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- Story-Driven Data Visualization? Yep, That's a Thing, and Here's How You Do It
B2B marketers live in a world powered by stats and facts; no wonder data visualization has become a thing, especially since so many people are visual learners. But data visualization isn't about pretty design, it's about telling a great story.
If you develop a new offering, will customers buy it? That's the perennial challenge for today's companies, and it's increasing as pressures to innovate "first and fast" intensify.
In love and in email marketing, you have to learn to admit when a relationship isn't working—especially when email subscribers you're attempting to woo are instead getting you blocked or blacklisted. Here are four types of offending addresses and how to deal with each of them.
Marketing rules and tactics for professional services providers (accountants, attorneys, physicians, dentists...) are often different from those for product or service marketers. Here's how newsletters work exceptionally well for professional services.
Modern CMOs know that to be successful they must integrate multiple data streams to glean valuable, actionable information for Marketing, Sales, and the wider business. Here's how to tell whether social efforts are having an impact on your company.
Today, Google ends support for Converted Clicks in AdWords. If you're still using this metric in reports or for Target CPA bidding, here's what you'll have to do.
You've probably noticed that you (and a lot of other advertisers) have recently been paying more for PPC campaigns than you used to. So how can you pay less, short of putting a stop to your PPC campaign or lowering your bids?
Until the Perfect Landing Page is created—an imaginary creature, no doubt—we will continue tweaking and testing and arguing the merits and faults of every landing page element. But these three unexpected tips will improve your landing page.
People like to be catered to, but not pandered to. Doubly so when they're at the receiving end of a marketing campaign. And especially so if they're Millennials. So here's advice from a Millennial on how to actually reach young customers.
Just how valuable is brand admiration, and what impact does it have on your brand's bottom line?
The story of the Trojan Horse seems a simple tale, but it was a stroke of strategic genius that took concerted effort to pull off. And there are important business and marketing lessons to be learned from it.
In our fast-paced, always-on, agile, want-it-yesterday, mile-a-minute world... there is a critical need to slow down. Why? Because doing so allows you to achieve real results—faster.
Print collateral is still an important sales and marketing medium. To produce strongly branded, high-impact print media, you need to know what materials work best together. So here are must-know basics about printers, ink, paper, and collateral types.
Your product is naked in front of all of your prospects, and they're highlighting not just its obvious beauty and strengths but also its small blemishes, stained teeth, and bad haircut. That's not a nightmare. That is the reality in our age of technology.
Most marketers strive to communicate as effectively as possible—except, unfortunately, when they're training fellow marketers. Because that's when, for some reason, PowerPoint takes center stage.
Developing strong messaging and activating it across your organization ensure that everyone can communicate clearly and consistently about your company's value. And that vastly increases your chances of attracting customers you want to attract.
Use these tips—straight from the mouths of journalists—to help your press release stand out from the ineffective and soon-to-be-deleted competition in your target journalist's inbox.
We're all familiar with the 3 Rs from elementary school. These days, though, every marketer—especially those working in e-commerce—should have a firm grip on three other essential Rs: retention, retargeting, and re-engagement.
Photo-sharing social network Instagram recently launched its most significant and talked-about feature to date, Instagram Stories. Here are five ways you can use Stories as a creative marketing tool.
Respect for a brand—for its identity, purpose, and achievements—increases brand credibility and influence, results in forgiveness of mistakes, and creates access to better partnerships and talent. How can you go about gaining such respect?
B2B marketing leaders who have experience with rapid growth give advice on the role of Marketing in such growth, what it means to think like a growth marketer, what challenges arise with scale, and how to approach those challenges.
"At work upon a client query, while I pondered, bleak and bleary, / Over many a bloated and drab volume of marketing lore, / While I nodded, nearly blotto, over another limp marketing motto, / Came to my cell a tweet so branded, deftly done, not underhanded..."
From time savings and increased productivity to usage rights, asset protection, and more, DAM's day as an essential tool for creative directors has arrived. The rewards are plentiful, and the risks of not investing in it are too great to ignore.
If you don't have video experience, video marketing can be intimidating. But it doesn't have to be. Here's a cheat sheet to get you started making great videos for YouTube.
Customers of businesses that don't focus on good customer experience are leaving in droves. Here's how to monitor customer experience and why a more holistic approach to doing so will benefit both your business and your customers.
Content curation builds trust and credibility for your brand because it keeps customers informed. You can communicate industry news, trends, how-to tips, or whatever your business goals dictate. Here's how to get started.
Is your email marketing growing stale? If you're up for trying something different, possibly even a little scary, try these somewhat unconventional ways to give your email marketing that much-needed boost.
Businesses need a strong mobile engagement strategy, but people use the mobile Web, apps, and SMS in different ways. How can you use each mobile medium for real-time communication with consumers?
Content now spreads in nanoseconds, so there's more risk in marketing than ever before. Brand reputation is at stake. Thus the importance of good storytelling. Because bad stories live forever online as a black scar on your brand's reputation.
The fear of public speaking is as old as humanity itself. Snakes in the stomach. Sweaty palms. The urge to run away... If you can relate, maybe it's time for a new approach.
If you cultivate and foster brand trust correctly, your company won't need to constantly throw piles of money at rebuilding and repairing trust with customers.
MMM and attribution measure the value and performance of your marketing activities. Both are sophisticated models for measuring cross-channel marketing activities, but they work in different ways, for different reasons.
Navigating call-tracking offerings can be difficult, especially if you're not sure of what to look for in a provider. Keep these four things in mind as a checklist of criteria when shopping for call-analytics software.
Calls from search, social, and display ads are often the most lucrative type of conversion, but also the most difficult for marketers to measure and optimize. Here's a basic lesson in how call attribution works and how it can benefit you.
As any good journalist will tell you, you don't have to have a degree in a topic to write about it well—and confidently. Even so, creating content for a company is often a different beast.
Without a doubt, data and analytics have become central to every organization's business strategy. Find out how to enable your marketing organization to successfully use data and analytics to drive business decisions.
Maybe? A little? Probably? Yeah... a fast-loading website contributes both to better results via search and to better user experience. And it need not be difficult or expensive to speed up your site.
The more relevant, interesting, and even entertaining the content that you share or publish, the more your audience will view you as a trustworthy source of information, and not just a provider of a product or service. Content curation can help.
Businesses depend on email as the glue that pulls marketing tactics together, yet many otherwise savvy marketers misuse email in a way that ultimately alienates customers. Here are six common blunders.
The final article in this series explores how to respond to altered behavior in the buying cycle, deliver content to where it is most needed, and focus on the proven sales-generating power of SEO.
Are you getting the most out of segmentation, or are you leaving money on the table? Here are seven common mistakes to avoid.
Inspiring and evoking feelings of brand love aren't accidental occurrences. Cultivating and fostering it require a purposeful, methodical, and strategic process that builds meaningful relationships over time.
Marketers can learn a lot from established voices who are driving decisions in marketing, and this analysis of 21 influencers' content sharing offers ways you can improve your own content strategy.
We've all heard the misconception that communicating over text via mobile decreases the personal touch. But, quite to the contrary, it's actually an effective, engaging way to connect when you're in the palm of someone's hand.
Ready to learn how to woo new customers? Use the following four ways to sweep them off their feet with some sweet-talking Web copy.
Here's straightforward guidance on how to identify what your customers value, understand how value motivates B2B buying, break through the price barrier, and use value (i.e., create it) to justify your pricing.
By ensuring that your marketing encourages repeat business, brand loyalty, and customer referrals, you give your business the kind of boost that can't come from any other source. But how do you go about doing that?
Popups were once the bane of the Web; today, they are an excellent way to capture visitors' attention and improve conversion rates. But if not done properly, they still ruin the customer experience.
Millennials are more aligned with brands than with retailers, and in the next 10 years will spend $65 billion on CPG products. Here are five ways CPG brands can maintain and grow that alignment over the next decade.
By not making it a priority to ask for, listen to, and implement customer feedback, companies are missing a huge opportunity to earn customer loyalty and improve their product or service.
In B2B marketing, to convince customers to buy from you, they must know who you are, what you do, and why you matter to them. Here's how to move their buying decision forward—from "we're interested" to "where do we sign?"
Keyword research has changed a lot over the past few years—from merely searching for long-tail opportunities with lower competition... to in-depth niche research. These four tools will help you adapt to the ongoing evolution of search engine optimization.
Clearly, as a business owner or marketer, you understand the importance of email marketing. But are you doing it right? Here are eight ways you may be sabotaging your email marketing efforts—and what you should be doing instead.
No longer are marketers asking, "What's influencer marketing?" Today, many are asking, "Should we develop an influencer marketing channel?" or, "How much effort and budget should we put behind it this year?"
Creating professional-quality videos is not an easy task. You are not going to immediately create masterpieces... You might never even get close. But that does not mean you cannot create video content that is successful online. Here's what you need.
The purpose of B2B marketing is to attract and retain profitable customers. The first step toward that goal is to learn who influences buying decisions—and then win their trust in a way that will result in a sale.
What's the best day and time to send outbound marketing emails? How many outreach attempts is "enough"? How long should emails be? Those and other email-related questions can be tough to answer.
Rather than just pass leads off to Sales, marketers now shape and guide prospects through the sales funnel until purchase intent is clear. Thanks to lead nurturing, doing so is easier and more effective than ever before.
Your SEO efforts have been paying off with steady website traffic... until the inevitable happens: Organic traffic stops growing. But getting past the "SEO plateau," one of the greatest challenges for online businesses, is possible.
Increasing content noise and competition, greater reliance on pay-to-play content promotion models, and over-promotion and channel saturation that sabotage your marketing efforts... You can conquer those negative trends.
When companies have high levels of brand admiration, they experience explosive revenue growth and improved cost efficiencies, and far greater access to the best talent and partnerships.
Starting an online business can be daunting, but focusing on the important components common to every company and organizing them into manageable chunks can help. Here's a crash course in entrepreneurship.
Is there a difference between TV ads and online video ads? If you ask consumers, the answer is a resounding yes. Even if the online video and TV commercial are identical, customers react more positively to the televised ad.
By collecting, curating and featuring user generated content (UGC)—such as selfies—brands can build authentic relationships with audiences and inspire genuine customer advocacy.
No matter the reason for a rebrand, there's no denying it's a major decision—and an expensive undertaking. Among all that needs to be done, these five things are a must for rebranding success.
Local SEO is every small business's key to better search engine rankings and higher conversion rates. SEO is a complicated industry, but these five tips will help you win customers and improve your SERP placement.
Building a business is not easy, but thanks to ever-developing technology you have access to useful and effective tools that can simplify your work. Make yourself and your business more productive with these 17 handy tools.
Facebook is a powerful social media outlet, even for B2B marketers. But how can you make use of Facebook when organic reach for B2B seems to be declining? The answer, in part, is "pay to play": Facebook advertising.
Competition is fierce. You need to get as much return as humanly possible from any outreach and influencer marketing activity you undertake. Knowing how to write effective, engaging emails is vital to ensuring those campaigns convert well.
Marketing is now data-driven, and if you're not informing marketing campaigns with data-derived insights, you will fall behind your competitors. Which is why CMOs and marketing teams need to collaborate with IT teams to drive business growth.
Marketing to the wrong people doesn't help you. Knowing what motivates purchase decisions is essential to building a successful inbound program. So how do you figure out what motivates purchase and how to reach those motivated people? By creating buyer personas.
Competition for top-tier talent is always fierce. If you don't know where to look, or if you focus too heavily on traditional methods, you could be losing to the competition. Success will require some trial and error, but you'll be on your way to finding quality talent if you follow these principles.
Content marketing is one of the most effective strategies for today's marketers. But the mindset, objectives, and intentions of B2B audiences are different from those of B2C audiences. Content for those different audiences must also differ.
Imagine trying to get added to Kanye's VIP list for the hottest club in LA. You're standing in line, hoping he'll let you in. That's just about the same as trying to get your emails into recipients' inboxes... because the principles behind email deliverability are based on human-behavior patterns.
Credit card users sometimes dispute charges on their accounts and demand reimbursement. Dealing with those chargebacks can take valuable time away from employees, and it can be costly. Here are four tips on decreasing the number of chargebacks you handle.
There's no shortage of content about the power of stories and storytelling in digital marketing. But how do you tell stories beyond your "brand story," especially if you work for a dreaded "boring" company? One source that never runs dry is employee stories.
Google's Shopping Insights tool helps retailers understand where their customers are looking for what products, and what devices (desktop, mobile) those customers are using in those areas. You can then use those insights to plan your marketing campaigns and promotions.
You're tasked with creating a Web page that shows people working collaboratively in an office setting. You dive into stock photos and find a familiar scene... boring, forced, inauthentic. To find more dynamic and realistic office-setting photos, follow these five tips.
Marketers know the duplicate-record problem well, but even more insidious are duplicate data fields. Here's how to minimize the problem and perform data unification, along with tools and resources for doing the job right.
Because of significant changes to the layout of Google's search results pages, digital marketers engaged in PPC and CTR campaigns are competing for fewer available spots on each page. To compensate, use these four techniques and win the top spots.
Marketing automation tools too often don't meet marketers' demand generation goals. Why? Many marketers assume marketing automation is a "set it and forget it" process; actually, it requires a lot of effort and preparation to do well.
For veteran app users and newbies alike, app ratings matter. They really matter. Especially as social proof that the app has value and is worth installing. Ask users for a review the wrong way, and you might well sink your app's future.
Turn any common presentation, such as a sales deck or company overview, into an asset that provides valuable information, turns prospects into buyers, and drives the bottom line.
Finding engaging content to share via social media can be time-consuming and tough—and a hindrance to all the other work you have to do. So use these four simple ways to discover and share content that can improve your social media marketing.
More than ever, we B2B marketers are held accountable for driving revenue—and proving that we are. If you're struggling with measuring your content's value, here are three sets of metrics to track—and tips on how you can track them.
When someone first visits your website, it's unlikely she's going to buy from you, no matter how good your product or service is. She needs to come to trust you first. So how can we marketers build such credibility?
You spend time and money getting people to your website so you can educate them on your offering and make a sale. And yet, your website is probably filled with lots and lots of text, even though video is the most effective way to tell your story.
Online reviews can pop up when you least expect them, leaving a lasting effect on how potential and current customers perceive your business. Improving your online reputation is no walk in the park, but it can be done.
Deciding where to put your investment—of money, time, and effort—isn't easy. And the ROI of both social and content is notoriously difficult to measure. So how do you decide where to put your efforts? And once you decide, how do you go about it?
Attorney Kerry O'Shea Gorgone answers marketers' legal questions about copyright law, content curation, and more.
If marketing is essentially about persuasion, then the use of highly effective persuasive techniques can take a campaign goal to the next level—whether that's attracting more traffic, earning more conversions, or sparking more customer engagement.
Brands today have an opportunity to enhance personalization and reach, addressing always-changing customer expectations. With real-time marketing, you can increase loyalty, even upsell, and help retain customers.
Use this compelling and intuitive method for taking a step back and gaining clarity on who your brand is and what kind of impression you're making on the world.
Marketers are inundated with offerings of state-of-the-art applications that can greatly improve every aspect of B2B marketing. These five questions will help you evaluate technology vendors and applications quickly to find the ones right for you.
Consumer engagement today looks more like an engine with interlocking gears than like the familiar funnel that marketers have relied on for more than a century. Here's how you can use the new framework to enhance the value of your marketing.
Yeah, you could totally wing it blog post by blog post, tweet by tweet. But if you truly want to build brand awareness and create meaningful relationships with your readers, followers, and customers, planning is a must.
Technical SEO mistakes are the silent killer of campaigns. They not only disrupt user experience but also make Google hate your website. Fix these seven mistakes to help you achieve your goal of ranking high on search results pages.
It's no secret that SEO has been changing—fast. Once, it was all about title tags, keywords, and backlinks. Today, SEO needs to take into consideration so much more.
These tips are for debugging content marketing software of a different sort—the words, phrases, and sentences that constitute your marketing content. So avoid misusing these 12 words or phrases.
Content marketing is a high priority for many organizations, but most are struggling with the strategies, processes, and technologies that can help them succeed.
Anyone doing serious mobile app marketing knows surveys can be useful for understanding app satisfaction, getting feedback on new functionality, understanding why a feature isn't being used, or collecting general feedback quickly.
Marketers have been under pressure for years to turn their art into more of a science, and "Big Data" is now more than a buzzword for CMOs: Understanding or using data is becoming integral to all marketers' jobs.
To better relate your product or service to consumers, present them in a way that identifies with those of a particular culture. Multilingual marketing is a way to do that.
A crucial element of marketing that all CMOs—and marketers as a whole—need to be addressing right now is social listening and analytics. Because social intelligence can be vital to business success.
These four content creation hacks belong in every marketer's toolbox. These tips and tricks epitomize the scrappy mindset we need to do more with less, and help us bring that mindset to life in our content marketing.
B2B marketers are overwhelmed by content marketing, with their top challenges relating to production. No wonder: a marketing department isn't the same thing as a content production team.
Though most email marketers focus on optimizing click-through rates and open rates—and for good reason—those popular metrics won't add up to success if your emails don't land in your contacts' inboxes in the first place.
Long-tail keywords can help even smaller and newer websites "steal" traffic from big, established players. Here's the lowdown on the what, why, and how of long-tail keywords.
PR and SEO aren't standalone marketing disciplines; for best results, they must work together. Here's how.
Creative teams thrive on flexibility, doing some of their best work when given the freedom to explore and experiment. But too much of a good thing can be, well, too much. You need some structure to maintain sanity and to be truly effective.
Poor customer experience drives brand switching—a key reason for three quarters of lost customers. And customers who suffer a bad customer experience spread negative word-of-mouth.
Bad news: People don't read your online content marketing these days; they merely scan most Web content. But with these tips you can write scannable, easy-to-understand text that will boost engagement.
Your product or service cannot survive on its own. It needs backup in the form of strong customer support. The way you interact with your audience will determine how far your business goes in our competitive world.
Nearly every business in the world has a website today, and that means small businesses have to overcome nearly insurmountable search marketing odds to claim one of the few spots on the first pages of search engine results.
A major pain point for marketers: generating quality content on a consistent basis. If you can't maintain velocity with your content creation, you can kiss goodbye to goals such as "owning" valuable search terms on Google.
In PPC advertising, landing pages are crucial to performance. But not just any landing page will work for your industry or company. You can apply all the advice and best-practices experts tout, but sometimes those practices do the opposite of what you want: They hurt your PPC conversion rates.
Now that you've done all the work of creating your new brand, it's time to unveil it for the world to see. These six best-practices are essential to achieving a successful launch, both internally and externally.
Video is fast becoming the content medium of choice for US consumers, especially younger ones. And even though you might already be producing videos, you may not be getting the maximum ROI if you're not optimizing them for search on both Google and YouTube.
Marketers have tended to shy away from integrating experiential campaigns into their marketing strategies because, until recently, demonstrating impact was difficult or next to impossible. But no longer!
If Facebook were a country, it would be the biggest one... which is why it's so important for marketers to understand how to advertise effectively on Facebook. Your successful ad can make a huge impact on a potentially huge audience.
The big challenge Marketing Operations faced in 2015 was Big Data: where it comes from, what it means, who takes care of it—and what to actually do with it. But what's just as important is what not to do with it.
Storytelling is at the core of what drives great marketing today. You can amp up your marketing campaigns by following these five easy tips that create powerful stories.
Once you've decided that you need a companywide makeover, use these nine tips to achieve the results you want on a reasonable timeline.
Most email campaigns do a lousy job of turning warm leads into customers. But with interest-based segmentation, you'll not just dramatically increase your results... you'll do so without annoying prospects.
With the convergence of online and offline marketing, choosing the right measures is far more important than the quantity of data measured. Measuring the right data, and acting on the results, is essential to operating Marketing as a center of excellence.
Left unsupervised, your online forms can cause a lot of trouble for your conversions. However, optimize your forms for performance and they'll become your website's greatest money-making asset. The choice is yours.
Blogging is an important part of digital marketing. Yet, many choose not to blog because they think they don't have the necessary writing skills. These tips will go a long way toward helping you write engaging content.
Customer advocacy programs are hot right now. And why shouldn't they be? Customers have the ability to be hyper-connected to the brands they love, and they are gaining more influence over the buying process every day. But advocacy is a fragile thing.
It's hard to imagine a world where we lace up our Blue Ribbon Sports running shoes (instead of our Nikes), stop for lunch at Pete's Super Submarines (instead of Subway), and then enjoy a refreshing Brad's Drink (instead of a Pepsi) later that afternoon.
Customer behaviors are changing. Fast. Not keeping up is all too risky. The companies that really "get" their customers, like Apple and Amazon, are setting the standards—and the bar is set high.
Unless you're one of the iron-walleted few, gaining startup capital for your business venture will require the help of investors. Navigating those waters can be a lesson in humility; it also requires a certain amount of know-how.
Making your app stand out in today's hypercompetitive app market is tough. But don't lose hope. It doesn't have to be as hard as you may think it is.
Most CMOs view content as the future of marketing. But the job doesn't end with simply producing content... Making sure it performs is critical to driving engagement and reaching target audiences.
Painful as they may seem, requests for proposals are a B2B fact of life. They help you establish successful partnerships in an age of tight budgets and fierce competition for service contracts. Ensure your company gets the most out of the RFP process.
If you want a highly engaged community of customers, build an email list of people who are ready to listen to your messages and willing to buy from you. Here are four ways to build such a list.
Facebook's scale and evolving video publishing platform make it a compelling video marketing option. To succeed in a digital age, marketers need to keep up with the platform's video advertising options.
How can a vendor—an outsider—drive adoption for its solutions inside a client organization? Sales and marketing professionals are now the owners of accounts before, during, and after implementation.
A book is the ultimate business card... but only if you do it right. Unfortunately, many entrepreneurs (and others) don't, especially because they don't account for editing.
Implement these five hacks, and in a couple of weeks you'll be connecting with people every hour.
Performance marketing demands objective ways to evaluate what's working (vendors, channels, media, creative...) and how your strategies and tactics are affecting the bottom line, margins, and cost efficiency. These nine optimization techniques can help.
Build a funnel specific to your business rather than adapting to a generic approach, and you'll maximize your marketing efforts and optimize conversions.
We've all been there, sitting in front of a boring long presentation filled with charts and small text you can't even read. Now that it's your turn to present, don't make the same mistakes you see all too often.
Have you been using Instagram in your social media marketing campaigns? If not, would you like to? Either way, you could probably do with a little less work and a little more simplification. These tools will help.
Here's how marketing, PR, and content can work together across four main areas—the PESO model—as well as where they diverge, and how to assign responsibilities where they make the most sense.
Multiple clients with multiple projects, all with multiple deadlines... Whether you are approaching a new product launch, a website redesign, or any other project, here are a few ways to effectively juggle multiple project tasks.
Does your small business have marketing and branding needs but not enough money to hire an agency or a consultant? Don't fret, you have many options to ensure you get the help you need to start or grow your business.
The success or failure of a dashboard is closely linked to data visualization. But focus purely on the visualization, and you'll fail. So consider these three questions and then take the prescribed actions.
It's not tough to publish on social media: With a few clicks you have a post on Facebook, a tweet on Twitter, or a video on YouTube. The tough part, as you know, is getting found, viewed, read, liked, and shared—and doing it without annoying people.
The near-universal adoption of smartphones and social media has fundamentally altered the science of handling customer complaints. The critics ("haters") are not your problem, however... Ignoring them is.
A customer journey map is a visual representation of the various interactions a buyer has with a business. Building that map from the outside-in—from the customer's perspective—requires a thorough understanding of the customer's needs, wants, and desires.
Video can be an amazing marketing tool, yet it has a short shelf life. Luckily, it's also a dynamic asset that can be edited, tweaked, and optimized over time. Here are four ways to keep your video content current and engaging.
With the right strategy in place, webinars can generate high-quality leads and drastically increase revenue. But they—and you—can't do any of that if you can't get people to register and attend.
Customer insights are essential to growth and success, yet they remain the elusive holy grail of many a business—a seeming exercise in futility. But you can avoid others' mistakes and develop actionable customer insights.
We all have dream clients—company logos we'd love to place on our homepage. The only way to get there, in most cases, is by engaging with senior decision-makers over time—starting right now.
With social media, podcasting, videos, push notifications, and other mobile channels taking up our lives, you may think that the good-old email is losing its dominance in the mobile age. Well, think again.
Marketing budgets are already on the chopping block, even though CFOs say better top- and bottom-line growth requires sales and marketing. We need to prove our value by turning Marketing into a center of excellence. These five steps will help.
So frustrating: You work hard. You know your industry inside and out. You offer something nobody else does. And you take precious time to write about it in your business blog. Yet... nobody is reading.
Are the leads you're getting from Google in too short supply for your taste? That no longer has to be the case, because you now have the definitive guide to dominating Google AdWords for your local area.
Are the leads you're getting from Google in too short supply for your taste? That no longer has to be the case, because you now have the definitive guide to dominating Google AdWords for your local area.
Does it frustrate you when your TV screen fills with your competitor's face as he relates pertinent industry insights studded with self-deprecating chuckles? Don't get mad, get even.
Competitive intelligence often takes a back seat to performance indicators that marketers are daily concerned with (open rates, social metrics, conversions...). But that solely inward focus can lead you astray.
Unlike texting while driving, texting while selling is not dangerous; in fact, it can be invaluable in helping sales teams meet their numbers. But before you fire off texts to all your leads, keep these tips and tricks in mind.
Identifying the ideal topics to curate—those most likely to engage your audience and support your content marketing strategy—is a key component of content curation.
Getting customers to engage is harder than ever. Yet, there's a direct relationship between engagement and revenue. The longer consumers spend time on your site, the more likely they are to buy from you.
You as a marketer can take these five steps to address today's sales-force performance and productivity challenges and get the most out of your sales team right away.
Next time your team is drafting a new piece of visual content, ask the following four questions before you pour hours and dollars into the project.
Before jumping in and spending precious dollars on Facebook video ads, use these tools and tactics to create a powerful paid video campaign.
The primary goal of user-experience (UX) design is to ensure your business remains aligned with the needs of your users. That's why UX should be a dedicated part of your website development process.
Inbound marketers must convert readers into customers. However, producing compelling content three or four times a week can be challenging. These four steps to creating better blog posts and articles can help.
You can optimize your website to rank better in local search engine results pages and avoid the informational noise and overload that often irritates your potential customers.
When you ignore mobile, you miss a huge opportunity to engage with your current and potential customers, capture their interest, and generate leads. Here's how you can successfully integrate mobile into your marketing plan.
Companies have hired armies of smart, hip, Web-savvy people to usher their brands into a new era of connectedness that allows them to reach customers in new and interesting ways. So why do brand tweets as if they're clueless?
Millennial consumers have particularly high expectations. Having grown up with the Web and smartphones, they're also highly visual. You need to show them that your brand is worthy of their attention.
You can spend hours writing a comprehensive post, or spend thousands on creating interactive or video content, but if you don't have a strategy for getting it in front of eyeballs, nobody's going to see it.
How can you develop a YouTube channel that stands out? It so happens that successful business channels have qualities in common that anyone can replicate. Do so, and you'll be rocking the No. 2 search engine in the world.
Marketers, bloggers, and small business owners have struggled with the same problem for years: how to create compelling content. Why? Because they're using the wrong process—or, worse, no process at all.
Businesses tend to focus on what to do about one or two negative reviews, but the most effective way to combat bad feedback is to increase the amount of positive reviews for your product or service.
If you aspire to be a successful content strategist or marketer, here are nine things you should plan on learning—the sooner, the better!
You don't have to come up with all the ideas for content creation. You can crowdsource from those who are likely even more qualified to determine what would be valuable to your audience.
Being able to effectively increase your online conversion rate is among the major factors affecting the future success or failure of your business.
What motivates your buyers? Four key personality types, as defined by the DISC model, will give you the clues you need to understand buyers. Here is how each type of personality thinks, along with some approaches for selling to them.
Here are four ways segmentation can improve demand generation—and four practical tips on what and how to segment.
Mobile marketing is by no means new, but it has been so refined in recent years that its toolsets and techniques are growing increasingly effective—and, more important, increasingly seamless.
In 2015, the FTC updated its Endorsement Guides, covering issues such as disclosures in close proximity to affiliate links, purchases of Likes, incentives in return for tweets, and disclosures in consumer reviews.
The people writing consumer/user-generated content are the same ones performing search queries. If you can harness their sentences, paragraphs, and ideas, you can crowdsource search optimization.
Established brands can likely withstand experiential marketing flops because customers can fall back on previous positive brand experiences. Not so for new brands or product lines: A negative customer experience would likely be enough to sink them.
If you decide to fix even one of the following mistakes, you will see better results for you and your business.
Influencer marketing—the "it" tactic of 2015—will only gain momentum in 2016. If you're planning to work with high-level influencers for complex social media campaigns, here are key steps to take.
Online retailing is a booming business—as are concomitant scams. So let's review a few frequently asked questions about the legalities of e-tailing and online marketing.
As a marketer, you need to know when to buckle up and tackle an initiative internally or when to secure an outside expert, ideally before a situation becomes critical or spirals out of control.
Mobile marketing has come a long way, but there's still progress to be made in technology, analytics, and strategy. Most notably, it's time for a paradigm shift: to think of mobile as the home for omnichannel marketing.
Here's how you can begin optimizing your newsletters and lead nurturing, event, and other marketing emails for more clicks.
Even when brand communications hit all the marks—they're clear, meaningful, and on message—they're often dull. That's an opportunity, though, for companies willing to show off their human side and maybe even stick their necks out a little.
Without even knowing it, you may be hindering project success and timelines. Knowing what makes your copywriter tick versus what ticks them off can mean all the difference between a healthy work environment and a dysfunctional one.
When creating a hashtag to represent your brand, community, or event, you might think of it as dating: you want excitement, you want intrigue, but you also want something that will last, at least a little while.
With the start of the year comes the opportunity to re-evaluate your marketing and customer-experience strategies—to plan how you can up your game in the year ahead. Here's what three trends have in store for you this year.
The success of your marketing strategies hinges largely on your content's quality and its ability to engage your audience. Follow these steps to not only better understand your customers but also identify where your sellers are more likely to win.
Targeting and buying online audiences has never been easier or more affordable. But even the right audiences can be hard to engage once you reach them. The key to making your audience care is relevance.
To make sure your company blog consistently engages your audience, apply persona research to the content you produce. Here are five steps for creating and using your blog persona.
Writing 2,500 words per hour is possible. It's not even that hard. I do it regularly. You can, too.
Yahoo Mail's 18th birthday makeover will affect how marketers reach consumers in the future. In fact, updates such as search filters, avatars, and embedded brand logos actually have the potential to make marketers' email efforts more productive.
Ask most people to describe a salesperson, and "trustworthy" probably won't be their first choice of adjective. Yet, to stand any chance of making a sale, you must establish credibility with your buyers. Trust is a core element of every successful sale.
Marketplace competitors can easily make your products or services a commodity so that everything comes down to price. How do you know whether you're being commoditized? And how can you avoid that undesirable fate?
What are the guidelines for making choices and setting priorities in your marketing organization? To achieve success in 2016, these are the most important questions for marketers to ask.
The latest trend to enter the marketing world is interactive content, and it's gaining popularity for very good reasons.
These are the how-to articles—those that dispense practical, tactical advice and tips—that you and your fellow marketers found most worthy of your time and attention in 2015.
It's much easier to start a journey if you know where you're going—and much more likely you'll actually get to somewhere you want to be.
Video content is easy to consume and engaging, and it helps you connect with the people who matter most—your audience. But how do you make sure you're getting the full benefits of video marketing?
There's a growth-stifling disconnect between brand marketers that have indirect sales models and the local channel partners that sell the brands' products or services.
The GOP campaign is generating heat, and that's good news for marketers. Let's take a look at top GOP candidates, the tools they're using, and the lessons their wins (or epic fails) can teach your business.
The lifetime value of a blog post is 700 days, according to new research. But is it worth it for brands to adjust their content marketing strategy, and how exactly can they do that?
Yes, responsive websites are important, but the real money is in connecting with—and converting—high-value customers... those who have already considered your product or service and are now calling you on their mobile device.
Thinking your own mobile marketing campaigns are now in danger because of ad-blocking? First, take a deep breath. Then, read these four tips.
A campaign that focuses on your customers' values takes commitment and research. Building an accurate picture of those values and priorities, then acting on it, is hard but rewarding work.
In 2016, the video skills marketers have learned in 2015 will allow them to create better content and tell stories that have greater impact, and they'll get serious about measuring ROI and using that data to optimize results.
A well-defined strategy is vital for a team to understand what needs to be done and which areas need investment. It also helps you identify what to stop doing, where to save money, and what is not worth the team's time.
We need to understand where and how customers interact with our brands, where and how they make their purchase decisions, and what kinds of engagement strategies translate into better sales numbers down the road.
Your audience loves interviews, particularly with thought leaders. Bonus: interviewing influencers can help position your brand as an expert by association. So how do you secure an interview for your blog, podcast, or other owned media?
Holiday sales are traditionally viewed as mere transactions with customers buying gifts once a year rather than as important interactions with potentially long-term, loyal customers. That's a lost opportunity.
Most businesses are interested in testing their sites, but they're hesitant because they don't know the differences between A/B tests and multivariate tests. Using examples, let's go over three ways the two differ.
Get ready for a new year of changes to Google's algorithms—and your SEO strategy. Here are five of the biggest search trends on tap for 2016. They're sure to be buzzed about next year.
Here's practical advice on how to increase your app's exposure on mobile search, make app content more easily discoverable, and avoid app resubmission to and approval from app stores for certain marketing-related changes.
These five CRM systems offer an optimal combination of the features and functions salespeople want most in CRM software.
One-click Cyber Monday-like shopping to achieve market leadership—and get a huge discount on marketing talent to boot? Oddly, some CEOs think it's possible. Here's how to disabuse them of the notion.
Want to get your next book not merely published and reviewed but actually sold? Marketing plays a key role in that goal. But, you don't have to be a marketing expert. You just need to apply marketing basics.
Casinos have tapped into ethnic markets, but they aren't the only businesses that can benefit from doing so. Here are four things you should consider when driving growth through multicultural marketing.
Whether big fuzzy teddy bears or utter dictators, executives operate under the same prime directive: Make money for the company. Once you can see the world from their eyes, you can get them on your side.
Most salespeople don't like using CRM systems. They'd much rather be talking with prospects than learning difficult software and entering volumes of data. In article 1, we discuss what salespeople specifically like and dislike about CRMs.
Having a documented content strategy is critical for effectiveness—now more than ever. Why? Because digital and social marketing have amplified the need: More Channels = More Content = More Complexity.
Millions of mobile apps out there make getting your app noticed extremely difficult—and rare. Gaining visibility is not as simple as coming up with a great concept, building the app, and submitting it to app stores.
Marketers and advertisers who understand the importance of customer behavior and psychology consider heuristics (mental shortcuts that people use to form judgments and make decisions) to target their markets.
The solution to ad-blocking software is simple: If users block ads they don't want, marketers have to offer them ads they do want—with content that digital shoppers truly enjoy.
Sharing great content, particularly via social media, as part of your content marketing can seem like an uphill task. Use these six tools to keep your social media pages buzzing with great content.
To help Sales, marketers should embrace lead handoffs as the beginning of a new phase that requires its own content strategy for maximizing post-handoff lead conversion.
E-commerce reviews have transformed shopping behavior—from how consumers approach a purchase to their confidence in the buying process... and much more.
For you to successfully reach customers through social media, you need to rely on consumers to deliver your brand messages to other consumers. Enter user-generated content campaigns.
Avoid painful implementation, limited effectiveness, and poor ROI. Instead, maximize your marketing technology investment and achieve the results that you and your customers expect—by doing these three things.
Some marketers would say salespeople are like babies who need structure and boundaries... and can't be trusted with storytelling. But as a marketer and former sales rep, I know the two sides can play well together—with great results.
Organizing and keeping all of your sales support content up-to-date can be challenging. And ensuring your content repository is easily accessible and searchable can be even more of a challenge.
Why is there so much mystery surrounding content curation? And why are marketers still struggling to understand it—and put it into practice? Maybe in part because myths about it still abound.
From phishing messages to malicious attachments and links to viruses, spam affects billions of email users each year. If your marketing emails are mistakenly considered spam, you'll lose both money and conversions.
It's critical that the time and resources you're investing to participate in tradeshows generate great leads and real ROI. Here's how to use email and marketing automation to ensure you do exactly that.
Marketers, looking for ways to take your brand to the next level? Here are 35 ideas and examples of brands that are doing it right.
There are hundreds of tried-and-true conversion optimization methods for improving landing pages. Here are seven of the most basic—and powerful—ones.
How can e-commerce marketers get a serious leg up on the competition? By using their emails and marketing automation systems to "frame" their customers for the perfect sale.
You've expanded internationally, but for some reason your marketing isn't making the impact you thought it would. Here are some common pitfalls of global marketing and practical strategies to overcome them.
In B2B organizations, aligning sales and marketing goals with your current customers in mind can make the difference between meeting your quarterly goals and hoping next quarter will be better.
Top-of-funnel marketing is all about engaging prospects with thought leadership and content marketing—not beating them over the head with hard-sell tactics. So how do you get the word out about your product?
Amazon is the online king, trying to impose its will on retailers big and small in its quest to become "The Everything Store." What can you do to combat the threat? A look at Amazon Prime offers you three ways you can fight back.
Like it or not, mobile has become the primary mode of communication between companies and consumers, and mobile devices are changing how people are purchasing products and services in the real world.
Marketers are likely in the thick of marketing planning, so now is a good time to revisit how to apply both the Golden Circle and the best-practices of alignment and accountability to ensure Marketing makes a difference for the business in 2016.
The holiday season is approaching quickly, so now is the perfect time to get your mobile marketing strategy in place. These tips will help you maximize mobile sales during the upcoming holidays.
Facebook is continually changing how it displays content to fans. Still, brands can consistently create content that stands out and leads to more engagement—despite Facebook's shenanigans.
Upselling and cross-selling are popular ways to increase average order size and total revenue. Customers, too, are amenable to such tactics because they discover products they need.
Your offer—or, more specifically, how compelling it is—will determine whether or not your target audience will gobble up what you are selling.
It's no longer a secret that visual social posts receive more user attention than blocks of text do. Here's how to cut through the increasing visual clutter and get noticed in a sea of social images.
Marketers today must stay current on trends, organize digital assets, monitor online conversations, measure ROI, and more. To handle those tasks, you need marketing technology. These steps will help ensure a smooth technology adoption process.
As the practice of content marketing matures, so too do the tools that make us more efficient, help us scale faster, and enhance our ability to measure. But making sense of all the available options can make your head spin.
The old Jedi Master would have made a terrific CMO. Here are some words of wisdom he might have imparted to Padawan marketers to ensure a strong online presence that can withstand the forces of the Dark Side.
Especially if you're targeting the twenty- and thirty-somethings who make up the core of the Millennial demographic, here's a handful of email marketing tips that will help you to boost engagement.
After all the effort you put into optimizing your e-commerce pages, it is truly disheartening to see two-thirds of your potential customers abandon their online shopping carts. But you can take these concrete steps to fix that problem.
Launching a website? Get ready for a busy few months. So much time, talent, and money goes into building a new site—yet roadblocks can easily push back your launch date. Here are some tips on how to keep your project rolling forward and on track.
Are you tired of reaching less than 5% of your fans with your Facebook page posts? If so, then you need to find new ways to get your updates in your audiences' News Feeds.
Putting your brand in the hands of the public can be dangerous, but the power of user-generated content (UGC) is real. If done correctly, with precautions in place, it can be highly beneficial for your brand.
Salespeople and marketers need to make sure their emails cut through the noise of a busy inbox. These tips will help you craft emails that encourage opens, generate interest, and garner response.
We receive thousands of marketing messages each day, so we don't trust marketers' emails or TV commercials or Internet ads. But people trust people who take the time to share stories and prove they're authentic.
Creating content in linear progression won't work for Sales: During the decision-making process, prospects have varying challenges and objections that Sales needs to overcome to convince prospects to take the next step.
There's no denying that popups, especially exit popups, work. But there's also no denying that they annoy website visitors. So how can you make exit popups bearable (or even enjoyable!) for your audience?
The mobile app saturation point for consumers is 26-27 apps, so becoming one of their top 25 apps is a tall order. To help increase your odds, here are a handful tips for helping to maintain engagement for your branded app.
You now have to capture your readers' attention at the earliest stage of their journey with your company. If you don't, you may never connect. So how can your marketing collateral grab their attention?
Find creative partners you trust, get on the same page about the project, then let them do their thing. But before you hand over the keys to the kingdom, here are four tips to make sure your project goes smoothly.
How valuable is your blog in the array of marketing efforts you're investing money in? How can you determine whether it's money well spent or a waste of marketing dollars? How can you take steps to make it cost-effective?
Brand loyalty isn't what it used to be. Consumers can now google your product or service and immediately see whether a competitor's pricing or location works better for them. Here's how you can still win them over.
If CMOs and CIOs had to make their relationship status public, most would have to check "It's complicated." But if they can't cooperate, they can't create consistent, relevant customer experiences.
Marketing to people based on their real-time context is all the rage. But marketers need to be careful, because it may not be a fit for their organization.
Developing B2B case studies is not without its challenges, but those who do it well can reap serious rewards—including reduced sales cycles, market share growth, and increased visibility among key stakeholders.
How can you engage buyers wherever they are in the selling process while reaching all of the important decision-makers—without being intrusive? Account-based marketing (ABM) to the rescue.
The demand for B2B content has dramatically increased. It's also flooded copywriter ranks with raw recruits who can waste your time and money. But you can avoid copywriting disasters.
Instead of bringing in new leads, Twitter can become a huge time-suck. So how can you make sense of Twitter, gain more followers, and tick off your marketing goals? Here are six simple yet effective ways to do exactly that.
So you want to fold social into your loyalty program? Good! Because that's a sound strategic move.
What should companies screen for when identifying marketing talent? The best candidates have strong hard and soft skills that will allow them to succeed and add value to the organization from day one.
With increased competition in the workforce, it is essential that you put in the extra effort to push your career forward. But what does "extra effort" mean?
With so many messages flooding your audience, to get its attention and make your message stand out requires more skill than ever. But you can cut through the clutter of the modern mobile era.
Some businesses bring in immense amounts of traffic to their websites without much text content at all. Here are a couple of examples of such sites—and four tips on how to do the same for your site.
Fundamentally, business is about beating the competition. You cannot make judgments around strategies for doing so without first understanding the strengths and weaknesses of competitors.
Data plays a key role in B2B marketing. Here is an outline of three ways marketers can reap the rewards of being more data-driven.
Marketing vs. User Experience. It doesn't have to be a hostile relationship. By using the principles and experiences of one field, you can improve the quality of the other. To improve your marketing, think like a UX designer.
Influencer marketing is one of the most effective ways to drive sales and grow your brand online. But you'll need to take a structured approach to building a long-term relationship.
Sales and Marketing misalignment not only saps marketing ROI but also slows pipeline growth, drags down conversion rates, and contributes to slow growth—or even loss—in revenue. But you can fix it.
Often, the hardest thing for a marketer to do—conceptually—is to separate brand from product. "Our brand and product are inseparable," I've heard it said—by some very successful people. But that's all an illusion.
At a time when marketers are challenged to furnish steady streams of engaging content, curating other people's content is an effective tactic. Still, it merely shifts the challenge to "How do I identify and curate valuable content?"
Personas are not new. What is new is taking personas and applying them to social media. This article provides four approaches to creating personas to increase the relevancy of your social media content.
Four technologies are driving live-event marketering: social, mobile, analytics, and the Cloud (SMAC), providing new ways to know your fans, reach them at the right time via the right channel, and measure results to ensure you spend precious marketing dollars wisely.
How can businesses use location to increase conversions and sales?
Often, great ideas come to us when we least expect them, but it's annoying when we can't generate content on deadline. Still, don't worry, this is the 21st century... We have technology and experience on our side.
To increase engagement and overall effectiveness of email campaigns, marketers need to focus on inboxing. Why? Because higher inboxing rates translate into higher open, click, and conversion rates, all of which ultimately affect program revenue.
The vast number of available marketing technology options is proof that marketing is evolving into a technology-powered discipline. To ensure your tech investments truly help your organization thrive, make sure they constitute an effective, efficient, and sustainable "technology ecosystem."
Generations are shaped to some extent by the times in which they come of age, so it makes sense for marketers who wish to reach millennials to understand the forces and behaviors that drive this diverse group.
You pour weeks into preparing for launch. You finally release the product and eagerly wait for sales to pour in. Yet, they don't. You blame the product: Should we add features? Are the colors wrong? But maybe, your copy is what's falling short.
For most marketers, coming up with content ideas is easy at first. We have them when we are at the gym, driving to work, or sitting at our favorite coffee house. But after a while, the well starts to run dry.
Delivering a great presentation is not only hard but also critically important to your business. If done correctly, a presentation often means the difference between getting that new customer or wondering what went wrong.
If you don't continually re-examine your clients and your brand in order to communicate your company's unique selling proposition, you could be muddling your value or—worse—speaking to the entirely wrong audience.
Most B2B companies are bad at social media marketing. They're too boring, or too product-focused, to engage social media users and develop a following, which leads management to conclude social media is for B2C. Which is wrong, of course.
Companies that mine the otherwise hidden person-to-person chatter of social media gain invaluable market intelligence into what consumers really think of their brands and competitors.
Creating lasting connections with email has never been more challenging. These tips will help you cut through the clutter while adhering to ever-changing regulations and convincing subscribers to stay loyal.
Grab your customers' attention and get them to respond to your television and radio ads by following these seven tips based on 25 years' experience crafting direct response commercials.
One of the hardest financial decisions when naming or renaming a company or product is whether you should splurge for the exact .com domain name—and, if not, how you should adapt the URL.
What if you could make your emails more interesting? And, what if, by making them more interesting, you could increase opens, click-throughs, and conversions?
You'll learn how to optimally display products or services on your pricing page, get your customers to choose the product you suggest, and use incentives and bonuses to increase conversion.
When people fill out your email subscribe form, they're showing a strong indication of purchase intent. Forms are also a first step toward gathering vital data for targeting customers with relevant information.
These days, many business buyers have already made a decision about what they're going to buy even before talking to a vendor. Sales needs to adapt to be on an equal footing with buyers. Luckily, Marketing can help Sales do just that.
Usually, advertising doesn't come cheap, but it can be cost-effective—if you do your homework ahead of time and follow some best-practices.
Just as you would when targeting any niche market, you need to follow some basic rules to effectively market to Spanish-speaking customers.
Success stories (case studies) are a crucial part of the marketing process, especially when complex business issues and solutions are involved. These tips will help you write successful success stories.
Today's brands engage customers daily through social and digital channels. We recently researched how successful companies use those ongoing conversations to shape their new-product development process.
This article will compare various tools for creating infographics to help you find the right tool for your own infographic marketing needs.
How mobile app makers and marketers learn from their peers' mistakes is what empowers them to create an app that engages users. So let's take a look at three common mistakes—and how to avoid them.
For marketers considering push notifications in their mobile marketing strategy, these tips for triggering hyper-personalized notifications will help build brand loyalty, as opposed to pushing users away.
Here's how you can reach Hispanic consumers, who are far less likely to access the Internet from a desktop computer, but more likely to own and use a smartphone, than non-Hispanics.
Are people watching your videos? If so, who is watching? And what are they doing after they watch? Here's how to use YouTube Analytics and Google Analytics to understand the impact your videos are having on your business.
Today's marketing environment is noisy and crowded. We have so many new techniques to promote our products and services that the chaos and clutter are getting worse. How do you get heard above all the noise?
When customers use your e-commerce site's search function, they're very likely looking to buy. If your site search isn't running optimally, you're losing sales.
The Apple Watch has been making a splash with consumers since its launch. For brands, it offers a key moment to make a very personal connection with customers.
Would you like to be perceived by the C-Suite as someone with business acumen? As influential, credible, and relevant to business? Of course you do! Who wouldn't? Yet, only 1 in 5 marketers is perceived that way.
Preparing for presentations is tough, tedious, and time-consuming, and the cardinal rule once you're in the room is to engage those in your audience—not put them to sleep. These seven tips should help.
Gaining leadership support and financial investment for a rebrand requires careful preparation of a rebranding business case that clearly outlines the need, the opportunity, the risks, and the cost of not rebranding.
Many factors go into on-site optimization, but three items stand out as not only crucial but also frequently shortchanged or completely overlooked. Here's how you can give each its due and dramatically boost your SEO performance.
How organized your marketing team is—how information is passed along, how tasks are carried out, how effective the team's communication strategy is—can determine its success or failure.
Converting social media fans requires more than constant sharing; it requires understanding the ways they interact and build relationships.
Brands looking to launch referral programs or fine-tune their current efforts must embrace best-practices that help guide audiences through three distinct phases of engagement.
A LinkedIn marketing or selling strategy is the difference between a B2B sales or marketing team that drives consistent revenue opportunities and one that just has lots of connections it does not engage with.
Managing deliverability can challenge even the most well-respected brand. Government regulations, inconsistent Internet service provider (ISP) policies, emerging technologies, and changes in subscriber behavior all add to the complexity.
Eager to prove its worth, Marketing is moving down the sales funnel, and some marketers are assuming sales enablement roles. Now's the time to become a cost-saver rather than remaining a cost center.
Believe it or not, the Declaration of Independence follows a simple formula dating back thousands of years to one of the original thought leaders about the art of persuasion: Aristotle.
If you want to make sure your ads are seen by the right audience, it's time to combine some advertising tools and strategies that make targeting (almost) as successful as selling hot chocolate at the ice rink.
Say what you will about her music, persona, or awards-show grooving... Taylor Swift is a marketing genius. From product launches and rebrands to borrowed equity and social media domination, her actions read like a strategy textbook.
There are a ton of reasons that top brands—and small companies—are active on SlideShare: It provides an enormous opportunity for any content marketer.
Here's how you can use location data—right now—to boost engagement, offer more personalized experiences, and build loyalty with users.
Whether you're an already-established business or you're just starting out, customer feedback can serve directly as a tool for customer acquisition and, indirectly, as a tool to boost other customer acquisition channels.
With all the buzz about and the allure of content marketing, jumping in quickly and then not seeing the expected results happens a lot. Here are three common mistakes and some ideas for how to avoid them.
Especially in this data-hungry age, all marketers can learn customer-relationship lessons from the healthcare industry's experience with obtaining and sharing data.
These days, PR is not just about getting immediate coverage: It is also about the secondary (i.e., curated) coverage that can make all the difference in winning the attention of the desired audience.
Many marketers are more comfortable with words than with numbers, but if you're willing to run a few equations, you might gain tremendous insights into the success of your content. And, more important, you'll probably be more likely to keep your job.
Choosing the right email service provider could make the difference between adequate results and extraordinary ones. Consider these six must-haves of an ESP for a mutually beneficial partnership.
You need a solid strategy to stage a successful tradeshow exhibit. You're competing for space, attention, and sales, so you can't get lazy with any part of your tradeshow planning.
Using effective imagery is a big part of the marketing process. By combining images with useful information and conveying your brand, you'll be well on your way to building an engaged community of followers.
Creating and running an email marketing program can be as difficult as... finding an enjoyable first date. The similarities don't end there. Here are four simple dating rules you can apply to email marketing.
Here's a tried and true way to dramatically increase content success on Facebook: Post engaging content! Easier said than done, of course...
How a business presents its services to potential customers is of paramount importance. And you may get just one shot at it...
If your website runs afoul of Google's website guidelines, you may well be penalized by its Penguin algorithm. And once you've been slapped by Google Penguin, it's difficult to have those penalties revoked. But it's not impossible.
No matter how much effort you've put into designing your website or mobile app, the proof of the pudding is in the testing, which allows you to learn what the actual users of a product think about it and how they use it.
For a lot of companies, finding PR success can be extraordinarily frustrating—especially when just starting out. But the good news is that it's actually fairly simple to get your brand name out there and in the media.
Here's why a content discovery tool must be part of every social media manager's arsenal, and these are some popular content-discovery tools businesses are using.
Marketers can deliver on the value of strategic—not just operational—speed to gain competitive advantage by upping their analytics and alignment game.
Pricing is more than cost plus margin or lowering your prices just a tad below competitors'. Think like a buyer to zero in on profitable pricing strategies tailor-made for you, with the added benefit of setting you apart from the competition.
Technology has changed consumer behavior, in turn forcing marketers to consider newer takes on traditional pricing models. You now have to dig deeper into buyers' thought process to understand what persuades them to buy.
The question of the day among millennials is "where can I capture an unforgettable experience right now?" Instagram presents a unique opportunity for brands or organizations to connect with their communities in new and interesting ways.
Content isn't always easy to write; in fact, depending on the topic or the industry, it can be downright difficult. Here are seven helpful tips for developing relevant, engaging, and creative content.
Ideally, your mobile app will do more with a push message than simply display an "FYI" or reminder. Here are some new ways that you may not have considered before for using push and inspiring action.
As the number of marketing channels and technologies continues to grow, so too does the need to hire specialists for your team. How do you ensure your company is selecting the right marketing expert for your open position?
Even the world's most effectively led, proactive, and well-organized content team is going to end up dead in the water without continuous quality input from within the organization.
Marketers recognize the growing need for timely, relevant content that can engage audiences, but developing original content on a consistent basis can be too costly and too time-consuming.
Big Data-enabled capabilities will require a new level of marketing sophistication and creativity. Your marketing department, and your organization as a whole, needs to prepare for a future IT landscape dominated by Big Data technologies.
Producing video is a pain. You're busy. Really busy. How can you cram a difficult, time-consuming, and expensive process like video production into your daily grind?
How well data and research are integrated into a presentation or pitch can make or break it. But not every marketer is a natural-born data geek. How can you work staid data points into a compelling presentation?
With an integrated content strategy, marketers can provide a more consistent message, expand a company's network of potential customers, and better connect with prospective buyers—all while driving greater returns.
Rather than competing head-to-head, consider the players in your field and how you could combine efforts to help both you and the other company—and, ultimately, your own customers.
Five months into 2015, search and content marketers are deep into the grind of links, keywords, content, and conversions. To keep your momentum going into the next year, adopt these five strategies.
You've heard of influencer marketing—but "marketplaces"? It's a smart idea (and the next big thing): Brands go there to find and hire bloggers to write reviews or mention them in posts; bloggers go to land gigs.
The only way to increase your search engine rankings and achieve long-term results for your business is to implement ethical, white hat SEO techniques that keep you in Google's good graces.
Marketers feel the pressure. They know that their credibility and influence are at risk when they cannot connect marketing activities to business results. Here's how to fix that problem.
A content creation framework can help employees across departments gain recognition as subject-matter experts and thought leaders—while helping the company achieve business development and strategic marketing objectives.
You've been told by "experts" for years that if you blog consistently, you will see truckloads of traffic, thousands of subscribers, and millions of dollars in sales. Here's the truth.
Guest-blogging is one of the most effective and widely used methods of gaining exposure via sites other than yours. But measuring the effectiveness of a guest-posting campaign is where most go wrong.
For many B2B marketers, getting in front of senior decision-makers is tough to do. So how can you get the C-suite to hear your marketing message? These five elements will position your marketing in a way that builds trust.
The reality is you can't run a business without having someone providing an online rating, review, or comment. It's an expectation in the age of transparency.
Taking content marketing from theory to reality can prove complex, time- and resource-prohibitive, and, when not done well, ineffective. That's why you need a crack team with these six key players on it.
Whether you are new to the e-commerce game or you've been selling online for years, there is always room for growth. And these seven tactics are the best way to achieve that growth.
The Web is chock-full of boring copy. But your website doesn't need to hang out with that crowd. Creating copy that connects with your audience is easier than you think; however, vague advice like "talk benefits" and "use your own voice" won't cut it.
What makes social networks so addicting? Here are four ways to apply their tools and tactics to your own online properties and keep your audiences from straying.
Contact forms, request-a-quote forms, market research forms, newsletter subscription forms... so many kinds of forms! If only you had a silver bullet for easily crafting a form that perfectly converts.
Companies and marketers are wasting time and resources on creating sales materials that are not what sales teams need. What can be done to give Sales effective tools it can actually use?
Positioning shouldn't be left to chance. Unless you do your research, your message to the market has almost no chance of getting through and hitting the mark. Here's what you need to do.
As we continue to ask for more an more of our digital campaigns and products, we need to look at where it all starts—with the digital brief. But most briefs are simply too long, too specific, and too tactical.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about six stupid marketing metrics that need to die. The response was overwhelming. But marketers wanted to know which metrics still matter. These four do.
Especially if you're taking an integrated marketing approach, your customers need to be driving the decisions your company makes. If not, your brand could risk becoming irrelevant or—worse—offensive to your audience.
Ideas are the lifeblood of any content marketing campaign. Without new ideas, campaigns will quickly become stagnant. Here's how to consistently deliver winning ideas over the long term.
Learn when conducting a survey is appropriate, get tips on survey design, and understand how to incorporate survey results into PR and marketing activities.
These 10 Web design trends are among the fading. Ditch them if you want to keep with your competition and increasingly demanding audiences.
In a typical inbox, people see only three pieces of information when trying to decide whether to open your email. That's not much. Shrinking attention spans and itchy delete fingers make getting it right crucial.
You've heard of growth hacks... Here are five marketing hacks. They don't take a ton of budget, but they have a huge impact on your content creation, customer relations, and sales tactics.
How can you effectively deliver personalized communications to a consumer base of thousands or even millions of customers and prospects? These five steps can help.
Creative talent can be a major differentiator for your brand, but creatives in corporate offices can be a frustrated bunch; they often feel stifled by rigid parameters. What can you do to keep your creatives from walking out the door?
SEO might seem a Herculean task for local businesses, but it doesn't have to be. Here are seven little secrets to effective local SEO.
When Google decided that mobile-friendliness will influence site rankings in search results, responsive design became a must. But what about the impact on copywriters and other content creators?
Today (April 21), Google's algorithm update will turn mobile optimization from nice-to-have to necessity. If your website isn't mobile-friendly, expect your search rankings and Web traffic to take a hit on April 22.
Learning about how software developers plan and execute their work can offer useful insights into how digital marketers can better structure and implement their own work.
Here you are, charged with exciting media buys, and you find that there are literally thousands of data providers who tell you using their insights will allow you to find the perfect audience.
What is digital rights management, and what does it mean to your business? This article explains how copyright infringement might occur in your organization and offers some practical ways to avoid it.
Many companies are using inbound marketing in their home markets. The good news is that globalizing your inbound marketing is more a matter of localizing existing content than creating it from scratch. Here's what you need.
Keep these six items in mind as you go through the event-planning process; they will help you make sure you and your stakeholders are prepared for the tasks ahead and able to generate a high ROI for your event marketing.
Though marketers use metrics and analytics to prove and improve marketing's value, the two are not the same. We explain each and offer a checklist to help you determine your team's proficiency level.
Generating leads is a huge part of our job as marketers. And even though content marketing has become vital for capturing leads, creating content that actually converts is a constant struggle. That's where quizzes come in.
"Authenticity" has become a word that's bandied about in marketing, and businesses are striving to align with this increasingly valued concept. But what does it mean to be authentic in today's market?
Marketing is supposed to make—not cause you to lose—money. But if you aren't careful, simple flaws in your marketing and website can lead to chargebacks. And nothing can drain profits faster than chargebacks.
To find business truths, the experimentation mindset goes beyond testing—and applies not only to your digital marketing and analytics teams but also your product marketing, user experience, and development teams.
You were hoping for more leads or conversions, yet it seems your SEM campaign is burning through its dwindling budget but not delivering... It's time for campaign optimization.
Writing landing page copy that converts like crazy isn't as simple as running through a checklist of best-practices. But it is as simple as following these three super-powerful pointers.
Content marketing crash—it's that inevitable decline in engagement and conversion after you've gained huge ground. Even the best B2B content marketers can get mired in these muddy battlefields.
Here are three of the biggest shopping cart turnoffs that can kill your e-commerce sales—and some easy solutions to keep customers engaged throughout the checkout process.
An email marketer should have one goal in mind: capturing readers' attention so they respond to the email's call to action. Here's how you can help ensure your customers engage with your emails.
Creating great CTAs is more than possible, yet so many links in brands' marketing emails remain unclicked. And many of those emails are never even opened in the first place.
When you begin any content marketing initiative, you quickly realize how difficult it is to churn out incredibly good content regularly. How do you solve that conundrum? The solution is content curation.
From renting floor space to designing and building your booth, tradeshow costs can quickly add up—into a five-figure sum. Which is why it's essential to also measure how much you earn as a result of the event.
It's amazing what some marketers are still measuring. Maybe they don't know any better, or maybe they're just married to legacy metrics that once made sense. But they're probably doing their campaigns more harm than good.
After your website visitors arrive at your online shopping cart, it's simply a shame if your cart then fails you by not helping you achieve the conversion.
Being on hold on the phone is probably one of the most attention-focused customer touchpoints there is. It can have a huge impact on how your customers feel about your brand.
Today, you can easily create a website, and even gather a team around it to grow the site through content. But that's not enough to get your site on the first page of SERPs.
When you're recognized as a brand authority, you become the go-to business in your industry, you can be more selective with clients, and you can charge higher rates that reflect your expertise.
Email marketing is likely a vital part of you marketing strategy. You'll need to keep up with these email trends if you want your marketing to remain relevant.
Achieving agility starts with your company's culture—which is where the rubber really hits the road. These four steps will guide your transition from traditional to agile marketing.
The voice channel is not going away any time soon, so spend time considering your options and planning, and be strategic about the branding and marketing opportunities your phone presence affords.
Brand tone of voice is vital to expressing your brand identity. The correct tone can help a company distinguish itself from competitors, reinforce the brand's personality, and underpin the brand's promise to its customers.
Your marketing plan (and accompanying budget) defines the body of work you carry with you for at least 12 months—everything you do on the job. And, if you do it right, it's your golden ticket to successful marketing.
A good company name doesn't have to tell customers exactly what you do. Names that hinge on a compelling narrative are often far more powerful.
Maximizing the lifetime value of your customers is central to maximizing the value of your business. Companies sink or swim based on their ability to retain customers.
As a marketer, you're often wearing many hats and simultaneously managing a variety of responsibilities and tasks—from social media to content creation. Luckily, there's an app or service for almost every marketing activity out there.
Your booth's location at a tradeshow can be either beneficial or harmful. Here's how to make sure you're prepared to select the best location possible for your company's both.
Online reviews appear in search results when people are evaluating your product or service, and professionals regularly frequent review sites when searching for solutions.
Automated email campaigns can help publishers—whether traditional, new, media and entertainment, gaming, or apps publishers—reach the right audience at well-timed moments to drive more website traffic.
This handy little guide will steer you through the best-practices of setting up your digital asset management system—and show you that it's as easy as running a bake sale (but maybe not as tasty!).
Your to-do list never seems to dwindle, no matter how often you hack at it. But chipping away at your marketing tasks would be so much easier if your figurative ax were sharper. These tips can make it razor sharp.
A perceived lack of credibility is one of the silent killers of great sales opportunities, since big potential clients are famously risk-averse. If you don't have great coverage—and therefore credibility—those potential clients won't ink deals with you.
As a B2B marketer, you're responsible for driving leads. But what happens when you overlook a valuable channel, such as inbound phone calls—which are excellent for generating leads? Nothing good...
"Old-fashioned" tactics such as tradeshows are often the most effective for achieving B2B companies' top marketing goal: getting more customers. But far too many spend far too little time on choosing the right sales reps for tradeshows or networking events.
Even after a CMO is accepted into the C-suite, a lot of confusion remains about what he or she should be delivering. The answer starts and ends with demonstrating a significant, positive marketing ROI. But how can a CMO do that?
Mobile marketing is practically made for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Let's talk about how you can get mighty with mobile, and zero in on your audience with pay-per-click mobile campaigns.
In the emerging sharing economy—modeled on collaborative creation and consumption—you can't effectively "create customers" without a deep, empathetic, and evolving understanding of their aspirations, challenges, and needs.
UGC-enabled marketing is no longer a fad; it's become a core part of modern marketers' toolkit. A closer look into UGC benefits, applicability to B2B, and a few key examples from major brands should put to rest any doubts.
Events—if done properly—can be a successful technique for marketing and engagement. Here are five tactics you can use to ensure your attendees thoroughly enjoy your events and, in turn, improve ROI.
Investing in owned media, such as a corporate blog, is crucial to a company's success in content marketing. But what does it take to launch and sustain a successful business blog? These six best-practices and tactics.
Managing content marketing can be stressful. This brief guide will show you how to use time and technology to maximize success without raising your stress levels.
Innovations are helping email to continue leading the way to more contextual and cross-channel experiences for consumers. Here are seven ways to tap into the contextual power of email.
The impulse to acquire what is scarce is wired deep into the oldest part of our brain, alongside our other survival instincts. Here are four ideas for how to implement the scarcity principle in your favor.
Although blogging is an effective marketing, branding, and sales channel, businesses don't make effective and efficient use of it. In fact, most corporate blogs add little real business value.
Your customers' experiences with your brand have the potential to turn them into your advocates who take the message of your company and products and deliver it for you—online and offline.
When you understand your customers' personal aspirations and fears, you can craft emotionally relevant brand messages that humanize your brand and help you communicate more authentically.
To ensure a customer-centric vision takes root in your marketing organization, you need to establish clear metrics that are linked to the company's strategic, operational, and financial goals.
So, you've got a great brand and a dynamite product or service that you offer to the universe. What's next for you? A brand extension, of course. Ah, if only it were that easy.
B2B content marketers consistently cite creating content that engages as a top challenge. Making the task harder still are marketers' preconceptions. Here are reality-based strategies that counter those myths.
Launch day is the end of a long road and the beginning of another. To make sure your startup can thrive during the journey, you'll need to walk through these 11 steps first.
Just a bit of know-how and practice can generate the kind of pins that engage other Pinterest users and drive traffic to your website. Millions of pins go up every day, but you can still make yours stand out.
Clearly, women are attracted to marketing—and, very often, they're good at it. So why are there so few women at senior marketing levels? These tips from top woman marketers can help all of us market ourselves.
These five habits are the most helpful, descriptive, easy-to-learn, and effective for becoming a master of adding meaning to marketing noise—once you learn to put them into action.
You're on a constant quest to connect with prospects, customers, and subscribers. Cultivating a high-performing email list should be a priority. These four steps will help build your list—and boost your marketing.
Many businesses concentrate their social media marketing on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. But why miss the opportunities afforded by the likes of Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest, Google +, and Ello?
Marketers want to know what their competition is up to. Setting up Google Alerts and following your competitor's Twitter feed can get you only so far. So what's the best way to gather competitive intelligence?
When your customers are using more devices than ever before, across more channels than we could even fathom 10 years ago, you need to ask, How can we better engage our customers?
The modern marketer can feel overwhelmed by progress: You can feel as though you're drowning in new opportunities, obligations, and demands. To stay ahead of the curve, keep these resolutions in 2015.
To create more connected brand experiences for our customers, we need to go from inside-out digital marketing to outside-in, cross-channel experience marketing—which focuses on the customer's needs and intent.
Innovation is critical to both the success and the survival of organizations, and imagination is the spark that fuels it, Sir Ken argued. That sounds both vague and high-minded, doesn't it? But holy wow... his talk so wasn't!
If you had to choose one digital branding profile to work on, focus on your LinkedIn profile. Why? Because, in business, it's often the first place people go when they want to check you out.
B2C marketers readily capitalize on the benefits of all the conversations and hoopla related to what are considered major consumer events, but the truth is... B2B companies can, too, and they should.
Many email recipients feel compelled to purge their inboxes and subscriptions at the start of each year. How can marketers deal with this detox mode—and make sure their messages (and customers) aren't lost for good?
A whole new marketing phenomenon has blossomed, enriching the user experience like never before: cloud technology. It's innovative... and it's threatening to turn into its own unique nightmare for companies.
To dramatically increase your mobile email open rates, let's take a look at exactly how to optimize the only three lines that matter.
In Part 2, you'll discover more lessons from Westeros's favorite characters and clans about how marketers can develop connections on LinkedIn.
What can you do to counteract the ill effects of Facebook's recent changes to its News Feed algorithm... and continue to get the most out of the social network?
Securing buy-in—and budget—from board-level stakeholders is one of the biggest challenges marketers face. Particularly in B2B firms, Sales often has more influence than Marketing. So what can you do?
Website conversion rate increases alone don't mean much. Revenue growth is what really matters. This article gives you seven examples (which you can use) that helped the author increase online sales by $21 million.
We might be in a Game of Thrones dry spell these days, but that's no reason not to glean some real-world lessons from Westeros's favorite characters and clans about how to develop connections on LinkedIn.
Firms with well-known industry experts and thought leaders are more likely to attract leads, command premium fees, and possess strong, recognized brands. Those "Visible Experts" have these seven traits in common.
Case studies are often dry, generic, or pretty much just a high school pep rally (minus the cool letterman jackets) cheering on the company. But they don't have to be.
How do you position your brand for success? What is the most compelling story you can tell about your business? Those are two of the most substantial questions marketers and entrepreneurs have to answer.
PowerPoint's best attributes often turn it into to a sales or marketing presentation's worst enemy and often resulting in a mind-numbing drill of slide-after-slide-after-slide. So how can you build/host an engaging presentation?
Marketing teams need to be innovative, quick-thinking, service-oriented, and committed to the company brand. That's a tall order. How do you keep the company's most creative team performing at their best?
There is no better way to determine the impact of a design, copy, or scheduling change on your email campaigns. But A/B testing can seem overwhelming to take on. These do's and don'ts will steer you in the right direction.
With the right planning and strategy, a selfie business campaign can be a great way to engage and connect both current and potential users and customers with your brand and products.
Most marketers say they cannot measure the ROI of their social media efforts. It's time to start thinking of social as a revenue-building medium—and adopt a results-driven approach toward it. Here's how to start.
Most businesses now look to social media as a tool mainly for creating brand awareness. To do so, though, is to ignore the real power of social media—as a driver of leads and revenue. Here's how you can get started.
The planning, design, writing, programming, and testing... a website can take hundreds of hours to build. The result of all that effort depends on a lot of little things—some of which, when done wrong, can hurt you. Big time.
Words. They can be powerful, passionate, and—if used correctly in marketing and sales communications and presentations—extremely profitable.
To create long-term customer loyalty and profits, marketing professionals need to find a way to extend the yearend holidays' sales momentum into the New Year.
As a marketer, you know that for your content to provide value, it must be (like food) consumed and digested. Straight from the marketer's cookbook, here are four tips for making your content readily consumable.
Facts tell, but stories sell. And there is no better medium than video for storytelling. Here's what to expect from video marketing in 2015.
Changes are coming, actually more quickly than they have in decades. Even for old-school industries, it's time to make important shifts in strategy—to rethink marketing and flip our media plans on their heads.
There is a lot of talk about the death of the sales funnel, but I disagree. The sales funnel is very much alive; it has, however, evolved.
Internet memes—images overlaid with text—are a popular way for brands to reach audiences. As followers and fans share the images, your products, logo, and brand spread to people you wouldn't reach otherwise.
Though pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and content marketing appear to be marketing islands unto themselves, many smart marketers use PPC to enhance their content marketing efforts.
We all know that a steady stream of leads is essential to keeping a business afloat. But coming up with original and effective ways to attract and convert qualified leads is easier said than done.
As you prepare your content marketing strategy for the coming year (and you are preparing one, right?), keep these awesome expert tips and nuggets of valuable advice in mind.
Consistency is important in integrated marketing, but that doesn't mean pushing the same content to every social media channel. Here are three examples of how to adjust content for multiple social channels.
It struck me this Thanksgiving that marketers could take a lesson from turkey gumbo—what I call the "leftover trick" for content marketing. Here are five simple ideas to get you started.
This holiday season, email marketers and online retailers are in a Hunger Games of their own: Keeping their emails alive—and out of the spam folder—will determine their ability to survive this season.
Marketing automation software can add to your workload, alienate important prospects, and cause you to add hundreds of dollars to the swear jar—or... it can deliver real, positive ROI. Here's what can make the difference.
In part 2 of this article, you'll discover six more practical ways to derive valuable insights about your customers.
Using video in email should be a no-brainer, because emails with video are the ones that subscribers find most memorable. But the email-video combo is still a rare pairing. Here's how to use it to your benefit.
From a website's conception to official go-live date, the design and development teams need to have shifted out of their silos and onto the same workbench.
There's no off-season in retail marketing, especially online—where, if you're not moving forward, you're automatically falling behind.
At the core of any marketing campaign are the customers—those who sign up to your email list and purchase your products or services. You need to know more about what they want and how they behave online.
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