great content will only increase. And so, doing things the usual way—the way everyone else does it—may help you tick the quantity box, but you'll fall short on quality... And that won't drive results.
Tired of brainstorming? It works if done right, but it's not the only way to shake loose creative ideas. Here are 5 effective ways to uncover core brand elements, reframe concepts for stronger appeal, generate fresh approaches—and unravel other marketing and communications problems.
Small content teams are expected to do big things these days, even though no company—large or small—has enough time or budget for content. So how can you create enough content to satisfy the voracious demand for it?
By harnessing the voices of people who are your customers, you create social proof—and advocates. Better yet, they are already familiar with your messaging and brand. Here's how you can kick off a customer-generated content strategy using reviews.
Long-form content is highly effective, but producing it can burn through time—our most precious resource as marketers. What can busy content marketers, who must create more and more high-performing content, do?
Infographics are everywhere on the Web, but it isn't easy to come up with good designs to create your own. Here are five the most popular types of infographic templates, the reasons they work so well, and tips and tricks to help you make them your own.
A friend shared an image on Facebook. Intended to be a funny political meme, it instead offended many who saw it... Should she have shared that post? Could she have lost her job? Might the issue have been avoided? Are people just overly sensitive? Let's explore those questions.
Combining creativity with B2B marketing is an ongoing challenge. How do you build an emotional connection with your customers and inspire deep-seated brand loyalty when you lack the direct tactics of B2C campaigns?
Marketers know they should be following up leads with an email autoresponder sequence. But many don't know what to write, and so never get around to creating follow-up emails. Use these five approaches to stay top of mind without annoying your prospects.
This article gives search and other digital marketers an idea of how the most significant changes in Google's paid products will affect search advertising strategy in 2017 and beyond.
Facebook is intentionally giving more organic exposure to live videos, which is why Facebook Live dominates the News Feeds of most users these days. What does that mean for businesses and B2B marketers? Here are a few ways to use Facebook Live to benefit your business.
It's jarring to realize you've been designing customer experience all wrong because you've prioritized scale over end-user satisfaction... But how do you set things straight? Change is notoriously difficult, but it is possible; these three steps will set you well on your way.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the sexiest conversation in email marketing, but few marketers are ready for it. Here's what the buzz doesn't tell you, and what you can do now to prepare for an AI-empowered future.
Everyone is publishing content today, at a blinding rate, and your undifferentiated content is getting lost in a sea of equally indistinguishable content. Bad news: Your content has become a commodity. Here's what you can do about it.
People's product preferences are undoubtedly influenced by media, and your audiences have no qualms about using media to share stories about their brand experiences. So here's how you can harness UGC to influence your target audience.
Google updates its search engine algorithms up to 600 times a year, but it no longer announces major algorithm changes. So search engine marketers have been left speculating about their ranking changes and guessing what the future holds. Here's some help.
What's so hard about engaging people who were already convinced enough about you to have made an initial purchase? These are five big mistakes companies make in their relationships with customers.
Social media's importance in the sales/marketing funnel is by now undisputed, but visibility into the insights each platform can provide is often clouded by meaningless metrics. Here's how your team should be using social insights to guide major marketing decisions.
Communities offer you an opportunity to better understand your customers by capitalizing on the data they provide online. You can then use that data to offer personalized content at various points in the customer journey.
It's no secret that video has become a more and more significant piece of the content marketing mix—and livestreaming has become a rapidly growing and effective tactic. The tips and tricks in this guide will help you get live video right.
Machine-learning (ML) startups are flourishing, and companies are predicating their value proposition on artificial intelligence (AI). That's because both ML and AI will likely have immense impact on profitability—and transform marketing.
With consumer trust of brands at an all-time low, customer reviews are more important than ever—both to buyers, who use them to make decisions, and to brands, which should be using them to boost revenue. How? Here are some tips on how to harness the power of online reviews.
How can you ensure a constant flow of new and engaging content to maintain your following and reach new audiences? And how can you improve your SEO? By cleverly recycling old content, you can solve both problems.
Coca-Cola has decided to eliminate the position of CMO; instead, Coke has created a chief growth officer role, in charge of both its customer and its commercial teams. Here's what marketers can learn from the shakeup.
Over 2 million blog posts are published each day. No wonder many marketers struggle with generating fresh content ideas to fuel their marketing efforts. Here are seven tactics to overcome your idea-generation hurdles.
A good content workflow makes your publishing process a lot more effective. Here's how you can organize the work of your content team and simplify the production and distribution of marketing content.
Go figure... The online reputation management industry has an image problem. So it's time to pull an Elon Musk and share a blueprint of how to do it right. These are the details you won't see anywhere in public, not even at conferences.
If you want your marketing and your business to succeed, you need to make the most of your lead generation campaigns and achieve the highest-possible ROI. Here are a few ways you can do that.
We've become used to hearing about Millennials as "the next generation of consumers." That's no longer the case. Millennials are adults now. They're the current generation. And they're your customers. Here's how to reach them.
The revenue number can hide successes as well as problems, and it tells you little about your customers. Here are six key performance indicators that are better at measuring the pulse of your business.
Many components of content marketing are controllable and predictable. What isn't? Your audience's response. Here's what you can do when a piece of content you've created simply doesn't produce the right results.
In the past year, Google made changes to AdWords intended to open up new channels for marketers on mobile devices. Here are four easy tweaks that will make the most of those new channels to get you more leads and conversions.
Moments that lead to a mobile or digital action in a consumer's daily life may seem trivial, but they can hold large opportunities for brands. Those "micro-moments," as Google has termed them, occur when consumers turn to a device for a specific need, anytime and anywhere.
Too often, salespeople don't understand the buyer's world or needs, and don't know to communicate real value. But whose fault is it? The sellers'? They often get the blame, but it might well lie with Marketing...
We've seen the shocking viral videos. The rage-inducing photos. The fire-and-brimstone calls for a boycotts and firings. How did it all go so wrong? More important: What lessons can we learn from United Airlines' ongoing struggles?
Here's what you need to know about fake news, why you should consider fact-checking in your own content marketing, and how to implement a fact-checking process.
Instead of hypothetical ways that might increase your site's organic traffic, here are proven approaches that 17 SEO experts themselves use.
The proliferation of digital devices, coupled with a deluge of short, "snackable" content, has given consumers greater choice than ever in how and where they consume media. How can you get them to notice your ads?
Just 18 words. Marketing and Sales pros who know this powerful stat, fly; and those who don't, die. (Well, their emails do.)
The time for personal branding is now, and today is the best day to start developing your personal brand. Here are 26 tips, from A to Z, to help your personal branding efforts.
From the tiniest startups in Silicon Valley to the largest global organizations, consumer and B2B marketers are pouring more resources than ever into video. But if you're just now getting into video marketing, these tips will help you catch up quickly.
To garner full value from their social intelligence strategies, CPG companies should be mindful of incorporating these three initiatives into their social plans.
Too many nurture touchpoints, too many pieces of outreach, too many really bad email messages. Buyers are beginning to shut down, and that's going to be a big problem for marketers. Unless...
It seems so obvious: Businesses that take a proactive approach to customer success, going out of their way to anticipate customers' needs and offer help rather than waiting to be asked, are more likely to have loyal and repeat customers.
Let's be honest: Website visitors hate to fill out your lead generation forms. Luckily, there are proven ways to reduce form friction and get prospects to hand over their valuable information.
The good news: The proliferation of new ad platforms and formats has created a lot of opportunities for publishers. The bad news: The proliferation of new ad platforms and formats has created tons of confusion and a whole new set of challenges.
Between two similar videos, what makes one buzz to the top of the YouTube charts, and one languish in obscurity? Experts weigh in.
When planning an experiential marketing campaign, it can be tempting to sink a titanic budget into the splashiest one-day event ever conceived, but that single-minded pursuit of buzz is risky. There are icebergs in those waters.
In the fast-moving world of marketing, it's easy to feel stuck. Here's what you can do to get your career moving forward.
Whether you're focused on building a content strategy, creating and distributing content, or measuring content performance, even one-person teams can achieve content marketing success.
Perhaps it's time marketing and advertising agencies re-evaluated their mission statements and standard operating procedures. Here are three still-relevant catchphrases from Jerry Maguire that agencies can learn from.
Marketers are known for late nights and jam-packed days. Unfortunately, that kind of schedule can lead to diminished productivity at best, and burnout and turnover at worst. There's a better way.
When you scale your content creation efforts with user-generated content, and use real customer photos alongside branded content in your marketing, you'll gain credibility and authenticity for your brand and marketing—and help generate sales.
Although Facebook and Google dominate mobile advertising, marketers run the risk of relying too much on them for the results their brands need. Spreading spend across a variety of channels increases the likelihood of optimal ad performance.
Account-based marketing might be thought of as an enterprise-level tactic, but that doesn't mean ABM, albeit scaled down, can't provide outsized results for your small-to-midsize business.
For many companies, selling beyond their home market is essential to business success. But selling into new markets is easier said than done. Here's sound advice for European B2B companies that want to localize marketing for the US.
Neuroscience can give marketers deep insight into what works and what doesn't in persuading customers to buy a product or service. These five neuromarketing principles will boost your marketing efforts.
These five steps for successful audience targeting will enable you to pair audiences with the right messaging to communicate in more personal and meaningful ways, ultimately allowing you to reach your business goals.
If you've decided that your business needs a digital asset management (DAM) system to take over from your old, complex legacy systems, demonstrating business value may be fairly easy. If you've never had any comparable tools before, your job may be harder, especially if budgets are tight.
The biggest challenge for a lot of distributed marketing organizations is that they don't have sufficient visibility into the co-op spending of their independent partners.
Star ratings are simple, but they have an immense effect. They increase social proof, boost word-of-mouth marketing, and improve the results of paid ads. And, most important, they influence purchases.
Not all influencers are the same. In fact, there are plenty of phonies and lame ducks out there. So how do you determine whether they can make a difference for your ROI? Here are three ways.
Search engines want to show the world your content, but not if you've made mistakes that undermine the user experience and search engines' guidelines. So give them what they want by avoiding these eight common mistakes that content creators make.
The SIC and NAICS classification systems were developed in an era of relatively little technology, but they provide a useful framework for the hundreds of industry verticals that manufacturing marketers address every day.
Even if consumers don't actually purchase via mobile, chances are mobile was a part of their customer journey. Here are three lessons from four top retail mobile apps to help you create mobile experiences your customers will love.
Marketing videos create awareness. But then what? What do viewers do after they click the "Play" button? If you want to know a lot more about your customers and your videos, get them interacting with each other. It's easier than you think, and you'll get data while your customers and prospects get a personalized experience.
You can't get answers if you don't ask questions. And if you don't get answers, you can't make informed decisions. Ask these nine questions, and you'll be on your way to owning your content-job interview.
If you're on the content bandwagon, but you don't know your customer acquisition cost (CAC) and customer lifetime value (CLV), you're playing a dangerous game: How do you know spending all that money on content marketing is worth it?
Donor retention is top of mind for nonprofits. And rightly so. But less than 1 in 10 take the most efficient and affordable action for combating decreasing donor retention: executing a welcome series.
You don't have time to do marketing yourself, but you know you need to if your business is going to succeed. Hiring an outside firm can be an option, but it can also be a risk. You need to clearly weigh the potential pros and cons.
Content publishers have mountains to climb in trying to reach and monetize their audiences in this mobile-first, ad-averse world. How can you reach readers, viewers, and listeners—and keep them coming back?
As with any marketing tactic, there is a right way, a wrong way, and a really wrong way to use SMS, too, for marketing. These best-practices and tips from experts will help you avoid pitfalls and guide you on the path to good SMS marketing.
Tradeshows and in-person events are powerful marketing tactics. Read on to learn what to do before, during, and after a tradeshow to drive engagement and sales.
This detailed guide can help you and your brand benefit from guest-posting—to position you as subject-matter experts, drive traffic to your site and generate leads, increase your audience reach, make connections with influencers, and much more...
What do your employees actually think about your brand? Do they trust your leadership team? And when they talk about the company publicly, does what they say support or undercut your marketing goals?
As a leader, building up the confidence of your marketing team is among the most rewarding things you can do—both for yourself and for your company. Give these five confidence-building techniques a try.
Changes in healthcare marketing have much in common with the shifts B2B marketers across industries have experienced in recent years. So there's plenty B2B marketers can learn from the world of healthcare marketing.
It turns out that having a C-level executive in charge of content marketing has not been realistic, but the need for content—and content leadership—remains. So who's going to lead the content team, and what skills should team members have?
To improve performance, optimize spend, and enhance customer experience, marketers must inject data and analytics into every phase of their marketing. Here's how you can avoid five common pitfalls of measuring marketing and media performance.
We have entered a new age of search experience optimization—and marketers the world over are on the hunt for the best recipe for cooking up a profitable search experience.
Here are some real-life examples of how an account-based marketing and selling approach on LinkedIn can drive not just reach and awareness but also demand and revenue.
Call tracking is one of the most powerful tools for your inbound marketing efforts. It results in clear-cut, actionable campaign data, enabling you to better optimize your inbound marketing strategy.
Marketers are using more digital channels than ever, and they are under pressure to prove the ROI of those efforts. Many look to attribution solutions to understand how channels are contributing to sales. But it's not that simple.
Key performance indicators (KPIs) become keys to optimizing your marketing only when you apply what you learn. Here's how to take a smarter approach to marketing with KPIs that guide your decisions.
Content marketers strive to create content that not only speaks directly to their target audiences but also compels those audiences to take action. Easier said then done, of course. But these three steps can help.
The annual marketing plan you created last quarter already feels out of date. How on earth are you supposed to plan for an entire year when marketing technology and platforms are changing at the speed of light?
Consumers can afford to be selective: Global competition is the norm today, and your retail competitors offer comparable prices and user experiences. To stay competitive in this environment, retailers and brands must make four key trends a priority in 2017.
Any detail of your branding efforts can have a negative or positive effect on your customers' decision-making. These visual hacks will help you get attention and enhance your branding efforts.
The challenge? Measuring Marketing's performance and value to the business. The traditional approach to metrics simply perpetuates the myth that marketing activity equals value. Here's how to measure Marketing's true value instead.
The mobile and digital revolutions have changed the way national and global brands can reach consumers where they are, and when and how they want to be reached. Here's how to do local right.
Part 1 examined stimuli that get the attention of the decision-making portion of the brain. Part 2 explains how specific tactics appeal to the brain and improve the effectiveness of your marketing.
Choosing the right social network for your marketing campaigns is as important as the quality of the campaign's content. Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, and YouTube offer discrete opportunities and challenges.
For healthcare professionals, the days of hanging a shingle and waiting for patients is long over. So what are the best strategies for healthcare organizations, doctors, and physician practices in today's digital world?
Here are five ways to get smart about planning, implementing, and measuring video to ensure your video marketing campaign engages your audiences and achieves your objectives.
Measuring the impact and influence of organic LinkedIn activity is not easy. The social network's analytics features are limited for organic (i.e., not advertising-related) activity. But it's doable.
Tradeshows can feel overwhelming unless you have a few tips and tricks up your sleeve. Luckily, you know exactly what you need to do to make a fantastic impression—thanks to an article you read about nailing your first tradeshow...
Having a strong understanding of your customers helps you spot warning signals before sales go completely south, as well as discover trends that can lead to new areas of growth and opportunity. Here are five steps you can take.
Customers buy on convenience—because they want to make their job or their life easier. Automatic renewals are as easy as it gets. And from a business standpoint, it guarantees repeat business—the lifeblood of well-run organizations.
Are you becoming an annoyance in your customer's inbox? Avoid these six worst-practices and learn how to instead get your messaging to resonate with your audience.
Content marketing experts Scott Abel, Ardath Albee, Michael Brenner, Ann Handley, and Robert Rose share a heap of insights on content. If you know content marketing, you know that's quite a squad.
Just about anyone, not just the talented few, can be creative. Here are six techniques for coming up with loads of creative ideas.
To ensure your marketing communications engage and convince your audiences, you'll need to understand how the human mind works. These are the six characteristics of the decision-making part of the brain you should be using to your advantage.
Why are case studies so useful in sales and marketing? Because they can trigger the underlying emotional drivers of buyer behavior. So here are five ways you can apply psychology to supercharge case studies—and content, in general.
As marketing technologies, channels, and platforms evolve, so must the skill sets of digital marketing professionals. Do you and your team have the most important digital marketing skills needed for success in 2017?
Before you create marketing content, you need to ask why, what, when, and where—the 4Ws. And because content creation is as much science as it is art, you need data about the 4Ws of marketing content.
Addressable TV is a powerful advertising tactic. Its advantages lie in the data available for targeting, its ability to significantly reduce waste, its ROI measurability, and the post-campaign data that helps you optimize traditional TV buys.
Just-in-time marketing reduces marketing waste and drives revenue growth. Investing in the right capabilities, models, and technologies can transform marketing operations and achieve a competitive edge.
In an age of algorithms and artificial intelligence, marketers don't just need to be tech-savvy... they need to be tech-everything. That may sound like an exaggeration, but have you looked at job postings lately?
To build loyalty and retain customers, marketing teams can take these four steps that improve customer insights and the overall customer experience—and build lasting customer relationships.
Which of your social media connections are potential advocates for your B2B company, and how do you build an advocacy system around them?
In 2017, marketers will be at the mercy of politics. Net Neutrality, a pillar of Cloud-based content, apps, and services, faces extinction. If the Web becomes a pay-for-performance utility, Cloud-based marketing strategies could become prohibitively expensive.
Mark Zuckerberg said at the end of 2015 that we would be in the "Golden Age of Video" for some five years. So... it's not over yet, and business owners' and marketers' growing access to video will only further the shift in our social feeds in 2017.
Jargon isn't necessarily gibberish. Use it right, and you can make your content more effective. But the most commonly used jargon doesn't do that at all.
The past year provided fertile ground for social media goofs and gaffes. Many marketers apparently didn't do enough thinking before they clicked on the tweet, post, publish, or share button. Here are some of 2016's biggest social media fails and the lessons they can teach us.
Social media is already an important part of the customer experience. Which is why marketers are using social listening for better targeting during the customer journey. Here are the social listening capabilities you need in your marketing strategy for 2017 and beyond.
A panel of senior business leaders at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum discussed their careers and offered advice on the path from modern marketer to CMO or CEO. These four common lessons emerged from the discussion.
Video content is becoming indispensable for your marketing efforts... Here's how you can create engaging videos and use your video content to build a loyal audience.
For nonprofits, social media marketing can be just as advantageous as it is for businesses. It's a great way to build support, grow your ranks of volunteers, and increase donations. But you need to be vigilant.
Just because we marketers understand the power of video doesn't mean we use it to its full potential. If you're not using video in all the stages of the marketing funnel, you're leaving conversions and sales on the table.
People check their smartphones obsessively—dozens, even hundreds, of times per day—and they open most of their emails on mobile devices. Here are five ways we email marketers can use those mobile habits to better reach our customers.
What if, rather than thinking of your blog as a chore on a to-do list, you were to view it as a savings account, with each post a long-term investment that generates increasing traffic and relevant leads?
Myth: creative content is the result of a smooth, linear process, thanks to inspired designers, writers, illustrators... The idea appeals to project managers and heads of marketing who love their Gantt charts. But the reality is more goat rodeo than Gantt chart. There is a better way.
We know a good tradeshow display when we see one: It's usually the booth attracting a ton of visitors and leads. Sure, success depends on more than just display design, but design helps you stand out in a sea of exhibitors.
At a time when tips and tricks for running an online business are so readily available, it should be easy to learn about achieving success. But how can you tell the difference between sound advice and seemingly sound myths?
As he moves from provocateur to President, what can Donald Trump learn from marketers about how to build relationships, grow influence, and sustain engagement? He might consider these four marketing-tested ideas.
All of us face a low-cost or low-price competitor at one time or another. The solution isn't to lower your prices and engage in a price war; that just means low profitability for everyone. So what can you do to compete?
Push marketing. Pull marketing. Content marketing. Social selling. Sales enablement. All are in the playbook that Marketing and Sales use to grow the business via digital channels. Here's what content marketers need to know about their role.
There are four main messaging channels your mobile app can use for marketing. Find out which of the four you should be using in specific, real-world situations.
Social media monitoring—AKA social listening—can help you build brand loyalty among your customers. Here are some simple steps you can take to encourage customer loyalty.
Facebook ads can be powerful, but only if you avoid some common mistakes. Here's how your customer service team can help you do just that so you can create better Facebook ads.
Collecting marketing intelligence on our competitors and rivals has long been a headache in search of an aspirin. We've had to use Google and scores of standalone tools to conduct competitive research. But it looks like we might have a cure in sight, in the form of a chatbot.
In 2017, three major shifts in how we create, promote, and measure video content will bring about the tipping point that changes the game and puts us squarely on track for the Golden Age of Video.
Ask B2B marketers to identify what they are focused on, year after year, and they will say "revenue." Enter marketing performance management. As we enter 2017, five key changes will make MPM a greater priority than ever for B2B organizations.
Marketers know that collecting and using customer data is central to generating positive business results. But, as always, the devil is in the details. Use these five tactics in 2017 to get more value from the customer data you're collecting.
If 2016 was anything to go by, we marketers should be excited about marketing automation in 2017. If you want your automation efforts to pay off this year, keep these seven predictions and best-practices in mind.
Marketing technology has been instrumental in helping marketers reach their audiences in 2016. Here's what you can expect from martech in 2017.
2016 was a big year for mobile marketing, but 2017 will be even bigger. A few tech trends looming on the horizon are going to make a deep impact on every mobile marketer’s work—whether they know it or not.
Did you sigh when you heard Google is revoking free access to its Keyword Planner? Your first reaction was probably something like "Google is sticking it to us again." But there's an easy, inexpensive workaround: a small PPC campaign.
Even as marketing changes at breakneck speed, some things stay the same. The four pillars of performance have withstood the test of time, so keep them in mind to improve your marketing campaigns' chances of success.
Marketing campaigns that take months to plan, launch, and execute may still have a place in today's always-connected world, but if you aren't also jumping into real-time marketing, you will lose out.
Customer churn is a normal part of doing business. The reasons customers leave you are diverse, but they fall in two categories: voluntary and involuntary. Understanding the differences between the two can dramatically improve your customer retention.
The experience economy gives us the opportunity to do more than just sell goods and services; we can now create unique memories and experiences for our customers—and in the process achieve competitive advantage.
SEO has evolved significantly, especially over the past few years: It is no longer search engine optimization, per se; our content efforts are now aimed at users, not search bots. These tips will help make your own SEO content more engaging in 2017.
No matter your audience, their fear of missing out (FOMO) can work marketing magic for you, especially in the age of social media. But beware: If you don't make use of FOMO responsibly, it'll backfire.
Writing isn't supposed to be easy. But that doesn't mean it has to be painful. Here are a few things I do to power through. Call it a list of struggling-writer affirmations.
Could a network of partners be your ticket to accelerated growth and market expansion? If so, where do you start? How do you build a solid partner ecosystem and ensure it's functioning as it should?
If you're considering investing in marketing video in 2017, you'll want to read these useful tips for creating an explainer video that can help you drive more sales.
Live video is a powerful, authentic, engaging, measurable, and cost-effective marketing option that more and more brands are turning to, for good reason. Here are some helpful tips to get you started.
To many midmarket retailers today, Amazon.com seems unstoppable. It's not. An underdog, however, doesn't win by beating a giant at its own game—but by outwitting, outmaneuvering, and out-strategizing it.
The insight you can derive from your own customers is invaluable. It will help you to not only increase the effectiveness of your content marketing but also reach your business and growth goals.
Scenario analysis is an essential part of creating agility. Scenarios help you anticipate. They help you ask better questions and prepare for the unexpected. They increase your readiness, which is what sets the stage for agility.
Last year, I wrote about five SEO trends you needed to know in 2016. Much has stayed the same since I made those predictions, but much has changed, too. Here are five of the hottest SEO trends you can expect to see in 2017.
This B2B positioning health-check will tell you how effective your positioning really is. And it'll help you overcome preconceived notions about positioning effectiveness and give you a proven way to perform a realistic assessment.
In the debate of paid traffic versus organic traffic, which wins? Is that even the right question to ask? Here are some lessons learned from a recent campaign.
Along their buying journey, customers are often in uncharted territory, stressed and disoriented. Your job is to keep them on track to reach their (and your) desired goal. Various types of online community can help.
Influencer marketing hoped to reclaim authenticity in advertising by influencing the conversations consumers are already having with experts and one another. Along the way, it strayed. Here's how it can reclaim authenticity.
How do you unify efforts with different team members, initiatives, and strategies for your blog, email, and social media marketing? You need a content strategy that accounts for each channel. These five steps will lead you to a cohesive cross-functional marketing plan.
Never sit through another irrelevant keynote again... Learn how to spot the next big-name speakers—and gain truly useful information—instead of paying too much for the same-old faces.
What Google Analytics data should marketers home in on to help executives understand the impact of marketing content and online efforts on delivering value through the sales funnel?
Don't spam your contact database with generic holiday email greetings; they will be ignored, your time will have been wasted, and your brand will lose credibility. Instead, make your efforts count. Here's how.
Account-based marketing is built on six processes that flip the focus from generating leads to courting the companies you want to do business with. An added benefit: total sales and marketing alignment.
Here's how to apply loyalty best-practices to your social media marketing to increase customer retention and long-term loyalty.
You've found yourself in the midst of the most crowded market imaginable—online content. The best shot you have at attracting and maintaining audiences is relevancy. And the foundation of relevancy is personalization. Embrace it.
Marketing has readily accepted the power of referral programs. Their reach, trust factor, and ability to target the right people combine to quickly and effectively boost customer acquisition. But some common mistakes undermine success.
Finding your way to content marketing success is not always easy. Here are four lessons and a few secrets to help you on your journey.
Traffic, acquisition, and sales have been critical priorities for marketers. Yet customer retention also plays a key role, though it is often neglected. Consider these marketing and retention trends and ideas as you finalize plans for the coming year.
Here's real advice for optimizing your website in a way that is both strategic and natural. Learn how to avoid Google penalties for over-optimized content, and get best-practices and character limit guidelines for optimization.
Google Search Console (previously Google Webmaster Tools) allows you to check your website's indexing status and to optimize its visibility for searchers. Here are issues you're like to face and how to deal with them.
Various ranking factors contribute to ranking your website and content high in search results, but the one that is seemingly ignored among them is consistently identified as the one with the biggest impact: links.
"Enriching benefits" have a strong influence on how much consumers admire a brand. Such benefits inspire consumers, moving them to action and engendering loyalty toward the brand.
What really motivates buyers to act? When using content, many B2B companies struggle to engage buyers. Here are eight engagement tactics that work, according to research, but marketers use them too infrequently.
At what point does a buyer persona mutate from a useful marketing tool into a meaningless collection of bullet points, stock headshots, and random guesses? Here's what we really need to know about our prospects to motivate them to respond.
Email marketers don't often go too far beyond conversion-, click-, and open-rate data. Yet, to create email campaigns that engage your subscribers and increase ROI, you'll need to.
The success of an e-commerce store can be determined by whether it generates enough quality traffic that ultimately turns into sales. SEO can effectively drive traffic for all websites; e-commerce, however, presents unique challenges.
In the world of marketing operations (MO), words like "enterprise" and "scale" are common, but we rarely hear "small business" enter the conversation. Ironically, small and midsize businesses (SMBs) need MO the most if they are to grow into the company they want to be.
Content that not only works but also makes users want to share it? It's possible when you understand the basics of contextual marketing.
The digital, multi-device era has disrupted traditional brand storytelling—fragmenting story plots and making genuine engagement rare. But here's how brands can still tell captivating stories that bridge channels and devices.
People often use Facebook Events to connect and meet up in the real world. So why not marketers? Facebook can help promote your in-person events—which are among the most effective B2B marketing tactics you can use.
Positive word-of-mouth (WOM) has long been documented as a powerful growth tool. The good news: unlike our B2C brethren, we B2B marketers can strategically manage WOM. Here are three ways to ensure word-of-mouth skews positive.
Lasting brand admiration is achieved when your business becomes part of who people are (think "Mac people") and what they stand for. That kind of relationship isn't accidental or the result of good fortune.
If you are part of a nonprofit struggling to gain donor support, get your team in the same room and ask yourselves two questions.
A unilateral or bilateral business model, whereby vendors sell to customers or via business partners, is old-school. Today, forming an ecosystem is the way to increase shareholder value, foster customer relationships, and enhance brand equity.
You don't have to do the verbal equivalent of dressing up in a burger suit and jumping up and down at passing cars. You can give your sales page copy some rhythm and oomph with these more subtle jazzifying moves.
How does the explosion in marketing tech help your team get stuff done today? It doesn't. So until you evaluate, decide, deploy, integrate, and optimize your marketing stack, try these lightweight but useful tools that cost little and are simple to use.
Beyoncé is a shining example of how a public figure and a brand can intertwine. But it's not just individuals who can learn a great deal from the renowned and meticulously built Beyoncé brand; companies can, too.
It's exciting to be part of a growing business. But growth can also be stressful, especially for Marketing. In fact, sometimes growth can cripple your business if you do not have the resources to adequately support it.
Clearly, developing a customer journey map is beneficial to your business. But how do you ensure that all of your work in mapping the customer journey will be properly implemented within your organization?
Just five years ago, in small-to-midmarket companies, 1-2 people were typically involved in the purchase decision. In recent years, that trend has shifted; now, 3+ people must approve purchases, even those below $50,000.
Content marketing can be as complex or as simple as you want it to be. Either way, six fundamental content principles should be guiding how you create and distribute your work. The trouble is, many marketers ignore at least some of those principles.
Enablement. Enticement. Enrichment. Those three E's are the very foundation of brand admiration. And they are important for any brand in any industry. So how should they be fostered?
If you want to help overwhelmed, time-poor searchers to find you and your business online, then it's time to think hard about what you publish, where, when, how often, and—most important—why. Enter the content calendar.
Most of the tricks and tactics that worked on Facebook a few years ago no longer work; today, they can actually harm your page's ranking potential. Here are some mistakes you might be making—and tips on how to avoid them.
Word-of-mouth marketing is nothing new, but digital influencer marketing is... and all parties involved have a lot to learn still. Which is why many brands are approaching influencer marketing the wrong way—and souring the results.
As technology becomes a driving force in marketing and sales, B2B companies need to better understand the art and science behind launching and executing a successful lead generation program.
An instant is all it takes to threaten your business's sterling reputation online. These five reputation management tools are some of the best for tracking mentions, discovering influencers, and managing online reviews as they happen.
PowerPoint files, and the information contained within them, are a valuable business (not just marketing or sales) asset. Presentation management unlocks the value of that asset, empowering everyone to make better presentations—before they ever open PowerPoint.
With the summer over, many companies are starting to think about capturing consumer attention in the run-up to the holidays. If pay-per-click advertising on Google or Bing is in your marketing plan, here are a few tips to help you get ahead.
It doesn't matter how much time you spend on crafting your marketing campaign: You have no guarantee it will pay off. Sometimes marketing just doesn't work the way you want it to. Here's what to do when that happens.
Becoming known as an eco-friendly brand isn't easy. Especially when so many brands present themselves as environmentally minded, and make so much noise on social and traditional media, even if their actually practices don't follow suit.
A consistently successful e-commerce site depends on myriad factors, and it is near on impossible to control all of them to guarantee success, but one thing you can do is to plug the holes that drain your sales.
Word-of-mouth marketing is not new, but companies are putting a new spin on it to help their marketing, sales, and recruiting: Instead of customers, employees are the ones spreading word to their social networks via employee advocacy programs.
How would customers react to your company's mistakes and missteps if it had long ago made sure to invest in becoming an admired brand? Certainly not the way they would to the mistakes of a brand they didn't admire.
Getting people to grasp new ideas and ways of doing things is especially critical to the sales process in tech companies. Which is why applying teaching and learning principles to scripting and producing marketing videos makes so much sense.
You market and sell to businesses. So, if you're going to create B2B sales and marketing material (which—make no mistake—your explainer video is), keep in mind these five tips for writing a video script that converts.
B2B marketers live in a world powered by stats and facts; no wonder data visualization has become a thing, especially since so many people are visual learners. But data visualization isn't about pretty design, it's about telling a great story.
If you develop a new offering, will customers buy it? That's the perennial challenge for today's companies, and it's increasing as pressures to innovate "first and fast" intensify.
In love and in email marketing, you have to learn to admit when a relationship isn't working—especially when email subscribers you're attempting to woo are instead getting you blocked or blacklisted. Here are four types of offending addresses and how to deal with each of them.
Marketing rules and tactics for professional services providers (accountants, attorneys, physicians, dentists...) are often different from those for product or service marketers. Here's how newsletters work exceptionally well for professional services.
Modern CMOs know that to be successful they must integrate multiple data streams to glean valuable, actionable information for Marketing, Sales, and the wider business. Here's how to tell whether social efforts are having an impact on your company.
Today, Google ends support for Converted Clicks in AdWords. If you're still using this metric in reports or for Target CPA bidding, here's what you'll have to do.
You've probably noticed that you (and a lot of other advertisers) have recently been paying more for PPC campaigns than you used to. So how can you pay less, short of putting a stop to your PPC campaign or lowering your bids?
Until the Perfect Landing Page is created—an imaginary creature, no doubt—we will continue tweaking and testing and arguing the merits and faults of every landing page element. But these three unexpected tips will improve your landing page.
People like to be catered to, but not pandered to. Doubly so when they're at the receiving end of a marketing campaign. And especially so if they're Millennials. So here's advice from a Millennial on how to actually reach young customers.
Just how valuable is brand admiration, and what impact does it have on your brand's bottom line?
The story of the Trojan Horse seems a simple tale, but it was a stroke of strategic genius that took concerted effort to pull off. And there are important business and marketing lessons to be learned from it.
In our fast-paced, always-on, agile, want-it-yesterday, mile-a-minute world... there is a critical need to slow down. Why? Because doing so allows you to achieve real results—faster.
Print collateral is still an important sales and marketing medium. To produce strongly branded, high-impact print media, you need to know what materials work best together. So here are must-know basics about printers, ink, paper, and collateral types.
Your product is naked in front of all of your prospects, and they're highlighting not just its obvious beauty and strengths but also its small blemishes, stained teeth, and bad haircut. That's not a nightmare. That is the reality in our age of technology.
Most marketers strive to communicate as effectively as possible—except, unfortunately, when they're training fellow marketers. Because that's when, for some reason, PowerPoint takes center stage.
Developing strong messaging and activating it across your organization ensure that everyone can communicate clearly and consistently about your company's value. And that vastly increases your chances of attracting customers you want to attract.
Use these tips—straight from the mouths of journalists—to help your press release stand out from the ineffective and soon-to-be-deleted competition in your target journalist's inbox.
We're all familiar with the 3 Rs from elementary school. These days, though, every marketer—especially those working in e-commerce—should have a firm grip on three other essential Rs: retention, retargeting, and re-engagement.
Photo-sharing social network Instagram recently launched its most significant and talked-about feature to date, Instagram Stories. Here are five ways you can use Stories as a creative marketing tool.
Respect for a brand—for its identity, purpose, and achievements—increases brand credibility and influence, results in forgiveness of mistakes, and creates access to better partnerships and talent. How can you go about gaining such respect?
B2B marketing leaders who have experience with rapid growth give advice on the role of Marketing in such growth, what it means to think like a growth marketer, what challenges arise with scale, and how to approach those challenges.
"At work upon a client query, while I pondered, bleak and bleary, / Over many a bloated and drab volume of marketing lore, / While I nodded, nearly blotto, over another limp marketing motto, / Came to my cell a tweet so branded, deftly done, not underhanded..."
From time savings and increased productivity to usage rights, asset protection, and more, DAM's day as an essential tool for creative directors has arrived. The rewards are plentiful, and the risks of not investing in it are too great to ignore.
If you don't have video experience, video marketing can be intimidating. But it doesn't have to be. Here's a cheat sheet to get you started making great videos for YouTube.
Customers of businesses that don't focus on good customer experience are leaving in droves. Here's how to monitor customer experience and why a more holistic approach to doing so will benefit both your business and your customers.
Content curation builds trust and credibility for your brand because it keeps customers informed. You can communicate industry news, trends, how-to tips, or whatever your business goals dictate. Here's how to get started.
Is your email marketing growing stale? If you're up for trying something different, possibly even a little scary, try these somewhat unconventional ways to give your email marketing that much-needed boost.
Businesses need a strong mobile engagement strategy, but people use the mobile Web, apps, and SMS in different ways. How can you use each mobile medium for real-time communication with consumers?
Content now spreads in nanoseconds, so there's more risk in marketing than ever before. Brand reputation is at stake. Thus the importance of good storytelling. Because bad stories live forever online as a black scar on your brand's reputation.
The fear of public speaking is as old as humanity itself. Snakes in the stomach. Sweaty palms. The urge to run away... If you can relate, maybe it's time for a new approach.
If you cultivate and foster brand trust correctly, your company won't need to constantly throw piles of money at rebuilding and repairing trust with customers.
MMM and attribution measure the value and performance of your marketing activities. Both are sophisticated models for measuring cross-channel marketing activities, but they work in different ways, for different reasons.
Navigating call-tracking offerings can be difficult, especially if you're not sure of what to look for in a provider. Keep these four things in mind as a checklist of criteria when shopping for call-analytics software.
Calls from search, social, and display ads are often the most lucrative type of conversion, but also the most difficult for marketers to measure and optimize. Here's a basic lesson in how call attribution works and how it can benefit you.
As any good journalist will tell you, you don't have to have a degree in a topic to write about it well—and confidently. Even so, creating content for a company is often a different beast.
Without a doubt, data and analytics have become central to every organization's business strategy. Find out how to enable your marketing organization to successfully use data and analytics to drive business decisions.
Maybe? A little? Probably? Yeah... a fast-loading website contributes both to better results via search and to better user experience. And it need not be difficult or expensive to speed up your site.
The more relevant, interesting, and even entertaining the content that you share or publish, the more your audience will view you as a trustworthy source of information, and not just a provider of a product or service. Content curation can help.
Businesses depend on email as the glue that pulls marketing tactics together, yet many otherwise savvy marketers misuse email in a way that ultimately alienates customers. Here are six common blunders.
The final article in this series explores how to respond to altered behavior in the buying cycle, deliver content to where it is most needed, and focus on the proven sales-generating power of SEO.
Are you getting the most out of segmentation, or are you leaving money on the table? Here are seven common mistakes to avoid.
Inspiring and evoking feelings of brand love aren't accidental occurrences. Cultivating and fostering it require a purposeful, methodical, and strategic process that builds meaningful relationships over time.
Marketers can learn a lot from established voices who are driving decisions in marketing, and this analysis of 21 influencers' content sharing offers ways you can improve your own content strategy.
We've all heard the misconception that communicating over text via mobile decreases the personal touch. But, quite to the contrary, it's actually an effective, engaging way to connect when you're in the palm of someone's hand.
Ready to learn how to woo new customers? Use the following four ways to sweep them off their feet with some sweet-talking Web copy.
Here's straightforward guidance on how to identify what your customers value, understand how value motivates B2B buying, break through the price barrier, and use value (i.e., create it) to justify your pricing.
By ensuring that your marketing encourages repeat business, brand loyalty, and customer referrals, you give your business the kind of boost that can't come from any other source. But how do you go about doing that?
Popups were once the bane of the Web; today, they are an excellent way to capture visitors' attention and improve conversion rates. But if not done properly, they still ruin the customer experience.
Millennials are more aligned with brands than with retailers, and in the next 10 years will spend $65 billion on CPG products. Here are five ways CPG brands can maintain and grow that alignment over the next decade.
By not making it a priority to ask for, listen to, and implement customer feedback, companies are missing a huge opportunity to earn customer loyalty and improve their product or service.
In B2B marketing, to convince customers to buy from you, they must know who you are, what you do, and why you matter to them. Here's how to move their buying decision forward—from "we're interested" to "where do we sign?"
Keyword research has changed a lot over the past few years—from merely searching for long-tail opportunities with lower competition... to in-depth niche research. These four tools will help you adapt to the ongoing evolution of search engine optimization.
Clearly, as a business owner or marketer, you understand the importance of email marketing. But are you doing it right? Here are eight ways you may be sabotaging your email marketing efforts—and what you should be doing instead.
No longer are marketers asking, "What's influencer marketing?" Today, many are asking, "Should we develop an influencer marketing channel?" or, "How much effort and budget should we put behind it this year?"
Creating professional-quality videos is not an easy task. You are not going to immediately create masterpieces... You might never even get close. But that does not mean you cannot create video content that is successful online. Here's what you need.
The purpose of B2B marketing is to attract and retain profitable customers. The first step toward that goal is to learn who influences buying decisions—and then win their trust in a way that will result in a sale.
What's the best day and time to send outbound marketing emails? How many outreach attempts is "enough"? How long should emails be? Those and other email-related questions can be tough to answer.
Rather than just pass leads off to Sales, marketers now shape and guide prospects through the sales funnel until purchase intent is clear. Thanks to lead nurturing, doing so is easier and more effective than ever before.
Your SEO efforts have been paying off with steady website traffic... until the inevitable happens: Organic traffic stops growing. But getting past the "SEO plateau," one of the greatest challenges for online businesses, is possible.
Increasing content noise and competition, greater reliance on pay-to-play content promotion models, and over-promotion and channel saturation that sabotage your marketing efforts... You can conquer those negative trends.
When companies have high levels of brand admiration, they experience explosive revenue growth and improved cost efficiencies, and far greater access to the best talent and partnerships.
Starting an online business can be daunting, but focusing on the important components common to every company and organizing them into manageable chunks can help. Here's a crash course in entrepreneurship.
Is there a difference between TV ads and online video ads? If you ask consumers, the answer is a resounding yes. Even if the online video and TV commercial are identical, customers react more positively to the televised ad.
By collecting, curating and featuring user generated content (UGC)—such as selfies—brands can build authentic relationships with audiences and inspire genuine customer advocacy.
No matter the reason for a rebrand, there's no denying it's a major decision—and an expensive undertaking. Among all that needs to be done, these five things are a must for rebranding success.
Local SEO is every small business's key to better search engine rankings and higher conversion rates. SEO is a complicated industry, but these five tips will help you win customers and improve your SERP placement.
Building a business is not easy, but thanks to ever-developing technology you have access to useful and effective tools that can simplify your work. Make yourself and your business more productive with these 17 handy tools.
Facebook is a powerful social media outlet, even for B2B marketers. But how can you make use of Facebook when organic reach for B2B seems to be declining? The answer, in part, is "pay to play": Facebook advertising.
Competition is fierce. You need to get as much return as humanly possible from any outreach and influencer marketing activity you undertake. Knowing how to write effective, engaging emails is vital to ensuring those campaigns convert well.
Marketing is now data-driven, and if you're not informing marketing campaigns with data-derived insights, you will fall behind your competitors. Which is why CMOs and marketing teams need to collaborate with IT teams to drive business growth.
Marketing to the wrong people doesn't help you. Knowing what motivates purchase decisions is essential to building a successful inbound program. So how do you figure out what motivates purchase and how to reach those motivated people? By creating buyer personas.
Competition for top-tier talent is always fierce. If you don't know where to look, or if you focus too heavily on traditional methods, you could be losing to the competition. Success will require some trial and error, but you'll be on your way to finding quality talent if you follow these principles.
Content marketing is one of the most effective strategies for today's marketers. But the mindset, objectives, and intentions of B2B audiences are different from those of B2C audiences. Content for those different audiences must also differ.
Imagine trying to get added to Kanye's VIP list for the hottest club in LA. You're standing in line, hoping he'll let you in. That's just about the same as trying to get your emails into recipients' inboxes... because the principles behind email deliverability are based on human-behavior patterns.
Credit card users sometimes dispute charges on their accounts and demand reimbursement. Dealing with those chargebacks can take valuable time away from employees, and it can be costly. Here are four tips on decreasing the number of chargebacks you handle.
There's no shortage of content about the power of stories and storytelling in digital marketing. But how do you tell stories beyond your "brand story," especially if you work for a dreaded "boring" company? One source that never runs dry is employee stories.
Google's Shopping Insights tool helps retailers understand where their customers are looking for what products, and what devices (desktop, mobile) those customers are using in those areas. You can then use those insights to plan your marketing campaigns and promotions.
You're tasked with creating a Web page that shows people working collaboratively in an office setting. You dive into stock photos and find a familiar scene... boring, forced, inauthentic. To find more dynamic and realistic office-setting photos, follow these five tips.
Marketers know the duplicate-record problem well, but even more insidious are duplicate data fields. Here's how to minimize the problem and perform data unification, along with tools and resources for doing the job right.
Because of significant changes to the layout of Google's search results pages, digital marketers engaged in PPC and CTR campaigns are competing for fewer available spots on each page. To compensate, use these four techniques and win the top spots.
Marketing automation tools too often don't meet marketers' demand generation goals. Why? Many marketers assume marketing automation is a "set it and forget it" process; actually, it requires a lot of effort and preparation to do well.
For veteran app users and newbies alike, app ratings matter. They really matter. Especially as social proof that the app has value and is worth installing. Ask users for a review the wrong way, and you might well sink your app's future.
Turn any common presentation, such as a sales deck or company overview, into an asset that provides valuable information, turns prospects into buyers, and drives the bottom line.
Finding engaging content to share via social media can be time-consuming and tough—and a hindrance to all the other work you have to do. So use these four simple ways to discover and share content that can improve your social media marketing.
More than ever, we B2B marketers are held accountable for driving revenue—and proving that we are. If you're struggling with measuring your content's value, here are three sets of metrics to track—and tips on how you can track them.
When someone first visits your website, it's unlikely she's going to buy from you, no matter how good your product or service is. She needs to come to trust you first. So how can we marketers build such credibility?
You spend time and money getting people to your website so you can educate them on your offering and make a sale. And yet, your website is probably filled with lots and lots of text, even though video is the most effective way to tell your story.
Online reviews can pop up when you least expect them, leaving a lasting effect on how potential and current customers perceive your business. Improving your online reputation is no walk in the park, but it can be done.
Deciding where to put your investment—of money, time, and effort—isn't easy. And the ROI of both social and content is notoriously difficult to measure. So how do you decide where to put your efforts? And once you decide, how do you go about it?
Attorney Kerry O'Shea Gorgone answers marketers' legal questions about copyright law, content curation, and more.
If marketing is essentially about persuasion, then the use of highly effective persuasive techniques can take a campaign goal to the next level—whether that's attracting more traffic, earning more conversions, or sparking more customer engagement.
Brands today have an opportunity to enhance personalization and reach, addressing always-changing customer expectations. With real-time marketing, you can increase loyalty, even upsell, and help retain customers.
Use this compelling and intuitive method for taking a step back and gaining clarity on who your brand is and what kind of impression you're making on the world.
Marketers are inundated with offerings of state-of-the-art applications that can greatly improve every aspect of B2B marketing. These five questions will help you evaluate technology vendors and applications quickly to find the ones right for you.
Consumer engagement today looks more like an engine with interlocking gears than like the familiar funnel that marketers have relied on for more than a century. Here's how you can use the new framework to enhance the value of your marketing.
Yeah, you could totally wing it blog post by blog post, tweet by tweet. But if you truly want to build brand awareness and create meaningful relationships with your readers, followers, and customers, planning is a must.
Technical SEO mistakes are the silent killer of campaigns. They not only disrupt user experience but also make Google hate your website. Fix these seven mistakes to help you achieve your goal of ranking high on search results pages.
It's no secret that SEO has been changing—fast. Once, it was all about title tags, keywords, and backlinks. Today, SEO needs to take into consideration so much more.
These tips are for debugging content marketing software of a different sort—the words, phrases, and sentences that constitute your marketing content. So avoid misusing these 12 words or phrases.
Content marketing is a high priority for many organizations, but most are struggling with the strategies, processes, and technologies that can help them succeed.
Anyone doing serious mobile app marketing knows surveys can be useful for understanding app satisfaction, getting feedback on new functionality, understanding why a feature isn't being used, or collecting general feedback quickly.
Marketers have been under pressure for years to turn their art into more of a science, and "Big Data" is now more than a buzzword for CMOs: Understanding or using data is becoming integral to all marketers' jobs.
To better relate your product or service to consumers, present them in a way that identifies with those of a particular culture. Multilingual marketing is a way to do that.
A crucial element of marketing that all CMOs—and marketers as a whole—need to be addressing right now is social listening and analytics. Because social intelligence can be vital to business success.
These four content creation hacks belong in every marketer's toolbox. These tips and tricks epitomize the scrappy mindset we need to do more with less, and help us bring that mindset to life in our content marketing.
B2B marketers are overwhelmed by content marketing, with their top challenges relating to production. No wonder: a marketing department isn't the same thing as a content production team.
Though most email marketers focus on optimizing click-through rates and open rates—and for good reason—those popular metrics won't add up to success if your emails don't land in your contacts' inboxes in the first place.
Long-tail keywords can help even smaller and newer websites "steal" traffic from big, established players. Here's the lowdown on the what, why, and how of long-tail keywords.
PR and SEO aren't standalone marketing disciplines; for best results, they must work together. Here's how.
Creative teams thrive on flexibility, doing some of their best work when given the freedom to explore and experiment. But too much of a good thing can be, well, too much. You need some structure to maintain sanity and to be truly effective.
Poor customer experience drives brand switching—a key reason for three quarters of lost customers. And customers who suffer a bad customer experience spread negative word-of-mouth.
Bad news: People don't read your online content marketing these days; they merely scan most Web content. But with these tips you can write scannable, easy-to-understand text that will boost engagement.
Your product or service cannot survive on its own. It needs backup in the form of strong customer support. The way you interact with your audience will determine how far your business goes in our competitive world.
Nearly every business in the world has a website today, and that means small businesses have to overcome nearly insurmountable search marketing odds to claim one of the few spots on the first pages of search engine results.
A major pain point for marketers: generating quality content on a consistent basis. If you can't maintain velocity with your content creation, you can kiss goodbye to goals such as "owning" valuable search terms on Google.
In PPC advertising, landing pages are crucial to performance. But not just any landing page will work for your industry or company. You can apply all the advice and best-practices experts tout, but sometimes those practices do the opposite of what you want: They hurt your PPC conversion rates.
Now that you've done all the work of creating your new brand, it's time to unveil it for the world to see. These six best-practices are essential to achieving a successful launch, both internally and externally.
Video is fast becoming the content medium of choice for US consumers, especially younger ones. And even though you might already be producing videos, you may not be getting the maximum ROI if you're not optimizing them for search on both Google and YouTube.
Marketers have tended to shy away from integrating experiential campaigns into their marketing strategies because, until recently, demonstrating impact was difficult or next to impossible. But no longer!
If Facebook were a country, it would be the biggest one... which is why it's so important for marketers to understand how to advertise effectively on Facebook. Your successful ad can make a huge impact on a potentially huge audience.
The big challenge Marketing Operations faced in 2015 was Big Data: where it comes from, what it means, who takes care of it—and what to actually do with it. But what's just as important is what not to do with it.
Storytelling is at the core of what drives great marketing today. You can amp up your marketing campaigns by following these five easy tips that create powerful stories.
Once you've decided that you need a companywide makeover, use these nine tips to achieve the results you want on a reasonable timeline.
Most email campaigns do a lousy job of turning warm leads into customers. But with interest-based segmentation, you'll not just dramatically increase your results... you'll do so without annoying prospects.
With the convergence of online and offline marketing, choosing the right measures is far more important than the quantity of data measured. Measuring the right data, and acting on the results, is essential to operating Marketing as a center of excellence.
Left unsupervised, your online forms can cause a lot of trouble for your conversions. However, optimize your forms for performance and they'll become your website's greatest money-making asset. The choice is yours.
Blogging is an important part of digital marketing. Yet, many choose not to blog because they think they don't have the necessary writing skills. These tips will go a long way toward helping you write engaging content.
Customer advocacy programs are hot right now. And why shouldn't they be? Customers have the ability to be hyper-connected to the brands they love, and they are gaining more influence over the buying process every day. But advocacy is a fragile thing.
It's hard to imagine a world where we lace up our Blue Ribbon Sports running shoes (instead of our Nikes), stop for lunch at Pete's Super Submarines (instead of Subway), and then enjoy a refreshing Brad's Drink (instead of a Pepsi) later that afternoon.
Customer behaviors are changing. Fast. Not keeping up is all too risky. The companies that really "get" their customers, like Apple and Amazon, are setting the standards—and the bar is set high.
Unless you're one of the iron-walleted few, gaining startup capital for your business venture will require the help of investors. Navigating those waters can be a lesson in humility; it also requires a certain amount of know-how.
Making your app stand out in today's hypercompetitive app market is tough. But don't lose hope. It doesn't have to be as hard as you may think it is.
Most CMOs view content as the future of marketing. But the job doesn't end with simply producing content... Making sure it performs is critical to driving engagement and reaching target audiences.
Painful as they may seem, requests for proposals are a B2B fact of life. They help you establish successful partnerships in an age of tight budgets and fierce competition for service contracts. Ensure your company gets the most out of the RFP process.
If you want a highly engaged community of customers, build an email list of people who are ready to listen to your messages and willing to buy from you. Here are four ways to build such a list.
Facebook's scale and evolving video publishing platform make it a compelling video marketing option. To succeed in a digital age, marketers need to keep up with the platform's video advertising options.
How can a vendor—an outsider—drive adoption for its solutions inside a client organization? Sales and marketing professionals are now the owners of accounts before, during, and after implementation.
A book is the ultimate business card... but only if you do it right. Unfortunately, many entrepreneurs (and others) don't, especially because they don't account for editing.
Implement these five hacks, and in a couple of weeks you'll be connecting with people every hour.
Performance marketing demands objective ways to evaluate what's working (vendors, channels, media, creative...) and how your strategies and tactics are affecting the bottom line, margins, and cost efficiency. These nine optimization techniques can help.
Build a funnel specific to your business rather than adapting to a generic approach, and you'll maximize your marketing efforts and optimize conversions.
We've all been there, sitting in front of a boring long presentation filled with charts and small text you can't even read. Now that it's your turn to present, don't make the same mistakes you see all too often.
Have you been using Instagram in your social media marketing campaigns? If not, would you like to? Either way, you could probably do with a little less work and a little more simplification. These tools will help.
Here's how marketing, PR, and content can work together across four main areas—the PESO model—as well as where they diverge, and how to assign responsibilities where they make the most sense.
Multiple clients with multiple projects, all with multiple deadlines... Whether you are approaching a new product launch, a website redesign, or any other project, here are a few ways to effectively juggle multiple project tasks.
Does your small business have marketing and branding needs but not enough money to hire an agency or a consultant? Don't fret, you have many options to ensure you get the help you need to start or grow your business.
The success or failure of a dashboard is closely linked to data visualization. But focus purely on the visualization, and you'll fail. So consider these three questions and then take the prescribed actions.
It's not tough to publish on social media: With a few clicks you have a post on Facebook, a tweet on Twitter, or a video on YouTube. The tough part, as you know, is getting found, viewed, read, liked, and shared—and doing it without annoying people.
The near-universal adoption of smartphones and social media has fundamentally altered the science of handling customer complaints. The critics ("haters") are not your problem, however... Ignoring them is.
A customer journey map is a visual representation of the various interactions a buyer has with a business. Building that map from the outside-in—from the customer's perspective—requires a thorough understanding of the customer's needs, wants, and desires.
Video can be an amazing marketing tool, yet it has a short shelf life. Luckily, it's also a dynamic asset that can be edited, tweaked, and optimized over time. Here are four ways to keep your video content current and engaging.
With the right strategy in place, webinars can generate high-quality leads and drastically increase revenue. But they—and you—can't do any of that if you can't get people to register and attend.
Customer insights are essential to growth and success, yet they remain the elusive holy grail of many a business—a seeming exercise in futility. But you can avoid others' mistakes and develop actionable customer insights.
We all have dream clients—company logos we'd love to place on our homepage. The only way to get there, in most cases, is by engaging with senior decision-makers over time—starting right now.
With social media, podcasting, videos, push notifications, and other mobile channels taking up our lives, you may think that the good-old email is losing its dominance in the mobile age. Well, think again.
Marketing budgets are already on the chopping block, even though CFOs say better top- and bottom-line growth requires sales and marketing. We need to prove our value by turning Marketing into a center of excellence. These five steps will help.
So frustrating: You work hard. You know your industry inside and out. You offer something nobody else does. And you take precious time to write about it in your business blog. Yet... nobody is reading.
Are the leads you're getting from Google in too short supply for your taste? That no longer has to be the case, because you now have the definitive guide to dominating Google AdWords for your local area.
Are the leads you're getting from Google in too short supply for your taste? That no longer has to be the case, because you now have the definitive guide to dominating Google AdWords for your local area.
Does it frustrate you when your TV screen fills with your competitor's face as he relates pertinent industry insights studded with self-deprecating chuckles? Don't get mad, get even.
Competitive intelligence often takes a back seat to performance indicators that marketers are daily concerned with (open rates, social metrics, conversions...). But that solely inward focus can lead you astray.
Unlike texting while driving, texting while selling is not dangerous; in fact, it can be invaluable in helping sales teams meet their numbers. But before you fire off texts to all your leads, keep these tips and tricks in mind.
Identifying the ideal topics to curate—those most likely to engage your audience and support your content marketing strategy—is a key component of content curation.
Getting customers to engage is harder than ever. Yet, there's a direct relationship between engagement and revenue. The longer consumers spend time on your site, the more likely they are to buy from you.
You as a marketer can take these five steps to address today's sales-force performance and productivity challenges and get the most out of your sales team right away.
Next time your team is drafting a new piece of visual content, ask the following four questions before you pour hours and dollars into the project.
Before jumping in and spending precious dollars on Facebook video ads, use these tools and tactics to create a powerful paid video campaign.
The primary goal of user-experience (UX) design is to ensure your business remains aligned with the needs of your users. That's why UX should be a dedicated part of your website development process.
Inbound marketers must convert readers into customers. However, producing compelling content three or four times a week can be challenging. These four steps to creating better blog posts and articles can help.
You can optimize your website to rank better in local search engine results pages and avoid the informational noise and overload that often irritates your potential customers.
When you ignore mobile, you miss a huge opportunity to engage with your current and potential customers, capture their interest, and generate leads. Here's how you can successfully integrate mobile into your marketing plan.
Companies have hired armies of smart, hip, Web-savvy people to usher their brands into a new era of connectedness that allows them to reach customers in new and interesting ways. So why do brand tweets as if they're clueless?
Millennial consumers have particularly high expectations. Having grown up with the Web and smartphones, they're also highly visual. You need to show them that your brand is worthy of their attention.
You can spend hours writing a comprehensive post, or spend thousands on creating interactive or video content, but if you don't have a strategy for getting it in front of eyeballs, nobody's going to see it.
How can you develop a YouTube channel that stands out? It so happens that successful business channels have qualities in common that anyone can replicate. Do so, and you'll be rocking the No. 2 search engine in the world.
Marketers, bloggers, and small business owners have struggled with the same problem for years: how to create compelling content. Why? Because they're using the wrong process—or, worse, no process at all.
Businesses tend to focus on what to do about one or two negative reviews, but the most effective way to combat bad feedback is to increase the amount of positive reviews for your product or service.
If you aspire to be a successful content strategist or marketer, here are nine things you should plan on learning—the sooner, the better!
You don't have to come up with all the ideas for content creation. You can crowdsource from those who are likely even more qualified to determine what would be valuable to your audience.
Being able to effectively increase your online conversion rate is among the major factors affecting the future success or failure of your business.
What motivates your buyers? Four key personality types, as defined by the DISC model, will give you the clues you need to understand buyers. Here is how each type of personality thinks, along with some approaches for selling to them.
Here are four ways segmentation can improve demand generation—and four practical tips on what and how to segment.
Mobile marketing is by no means new, but it has been so refined in recent years that its toolsets and techniques are growing increasingly effective—and, more important, increasingly seamless.
In 2015, the FTC updated its Endorsement Guides, covering issues such as disclosures in close proximity to affiliate links, purchases of Likes, incentives in return for tweets, and disclosures in consumer reviews.
The people writing consumer/user-generated content are the same ones performing search queries. If you can harness their sentences, paragraphs, and ideas, you can crowdsource search optimization.
Established brands can likely withstand experiential marketing flops because customers can fall back on previous positive brand experiences. Not so for new brands or product lines: A negative customer experience would likely be enough to sink them.
If you decide to fix even one of the following mistakes, you will see better results for you and your business.
Influencer marketing—the "it" tactic of 2015—will only gain momentum in 2016. If you're planning to work with high-level influencers for complex social media campaigns, here are key steps to take.
Online retailing is a booming business—as are concomitant scams. So let's review a few frequently asked questions about the legalities of e-tailing and online marketing.
As a marketer, you need to know when to buckle up and tackle an initiative internally or when to secure an outside expert, ideally before a situation becomes critical or spirals out of control.
Mobile marketing has come a long way, but there's still progress to be made in technology, analytics, and strategy. Most notably, it's time for a paradigm shift: to think of mobile as the home for omnichannel marketing.
Here's how you can begin optimizing your newsletters and lead nurturing, event, and other marketing emails for more clicks.
Even when brand communications hit all the marks—they're clear, meaningful, and on message—they're often dull. That's an opportunity, though, for companies willing to show off their human side and maybe even stick their necks out a little.
Without even knowing it, you may be hindering project success and timelines. Knowing what makes your copywriter tick versus what ticks them off can mean all the difference between a healthy work environment and a dysfunctional one.
When creating a hashtag to represent your brand, community, or event, you might think of it as dating: you want excitement, you want intrigue, but you also want something that will last, at least a little while.
With the start of the year comes the opportunity to re-evaluate your marketing and customer-experience strategies—to plan how you can up your game in the year ahead. Here's what three trends have in store for you this year.
The success of your marketing strategies hinges largely on your content's quality and its ability to engage your audience. Follow these steps to not only better understand your customers but also identify where your sellers are more likely to win.
Targeting and buying online audiences has never been easier or more affordable. But even the right audiences can be hard to engage once you reach them. The key to making your audience care is relevance.
To make sure your company blog consistently engages your audience, apply persona research to the content you produce. Here are five steps for creating and using your blog persona.
Writing 2,500 words per hour is possible. It's not even that hard. I do it regularly. You can, too.
Yahoo Mail's 18th birthday makeover will affect how marketers reach consumers in the future. In fact, updates such as search filters, avatars, and embedded brand logos actually have the potential to make marketers' email efforts more productive.
Ask most people to describe a salesperson, and "trustworthy" probably won't be their first choice of adjective. Yet, to stand any chance of making a sale, you must establish credibility with your buyers. Trust is a core element of every successful sale.
Marketplace competitors can easily make your products or services a commodity so that everything comes down to price. How do you know whether you're being commoditized? And how can you avoid that undesirable fate?
What are the guidelines for making choices and setting priorities in your marketing organization? To achieve success in 2016, these are the most important questions for marketers to ask.
The latest trend to enter the marketing world is interactive content, and it's gaining popularity for very good reasons.
These are the how-to articles—those that dispense practical, tactical advice and tips—that you and your fellow marketers found most worthy of your time and attention in 2015.
It's much easier to start a journey if you know where you're going—and much more likely you'll actually get to somewhere you want to be.
Video content is easy to consume and engaging, and it helps you connect with the people who matter most—your audience. But how do you make sure you're getting the full benefits of video marketing?
There's a growth-stifling disconnect between brand marketers that have indirect sales models and the local channel partners that sell the brands' products or services.
The GOP campaign is generating heat, and that's good news for marketers. Let's take a look at top GOP candidates, the tools they're using, and the lessons their wins (or epic fails) can teach your business.
The lifetime value of a blog post is 700 days, according to new research. But is it worth it for brands to adjust their content marketing strategy, and how exactly can they do that?
Yes, responsive websites are important, but the real money is in connecting with—and converting—high-value customers... those who have already considered your product or service and are now calling you on their mobile device.
Thinking your own mobile marketing campaigns are now in danger because of ad-blocking? First, take a deep breath. Then, read these four tips.
A campaign that focuses on your customers' values takes commitment and research. Building an accurate picture of those values and priorities, then acting on it, is hard but rewarding work.
In 2016, the video skills marketers have learned in 2015 will allow them to create better content and tell stories that have greater impact, and they'll get serious about measuring ROI and using that data to optimize results.
A well-defined strategy is vital for a team to understand what needs to be done and which areas need investment. It also helps you identify what to stop doing, where to save money, and what is not worth the team's time.
We need to understand where and how customers interact with our brands, where and how they make their purchase decisions, and what kinds of engagement strategies translate into better sales numbers down the road.
Your audience loves interviews, particularly with thought leaders. Bonus: interviewing influencers can help position your brand as an expert by association. So how do you secure an interview for your blog, podcast, or other owned media?
Holiday sales are traditionally viewed as mere transactions with customers buying gifts once a year rather than as important interactions with potentially long-term, loyal customers. That's a lost opportunity.
Most businesses are interested in testing their sites, but they're hesitant because they don't know the differences between A/B tests and multivariate tests. Using examples, let's go over three ways the two differ.
Get ready for a new year of changes to Google's algorithms—and your SEO strategy. Here are five of the biggest search trends on tap for 2016. They're sure to be buzzed about next year.
Here's practical advice on how to increase your app's exposure on mobile search, make app content more easily discoverable, and avoid app resubmission to and approval from app stores for certain marketing-related changes.
These five CRM systems offer an optimal combination of the features and functions salespeople want most in CRM software.
One-click Cyber Monday-like shopping to achieve market leadership—and get a huge discount on marketing talent to boot? Oddly, some CEOs think it's possible. Here's how to disabuse them of the notion.
Want to get your next book not merely published and reviewed but actually sold? Marketing plays a key role in that goal. But, you don't have to be a marketing expert. You just need to apply marketing basics.
Casinos have tapped into ethnic markets, but they aren't the only businesses that can benefit from doing so. Here are four things you should consider when driving growth through multicultural marketing.
Whether big fuzzy teddy bears or utter dictators, executives operate under the same prime directive: Make money for the company. Once you can see the world from their eyes, you can get them on your side.
Most salespeople don't like using CRM systems. They'd much rather be talking with prospects than learning difficult software and entering volumes of data. In article 1, we discuss what salespeople specifically like and dislike about CRMs.
Having a documented content strategy is critical for effectiveness—now more than ever. Why? Because digital and social marketing have amplified the need: More Channels = More Content = More Complexity.
Millions of mobile apps out there make getting your app noticed extremely difficult—and rare. Gaining visibility is not as simple as coming up with a great concept, building the app, and submitting it to app stores.
Marketers and advertisers who understand the importance of customer behavior and psychology consider heuristics (mental shortcuts that people use to form judgments and make decisions) to target their markets.
The solution to ad-blocking software is simple: If users block ads they don't want, marketers have to offer them ads they do want—with content that digital shoppers truly enjoy.
Sharing great content, particularly via social media, as part of your content marketing can seem like an uphill task. Use these six tools to keep your social media pages buzzing with great content.
To help Sales, marketers should embrace lead handoffs as the beginning of a new phase that requires its own content strategy for maximizing post-handoff lead conversion.
E-commerce reviews have transformed shopping behavior—from how consumers approach a purchase to their confidence in the buying process... and much more.
For you to successfully reach customers through social media, you need to rely on consumers to deliver your brand messages to other consumers. Enter user-generated content campaigns.
MarketingProfs uses single