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Marketing Article Index » More marketing articles

  • Four Steps to Ensuring Your Strategy Achieves Results
    Many companies at all stages invest time in planning but lack the processes and leadership needed to ensure a strategy achieves the desired results. Failure is expensive and wastes precious resources. To avoid both and to achieve execution success, check out these four tips.
  • Manage Your Marketing Career in 3D
    Many career-minded marketing professionals we coach tell us they are too busy working in their career to work on it. Sound familiar? If so, it's time to switch from autopilot to manual mode and deliberately manage your career.
  • How to Properly Close the Loop... and the Sale
    First impressions matter a great deal. That's why you need to structure your sales calls to establish rapport and drive toward a sense of trust and camaraderie with your prospects. Here are three tips for success on that first call.
  • Four Foundational Elements of Marketing Analytics Success
    A lot of marketing organizations today think that they are on the path to greater insight because they now have analytics technology. The reality is that it takes a significant investment in four foundational areas to ensure analytics success. Here's a look at each area.
  • Seven Online Marketing Activities You Can Start Today
    Want to market your small business online? Doing so isn't difficult. Just make sure to produce quality content and authentic messages. Here are seven ways to get started with your online marketing.
  • Seven Steps You Can Take to Capitalize on the Mobile Video Viewing Shift
    Through apps or the mobile Web, on a phone or tablet, consumers are watching more and more video on mobile, and now you have some figuring out to do lest you get stuck in the last century. Here are seven steps to get started planning your mobile content strategy.
  • Three Key Ways to to Help Your Business Find '2X' Profit Growth
    Many companies turn to newer, hotter media and technology when they want to increase profits. But being successful isn't about tech; it's about effectively engaging customers. Here are three ways to do that.
  • How to Use Google Analytics to Increase E-Commerce Sales
    Google Analytics is a great free tool for e-commerce websites. It can allow marketers and webmasters to record specific data about items purchased, learn how a user navigates the website, and focus on specific, actionable ways to increase sales.
  • How to Keep It Human in the Robotized Socialverse
    Social networks were meant for real humans—for real-life conversations about real-life things. But, of course, we marketers saw an opportunity. Social media can become a powerful medium... so long as you preserve a human face while acting on behalf of your company.
  • Mobile Innovation (Part 6): Innovating Value Propositions Through Mobile
    Value propositions are the heart, soul, and epicenter of a business. They reflect its market positioning while communicating the core promises it makes to its customers. Let's look at three smart organizations innovating their value propositions through mobile.
  • Three Powerful Ways to Measure the Impact of Your Email Marketing
    Though email campaign process metrics such as delivery, open, and click-through rates have their place, if you don't look beyond them... the true impact of your email marketing—and opportunities for continuous improvement—will go undetected.
  • How to Integrate Ratings and Reviews Into Your Social Marketing Programs
    Positive ratings and 5-star reviews from online consumers are powerful marketing content, because consumers trust other consumers for purchasing advice. But few marketers have integrated reviews into their social marketing.
  • 10 Critical Actions for Enhancing Customer Loyalty: The Case of Travel Companies
    The time has come for air travel and hospitality brands to address an existential threat to the travel industry: Customer loyalty has all but vanished.
  • From Broadcast to Unicast: Quick, Easy Steps to Engage Your Customers via Social
    Moving from one-size-fits-all broadcasting to highly targeted communications that are personalized and timely, and in the consumers' preferred channel... that's the proven path to marketing success in today's world.
  • How Text Messaging Can Drive App Engagement and Revenues
    One of the toughest marketing jobs today is working for an app developer. Here's how text messaging can attract new users and increase engagement with customers.
  • Build a Customer-Centric Marketing Automation Strategy
    The if-then logic of the marketing automation process can lead to a snarl of over-communication, with only a loose relevance to the recipient's true interests and needs. It doesn't have to be that way.
  • Mobile Innovation (Part 5): Innovating Customer Experiences Through Mobile
    Mobile is a boon to the customer experience, because mobile provides myriad ways for marketers to delight customers and improve their experiences in ways previously unavailable.
  • Turbocharge Your Content Marketing Machine
    Content marketing is not rocket science, but it can appear so in the absence of a clear-cut strategy—and planning, without which your content marketing machine will be firing on three cylinders instead of being a turbocharged V8 behemoth.
  • Give Me 10 Minutes and I'll Make You an SEO Expert (Kinda)
    Here's the quick-and-dirty guide to being an SEO "expert," which merely means you know more than the people around you. This article will accomplish that. Well, not really... But the building blocks are all here.
  • Marketing Training: How to Make E-Learning Effective
    When the need arises to train a large department within your organization on a new marketing campaign, or you find yourself having to relay crucial marketing information to partners or associates in a short amount of time, traditional e-learning methods just won't cut it.
  • Four Tips for Building Fail-Proof Buyer Personas
    Whether you think it, believe it, or discard it... the truth is that buyer personas are the start of every successful campaign. Every marketer knows that understanding your buyer is key, but every smart marketer knows that standard demographics just won't cut it anymore.
  • Stop Saying 'Awesome': Five Best-Practices for Americans Marketing to Europe
    Globalization brings exciting opportunities and enormous challenges for all parts of a business, but nowhere is that more apparent than in the marketing department. Here's how to avoid five common European marketing pitfalls.
  • Five Steps to Improve Your Marketing to Generation-Y
    Millennials grew up with the Internet, and they are used to having everything at their fingertips. After interviews with 21 global marketing executives, we defined a five-step plan for improving your marketing to Gen-Y.
  • Mobile Innovation (Part 4): Innovating Product Offerings Through Mobile
    Your customers, whether consumer or executive audiences, expect you to use the same mobile technology that has improved their lives to also improve the products and services they use: your offerings.
  • B2B Event-Driven Marketing: Triggers Your Analytics Shouldn't Miss
    The retail industry has recognized that critical events in customers' lives can shift loyalties, or serve as opportunities to retain or upsell via event-driven marketing. That approach can also work with B2Bs...
  • Is Your Email Subject Line Creative... or Deceptive?
    So where does the line get drawn between a creative, compelling email subject line and one that is deceptive (and, therefore, illegal)?
  • Seven Tips for Managing Communications on the Go
    Marketing professionals can use their mobile phones to maintain efficiency on the go and professionally manage day-to-day communication demands by applying the following tips and mobile features.
  • Seven Essential Skills for the Content Strategist
    Like the word "content" itself, "content strategy" is often an ambivalent term. But, however you define it, any good content strategist should have these seven skill sets.
  • Three Steps to Using Instagram for E-Commerce (Without Sharing a Single Photo)
    If Pinterest is great for driving referral traffic, Instagram takes the lead in customer retention and engagement. The practices outlined here are only just starting to spread, and they will continue to do so as more brands adopt Instagram.
  • Why Lead Nurturing Is Like Hosting a Dinner Party (and Nine Ways to Do It Right)
    Lead nurturing and dinner parties require the host (marketer) to build and maintain relationships through conversation, rapport, and trust. And both involve careful planning...
  • Mobile Innovation (Part 3): Innovating Sales Channels Through Mobile
    As any marketer knows, sales are mission-critical to the success and survival of all companies. But what many a marketer doesn't yet fully understand is how many ways mobile can be wielded to stimulate sales... more so than via any other medium.
  • Four Ways to Create an Army of Fans for Your Brand
    Why do rock stars have fans but companies have customers? The short answer: that's what rock stars and companies want to have. But if you think like a rock star, you can cultivate an army of fans for your brand. Here are four steps you need to take.
  • Six Reasons Your Website Will Fail
    Although the dawn of the Web was nearly two decades ago, many small and midsize businesses (SMBs) still have a limited, ineffective online presence. Let's examine the top reasons SMBs are failing online.
  • Connect Customer Experience, Convenience, and Differentiation to Business Results
    Understanding how the customer behavior you can monitor influences the buying process... is key. Here are three areas to monitor and how to tie them to more outcome-based metrics.
  • Managing Online Reputation: What to Listen for, and Where
    The cost of managing an online crisis or reputation issue can seem limitless. Worse, bad news travels online at turbo-charged speeds: A negative tweet or nasty video can end up on mainstream media within hours. It pays to plan ahead.
  • Want to Slash 50% Off Your Marketing Budget? Try Being Nice...
    In the '80s, in the days of Michael Milken and Gordon Gekko, the rule on the street was "eat your young." Nice guys finish last. Hold your information. Keep the rules to yourself. Win at all costs. No matter who or what you have to trample. But not anymore...
  • Helpful Conversion Optimization Advice From Rich Page: Get Started, Get Results
    Conversion-rate optimization can be intimidating, especially since marketers don't have many sources of clear advice on how to avoid common pitfalls, generate strong ideas, and run tests that get real results.
  • Mobile Innovation (Part 2): Innovating Brand Engagement Through Mobile
    The battle for attention—and, in turn, engagement—has escalated into an all-out war by marketers... and their target audiences are its victims. This article explores how to innovate brand engagement via mobile, providing three examples of companies that are doing just that.
  • Social Search Optimization on Five Major Social Networks (Part 2: Twitter, Pinterest, Google+)
    The combination of search and social is revolutionary. Find out the search capabilities of Twitter, Pinterest, and Google+ and how to search-optimize your presence on them.
  • How to Use the iPad for Content Marketing
    The iPad is one of the best ways marketers can enhance their brand image and interact with today's mobile generation, but marketers are struggling to find innovative ways that encourage and enhance customer conversation. Here are a few basic steps you should keep in mind.
  • The Omni-Channel Retail Experience, or How Kay and Jared Jewelers Upped Sales 49%
    As consumers become increasingly more connected, so too will multiple shopping channels. The industry has dubbed this shift the "omni-channel" experience. Here's how, by embracing this approach, two brands significantly increased sales.
  • The 7 Biggest Misconceptions of Successful B2B Marketing
    What really drives success in B2B marketing can be hard to decipher. Here are seven misconceptions about what makes for truly successful B2B marketing—and how you can steer your efforts in the right direction.
  • Google Authorship and Author Rank: Big for SEO in 2013 and Beyond
    This article will help writers gain a better understanding of Google Authorship and Author/Agent rank, learn to set up their own Google Author accounts, and help protect their online work from piracy.
  • 8 Do's and 5 Don'ts of Instagram for Building Your Brand
    Though some forward-thinking businesses are already using Instagram, chances are you aren't yet, and neither are your competitors. With its universal appeal, however, Instagram is not a medium marketers should ignore. And you'd better move quickly if you want to make an impact.
  • Mobile Innovation (Part 1): Welcome to Your Innovation Moment, Marketers
    Mobile devices are the first thing people reach for in the morning, and the last thing they look at before going to bed. Mobile is at the center of your customers' lives. Now, with mobile, you can be at the center of your customers' experiences.
  • Social Search Optimization on Five Major Social Networks (Part 1: Facebook and YouTube)
    The combination of search and social is revolutionary. Find out the search capabilities of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+—and how to search-optimize your presence on them.
  • Social Media for Customer Service: Just Do It!
    Social media is quickly changing what's expected in today's customer service world. But many companies are still struggling to find a way to fit it into their customer service processes.
  • Avoid an Emergency Career Crisis: 14 Tips for Planning Ahead for Your Next Job
    Anticipation and planning improve your ability to effectively cope with emergencies such as a storm—or a career crisis—even when its timing is uncertain. Those who are always prepared for an unexpected job change are likely to suffer less than those who are caught by surprise.
  • A Weight Watchers Case Study: How Smart Marketing Pays Off
    Weight Watchers is clearly the dominant company among weight-loss centers and programs. So what are the company's marketing secrets? Let's take a look at six savvy principles Weight Watchers has implemented to solidify its position at the top of the weight-loss stack.
  • How (and Why) to ID and Duck Wimpy Web Writers: 18 Telltale Signs
    Content is the treasure trove that connects customers to companies now. And where there's gold, you're bound to find miners. The problem is that far too many will be swinging a wimpy little pickax and struggling mightily to break any ground.
  • Top 10 Content Marketing Strategy Mistakes, and How to Correct Them (Part 3 of 3)
    In the final installment of this series, we cover three mistakes: Your content doesn't tell a story; your content never leaves home; and your content never grows up.
  • Expand Your Market and Audience: Use the 'Idea Graph'
    Your "marketing universe" contains everyone you can sell to; you must expand it, or your business will stagnate. Even if you build a receptive, high-conversion audience, but then can't increase its size, you'll soon be sunk.
  • Which Genres of Branded Video Work Best?
    What's the best way to establish connections with video viewers? Storytelling. But a great story does not guarantee success. Your video's genre plays a large role in determining whether you'll meet your campaign goals.
  • Five Ways to Connect With Millennials... Yes, via Radio
    Most people's perception of that Millennials don't like radio could do with a splash of cold, hard facts. Here are five ways you can put this phenomenal medium to work for you to reach Millennials.
  • Solving Marketing Problems: Learn From Polya
    The next time you confront a marketing problem, consider George Polya. What can marketers learn from the Muhammad Ali of mathematics? Problem-solving in four steps, of course. Here's a brief outline of those steps.
  • Landing Page Optimization Is Not a Strategy, CXO Is
    Landing pages aren't dead—or even unimportant—but you shouldn't be treating them as a standalone strategy. Rather, you should be focusing on the big picture: optimizing the entire customer experience.
  • Real-Time Bidding Ushers in the Era of Lean Marketing for Display Advertising
    The rise of real-time bidding (RTB) for online display advertising now allows marketing departments and agencies to build lean display ad campaigns. That's because RTB allows marketers new ways to optimize and adjust display ad campaigns on the fly.
  • Five Complainer-Customer Personas and the Role of Social Media [Plus an Infographic]
    Consumers are using social media to interact with brands, but most customer complaints and comments there remain unanswered. Big mistake! You must deal with these five types of complainers on social media.
  • Top 10 Content Marketing Strategy Mistakes, and How to Correct Them (Part 2 of 3)
    Does your content sound like everyone else's? Did you do any research before producing your content? Do you always use the same media format? And do you tailor your content according to venue and audience?
  • A Quick-and-Dirty Social Media Analysis That Won't Cost You a Dime
    Social media is full of numbers, but most of the time we don't use them in any actionable way... because social metrics are often too complicated. But here are some easy (but rough) calculations that will give you a general idea of success. They may not be perfect, but they will give you actionable insights you need to succeed online.
  • Stop FUD From Paralyzing Your Marketing
    Changes in technology, marketing channels, and customer behavior challenge a lot of tried and true tactics that worked in the past. The result is fear, uncertainty, and doubt about what will work. That kind of FUD often stands in the way of necessary action.
  • A Market Research Survey on a Shoestring Budget: How I Did It
    I'm a solo-preneur and a guy, and I run a women's jewelry and accessories store. I needed data to understand women's jewelry-buying habits. So I designed a survey, ran a contest, and marketed it via lifestyle bloggers. All for less than $350. Here's how.
  • How to Conduct Focus Groups: Seagate's Example
    Seagate, a leading provider of hard drives and storage solutions, realized that they knew very little about a very big target market: college students. So it conducted focus groups to gain insight. Looking to host your own focus group? Here are steps you can take to put together a program.
  • Are Your Clients Worth Keeping? Four Questions to Help You Find Out
    Focusing on ways to increase customer retention rates is a key to real growth, but you also need to determine whether certain customers are the right fit for your business. Ask these four questions to help you decide just that.
  • How to Evaluate and Select a B2B Teleprospecting Partner
    Many marketing organizations are now placing an emphasis on the role of teleprospecting as a component of their B2B lead generation strategy. Here are seven steps (and an RFP outline) that can help you locate, evaluate, and select the right teleprospecting partner.
  • Hey, B2B: Grow Up and Get a Social Media Strategy, Will You?
    Many B2B marketers are still avoiding social media. They wonder whether it works and how in the world they can tell whether it's working. Let's put that excuse to rest once and for all, shall we?
  • Top 10 Content Marketing Strategy Mistakes, and How to Correct Them (Part 1 of 3)
    "Content marketing strategy" is a phrase that gets thrown around quite a bit, but how well do we really understand it? Not well at all, which is why content marketers make these 10 content marketing mistakes.
  • Measure and Maximize the Impact of Online Activity on Offline Sales
    Measurability is the battle cry of every digital marketer. The challenge is how to decide which measurements make sense based on campaign objectives. The ultimate challenge is how to optimize in real time to maximize impact on brand-marketing or direct-marketing objectives.
  • Managing Marketing Content Across the Customer Lifecycle
    Getting caught up in the content marketing frenzy is easy. But content delivered in the right channel, but at the wrong time in the customer's buying process, can be a wasted touch point. You need to synchronize mix and content with the customer buying journey and lifecycle.
  • Five Common Errors in Marketing-Performance Evaluation and Measurement
    Although the exponential increase in the availability of customer and business data has enhanced our ability to measure success, it has also increased our chances of misunderstanding and misinterpreting it. Avoid these common errors when setting out to measure your marketing efforts
  • The Five Big Problems of Big Data
    The idea of unlimited customer insights, in real time, guiding every decision, is attractive. But before you embark on a Big Data project, separate the buzz from the reality of turning the hype into insight, business value, and, ultimately, increased revenue.
  • Are You Creating Purposeful Content?
    We are in the age of information overload, with a plethora of blogs for every topic imaginable. We don't have time to read everything. And we need to maximize value: We read content to learn, after all. Which is why marketers must create purposeful content.
  • Increase the Value of Your Facebook Community
    Facebook presents a robust opportunity for your to reach potential and current customers. If used correctly, it increases brand awareness and advocacy, lowers service costs, and drives loyalty and incremental sales.
  • Content Is Not the New Black: Time-Tested Tips for Creating Compelling Content
    Content has always been, and will always be, the very foundation of marketing. Yet we are challenged with meeting the constant demand for consistently compelling content. These tactics will help you supply such content.
  • Want Effective Calls to Action? Use 'Action Trains'
    The most difficult task in marketing is to get people to take the action you want them to take. But once they have, getting them to take one more is so much easier—especially if you use "action trains."
  • Six QR Code Do's and Don'ts for Events
    Slapping a QR code on a handout or a poster is easy, but creating something useful takes thought and planning. So what are QR codes good for? Plenty, including for your events, if you use QR codes wisely.
  • How to Gain Subscribers Without Buying Email Lists
    Few things are as antithetical to good inbound marketing as purchasing a list of email addresses and blasting them with your latest campaign. You risk significant business damage. Here's what to do instead.
  • Join the LinkedIn Party: Five Tips for Using LinkedIn Groups Effectively
    If you are on LinkedIn to really connect with people, LinkedIn Groups is where the party is. But to get the most out of LinkedIn Groups, you need to learn how to be the life of the party—not a wallflower or a party crasher. Here's how.
  • Lead Nurturing and Marketing Automation: 15 Key Questions Answered (Questions 13-15)
    The final installment in this series answers three questions: What are the keys to successful nurture campaigns? What's an example of a typical nurture sequence? How do I select a marketing automation vendor?
  • Avoid These Three Deadly Sins of Sales Messaging
    Salespeople's lips moving—that's how deals get done. The entire deal rides on what you have to say even more than what you have to sell. So here's how you'd better the three deadly sins of sales messaging.
  • How to Tell a Visual Story (Even You, B2B): A Marketer's Guide
    As storytelling becomes more and more part of marketing, another trend is coming clearly into focus: Brands are becoming more visual. Businesses that aren't ready for this visual revolution will get left behind.
  • Lessons From the Greatest Marketer of All Time... Expelled From Oxford
    He is, of course, David Ogilvy, who was given the educational opportunity of a lifetime at the University of Oxford, then expelled (for undisclosed reasons). Here are some lessons you can learn from his life and work.
  • Five Advantages of Agile Marketing
    Agile marketing prioritizes the needs of the customer and focuses on a rapid response to customers and current trends. Here are five reasons you should consider adopting the strategies of agile marketing.
  • Lead Nurturing and Marketing Automation: 15 Key Questions Answered (Questions 11, 12)
    This installment of our series answers two questions: Are blogging and social media viable lead nurture tools? And do all demographics respond well to lead nurturing?
  • The Benefits of Byline Authorship, and How to Do It Right
    Get this content marketing and PR tactic right, and you'll gain authority in your market, you'll improve your search engine optimization (SEO), and you'll spark conversations that can generate leads. Take these three steps to get started.
  • Five Tips for Post-Penguin Link-Building
    Much has been said and done regarding post-Penguin link-building. Here are some foolproof tips to not only secure improvements in your rankings but also survive the Penguin update successfully.
  • Seven Tips for Creating a Mobile-Aware Marketing Culture
    The next cultural shift your organization must pay attention to is mobile marketing—at the strategic planning level and at the tactical level. As a marketer, are you ready to ease your organization into mobile?
  • 17 Types of Content That Google Will Eat Up
    Just what the title says... along with an infographic and a host of examples, illustrations, and explanations.
  • Your Guide to Getting Started With Digital Signage
    When you see a screen displaying some type of message, image, or video, you are seeing a digital sign. These design tips will help you with your first digital display, and these marketing tips will help you create an ongoing digital display strategy.
  • Is Your Video Platform Future-Proof?
    You might already have your video marketing strategy figured out, but technology is always changing. Learn whether your video platform is future-proof, and get tips on making sure your video platform and enterprise videos remain accessible and useful as technology advances.
  • Video: Why and How You'll Be Using It in 2013
    Online videos, which users love, have become useful marketing tools—for SEO, social media programs, and mobile and e-commerce. Here's how video will continue to make inroads in 2013.
  • How to Market Your Book: The Modern Book Tour
    As publishing evolves, writers need to expand their skill set to succeed. They must "own" the marketing and sales introduction of their books. What used to be done via a whirlwind multicity book tour is now done mostly online: more efficient, yes, but also a lot of work!
  • 10 Lessons From Digital Pioneers on How To Become a Digital Success
    If you could speak with the brains behind TED Talks videos, Google's Webmaster community, and my.barakobama.com—and 17 other digital pioneers, what might they advise? Probably not what you'd expect.
  • Lead Nurturing and Marketing Automation: 15 Key Questions Answered (Questions 8, 10)
    This installment answers two questions: "What's the difference between inbound and outbound marketing? (and which is better?)" and "With so much content to create, where do we focus our efforts?"
  • How Often Should You Feed Your Content Marketing Programs?
    Some common questions arise as you begin to implement a content marketing program: How often do I need to update my content? How often should I be publishing? What is too much? How do you find the time to publish?
  • Need to Know: Four Mobile App Marketing Trends for 2013
    Mobile marketing changes so rapidly that every day brings new developments, but some trends are here to stay, including the steady growth of mobile apps. To stay at the top of the mobile marketing game, you have to stay on top of these four trends.
  • Five E-Commerce Resolutions to Improve Search Engine Visibility in 2013
    Online marketers near and far resolved in January to get to the top of search results this year. If you're still stumped, here are a five simple yet effective tactics to employ during the rest of 2013.
  • 7 Marketing Lessons (and an Infographic) for Next Year's Super Bowl Advertisers (and You)
    This year's Super Bowl advertisers' near total failure to engage viewers beyond the TV screen led me to distill seven marketing lessons for any marketer looking to get more ROI from marketing investments.
  • Three Things You Need to Know When Building Your Brand in China
    China has become one of the most competitive consumer markets in the world. In such a dynamic market, building a strong brand is imperative if you are to be picked out from the clutter of products. But how, exactly?
  • How to Turn Your Office Into a Video Studio
    Video has become one of the primary ways people consume information and companies market products. Clearly, marketers need to create engaging, fun videos as part of their marketing efforts. But where to start?
  • Lead Nurturing and Marketing Automation: 15 Key Questions Answered (Questions 7 and 9)
    This week we answer two questions: When is a lead truly "Sales-ready," and what are some best-practices of lead scoring? And we offer two tools you can use to help you answer those questions for yourself.
  • The Liquor Store Model for Social Media Marketing Success
    I run a liquor store in a small town, and I've always dealt with instant communication among customers. An unhappy customer, can go down to the coffee shop and spread the word all over town. Now every business faces that same pressure online.
  • What Not to Do With Your Online Presence in 2013
    If you need some help with your online presence (think social media, blogs, local listings, and more...) here's a list of 10 do's and 10 don'ts to keep your marketing on the right track in 2013.
  • Three Steps for Making (Big or Small) Data Work for Marketers
    When pricey data tools are not an option, these few simple steps can help make data work for you by allowing you to derive insights that make the most impact across your department or organization.
  • Lead Nurturing and Marketing Automation: 15 Key Questions Answered (Question 6)
    Do you need a customer relationship management system to do lead nurturing? The short answer: A good CRM system is critical for getting all the value possible from your lead nurture and marketing automation investments.
  • Five Ways to Treat Your Retail Customers Better (and Boost Profits) in 2013
    It's time to get serious about your strategies for 2013. How will you treat your customers? How will you acknowledge their experiences and build their brand loyalty? How will you encourage interaction with multiple channels? The short answer: listen to them. The long answer: read this article.
  • Product Portfolio Management: Are You Working on the Right New Products?
    Are you able to make sure you're properly resourcing your new-product portfolio? And do you have the tracking tools you need to make sure those products launch on time?
  • Building a Website Testing and Optimization Program: Measurement (Part 3)
    Learn how to measure and communicate the results of your website testing and optimization efforts in this third article of a three-part series on the steps you need to take to create a successful optimization program.
  • Six Principles of Great Content Brands
    The torrent of content is increasing by the day. It's a good sign: Marketers are getting hip to the power of content. But the only way to survive the coming erosion of engagement with your content is to create a Great Content Brand.
  • Lead Generation Isn't Everything: You Need a Sales Rock Star!
    Sure, marketing can generate leads—but leads, though necessary, aren't sufficient. You also need a sales rock star to convert those leads into sales. So, what qualities should your star have?
  • 10 Personal Branding Trends for 2013 (Part 2)
    In Part 1 of "10 Personal Branding Trends for 2013," I shared five important personal branding trends for the New Year. In this second installment, I have five more trends for you to include in your personal branding strategy to make you stand out and achieve your goals.
  • Building a Website Testing and Optimization Program: Implementation (Part 2)
    This second article in a three-part series on website testing and optimization outlines the four key steps you'll need to take to implement your optimization program.
  • Lead Nurturing and Marketing Automation: 15 Key Questions Answered (Question 5)
    To answer the question of how much content you'll need for lead nurturing and marketing automation, let's look at how you pack for a long weekend of skiing with friends and family at a mountain resort.
  • Pavlov's Dog, or How to Develop and Deliver a Consistent Brand Experience
    When we hear a name, see a logo, whiff a particular scent, or encounter a sensation, we are conditioned—like Pavlov's dogs—to respond in a specific way.
  • How to Use Web Video to Win Business and Wow Customers
    The human brain is programmed to take in a large amount of information when it's presented in a combination of images, movement, and sound. The benefits of Web video as a marketing medium for business, then, suddenly becomes clear...
  • 10 Personal Branding Trends for 2013 (Part 1)
    At the end of each year, personal branding guru William Arruda predicts what personal branding trends will be valuable to career-minded marketers in the coming year. He says many exciting changes are afoot that will simplify building your brand in 2013.
  • Lead Nurturing and Marketing Automation: 15 Key Questions Answered (Questions 2-4)
    The second article in this series answers three questions: How do we get started with lead nurturing/marketing automation? What is lead nurturing and how does it work? How long till we see ROI on lead nurture?
  • Building a Culture of Testing and Optimization: Planning (Part 1)
    Whether you've been testing for years or you're just getting started, your optimization program's success depends on careful planning, implementation, and measurement. This is the first in a three-part series of articles that looks at the steps involved.
  • How to Avoid 'False Choices' in Content Marketing
    Our penchant for snappy axioms—most of them a derivative of "set content free"—has put content marketing on a collision course with otherwise sensible business objectives.
  • Seven Deadly Email Marketing Sins, and How to Avoid Them
    If you're interested in optimizing your email campaigns at all, you'll steer well clear of the all-too-tempting email marketing sins of pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth!
  • What You Need to Know About Printing, Including Costs
    We might be living in the age of the Internet, but print collateral is still a part of just about every organization's marketing arsenal. Here's what you need to know to make good choices when purchasing printed materials.
  • Lead Nurturing and Marketing Automation: 15 Key Questions Answered (Question 1)
    This first article of a series focusing on lead nurturing asks and answers, "How do you achieve alignment between Marketing and Sales?" The series will cover 15 questions that are top of mind for companies.
  • Buried Treasure: How to Find Great Content Right Under Your Nose
    Your PR folks have access to content treasure you didn't know you had—without weighing down your team or running up the bill. Here are some easy ways they can help you find those content gems.
  • Seven Ways to Help Sales Use Marketing Content to Win Buyer Trust
    Buyers don't care about your product or service. They just care about the problems and opportunities they face and how your expertise can help them. Accordingly, Marketing and Sales share a common goal: earning the right to connect with buyers.
  • Five Ways SMBs Can Track the ROI of Social Media Ads
    Before SMBs embrace new advertising opportunities offered by social networks, they need to seriously consider how to go about measuring the ROI impact of such ad investments.
  • The Seven Pitfalls of a Modern-Day Brand
    Reaching people is easy these days. For all intents and purposes, we no longer have technological barriers and geographical boundaries to worry about. Brand awareness is easy to come by. Or is it?
  • 2012's Top Lessons for B2B Marketers
    I know, I know. You're probably thinking, "Great, another end-of-the-year list!" I'm with you... But, it's easy to get contemplative when the last quarter draws to a close. And there are real lessons to learn. Here are eight of them for B2B marketers.
  • What Marketers Can Learn From a Gaming Company's Email Tactics
    With the prevalence of the smartphone, email has become a virtually "always on" channel. It can lift retention, increase brand favorability, and create more payers out of players (or subscribers or members or prospects...).
  • Seven Rebranding Lessons Learned: A Road Map From a Newly Merged Company
    Working through a six-month rebranding effort, we learned seven key lessons we deemed worthwhile to share in the hope they can help others who might face similar challenges.
  • From Tampons to Tablets: The Best and Worst Product Names of 2012
    We're astounded, amused, and occasionally awestruck by brand names that naming consultants and other marketers come up with over the course of a year. So here are the most inspired (and most misguided) product brand names of 2012.
  • How to Tell Your Brand's Story: Four Questions You Must Answer
    Whatever happened to Cinderella's shoe? Who knows? It didn't go viral. Put another way: Story generation and the way we develop content have changed, so you must change, too—and answer these four questions.
  • Prepare for 2013: 10 B2B Marketing Trends and Developments
    Again, that time of year has come. It's predictions season... And in the spirit of the season, here are 10 marketing trends of 2012 that will grow even more prominent in 2013.
  • Five Tips for Building a Case for Marketing in the Boardroom
    Marketing is often viewed as a cost center, and marketers meet resistance when their budgets are being approved. But Marketing is an asset, and you need to position it to your CEO in terms of the revenue it delivers. Here are some best-practices that can help you do that.
  • Achieve Visual Storytelling (and Sales) Success With Whiteboards
    Whiteboards are an essential visual storytelling tool that you as a marketer can help create for salespeople to differentiate your company from the competition—and get customers and prospects to choose you.
  • Brands That Surged (and Brands That Sank) After Hurricane Sandy
    When Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast, millions lost electricity, heat, and water. But just a few days later, many companies promoting to those millions had—cluelessly—gone back to business as usual. Here is a list for brands that "surged" and brands that "sank" in Sandy's aftermath.
  • Your Brand and Nine Legal Issues Related to Patent, Trademark, and Copyright
    Protecting your brand, one of the most fundamental aspects of your market presence, is not something that should be taken lightly or ignored. From the very beginning of your business, you need to create and maintain a solid intellectual property (IP), patent, and copyright strategy.
  • Four Ways B2B Marketers Can Boost the Value of Their Tweets
    Whether you're looking to move beyond the occasional tweet or you're aiming to further polish your approach, here are some tips for how you, as a B2B marketer, can take full advantage of Twitter as a marketing tool.
  • Three Steps for Stopping Checkout Abandonment
    Any e-commerce site owner knows the frustration resulting from the abandonment of a full shopping basket. But the most likely causes of a high rate of abandonment are few, and they're relatively simple to rectify. Here are three key areas that can generate improved conversions if you pay attention to them.
  • Six Ways to Use Online Video for B2B Event Marketing (a Case Study)
    Online video is a highly engaging and versatile tool for B2B marketing and lead generation, including tradeshow marketing. This brief case study shares how a B2B technology company used online video to increase in-person tradeshow meetings with targeted decision makers by 218%.
  • 10 SEO Tips to Improve Your Search Rankings--and Your Website
    Don't just try to move up a few places in search results with your SEO efforts; rather, turn a visit to your website into a better experience and help your site to naturally grow in popularity.
  • Eight Ingredients of Effective Inbound Marketing for Generating and Qualifying Leads
    As marketers, we instinctively realize it's impossible to pinpoint when our prospects will be buying. That's why it's critical not just to keep in touch but also to make sure your company shows up in all of the right places when the prospect is selectively attracted to buy from you.
  • PEAR, or Why a .3% Click-Through Rate for a Banner Ad Is Perfectly Acceptable
    Your banner ads aren't all about the click-throughs and immediate purchases. Brand retention and recognition are key goals of online advertising, because you want customers to seek you out when ready to make purchases.
  • Five Ways Marketers Can Boost the ROI of Big Data
    Big Data, applied to marketing, is transforming how marketers in myriad industries attempt to reach consumers. But achieving meaningful returns from Big Data investments can be an elusive goal. Here are five of the best ways to increase the ROI you achieve on your Big Data expenditures.
  • Six Tips for a B2B Facebook Contest
    Have you ever wondered whether a Facebook contest will work for your B2B company? Here are some helpful tips to consider before creating a Facebook contest.
  • Driving Direct Sales With Social Media
    Although social media is a relatively new marketing channel, there is fairly strong consensus that it can help with business growth. What few people realize, though, is that you can actually drive direct sales from social media—provided you have the right strategy in place.
  • Five Impacts of Facebook's Open Graph on Marketers in 2013
    Facebook's Open Graph is a formidable force that is changing the way brands and consumers interact. As 2013 approaches, more brands will try to quantify the ROI of their Facebook marketing investments, and the Open Graph provides significant opportunities to do just that.
  • Five Takeaways From Holiday Marketing Campaigns of Years Past
    Holiday marketing can be tough. But some of the coolest holiday marketing campaigns of years past can prove instructive, so we've identified five campaigns, along with takeaways, to help your holiday marketing.
  • A Three-Step Approach for Linking Content and Behavior: Measuring Relevancy
    Almost everyone would agree that content must be relevant. But what is the best way to measure relevancy? Many of the ways are complex, but here's a simpler, three-step process any marketer can use to link interaction (behavior) with content and a method for measuring relevancy.
  • Three Metrics for Measuring the Success of Your Video
    Let's face it, video is hot—and everyone knows it. Video gets people more excited and engaged with the message we marketers are trying to convey than do paragraphs of writing. But one major problem most of marketers have with video is this: How the heck do you measure the success of a video?
  • Four Reasons It Pays to Have a Company Blog
    Having a strong online presence is essential in today's economy, and an excellent way to ensure such a presence is to establish a blog that's connected to your company website.
  • A New Marketing Lesson From the 2012 London Olympics
    The athletes competing at the London Olympics broke many records, but the number coming out of the Games that is most revealing for us is the worldwide audience: not the number of TV viewers worldwide, but the overwhelming number of global online spectators.
  • Eight Tips for a Safe and Profitable Black Friday Retail Checkout Line
    Retailers are planning now to deal with the oncoming consumer-oriented buying frenzy that is Black Friday. Here are eight tips for retailers on preparing a checkout line for the crowds and excitement of an event filled with great opportunity—and great risk.
  • Five Ways to Get Speaking Engagements to Market Your Business
    Speaking is one of the best ways to get the word out about your company. But getting speaking engagements can be tough, and many would-be public speakers struggle to find opportunities. Here are five ways to get speaking engagements that market your business.
  • From Content to Lead to Handoff: Inbound Marketing in Six Steps
    Marketers today need to be more in tune with where, when, and how people want to receive messages. You need to build a presence in places that matter most, so that when people come looking, they find you. But that's just the beginning...
  • Humanizing the Web With Personalization 2.0: Three Tips to Get Started
    We're not talking "Welcome back John" and certainly not "Dear Valued Customer." Real personalization goes much deeper than that today. Call it Personalization 2.0: it means the delivering the right content to the right person at the right time on the right device, using the right channel, published on the right platform.
  • Make the Most of Holiday Marketing: Five Things Online Retailers Should Do Now
    Every year, your stakes are at their highest during the holiday season, when deals and discounts have proven especially attractive to online shoppers. But what else can you do to boost sales online? And how do you keep shoppers coming back when the holidays are over?
  • Get More Green on Black Friday, Compliments of Remarketing
    Every year, retailers employ the same strategy: churn and burn through their email list in an attempt to cash in on subscribers over Black Friday/Cyber Monday. But remarketing can produce dollars without weighing down inboxes. You can send fewer emails yet achieve greater impact.
  • Customer Experiences and the Theory of Relativity
    Your customers see the world through a lens of comparisons to meaningful reference points. That has repercussions for the design, measurement, and analysis of customer experiences—and, by extension, customer loyalty.
  • Five Marketing Decisions Social Media Should Be Shaping
    If you're not deriving customer intelligence from social media to inform your marketing decisions, you're missing an important opportunity to extend the reach and effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
  • Three Valuable Lessons Marketers Can Learn From the World Series
    When Pablo Sandoval faced Justin Verlander in Game 1 of the World Series, each had a season full of data at his disposal: what pitches Verlander tended to throw in certain situations, and which areas of the strike zone Sandoval was most likely to get a hit. We marketers can learn from that.
  • Four Lessons for Brand Managers From the Race for the White House
    Not Apple, not General Motors, not Microsoft. If we're talking the really big brands currently dominating American consciousness, we're talking politics: the 2012 US presidential election. And the relative strengths and weaknesses of the competing campaigns point to some interesting lessons for brands.
  • Six Ways to Make Your Video Strategy More Social
    Online video can engage an audience, help viewers retain information, and—for businesses—assist customers in remembering a brand. But how can you go one step further... and make your videos social?
  • PPC and Retargeting: Cross-Channel Marketing That Gets Results
    Using paid search in conjunction with retargeting to drive conversions will boost marketing performance overall while amplifying the effectiveness of each tactic. That's because audiences are more likely to respond to marketing messages if they see the same message across multiple channels.
  • Five Easy Tricks to Get More Treats From Your B2B Contact Database
    "Trick or Treat" may be a beloved phrase come Halloween, but it takes on a whole new meaning for many B2B marketers whenever a lead generation campaign gets deployed: Will its performance be an absolute treat bag full of results, or do the open, bounce-back, and click-through rates point toward some kind of trickery?
  • Voice of the Customer: Trick or Treat for Your Product Launch?
    Have you heard of the phenomenon of “declared preference” versus “revealed preference?” If you haven’t, you may be in for a scary surprise this Halloween season if you are using “voice of the customer” research to drive the positioning and messaging for your product launch.
  • Science + Structure + Metrics = A Winning Formula for Positive Teleprospecting Results
    "Science + structure + metrics = successful outcomes" might not be the formula that immediately comes to mind for improving your teleprospecting results, but following it step-by-step is a great way to keep your teams focused and organized throughout a campaign.
  • Nine Surefire Ways to Make Your Blog Fail
    Blogs provide an excellent platform for engaging with customers, but many bloggers make fundamental mistakes that can seriously harm their success. Here is a list of nine unforgivable blogging offenses you should avoid.
  • Six Ways to Rally Your Company During a Rebrand (and How Your Agency Can Help)
    A rebrand requires a compelling vision that can be understood and articulated by all—starting with your company's leadership and employees. After all, if they haven't bought into the rebrand and the philosophy behind it, why in the world would anyone else?
  • Seven Ways to Get Great Customer Testimonials
    Engendering trust in your company and understanding what your customers consider great service are vital to getting testimonials from them. Here's how we marketers can make it easy to get those customer testimonials.
  • Five Rules on How Not to Use Social Media
    Social media is a powerful thing, which is why it can wreak havoc if misused or misdirected. Here are five rules for building users' trust, interesting them in your business, and getting them to talk among themselves about it.
  • Five Tips for Engaging Customers With Video Ads This Holiday Season (and Most Any Other Time)
    You still have a small window of time to enhance your holiday marketing initiatives before shoppers start checking off their wish lists. The most engaging medium to use with those initiatives is online video advertising. Here are five tips for smart video ads that will make the most of this holiday season for your business.
  • The Two Paths to Trust in Marketing Professional Services
    The most fundamental tenet of professional services marketing is trust. How can you expect potential clients to retain you if they don't trust you? You can't. Until recently, only one path led to trust between you and clients; now, another path is available to you.
  • How to Mimic Google's Personalized Search to Laser-Target Web Audiences
    That Google personalizes your search results is no secret. What that means for SEO is the inability to target particular groups of customers. But what if you could "fake" Google personalization to step into your customers' search shoes?
  • Solve Your Four Hairy Demand-Gen Data Challenges
    What do you get when you put an analyst, a consultant, a practitioner, and a ringleader on the same panel devoted to demand-gen data? You get smart answers to your most pressing questions. Here's a summary of the smarts that such a panel imparted at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum earlier this month.
  • Nine Tips for Building a Solid Mobile Website
    Grab a smartphone. Key in your website/blog URL. If what you see is jumbled or distorted, you are likely losing tons of traffic—and conversions. Now that your audiences are mobile, is your website?
  • What Marketers Can Learn From Farmers
    Marketing is a game of seasons and cycles. We deal with ups and downs, timing, and patience. It's a lot like farming, actually. Farmers have to deal with seasons, and so do you.
  • 23 Tips for Using LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter for Business
    With the global economy still slumping, businesses and marketing companies are embracing new methods of social marketing as a way to spread the word in a more reliable, consistent, and cost-effective way. Are you taking advantage of all that LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter offer?
  • Six Tips for Creating an Analytics-Driven Marketing Culture
    These days, if a marketing organization is to deliver value and show tangible results, it must build an analytical culture. If yours is like most marketing organizations, you already pack a strong dose of creativity. Analytics enables you to combine that creativity with fact-based decision-making—with powerful results.
  • The Four Relevancy Commandments of Lead-Gen Marketing
    People hate push marketing: It interrupts their favorite shows. It clutters their screens. And too often it has nothing to do with their interests. But customers don't mind messaging that's relevant to their needs. These four commandments will keep relevancy central to your messages.
  • For Effective Company Web Events and Presentations, Learn From the Politicians
    Whether you like politicians or not, you've got to hand it to them: On either side of the aisle, they know how to connect with others and win hearts and minds. How they do it is how you can do it, too.
  • BMOC (Big Marketer on Campus): How Your Brand Can Win Over the College Crowd
    The more than 21 million US college students have a total discretionary spending power of $120 billion per year. No wonder marketers are excited about the opportunity at colleges. Here's a quick refresher course on how your brand can make a splash on campus.
  • Who Has Time for All That PR Stuff?
    When people want to know about you, your products, and your success story, the first thing they do is go to Google to see what you're doing, even before checking out your website. And if you look as if you don't have momentum, you may never get that call. It's not too late to start doing that PR stuff...
  • Nine Tips for Writing Effective SEO Content
    Content creation is a large part of what we do as marketers—and writing effective, well-optimized content is, well, hugely important. In fact, poorly written and unoptimized Web content can render you all but invisible on the Web. Not good...
  • How Agile Project Management Saved My Marketing Team
    Here's a quick crash course on the agile project management methodology and how I, as a marketer, applied it to managing my team. I hope to help you identify where you can improve your marketing project management.
  • Nineteen (19!) Ideas for Growing Your Email List
    What would you rather have, a big list with dismal conversion rates or a smaller list targeting a highly engaged audience? Thought so. For a healthy opt-in email list, quality always trumps quantity, and here are 19 budget-friendly ways to get the list you want.
  • Why Social Media Marketing May Be Hurting, Rather Than Helping, Your Business
    Because nearly every person has at least one social media account, businesses have embraced social media to connect with people and drive promotions. A poorly managed social media campaign, however, can easily backfire.
  • 10 Reasons to Hire YouTube Stars for Your Brand
    Need a celebrity spokesperson? Bypass Hollywood and turn to YouTube. Established brands have been on a hiring wave of YouTube video stars, such as Toby "Tobuscus" Turner and iJustine, and there's no reason you shouldn't consider YouTube video stars, too.
  • Don't Just Script... Teleprospecting Done Right
    The way teleprospectors phrase their questions and emphasize key messaging can be the difference between a fully qualified lead or a dial tone. But don't fall into the common trap of writing a script and trying to get everyone to follow it verbatim.
  • Microsegment Your Way to Success in Social Media Marketing
    Social media marketing facilitates engagement with consumers in real time and contact with people who influence others. But it also allows you to microsegment audiences in a way that traditional marketing segmentation couldn't possibly.
  • How to Nurture Your Marketing Automation Leads to a Certain Sale
    A common misconception about lead nurturing in marketing automation systems is that its purpose is to "move prospects through the sales funnel." But it's not—at least not if you want the end result to be a sale...
  • 10 Ground Rules for Content Marketers
    Content creation is a huge opportunity for brands. But when done badly, it's a potentially huge fail that could tick people off—and damage your reputation, your brand, and your business. So Brands must adhere to some basic editorial standards, including these 10 ground rules.
  • How to Use Gamification to Reward Customers and Engage Prospects
    Adding game mechanics to your marketing arsenal will accomplish more than adding a bit of fun: It adds incremental value. Here are three ways to make your existing customers more profitable via gamification.
  • The Three 'Knows' of Naming Your Product or Business
    Naming or renaming your business or product can be one of the toughest challenges you face. Whether you decide to do it yourself or hire help, you need to know some basics before launching out into the wide, sometimes-weird world of naming.
  • How to Reactivate Your Lapsed Email Subscribers
    You've seen the hoarder reality shows... Email marketers can be hoarders, too: Do-nothing subscribers are likely piled up in you lists, getting in the way of your marketing. Get rid of the clutter and salvage what you can.
  • Go From Good to Great by Listening to Your Customers
    What causes customers to flock to one brand rather than another, even when their offerings aren't substantially different? The ability to listen to customers. But effective listening is not intuitive: We have to work at it. Here's how.
  • Six Steps to Developing Creative Executions Efficiently
    However efficient your organization's processes may be, you're almost certainly experiencing endless rounds of revisions in the development of creative—ads, graphics, emails, press releases... Follow these rules to stop the madness.
  • Four Reasons to Jettison the Traditional Website and Go Social
    Companies are dispensing with the traditional website, instead integrating popular social networks right into their site and communicating with customers in real time via tweets and Facebook posts. Here's why you might want to follow their lead.
  • How Social Media Is Changing the English Language (and Why It Matters to Marketers)
    How social media is transforming the English language offers lessons for businesses and marketers. With the right strategy, marketers can use those insights to achieve social media wins for their organizations.
  • The 7 Ps of Customer Retention Marketing
    We often think of marketing as a way to acquire customers. But, today, business is more relationship-based and therefore just as focused on retaining customers. So how do the 7 Ps of marketing apply to customer retention?
  • How to Guest-Blog Like a Champion: SEO, Social Media, and Google Author Stats
    This article teaches you the nitty-gritty of a powerful content marketing tactic that makes use of two of online marketing's most powerful tools: SEO and social media. The benefits you'll derive are invaluable.
  • What's Showrooming? (And Six Ways You Can Combat It)
    Armed with smartphones, shoppers are going to brick-and-mortar stores to evaluate products—then, often while still in the store, buying them online to get deals. That's "showrooming." Here's what you can do about it.
  • A Quirky Experiment Proves the Value of Story-Driven Content
    How much is a $3 ashtray purchased at a yard sale worth on eBay? If it includes a short story by William Gibson, then it's worth $101. Still don't believe in the alchemistic powers of a great story? Read on.
  • How the Best B2B Marketers Think Like B2C Marketers: Five Strategies to Emulate
    The best B2B marketers are successful because they start with building a brand. In other words, the best B2B marketers think like B2C marketers. And here's just how they think and what they do.
  • The Cobbler Wears Prada: A Four-Step Guide to Succeeding at Self-Marketing
    Companies often don't practice what they preach (or sell)—a classic case of "the cobbler's children have no shoes." Agencies and marketers are not exempt. Here's a guide to help you succeed at internal marketing.
  • Content Creation: How to Build a Successful Outsourced Team
    Marketers far and wide know the value of content marketing. But delivering a high volume of quality content that is profitable and efficient poses operational challenges. Here's a way you can overcome those challenges.
  • Three Cross-Sell and Up-Sell Tactics to Improve Email Marketing Results
    It's an old adage: Driving increased sales from your current customers is easier than acquiring new customers. But when marketing via email, a lot of businesses seem to be missing an opportunity that's right in front of them.
  • Why and How to Encourage Online Reviews
    One of the first things consumers look for when making a purchase is a review of the product or service they're interested in. They look to their peers for input and advice and trust them far more than they do the brand, especially if they've had little or no interaction with it.
  • Seven Ways Market Research Can Feed Into Business Activities
    Most commonly, market research is viewed as a method to improve advertising and marketing initiatives and to develop products that are friendlier to specific markets. However, the true range of uses for market intelligence is much larger than most businesses think.
  • Zen and the Art of Conference Presenting
    At a recent industry event, I was often inspired, but also confused... therefore this attempt at Zen, to provide feedback to presenters everywhere about what they do that's excellent—and less than excellent.
  • The Road to Stellar Customer Experience Is Lined With Engaged Employees
    Various variables contribute to customer experience: your product line, painless processes, engaged employees... Giving your employees the opportunity to maximize the impact they have on customers enables you to create successful (and profitable) customer experiences.
  • Eight Website Super Signals That Increase Brand Trust
    Getting lost down a dark alley in a seedy, unfamiliar part of town is nobody's idea of a good time, so don't make your customers wonder whether they've visited the wrong side of the Web when they come to your website.
  • Who Is Your Ideal Customer? Three Simple Ways to Find Your Target Market
    The old adage that "a product sells itself" is nothing more than a sales and marketing myth. Products sell in large part because of the due diligence that is completed before the first sales call is made. That means taking the necessary time to create your "ideal customer" profile and then securing a high-end database of prospects and companies that match that profile.
  • Three Tips for Navigating the New 'Demand Waterfall'
    What was once defined as a tidy "funnel" or a simple "waterfall" is no longer as relevant as it once was. Think, instead, a river fed by many brooks and streams that gracefully come together, only to rush over the edge of the waterfall into the (sometimes) beautiful and tranquil pond below
  • Why Being Human Matters in Marketing
    Instinct tells us that "humanizing" a brand—connecting it in the consumer's mind with a distinctive personality or an engaging personal narrative—is a good idea. But we don't have to rely on instinct. Research demonstrates how human interaction affects transactions, with lessons for marketers.
  • How Marketers and Designers Can Work Together More Efficiently
    Marketing folks and designers have the same goal: well-designed sites and well-executed campaigns that convert viewers into customers. But getting to that goal can be challenging. Start by understanding the ways in which marketers and designers are similar, where their differences lie, and what they can do to minimize conflict and maximize creativity.
  • Eight Ways to Find and Nurture High-Value Affiliates
    Thanks, in part, to its pay-for-performance model, affiliate marketing is one of the fastest-growing segments of online commerce. But low-quality affiliates can end up costing, rather than making, money. The best way to make sure an affiliate marketing program delivers sustainable results is to recruit and nurture high-value affiliates.
  • Five Ways to Drive Foot Traffic and Build Relationships With Social Media
    Although you can use online media to develop relationships, real-world connections are what solidifiy them. Here are five ways social media can support your efforts to increase foot traffic, brand awareness, customer relationships—and sales.
  • 'No soup for you!' Email Marketing Lessons From Seinfeld
    Seinfeld reigned as the most popular sitcom for most of the 1990s and inspired many a workplace water-cooler conversation with its quirky characters and absurd plots. The show might not seem the most likely source of practical advice, but some of its most memorable moments provide lessons for email marketing.
  • Four Keys to a Successful Mobile Web Marketing Strategy
    Does your business have a mobile site that is designed with your mobile customer in mind? Is it a branded, usable, engaging experience? If the answer is no, or if you're not sure, you are not alone. One thing is clear, though: If your site isn't mobile friendly now, it's time to make it so.
  • Pinterest: The Email Marketer's New Opportunity
    Pinterest and email marketing are intersecting in three ways: emails that use Pinterest-generated content, emails prompting recipients to follow a brand on Pinterest, and emails that have content appealing enough that recipients end up "pinning" the content. How do you get started?
  • Five Tips to Make Company Blogs Worth Reading
    Creating consistently engaging and fresh content for any company's blog is no easy task; even the most thoughtful corporate bloggers can get stuck from time to time. If you think it's time to rethink your company blogging strategy, follow the following five quick tips to build your audience and make your company blog worth reading.
  • Five Strategies for Promoting Your Online Video
    Online video should be an essential part of every business's online marketing strategy. Of course, everyone wants a video that goes viral, but no amount of money can guarantee a blockbuster. Fortunately, you can employ some strategies to get your video in front of as many viewers as possible.
  • Five Ways to Create Your Prospects' Favorite Website
    Your prospects have a huge array of websites to choose to visit—and buy or learn from. You have to give them good reasons to choose yours. So how do you turn your website into your prospect's favorite online business destination?
  • Six Email Marketing Mistakes to Avoid
    Email might not be as shiny as social media and other emerging marketing channels, but it's still arguably the most powerful marketing tool around. So how do you maximize this old workhorse for new gains? In part by avoiding these common mistakes.
  • Five Ways to Turn Your Chamber of Commerce Membership Into Sales
    Many businesses are members of their local chamber of commerce but don't take advantage of opportunity to increase sales and brand awareness. Here are five ways business owners can derive value from their chamber membership.
  • Why You Should Integrate Online Marketing and Direct Mail
    It would be great if online marketing—websites, pay-per-click, email, etc.—were all you needed to get the most out of your business's marketing plan, but that just isn't the case. Could you make it work? Sure. But you'd be leaving money on the table.
  • Get Your Story Straight... Because It's the Key to Your Success
    Stories matter. We see it over and over again: Companies that capitalize on an inflection point and grab a leadership position always have a thought-provoking point of view that resonates with buyers.
  • Nine Ways You Can Use Virtual Events to Train, Communicate, and Sell
    Webinars can be great lead-generation tools. But virtual communications can also help you build communities, communicate with customers, train sales teams and partners, measure the success of campaigns, and launch products.
  • Seven Rules to Cultivate Deep Mobile Relationships
    For marketers, mobile apps present an unprecedented opportunity to always be a mere arm's length away from customers. And we can know more about them than ever before. But how do you ensure a lasting mobile relationship?
  • Five Tips From Leading Companies for Online Video Marketing
    Customers are now using video to educate themselves on products and services before they buy, and that extends across both the consumer and business-to-business markets. Here are five tips from five companies that are making online video work for them.
  • Top 10 B2B Marketing Mistakes
    Even the most seasoned marketing professionals sometimes fall prey to mistakes in tactics or implementation. But with a watchful eye, practitioners can avoid costly pitfalls. Here is a quick review of the 10 most common B2B traps and how you can dodge them:
  • How to Optimize for Local Search With Post-Venice Citation-Building Strategies
    The importance of local search has been growing. But with the recent release of Google's Venice update, local search has become more important than ever. If you don't have a strategy for local search optimization, you're losing business.
  • Nine Ways to Draw Event Visitors to Your Booth and Wow Them
    Here are nine ways to draw tradeshow attendees to your booth and engage with them. Some of these tips may seem like common sense, but you'd be amazed at how many exhibitors completely disregard them.
  • Three Steps to Prepare Your Company's Brand for the New gTLD Expansion
    You've been hearing about the generic top-level domain (gTLD) registration expansion. From 22 now (think .com, .net, .org, etc.), TLDs will expand to 1,400+ starting in 2013. Will you be ready?
  • How to Manage a Successful Marketing Campaign That Meets Your Objectives
    The process of developing and overseeing a campaign for a company's advertising or marketing program can be broken down into these five steps that a marketing manager must oversee or personally complete.
  • Companywide Collaboration: Marketing's Crucial Role
    Even though launching an organization-wide collaboration effort isn't just a marketing project, its success is largely dependent on your internal marketing efforts. Marketing's role is crucial... and here's what it entails.
  • Eight Content Marketing Lessons From a Zombie Apocalypse Guide
    To inspire people to prepare emergency kits for real-life disasters, the CDC brilliantly crafted an imaginative and educational "zombie apocalypse" campaign, generating some 80,000 Likes and 2,500 tweets. Here's how.
  • A Brand Is a Terrible Thing to Waste: How to Manage Your Company's Online Image
    Today, customers can share their rants and raves instantly with a worldwide audience. In such a wired world, your online image is everything! Here's how to track and enhance that image and manage your reputation.
  • Content: Fuel for the Marketing Automation Engine
    Without content—reports, webinars, and follow-up emails—your expensive marketing automation software will be a big flop. Learn why content is the fuel that makes any marketing automation system run smoothly.
  • Know Your Audience (and Where They Are and How to Reach Them)
    To achieve brand marketing goals, you must know your target audience—and how best to reach that group. Learn three key questions to ask before funneling marketing and ad dollars out of your television advertising budget and into new media.
  • Six Steps to Attracting 1,000 Daily Blog Visitors
    Is blogging useless nowadays? Not if you're blogging the right way. When done right, blogging can attract a huge pool of prospective customers. Learn how to go from 0 to 1,000 daily blog readers in six steps.
  • Use Your Spidey-Sense to Enhance Your Web Presence
    When Peter Parker practices his heroics as Spider-Man, he captivates the citizenry and the press alike. By emulating his superpowers, you too can masterfully connect with customers and followers online.
  • Three Steps to More Original Content for Your Website: Crowdsourcing Matures
    Although content marketing continues to prove its effectiveness, and it's used by nearly 90% of marketers across all industries, creating relevant, fresh, and intriguing content that engages your community remains as difficult as it has always been. Or does it?
  • Picture This: Acquisition Email That's More Visual
    Looking at the evolution of social media over the last few years, you can plainly see that it's now being driven by imagery. Consider Facebook's Timeline (and its acquisition of Instagram) or the rise of Pinterest. However, we forget that email, too, is a social medium. So now is a great time to evaluate how you use images in your email marketing.
  • How to Gatecrash the Olympics Marketing Season
    Only a few Games ago, trying to take advantage of the Olympics if you weren't a sponsor was as difficult as teaching a Los Angeles Kings "fan" the meaning of icing. But in the case of the 2012 London games, you can... without investing serious sponsor-level cash.
  • Four Lessons on Avoiding a Brand Management Nightmare
    Brand extensions can be a great way for a core brand to develop its overall brand equity and reach new customers. We can learn valuable lessons from those who have done it right, and those who haven't.
  • Google's Knowledge Graph and SEO: Search Gets Smarter
    Google recently entered the semantic search sphere with its Knowledge Graph update. Semantic search changes the way a search engine "thinks" about a search term. What does Knowledge Graph mean for searchers?
  • Is Your Brand Message on Mute?
    Is your brand's message getting lost in today's data deluge? Learn how to maintain a consistent brand voice, and how to ensure your messaging cuts through the data noise.
  • How to Convince Older Business Owners to Invest in Social Media
    Convincing older business owners to invest in social media can be difficult—but it doesn't have to be. Learn five undeniable benefits of social media that could help make the case for a social investment.
  • Why Content Marketing Across the Revenue Cycle Is Crucial
    Today's revenue-focused marketers need to be experts in inbound marketing. Learn why effective inbound marketing requires relevant, compelling content that is tailored to prospects at each stage of the buying cycle.
  • Five Tips for Effectively Marketing to College Students
    Generation Y is estimated to be the largest consumer group in US history, and marketers simply cannot afford to ignore the student segment. Learn why you should be marketing to college students—and how to do so effectively.
  • Four Economic Reasons to Rebrand Your Business
    How much can your company benefit from a timely rebranding? A business rebrand can make your business look good, and, more important, make your bottom line look good, too. Here are four reasons to rebrand your business.
  • How to Create a Social Loyalty Loop
    Today, brands are building social campaign experiences that spread from one brand loyalist to her friends—creating a powerful social loyalty loop that cultivates new brand loyalists. Learn four ways to fuel such a loyalty loop.
  • Five Components of the Ideal Enterprise Sales App
    Enterprise-grade mobile apps can equip sales teams with a set of high-impact selling tools. But not all apps are created equal. Learn the five essential elements of an effective sales app.
  • Five Ways to Market to Gen-Y
    The consumers of Generation-Y are the next great decision-makers in the consumer world. Fortunately, marketing to Gen-Y is actually not as difficult as you might think. Here are five ways to appeal to Gen-Y.
  • Seven Mobile Marketing Best-Practices
    If you aren't tailoring your marketing for a mobile audience, you could be selling your efforts short—and missing a huge opportunity to get results. Here are seven best-practices for reaping the most benefit from mobile.
  • Questions You Need to Ask About Your Qualified Leads
    Countless solutions have been developed to automate lead-scoring, but those scores don't provide salespeople much valuable information. Learn a practical six-question scoring system that effectively evaluates and qualifies leads.
  • How to Create a Successful Blog Editorial Strategy in Just Six Steps
    What's the key to effective blogging? Strategy. A solid blog editorial strategy will help you create relevant content regularly to attract readers and convert them into customers. Learn six steps to creating a strategy that gets results.
  • Four Tips for a Common-Sense Approach to Mobile Marketing
    Want to enhance your mobile marketing efforts? Rather than undergoing dreaded technical training, apply a common-sense approach to mobile. Learn four practical tips from four marketers in the trenches of mobile marketing.
  • Seven Effective Ways to Integrate Social, Local, and Mobile
    Have your marketing efforts gone "SoLoMo" yet? Learn why combining your social, local, and mobile marketing efforts are critical in today's market—and how you can go "SoLoMo" in seven ways.
  • Why I Love Google+
    I spend two hours a day on Google+ because doing so is enjoyable and good for my brand. In addition to my fondness for its members, Google+ embodies many appealing attributes that make social networking better.
  • Pinterest: Top 9 Ways to Be a Responsible Pinner
    If you aren't one of the millions using Pinterest, now is the time to add the image-driven social network to your traffic-generating toolbox. But if you're going to use Pinterest, do so responsibly by using these nine tips.
  • Integrate Social to Inform Product Development and Strategy
    Are you using social media to fuel product strategy and development? Learn why social can be an effective research tool, and how three forms of social listening can help inform product marketing.
  • The Most Undervalued Analytics Tool: Communication (Part 3: Communication With Executives)
    For analytics to succeed in an organization, analysts must be capable of speaking the language of executives. Learn five ways analysts can create meaningful communication with the higher-ups.
  • How to Improve Performance Measurement in Four Steps
    Measuring and reporting on Marketing's value is more important than ever. To truly demonstrate their value and design an effective performance measurement system, marketers should focus on four key areas.
  • How Photography and Online Video Influence Customer Purchasing Behavior
    Photography and video have an immense impact on customers' purchasing behavior because they enable customers to visually connect with products before they buy. Learn how compelling visual content can help drive sales.
  • What Exactly Is a 'Social Business'?
    Here we go again. We have a new buzzword. Social media experts, and many others, are now talking about Social Business. But being a social business is not about having a team of people monitoring LinkedIn, Twitter, and (if you are in the "leading edge") Google+ and Pinterest.
  • Five Must-Have Pinterest Tools for Content Marketers
    Pinterest has managed to claim a huge following in a short time. But if you're a blogger or content marketer who uses words more than pictures, can you generate buzz using Pinterest? Absolutely—if you've got the right tools.
  • The Most Undervalued Analytics Tool: Communication (Part 2: Communication Across Departments)
    A lack of communication between analysts and other departments can be an express ticket to ineffectiveness—and can significantly diminish the value of analytics. Here are four ways to improve communication across departments.
  • Four New Ways Your Marketing Automation Investment Will Pay Off
    Marketing automation companies are steadily rolling out new features and new versions of their products. What changes can you expect? Here are four cool ways marketing automation tools are evolving.
  • Eight Key Lessons on Running a Top-Notch A/B Testing Program
    Running an A/B test requires resources, so it pays to know how to conduct tests for the maximum benefit to your organization. Here are eight of the most important lessons on running a successful A/B testing program.
  • Seven Tips for Using Social Media From the Good Shepherd Sisters of Quebec
    What happened when a Canada-based religious order turned to social media to reach women who were hearing God's call to the religious life? It worked wonders. Learn invaluable social media tips that led to the group's success.
  • Cultural Targeting: The Key to Online Consumer Receptivity
    Do your online marketing efforts consider the cultural context of your target market? Learn why cultural understanding is critical to online marketing—and how to implement cultural qualification in your strategies.
  • The Most Undervalued Analytics Tool: Communication
    Companies that struggle to realize the impact of analytics often blame the solutions they have in place. But communication flaws could be to blame. Here are five ways analysts can enhance communication within their teams.
  • Let's Make a Deal on Daily Deals
    The popularity of daily deals shows no signs of abating. But how can you ensure your deals effectively appeal to subscribers? Learn examples of daily deals strategies that work wonders—and those that flop.
  • Subscribers, Not Buyers: Five Ways the Shift to Subscription Services Changes Marketing
    A major change is afoot in the way people are spending; they are moving away from one-time buying and toward subscribing to services. That shift means more revenue opportunities for marketers—and big changes in how they market.
  • What Is Agile Marketing, and Why Is It Essential to Marketing Operations?
    Why is agile marketing imperative to marketing today? Here are four reasons marketers should implement agile marketing—and seven expert tips for those thinking of starting their own sprints and scrums.
  • The Problem With Personalized Search: SEO Ranking Reports Are Dead!
    OK, SEO ranking reports are not dead... but Google's personalized search is making them less and less relevant. Learn why many are using the wrong metrics to measure success—and three ways to reach online customers despite personalized search.
  • How Personas Can Lead Your Messaging Astray (and Four Tips for Keeping It on Track)
    Do you think a prospect responds better to your marketing message because you've based it on a customer persona? Unfortunately, that is not the case. To craft effective messaging, you need to address four essential questions.
  • Viral Advice From the Creators of TextsFromHillary.com
    Want to create the next online viral sensation? Though no magic formula will get you there, the creators of the wildly popular Texts From Hillary website offer four essential tips that helped make their site a huge Internet smash.
  • Six Ways Brands Are Optimizing Facebook Timelines
    Many brands recognize the potential of Facebook's Timeline, but they don't really know how to use it to their full advantage. Learn six straightforward ways to optimize your brand's Timeline to drive better marketing performance.
  • 12 Ways to Strengthen Your Call to Action
    Creating a great call to action that gets results can be tricky, unless you have a few tricks up your sleeve. Here are 12 essential tips for optimizing your calls to action to ensure they compel potential customers to act.
  • Don't Be a Lead Killer: Three Ways to Keep Sales Leads Alive
    Despite their critical contribution to a business, sales reps can often get in their own way. Here are three of the biggest ways sales reps kill leads—and three solutions that'll help turn prospects into customers.
  • A Zoo Visitor's Guide to Customer Experience and Performance Chain Excellence
    If you've ever been to a zoo, you probably used a zoo map during your visit. Those maps provide wonderful visual cues to the customer-experience and performance-chain lessons we can all apply to our businesses.
  • Five Must-Have Elements of an Awesome Mobile Marketing Call to Action
    Like any marketing campaign, a mobile marketing campaign can be well thought out, meticulously planned, and perfectly functional... but still produce limited user engagement. Why? A subpar call to action.
  • Pinterest Beyond the Basics: A Marketer's Guide to Successful Pinning
    Companies are leaping onto the Pinterest bandwagon, and your brand, too, can benefit from what is now one of the world's largest social networks. Learn what type of content marketers should pin—and how.
  • Three Steps to Making Your Website More User Friendly
    In an age of information overflow, having a user-friendly website is critical. How does your site measure up? Here is a three-step approach to analyzing the usability of your website, along with tips for improving its usability.
  • The Four Doors to Loyalty: Your Welcome Mat to Customer Intimacy
    Sure, you have customers. But are they loyal to you? Learn four things you need to know about your customers to inspire their loyalty.
  • How to Make a CMS Work for Your Business
    Choosing and installing a new content management system (CMS) is a great opportunity to improve your online presence. Here are six critical questions to consider when choosing a new CMS.
  • Follow Three Steps to Identify Your Campaign Goals and Measure Their Outcomes
    Do you know exactly what your campaign goals are? Do you know how to measure your campaign outcomes? If not, here are three steps you must take when developing and executing any marketing campaign.
  • 10 Tips for Successful Media Appearances
    Media appearances are essential if you want to build your personal brand and emerge as a recognized industry expert. Learn 10 tips for mastering media appearances, and five key guidelines to follow during an interview.
  • Writing a Better Call to Action
    The call to action in your marketing materials is one of the most important elements in a campaign. So how can you write one that works? Learn tried-and-true tips that can help catapult your call-to-action writing to expert level.
  • MRM Technology: Why You Need It, and How to Choose the Right Solution
    Too many companies have yet to embrace marketing resource management (MRM) technology, which offers a host of capabilities that can empower them. Learn why you need an MRM solution, and tips for choosing the right one.
  • When a B2B Blog Posts and Nobody Comments, Does It Make a Sound?
    For B2B, the ROI from social media isn't always so clear. Learn research findings about the social media use of one B2B segment—and four opportunities for B2B marketers to maximize social media ROI.
  • The Pros and Cons of In-House Marketing Mix Analysis
    Marketing mix analysis provides insights that improve ROI and optimize spend. The question is... will you get better results from outsourcing marketing mix analytics or building in-house capabilities?
  • 'Customer Experience' Is the Catchphrase for 2012
    Customer experience is about meeting customer needs, aligning touch points, and creating relationships. Learn customer experience basics—and how to create an enriched customer experience that gets results.
  • P.S. Five Tips to Increase Email Click-Through Rates
    The post script (P.S.) can be a powerful tool for marketers—if it's used the right way. Learn five things you can do with your post script to generate more clicks in your emails and capture the reader's attention.
  • Six Steps to Global Growth: How to Plant Your North American Brand Equity in Foreign Markets
    Before taking your brand global, make sure you've done the proper market research, hired the right staff, and implemented the cultural checks needed to succeed. Here are six steps all brands must consider before going global.
  • So I Have a Marketing Automation System... Now What?
    Marketing automation systems offer a veritable multitude of capabilities. But don't let all those features overwhelm you. Learn five ways to jump-start your marketing automation strategy without getting stressed out.
  • Doc, What Can You Do for My Marketing Headache? A Data Prescription
    Marketers can feel overwhelmed by the waves of marketing "solutions" that come at them daily: new digital advertising options, new mobile apps, every surefire lead-generation scheme in the book. It's enough to give a person a monumental headache. No worries, though. The data doctor is in.
  • Engagement Energy: 10 Ways to Power Up Sales and Marketing to Capture Attention and Drive Action
    Imagine having a switch that activates your buyer's brain and gets her to pay attention to what you say—and to take action. Learn how "engagement energy" can help you craft stronger sales and marketing messages that get results.
  • The Marketer's Guide to Fixing Your Website
    Almost inevitably, every website will encounter a problem of some kind. Many online marketers lack the technical skills to make website fixes themselves. So how can they effectively mitigate a website problem?
  • Social Media Is Not Social CRM, but It Can Be With These Five Steps
    Social media success is not just about gaining followers or "Likes." You need to track how many followers buy your products or subscribe to your services. Learn five steps to building a successful social CRM practice.
  • A 13-Step Road Map for How to Go Hyper-Local
    It's a no brainer. Local businesses that want to maximize their business results should implement hyper-local digital marketing. Learn key tips for effective local advertising that can help take your business to the next level.
  • Marketing Automation: Five Must-Do's for Achieving Maximum Efficiency
    Marketing automation (MA) software allows marketers to manage prospect and customer databases, track activity, and personalize their messaging. Get the maximum benefit from your MA software by taking these five actions.
  • Why Social Media Doesn't Work (and What You Can Do About It)
    To make social media work for your brand, you need a solid engagement strategy. Learn five engagement-strategy idea starters—and three key ingredients—for social media success.
  • Email Like It's 2012, Not 1999
    No excuse justifies emailing like it's still 1999. Today, email marketing is about achieving optimal delivery, response, and financial benefits from the channel. Learn how to modernize your email marketing for success in 2012.
  • Four Ways to Improve the Lead-to-Sales Handoff
    Improving the lead-to-sales handoff at your company—and setting lead follow-up guidelines—can significantly boost ROI and help close Sales. Learn four invaluable handoff techniques you should be implementing.
  • Want Real Business Results From Facebook? Run a Social Campaign
    To get real business results from your social media efforts, you need to build a community, engage your audience, and create word-of-mouth. Learn how running a social campaign on Facebook can help you do just that.
  • Decoding the Code: Seven R's of a Relevant Mobile Barcode Campaign
    Mobile barcode campaigns can deliver a call to action, engage customers and prospects, and enhance the human experience as it relates to your brand. Learn seven key tips for launching a successful mobile barcode campaign.
  • Six Ways to Prepare Your Brand for Social Media's Visual Revolution
    Considering the emergence of the social network Pinterest and Facebook's Timeline, it's clear that brands without a solid visual vocabulary will be left behind. Learn six tips for ensuring your brand is ready for the visual revolution.
  • Boost Your Email Marketing ROI by Focusing on Three Key Areas
    Email averages an ROI of $40 for every $1 spent, so it's no surprise that 67% of organizations plan to increase their email marketing spend in 2012. Use those new budgets to maximize your ROI by focusing on three key areas.
  • Top 4 Reasons Businesses Don't Get Backlinks
    Links that point to your business website are one of the most important SEO factors that influence your online visibility and search engine ranking. Are you getting enough backlinks? If not, learn four reasons you may be falling short.
  • Thriving in the Wild: Survival of the Fittest CMOs
    Once focused on defending their turf and justifying their domain, CMOs have evolved and now drive business value. They've morphed into a "super-species": Marketing's CEO. Learn five survival principles for today's CMO.
  • Four Ways to Maximize 'High Masthead Value' Publicity
    Many companies invest considerable effort seeking publicity via influential media—and then fail to benefit from the masthead value of that exposure. Learn how to increase the business impact of high masthead value publicity.
  • Two Key Building Blocks for Creating a Marketing Dashboard
    Not having the right information means that you'll have to base your business decisions more on instinct and intuition than on facts. Having the right information readily available in a manageable and comprehensible format is essential for success. That's why a dashboard is invaluable.
  • Pinterest and Copyright: Lessons in Life and Law
    Do copyright laws apply to posting content on Pinterest? Learn why you might not want to take legal action if your copyrighted content is shared without your permission, and how you can parlay "pins" into profits.
  • How to Get Your Products on Mass Retailers' Shelves
    You have a good product and great branding, but how do you get the buyers of large retailers to notice your brand? Here are four effective ways to be resourceful when trying to get your product on store shelves.
  • The Inside Scoop on Becoming a Good Public Speaker
    Public speaking is a powerful way to get your message to key influencers and decision-makers. Want to be a sought-after speaker? Learn what it takes to master the organizational and marketing side of public speaking.
  • Three Reasons Your Expertise May Be Killing Your Content Marketing
    Is your company having a hard time embracing content marketing? Learn why your marketing expertise may be failing you, and steps you can take to reap all the benefits of content marketing.
  • CMO and CIO: A Beautiful Friendship?
    As analytics become increasingly vital to understanding customers, CMOs can no longer enjoy the luxury of being naive about IT. Here are six steps CMOs can take to embrace technology tools and boost their effectiveness.
  • Five Steps to Shifting Marketing's Capabilities to Meet Today's Needs
    Companies need up-to-date marketing capabilities to execute strategies that address today's changing environments and evolving customer needs. Learn how to shift your firm's capabilities, and give your strategies a fighting chance.
  • How to Avoid Website (and Customer) Disasters
    We've seen too many high-profile calamities of websites going down in a major way. It's painful to watch, and it must be painful to experience. Though online disasters can happen to anyone, you can take steps to avoid them.
  • How to Measure Those Three Little Words: Return on Investment
    Let's face it, no three words are more beautiful to hear while on the job than "return on investment." Learn the basics of calculating marketing ROI—and a more nuanced approach that'll help prove the effectiveness of your campaigns.
  • Six Takeaways From a TEDx Event: Experiential Marketing Done Right
    Those of us who spend a significant amount of time watching online video are likely smitten with the inspirational TED talks. But the local TEDx events are equally enchanting, and they offer great lessons in experiential marketing.
  • Why Your Customers Are Just Not That Into You
    Do you know what your customers want from their business interactions? Learn which marketing activities draw customers closer to your brand—and which ones act as repellants.
  • Sales and Marketing Alignment: Seven Steps to Collaborative, Right-Time Revenue Optimization
    Sales and Marketing alignment is not a new issue, but marketing and sales organizations should not ignore some of the newest best-practices for creating a strong, collaborative revenue engine. The steps outlined here will fuel that engine by helping to align sales and marketing teams.
  • In Defense of Fun: Humor Is Serious Business for SMB Marketers
    Big brands use jokes to market their products all the time. But, sadly, many small and medium-sized (SMB) marketers have lost their sense of humor. Why is that? Maybe SMB marketers sense they have too much to lose. But there's much to gain, too.
  • Three Awesome Google Spreadsheet Hacks for Marketers
    Google Spreadsheets is an excellent tool for campaign tracking, reporting, automating, and aggregating complex SEO and social media tasks. Learn invaluable tips for using Google Spreadsheets more effectively.
  • A 47-Point Guide for First-Time Webinar Success
    Though webinars are live and sometimes free-flowing, they should never be disorganized. Careful planning demonstrates respect for your attendees and their time. Here are 47 tips for hosting a webinar that'll wow your audience.
  • Four Ways to Use Mobile at Your Next Tradeshow Booth
    At your next tradeshow, you'll likely be competing for the attention of a finite pool of attendees. So how can you best your competitors and capture (and keep) the attention of attendees? You've got to effectively incorporate mobile.
  • Social Media ROI: How to Ensure Your Social Media Efforts Pay Off
    Social media marketing can either be an extremely worthwhile investment or a massive time sink that brings you no benefit. How can you tell which of those extremes you'll fall into? Learn how to set up your strategy to measure ROI.
  • How to Create an Actionable Marketing Dashboard (and Why You Need One)
    If you want to answer the C-suite's questions about how Marketing is performing, you need a dashboard—an insightful report that can optimize performance. Learn five key steps to creating a viable marketing dashboard.
  • Five Ways Interactive Images Can Enhance Brand Engagement
    If you're not using interactive images in your marketing, you should be. Learn how they can drive engagement, retention, and sales.
  • Gut Check: Are You Ready for Mobile Marketing?
    Today, mobile is everywhere. But how can marketers use this powerful force to their advantage? Here are four critical questions every business should consider to maximize its mobile marketing return on investment.
  • Three Ways to Improve Your Lead-Scoring Process
    Lead scoring enables marketers to precisely measure the warmth of leads before passing them to Sales, thereby increasing conversion rates. But that can be tricky. Learn how to smooth out the scoring process—and get results.
  • What Pinterest Teaches Us About Innovation
    Is your business truly innovative? Real innovation is difficult to generate, and even harder to repeat. But Pinterest, a relatively new social network, can teach your business three invaluable lessons about innovation.
  • Drive Business Success With a Winning Marketing Concept
    Behind every successful product, service, or brand lies a powerful concept. Do you have one? Learn what it takes to craft a winning marketing concept, and why having one is critical to the success of your business.
  • Give Them Something to Talk About: Create a Community Around Your Site's Content
    Are people talking about you? If you can get people to talk about your company and its website, half of your marketing will be done for you. The best way to attract that attention is to start a community around your content.
  • Pinterest: Not Just for Stay-at-Home Moms and Aspiring Wedding Planners
    Pinterest is a hot new social media website that provides a way for users to save and display ideas on virtual pin boards. But what's in it for marketers? Here are four ways to use Pinterest to get more business.
  • How to Find Better Leads in Five Steps
    Lead generation is hard. Why make it harder by doing it without a plan? Learn how effectively developing your strategy, choosing your tactics, and building your list will help you find killer leads.
  • How Not to Think About Thought Leadership (and How to Do It Right)
    Thought leadership—if done correctly—can prompt sales leads to come to you. But some companies still get it wrong. Learn why that happens, how to avoid major mistakes, and how to excel in thought leadership.
  • Five Crucial Steps to Retaining Brand Loyalty in a Crisis
    Whether a brand is facing a minor kerfuffle or a major tragedy, the path of correction should be simple and clear. Learn how to take control of any crisis situation, and emerge with a healthy brand and reinforced customer loyalty.
  • Five Must-Do's to Get the Most Out of Local Search
    Local search is a rapidly growing trend and an essential marketing task for businesses that want to increase sales. Are you reaping the most benefits from local search? Learn five steps that'll help you do just that.
  • Case Study: One Company's Clever Approach to Turning Online Transactions Into Social Experiences
    Online testimonials are undeniably valuable, but they come after the sale. What if you could start that engine earlier? Learn how one company used Twitter and landing pages to boost sales and deepen customer engagement.
  • Usability Testing on a Dime: A Three-Week DIY Plan
    Usability testing is the most powerful, most effective thing you can do for your website, yet people assume it's too complicated and expensive. But almost anyone can do usability testing—from start to finish—in about three weeks.
  • Five Trends B2B Marketers Need to Understand to Succeed in 2012
    What will the remainder of 2012 have in store for B2B marketing? Thanks to data, what lies ahead isn't so hard to predict. Learn five significant trends that will affect B2B marketers in the months to come.
  • We Are More Than Marketers: Integrating a Human-Centric Approach
    Do you treat customers and prospects as if they were whole human beings—with hearts, minds, and spirits? You should. Learn six steps that lead to a human-centric approach to marketing.
  • A Five-Step Process for Hosting a Webinar That Generates Sales
    When hosting a webinar, you want people to show up and you want to generate leads. But meeting those goals isn't easy. Here's a five-step plan that'll take the guesswork out of hosting an effective, successful webinar.
  • Five Steps for Building Your Email and SMS Lists via Social Media
    Want to grow your SMS and email marketing lists? Your social media fans and followers—who've already demonstrated their interest in you—are the perfect targets. Learn five steps for converting your social fans to subscribers.
  • Never Waste an Opportunity: The Value of Lead Nurturing
    When new visitors arrive at your website, you have two ways to seize the opportunity and guide them toward becoming customers. Both opportunities can evaporate in the blink of an eye—if you don't have the proper systems in place.
  • Four Keyword Research Mistakes to Avoid at All Costs
    If you are serious about the words "sales," "profit," and "conversions," you must master keyword research. Learn four common pitfalls marketers make when selecting keywords—and how to avoid them.
  • The Inside Scoop on Using Twitter Lists for Profit and Sanity
    The dirty secret of Twitter is that as helpful as it can be, it's also a time sink. Learn how properly using and cleaning up your Twitter lists can help you save time—and generate leads for your business.
  • 10 Hot Tips (and a Promo Campaign Planner) for Seasonal Sale Success
    Customers today expect more deals and offers during holiday seasons, so it's important to create seasonal campaigns to increase revenues. Here are 10 tips—and a campaign planner—to help you achieve seasonal sale success.
  • Five Tips for Implementing a Successful QR Code Campaign
    QR codes can be inexpensive to implement and can provide you a measureable return on investment—if you use them correctly. Learn five invaluable tips for implementing an effective QR code campaign.
  • Four Easy Tactics for Becoming a Must-Follow Account on Twitter
    Twitter is a powerful channel that can help you connect with customers, promote products, and create brand awareness. Learn four tactics for making your Twitter account a social media heavyweight in your industry.
  • Break Down Marketing Silos Now: Build Engagement With Cross-Channel Marketing
    Marketers have a tough job! No juggler's job has ever been as tough. With 13 or so online marketing channels (and just as many offline), the job of cross-channel marketing is difficult. But creating a successful cross-channel marketing organization is possible.
  • Three Keys to Accelerating Marketing Measurement and a Fact-Based Culture
    If CMOs are to be accountable for marketing ROI, their organizations must have marketers who have data, analysis, and measurement skills. Here are three steps for effectively creating a fact-based culture.
  • Seven Tablet and Mobile Trends to Expect in 2012
    In 2011, mobile shopping increased and iPad tablet conversion rates soared. Are you prepared for the growing mobile and tablet retail environment? Learn seven key trends that will dominate 2012.
  • Follow AMEX's Example of a Successful Facebook Campaign
    Sure, Facebook promotions can get you some "Likes," but is that all there is? Learn how American Express's Israel division used Facebook to gain valuable customer insight and deepen brand engagement.
  • Five Ways to Create a Data-Driven Marketing Culture
    When handled adeptly, customer data can be a marketer's most reliable weapon for reaching customers' buying intentions—and closing sales. Learn five ways to build a data-driven marketing culture that'll help you get results.
  • A Business Listing Is Your Online Anchor (Five Rules for Ensuring Stability)
    In today's noisy business listing landscape, it's important that your online anchor be consistent and visible throughout the local search ecosystem. Here are five essential rules to keep in mind when managing your online listing.
  • How Your Customers and Analytics Can Help Increase Online Sales
    Increasing your online sales isn't quick or easy, and it involves a lot of trial and error. Learn three steps that'll help you skip some of the guesswork and boost your website's conversion rate.
  • You Botched That Marketing Email. Now What?
    Mistakes will happen—even to the very best email marketers. The key is responding appropriately. Learn six email blunders you may encounter, along with guidelines for rectifying them quickly and effectively.
  • Strategy Is Fun Too, You Know (Well, Fun-ish)
    It may be boring, but a thorough discovery and strategy-development process is essential before a website redesign. Here are five important elements of a redesign plan you should have in place and readily available... before the fun design stuff starts.
  • Content Marketing Trends for 2012: What's in and What's Out
    No doubt about it: 2011 was a big year for content marketing. Twice the number of marketers implement content marketing vs. the number of those who use print, television, and radio advertising. But what's in store for 2012?
  • Personal Branding Trends for 2012 (Part 2)
    Personal-branding expert William Arruda offers six more trends to keep in mind and on top of in 2012 as you continue to build, improve, and polish your own personal brand as a marketer in tune with the times.
  • Writers for Hire: How to Get What You Pay for on Elance
    When working with freelancers, "let the buyer beware" is a good rule of thumb. If you aren't careful in the due-diligence process, you may be in for more than you bargained for (literally). How can you make sure you don't get burned?
  • Why Marketing Needs Objectives... Not Just Goals
    Many companies have the same overarching goals: increase sales, decrease costs, and reduce churn. But why don't they all succeed? It all boils down to mindfully setting objectives and implementing strong tactics to support them.
  • What's Wrong With This Picture? The Stauer Chronograph
    We've all seen them—those disastrous ads that make us cringe as marketers. Here is a detailed critique of one ad—gone terribly wrong—that'll help you avoid a host of pitfalls in your ad copy.
  • Redesigning the Site Redesign RFP: Eight Do's and Don'ts
    Is a site redesign among your company's New Year's resolutions? To end up with a site that's built to last, you'll need a well-crafted RFP that covers all bases. Learn eight invaluable guidelines for creating your site redesign RFP.
  • Case Study: Why Targeting by Level of Engagement Works
    The words "engagement" and "hypertargeting" are practically everywhere, but what happens when you combine the two? Learn how one company ran a diverse campaign that captured the interest of core, active, and casual fans.
  • How to Streamline Site Navigation to Attract and Retain Customers
    A website with poorly designed navigation can frustrate your visitors, cost you sales, and hurt your reputation. Learn how to enhance your site's navigation to showcase your content—and keep your customers coming back.
  • Seven Tips for Forging an Appropriate Online Apology
    Despite best efforts, mistakes happen to every small business at some point. The key is not to panic, but to apologize to customers—the right way—and assure them that you are still worthy of their trust, confidence, and respect.
  • Personal Branding Trends for 2012 (Part 1)
    Over the years, personal branding has proven to be an effective technique for enabling career success. But how we build our brands is evolving. Learn six personal branding trends for 2012 that'll help keep you ahead of the pack.
  • The Email Marketer's Success Kit: Five Trends for 2012
    Now that 2011 is in our rearview mirrors, it's time to focus on 2012. Though the email marketing environment shifts especially swiftly, five dominating trends from 2011 will continue to reign this year.
  • Managing Chaos: The Marketing Approach
    Nowadays, the marketer's world is chaotic and cluttered. Effectively meeting a myriad of demands can seem impossible. That's why connected marketing solutions are critical to success in today's marketing landscape.
  • Four Ways to Make Local Deals Work
    Are your daily deals promotions hurting your bottom line? It doesn't have to be that way. Here are four key tips for using daily deals to boost awareness, gain and maintain customers, and get results.
  • Eight Ways to Segment Link Prospects
    Link building is probably the most difficult aspect of SEO. Quality links that bring results are hard to get... unless you have a link-building strategy that targets specific, meaningful market segments.
  • Eight Common Mistakes of Promotional Marketing
    Sometimes promotions work, and sometimes they bomb. But what makes a promotion tank? Here are eight deadly sins that companies commit—and that you should avoid—when planning and executing promotions.
  • 15 Lead Magnets (Plus 7 Best-Practices) to Help You Capture and Convert
    Is your business throwing Web traffic in the trash? If you're not capturing the traffic you spend big bucks to get, it's time to re-evaluate your lead-capture strategy by looking at the effectiveness of your lead magnets.
  • How Not to Craft a Professional Bio
    How effective is your professional bio at building reputation, gaining clients, and generating income? Here are five detailed critiques of real-life professional bios that'll help you avoid common pitfalls in your own bios.
  • What Every New Business Should Know About Google's Ranking of Names
    Picking your brand name is crucial, and making sure that it's Google-friendly is even more important. Before you choose your brand name, learn three major facts about how Google rates and ranks personal and business names.
  • Six Steps for Rebuilding Your Brand After a Crisis
    It's amazing how quickly a brand can find itself in a crisis, struggling to salvage its reputation. But your brand doesn't have to suffer. Learn six steps to take—before and after a crisis—that'll help rebuild customer confidence.
  • Use QR Codes so You Don't Get Thrown Away After Tradeshows
    Want to leave a lasting impact on tradeshow attendees? Go mobile. Learn three ways to maximize your tradeshow success using QR codes—and five key considerations for using them most effectively.
  • Four Event Marketing Predictions for 2012
    Tablets, social media, QR codes, and hybrid events all redefined tradeshow and event marketing in 2011, but what will 2012 bring? How can marketers embrace the latest trends to make their events more exciting and engaging?
  • Why Predictive Modeling Is Hot... and Five Things You Should Know to Do It Well
    If you want to better predict the relationship between marketing inputs and customer behavior, predictive modeling may be your answer. Here are five essential tips to consider before you get started.
  • The Evolution of Marketing Agencies and Consultancies
    The marketing agency ecosystem is evolving because of changes in customer behavior and advances in technology. Is your firm keeping up? Learn 10 key considerations for transforming your organization.
  • Five Quick Checks for Transforming Your AdWords Account in Less Than an Hour
    Do you want to improve the performance of your Google AdWords campaigns? Here are five quick checks that'll help you gain valuable insights into your campaigns—and save you money.
  • The Introverted Marketer's Guide to Attending a Conference
    Are you an introverted marketer? If so, attending busy conferences might make you very uncomfortable. Here are four ways to break through your challenges and get the most out of any conference.
  • Top 5 Marketing Trends for 2012
    As 2011 winds down, it's time to consider the trends that will dominate marketing in 2012. Here are the Top 5 trends on the horizon and tips on how to take advantage of them in your marketing plan.
  • Why and How Email Feedback Loops Increase Customer Satisfaction and Reduce Complaints
    If you are a large-volume sender of email, you should be signed up for all available feedback loops. Learn how feedback loops can help report spam, increase customer satisfaction, and reduce end-user complaints.
  • Five Proven Ways to Improve ROI Using Marketing Automation
    Marketing automation offers five main opportunities to improve ROI and drive revenue. Are you taking advantage of them? Learn how marketing automation can help you segment leads, improve conversions, and reduce lead leakage.
  • What to Do When E-Books and Round-Up Posts Just Won't Cut It
    How effective can a strategy be if all of your competitors are using it, too? To stand out, step outside the realm of e-books and round-up posts, and apply these six tips for producing unique, compelling content.
  • Are You 'Messaging It Great'?: Five Lessons From Malcolm Gladwell and Morton Grodzins (Who?)
    How did an author make millions writing about a stuffy academic concept someone else discovered? He messaged it great. Here are five key lessons on messaging your ideas, offerings, and strengths to appeal to customers.
  • Marketing Destination: Online Community... How to Survive and Thrive
    Online communities can deliver outstanding ROI, but they rarely produce value without significant investment, professional management... and consistent, intelligent, and engaging interaction.
  • Five Commandments of Small-Biz Email Marketing Awesomeness
    Is email marketing for your small business even worth doing? Yes, if you do it well. To ensure your campaigns are effective, you should be practicing the Five Commandments for email awesomeness.
  • Sales Copy: Make Them Laugh? Or Make Them Buy?
    A debate has been raging in certain quarters: Should humor be included in sales copy? Is humor disarming and refreshing, or can it actually hurt sales?
  • 10 Questions + 10 Actions = Lead Generation Gains
    Is your organization experiencing a critical gap between Marketing and Sales performance expectations and actual results? If so, answer these 10 questions and apply these 10 steps to close the gap and ensure results.
  • 10 Ways to Make Your Blog Less Sucky
    Blogging can be powerful and effective only when it's done well. Learn 10 essential tips for writing killer posts that will attract readers—and keep them coming back for more.
  • 10 Ways to Own Page One of the Google Search Results
    With the rise of mobile search and social media, local Web-presence optimization is crucial for small businesses. Learn how to secure a top spot on Google's search results—and knock out the competition.
  • Delivering on the Promise of Marketing Automation
    More and more organizations are investing in marketing automation platforms. Is yours one of them? If so, learn how to select the right one, plan for its adoption, and avoid common implementation pitfalls.
  • A Case Study in Landing Page Optimization: How to Double the Impact of Your Budget
    Need help boosting your landing page conversions? Learn six landing page optimization principles that helped one website nearly double its conversion rate...
  • 12 Marketing Predictions for 2012
    2011 ushered in a host of changes in marketing, affecting social media, search, and customer relationships. What digital changes and trends should forward-thinking marketers anticipate in 2012?
  • Five Ways Your Loyalty Program Can Deliver the 'Wow' Factor
    To deliver the critical wow factor that draws people into loyalty programs and keeps them there, marketers must get inside customers' heads to identify what motivates them. Learn five key points about driving customer behavior.
  • Nine Essential Skills for Any Public Relations Professional
    If staying current in today's PR world is important to you, adopt the famous aphorism "Learn as if you were to live forever." This article highlights skills that remain essential—and some new skills you'll need for future PR success.
  • The Evolution of B2B Marketing: Why Generating Leads Isn't Enough Anymore
    Today's B2B marketers can't focus only on generating leads and turning them over to Sales. To get results, they need to create effective, targeted programs that hit the right people via the appropriate channel. Here how.
  • Five Defining Features of Landing Pages 3.0
    A third generation of landing pages has emerged over the past year that incorporates ideas from content marketing, social media marketing, and mobile marketing. Learn what features define Landing Pages 3.0.
  • Five Marketing Trends That Only a CMO Contemplating Career Suicide Would Ignore
    Marketing is changing and evolving at a rapid pace. Are you keeping up? Here are five major changes taking shape in 2012 that CMOs can't afford to ignore.
  • Take Your Online Presence Global: Five Foreign-Language Online Marketing Tips
    With the exponential rise of the multilingual Web in recent years, extending your online marketing strategy internationally is more timely than ever. Here are five key tips for effective global digital marketing.
  • 10 Tips for Producing Tantalizing Business Video Tours
    If the term "video tour" makes you think of something you'd find only on a real estate website, think again! Video tours are a great way to market a wide array of products and services—if you do it the right way..
  • Social Media Is Only Part of the Answer
    The best way to embark on a social media marketing strategy is to prepare in advance. To ensure success and maximize results, learn six questions you'll need to tackle before delving into your next social strategy.
  • How to Improve Your Conversion Rate (A Case Study Approach)
    You've managed to get people to your site, but how do you get them to convert? Learn three strategies—based on various case studies—for boosting your site's conversion rate.
  • What Social Media Can't Do for International Marketing
    Applying social media marketing efforts to an international audience could present unique challenges—but it doesn't have to. Learn six best-practices that'll ensure the greatest ROI in localized social media.
  • How to Reduce Lead Leakage Now
    Are you letting leads seep out of your sales funnel? Learn how to plug the holes in your funnel, nurture leads into qualified sales opportunities, and boost your company's bottom line.
  • Three Things Marketers Can Learn From a Law Firm (Yes, a Law Firm) About Creating Awesome Content
    What can you learn about content marketing from video vignettes of lawyers speaking candidly about their professional philosophies and personal viewpoints? For one, you can humanize your business and show off your personality in a creative, interesting, and wholly unexpected way.
  • Five Ways to Navigate Today's Influencer-Relations Avalanche
    Today, getting your story in front of an influential writer can mean getting it to a traditional journalist at an established publication, an independent blogger, or a peer-to-peer reviewer. And getting in touch with those key influencers is no easy task. Here's how you can do it.
  • Stop Pushing, Start Engaging: How Marketing Mimics Dating
    Just as in dating, being too pushy or too neglectful when marketing could get you dumped. Learn how to effectively woo prospects into becoming long-term committed customers who stick with you through thick and thin.
  • When Your Customers Know More Than Your Salespeople
    Today's product-savvy customers expect more from in-store shopping experiences. Learn why new technologies, knowledgeable salespeople, and stellar service are critical in today's shopping climate.
  • Four Ways to Keep Your Online Audience Interested
    Much like an attractive store, a well-designed website will attract customers who will be happy to be there—and happy to stay. Avoid these four common mistakes that can turn visitors away and hurt your business.
  • How to Write Hot-Button Sales Copy in a Recession
    No matter who your customers are or what they desire, 13 human motivators, or "hot buttons," are ultimately responsible for driving sales. To boost sales, learn which motivators and human desires to tap into—and when.
  • The Six Cs of a Customer-Centric Marketing and Sales Pipeline
    Customers today are actively engaged buyers, so your approach to the sales and marketing pipeline must evolve. Learn six revised stages for implementing and measuring Marketing's contribution to the pipeline.
  • What Doesn't Work in Lead Management
    Effectively managing sales leads today is tricky, but not if you understand the problems between Marketing and Sales. Learn which four lead-management strategies could be hindering your success.
  • A Seven-Step Guideline in Crisis Communication (Lessons From the Sony PlayStation Network Breach)
    A crisis can serve as a stage to show the world that your company is either unorganized and uncaring or responsible and human. Learn how to preserve your brand equity—and keep your customers—during a crisis.
  • Three Approaches to Promoting Your Event Online
    Thanks to the Internet, event promotion has never been cheaper to do or easier to track. But before you set off to promote your next event online, learn the benefits—and drawbacks—of three popular approaches.
  • Eleven Tips for Crafting a Pitch That Wows Journalists
    Writing the perfect pitch isn't easy. But knowing how to pitch your story idea to journalists can make the difference between their pursuing—and their flat out ignoring—your pitch. Earn their interest and attention with these 11 tips.
  • Can We Hug? Six Tips for Getting Customers to Show You Love
    Hugging your customers—at least in a virtual, figurative sense—can increase engagement and boost positive word-of-mouth. Here are six ways to get customers to embrace you and market for you.
  • Why Your Influencers Matter Now More Than Ever
    In today's social climate, influencers are more important than ever in shaping impressions and customer actions. Connect with those powerful voices. Learn three steps to locating and engaging your key influencers.
  • Five Tips for Writing Effective Sales Letters
    Informative and persuasive sales letters might be difficult to write—but they can pay off big time. Learn five tips for writing engaging, informative, and concise sales letters that'll produce results.
  • From Action to Engagement: The Call to Action Comes of Age
    Today, call to action buttons provide valuable insight into your prospects' minds. Learn how calls to action can be a lead-generation tool that engages and converts website visitors—and four key predictions on their future use.
  • How to Increase Web Traffic via Organic Search
    Want to increase Web traffic via organic search without breaking the bank? Learn three key ways to build and promote content on your website—and attract and maintain more visitors.
  • Is Your 'About Us' Page Effective?
    For a small B2B business, the second most important page on its website after its homepage is its "About Us" page. Learn a highly effective formula for creating content for your "About Us" page, and how to track its effectiveness.
  • Three New Ways to Market Your Small Business
    Running your small business is a labor of love, but promoting it with new, targeted efforts is necessary to connect with customers. Learn how to keep things fresh and stay connected when marketing your business.
  • How to Get to the Bottom of Base Sales Drivers
    To significantly boost sales, you've got to understand base sales drivers and marketing's impact on them. Learn from examples that illustrate how factor analysis can help you yield consistently high ROI.
  • Keeping Score: Make Tracking Stats Fun With Gamification
    Need to stay on top of stats? Let the games begin. Make monitoring metrics fun, and learn how to keep track of your social media, search engine optimization, and email marketing efforts.
  • How Communities Are Changing Marketing (And Four Community-Building Lessons)
    Few companies realize the incredible power of their customer communities. Don't be one of them. Learn about the interplay between content and community and four engagement lessons that'll keep you ahead of the pack.
  • Jeff Bezos and the Shoe-Store Owner: How to Build Instant Rapport With Your Customers
    In April 2009, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos convinced Zappos founder Tony Hsieh to sell his online shoe store despite his initial reluctance. The story serves as a lesson to all marketers on building rapport with customers.
  • What's Wrong With Your Email: A Second Look at Proven Attention Grabbers
    When soliciting business via email, there's a right way and a wrong way to grab your subscriber's attention and interest. Here's a real-life example—and a detailed critique—of an email solicitation gone awry.
  • Top Tips for Multicultural Marketing
    Are your campaigns reaching the intended audiences? Learn how to create an effective multicultural marketing campaign—and avoid the common pitfalls many endure when marketing to growing ethnic groups.
  • Analytics and Marketing Operations: A One-Two Punch for Growth
    Today's customers are more value-oriented and less loyal. Considering the increase in customer expectations, the competitive landscape, and the data deluge, marketers will need an analytics approach to succeed.
  • The Value of Face-to-Face Marketing in a Virtual Age
    Both face-to-face and virtual marketing are essential components of any company's communications strategy. Learn the benefits of both approaches and how they can be combined to maximize return on investment.
  • Five Strategies for Speaking to B2B Buyers' Pain Points
    Effective B2B lead generation, lead qualification, and lead nurturing programs are built on a rock-solid messaging platform—your offer. The most important aspect of a great offer is a deep understanding of what motivates potential buyers.
  • Customer Advocacy and the New Purchase Funnel
    President Obama's 2008 presidential campaign was successful because he created and mobilized advocates. Brands can apply that winning strategy, too—if they invest in and drive customer advocacy programs.
  • Email Creative: Standing Out From the Crowd
    With email inboxes more crowded than ever, your message's successful arrival in the recipient's inbox is half the battle. The second half of that battle is standing out from the crowd. Here are three tips that'll help you get noticed.
  • Five Ways to Quickly Build Backlinks (and Get Relevant Traffic)
    If you're a small business, building backlinks to your website can be an effective way to gain traffic and increase revenue—no matter what your industry. Here are five ways to kick off your link-building with ease.
  • Life After 'Like': How to Mobilize Your Loyal Audience Into an Army of Active Influencers
    Online marketers have a dirty little secret. They've got no idea what to do once they've earned enough social media "likes" to reach their goals. Here are five ways to turn those fans and followers into brand advocates.
  • How Digital Customer Behavior Is Changing Brand Management
    More than ever before, brands today are shaped by customer experiences—including those online. Create positive digital experiences with these four tips that'll help you effectively build and manage your brand online.
  • What's New With the New Rules of Marketing and PR?
    To keep up with the ever-changing world of marketing, you've got to roll with the punches. As marketing channels emerge and evolve, so should your ideas, strategies, and metrics.
  • SMS Marketing: How to Harvest Your Customers' Mobile Details
    SMS marketing is a huge growth area for all businesses. It's cheap, easy to track, direct, and personal. Interested? Learn how to collect your customers' mobile numbers—and keep them open to receiving texts.
  • Four 'Secrets' to Turning Raw Leads Into Real Opportunities
    Raw leads are neutral entities at first, but you can turn them into real prospects. Learn how to qualify those with high-value potential and move them to closed-deal status.
  • Five Fundamentals for Productive Ideation Sessions
    What makes a great ideation session? The quality of the participants, the energy of the facilitator, and the range of creative exercises. But there are five guidelines that'll exponentially boost the odds of having a productive session.
  • Screen and Street Appeal: Building a Business to Thrive Online and Offline
    Many businesses take great pains to build and nurture their offline brand, yet they drop the ball when they take their messages online. Avoid that problem with these five tips to connecting your online and offline identities.
  • Content vs. Messaging: How the Digital Customer Narrative Is Changing Marketing
    Content is more than just words. Content experiences that are strategic, planned, structured, and measured can develop a new customer narrative that'll bring companies and customers closer than ever.
  • How Virgin Atlantic Improved Sales Attribution and Saved Six Figures in Two Months
    When a customer makes a purchase on your site, are you able to pinpoint exactly who to give credit to for the sale? Learn how Virgin Atlantic Airways tackled that problem.
  • Snackable Content: The Key to Engagement
    Whether it's listening to an iTunes 30-second free snippet or grabbing a snack pack of chips, people like to sample. Apply that idea to marketing, and learn why it pays to create consumable, snackable content.
  • The Future of Marketing Is Crowdsourced
    Your customers will soon wield more and more power, becoming the most powerful communications channel. Are you ready for the new world of marketing? Learn the five keys to building a crowdsourced future..
  • Why Sales Needs Fewer Leads From Marketing
    Buyers are now driving the buy/sell process once controlled by field sales, causing sales teams to miss their targets. But high-volume lead generation won't help. Here's why a "less is more" approach is the answer.
  • There's No One-Size-Fits-All Internet: Why Audience Should Determine Website Design
    Do you know your audience? If you're taking a one-size-fits-all approach to website design, you could be alienating your core customers. Make sure you learn your audience's Web-usability priorities, behaviors, and preferences.
  • 25 Keys to Getting Waaaaay More Out of Your Social Media Marketing
    Social media marketing can broaden your reach, enable you to engage your audience, and help you create raving fans if you use it the right way. So why are so many businesses still treading water with social media marketing?
  • Potential Customers Are Telling You How to Market to Them!
    The key to achieving high rankings in search and creating buzz in social media is solid content. Fortunately, the Web provides free marketing data that can help you create relevant subject matter and learn about your customers.
  • Customer Service Can Make or Break Your Brand: Eight Steps for Success
    What's the use in receiving stellar product reviews and making lots of sales if you can't pick up the pieces when something goes wrong? Here are eight ways to protect your brand when tackling customer problems.
  • New 'X Factors' in Buying and Selling
    Up until the mid '80s and early '90s, salespersons held most of the trump cards. To make decisions, buyers had to rely on the information that sellers brought to the table. But the buying/selling process has changed.
  • The Funnel Is Dead, Long Live the Measurable Customer Narrative
    One of those reassuring little white lies we tell ourselves as marketers is this: People make linear decisions. It's simpler to draw straight lines about people's behavior, so to date we have typically pushed people through carefully scripted marketing processes. But, especially today, it just ain't so.
  • Planning Isn't Free: What Marketers Can Learn From HGTV
    HGTV shows make those overnight home transformations look so easy. Many marketers approach their marketing plans the same way: a few days and a few dollars, and voila—a new marketing plan! But that won't get you results.
  • Seven Simple Ways You Can Strengthen Customer Relationships
    A company can successfully build its brand name in many ways, but perhaps the factor most important for its continued success is its relationships with clients. Learn to keep the magic alive—and get results.
  • Feng Shui for Mobile Marketers: Best-Practices for Creating a Harmonious Mobile Environment
    For years, marketers have been working to perfect their sites to create just the right energy to ensure happy customers—and seamless selling. But it wouldn't be wise to transfer those same strategies and websites to the mobile space.
  • Stop Making Presentations! How PowerPoint Ruined the US Economy
    Right now, in countless corporate conference rooms, otherwise productive professionals are quietly snoring during yet another PowerPoint presentation. Such presentations are costly, ineffective, and distracting.
  • How to Build Your Own Customized B2B Prospecting Lists for Free
    A customized prospecting list is a great resource for your cold calling, direct mail, and email marketing efforts. If you prefer to "do it yourself," here are nine steps for building a free B2B marketing database for your outbound marketing campaigns.
  • CMOs, Gain Power: Don't Let Chief Marketing Obstacles Stand in Your Way
    Where does the CMO fit in at your organization? How CMOs are positioned can affect the influence they have over major decisions. Here are four ways CMOs can gain the power needed to be effective.
  • Variety Is the Spice of Inbox Life: Four Nonpromotional Email Message Types
    Spice up your email campaigns. If you're sending out only promotional messaging, your campaigns could be bland. Here are four types of greetings you should include in your message stream.
  • Clash of the Social Network Titans: Google+, Facebook, and Twitter
    A few weeks into Google+, and most at least know of the new social networking site, even if they haven't joined yet. Still resisting? Based on its current growth rate, you may want to jump in sooner rather than later. Or not.
  • Small Movement Matters: Marketing Lessons From 'Moneyball' on How to Measure Digital Relationships
    Marketing is like baseball. If you can measure data well, you can unlock new insights about how to win. Here are some ways to keep score of your digital relationships—and get results.
  • Case Study: How One Company More Than Doubled Customer Referrals
    Many companies have referral programs, but how many can say theirs converts at about three times the rate of other online campaigns and brings in over 500 product sales each month? Learn how one company did just that.
  • A Lesson From Sales Pros: How One-to-One Marketing Can Pay Off Big Time When Your Budget is Zero
    One-to-one marketing is time-consuming, but as any sales professional can tell you, the personal touch—communicating directly with the decision maker—can be very effective.
  • Seven Tips for More-Profitable Direct Mail in Today's Economy
    If you create or manage direct mail programs, the current economy probably has you pulling your hair out. Now is the perfect time to get back to basics and remind yourself of the following seven core principles of direct marketing.
  • Human vs. Machine: Clash of the Translation Titans
    Humans or machines—which are superior these days? Both human and machine translation can be used when taking marketing content global. Learn three translation techniques—and when to use them.
  • Online Marketing Judo: How to Convince Influencers to Help You
    To get the most out of your online marketing, don't go it alone. Get powerful influencers in your corner to help spread the word about you. Here's how to build your team of evangelists and create a winning word-of-mouth campaign.
  • Get 'Em While They're Hot: Six Ways to Maximize Lead Conversion
    Are you increasing your inbound leads? What happens once you get them? Without successful conversion, leads are essentially useless. Here are six steps that'll immediately increase your lead-conversion rates.
  • How and Why Email Marketers Should Integrate Social
    When social media use first took off, many posed the question, "Is social media going to kill email?" But savvy email marketers soon realized they could use social media to their advantage. Here's how.
  • Opportunity Calls: How to Effectively Capture Mobile Marketing Conversions
    Smartphone use is exploding, providing new opportunities to connect and engage with target audiences. Learn how to optimize your mobile marketing campaigns, and effectively track and record mobile conversions.
  • Embrace Irrationality: A Human- vs. Customer-Centric Approach to Marketing
    Are you ready for the new marketing paradigm that's emerging? It's human-centric marketing, an evolution of the current customer-centric approach. And it will change the way we are introduced to and form relationships with brands.
  • Creating an Interactive Experience: Trends in Email, Mobile, and Social Marketing
    Today's customers often rely on social networks to interact with brands. Marketers need to adapt to a customer-centric model and understand consumption patterns across social networks and the total digital ecosphere.
  • Six Do's and Don'ts of Email Design
    Without a well-crafted, clear, and consistent email design for your brand, your messages could be lost—or ignored—in the vast digital space. Here's how you should and shouldn't design your emails to get results.
  • How to Evolve Your B2B Customer Experience Using Images
    Do you know why your customers behave as they do? People tend to have difficulty explaining exactly why they like a product, but using images can help you get to the root of the real drivers of customer behavior.
  • Four Simple Ways to Increase Website Conversion Rates
    Want to improve your website's conversion rate? First, you'll need a professionally designed website that's been built with SEO in mind. Then, use these four tips to boost conversions and turn your visitors into customers.
  • Want to Create Email Marketing Value? Check Out the Direct Mail in Your Mailbox
    Direct mail certainly isn't what it used to be, but email marketers can apply many of the theories used for direct mail campaigns to increase the value of their email marketing. Consider these key lessons.
  • How to Find and Target Your Ideal Prospects on the Web
    Wouldn't it be good to know who your ideal prospects are before sending out emails, newsletters, tweets, or Facebook fan-page invites? Learn how to identify, find, and market to the right customers.
  • How to Sell Ad Space on Your Website
    If you have a website that gets a good deal of traffic but generates no money, placing ads on your site may be the key to success. Learn how ad type, placement, and location can boost your website revenue.
  • Social Media: It's All About Results... and How to Measure Them
    Self-service business intelligence (BI) and social marketing are a match made in heaven. BI tools may be exactly what marketers need to demonstrate the value of social media. Consider these best-practices for gaining great insight.
  • Want Sophisticated Real-Time Marketing Campaigns? Take These Five Steps
    How can you engage customers via real-time marketing? Marketers are adopting technology that can help recognize a customer's interests and provide actionable intelligence in real-time to any customer channel.
  • Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Blog... Where Is Your Hub?
    Is your online presence scattered about and disconnected? Learn how to centralize and connect your presence across different social sites by creating a social hub that'll get the right people to see your content.
  • Tactics for Engaging Email Subscribers: Five Companies Getting It Right
    What's the use in crafting clever emails if they get relegated to the bulk folder? Engagement rates will determine whether or not your emails will make it to the inbox. Learn how to drive engagement and get your messages read.
  • Get Your Social Media Plans Ready to Play Broadway
    Just like hit Broadway shows, social media campaigns need to be evaluated, prepared, and tweaked before their big debuts. Here are six ways to perfect your campaigns to ensure they launch to standing ovations.
  • The Case for Ongoing Media Relations and 10 Tips and Tools to Help You Spread the Word
    You might think you don't need a media relations program, or don't have the resources for it... but how cool would it be to have the media singing your praises? Use these tactics, and you will soon have a chorus of coverage.
  • How Mini-Stories Can Help Buyers Reject the Status Quo... and Embrace You
    Stories are how we make sense of the world. Learn how telling mini-stories will allow buyers to take your offering for a virtual mental test drive, to accept change—and to reject the status quo.
  • Is Tradeshow Marketing Dead? 12 Tips to Resuscitate a Classic Lead-Gen Tactic
    Many have pronounced tradeshow marketing dead. But with the right strategy, hard work, and flawless execution, tradeshows can still be a productive part of your marketing plan. Here are 12 ways to breathe new life into your tradeshows.
  • Get It Right When You Write (or Speak): Three Commonly Misused Words
    In all your business communications, you want to put your best foot forward—and that calls for careful writing. Careful writing enhances your credibility, so avoid making these common errors and keep your copy clean.
  • Need to Engage and Connect With Prospects and Customers? Marketing Automation to the Rescue (Maybe)
    Think marketing automation platforms are just a way to make your marketing organizations more efficient? Wrong. These systems—if used properly—can do wonders for your interactions with prospects and customers.
  • Before You SEO: Three Steps to Help Your Website Earn Its Keep
    Search engine optimization works best when it's the last, rather than the first, item on your website checklist. Don't miss these commonly overlooked steps that can vastly improve your site's performance—before you SEO.

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