Marketing Article Index » More marketing articles
- We Are More Than Marketers: Integrating a Human-Centric Approach
Do you treat customers and prospects as if they were whole human beings—with hearts, minds, and spirits? You should. Learn six steps that lead to a human-centric approach to marketing.
When hosting a webinar, you want people to show up and you want to generate leads. But meeting those goals isn't easy. Here's a five-step plan that'll take the guesswork out of hosting an effective, successful webinar.
Want to grow your SMS and email marketing lists? Your social media fans and followers—who've already demonstrated their interest in you—are the perfect targets. Learn five steps for converting your social fans to subscribers.
When new visitors arrive at your website, you have two ways to seize the opportunity and guide them toward becoming customers. Both opportunities can evaporate in the blink of an eye—if you don't have the proper systems in place.
If you are serious about the words "sales," "profit," and "conversions," you must master keyword research. Learn four common pitfalls marketers make when selecting keywords—and how to avoid them.
The dirty secret of Twitter is that as helpful as it can be, it's also a time sink. Learn how properly using and cleaning up your Twitter lists can help you save time—and generate leads for your business.
Customers today expect more deals and offers during holiday seasons, so it's important to create seasonal campaigns to increase revenues. Here are 10 tips—and a campaign planner—to help you achieve seasonal sale success.
QR codes can be inexpensive to implement and can provide you a measureable return on investment—if you use them correctly. Learn five invaluable tips for implementing an effective QR code campaign.
Twitter is a powerful channel that can help you connect with customers, promote products, and create brand awareness. Learn four tactics for making your Twitter account a social media heavyweight in your industry.
Marketers have a tough job! No juggler's job has ever been as tough. With 13 or so online marketing channels (and just as many offline), the job of cross-channel marketing is difficult. But creating a successful cross-channel marketing organization is possible.
If CMOs are to be accountable for marketing ROI, their organizations must have marketers who have data, analysis, and measurement skills. Here are three steps for effectively creating a fact-based culture.
In 2011, mobile shopping increased and iPad tablet conversion rates soared. Are you prepared for the growing mobile and tablet retail environment? Learn seven key trends that will dominate 2012.
Sure, Facebook promotions can get you some "Likes," but is that all there is? Learn how American Express's Israel division used Facebook to gain valuable customer insight and deepen brand engagement.
When handled adeptly, customer data can be a marketer's most reliable weapon for reaching customers' buying intentions—and closing sales. Learn five ways to build a data-driven marketing culture that'll help you get results.
In today's noisy business listing landscape, it's important that your online anchor be consistent and visible throughout the local search ecosystem. Here are five essential rules to keep in mind when managing your online listing.
Increasing your online sales isn't quick or easy, and it involves a lot of trial and error. Learn three steps that'll help you skip some of the guesswork and boost your website's conversion rate.
Mistakes will happen—even to the very best email marketers. The key is responding appropriately. Learn six email blunders you may encounter, along with guidelines for rectifying them quickly and effectively.
It may be boring, but a thorough discovery and strategy-development process is essential before a website redesign. Here are five important elements of a redesign plan you should have in place and readily available... before the fun design stuff starts.
No doubt about it: 2011 was a big year for content marketing. Twice the number of marketers implement content marketing vs. the number of those who use print, television, and radio advertising. But what's in store for 2012?
Personal-branding expert William Arruda offers six more trends to keep in mind and on top of in 2012 as you continue to build, improve, and polish your own personal brand as a marketer in tune with the times.
When working with freelancers, "let the buyer beware" is a good rule of thumb. If you aren't careful in the due-diligence process, you may be in for more than you bargained for (literally). How can you make sure you don't get burned?
Many companies have the same overarching goals: increase sales, decrease costs, and reduce churn. But why don't they all succeed? It all boils down to mindfully setting objectives and implementing strong tactics to support them.
We've all seen them—those disastrous ads that make us cringe as marketers. Here is a detailed critique of one ad—gone terribly wrong—that'll help you avoid a host of pitfalls in your ad copy.
Is a site redesign among your company's New Year's resolutions? To end up with a site that's built to last, you'll need a well-crafted RFP that covers all bases. Learn eight invaluable guidelines for creating your site redesign RFP.
The words "engagement" and "hypertargeting" are practically everywhere, but what happens when you combine the two? Learn how one company ran a diverse campaign that captured the interest of core, active, and casual fans.
A website with poorly designed navigation can frustrate your visitors, cost you sales, and hurt your reputation. Learn how to enhance your site's navigation to showcase your content—and keep your customers coming back.
Despite best efforts, mistakes happen to every small business at some point. The key is not to panic, but to apologize to customers—the right way—and assure them that you are still worthy of their trust, confidence, and respect.
Over the years, personal branding has proven to be an effective technique for enabling career success. But how we build our brands is evolving. Learn six personal branding trends for 2012 that'll help keep you ahead of the pack.
Now that 2011 is in our rearview mirrors, it's time to focus on 2012. Though the email marketing environment shifts especially swiftly, five dominating trends from 2011 will continue to reign this year.
Nowadays, the marketer's world is chaotic and cluttered. Effectively meeting a myriad of demands can seem impossible. That's why connected marketing solutions are critical to success in today's marketing landscape.
Are your daily deals promotions hurting your bottom line? It doesn't have to be that way. Here are four key tips for using daily deals to boost awareness, gain and maintain customers, and get results.
Link building is probably the most difficult aspect of SEO. Quality links that bring results are hard to get... unless you have a link-building strategy that targets specific, meaningful market segments.
Sometimes promotions work, and sometimes they bomb. But what makes a promotion tank? Here are eight deadly sins that companies commit—and that you should avoid—when planning and executing promotions.
Is your business throwing Web traffic in the trash? If you're not capturing the traffic you spend big bucks to get, it's time to re-evaluate your lead-capture strategy by looking at the effectiveness of your lead magnets.
How effective is your professional bio at building reputation, gaining clients, and generating income? Here are five detailed critiques of real-life professional bios that'll help you avoid common pitfalls in your own bios.
Picking your brand name is crucial, and making sure that it's Google-friendly is even more important. Before you choose your brand name, learn three major facts about how Google rates and ranks personal and business names.
It's amazing how quickly a brand can find itself in a crisis, struggling to salvage its reputation. But your brand doesn't have to suffer. Learn six steps to take—before and after a crisis—that'll help rebuild customer confidence.
Want to leave a lasting impact on tradeshow attendees? Go mobile. Learn three ways to maximize your tradeshow success using QR codes—and five key considerations for using them most effectively.
Tablets, social media, QR codes, and hybrid events all redefined tradeshow and event marketing in 2011, but what will 2012 bring? How can marketers embrace the latest trends to make their events more exciting and engaging?
If you want to better predict the relationship between marketing inputs and customer behavior, predictive modeling may be your answer. Here are five essential tips to consider before you get started.
The marketing agency ecosystem is evolving because of changes in customer behavior and advances in technology. Is your firm keeping up? Learn 10 key considerations for transforming your organization.
Do you want to improve the performance of your Google AdWords campaigns? Here are five quick checks that'll help you gain valuable insights into your campaigns—and save you money.
Are you an introverted marketer? If so, attending busy conferences might make you very uncomfortable. Here are four ways to break through your challenges and get the most out of any conference.
As 2011 winds down, it's time to consider the trends that will dominate marketing in 2012. Here are the Top 5 trends on the horizon and tips on how to take advantage of them in your marketing plan.
If you are a large-volume sender of email, you should be signed up for all available feedback loops. Learn how feedback loops can help report spam, increase customer satisfaction, and reduce end-user complaints.
Marketing automation offers five main opportunities to improve ROI and drive revenue. Are you taking advantage of them? Learn how marketing automation can help you segment leads, improve conversions, and reduce lead leakage.
How effective can a strategy be if all of your competitors are using it, too? To stand out, step outside the realm of e-books and round-up posts, and apply these six tips for producing unique, compelling content.
How did an author make millions writing about a stuffy academic concept someone else discovered? He messaged it great. Here are five key lessons on messaging your ideas, offerings, and strengths to appeal to customers.
Online communities can deliver outstanding ROI, but they rarely produce value without significant investment, professional management... and consistent, intelligent, and engaging interaction.
Is email marketing for your small business even worth doing? Yes, if you do it well. To ensure your campaigns are effective, you should be practicing the Five Commandments for email awesomeness.
A debate has been raging in certain quarters: Should humor be included in sales copy? Is humor disarming and refreshing, or can it actually hurt sales?
Is your organization experiencing a critical gap between Marketing and Sales performance expectations and actual results? If so, answer these 10 questions and apply these 10 steps to close the gap and ensure results.
Blogging can be powerful and effective only when it's done well. Learn 10 essential tips for writing killer posts that will attract readers—and keep them coming back for more.
With the rise of mobile search and social media, local Web-presence optimization is crucial for small businesses. Learn how to secure a top spot on Google's search results—and knock out the competition.
More and more organizations are investing in marketing automation platforms. Is yours one of them? If so, learn how to select the right one, plan for its adoption, and avoid common implementation pitfalls.
Need help boosting your landing page conversions? Learn six landing page optimization principles that helped one website nearly double its conversion rate...
2011 ushered in a host of changes in marketing, affecting social media, search, and customer relationships. What digital changes and trends should forward-thinking marketers anticipate in 2012?
To deliver the critical wow factor that draws people into loyalty programs and keeps them there, marketers must get inside customers' heads to identify what motivates them. Learn five key points about driving customer behavior.
If staying current in today's PR world is important to you, adopt the famous aphorism "Learn as if you were to live forever." This article highlights skills that remain essential—and some new skills you'll need for future PR success.
Today's B2B marketers can't focus only on generating leads and turning them over to Sales. To get results, they need to create effective, targeted programs that hit the right people via the appropriate channel. Here how.
A third generation of landing pages has emerged over the past year that incorporates ideas from content marketing, social media marketing, and mobile marketing. Learn what features define Landing Pages 3.0.
Marketing is changing and evolving at a rapid pace. Are you keeping up? Here are five major changes taking shape in 2012 that CMOs can't afford to ignore.
With the exponential rise of the multilingual Web in recent years, extending your online marketing strategy internationally is more timely than ever. Here are five key tips for effective global digital marketing.
If the term "video tour" makes you think of something you'd find only on a real estate website, think again! Video tours are a great way to market a wide array of products and services—if you do it the right way..
The best way to embark on a social media marketing strategy is to prepare in advance. To ensure success and maximize results, learn six questions you'll need to tackle before delving into your next social strategy.
You've managed to get people to your site, but how do you get them to convert? Learn three strategies—based on various case studies—for boosting your site's conversion rate.
Applying social media marketing efforts to an international audience could present unique challenges—but it doesn't have to. Learn six best-practices that'll ensure the greatest ROI in localized social media.
Are you letting leads seep out of your sales funnel? Learn how to plug the holes in your funnel, nurture leads into qualified sales opportunities, and boost your company's bottom line.
What can you learn about content marketing from video vignettes of lawyers speaking candidly about their professional philosophies and personal viewpoints? For one, you can humanize your business and show off your personality in a creative, interesting, and wholly unexpected way.
Today, getting your story in front of an influential writer can mean getting it to a traditional journalist at an established publication, an independent blogger, or a peer-to-peer reviewer. And getting in touch with those key influencers is no easy task. Here's how you can do it.
Just as in dating, being too pushy or too neglectful when marketing could get you dumped. Learn how to effectively woo prospects into becoming long-term committed customers who stick with you through thick and thin.
Today's product-savvy customers expect more from in-store shopping experiences. Learn why new technologies, knowledgeable salespeople, and stellar service are critical in today's shopping climate.
Much like an attractive store, a well-designed website will attract customers who will be happy to be there—and happy to stay. Avoid these four common mistakes that can turn visitors away and hurt your business.
No matter who your customers are or what they desire, 13 human motivators, or "hot buttons," are ultimately responsible for driving sales. To boost sales, learn which motivators and human desires to tap into—and when.
Customers today are actively engaged buyers, so your approach to the sales and marketing pipeline must evolve. Learn six revised stages for implementing and measuring Marketing's contribution to the pipeline.
Effectively managing sales leads today is tricky, but not if you understand the problems between Marketing and Sales. Learn which four lead-management strategies could be hindering your success.
A crisis can serve as a stage to show the world that your company is either unorganized and uncaring or responsible and human. Learn how to preserve your brand equity—and keep your customers—during a crisis.
Thanks to the Internet, event promotion has never been cheaper to do or easier to track. But before you set off to promote your next event online, learn the benefits—and drawbacks—of three popular approaches.
Writing the perfect pitch isn't easy. But knowing how to pitch your story idea to journalists can make the difference between their pursuing—and their flat out ignoring—your pitch. Earn their interest and attention with these 11 tips.
Hugging your customers—at least in a virtual, figurative sense—can increase engagement and boost positive word-of-mouth. Here are six ways to get customers to embrace you and market for you.
In today's social climate, influencers are more important than ever in shaping impressions and customer actions. Connect with those powerful voices. Learn three steps to locating and engaging your key influencers.
Informative and persuasive sales letters might be difficult to write—but they can pay off big time. Learn five tips for writing engaging, informative, and concise sales letters that'll produce results.
Today, call to action buttons provide valuable insight into your prospects' minds. Learn how calls to action can be a lead-generation tool that engages and converts website visitors—and four key predictions on their future use.
Want to increase Web traffic via organic search without breaking the bank? Learn three key ways to build and promote content on your website—and attract and maintain more visitors.
For a small B2B business, the second most important page on its website after its homepage is its "About Us" page. Learn a highly effective formula for creating content for your "About Us" page, and how to track its effectiveness.
Running your small business is a labor of love, but promoting it with new, targeted efforts is necessary to connect with customers. Learn how to keep things fresh and stay connected when marketing your business.
To significantly boost sales, you've got to understand base sales drivers and marketing's impact on them. Learn from examples that illustrate how factor analysis can help you yield consistently high ROI.
Need to stay on top of stats? Let the games begin. Make monitoring metrics fun, and learn how to keep track of your social media, search engine optimization, and email marketing efforts.
Few companies realize the incredible power of their customer communities. Don't be one of them. Learn about the interplay between content and community and four engagement lessons that'll keep you ahead of the pack.
In April 2009, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos convinced Zappos founder Tony Hsieh to sell his online shoe store despite his initial reluctance. The story serves as a lesson to all marketers on building rapport with customers.
When soliciting business via email, there's a right way and a wrong way to grab your subscriber's attention and interest. Here's a real-life example—and a detailed critique—of an email solicitation gone awry.
Are your campaigns reaching the intended audiences? Learn how to create an effective multicultural marketing campaign—and avoid the common pitfalls many endure when marketing to growing ethnic groups.
Today's customers are more value-oriented and less loyal. Considering the increase in customer expectations, the competitive landscape, and the data deluge, marketers will need an analytics approach to succeed.
Both face-to-face and virtual marketing are essential components of any company's communications strategy. Learn the benefits of both approaches and how they can be combined to maximize return on investment.
Effective B2B lead generation, lead qualification, and lead nurturing programs are built on a rock-solid messaging platform—your offer. The most important aspect of a great offer is a deep understanding of what motivates potential buyers.
President Obama's 2008 presidential campaign was successful because he created and mobilized advocates. Brands can apply that winning strategy, too—if they invest in and drive customer advocacy programs.
With email inboxes more crowded than ever, your message's successful arrival in the recipient's inbox is half the battle. The second half of that battle is standing out from the crowd. Here are three tips that'll help you get noticed.
If you're a small business, building backlinks to your website can be an effective way to gain traffic and increase revenue—no matter what your industry. Here are five ways to kick off your link-building with ease.
Online marketers have a dirty little secret. They've got no idea what to do once they've earned enough social media "likes" to reach their goals. Here are five ways to turn those fans and followers into brand advocates.
More than ever before, brands today are shaped by customer experiences—including those online. Create positive digital experiences with these four tips that'll help you effectively build and manage your brand online.
To keep up with the ever-changing world of marketing, you've got to roll with the punches. As marketing channels emerge and evolve, so should your ideas, strategies, and metrics.
SMS marketing is a huge growth area for all businesses. It's cheap, easy to track, direct, and personal. Interested? Learn how to collect your customers' mobile numbers—and keep them open to receiving texts.
Raw leads are neutral entities at first, but you can turn them into real prospects. Learn how to qualify those with high-value potential and move them to closed-deal status.
What makes a great ideation session? The quality of the participants, the energy of the facilitator, and the range of creative exercises. But there are five guidelines that'll exponentially boost the odds of having a productive session.
Many businesses take great pains to build and nurture their offline brand, yet they drop the ball when they take their messages online. Avoid that problem with these five tips to connecting your online and offline identities.
Content is more than just words. Content experiences that are strategic, planned, structured, and measured can develop a new customer narrative that'll bring companies and customers closer than ever.
When a customer makes a purchase on your site, are you able to pinpoint exactly who to give credit to for the sale? Learn how Virgin Atlantic Airways tackled that problem.
Whether it's listening to an iTunes 30-second free snippet or grabbing a snack pack of chips, people like to sample. Apply that idea to marketing, and learn why it pays to create consumable, snackable content.
Your customers will soon wield more and more power, becoming the most powerful communications channel. Are you ready for the new world of marketing? Learn the five keys to building a crowdsourced future..
Buyers are now driving the buy/sell process once controlled by field sales, causing sales teams to miss their targets. But high-volume lead generation won't help. Here's why a "less is more" approach is the answer.
Do you know your audience? If you're taking a one-size-fits-all approach to website design, you could be alienating your core customers. Make sure you learn your audience's Web-usability priorities, behaviors, and preferences.
Social media marketing can broaden your reach, enable you to engage your audience, and help you create raving fans if you use it the right way. So why are so many businesses still treading water with social media marketing?
The key to achieving high rankings in search and creating buzz in social media is solid content. Fortunately, the Web provides free marketing data that can help you create relevant subject matter and learn about your customers.
What's the use in receiving stellar product reviews and making lots of sales if you can't pick up the pieces when something goes wrong? Here are eight ways to protect your brand when tackling customer problems.
Up until the mid '80s and early '90s, salespersons held most of the trump cards. To make decisions, buyers had to rely on the information that sellers brought to the table. But the buying/selling process has changed.
One of those reassuring little white lies we tell ourselves as marketers is this: People make linear decisions. It's simpler to draw straight lines about people's behavior, so to date we have typically pushed people through carefully scripted marketing processes. But, especially today, it just ain't so.
HGTV shows make those overnight home transformations look so easy. Many marketers approach their marketing plans the same way: a few days and a few dollars, and voila—a new marketing plan! But that won't get you results.
A company can successfully build its brand name in many ways, but perhaps the factor most important for its continued success is its relationships with clients. Learn to keep the magic alive—and get results.
For years, marketers have been working to perfect their sites to create just the right energy to ensure happy customers—and seamless selling. But it wouldn't be wise to transfer those same strategies and websites to the mobile space.
Right now, in countless corporate conference rooms, otherwise productive professionals are quietly snoring during yet another PowerPoint presentation. Such presentations are costly, ineffective, and distracting.
A customized prospecting list is a great resource for your cold calling, direct mail, and email marketing efforts. If you prefer to "do it yourself," here are nine steps for building a free B2B marketing database for your outbound marketing campaigns.
Where does the CMO fit in at your organization? How CMOs are positioned can affect the influence they have over major decisions. Here are four ways CMOs can gain the power needed to be effective.
Spice up your email campaigns. If you're sending out only promotional messaging, your campaigns could be bland. Here are four types of greetings you should include in your message stream.
A few weeks into Google+, and most at least know of the new social networking site, even if they haven't joined yet. Still resisting? Based on its current growth rate, you may want to jump in sooner rather than later. Or not.
Marketing is like baseball. If you can measure data well, you can unlock new insights about how to win. Here are some ways to keep score of your digital relationships—and get results.
Many companies have referral programs, but how many can say theirs converts at about three times the rate of other online campaigns and brings in over 500 product sales each month? Learn how one company did just that.
One-to-one marketing is time-consuming, but as any sales professional can tell you, the personal touch—communicating directly with the decision maker—can be very effective.
If you create or manage direct mail programs, the current economy probably has you pulling your hair out. Now is the perfect time to get back to basics and remind yourself of the following seven core principles of direct marketing.
Humans or machines—which are superior these days? Both human and machine translation can be used when taking marketing content global. Learn three translation techniques—and when to use them.
To get the most out of your online marketing, don't go it alone. Get powerful influencers in your corner to help spread the word about you. Here's how to build your team of evangelists and create a winning word-of-mouth campaign.
Are you increasing your inbound leads? What happens once you get them? Without successful conversion, leads are essentially useless. Here are six steps that'll immediately increase your lead-conversion rates.
When social media use first took off, many posed the question, "Is social media going to kill email?" But savvy email marketers soon realized they could use social media to their advantage. Here's how.
Smartphone use is exploding, providing new opportunities to connect and engage with target audiences. Learn how to optimize your mobile marketing campaigns, and effectively track and record mobile conversions.
Are you ready for the new marketing paradigm that's emerging? It's human-centric marketing, an evolution of the current customer-centric approach. And it will change the way we are introduced to and form relationships with brands.
Today's customers often rely on social networks to interact with brands. Marketers need to adapt to a customer-centric model and understand consumption patterns across social networks and the total digital ecosphere.
Without a well-crafted, clear, and consistent email design for your brand, your messages could be lost—or ignored—in the vast digital space. Here's how you should and shouldn't design your emails to get results.
Do you know why your customers behave as they do? People tend to have difficulty explaining exactly why they like a product, but using images can help you get to the root of the real drivers of customer behavior.
Want to improve your website's conversion rate? First, you'll need a professionally designed website that's been built with SEO in mind. Then, use these four tips to boost conversions and turn your visitors into customers.
Direct mail certainly isn't what it used to be, but email marketers can apply many of the theories used for direct mail campaigns to increase the value of their email marketing. Consider these key lessons.
Wouldn't it be good to know who your ideal prospects are before sending out emails, newsletters, tweets, or Facebook fan-page invites? Learn how to identify, find, and market to the right customers.
If you have a website that gets a good deal of traffic but generates no money, placing ads on your site may be the key to success. Learn how ad type, placement, and location can boost your website revenue.
Self-service business intelligence (BI) and social marketing are a match made in heaven. BI tools may be exactly what marketers need to demonstrate the value of social media. Consider these best-practices for gaining great insight.
How can you engage customers via real-time marketing? Marketers are adopting technology that can help recognize a customer's interests and provide actionable intelligence in real-time to any customer channel.
Is your online presence scattered about and disconnected? Learn how to centralize and connect your presence across different social sites by creating a social hub that'll get the right people to see your content.
What's the use in crafting clever emails if they get relegated to the bulk folder? Engagement rates will determine whether or not your emails will make it to the inbox. Learn how to drive engagement and get your messages read.
Just like hit Broadway shows, social media campaigns need to be evaluated, prepared, and tweaked before their big debuts. Here are six ways to perfect your campaigns to ensure they launch to standing ovations.
You might think you don't need a media relations program, or don't have the resources for it... but how cool would it be to have the media singing your praises? Use these tactics, and you will soon have a chorus of coverage.
Stories are how we make sense of the world. Learn how telling mini-stories will allow buyers to take your offering for a virtual mental test drive, to accept change—and to reject the status quo.
Many have pronounced tradeshow marketing dead. But with the right strategy, hard work, and flawless execution, tradeshows can still be a productive part of your marketing plan. Here are 12 ways to breathe new life into your tradeshows.
In all your business communications, you want to put your best foot forward—and that calls for careful writing. Careful writing enhances your credibility, so avoid making these common errors and keep your copy clean.
Think marketing automation platforms are just a way to make your marketing organizations more efficient? Wrong. These systems—if used properly—can do wonders for your interactions with prospects and customers.
Search engine optimization works best when it's the last, rather than the first, item on your website checklist. Don't miss these commonly overlooked steps that can vastly improve your site's performance—before you SEO.
It's easy to bore your customers to death with email when you're sending them the same type of message repeatedly. Keep them interested by weaving these message types into your email marketing stream throughout the year.
A content management system is not a search engine optimization (SEO) magic bullet, but it can make the SEO job less painful. Learn how today's tools make it easy to automate the important tasks of SEO management.
Many people detest making presentations. Such angst is unfortunate, because with preparation and practice, delivering presentations can be a great way to advance a career and positively promote a company's message.
Love it or hate it, Quora is a phenomenon that can't be ignored. It embodies a set of principles and trends that will be critical to the future of community management and social media marketing.
In today's market, your brand and reputation aren't always safe from the scorn of disgruntled and social-media-savvy customers. Looking ahead is critical to anticipating when something may go awry and taking meaningful action.
Like living things, brands pass through life cycles. Marketing approaches that worked well when a company was in its growth phase may not work later in its life. Learn how the four stages of a brand's life dictate its marketing needs.
This is the decade for geotargeted local advertising and bringing the global presence to the local user. Though it may seem daunting, getting local can be a simple and rewarding process if you follow these seven steps.
Attracting, engaging, and retaining customers in the digital age of marketing requires companies to adopt a true integrated multichannel strategy that is fueled by customer data and enabled by interactive marketing technology.
Respecting traditional branding ideas in the face of an increasingly interactive marketplace may best be described as "tradigital." Here are four ways to marry traditional and digital values at your organization and get results.
There is magic in passion. If you believe in your work, you will take more risks, bounce back from more humiliating rejections, and fight longer and harder for your projects. Here's how I did it.
Marketing automation is rapidly changing how we mine our data, create our programs, deliver our content, and continually refine, streamline, and automate. But getting results requires having (and retooling) the right team.
Engaged subscribers often make up only 30-40% of an email marketer's database, meaning at least 60% of recipients ignore communications. Here's how to keep your messages out of the trash bin—and stimulate engagement.
Many businesses simply fix issues when customers complain. But there's a lot of effort—and angst—that precedes an actual complaint. Learn how to funnel that energy positively and generate productive, lasting outcomes.
For years, a marketer's contribution to the bottom line was difficult to measure. But today's economic climate and competitive marketplace mandate that marketers quantify their value via campaign analysis.
Real-time marketing is constantly evolving, and it's more competitive than ever now. A wave of new technologies can help businesses enrich the customer experience—and boost results—in real time.
Differentiating a brand today requires expanding brand management from a traditional product, price, place, and promotion focus to a focus on customer experience as well. Here are four strategies that'll make your brand shine.
What should a business look for in a chief content officer—the key person responsible for sharing and creating its content? To succeed in this important role, your ideal candidate should have these critical (but not so obvious) skills.
The ever-increasing interdependence between search and social media should be viewed as an opportunity rather than a threat. Learn how to use both strategically, and boost your marketing effectiveness.
If children learn from fairy tale characters and their actions, online marketers can learn to evaluate and improve their online campaigns—and end up with a much healthier ROI—from fairy tale antics, too.
Do you know where you stand after a tradeshow? Research suggests that very few companies measure the tradeshow results that have a direct impact on funding and strategy. Gain insight and close leads with these tips on collecting, analyzing, and applying tradeshow data.
Though no one can deny the explosive popularity of social media, some hard-core justifications for its B2B use have yet to be laid out. Consider these four points before leaving social media out of your B2B marketing strategy.
The 2010 census results will be released this summer, and marketers should expect major demographic shifts. To cope with these changes, I recommend adopting three approaches for your email, mobile, and social marketing.
The corporate community has recently recognized the potency of using storytelling strategically—to position brands, transform business, and engage and align employees. Here are four distinguishing facets of strategic storytelling that'll help you better understand what it is and how it works.
Marketers tend to race headlong, hell-bent after the next shiny toy. But at what price? I'd suggest at the price of our credibility. Here are five things to consider before racing to deploy the next new shiny toy.
New tools are popping up each day to help marketers collect an abundance of data, but that data doesn't always translate to insight, let alone intelligence. Learn how to make the most of your time—and your data.
With any lead-based online marketing campaign, it's important to track the sources of your leads. Learn how a new technology, Dynamic Telephone Number Insertion (DTNI), can track website leads based on incoming sales calls—and how it falls short.
Guilty by association. That's a tough place to start when trying to launch a new brand. Learn how AIA, the nation's largest and oldest network of bail bond agents, rose above an undeserved reputation in no time.
Using negative keywords in your paid-search campaign can help you reach ideal prospects, reduce cost per click (CPC), and increase return on investment (ROI). Learn how to select negative keywords and create your list.
Increasing social media chatter about your brand is almost always beneficial and can help drive sales. Take it a step further: Highlight the social buzz around your brand in your email campaigns using these five tips.
For some of us writerly types, content comes easy. But extracting copy from others is like pulling bad teeth. But it needn't be. Use these winning strategies to unleash the inner writer in even your most reluctant team members.
A corporate blog can be a key component of any marketing strategy. It can help generate leads, demonstrate a customer-centric culture, and engage your audience. Here are 30 ideas for creating a well-rounded corporate blog.
Whether your new-business prospecting list is purchased or homegrown, your business can improve sales 100% or more. The key isn't just about how companies effectively work the phone but, rather, how they work the list.
Everywhere you turn, everyone is talking about mobile. Though B2Cs have been diving into mobile, B2Bs have been falling behind and missing prime opportunities to reach and engage their business audiences.
Warning: Some of your colleagues are afraid—deeply, irrationally afraid—of social media. How can you overcome their resistance against social media? Have them commit in writing, and follow these five steps.
Dealing with prospective clients, including the inconsiderate ones, is just part of the job for many of us. Fortunately, you can make the experience a little less frustrating and time-consuming. Here are a few tips I've picked up.
If we've learned anything in the last few years, it's that the old marketing model is broken. As a result of a seismic shift in influence, marketers are just now learning the big secret about motivation—people respond more favorably to intrinsic rewards than extrinsic rewards.
Having been neck-deep in the psychology of influence and the business of marketing while launching my own book, I had the opportunity to ask Guy Kawasaki about succeeding by embracing the "nobodies," thinking differently about demand generation, and enchanting your employees.
Content has always been king, but now the kingdom is much larger and more powerful than ever. If measured and managed properly, it can drive high return on investment (ROI). Here are three ways to boost ROI with content marketing.
Like a good meal with good friends, great presentations encourage sharing, interaction, and conversation. So sharpen your knives, oil your pans, and think like a top chef preparing a meal that will stimulate the senses, invite conversation, and demand involvement.
When executed well, a VoC program can provide insight about customers and what is important to them. Besides the obvious reasons why that's important to know, there are business benefits to making this type of investment of time and money.
Don't keep your marketing insight languishing in a silo, away from your core business processes. The technology exists to generate real business value from this often-untapped information, so take advantage of the chance to link knowledge about your customers to the rest of your business.
What are others saying about you and your company online? With so many online channels available to consumers and competitors, it's time you took control of your online reputation. Just follow these seven simple steps.
Corporate rebranding is intricate and time-consuming; but with the mergers, acquisitions, and ownership changes of the current dynamic business environment, it's a necessary endeavor. Avoid these pitfalls and use this checklist to ensure uniform, integrated distribution of your new brand/name.
When choosing someone to lead the charge on the social media front, do you want someone who's merely "good at social media" or someone who can achieve business goals? Here's how to hire the right person and get results.
B2B and B2C marketing have commonalities—and differences. Some B2C rules apply, whereas others have to be tweaked to fit B2B. The same is true for SEO. Here are three must-know SEO tips for B2B marketers.
If you're in the business of building lasting customer relationships, saying "thank you" is essential. Without it, you're at greater risk of customer flight—and you're a sitting duck for the competition. Here's how to thank your customers via email—the right way.
"We're not allowed to" is one of the most commonly uttered phrases about social media by marketing professionals in regulated industries. Here are three ways to cut through the red tape and get back in the game.
We all face giants, those competitors who have more people, budgets, and resources than we can ever hope to have. And despite the uphill fight, we're asked to not only compete but also win. It's possible. Here are three ways to topple your biggest competitors.
Gaining access to your prospects' inboxes is one of the most important things you can do. Building a solid email list of leads is the best way to grow your business, but just how do you get people to subscribe?
Sales letters are powerful selling tools. They are a simple, direct way to generate sales leads and orders. But for many businesspeople, they present a daunting writing challenge. Use these 10 tips to write a winning sales letter.
Let's face it: Business is changing. It's now being conducted through meaningful conversations between organizations and constituents. But it isn't easy. Here are seven rules to live by to achieve social success.
After laying out an 18-month plan for rebranding our 10-year-old company, we learned we had only six weeks to do it. Here is how we shifted from "OMG, they're crazy" mode into high gear, accomplishing the unthinkable in 42 days.
Everywhere you look, people are talking about "communities"—how to find them, how to join them, and... if you're lucky, how to successfully sell your products and services to their members. Here are five steps to engaging online communities and finding and maintaining your fanatics.
Brand Beckham —the husband-and-wife team of soccer star David Beckham and former Spice Girl Victoria—is worth an estimated £145 million ($226 million). How are they worth so much years after their prime? Here's how.
When I saw this ad, I thought it was a joke. A parody, a satire, a lampoon... anything but what it really is—totally legit and serious. If ever there was a marketing message completely unaware of the modern zeitgeist (and offensive), this ad is it! Here's what not to do when creating your next ad.
It's one thing to design a product to be greener, but it's all for nothing if the consumer uses it (or disposes of it) irresponsibly. Here are four examples of companies that went green (with their customers) and profited as a result.
Visits, pageviews, unique visitors, click-throughs... the list of metrics for digital marketing performance is endless. Often it's up to online marketers to decode the jargon to execs. Here are five ways to do just that.
Your online marketplace encompasses the vast sprawl of the Web. That means endless opportunity. But it also means that a single, centralized location point becomes more important than ever before. Learn how your website—and content—can turn visitors into loyalists.
Ever wonder how fans of Apple are the brand's biggest advocates? Marketing is about understanding your customers enough to empower them to be evangelists for your cause. Here's how to motivate your fans and get results.
When you have a fabled story attached to your business, it should be easy to succeed in social media, right? Wrong. Storytelling the right way and monitoring feedback will connect you with customers and get you results.
When you strip away the basic requirements expected of marketers—hard skills and experience—what's left? Everything that can't be said in a resume! Learn how to stand out and let your personal brand shine with a video bio.
If you are a content creator, use Content Rules to break through writer’s block. If you are a content manager, use the book to elevate the quality and impact of the output. Regardless of your level in the organization and your responsibilities, you will use this book to guide your work every day.
How do customer service champs maintain their loyal following? Three key speakers at this week's annual Customer Experience Leadership conference preview their talks and share best-practices on customer-centric cultures.
Filmmakers and marketers migrate toward one another because the key to their success is the same: story. Learn how Apple successfully created an emotional bond with its customers that transcends commerce and lives on.
Consumers are up to four times more likely to buy a product once they’ve held it in their hands. But it can be challenging to get people into stores, let alone within reaching distance of your product. To provide the masses with a virtual hands-on experience, Olympus tried a new augmented-reality technology.
Communicating with your customers via the mobile platform is an effective way to engage, share offers, and learn about your consumers. Learn how to reach your target audience and boost your mobile marketing ROI.
Our job as marketers is to acquire, grow, and retain profitable customer relationships to create a sustainable competitive advantage. Here are five factors for measuring (and maintaining) successful customer relationships.
What slowly began as a dorm room phenomenon has developed into one of the world's most essential business strategies. But before businesses jump headfirst into Facebook, they might want to take a closer look at the power Facebook wields over every account, page, and photograph.
Market research surveys, though expensive and out of reach for many, have been around for ages. But there is now a revolution brewing in MR that makes it something even the smaller players can fully participate in.
If you've invested a lot in social media, you hopefully have a growing number of people talking about you. If so, who are they? Which ones are driving the conversation? Do your social CRM measurement tools tell you anything?
Product value isn't defined by quality or price; it relies on marketing and customer insight. Without them, a $1,000-a-minute violinist is a $32-a-day subway performer. Learn to find your $1,000-a-minute market.
Though social media has brought clients and vendors together, it's still a tough sell to get clients to agree to do case studies. But the B2B marketers who produce dozens of case studies know a few secrets... and this article shares them with you.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a common theme of website-redesign projects these days. RFPs dedicate entire sections to the topic, but it's still confusing to some. Here are the must-know, fundamental basics of SEO.
The youth market is hotly pursued by scores of brands in so many industries. But the youth demographic is fraught with myths. To help reinvent your marketing efforts and boost results, here are five common myths—busted.
Humans need their stories to be fast, frugal, and fascinating. That's why marketers need to tell their stories in Micro-Scripts. Learn the greatest marketing secret about your customers that'll get you results.
Targeted campaigns have become a necessity for companies trying to meet the demand for customer personalization. Learn how to replace your mass outreach with tailored messages that'll reap results and increase brand trust.
This will be the year online advertising turns its attention to small and midsize businesses (SMBs). Many SMBs could get overwhelmed by the number of new online marketing tools. Here are seven trends that'll create the biggest opportunity—and confusion—for SMBs in 2011.
Many companies ditch email marketing because it doesn't yield results, but the truth is—it's underperforming because they don't care about it. Here's how you can give your email campaigns a little love, and watch them flourish.
So far in our crash course on conversion, we covered the economics of conversion, why homepages aren't the best way to get results, and how to effectively use landing pages and calls to action to boost conversion. Our final installment covers page optimization and testing.
Previously in our five-day crash course on conversion, we covered why homepages aren't the best choice for conversion success. Now, learn the five benefits of landing pages—and how to keep ad-to-page message alignment.
In part three of our five-day crash course on conversion, you'll learn why your homepage is likely not the right choice for conversion success—and four reasons why you might want to forego using it as your landing page.
How do people convert? In simple terms, they interact at a designated conversion point. They do this—and are triggered to do this—by a call to action. In part two of our five-day crash course in conversion, learn how to effectively use a call to action.
Conversion is the mechanism and process of pouring targeted consumers into, through, and out the other side of the marketing funnel. That is the essence of "Clicking Me Softly." Convince, don't coerce. Guide, don't deceive. In day one of this crash course, we'll explore the economics of conversion.
Rebalancing your marketing investments is the way to sustainable, predictable, and profitable growth. That's why it's crucial to analyze where your budgets are going and identify where the biggest returns on spend are.
Effective marketing-measurement helps companies guide scenario modeling, planning, and investments. Establishing key performance indicators (KPIs) is an integral part of such an initiative. Find your KPIs with these four steps.
List segmentation increases the relevancy of your email messages—resulting in higher open and click-through rates and increased sales. Not sure how to get started? Here are eight factors to consider when segmenting customers.
Simply slapping up social media content and hoping it works to build brand awareness and drive sales is not enough: "Social" is not the same as "sharing." And social content works best when it's shared. Here's how you can activate viral sharing of your content.
With Valentine's Day here, I'm reminded that marketing is like dating. You have to attract leads and differentiate yourself from the competition. Steer clear of these five mistakes, and build long-term relationships with your customers.
It's that time of year again. Valentine's Day is looming, and you're still alone. But are you marketing yourself well enough? Make these simple tweaks to any website—including your online dating profile—to improve success.
Whether customers are motivated by curiosity, personal interests, or commercial goals—it's crucial to know why they'd want to collaborate with your business. Here are three motivational forces that drive collaboration.
Outsourcing creative marketing functions may bring big cost savings to some, but going with an agency might not be the best route for others. Here are nine benefits and a few drawbacks to consider when contemplating outsourcing.
Tradeshows remain one of the most effective ways to market your brand. But it's essential to understand who your key targets are—and aren't. Implementing a well-thought-out engagement strategy will lead to qualified customers and increased event ROI.
As an editor and marketer, I think about how to translate marketing ideas into actionable steps. But sometimes it's good to take stock of the bigger picture. Here are some big trends I see shaping B2B marketing in 2011.
Many organizations struggle to capture, organize, and effectively act on Web data to drive marketing programs. Here is a five-step path to help marketers develop their capabilities and expand the use of Web analytics to deriving behavioral-insights that fuel interactive marketing.
If your idea of giving your website a social life entails having a "follow us on Facebook" link on your homepage, you might want to take a second look at your analytics. Learn why and how B2B marketers should socialize better on the Web and boost results.
Every industry—including the email marketing community—has its own jargon. Whether you send email campaigns (as a marketer) or receive them (as a consumer), you should know the following 17 terms to successfully navigate the world of email marketing.
Website redesigns have become an addiction. Every year or two, Marketing decides it's time to "freshen up the ol' site." But before you go out and rebuild the most important weapon in your marketing arsenal, make sure you have a well-defined plan for success.
As companies embrace the idea of aligning their decentralized sales and marketing teams, they sometimes make counter-productive decisions. To successfully align Sales and Marketing—and, ultimately close more deals—dodge these five common mistakes.
Cloud computing is a revolutionary operational model that's changing how IT is managed and delivered. Successfully marketing the cloud requires understanding it and effectively communicating its benefits to prospects.
Product, price, place, and promotion are the four Ps of marketing. These days, however, there's a frenetic obsession with promotion, confusion about place, and a hectic battle over price. Amid the chaos, that first P is often overlooked.
Writing is a vital component of various marketing-related tasks. Effective writing can improve sales pitches, enhance brand value, and perfect ad campaigns. Spruce up your marketing with these five tips.
Sales and marketing best-practices are universally desirable—but, too often, elusive. Here are seven solid best-practices that address the misalignment between Sales and Marketing and help increase sales.
Whether you're just beginning to present to audiences, or are a veteran speaker—becoming a speaking champ requires attention to detail. Begin with these nine, nuanced tips to master your speaking skills.
Are you dissatisfied with the results of your Google AdWords ads? A low "Quality Score" could be to blame. If you've tried all else but aren't seeing results, give these three unconventional tips a shot at bumping up your score.
Online reputation management (ORM) has become a hot term in digital marketing. But few marketers know exactly how to use it to their advantage. Learn how to tackle the Top 3 ORM challenges, and let your brand shine.
How many Facebook fans or Twitter followers you have isn't necessarily the best indicator of how many people are receiving your message. But a new breed of engagement metrics can give you those answers, and help mold your messaging to generate the highest levels of engagement.
2011 is here, and that means B2B marketers have just been evaluating plans and allocating budget. Though each company is different, the same five trends will affect them all—and marketers who capitalize on them are better positioned to reach their goals.
Gaining PR campaign momentum can seem impossible without the availability of your client contacts or the participation of the management team. Learn seven ways to overcome these challenges, and watch your PR campaign soar.
When it comes to tradeshow participation and building brand awareness, having a well-defined communications strategy before, during, and after the event is crucial to maximizing your return on investment (ROI).
Using social media as a comprehensive, effective marketing channel for your organization can be met with challenges or seem daunting. It doesn't have to be. This four-phase adoption model will help your company see the bigger picture when it comes to social media.
Studies show that online video improves email click-through rates, sales conversions, and search engine rankings; it's no wonder marketers are funneling more budget dollars into this tantalizing medium. Learn eight ways to make your video content last 18 months.
Do you use freelancers to keep up with the online content boom, despite your fear of compromising your brand? Here are six simple steps to keeping freelancers in line with your brand identity.
Although content marketing spans across industries and company sizes, B2B marketers recognize the need to improve the effectiveness of their efforts, according to new MarketingProfs research of B2B marketers. Our analysis of the survey data reveals a dozen recommendations for creating relevant content that will have a direct impact on sales.
How does advertising yield improve when targeting digital ads to certain audiences? How much influence does the type of content users are reading when the ad is shown have on yield? This article summarizes the results of an extensive study on the subject.
Marketing accountability was a key topic of the last decade, and as 2011 kicks off—it looks like that's not going to change. Learn the five marketing-accountability resolutions that will improve marketing measurement and performance as you start your new year.
Like it or not, your content is constantly battling through the daily avalanche of contemporary media to reach its intended audience. Learn The Five Commandments of Editorial Excellence and conquer your content.
Staying ahead of personal-branding trends will keep you visible and vital in your marketing career. Learn these 11 personal-branding trends for 2011, and let your brand take center stage.
In an Internet business environment that expects immediate results, online marketers have overlooked the power of SEO, or organic search, as a top revenue-generating channel. It can also teach you how to run your business in a smarter way.
When it comes to social marketing, there's power in numbers. Our thoughts and behavior patterns are shaped by the opinions and actions of others, especially those we know and respect. Find out how to grab and keep their attention by using "social proof."
Networking is the best job-search method and generates more than 80% of new hires. Constantly nurturing your relationships and strategically developing new contacts puts you on the inside track to plum job leads. Learn how to flesh out your network in just 12 days with these job-market secrets.
Cloud computing is a transformative technology that is expected to have a revolutionary impact on the business of marketing. Learn how you can gain a competitive advantage using the three platforms of cloud computing.
Retailers, marketers, and service providers are at an ideal point to capitalize on a massive opportunity to elevate the classic brick-and-mortar shopper experience by embracing emerging mobile technologies. Don't miss the opportunity to use these budding technologies to evolve the customer experience and boost profitability for your company.
Warning: Social media may be heading for a big crash in 2011, and it could happen because businesses don't know how to measure the ROI of their social media campaigns. Find out how the Fortune 500 use social media, learn the three categories of social media measurement, and discover the one formula you need to dodge the Great Social Media Crash of 2011.
Worldwide sales of mobile devices were reportedly up nearly 14% in the second quarter of 2010 over the previous year. As the mobile marketing space continues to balloon, keeping up doesn't have to be daunting. Here are 10 technological design issues you'll need to know about to stay ahead of the game.
A company's communications strategy plays a key role in reinforcing brand identity. For many, that includes logos, brochures, online presence, public relations, advertising or packaging. But what about tradeshows? How often have you attended tradeshows on behalf of your client, noticed an exhibitor, and wondered: What exactly does this company do?
Many marketers aren't using triggered-email campaigns efficiently and are missing the chance to maximize customer lifetime value. Learn how up-sell/cross-sell and reactivation campaigns can boost conversion.
As social media becomes a strategic communication and marketing channel, the way you manage it must itself become more strategic. This article lays out the four phases of implementing a social-media management system in your business and outlines the 20 steps necessary for running a successful social-media function.
Most organizations try to predict retention rates based on customer-satisfaction scores. The reality is that in B2B, user satisfaction does not equal customer retention. Remember, most customers who leave a company leave satisfied. Here's why... and what you can do about it.
The latest recession has profoundly altered consumer behavior. As home values plummet, stock portfolios shrink, and company profits erode, prospects are less likely to make purchases, and thrift is back in vogue. Time to stop selling; instead, become a trusted adviser and start helping your customers.
If you market your business online, chances are you've bought more than one domain name over the years. It's important to periodically review all your domains, even the old ones pointing to an old microsite promotion. If you don't, you may be losing out on traffic or money—or, even worse, you may be facilitating a brand catastrophe.
How do you avoid the deep deadly pit of uninspired corporate content? Simple. If you want people to come to your site, and stay there, your content should be as rich and varied as that of a good consumer magazine. Offer that kind of variety, and you'll really build a community.
To make customer experience stick as part of your operation, you need to have an organized and phased approach for integrating it into your organization. Here, based on working with scores of clients from around the world, is the real-world approach for how to integrate customer experience into your operation.
Small-business owners often feel the cash-flow pinch, especially when they're starting out. Because their resources are limited, they may feel that their marketing efforts have to be limited as well. Yet what they may not realize is that they already have some powerful marketing tools at their disposal.
Simply put, "app-vertising" is the use of applications to deliver branding, messages, content, or functionality to reach target audiences. And if you're looking for a tool that offers affordability, ease of use, and significant return on investment (ROI), then app-vertising may well be right for you.
It's a lot easier to maintain a robust, active blog when you have many contributors—not just one person responsible for writing compelling content, day in and day out, rain or shine, in sickness and in health. One place to look for help is to your own employees—from throughout the organization, not just the usual suspects from Marketing or PR.
Most prospects are not experts in purchasing the types of products and services you offer. So what do they do? They turn to testimonials because testimonials are readily available and because they hope to learn from others' experiences.
This article looks at the first two of four triggered-email campaigns that no email-marketing program should be without: Welcome and onboarding emails, and remarketing emails (such as resending to nonoperners and clickers but nonconverters).
To make customer experience stick as part of your operation, you need to have an organized and phased approach for integrating it into your organization. Without it, customer experience becomes one more customer-focused tactic that your company tried for a while and then abandoned.
Webinars are a wonderfully robust and lively marketing tool, and an effective way to reach your prospects or buyers. Or, rather, they can be... if done correctly. Here are three key challenges you need to address if you want to call your webinar a success.
Large retailers can count on Black Friday to turn their books from red to black, and online retailers have Cyber Monday to cash in afterward. This year, though, we also have Small Business Saturday. So how can a small business get the upper hand on these three monumental shopping days?
Even before the recent furor over Amazon's sale of the self-published "The Pedophile's Guide to Love and Pleasure," and the subsequent less-than-stellar and social-media-inept response by Amazon, it seemed clear that the pioneering e-commerce giant had begun to fall behind the social-commerce curve.
Many people are bullish about growth prospects now that the Great Financial Crisis seems largely behind us. But a lack of planning and preparedness will sink many of ambitions to start a business. These four questions can help structure your thinking before you make some important decisions.
To launch your marketing programs, you need the green light from your internal executives—and that means building the business case for new media and new programs. Here's how to convince B2B executives that mobile poses a high-opportunity, high-ROI marketing channel—and can make a significant impact with their business-centric audiences.
Customer retention is ultimately driven by value. Even the best segmentation, targeting, positioning, creative messaging, or promotion with flawless execution will fall flat in the absence of value. To succeed, customer retention must be a top-down, companywide initiative. Here's how to get there in six steps.
Companies have discovered that a virtual-engagement strategy provides a new channel for reaching target audiences. Virtual-engagement platforms remain open 24/365 for connecting with prospects, customers, and employees around the globe. No wonder virtual engagement is on its way to becoming a key component of innovative companies' marketing mix.
Some of the funniest comedy skits have been spoof TV spots—and they closely follow proven DRTV principles to make their sketch more believable and more poignant: They grab your attention; they frame a problem that needs to be solved; they state their offer as the solution; they show the product in use; and they ask for the order—a lot.
Leading with price in your messaging suggests your brand has nothing else to say or show for itself. And that's not good for a host of reasons.
You can segment your list and version your broadcast campaigns with different offers and creative, but the real power of personalization and relevance lies in trigger-based email, because behaviorally targeted trigger-email campaigns get 30% higher open and click-through rates and three times the conversion rates of broadcast email.
During the holiday season, how do you reconcile the high-pressure needs of your small business with your family's desire to roast chestnuts on an open fire? Having a virtual phone service can help, as can these 12 small-business phone tips for the 12 days leading up to Christmas.
The success of your email-marketing campaigns cannot be determined without proper focus on what reports are telling you, and reporting on click-throughs is a critical way of determining how engaged your audience is. But you need to be able to translate link reports into successful email-marketing campaigns.
Your sales and marketing organizations are the most critical links to customers. The alignment of those two organizations determines how well a company attracts buyers and sells to them. The relationship is more than just a simple handoff at the point a lead is generated; it is the foundation for profitable revenue growth.
In a world where speed and agility are essential to success, most organizations still operate slowly and deliberately. But the MBA-style approach of working off spreadsheets that predict what to do months into the future is no help when news is breaking in your industry today. The Internet has fundamentally changed the pace of business, compressing time and rewarding speed.
On the Web, customers want details, facts, comparisons, and feedback from other customers. They avoid the fluff and waffle and marketing hype. What the Web represents, more than anything else, is a shift in power: away from organizations, toward customers. Brands, politicians, even popes are being questioned more than ever.
The path to social-media success is filled with sinkholes that cost you time and relationships. Clearly defining your plan, documenting the process and details, and revising the plan as needed is the difference between profitable social-media engagement and being just another corporate presence.
On any email list, there will be three populations: those who love you, those who like you, and those who are just hanging in there. This article focuses on by far the most appealing sector: the people who love you. So how do you figure out who's who? Here are five ways to identify brand loyalists on your email list.
Your social-media manager or director is a critical and strategic hire who will be responsible for formulating and executing your strategy, as well as educating your whole organization and aligning it with that strategy. How can you sift the wheat from the chaff? Here are the seven virtues of a social media leader.
Although most online campaigns seek to drive conversion-based goals, many still use the click or CTR as the primary metric—mainly because it has been traditionally used to measure success and because it's easy to measure. But that's no excuse for making a mistake that's costing marketers $1 billion a year.
The value of strong questionnaire design is all too often not fully appreciated in the market research community. But the fact is, you can never fully recover from a poorly written and designed questionnaire—no matter how great you are at data analysis, manipulation, interpretation, and presentation.
Online Web forms that capture customer data in exchange for content—or another kind of information or service—are often the first point of contact customers have with your business. So, why are they so awful? Or overly ambitious?
Is the buzz around Facebook fading? That is just what a couple of recent studies suggest, so perhaps it's time to bring your fans home—back to your website. Marketers should give serious thought to supplementing their social-media strategies with a strong content-driven website.
Interactive media platforms are a global phenomenon, occurring in all markets regardless of their level of economic, social, and cultural development. Therefore, when translating content into other languages, it's critical to define terms clearly. But what is the best approach?
Time is today's scarcest resource, and everyone is suffering from attention overload. Many marketers have therefore resorted to just getting louder (literally and figuratively). Rather than pushing (and annoying) customers, one way to break through the cacophony is via triggers that redirect customer behavior.
Those who think mixed martial arts athletes are merely cavemen pounding each other for sport need to realize that they may well be the strongest personal-branding experts in the marketing world. Those "brutes" are very often better at social media marketing than many self-proclaimed gurus.
People are always looking for the next great thing in email marketing, and these days much of the talk involves social-networking integration. But now that email and online media have gotten much more sophisticated, there is one other technology—video, long considered taboo in email marketing—that can be integrated into your campaigns.
Although the ability to measure tangible results when using social media is still evolving, companies are realizing substantial savings from their social-media initiatives.
Now that fall is here, you are likely tackling your marketing plan and budget. The pressure for marketing organizations to justify their spending, prove their programs' contribution to the organization, and demonstrate value is only increasing. These three steps can help ensure you are properly aligned with your organization and help you secure your marketing budget.
There's more to Twitter than amassing followers and broadcasting your latest news. Properly engaging in the right discussions can earn customer goodwill and brand awareness. The real-time conversations that fill the Twitterverse offer an abundance of market insight.
Who said small firms can do business only with other small firms? If you can get your foot in the door, working for Fortune 500 companies is the smart way to grow a profitable marketing firm. This is how one small company found ways to turn its small size into a competitive advantage and now works with global giants.
Lost user confidence is but one cost of sloppy code. Attempts to fix it can rack up thousands of dollars in consultant fees. And poorly coded Web assets can hinder marketing-campaign performance. All the beauty and elegance in the world will never compensate for the ugly repercussions of improper rendering.
Imagine making your events (marketing meetings, conferences, tradeshows, etc.) available to a much larger, highly attentive audience that can conveniently gather and exchange information, browse exhibits, receive product demos, provide feedback, and network—all via their computer.
On any email list, there will be subscribers who signed up and never again showed signs of life. In email lingo, we call such list members "inactives." They may have opted in to a specific offer, then disengaged, or they were in the market for your product or service but aren't any more. Here are four ways you can deal with inactives.
Leading and misleading questions always yield questionable data, based on which you are highly likely to report findings that can misguide stakeholders. Moreover, decisions they make based on such data could cause an organization's failure rather than lead to its success. Here's how to diagnose and repair those faulty questions.
This final installment in a series of articles on achieving relevance in direct digital communications discusses the fifth vital key: developing and maintaining a plan. Achieving relevance requires you to define a step-by-step approach to overcoming each hurdle.
Welcome to the power of the testimonial: A potent plug can make people as much as seven times more likely to buy or try than if they saw a paid advertisement. Email-based testimonials can be just as persuasive, but the key is to maximize their power. Here's how to do that...
If you're like many professional service providers, you get a lot of business from referrals. You get them because you're an expert and you provide excellent service. Nevertheless, that's not enough. Several things need to happen first: In fact, the referral process parallels the buying process that prospects use to make purchase decisions.
With short message service (SMS) reaching 5 billion mobile phones around the world, marketers can no longer ignore the significance of texting as a marketing channel. Some consumers, however, are hesitant to take advantage of those mobile marketing programs, in part because of the fees associated with branded messages. Enter free-to-the-end-user (FTEU) messaging.
As the mobile channel continues its rise to prominence among marketers and consumers, the lines between the digital marketing and the physical marketing worlds have become blurred. If mobile is meant to connect the two worlds, a new approach to data management is crucial for marketing to remain effective and relevant.
There's not merely buzz but outright din surrounding social media and how "everyone" is using it to win hearts and minds, and maybe even help grow business. But before you jump in, take pause to reframe your thinking about social media—away from the tactical, and toward the strategic. Doing so will ensure that instead of adding to the noise you're positioning your organization to win.
Keyword discovery is a huge component of pay-per-click advertising. You need to find relevant keywords so you can create topical ad groups, text ads, and landing pages. But for truly cost-effective, high-ROI PPC campaigns, it's equally important to find negative keywords—those that aren't relevant to your offerings or customers—so you don't waste ad spend.
The highly effective strategy of creating informational content that's valuable to prospects and customers has been with us for decades. Demonstrating expertise, becoming an authority, providing "how-to" information, and speaking about subjects of interest or relevance to your market are a superb way of promoting or driving market engagement for B2C or B2B brands.
When it comes to social media, the one thing that small and midsize businesses want to know is this: Is it worth it? Yes, it is. Here are five quick reasons why.
The rules of social media are just now being written, so they are more like guidelines than well-defined best-practices. In other words, it doesn't make sense to blindly follow rules someone else has set. There's only one sure way to know what works for you in social media: Test it. Here are five five lessons learned from one practitioner who tested the social media waters.
Marketers have rushed to embrace Facebook, Twitter, blogs, customer ratings and reviews, and other social media platforms—inviting customers to comment on their products and services across the Web. The result? Content overload. Here are eight tools to help you tame and respond to the otherwise overwhelming flow of information.
It's a global trend: Consumers want to buy from, employees want to work for, and other businesses want supplies from, socially responsible enterprises. Small-business owners can use the corporate social responsibility trend to improve their own businesses and stand out from competitors by taking the following steps.
Does the phrase "open source" scare you? You're not alone. Many marketers hear the phrase and cringe. However, open source not only offers the collective creativity of a large, vibrant community but also promises a new level of customer engagement, brand equity, and a competitive edge for today's marketers.
Just because marketers are jumping on the interactive-marketing bandwagon doesn't mean things on the interactive side are all rosy. The decreasing numbers for print don't necessarily mean a particularly high ROI for all digital initiatives. Still, there is opportunity—but you need embrace a multichannel approach. Catalogs are a great example.
Data from mixed-mode questions are hard, if not impossible, to interpret accurately. But such flawed survey questions abound, perhaps because at first blush they seem entirely workable. Here's why they're not—and how to avoid them in your survey instruments.
Most job seekers start their job-search process with many of the same ineffective steps—holdovers from a time before the rise of technology and social media. A job search, like successful business projects, should be expertly strategized, organized, and implemented.
Content is moving from being among the final considerations of a Web-development project to being front and center in a digital-marketing strategy. And, more and more, brands are recognizing that a strategic approach to content is becoming important. To help, here's a simple 10-step systematic process for formulating a content strategy.
It's no secret that loyal employees are the driving force behind solid, stable, and profitable companies, whereas unhappy, disgruntled, and disloyal employees can quickly bring any company to its knees. Companies that lack employee commitment can change their culture and build loyalty from the inside out by following these eight steps.
If you've ever manned a tradeshow booth, you're familiar with that sense of urgency to bring back home a stack of qualified leads. And, with so many other exhibitors vying for the same prize, you may find yourself behaving a bit like a carnival barker in your efforts to lure visitors. Luckily, there's a more dignified option: Let your tradeshow booth do the work for you.
Targeting the right audience is the key to success for any marketing campaign. Up-to-date contact information, valid email addresses, and the tools to segment a list accurately are must-haves for any marketer, yet they are by no means assured in the lists purchased from business-contact vendors.
More and more businesses are using social media to get their messages out. And because they are user-driven, implementing them is relatively easy and inexpensive; too often, however, social-media marketing communication is undertaken without an integrated strategy. Below, the resulting five most common errors that businesses commit in using social media.
If you're using direct marketing to sell your products and services, then you know that it's all about making an offer. But are you testing your offers to find out what work best? There are hundreds of offers and thousands, perhaps millions, of offer variations you can test. However, some offers are proven winners. Here are 59 of them.
If no one's reading your email campaign, no matter how great it is, it's not going to make any sales. You need a great email list filled with customers and prospects who have said yes to receiving information from you and who will be moved to action if the time or offer is right. But that list needs to grow if you want your business to grow.
Since the Internet began, some 40 years ago, most of its content has been free to access. Today, that is still the case. However, paid content is one of the fastest-growing areas of Internet business, generating more than $15 billion in revenues in 2009 in the US alone. With so much freely available on the Web, what type of content will people actually pay for?
Social media can be an effective marketing tool for small businesses. However, different businesses have different needs and different reasons for adopting social media. Regardless of the reason, social media can serve as an efficient, low-cost marketing tool for businesses seeking to generate measurable business results.
Perhaps because the difficult economic climate has forced marketers into a more tactical mode, with leaner teams trying to execute more with less, marketing strategy has taken a back seat. Whatever the reason, the lack of a strategy has huge implications on an organization's marketing effectiveness.
Whether you're marketing an e-commerce, informational, or B2B site, your site search is a critical feature of your site and deserves your time and attention. And by making some small improvements to your site search, you can reap higher conversion rates, more leads, and happier repeat customers.
About 10%-20% of all emails you send—even to people who requested them—will get accidentally routed to the junk/spam folder. What about that other 80%-90%? Those emails may not be spam, but they will have definitely broken some of these six rules for avoiding a one-way trip to email oblivion.
If you want to drive traffic to your website, which media should you use? Too many people suffer from an "oil and water" mentality when it comes to mixing online and offline media. But they work well together. And when you need to drive online traffic, an integrated approach can often work wonders.
Historically, companies that monitor links to their websites haven't looked kindly upon inbound "deep links"—links to site pages other than the homepage or other top-level pages. But the truth is that deep links can actually be really good for a website. Here are five benefits they provide.
Marketing dashboards are all the rage. Perhaps because every other management function has a dashboard, VPs of marketing feel they need to have one, too. Or maybe because dashboards can be a great tool to help you manage your business processes. But it is entirely possible you could be deploying a useless software-based tool.
Lead nurturing has high potential value when your acquisition programs have generated responses from interested prospects, but those prospects are not yet ready to buy. The 2010 Lead Generation Marketing ROI Study found that six in 10 lead generation marketers (58%) agree that nurturing stalled leads is under-funded relative to the potential value.
E-commerce sites can be particularly challenging for search-engine optimization (SEO) because they tend to lack unique, relevant content. The challenge can be easily (though not necessarily quickly) overcome with these five content techniques that can help you search-optimize e-commerce websites.
Poorly designed questions and scaling problems can derail your research efforts faster than you can say "the cat in the hat"! To help you avoid a few of the more common and onerous problems, this article explores two separate but related questionnaire-design issues: matrix questions and unbalanced scales.
When people think of branding, they often think of just a logo or business card. Or they think of the opposite extreme, such as Apple, and so assume they will never have the resources to "brand effectively." But branding on a budget is more than possible, and dispelling these five popular myths is key to starting that process and transforming your business.
People tend to open an email based on the two things they can see in their inbox: the From name and the Subject line. If recipients receive an email from a sender they do not recognize or trust, they are less likely to open it. If an email with a "suspicious" Subject line lands an inbox, it's most likely to be deleted or marked as spam.
Organizations need to understand the logical progression of leveraging mobile short-message service (SMS) technology in enterprise environments. Here are some common questions and concerns companies have when considering SMS—and some answers to help them jump over the hurdles.
The Grateful Dead teaches us to show our brand's playfulness and to trust that our customers will recognize our brand even if it looks a little "different." By loosening up your brand, you allow your company to show its personality—and, by extension, its ability to roll with the punches.
Previous installments of this article series have describe the importance of relevance in direct digital marketing and three of the five keys to achieving a relevance-centered approach. This article looks at the fourth key: taking an incremental approach to creating more relevant, valuable communications every day.
Eigen values are what marketers use when we're doing our best work. Once we view everything that our brand does through the prism of eigen-value standards, it changes how we launch our websites, train our customer-service people, and hire our employees. Want to see how an eigen value plays out in real life? Look at Vibram and its FiveFingers shoe.
Part 1 and Part 2 of this article covered the first 10 of the 13 worst marketing mistakes. Here are the rest of the top 13 marketing mistakes you should avoid at all cost.
Marketing automation—one of the new buzzwords in marketing—bridges the gap between lead generation and the sales force. Its goal is to improve Sales and Marketing alignment by passing over only sales-ready leads. There are really good reasons why you should be interested in marketing automation. There are really bad ones, too.
If you're like most people, you live in a world where blame often happens in a systematic and predictable way. People simply have a tendency to believe the fault lies with someone else—and that someone else can be you. Of course, the process can work in the opposite direction, too... as when you are always right and someone else is wrong.
Most marketers are eager to achieve a level of engagement with current and prospective customers, but the majority stop dead in their tracks when they consider this question: Where am I going to find the time to develop all the content necessary to do it? But here's a little secret: Engaging customers online with content does not have to be difficult.
This article originally addressed the seven worst marketing mistakes. But seven wasn't nearly enough. The list grew until it reached unlucky 13. Here is the next batch of marketing mistakes you should avoid at all cost.
The right message, even if delivered via a suboptimal media mix, can have significantly more impact on a campaign's returns than the most effective media mix delivering a suboptimal message.
What is the process at your organization for leads that come in through a Web form via your website? Do you give them to a sales rep for follow-up? And do your sales reps sometimes complain that those leads aren't qualified? If your organization is like most, the answer is a resounding yes. But what else are you supposed to do with those leads?
This article originally addressed the seven worst marketing mistakes. But seven wasn't nearly enough. The list grew until it reached unlucky 13. Here are the first four.
The robots are here to help. Whether in the future you'll be tucked into bed by a robot is uncertain, but what is certain is that sometime in the next five years you're going to interact with a virtual agent on the Web, if you don't do so already.
Many companies in crowded markets continue to go head to head against vendors with similar (or better) products. It's scary to narrow your focus to a smaller set of prospects, but if you address their needs—the "jobs" they want done—before your competitors do, you can boost wins, revenues, and morale.
Over half of the responding companies to a recent survey indicated that the biggest barrier to an effective measurement strategy is a lack of budget and other resources; fewer than one-third selected any other issue. How can we break out of the vicious circle and improve our effectiveness and accountability?
To achieve top performance from the sales team, a manager needs the skills and tools to provide clear answers to five simple but profoundly important questions. Together, those questions offer a road map for effective management and a guide to the key skills a high-performing sales manager needs.
There has been much debate in the search community about whether it is proper or even hypocritical for a search engine marketing company to use other forms of advertising unrelated to Internet marketing. The naysayers generally have a common argument: A quality SEM company "shouldn't need" to engage in any form of offline marketing.
Those who write in corporatese love a paradigm, whether it's new, shifting, or otherwise. And they would never think of simply using something when they can leverage it. But there's a better way.
Scotts Miracle-Gro Company, like many consumer packaged goods companies, has no direct online sales channel—but it finds that email-newsletter subscriptions boost purchases on average 1.5 times annually. Perhaps the reason the Scotts Lawn Care Update email newsletter is so successful is its commitment to the roots of the program—customer service.
When used systematically, market research is an ongoing two-way communication between your business and its target audience. Treated as such, market research becomes a constant source of information about opportunities for improvement and innovation. And via the Web, you now have a direct round-the-clock link to every potential customer.
The key questions businesses should ask are, What am I doing to optimize my own site to drive social participation and socially referred traffic? and, How do I measure success?
Customer loyalty matters, because selling more to current customers is easier and cheaper than finding and selling to new ones. Loyal customers tend to buy more, more regularly. And frequently they will recommend your business to others. Here are 10 tips for you to consider to deepen relationships with customers.
The previous installments of this series of articles covered the idea of relevance in digital marketing and discussed the first two of five keys for achieving relevance. This installment covers the third: tactical execution in the form of segmentation and optimization.
A brand audit enables a firm to lay a solid foundation for management and oversight. The following approach to brand auditing is based on a robust audit methodology that focuses on seven key areas of marketing capability and can be used to assess the marketing activities of any firm.
Although much of what you might have heard recently about Facebook likely involves privacy concerns, many of the updates coming out of Facebook's F8 Developer Conference this past April should only make it easier for marketers to engage with their key stakeholders on the social-networking giant.
If yours is like a lot of sales organizations, it may have intensified prospecting efforts lately as old customers downsized, cut spending, and, in some cases, went out of business. The problem is that prospecting is often time-consuming, costly, wasteful, and hard on the sales team's morale. Why? They hear a very large number of "No's" for every "Yes." Here's how to beat that problem.
To be an effective marketer on Twitter, you must first stop thinking like one... because marketing on Twitter requires a shift in your mindset: Twitter is all about simple conversations; you can't use press releases, marketing copy, or other one-way communication tactics and expect results.
It's hard to stand out. There are myriad other marketing professionals with seemingly similar credentials and experience. Yet differentiation is key to your success. How do you cut through the clutter and get people interested in who you are and what you have to offer?
Is it your job to listen to and analyze social-media messages and direct customer feedback about your product, brand, or service? Effective listening and insights analysis allow you to track not just the volume but also the meaning of online conversations across a complex web of consumer-interaction channels.
The iPad has the potential to provide an all-in-one tablet that people are going to use everywhere—on their couch, while on vacation, and from all the places in between. No doubt brands are salivating at the chance to use the device to connect with consumers. Since many are hitching their wagons to the device—how can you, as a marketer, take advantage of the iPad?
If you are like many B2B marketers, you have great content-delivery tools—in the form of marketing-automation or campaign-management software—but a short supply of effective content to push to the market. Here's how to create content for the four stages of the buying cycle.
Most companies do a fairly good job keeping pace with technologies. But the harder, yet more rewarding, work involves keeping up with how people use the Internet to learn, communicate, shop, and entertain themselves. By matching your Web presence to your customers' Web habits, you stand the best chance of winning their confidence and cash.
There's no shortage of advice about which strategies work or don't work for services marketing. Yet they seem to conflict with each other regularly. So what's the scoop? Which ones work? It's less a question of which ones work than it is which ones will work for you given the dynamics of what you sell.
Facebook has more than 400 million active users who collectively spend more time on the platform than on any other website in the world, sharing detailed information about their likes, dislikes, and preferences. No wonder advertisers are salivating at the chance to reach Facebook users with precisely targeted ads.
To some, June means the official start of those lazy days of summer. To many retailers, though, June is a busy month, because it's when they pick up extra revenue from those shopping for "Dads and Grads"—Father's Day and graduation season. How do you get your share of that revenue?
most marketers realize how important good email integration with other marketing (especially digital) channels and sales systems is to success. But once you've created a regular email-communications program, are you remembering to strategically use email to strengthen and encourage relationships with your list members in other channels?
Every time we hear or read "Hispanic market," we also hear the tagline "acculturation level." So what is acculturation, and why is it vital to take it into consideration? Because without segmenting this increasingly important market by level of acculturation, you'll never be able to speak their language.
My first-ever two blog posts have received 159 comments and have been tweeted 272 times. I'm simply stunned. But my foray into blogging has shown me that it can be a Herculean task to keep up with responding to comments and tweets while balancing clients and life. The reality is that this first week as a blogger has kicked my butt.
Conversation marketing. Engagement marketing. Social media. Earned media. Consumer-generated media. User-generated Content. Crowdsourcing. Outsourcing. Co-creation. No matter what you call it, the evolution of the way brands reach and interact with consumers has led to mass experimentation with the alluring, yet often hard-to-execute marketing tactic: the video contest.
With social media a hot ticket item and social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube making it easy to share, people are spending a lot of time offering free advice and sharing knowledge publicly, yet they are not asking for anything in return. But it's OK to ask.
Unhappy customers are typically more vocal than satisfied customers, which means that new prospects coming to the market will more likely hear negative things about your brand. Here's what you can do.
The technology puzzle is no longer an area of operations that marketing-focused professionals can afford to ignore or defer to other entities within the organization. Marketing must influence technology if we are to achieve relevance in direct digital marketing.
At Kadient—a company that now delivers interactive Sales Playbooks—customer satisfaction is more important than ever. As the company began development of a SaaS product for a new market, here's how the management team readied a formal process for gathering customer feedback.
To successfully reach the Hispanic audience, marketers should understand that what works with the general market can't simply be transferred to the Latino market. Instead, messages must be culturally adapted to capture the thought, meaning, and feeling, not just the words.
Most companies know they need to pay attention to social media, because it provides the richest data sets of consumer information that have ever existed. So brands know there's an opportunity, and they fear being left out if they aren't tapped in. But what's the difference between monitoring social media and listening to social media?
Is there a basic philosophy regarding organic search engine optimization (SEO) and paid-search advertising? Is one tactic more favorable than another? How do you know which channel to pursue? Should you do both—and in what proportions?
This is the strategy: Get company executives or yourself published in an editorial context for significantly greater marketing credibility than self-publishing another whitepaper that just sits on your website.
For Marketing to fully achieve maturity in marketing performance measurement and management—or just take it to the next level—the role of, and skills within, the marketing-operations function at a minimum needs to address three Ps: planning, process, and performance management.
You must be realistic about the size and characteristics of your target market. So what do you do when your prospects are few in number and elusive? You face the facts—and do battle where you have the best chances of winning and the least chance of suffering casualties. Before all else you secure you prospect base.
Even if you business can carve out a Blue Ocean spot—avoiding the cutthroat, backstabbing bloody Red Ocean by making the competition irrelevant rather than trying to beat it—how do you stay in the Blue Ocean for long-term prosperity? Enter the need for the business model!
A new type of online marketing system, marketing automation has recently become popular. What is it, how does it work, and—most important—should you adopt it? Not all companies should. But if yours is among those that could benefit from marketing automation, you'll definitely gain a competitive advantage.
Mad Men-style advertising, based on interrupting entertainment or news, is still with us—but most marketers recognize that it's unsteady on its feet. The reality is that people are tired of being "targeted" with ads and so are inclined to take evasive action. It's time to dust off the tried-and-true customer testimonial, and turbo-charge it for your website with video storytelling.
At many companies, Marketing can't match the financially relevant, standardized measurements produced by peers in Finance and Operations. That is a big problem, because the lack of financially relevant, standardized measurements weakens CMOs' stature. It doesn't have to be that way.
Ad networks offer a flexible and more efficient way to reach and segment consumers. Advertisers can meet ambitious goals by leveraging the networks' mass reach, diverse targeting options, and flexible pricing platforms.
Movie studios are struggling to effectively reach moviegoers, who have so many other media vying for their attention. So like the plot of a blockbuster film, the studios are on a quest to find the ultimate marketing channel. But they don't have to venture to a galaxy far, far away. It's time they rediscovered email.
When it comes to mobile, B2B marketers find themselves more confused than confident. This companion piece to our 10-Step Guide on social media focuses on integrating mobile into the B2B marketing mix. Follow these 10 steps to ensure you start smart, launch strong, and produce mobile programs that deliver high return on investment (ROI).
If you're passionate about something and you have an idea that just won't go away, now is the time to explore it and to make something remarkable happen. Here are seven key steps you can take to ensure your great idea becomes a success.
When you're marketing to global audiences, your messages must be accurate, concise, and targeted to establish consumer trust and brand loyalty. Satisfied customers often result in repeat purchases and increased return on investment (ROI). That is where translating marketing content comes into play, ensuring that messages are properly conveyed to various global audiences.
In today's consumer-goods industry, manufacturers and retailers alike are recognizing the value of developing an integrated understanding of the consumer and the shopper. Combining the voice of the shopper into brand and category plans is rapidly becoming a cost of entry for successful trading relationships.
Analytics are especially useful in the burgeoning field of interactive ads delivered to shoppers' smartphones and other portable devices. The immediacy of those ads—their ability to spark impulse purchases—can be very powerful. But to be successful, they must be personalized—the right ad aimed at the right customer at the right moment.
Video is 50 times more likely to appear on the first page of Google search results than text. But in order for your intended audience to find your video, you need to optimize it for maximum visibility in Google and other search engines. Here are eight tips for optimizing YouTube videos.
Predictive analytics take you beyond the traditional slicing and dicing of your data so you can be smarter and more agile in marketing. With predictive analytics, you can gain faster insights and optimize programs by simultaneously testing copy, offers, and creative rather than deploying the more traditional A/B-testing methodology, which may take longer and delay course adjustments.
Far too often, Web-analytics initiatives fail to provide the insight that most businesses need and want. Companies are so eager to obtain immediate value from newly implemented Web-measurement systems that they overlook the complexity of Web analytics, which require a significant investment in preparation and pre-planning.
As marketing professionals, business owners, and salespeople, our livelihood depends in large part on our ability to communicate. And as we prepare for our next marcom project, marketing campaign, sales presentation, or public-speaking opportunity, we would do well to call to mind the lessons to be learned from Lincoln's masterpiece.
When Shop.org surveyed retailers for its State of Retailing Online 2009 report, it found that email was the most-mentioned successful tactic overall. What are you waiting for...?
Successful business owners understand the value of location, and they will go to great lengths to find the right storefront. Unfortunately, many business owners do not have the same discipline in building a website. Instead, many companies slap a few Web pages together and expect business to start flowing. But you need to apply these three tactics instead.
Foothill Dental gets it. It's not "doing social media" in the way we think of it. Foothill Dental does not have a Twitter account or Facebook fan page. It doesn't blog or answer questions on LinkedIn. It doesn't use Gowalla or Foursquare. Foothill Dental leverages the awesome power of email marketing. Here's how.
Will Google's latest search-engine algorithm update, dubbed "Caffeine," change search as we know it, or is it simply a minor update?
You know you've been successful in building your brand when your constituents have taken ownership of it. Achieving that happy state of affairs requires working through an entire process. But even then you're not there yet. You have to engage your organization first.
If companies are interested in outsourcing their marketing operations, what can they do to ensure that their plan is well thought out and effective? My counsel to this particular marketing executive was to keep seven mantras in mind.
When considering mobile marketing for B2B companies, today's marketers are wrestling with some big questions: How can we use mobile to engage our target audience of business professionals? Where do we even begin to integrate mobile media into our B2B marketing plans?
Once you have your page set up, how do you maximize your fan base and get the most out of your page? Some social-media gurus think that "old-school" marketing techniques have gone the way of the dinosaur and won't work on Facebook or other similar platforms. I disagree.
You've done your homework and designed a strategic brand program. You've found insight through research, learned what makes your constituents tick, established a strong brand foundation, developed a framework for messages, and evolved a system for visual expression—all necessary to help your organization realize its goals and vision. Now it's time to build.
Whether folks are coming to your website to read about products and services, complete a purchase, obtain customer support, or find out where you're located, you have invested to get them there. Now you need to get them to return, engage, help others, and help you innovate. Here are the six most proven methods for growing and maintaining your customer network.
With the right strategy and execution in place, digital media has proven very cost-effective. It scales and caters to a larger volume with faster go-to-market capabilities. Which brings us to the issue of properly implemented Web analytics to accurately measure and quantify the power of digital marketing.
It's been said before and it bears repeating: When it comes to those traditional three pillars of direct-response marketing, "The gold is in your list." So here are four customer email-address acquisition tactics you should put in place (if they're not already) to immediately grow your customer email list and, with it, your customer relationships.
Creating your visual brand mosaic requires a toolkit different from the one used by earlier corporate ID practitioners––one based more on shared thinking and approaches and less around rules, one that allows you to tune communications for different initiatives and constituencies, and one that can be taught and shared.
One has only to scan news reports from the beginning and the end of the past decade to see how much our language has changed in the interim. The usual suspects—technology, consumer culture, politics—were joined by new agents of lexical change: think terrorism, economic instability, and social networking. Here are some language trends to be looking and listening for in the decade ahead.
In 2010, there is no excuse for keeping your marketing insight languishing in a silo, away from your core business processes. Thanks to today's Web-based technologies, you have an unprecedented number of opportunities to generate real business value from such insight.
Saving your budget (and keeping your team employed) in a down economy really boils down to one word: profit. If you're not making money, you're losing money—and that's never good for business. And when it comes to profit, ROI (return on investment) is everything.
How can we make the work activities of our business audience better, faster, and easier through mobile? With more than half the planet currently owning mobile devices, and businesses well on board the anytime/anywhere mobile communications medium, this question serves as a guide for B2B marketers working to develop their mobile-marketing strategies.
How can you articulate your ideas, qualities, and capabilities in ways that connect to, and engage, your communities? Messaging, or communicating with a rigorous focus on a system of key ideas, is a fundamental activity of strategic brand development and management. Disciplined messaging helps organizations engage in productive dialogues, especially across social media communities.
A 2009 survey of 9,000 decision makers in B2B companies found that 86% of the "unique benefits" touted by vendors were not perceived as unique or having enough impact to create preference. Unwittingly, it appears, companies are creating value parity-positions, not value propositions.
Direct digital marketing solutions are no longer exclusive to B2C marketers. B2B marketers must demand more from their marketing partnerships because the transference of traditionally B2C marketing approaches to B2B is possible—and direct digital marketing is the key.
The sweeter the deal, the better your chances that your visitor will become a subscriber. Many email-list managers offer a e-book or video download or special one-time discount. Those are basic techniques for email list-building. Here are nine more-advanced list-building techniques.
Think of your brand as a mosaic where you can select and place most, but not all, of the tiles: You can control the communications you make, your offerings, and how your organization behaves. But some of the tiles in your brand mosaic are placed by others––the media, bloggers, tweets, the conversations that happen outside your walls. It's important, therefore, to develop a strong foundation for your brand.
Do you really know why you lost the recent deal or why some customers keep coming back? Customers have the answers, but they rarely provide them in an unfiltered manner to your sales and service teams.
You've made a couple of forays into social media, and you like what you see! But what tactics are really working out there to draw prospects in—and not turn them off? What are some cool ways to match social with selling?
Approaching your website's analytics as a three-step process will allow you to not only understand the tools available and what they have to offer but also create a gauge by which you can determine how well key business objectives are being met.
In online marketing, when it comes to lists, the email-marketing list reigns supreme. But for most email marketers, continual email-list growth is the Achilles' heel of email marketing.
With most large corporate purchases, the only way to get new customers to sign on is to let them hear directly from current customers who can speak about their experience with your products. So why do salespeople often resist participating in your company's customer-reference program? For several reasons...
If your unique brand attributes aren't all bubbling to the surface vying to be the No. 1 attribute, then you don't have a branding problem, you have a business problem. In other words, it's your business—not the brand—that isn't offering anything of unique value.
Much more than just "your customers" or "your audience," your constituents are all the people for whom your work is meaningful—the internal and external populations whose interest, participation, and advocacy are important to your stability, growth, and long-term success. How do you connect with them?
You've heard about recent well-publicized PR nightmares for two major brands (Heinz and Southwest). How could those situations have been handled differently? Here are some ways.
The author sees a lot of personal-branding disasters—efforts that diminish brand value rather than increase it. Here are the nine personal-branding mistakes I saw continually repeated in 2009. Avoid them so you can build a powerful and compelling brand that increases your brand equity.
Getting speaking gigs can be a mysterious and frustrating process, particularly if you don't have much experience. You know the drill: Send pithy email offering yourself up (or copiously fill out online proposal form). Hit Send. Wait. Sound familiar? Here's how to get the green light.
You already know that a dashboard is an essential tool for improving (and proving) marketing effectiveness. These five steps will help you and your marketing team get started on the road to creating a dashboard that works for you.
A best-practice is the generally preferred practice, one that will make your company more money, thus making your boss happy, which in turn will make you happy. If it were only that easy.
Do you have a clear picture of your organization's strengths and weaknesses, and of the opportunities and threats in the marketplace? Is your position vis-à-vis your competitors clear and compelling? Does anyone else in this vast universe know or care? What brand signals echo back from the noise in the social Web?
This year will be another year of key strategic and tactical decisions for marketers. With flat or reduced budgets, marketers will once again have to determine where to invest for the best return. So if you want to get the most juice for the squeeze for your marketing dollar in 2010, here are five things you must do.
We are in a perfect storm brought on by the economic downturn, emerging consumer interest in sustainability, and the power of social media. And whether for reasons of cost savings or family health, women who are moms, write blogs, and self-identify as "green" have exactly the motivation and conviction marketers need to understand right now.
Cross-channel attribution is about assigning credit for marketing results to where credit is due. Most marketers and agencies either attribute all credit to the last touch point or have no way of attributing the credit in a meaningful manner. Here are the five common mistakes they make—and can avoid, by deploying cross-channel attribution techniques.
Which converts better and drives more sales: long-form copy or short-form copy? "The more you tell, the more you sell," claim the adherents of long copy. "No one has time to read below the fold," counter short-copy partisans. Of course, both sides are right...
Everyone has a website stuffed with content ranging from the important to the useless. But marketing initiatives aimed at a highly targeted audience require their own space and identity if they are to succeed. When you use the Web as your vehicle for your campaign, the obvious solution is a video-campaign microsite.
Especially in a down economy, it's important to understand where the opportunities are—and how to capitalize on them. Luckily, today's companies have many avenues for gathering such information.
The digital-marketing trifecta of social media, mobile, and email are fueling (not cannibalizing) one another. One clear example is the impact that smartphones are having on the use of email and social networking.
How can you ensure that your translated campaign carries the impact of the original? More important, how do you avoid the enormous cost (new creative, photography, design) of having to launch a new marketing campaign for each local market?
Combining your product with top brands is an incredible way to escalate growth. If you are looking to drive revenue, enter new markets, or reposition your product, brand licensing can lead to dramatic results. As with any new endeavor, however, pitfalls abound.
Build a value proposition for your SaaS solution that's supported by multiple legs, because there's danger in relying on a single strategic advantage over your competitors. In other words, it's hard to sit on a one-legged stool.
Is your website a lead-generation machine? Your website can be your most powerful marketing tool, delivering a steady stream of new business leads and filling your sales pipeline. Find out your website's lead-generation potential by giving it a lead-generation checkup.
Are you facing increasing pressure from your leadership team to justify your marketing decisions? Most marketers can no longer afford to make decisions based on intuition or gut feel. Today, making good decisions requires data. Data and technology enable marketers to act and react.
Cross-promotional efforts can help companies spread the word as new online-marketing platforms are launched, boosting follower interest and opt-in. The following are 10 popular strategies that companies use to maximize their digital-marketing mix.
Understanding customer behavior is key to creating marketing campaigns that generate high response and revenue. One of the best ways to understand customer behavior is to study customer migration patterns—to learn when and why a customer ends up in a segment different from the one he or she had been in.
Some marketing activities or processes (in reality, many business activities) require "artists" to produce the desired output. However, that by itself does not make the output art. The distinction is important.
Link-building services are the most commonly outsourced aspect of SEO. The process involves finding qualified and thematically relevant one-way linking partners who will link to your website. Spammy, automated products seldom cultivate valuable links and tend to do more harm than good. Doing it right means link-building by hand. Here are five tips to help you get started.
Looking for ways to create a proposal that sets you and your company favorably apart? Ways that capture the great things you have to offer? Here are six suggested best-practices intended to not only maximize your chances to stand out and land the job but also manage the risks.
While we struggle to emerge from a full-blown recession, marketers know all too well that advertising and (unfortunately) innovation are the first budgets that are most likely to get cut. So how can marketers continue to innovate?
You'd think that to get half of your subscribers to click through, you might have to give away a million dollars every month. Publishers Clearing House actually does give away millions of dollars, but that wasn't enough on its own to earn a significantly higher-than-average response rate on its email promotions.
In the current economic climate, more business owners need to evaluate their website and revamp it to turn it into a presales tool, lead-generation machine, or even a revenue-producing cash cow. Can it be done? It just takes a few tweaks to turn on the profits.
We've created a cool website. The bell and whistles are working well—not too little, not too much. We're getting lots of visits from lots of cool folks. But now that we're up and running so well, we're panicked about keeping content fresh! How do I keep it interesting, and keep them interested so they keep coming back?
In the world of B2B marketing, what would you say your customers want most from you? Some of the obvious things are quality products, great service, reasonable prices, and solutions that increase profits. But what would they really want if they could have anything from you? How about more customers?
Organizational challenges can be the silent killer to achieving relevance in direct digital marketing, placing constraints on innovation and on the adoption of technology and best-practices, or limiting the manpower to create compelling campaigns and programs. You can do everything else right, but failure to address organizational challenges can torpedo an otherwise watertight ship.
During challenging economic times, buyers look for value. The more value you provide, the more likely you are to become the provider of choice. Presentations offer you excellent opportunities to provide that value at different stages of the sales cycle. Here are five ways to create more value in your presentations.
Plan A, which calls for pouring dollars into advertising, rarely increases profitability. Sometimes it doesn't even boost sales, and it certainly doesn't guarantee improvements in marketing effectiveness or ROI. Enter Plan B: taking a closer look at the basic marketing strategy fundamentals that drive tactical decisions.
In the B2C space there's a lot of buzz around mobile marketing, but in the B2B sector it's more likened to a whisper. B2Bs are missing out on super-sized opportunities for integrating a valuable new brand touch point for their customers and establishing a dynamic new communications channel with professional audiences.
New vision and approaches can add significantly more value to brands over their competitors. Some brands can easily become commodities. Unless they choose otherwise.
Billy Mays, who, sadly, passed away at age 50, was a potbellied, black-bearded Atlantic City carnival barker who wore a blue long-sleeve shirt and a white undershirt. And direct marketers loved him. According to Mays, to be great and an easy sell, a product must have these five essential character traits.
We are facing economic challenges the likes of which many of us have not experienced before. As professionals, how do we break away from this stagnation and take advantage of opportunities to grow your business?
One of the traps that many organizations fall into when launching a new Web initiative is putting the focus of the project on new technology or new functionality. Instead, you need to start your project with the end result in mind. This article outlines project phases that you need to include when launching any Web campaign.
With Q4 looming, along iwth company revenue targets for the year ahead, this company faced the perennial dilemma common to B2B marketers: how to fill the sales funnel with quality leads now to get a jump on sales-cycle activity in January. A classic direct-mail package and a brilliantly simple strategy for getting through the mailroom and onto prospects' desks was the solution.
At its core, market opportunity is your sizing forecast for a specific product or service, now and over the next several years. At a minimum, you should know that information in terms of sales dollars. A solid understanding of opportunity will guide you to the best markets and warn you off the bad ones. It will frame your investments and serve in part as your scorecard to mark progress.
Salespeople rely on strategies such as "sell the value" or to "value-add"—neither of which produces sustainable advantage. They do so because it's hard to achieve genuine differentiation based on something the customer values. But suppose salespeople were able to create highly differentiated offerings that provide real value that competitors can't copy...
Don't indiscriminately get rid of people paying you for your goods and services. But identify that 20% from the old 80/20 rule and get rid of some of those who meet the four points described here. Your goal should not be to "please" customers. Studies show only 6% of "satisfied" customers become loyal to your organization.
"Relationships don't just happen, they are built—one experience at a time," says Joel Book of ExactTarget. And lucky for us, Joel has mapped out the process of doing just that via email marketing.
The economy still stinks. But only if during the long-gone good times your business was on cruise control and you saw your customers as dollar signs and not people. Some marketers are suffering far less than others, because they cared to look deep into their customers' eyes and not just plumb the depths of their wallets.
By using new campaign-management techniques, smart marketers can gain a sizable and lasting advantage over the competition in the auction for keywords—ensuring their ads show up high in search results without dampening ROI.
Are your website visitors like tourists strolling through Times Square on their way to a matinee with little time to spare, or are they a captive audience willing to watch and absorb all you hope to communicate? Websites increasingly appear to assume the latter, but Web-analytics data prove the former.
You know that saying about how you can't understand where you're going unless you understand where you've been? That's the reason we've pulled together this list of the top stories of 2009.
The hottest trend in brand marketing right now is the very thing that has fueled traditional advertising's ongoing evolution: Brands are bypassing traditional media outlets in favor of creating their own private media platforms. That's right, brands are becoming the media.
There's no question that online video is fast becoming a favorite of Internet users around the world. But the hit-or-miss nature of viral video, the brand quality considerations of user-generated content, and the general disdain for television commercials online have left marketers wondering, "How do I make video work for me?"
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