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- The Next Big Influencer Platforms and Trends in Social Media Engagement
Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook are the most popular social media platforms, but brands need to be aware of emerging platforms if they don't want to risk missing lucrative opportunities. Here are key market trends in social media engagement and ways emerging platforms are addressing those trends.
More and more marketing departments are moving from just being curious about Agile to actually implementing Agile practices. But many have the wrong idea about what Agile is and what it can or cannot do, so let's debunk some of the most common myths about Agile.
In far too many businesses, marketing and sales teams maintain radio silence between each other, even though each has plenty to offer the other—especially regarding content. If only they could team-up, their collaboration would mean less wheel-spinning and more success for both.
How can marketers and advertisers gain the benefits of artificial intelligence and machine-learning while avoiding the pitfalls? By finding the right balance between the explore vs. exploit dynamic. Find out what that means.
Marketers struggle mightily to take advantage of the huge opportunity that is mobile advertising. That's because we must first understand how receptive consumers are to certain types of messaging at various moments during the day. These insights will help.
The emails you spend so much time strategizing, crafting, and scheduling aren't worth much if they don't actually reach your target audience. Email deliverability is essential, yet many marketers don't pay much attention to it. Here's why you should remedy that.
B2B companies tend not to believe social strategies will work for them. Instead, they often use social platforms as real-time broadcast channels for announcements or updates. But, done correctly, social can drive B2B lead generation—and conversions.
Content marketing helps shape your company's place in the marketplace. The key to creating content that drives website visits, improves conversion, and creates brand lift is understanding what your audience needs and how you can best provide it. Make sure your content marketing can compete.
Some niche businesses think a small social presence and a semi-decent website are enough to engage customers in the age of digital marketing. Not even close, of course... So, what do successful customer engagements look like in the age of digital transformation?
These days, finding data about consumer behavior is so easy, our instinct is to pile up a mountain of it so we get a better view of customer preferences, behaviors, and experiences. That sky-high view empowers us to see a vast landscape, but it leaves us blind to what actually shapes behavior: consumer feelings.
This list of marketing thought leaders is designed to be a place where you can find some of the best and brightest minds on most marketing topics. Who's on this list? 100+ genuine marketing thought leaders spanning a wide range of marketing disciplines.
Social media marketing is more than just posting stuff and waiting for miracles to happen. Organic social media reach is all but dead. That's the reality we have to deal with. Here's how you can conquer that reality in seven steps.
Companies aren't living, breathing things, so they must communicate their personality and identity—their brand—through design elements. Which is why design and branding are inseparable. See how that process works, along with a couple of good examples.
Hiring and scaling your team can be daunting. Making a hire and then discovering it was the wrong one can be extremely costly: in terms of time, money, resources, and—less obviously—team morale. When hiring, here's what you need to consider to do it right.
You've likely sat through dozens of terrible presentations—and you're right to feel you were robbed of your time. Avoid subjecting your own audiences to the same fate with your own presentations: Apply these content marketing principles to create and deliver stellar presentations.
Are the 4Ps still important? Has the emergence of customer-centricity supplanted them? How has digital changed the marketing and sales funnel? What's the new relationship between Marketing and Sales? This article explores those questions—and more.
Brands that understand the value of partnerships with influencers are prioritizing the repurposing of influencer-created content. But extending the life of that content comes at a price, which is something marketers should be mindful of when beginning a partnership. Here are the important things you need to know.
Considering the $350 billion combined spending power of Millennials and Gen Z, brands have made it a priority to reach them, motivate them, and inspire loyalty among them. But how? Here's what a panel of experts from Facebook, Airbnb, Lyft, Ellevest, and InterQ Research suggested marketers do.
Experiential marketing has hit its stride. Once considered experimental or risky, it has now proven its legitimacy among major brands. So whether you're organizing an immersive pop-up, on-site virtual reality installation, or a live performance, follow these seven tips to achieve the ROI you're looking for.
Marketing controversial products or services—such as cannabis and cosmetic surgery—involves more than following rules and regulations. The legal and ethical landscape in those markets is dynamic, continually creating hurdles and challenges for marketers. Here are five marketing strategies to help educate consumers and build trust in controversial markets.
A thought-leadership program drives value and builds trust. But many marketers struggle to identify their unique industry perspective, and then to integrate it into their messaging, positioning, and content. These five steps will help you kick off (or elevate) your thought-leadership program.
Marketers have long sought to encourage brand loyalty, but their tactics are falling short. Marketers still make two big errors when using traditional loyalty tactics: trying to develop a relationship built on transactions; and not listening to consumers. Here's what to do instead, in three steps.
Millennials are expected to outnumber members of any other generation in the USA this year. How can savvy marketers make the most of this opportunity? What's the best way to reach out to the Millennial market? What kind of message is most likely to resonate?
Fortnite's live performances and Netflix's new ventures are evidence that younger audiences' expectations of content are changing: They don't want to just watch it, they want to experience it. What will be the next way to grab mass audiences' precious time and attention?
Today's consumers have endless options, so they expect you to compete for their brand love. That's why forging a genuine connection with them is so important: It will secure their loyalty.
Tradeshows, conferences, live events in general have become essential components of exceptional marketing strategies. No other medium works better to create an emotional bond between your brand and its customers and prospects. Of course, there are right and wrong ways to approach live events.
For successful growth marketing, PR, and promotions, today's marketers need digital tools, including browser extensions, to bring their marketing communications strategy to life. Check out these top digital tools and Chrome extensions.
Google will begin to add podcasts to search results. Soon, podcasts won't have to rely on Top 100 lists and word-of-mouth to be discoverable. This development will fundamentally change the medium. Here's what you need to know.
Segmentation—the process of identifying specific customer groups—is imperative for personalized marketing and communications. Yet, despite all the effort they put in, companies repeatedly make easily avoidable segmentation mistakes. Here are five common ones, along with tips to avoid them.
What can you really achieve with a solid email marketing strategy? What is a realistic email goal for your business? This article walks you through four real-world examples of businesses that set goals and used email to achieve them.
Digital brand communities have grown in popularity, so it makes sense to explore some high-profile examples. A community's landing page is an important building block of an engaged, growing community. It's what draws people in. Draw inspiration from these 10 examples.
Even when you create a great piece of content, it might never be seen if it's not promoted and shared. Promotion is critical to the success of your content strategy, in general. To ensure your content gets seen and generates leads, use these 10 unpaid, organic content-promotion tactics.
In a digitally driven world, the human element can get lost. Nothing can replace face-to-face rapport, which is why events can do wonders for your sales—certain types of events more than others, depending on your brand and positioning. These three types of events can boost your sales.
If you want a website designed to convert visitors into customers or potential customers, and you're banking on SEO to bring you targeted visitors, a low-cost solution or vendor can often cost you more in the long run. So how do you choose?
Nearly 30% of Americans, that's some 70 million people, regularly listen to at least one podcast. For any business, that's a huge opportunity to tap into a market hungry for content, especially in niche areas of interest. Your podcast audience is waiting for you...
Digital experiential technologies are redefining everyday processes and influencing a variety of industries, from retail to real estate. See how retailers can harness AR and VR to propel their marketing initiatives, enhance the shopper experience, and drive sales.
Modern B2B buyers are acting more like consumers and demanding frictionless, convenient buying experiences. But delivering those experiences is easier said than done. Here are five key considerations for enabling your marketing and sales teams to exceed buyer expectations.
Brand safety is being redefined by consumers. Marketers today need to look beyond just making sure their ads don't appear in controversial contexts. Brands' usage policies, partnerships, and even political campaign contributions are now in play. Here's advice on how to keep your brand safe.
Marketers are drowning in martech alphabet soup. They must sort through that haphazard collection of acronyms that vendors have created to market their products. Then, marketers have to select the right acronym and the right vendor. Avoid the unhealthy hassle.
Whether you're a big or small brand, today's consumers assume you know them and understand them—and can personalize their interactions with you online, offline, across devices, and so on. But where do you even start? Every CMO needs to consider these three key priorities.
Paid search, also known as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, is a part of search engine marketing (SEM). It's an effective way to drive search traffic your way quickly and consistently. But how does it work? And why should small and midsize businesses be using it?
Are you still using the sales funnel as your model for marketing? Stop. There's a better, far more accurate way that also aligns with lead nurturing and trust-building via content marketing. It's lifecycle marketing, and here is how it works.
Sellers—and marketers—are crazy if they don't take advantage of the vast amounts of information about their buyers that's available on social media. And yet, they don't. Those who do... have a great advantage. Here are ways to research buyers on social platforms.
It is an interesting, complicated, and marvelous time to be a woman. Likewise, it is an interesting, complicated, and marvelous time to be naming brands catering exclusively to women. It's also a task fraught with missteps. So... what is the best approach to take?
How often have you clicked on a search result and then clicked away because the site didn't load quickly? A lot? Yes, that's common. In 2019, site speed is the name of the SEO game. You can either keep up with speed expectations, or you can lose out.
Because of the many benefits they provide, specialized online communities that cater to specific interests, including specific brands, have begun to emerge. That's because they can be what traditional social platforms can't: true communities for the like-minded.
To get the maximum return on investment from their content marketing and sales teams, company executives need to create a culture that enables those teams to work together. Here's a three-step guide to creating that kind of company atmosphere.
"Artificial intelligence": you've heard the term, you know it's a trend, you know you're "supposed" to be using it... But if you were asked to explain in a few short sentences what it means for marketers, could you do it? If not, then you've found the right article.
Everyone in your company is working hard to understand how customers think. But what if all that effort and all the investments in customer platforms, your understanding of your customer is only marginally better. Detailed customer insight can be hard to come by. Here's the likeliest cause of that problem.
Social media long ago became the place where people voice their opinions on everything, including your brand and products. Also about company leaders, like your CEO or CMO. Which is why social media monitoring exists. But Google Alerts isn't nearly enough. Instead, here are 10 tools that work well.
Relationships are hard work—full of ups and downs, twists and turns. The relationship between client and marketing agency, too, requires TLC. Finding and keeping the right one is vital. Here's how you can cultivate a lasting, meaningful relationship with your marketing agency of choice.
Revisit the emails you sent to your B2B audience recently. How many ideas, emotions, and benefits did each message contain or refer to? How many possible responses could it have elicited? Chances are... too many! For high-converting emails, follow this rule instead.
Media strategies need to remain agile and democratized in a world saturated with digitized media formats and emerging tech trends. What are the business models that can ensure success with digital media now and in the future?
Although the concept of delivering quality content to educate and build trust with customers is a sound one, actually executing on that idea—in a way that serves both the customer and the marketer—has never been more difficult. But content marketing can—and will—be saved. Here's how.
We marketers have been trying for years to decode the most enigmatic generation of our time, Millennials. But many of them are now marketers themselves, and they have set their sights on the next generation: Gen Z. Here are three ways we can break through to this rising generation.
How do you spot room for growth when the local SEO playing field looks too even? When you take a close look you'll find the opportunities for growth are there—and can have direct, measurable impact on both search engine visibility and the bottom line. A future-proof strategy exists.
Cold email is still an effective way of generating appointments and making new connections. B2B companies, in particular, can still send personalized, cold emails at scale. Here are cold-email principles you can use to create response-boosting outreach campaigns.
A lot of weekend warriors tend to show up in emergency rooms on Sunday nights. Marketing teams, too, can fall into cycles of intense effort followed by exasperation and, often, failure. But you can avoid common "marketing weekend warrior" scenarios—and market like a fit athlete instead.
When writing for marketing, you need to connect with your audience. But first you have to understand who they are and what they care about. To understand what will motivate your potential customers, use empathy mapping. Here's how.
All the digital channels and bells and whistles aside, your success as a marketer today still stems from using emotional marketing that understands consumers' needs and preferences. Now, with the emergence of influencer marketing, we can combine these two approaches in our content marketing to reach deep into our desired audiences.
If your website or blog has an abundance of posts and pages that aren't search-engine optimized, you should be thinking about doing a content audit to improve SEO. Here's a six-step content audit and optimization process that will markedly improve organic traffic to your site.
These days, to successfully complete an RFP response, it takes on average 3-10 people (and sometimes up to 20). It's no easy feat. So how can your organization ensure a truly collaborative effort on its RFP projects? Use these six best-practices.
Businesses that rely on organic search for sales and conversions know the importance of SEO, but ranking for keywords is becoming harder and more time-consuming. But there's plenty you can do about that. Complete these three SEO tasks to improve your site's organic search visibility across the Web.
So far this year, six naming trends have become prominent, or are becoming so. This article explains how each trend can be used and what benefits it can bring you. If you're ever tasked with naming a business or product—and you want it to truly stand out—check out these valuable insights.
Webinars are a great tool for any stage of the buyer's journey, but you're probably not going to get the level of attention and engagement you're after if your webinar is a sales presentation in disguise. Take these four basic actions to ensure better ROI for your webinar efforts.
Companies that use lead scoring benefit from a 77% increase, on average, in lead generation ROI vs. those that don't. But you have to do it right. Go through this checklist to ensure your lead-scoring is sophisticated enough to work well.
Page titles are an important, but often overlooked, part of achieving success with your SEO efforts. When used correctly, they can help you achieve greater organic search visibility and higher click-through-rates for your website. Here are a few tips on how to optimize your page titles and improve your SEO.
Buyers are becoming increasingly fussier. Without a delightful and error-free experience with your brand or website, it's likely you're losing out on conversions, leads, and clients. These five conversion rate optimization (CRO) principles will increase lead volume and help you surpass your targets.
Compliance protocols and processes need to meet C-suite expectations, but they also need to be flexible and responsive enough for front-line employees to be quick, creative, and, of course, compliant.
Search engine optimization is an ongoing process. It takes a lot of work to achieve those elusive Page One rankings—and to retain them. Part of the onsite work is a systematic review of sources that might indicate there's trouble brewing or in full storm mode. Here are 10 checks for such indicators of trouble.
To reach consumers and provide superior customer experiences, we need to deliver content that engages. Understanding what’s important to buyers is the key—and a growing number of buyers cite shared purpose as one reason to buy from a company. Social purpose is a powerful tool; here's how you can wield it.
The unprecedented growth of e-commerce has fundamentally changed the way consumers, and therefore marketers, think about retail—and marketing. Traditional experience models are no longer enough to serve and delight consumers. Let's see how lessons from e-commerce can help us reach today's customers.
The next consumer powerhouse generation can be summed up in one letter: Z. Communicating with and marketing to this young audience of digital natives isn't easy. But it is possible—if you focus on their diverse subcultures. Here's how.
What if you could take simple steps to update your blog content and get more ROI from existing efforts without having to publish anything new? In fact, you can. Do these three things.
Automated push notification is an optimal channel in the post-GDPR era, allowing e-commerce brands to push communications to target users efficiently, effectively, and easily. Now's the time to act—because late adopters will fall behind.
One of the most frustrating moments of the sales process is the "no-show"—when a prospective customer fails to show up for a meeting or isn't available to take a scheduled sales call. But that doesn't mean your prospect is not interested in buying from you! In fact, no-shows are a hidden source of future business opportunity.
If you're a B2B marketer, you're obsessed with customers' data about their buyer journeys. You want to know how often people visit your webpages, how long they stay, when they leave, what content is getting the most conversions... So if you don't use Google Tag Manager yet, it's time to get up to speed.
Instead of flooding the Internet with content that's merely meh, avoid these three content marketing mistakes to ensure that you are strategically producing content that breaks through and wows your audience.
What's the overall aim of any business? More often than not, it's to increase sales. So, if your employees are engaged, that engagement almost always converts into better employee performance. As a result, you can expect to see an increase in sales.
Is social media helping us reach potential customers? After all, we're sweating blood to create social media content and investing in ad campaigns to help our content gain more visibility. Is all of that delivering business results? We should find out.
Some days, Sales and Marketing can seem closely aligned. Other days, it seems Marketing is from Venus and Sales is from Mars. But sales and marketing teams need to better understand each other, pursue shared goals, and work together more effectively—for the greater good of the company. Here's how to make that happen.
At a time when we're reaching customers through more channels than ever before, it can be easy to assume your average Millennial is more likely to engage with an Instagram post or a Facebook ad than your humble email. But if that's what you think, you're missing out on reaching Millennial customers.
Marketing has been around for as long as humans have had something to sell. But in recent years just about every marketing tactic and delivery channel imaginable has quickly and drastically evolved. It's hard for us marketers to be sure of anything these days. Let's see what we can do about that.
B2B companies know how to talk-up their products or services, emphasizing how efficient and cost-effective they are. But customers don't want marketing spiel: They want balanced and unbiased information and insight from people they can relate to. You can make sure that's what they get.
If you want your B2B marketing content to gain readers, the first thing you must do is think like a journalist so you can quickly grab your readers' attention with the key points you want them to take away. Read on for more, including four other surefire ways to engage your readership.
Before you can even start to measure the success of your ABM efforts, you've got to make sure four critical foundational components are in place. Here they are, along with how to set them up.
The path to brand attachment—one level up from brand loyalty—is long, winding, and challenging. And you can't skip ahead or take shortcuts. Here's how to get there in five strategic steps.
In this video, a neuroscientist explains how the brain responds to the various elements of storytelling: At various points in a story, the brain actually releases powerful hormones. The upshot: as a marketer, you can effectively engage your audiences through storytelling.
When you work on a team managing social media—whether a team of 2 or 20—issues and mix-ups are bound to arise: Who decides what gets published? Who is allowed to access a particular social account? How do you quickly get approval from busy managers or clients? These four tools can help.
When planning a digital marketing campaign, you have to make sure it will be successful and you'll be using your budget optimally. Take these five important steps before launching your campaign so you don't waste money or time.
Could you create effective marketing copy by imposing limits on how you write? How about using some tricks and tactics that poets—and Dr. Seuss—use! To craft unforgettable, memorable marketing copy, take a page or two from Dr. Seuss.
Loyalty rewards have been around since the 1700s, but programs have changed dramatically due to innovations in technology and e-commerce. But have those changes advanced customer loyalty? Not necessarily. But these 10 best-practices, based on research, data, and experience, actually do produce results.
Want to create a lip-smacking lead magnet that prospects will come from far and wide to sample? You'll need the right mix to do it, including these 3 essential ingredients.
It happens at the start of every year:Local businesses are eager to activate their marketing plans; but, after a busy holiday season, even the most experienced marketers can be overwhelmed. Here are some simple steps to get going and stay on track in 2019.
Marketing technology is continually evolving to solve day-to-day problems for companies across industries in efficient, effective and innovative ways. Here are some predictions for 2019 from six martech leaders. They cover a variety of topics—from ABM to Facebook marketing to meeting automation and more. See what these leaders think awaits for you this year.
The Internet has become a competitive place: Every day, it becomes harder to stand out and attract the website visitors you need for your business. Here are some ideas to hack your way to some extra website traffic. Give them a try.
How can we marketers map our messages and voice to ensure our audiences are comfortable with both, and create a neat fit between message, product, and medium? Watch the video to find out.
A hashtag is making the rounds on Twitter, and it's one marketers should be sure to take note of: #BadStockPhotosOfMyJob. The hashtag refers to stock images that fail to accurately represent what professionals actually do. Here's how to avoid having your next campaign's images being branded with the hashtag of fails.
Customer lifecycle assessment is all about steady improvement—identifying weaknesses so you can eradicate them. The potential rewards of optimizing your customer retention process is so significant in the B2B world, you wouldn't want to give short shrift. Here's your action plan.
If you gather information to gain a strong understanding of your competitive landscape and market environment, you can improve your strategy across every area of marketing. Let's take a look at how to gather intel in three areas to help you stand out against your competition and win.
Marketers must stand out: not as the people who make things look pretty, but as the people who drive tangible value for their organization. These metrics can help prove that marketers are indispensable for growing any business.
As technology becomes central to marketing success, one theme stands out: In a tech-centric world, what role does creativity play? The infusion of technology into marketing can pose a fundamental, even existential question for marketers: Is there a role for creativity in a modern marketing program?
B2B customers are demanding education and advice as part of the sales experience. They see through the bright and shiny marketing speak. They want proof. Real thought leadership is that proof. Take these four steps to identify your company's most powerful thought leaders and their perspectives.
A single image can have a significant impact on the performance of an email campaign by ensuring that customers receive a compelling and personal experience. Selecting images with maximum appeal requires considering a range of factors. See how to select those impactful images.
Sabine Benoit, professor of marketing at the University of Surrey, briefly explains how consumer behavior is affected by contextual factors and what marketers can do to capitalize on it.
A lot of marketing directors are constantly tweaking their messaging—because it just isn't doing what they want it to do. And it's not easy to fix... with so many moving parts. But here are five of the most common issues that show up in marketing messaging of all kinds. Let's straighten them out, shall we?
You probably have a social media presence and a blog, but if you really want to make a lasting impression on your online audience, you need to be creating videos. Here's a look at why video marketing is one of the most effective methods of brand promotion there is—and how you can use it to your advantage.
Two heads are better than one, right? So let's explore the immense possibilities of content created through collaboration. We start with 5 reasons to produce collaborative content, and then move on to 15 ways to bring collaborative content to life. See how to make content creation easier, more fruitful, and highly effective.
If you're struggling to drive traffic through search engines because your high-quality content is ending up on the third or fourth page of Google SERPs, this guide will show you how to identify the keywords you could be ranking for. Let's find the keywords you can be realistically competing for right now.
Are there things small-company marketers are doing, in some cases out of necessity, that we should all consider incorporating into our routines? Is their hustle something we could all learn from?
How can busy marketers make time for learning when we're already having trouble keeping our head above water with our day-to-day responsibilities? Podcasts are one of the most efficient ways to learn (and teach). They're easy to access, portable, economical. But where to start? Check out this list of 18 podcasts.
"Customer participation" is sometimes used interchangeably with "customer engagement," but the former is so much more than the latter. In today's competitive business landscape, customer participation trumps customer engagement. Here's why the time to invest in customer participation is now.
The rise of smart speakers, smartphones, AI, and voice search is changing the SEO landscape before our eyes. Meanwhile, many marketers and businesses are just now catching up to text-based, traditional SEO. This is your opening—your opportunity to gain an edge over the competition.
Content on different channels and on different devices is consumed in different ways; as a result, there are more challenges for the storyteller, but more opportunities, too—including transmedia storytelling. Find out about the persuasive capabilities of storytelling across platforms.
There are thousands of time-management and productivity tips and systems out there, but it's hard to know what really works. What can you do today that will boost your productivity throughout the year ahead? These 28 proven productivity hacks can help you boost your work efficiency and productivity tremendously.
A change in calendar year is an ideal time to think about where things have been and where things are going. For email marketers, the future is bright—as long as we take advantage of important trends and apply best-practices.
Marketers who understand the value of engagement in influencer marketing also understand the power of micro-influencers. These are regular people with regular social media accounts who are truly driven to share their passions. As a result, they have passionate followings—and incredible endorsement power. Here's what you need to know to harness that power.
Being data-driven is a top priority for most marketers—because they understand its vital importance to achieving marketing success. And every great data-driven marketing program rests on a foundation of data integrity and data ownership. Consider these nine tips to help you lay that foundation in your organization.
Content marketing has proven itself time and time again, but merely producing content doesn't guarantee business or even marketing success. There's already too much content being produced. So what's the solution to making content marketing work for you? The answer is content distribution, and here's what you can do about it.
Your company probably has some social media presence. But if you're not incorporating it into your strategy for marketing to customers, you're missing out. to expand your customer base, keep current customers engaged, and increase profits, take steps to build a social media marketing plan.
If you aspire to lean and confident writing in your marketing content, you'll avoid populating your prose with superfluous words. Simply put, the most effective writing and communication makes every word... communicate. Here's how to write less but say more.
Testimonial videos are ideal for the decision stage of the buyer's journey, when prospects are aware of and want to solve a problem, and they are looking for information to help them make up their minds. Help them choose you.
Disruption can be annoying, but it can also help to grab attention. In this, the first in a series of brief but insight-packed videos, marketing professor Isabelle Szmigin discusses how consumers navigate through messages they do and do not want to receive. Useful, right? Check it out!
You have a business that specializes in providing a B2B service or product. But all your keyword search terms return results that are B2C. The unpleasant outcome? High bounce rates, irrelevant traffic, and low conversion percentages. So, how can you attract the right kind of audience via search?
Baffled. Enthralled. Amused. Maybe insulted. Those are just a few reactions you might experience when encountering a nail polish name. Whatever the emotion, top marketing executives agree the name is nearly as important as the color. That can be true for other products as well. Here's a high-level look at a naming project—along with naming tips and techniques that might prove useful for brand managers and marketing execs.
Each of these handful of tactics you can use in conjunction with your social media efforts can boost your lead counts. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, however; you'll need to experiment to find which work best for you. Check out these potentially winning lead-gen tactics.
The beloved American children's classic Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was published in 1939 by the Montgomery Ward department store. So it's tempting to think of it as yet another lasting piece of seasonal content marketing. Except Rudolph is so much more than that. It's also a handy framework for telling our own brand stories.
Effective data collection and analysis are essential for better customer relationships. From achieving true personalization to predicting behavioral patterns and creating ongoing conversations, improving customer engagement all starts with deriving insights from data. Take these three steps to get there.
Dear SEO professionals: Clients don't simply want our SEO recommendations... they want guaranteed results. Why should you offer SEO guarantees? When should you offer SEO guarantees? And what kind of SEO guarantees should you offer? Read on to find out.
Here's the hard truth: Most CMOs will never be able to get all their work done. Yet, Marketing is critical to the success or failure of organizations. The solution? A rigorous focus on the things that matter most. So here are three areas for CMOs to prioritize, and three to let go of.
Many of us make the mistake of treating LinkedIn as simply an online Rolodex or a glorified CV, rather than an inbound marketing channel that can be optimized for sales inquiries. That is a huge misstep. Find out how to turn your LinkedIn profile into a powerful inbound sales asset.
Whether you're a budget-challenged startup or a corporate marketer headed to a tradeshow for the first time, it can be daunting to prepare your company's branding for an appearance at a major industry event. These do's and don'ts will help you achieve great results.
You knew this article was coming: the hottest SEO trends for the year ahead. Some of these trends you've already seen this year, and some are new, but we can definitely expect to see more of all of them in 2019. Check them out to prepare your SEO efforts for next year.
A common fallacy regarding email programs is that once you set them up, they are self-sustaining. That couldn't be farther from the truth. Make sure your email campaigns actually work as you'd like them to. Take these four steps.
When you're smarter about your audience's needs and behaviors, you can meet those needs more effectively. That's where a data-driven approach to personas can make all the difference. Go beyond the limits of traditional marketing personas.
With retailers and marketers ramping up their email volume at the same time during the holidays, you're competing for your customers' attention and the resources of the ISPs delivering your mail. To get your emails opened and to maximize conversions, use these five tactics.
Much is made of email content or design—and rightfully so—but sender reputation holds plenty of power over whether or not your email reaches its expected destination. To improve email deliverability, explore a few steps you can take to enhance your sender reputation.
Marketers and brands can benefit from a deeper understanding into how the brain drives human behavior and how emotions influence the body. Use these six neuroscience principles to supercharge your marketing and advertising campaigns.
Some brands are already using artificial intelligence to engage their audiences on social media and gain an edge on their competition. See how you can start using AI and stay ahead of the curve.
Getting a blog post to rank in Google has become difficult. But for certain types of searches, quality videos are rising above quality blog posts in search results. And therein lies your opportunity. Here is how you can start optimizing your YouTube videos to rank on Google.
Close alignment and cooperation between Sales and Marketing is key to a successful account-based marketing program. Here's how you can set up your ABM program for success and avoid common mistakes.
Consumers are in a spending mood, and retailers should be paying attention. By planning ahead, brands can encourage purchases now and also set themselves up for more business in the long run.
Knowing how to collect, read, and use your analytics can mean better customers and higher retention rates. Here are four key steps to put your analytics to work for you.
Third-party customer-intent data is helpful, but the best way to ensure you have the most accurate, useful intent data is to collect website-visitor data yourself. Here's how to do that.
Email marketing is an indispensable channel for any successful content strategy. But how can you make sure email marketing campaigns are effective? Avoid making these 13 common mistakes.
Few of us would argue against the benefits of exhibiting at a tradeshow, where we can possibly reach hundreds, maybe thousands, of leads. But many of us focus so much on lead capture that we forget about a follow-up plan for nurturing leads into customers. These six tip should help.
When making the transition to marketing automation, many B2B organizations find scale to be the biggest issue they face. Here are 10 obstacles that pop up when planning and executing campaigns with marketing automation.
Account-based marketing isn't new, but many marketers still run into issues with implementation and performance. Here are six common ABM problems--and their solutions.
Artificial intelligence can seem like a magical marketing solution. But beware: Investing in AI too quickly can backfire. Here's how to know if your brand is ready for AI.
The 2018 holiday season retail outlook is optimistic. Consumers want to spend on personal items and gifts, and advertisers want to make the most of the red-hot market. Use these tips and tricks to attract consumers and totally ace the holiday season.
Having a content strategy in place is important, but it's not the only step to content success. Here are six considerations to ensure that your content marketing efforts are not being wasted.
Marketers struggle to attribute their campaigns to conversions. But the need to prove ROI is going to get only greater as marketing teams look for additional budget to spread across the many channels they wish to market on.
Instagram's IGTV could be exactly what your marketing needs to take your social media video strategy to the next level. Here are 7 tips to help marketers use IGTV.
Increasing email engagement is marketers' top priority and challenge, but email deliverability issues can undermine engagement. Unsubscribe from these 5 email myths to increase email deliverability.
Put your mobile shopping site or app to the test by re-examining these seven elements, and make it easy for customers to buy from you.
Cognitive biases--thought traps--are the enemy of rational decisions. But rational decisions based on data are vital for marketing and business success. Avoid these common cognitive biases.
This article shares three less-popular content marketing tactics that still work really well to generate traffic, links, and social shares.
Your new ABM program will need a new lead management process: The parts may be similar to your current process, but they work differently for ABM.
These are commonly asked questions (and their answers) about voice search, which is top of mind with marketers and businesses because so many searches are being conducted across Siri, Alexa, Google Home, and Cortana.
Sales emails are often easily overlooked, but adding video to your emails can give your company the competitive edge. Here's a guide on how to do that and which tools can help.
The assumption is that negative comments of rival fans hurt the involved brands--at least on the social media channels on which those comments and interactions take place. But is that really the case?
Increase your email program's ROI by knowing your who customers are and what content they want to see. Use these six methods to personalize your emails beyond the basics.
Before investing time and money into video marketing, make sure you have a strategy that aligns with your business goals.
WeWork started as a local coworking space, but it quickly grew to become a global force in other industries. What makes WeWork's growth so impressive compared with competitors', and what can its story teach you about how to grow your brand?
Want to future-proof your business for search—and more? Make sure you provide relevant, contextual answers to consumers' voice searches. Here's how.
Video is useful for more than just your marketing. Imagine using videos to make your hiring and onboarding processes more efficient. Here's how a video content management system can help you do that.
Great deal! Buy now!! But why should people buy from your brand over the competition? That's where your value proposition comes in. Here are five steps to test whether your value prop is helping you succeed—or fail.
As a marketer, you've likely asked yourself or your team how you can best deliver value to your customers. Adopting an Agile marketing strategy might well be the best answer to that question.
Companies rarely seek direct input at high volumes about purchasing behavior and experiences from the people who know it best: current, happy customers and former, not-so-happy customers. But why oh why?! Nobody knows more about the value or broken promises of products or services than the people who buy them. Here's your very own Voice of the Customer starter kit. Open it up!
What makes one brand succeed over other brands that sell the same or similar products? Gutsy brands make themselves stand out in ways their audiences relate to. Here's how to find and capitalize on your brand's gutsy qualities.
Design concepts can enhance your market research, and your marketing itself, helping you to communicate in your audience's language. That's especially the case when marketing to young women, but these four approaches can apply to any campaign.
The term "product-market fit" may not be familiar to some marketers, but it's fundamental to business growth. Here are five areas marketers should focus on to make sure their brand has the right product-market fit.
ABM is not a new strategy by any means, but more and more B2B marketers are embracing it, in part because they're dissatisfied with their current lead generation programs. But don't get tangled up in the hype; success relies on a careful approach.
If you've heard Reddit is a tough place to market, you've heard right—but changes to the platform have made it more marketing-friendly, and it can be one of the most effective social platforms for reaching new, relevant audiences.
Working with B2B influencers can help you reach new audiences, and it doesn't have to cost a fortune if you know how to engage with them organically.
Many marketing organizations lack the organizational structure to energize and optimize an ABM strategy and program. In some ways, Marketing's traditional org chart may actually hinder ABM success.
Despite its massive fan base, loyal users, and billions of impressions, our beloved SlideShare has succumbed. A once-powerful channel is all but dead, and here's why.
Editors are the guest-article gatekeepers at your audience's favorite online publications. If guest posting is part of your content marketing strategy, take a look at what they have to say about guest-article mistakes.
Creating personalized content that communicates value is the key to reaching customers in today's complex marketing landscape. Here are three things you need to know.
Paid search ad campaigns can be the fastest way to generate leads. The challenge, however, is to ensure healthy cost per acquisition (CPA). Here are eight techniques you can use to boost conversions while reducing CPA.
We have more data than ever before. And more data means better decisions, right? Not always, because numerical mirages can lead us astray. Here are six ways stats can let us down.
AI is a powerful technology that can help you create relevant marketing campaigns that bring results—or irrelevant campaigns that waste your money and your customers' patience. Let's go over what AI is and isn't, and what it can and can't do.
Your data is more valuable than you may know. These three strategies will help you maximize the value of your data and use it to achieve marketing and business objectives.
Your customer service team is either helping you retain customers... or it's helping you lose them. By overcoming these three challenges of customer service, you can give your customers better experiences and outshine competitors.
Content marketing and native advertising each have their own benefits. But when used together, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Read on for tips to help you drive even more leads.
Today, branding is not about slapping logos on various media. To grow, your brand needs to be providing consumers with disruptive—that is, memorable and sharable—experiences.
Meal kit companies can teach you more than just how to cook. This analysis of the names of the brands in that industry provides insight into creating memorable and evocative brand and product names.
These nine actionable tips will help you assess your networking and interviewing skills so you can land the marketing job you want.
Marketers need go beyond learning skills if they want to get a job. They should increase creativity, resiliency, and other characteristics—and employers should assess those types of traits when hiring.
This guide includes costs to consider, metrics to monitor, and formulas to use so you can determine whether your content marketing campaigns are producing the ROI you want.
Creating content is a waste of time if your target audience isn't consuming it. Here are three steps to creating content that prospects will care about.
You have data, but that doesn't mean you have actionable intelligence. Knowing how to report on that data is what helps you tell the stories you want to share. And the process might be simpler—and more enjoyable—than you think.
B2B influencer marketing can be tricky because B2B influencers may not have a big online presence. Here's how you can find offline influencers so you can combine online and offline efforts to improve results throughout the sales process.
Pull out your magnifying glass and read on to learn how to dig up clues about accounts and create a winning ABM program.
Can you spot a real from a fake? Here are some tips to determine whether the Instagram influencers you work with are as influential as they claim.
Want to increase your social presence while also boosting employee engagement? Here are 10 steps to launching a successful employee advocacy program.
To reach more customers at the right time in the right channels, marketers need to adapt messages for the different niche mediums and channels customers use during key parts of the customer journey.
Whether you create SEO reports internally or for clients, creating the right template and reporting on the most vital data will make your job easier and help you prove ROI.
Phew—you survived GDPR! Time to relax and... wait, what? The California Consumer Privacy Act was recently passed? Here's how marketers can get ahead of the competition by preparing for the new legislation that goes into effect in 2020.
If your data practices are GDPR-compliant, you don't have to worry, right? But marketing technologies and techniques that use consumer data for targeting and personalization can still put you in a bind.
Promoting too many sales and discounts can devalue your brand and hurt your bottom line in the long run. Instead, use content to build audience engagement, boost your brand, and increase ROI.
Is your content marketing strategy working as hard as it should be and achieving your goals? Here's how to audit your content to ensure it's moving your customers—and your ROI—in the right direction.
If the all the recent anti-spam legislation has you feeling hesitant about sending emails, fear not. Newsletters are still one of the most effective ways to reach your B2B audience. Here are some tips to get excellent results.
Promoting your content on the right platform at the right time can make all the difference in establishing your brand as a thought leader. Here are four steps to help you get there.
Less time scheduling social posts means more time creating great social content. Here are some tricks for creating an efficient scheduling process and three tools that can help you get your content seen.
These four steps will help you make sure your goals are measurable and, most important, revenue-driving.
You've been testing CTAs and landing pages, but now what? Here are 10 lesser-known—but highly effective—tactics you can use to increase website conversions.
Looking for some social media marketing inspiration? Go beyond standard posts with these four unique and effective campaigns.
Does the word "audit" give you the chills? Fear not! An audit can help your marketing team run more efficiently and make your marketing efforts more effective. And it can even be a fun process.
Sales enablement is no longer a task limited to the marketing team. When your business takes a more holistic approach to sales enablement, sales teams are more likely to increase win rates and exceed quotas.
Follow these five steps to create a memorable and effective brand that will help your company stand out from the competition.
Surveys are one of the most important digital touchpoints you can have with customers, eliciting valuable feedback to drive product and company direction. But how can you elicit better response rates?
Two of the biggest challenges content marketers face are finding enough time and hiring the right talent. Here's how to solve those problems.
When you're looking for a marketing job, it helps to get meta and figure out your personal brand. Here are some useful tips to help you find the right position.
Tired of last-minute projects and fire drills? Here's how to get your processes in order so you can spend less time planning and more time getting your marketing done.
For SEO, mentions of your brand that don't include a link back to your site are becoming just as important as linked mentions. Here are five steps for managing linkless mentions.
A subscription-based business model can be extremely successful—when it's marketed well. Here are some tips for reaching more of your target market, engaging your audience, and controlling churn rates.
Just as you need quality ingredients to make a delicious meal, you need quality data to ensure a successful marketing campaign. Here are three tips to make sure your data is fresh—and useful.
Providing useful content to your audience and selling your product or service to them aren't mutually exclusive tasks. These three tips explain how to use customer research to write compelling CTAs that help you make sales.
Forget the fancy sound effects and music: B2B podcasts need to be informative, useful, and respectful of their listeners' time. Here are 11 tips for how to make your B2B podcast a success.
The number of businesses selling via social media is increasing even as you read, especially on the king of all platforms, Facebook. Here's how you can harness Facebook's potential as an online store for your products or services.
GDPR may seem like a burden, but it helps us marketers think Customer First. Here's how to make sure you not only comply with GDPR's regulatory requirements but also provide customers what they need.
Unlike passive forms of marketing, experiential is an active, multidimensional vehicle that connects with customers on a deeper, more emotional level.
ROI is a misleading metric for evaluating event-marketing performance, especially since most B2B events are way more than just selling opportunities. Instead, here are four metrics that truly matter to event marketing.
Each touchpoint of interaction with your customers creates an opportunity for insight, improvement, and engagement. Here's a six-step process for measuring touchpoint effectiveness and identifying the touchpoints that matter most for a better customer experience.
The idea of creating a brand that customers will love is, really, something of a fairy tale. But we're big kids now, so let's put the fairy tales aside, roll up our sleeves, and get to work.
Marketers managing consumer promotions and engagement (CPE) efforts often can't easily measure ROI and determine what's working. Here are five tips to make CPE for consumer goods brands more efficient and profitable.
The co-producers and co-hosts of Basecamp's Rework podcast offer some practical advice from the podcasting trenches. Keep these three tips in mind when starting and producing your own podcast.
Using conversion rate optimization techniques in clickthrough-rate testing of title tags and meta descriptions can increase Web traffic (without dealing with search rank).
There is wisdom in integrating direct mail into email marketing campaigns. Here are tips and best-of-breed guidelines for effectively doing so.
GDPR's new consent standards will compel marketers to do what they need to be doing anyway: get to know and serve their customers better. Here are four ways to transform restrictive processes into strategic customer-relationship opportunities.
To plan your marketing, you need a marketing strategy. But how do you create that strategy? You need a tactical approach to understanding where you've been, where you are, where you're going (or should be), and what resources are required to get there.
A good rewards program can increase sales, reduce discounts, and grow customer loyalty. Here's how to launch a strong program and encourage customer participation.
Backlinks to your site are usually helpful—until they're not and they start to damage your search results. Here's how to disavow damaging backlinks by using Excel and other easily accessible tools.
If your marketing campaigns aren't performing as well as you'd hoped, it may be that they're falling on deaf—or even alienated—ears. Here are five mistakes you need to stop making.
Market leaders often take one of three paths to beat the competition. See which strategy can work best for your brand.
Video can make for effective marketing content, but tracking its ROI can be tricky. Here are 10 metrics to monitor to help ensure your video investment is paying off.
E-commerce businesses have options for shipping: do it yourself, outsource to a fulfillment center, or dropship. Explore the pros and cons of each to find the right option for your company.
The FTC's Telemarketing Sales Rule applies to everyone. Yes, there is a specific exemption for B2B calls, but marketers must understand the law and use caution.
Is your team spending too much time on manual tasks, such as cleaning up data? The good news: there are easy-to-implement processes to free up your team and improve your ROI.
See why contests are so effective for marketing, and follow these eight steps to create a contest that will help you generate leads, collect valuable data, and give your customers and prospects a great experience.
Even without grabbing the top spot in search engine results pages, you can be at the top. How? "Featured snippets"! Here are the various featured-snippet types, along with step-by-step instructions on how to claim your spot at the top of SERPs.
Selecting the right marketing tech stack can be overwhelming. All-in-one solutions are enticing, but sometimes individual tools that solve specific challenges are more useful. Here are three considerations for choosing your marketing tools.
Your email program is vital for turning one-time buyers into loyal customers. Here are some tips to make your emails effective in improving customer retention and encouraging loyalty.
To get the most out of your video investment, here's how to create the right types of video for each stage of the buyer's journey.
These six online tools can help all types of marketers level-up their graphic-design skills.
Writing better copy isn't difficult, but it does take a reset of how you think about marketing copy. Follow these five steps to find your brand's authentic voice and connect with customers.
Webinars offer a perfect platform to engage and train your B2B customers. See how to make them interactive and offer value to your attendees.
The mounds of social media data available offer a goldmine for marketers, but sorting through all that data can be overwhelming. That's where AI comes in to help you monetize your social data.
Marketers have access to overwhelming amounts of data, but acting on that data can be a challenge. Integrating qualitative and quantitative research can result in information that helps you sell your products and improve customer experience.
If you had sonar that could pinpoint great B2B leads for you, you'd use it, right? That's what buyer intent data can do for your lead generation efforts, putting you far ahead of the competition.
Content is king, right? Well, not so fast. Technical SEO is vital, too. Follow these tips to make sure your content can be easily discovered online.
Employees can be a brand's most influential advocates. Put that often-untapped resource to use by empowering employees to be your brand's best ambassadors.
Should companies allocate precious resources toward professional development and training for their marketing teams? Yes... but you need to ensure training effectiveness. Here's a four-step process for doing exactly that.
Innovating existing products and services rather than chasing the shiny and new is a smart use of resources and energy. And it has a far higher chance of success. It also protect your iconic status, the highest and most profitable form of branding.
B2B marketers have long assumed that business decisions are based primarily on rational motivations—and that emotion is exclusively B2C territory. But it's become increasingly apparent that emotion plays an important role in B2B as well.
Personalization is a powerful marketing tool, but with great power comes great responsibility. Misusing personalization can diminish consumers' trust in a brand. Here's how to be transparent and effective.
Your customers drive your business, so consider their habits when you're setting up your e-commerce site.
Exceptionally strong content can help you fulfill many goals at once: increasing website traffic, earning backlinks, and reducing bounce rate. Here's how to create that type of content.
You've heard the term "Blockchain," and maybe you're familiar with cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin, but what does all that have to do with marketing? Here's what you need to know.
Storytelling is key to successful marketing and advertising, but how can you make your audience really feel the story and be captivated enough to hear more?
Pricing can be one of the most sensitive parts of a marketing proposal, but these four tips can help your prospects focus on the value of your services rather than the dollar amount—and give you their Yes.
What are B2B marketers' priorities for growth? Branding, followed by innovation and customer satisfaction. The good news? Budgets and optimism are up. The bad news? Challenges still exist.
ABM does take time and effort, but the results can be extremely rewarding. These five steps (and one bonus tip) will walk you through how to set up your ABM program for success.
Discovering what drives your top buyers—and applying that info to prospects—can help you get more stellar customers.
GDPR goes into effect in two months, but most US companies are not prepared. Here are seven questions marketers should be asking themselves and their companies to ensure compliance—and avoid fines.
Think videos are just for B2C? Think again. They can be a powerful tactic in the B2B sales journey as well. Here's how to use video effectively in your B2B marketing.
Social media isn't just for collecting likes and follows: It can help you increase sales—when it's used right.
Both PPC and SEO are incredibly valuable components of your search engine marketing strategy, but they are even more powerful—and can get you even better results—when they come together.
Don't let the stories scare you. Some of the email axioms we believe to be true just aren't—at least, not anymore. See whether you've fallen victim to some of the most common email myths.
Done right, humor sells. But you probably don't sell a product or service that's inherently funny. So how can you create funny content that's just right for your business?
Get your readers past the headline and into the content with these helpful tips for leveling-up your headline game.
All the technology in the world won't give your customers great experiences if your customer service team—the face of your brand—isn't trained and supported properly. Here are three ways to make sure they are.
With new technologies and more data available than ever before, it's easy for marketers to get bogged down in things that don't always help them meet their goals. Here's how to stay focused on what matters.
What can marketers learn from the techniques that Brexit supporters used to convince a majority of the population to vote for what's been called "the stupidest thing any country has done"?
If you produce a marketing video but no one watches it, does it have any impact? Videos must be optimized for search to have the reach and ROI you want. Here are three tips to improve your video SEO rankings.
You can't be in more than one place at a time—but your brand can, and it should. Your customers are on multiple channels at the same time, and marketers need to keep up with them to be successful.
What do people see when they visit your LinkedIn profile? Ask yourself three questions to boost your profile and generate more leads from the professional networking platform.
Millennials are known for being a tech-savvy group, but ad overload means many digital ads are simply ignored. One way to capture Millennials' attention: go offline with billboards.
Creating a social media strategy can feel overwhelming—especially when there are so many social platforms. These tips will help you focus on the basics so you can find your audience and get up and running.
Do Millennials really have unique qualities, and do they really present unique challenges to marketers... or are we simply dealing with recurring clichés? Let's dispel three of the most commonly repeated myths about Millennials.
With a mobile device in nearly every consumers' pocket, many marketers have found success with SMS campaigns. As you explore this channel, keep these three key tips in mind.
As Google shutters its Site Search, these three key questions will help you avoid a scramble to find a replacement. They'll also help you determine which technology will work best for both you and your website visitors.
Gamification allows you to capture data, increase brand loyalty, and provide memorable and exciting customer experiences. These five tips will help you integrate gamification into your experiential marketing campaigns.
Up to 80% of customers in subscription-based services cancel their subscription in the first three months. Across the customer journey, here are the four personas you should be aware of and the actions you should take to retain them.
For your website, 2018 will be the year of legal compliance and user respect, and savvy brands can't afford to be left behind. Implementing these five techniques will get your site ready for this year—and beyond.
Although we marketers may not be the ones implementing security applications in our workplaces, what can we do (if anything) to help prevent security breaches—or ease their consequences?
Four out of five readers won't get past the first sentence of an online article. For marketing content creators, today's reading habits can be challenging. But here's how you can win over impatient or distracted readers and get your content read.
SEO and content marketing, particularly blogging, are a powerful combination that can build your website's authority and drive valuable search engine traffic to your site. But content marketers tend to make these five SEO mistakes. Here's how you can avoid them.
Message personalization has become a buzzword in marketing. But in most cases what’s really being used is easily captured demographic and geographic data. To send messages that are truly personal, businesses need to tailor their messages to behavior.
The problem many marketers face when trying to learn about marketing automation is that the topic seems overly broad and too technologically nuanced to tackle. But that's not so! You just need the right resources to move you from newbie to wizard.
Prior to last week, Crock-Pot wasn't even on Twitter—because, honestly, who wants to talk to Crock-Pot? Yet, a week later, the hastily assembled @CrockPotCares Twitter feed was still defending itself from attacks caused by the unlikeliest of sources.
There's an elite cadre of CEOs out in the marketplace who have a clear advantage over their counterparts: They have marketing backgrounds. Here's a look at what gives marketing-focused CEOs a leg up in the business world, and what you can learn from them.
Although there are no marketing silver bullets, cinemagraphs are fairly shiny and new—and still rare enough to have impact. Find out what they are, how they're different from GIFs, and how to make one.
In the world of marketing, there's a perception that B2B marketing is serious and logical, whereas B2C marketing is fun and creative. Yet, the role that emotions play in both B2B and B2C marketing is strikingly similar.
In the new year, a combination of technology advances, organizational cultural shifts, and buyer-behavior changes will push B2B marketing in new directions. Here are four trends that will start to mature in 2018.
Trying to continually strike a balance between creating engaging, high-quality content and producing it at scale can seem like a bad dream. But here's a proven process to help you dispel four common content creation nightmares.
In our age of information overload, engaging your audience is more challenging than ever. But what if, rather than trying to divert customers' attention, marketers could meet customers where they're already spending time?
A lot of ABM and sales-enablement vendors talk about how companies can use technology to scale customer contact. Despite the promises about futuristic things like artificial intelligence, you'd be paying to fail if you don't take the human touch into account.
Imagine you're tasked with planning a trip. Now imagine trying to do that without knowing the trip's starting point... Tough, right? It's the same with a brand-awareness campaign. You won't get far without first knowing your brand's current standing in the market.
Customer advisory boards can deliver amazing benefits to host companies and participants, but they can easily backfire if not managed, budgeted, or resourced properly. Here's how to make sure your CAB program succeeds.
Content creators have a tough gig. Too often, our colleagues view us as short-order content cooks who can whip up content at a moment's notice. Fortunately, there's a process designed to protect the content creators of the world. It's called Agile, and it works beautifully in marketing.
Marketing campaign success isn't determined by diagnostic metrics (think website visits and the like). Don't fall into the trap of letting those middle metrics dominate your campaigns. Take these three steps instead.
To pick a side or not to pick a side? That is the question plaguing many brands in today's politically polarized environment. Pick a side, and you risk potentially losing a wide customer base that holds opposing views. Don't pick a side, and you may be viewed as inauthentic.
If your client, CMO, or manager views content not so much as king but as bastard prince, it's time to go to battle, breach some preconceived walls, and prove content's prowess. These eight tactical measures will help you do all that.
Using SlideShare for content marketing (think videos, documents, infographics, e-books, presentations...) can increase brand awareness and drive traffic to your website. But how can marketers use SlideShare for lead generation?
Selecting the right marketing technology is often a messy process with iffy results, but it doesn't have to be. Do the work to evaluate the company behind the product, and you'll put yourself in a position to succeed. Here's how.
What changes or innovations will alter how we email in 2018? What will go away or become less relevant? What role will video play? What are some top tips for email marketers in 2018?
Influencer marketing has successfully transitioned from being considered a passing fad to being allotted a respected place in the modern marketing mix. It will continue to rapidly evolve to meet marketers' needs, so keep your eye on these five trends.
For decades, marketers have meticulously segmented audiences on demographics and personas, but these methods are growing irrelevant. There are stronger predictors of buying habits.
Getting people's attention on social media is more difficult than ever. But giving up isn't an option. So... what should marketers do? Create well-conceived, well-written campaigns that cut through the static, of course. Here's how.
Today's inboxes are more crowded than ever. But using smart design and tactics, marketers from brands big and small can build effective email campaigns. For inspiration, check out some of the best emails from 2017, along with tips to ensure your emails stand out.
With all the talk about the future of marketing, we sometimes forget about the changes happening right here, right now. Like voice search, which is already affecting search results. Here's how to capitalize on it with the right optimization techniques.
Generating qualified leads remains a top challenge for B2B marketers. Here's how you can address three key B2B buying trends to earn buyers' attention and trust—and improve the quality of your lead generation.
For any marketing campaign to be successful, marketers must find innovative ways to interweave the brand's core values with the cultural context of the intended audience—its ideologies, tensions, values...
Design trends are often the result of shifts in technology, pop culture, and the political climate, and they often point to larger cultural shifts. Here are four of the most compelling design trends that will be influencing 2018.
Getting an email program up and running is tough under most circumstances, including when you're first starting out. But you can take steps to stack the email marketing deck in your favor.
Livestreaming is fraught with risks at a time when a little bit of bad publicity can go a long way. But it's also a game-changer full of potential. It would be wise to explore how to use livestreaming to reach your customers on their preferred social channels.
Marketers need to understand customers and offer truly personalized experiences, delivering the right content or services to the right people at the right time—i.e., the right context. Here's how to lay the foundation of a customer experience program and team.
As social media users, we think nothing of creating videos that are fun and entertaining. Yet, when it's time to use video in a more structured environment, say for marketing, suddenly videos are intimidating. But they don't have to be.
Marketers can no longer afford to view technology as a "nice to have." In 2018 and beyond, our performance will rely in great part on our martech stacks. Those without an adoption strategy will find themselves unable to keep up with competitors who use technology more effectively.
Video plays an important role in driving consumer purchase decisions, so using your YouTube channel could be a great way to drive sales. But how can you convert subscribers into customers?
E-books are valuable fuel for your content marketing engine. They assist in positioning companies as thought leaders, they provide value to customers and prospects, and they generate leads. But what should your e-book be about? And how do you decide?
Ad tech trends seldom mature overnight, but as the industry figures out how it can improve user experience as well as increase revenue, 2018 will be a rough ride for most.
Here are three effective ways you can use lateral thinking to reinvent your marketing and unlock new revenue growth for your business.
By working in lockstep with data scientists, marketers can better understand who their targets are, what they desire, and what their challenges, behaviors, and motivations are. Marketers can then devise more effective campaigns to influence consumers.
Video is ever changing—from '90s video clips on MTV to vanishing Snapchat Stories—and the platform that airs the content helps shape and refine both video and how it's used. So when you're considering using video in your next social media marketing campaign, also consider this advice.
People are busier than ever, and increasingly they are learning by listening to podcasts while multitasking. Accordingly, audio content might be the perfect choice to market your business or brand.
It's a battle as old as time: You've been assigned to an important project with a tight deadline, but your inspiration's running dry. How can you possibly be creative when the clock is ticking and the pressure is mounting?
A customer-centric mindset is vital for marketing success, helping campaigns resonate with prospects and leading to more sales and greater customer satisfaction. So how can busy marketers implement a customer-centric mindset?
If you forgot to tend to your technical SEO while you were busy surviving all the recent Google algorithm updates, who can blame you? But now is the time to shore up your technical SEO fundamentals in preparation for 2018.
With the year quickly coming to a close, many companies are looking to ramp up their sales efforts to hit or exceed their projected numbers for the year. These six platforms can help B2B sales departments close out the year strong.
Relying solely on analytics tools when making business decisions can lead to misdirected targeting, causing major consequences for an organization's bottom line.
We are in the next great Golden Era of marketing, and with this new era comes an entirely new set of possibilities—along with commensurate customer demands. Here are five megatrends we marketers need to be aware of as we move into 2018.
It's that time of year when marketers are figuring out how to allocate their resources. Here are some important things to keep in mind as you build your marketing budget for the upcoming financial year or quarter.
If an explainer video is a snack, a long-form documentary (think 15 minutes) is the marketing equivalent of a four-course meal. The thing is... no content strategy can live on snackable content alone; sometimes, you need to serve up a full meal.
Getting holiday-season email delivered and opened without irking your recipients is a challenge. Luckily, we've compiled a few tested tips and tricks that will help you refine your emails to bring your organization more cheer this season.
Marketers and retailers have a huge opportunity on social media during the holidays. Being prepared for the holiday rush is a huge advantage, but some brands can easily fall behind this hectic time of year. Stay ahead of the competition with these seven key steps.
Those who consistently score likes, comments, and engagement with their Instagram posts aren't doing so by accident. By understanding the ins and outs of Instagram's most popular types of posts, you can fine-tune your own content strategy.
Customer experience (CX) leaders generate more revenue than companies that fail to prioritize CX. Brands become CX leaders by personalizing engagement in relevant and valuable ways. Here are four guideposts for getting CX right.
Many of us in marketing recognize that Taylor Swift is a cunning, calculated positioning savant, and the new, edgy, and angry Taylor is nothing but a brand refresh. Here are three takeaways for your own company or brand.
If used properly, user-generated content can be a huge asset for content marketers. UGC can save you time and money, and boost your credibility. Here are six UGC benefits—and ways you can profit from them.
Fully 40% of holiday shoppers begin searching and purchasing before November 1, which means search engine marketers need a game plan now to make some jolly-good sales this season.
The home stretch of the holiday season is a unique opportunity to retool digital strategies that carry you into January and beyond. Here's how retailers and marketers can connect with consumers even after the wrapping paper is tossed out and leftovers are gone.
How can your business react to consumer behaviors—and try to beat the retail giant that is Amazon? Here are a few new, innovative ways to keep driving revenue this holiday retail season through next-generation remarketing.
Content marketers tend to focus on external communication channels, such as social media, video channels, and blogs, but it would be a mistake to neglect other important touchpoints. These three effective tactics can extending your content marketing reach.
Despite the annoyance, budget planning is an absolute necessity. Without it, you can't proceed or succeed. When planning for 2018, here's how to avoid and correct the top 4 mistakes almost all marketers make.
Instead of targeting just the C-suite, today's B2B marketers must target groups of buyers and influencers who range from junior procurement specialists in their 20s to senior executives in their 50s and 60s.
The success of a direct marketing campaign depends, to varying degrees, on your list, your offer, and your creative. Getting those three things to work together in sync—in online and offline channels—will explode your results. Here's an overview, in interview format, of the fundamentals of direct marketing.
As a marketer, you always look for ways to give your company or clients a leg up. You have Google Analytics experts, dashboards, reports on demand, and more. GA has worked well for you so far. But recently you've noticed there's a whole new playing field.
You worry that members of your sales team are not following the right messaging guidelines in their cold outreach to prospects. The solution: you give them email templates proven to work.
At the end of the day, lead generation is B2B marketing's primary task. It is also the trickiest. Getting disconnected from what customers want happens a lot more and faster than you think.
The specter of the General Data Protection Regulation has loomed large. With GDPR taking effect next year, efforts to comply with the new regulations should already be well underway. That's simply not the case at many companies, however.
As marketers, we need to know how to build excitement for our product or service without overhyping and disappointing customers. And the best way to master walking that fine line is by better understanding how and why expectations alter experiences.
Welcome to the world of Instagram—an immensely creative and engaging platform where you can connect with millions of users and promote your brand effectively. Read on for salient pointers on how you can use Instagram skillfully to promote your products and boost sales.
As we near the end of 2017, retail faces significant profitability issues. In turn, marketers are facing pressure to capture and retain customer attention, and they're resorting to flashy new approaches. But email remains unmatched in helping to build brand, convert, and make sales.
There's plenty of autumn left, but the holiday season is fast approaching. You might think you still have lots of time to launch your holiday email marketing campaign, but now is the time to prepare. Check out these holiday email marketing tips from the experts.
Voice search has begun to take center stage, signaling a dramatic change in the way consumers search online. Here's what you need to know, including current trends, potential growth, likely effects on digital marketing and SEO, as well as opportunities and barriers marketers may face.
To account for shifts in consumer behavior, marketers have to adapt their video marketing approaches to a mobile-first world in which text and video are forming a symbiotic relationship.
The essence of creating a positive experience is making customers feel that they are heard and important—before, during and after a transaction.
The need for high-quality content cannot be overemphasized, which is why you need a team that knows how to implement your content strategy. Here's how to build and nurture a content team that gets the job done.
This article provides a tool for B2B marketers—the "event effectiveness matrix"—to evaluate events and choose the one with highest lead-generation potential.
In a world of mass emails and stimulus overload, personalization has become critical to B2B marketing. Buyers are becoming harder to identify and increasingly like consumers: They want personalized outreach and one-to-one interaction...
Some marketing organizations excel at marketing performance management and, as a result, achieve better growth for their companies. How? They operate Marketing as a center of excellence (CoE). Here's how to turn your marketing organization into a CoE.
Customers today have seemingly contradictory demands: super-fast websites and immersive experiences. Web publishers would be wise to optimize their image-based assets, lest they lose visitors—and revenue—to slow pageload speeds.
Articles are a fundamental tool in your content marketing toolbox. Here are three places your articles can find a home, each of which serves a different purpose and offers unique benefits for your content strategy.
In marketing, we talk nostalgically about the "corner store" as the epitome of customer relationships. But that Norman Rockwell version of customer loyalty is dead. Which is why we need to get back to fundamentals. Here are three ideas on how.
The right booth space and location on the exhibit floor are vital for maximizing event ROI. The location selection process, however, can be complicated. So here, in a handy guide, are all the important factors you need to take into account.
What is dark data? It's the unstructured data that's all over social networks, and it's full of valuable insights you can use to generate revenue and improve your business. And it's highly likely you're not using it—yet.
So how do you stand out from the crowd as a B2B social media marketer? Here's the advice you need to ensure your company engages with potential customers and develops a social media following that converts into what you really want—sales!
It's time to talk about your website relaunch—and a frequent crucial misstep by too many marketers. Before moving too far along the relaunch process, ask (and answer) these seven questions.
We are all after content that converts readers into customers, gets shared, builds backlinks, and ranks high in search results. But you can't get any of these results unless your content manages to engage your target audience.
How can you overcome a fear of public speaking? How can you deliver a winning presentation that encourages your audience to applaud, give you high marks on post-presentation surveys, and seek you out for a chat after the microphone is turned off? Here are a few recommendations and best-practices.
Congrats, you're 99% of the way done with your new or redesigned website project, but it's not time to relax just yet. Follow these website launch tips for a seamless go-live transition.
What marketing tools should your company be using right now? Here are 17 for 2017—some new, some tried and true, all totally useful.
A loyal base of followers is key to your marketing—to bring in steady website traffic and ensure positive word-of-mouth that helps your business gain traction. To avoid ruining your relationship with your social following, use these three strategies.
If your marketing calendar is a cobbled-together spreadsheet, be prepared for a content-related nightmare. To maximize your marketing calendar's effectiveness, make sure these three components are in place.
Blogging is a great way for sales reps to establish credibility, but it's up to us marketers to ensure the brand's best face is put forward with clear, concise, and appropriate messages that aren't too salesy. Here's how.
To build your online reputation and your personal brand, you need to present yourself as an expert, someone people will want to hire or buy something from. A blog is an ideal way to hone your personal brand online.
Companies that don't support messaging apps risk creating a negative customer experience—and having competitors fill the gap. A messaging app program, with chatbots or without, helps you be responsive to consumers in a way that humanizes the brand through conversation.
With nearly 5,000 solutions in the B2B marketing technology and PR technology landscape, it can be daunting to decide which technology your company should use. So here are four important areas of consideration and related questions to help you identify the best solutions for your organization.
Facebook recently introduced new features that help advertisers garner more return on their social media advertising investments. These three features, especially, are worth a try.
Whether you're trying to contact a prospect, pitch an investor, email a press release to an editor, or strike up a conversation with a potential employer, email is one of the best ways to connect. But what if you don't have their email address?
At the core of every consumer-generated content (CGC) program is the ability to collect and share ratings and reviews. But there is much more marketers can do to increase the effectiveness of their CGC.
You just got the green light to create a public relations program for your startup. There's a lot to do and you don't have enough time or budget to do it all. Where should you begin?
Customer or market research and intelligence are essential to fact-based decision-making. Here are six best-practices for conducting research and reasons for considering external resources to help you avoid costly mistakes.
Even the greatest content needs an early boost to gain traction in social media. Paid promotion and influencer marketing can help, but they can be costly. Fortunately, virtually every organization has a captive audience that's willing—even happy—to share content with their networks for free.
Today's consumers connect with brands through more channels and devices than ever before. And though many companies have some process in place to measure marketing ROI, few are doing it right. What do you need to know to get right?
A review of award-winning actor and best-selling author Alan Alda's new book 'If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on my Face? My Adventures in the Art and Science of Relating and Communicating.'
Many marketers, business owners, and entrepreneurs think innovation is synonymous with invention—and that to move the needle, we need to come up with a shiny new product, market, or idea. But some of the most innovative brands of our time prove otherwise.
User-generated content is here to stay. And as the marketing landscape begins to shift to a more user- and UGC-centric direction, what steps can you take to capitalize on this authentic marketing tactic?
With 2 billion monthly active users on Facebook, the question is no longer whether you should advertise on the platform—but how. Here are four types of Facebook retargeting that can help you increase e-commerce revenue.
SaaS companies can ensure nurturing and upsell campaigns are consistently successful across the entire buyer's journey, from initial contact through the trial/freemium phase to after commitment. Here's how.
It wasn't always obvious that marketing operations would become such a central part of B2B marketing. But it has, and it's now the core engine making Marketing smarter, faster, and more cohesive.
Social media monitoring has become an important part of digital marketing. Though most marketers understand its necessity, the details aren't as clear. The most common question: What keywords should I monitor?
These are the five key KPIs that marketers must regularly measure. You'll learn how to measure them, followed by tips on how to improve the performance of each.
To survive and thrive, nonprofits have had to develop approaches and skills that for-profits can also use to improve their competitive position, customer relations, and long-term health and value.
You did it. You built a solid hub of corporate content. But now what? You've got a well-planned content machine, but is it sustainable? Here's what happens when a good blog goes bad, and gets killed before it has a fighting chance to thrive.
As influencer marketing grows, audience size is taking a back seat and engagement is becoming the No. 1 indicator of success—i.e., relevancy and leads. And that's where social media micro-influencers come in.
Social media influencer marketing is still a relatively new practice, which means making mistakes is unavoidable. Here's how you can avoid three of the most common influencer marketing mistakes.
Data can help deliver insights that marketing leaders can use to collaborate with CEOs, CFOs, and sales leaders. And these four essential data points and relationship-building strategies will help you demonstrate ROI and Marketing's value.
Today, few terms generate as much buzz as "influencer marketing." But is the result more heat than light? Here's a look at three top challenges of influencer marketing, along with a big-picture view of this marketing strategy.
These 15 email marketing tips and best-practices (with real life examples) for e-commerce are entirely actionable, and you can easily implement them to increase your conversion rate.
Multichannel automation, content personalization, social sharing tools, analytics... a marketing Cloud makes it possible to juggle the numerous tools necessary for today's marketing. But do you get a turnkey solution, or do you build your own?
When corporations mess up, the online outrage and media recrimination seem devastating. But, these days, the result is often increased brand awareness. What does a business have to do to really fail?
Many companies find themselves asking the same question: How do we authentically engage with customers throughout their entire buying journey to keep them satisfied and buying more? The answer, up until now, has been complicated.
Social marketing is different because your audience talks back—immediately, directly, and sometimes not in your favor. If you're developing a social advertising strategy the way you would for PPC ads or email, you're missing a huge opportunity to capture market share.
An effective B2B email marketing strategy has much less to do with email, per se, than you might think. The best programs nurture and engage leads while also working to close deals. Which is where managing your contact database comes into play.
What is the secret to an engaging headline? Everyone has an opinion... but what does the data say? After analyzing 100 million headlines, we found that the essence of an engaging headline comes down to a few core principles.
The Millennial market: such a tempting conquest, yet so frustrating to conquer. Connecting with this elusive and lucrative demographic is not easy. Here are four major insights to help you market to—and win over—this tough crowd.
It's a multibillion-dollar problem that's shaking the confidence of thousands of marketing decision-makers. But what is it, exactly, and why is it leaving CMOs fed up and frustrated?
Imagine graduating from college with a marketing degree and being able to immediately function as a marketer in most any company or situation. Education has forever grappled with the the "theory vs. practice" problem. Here's how to balance the two approaches.
Drawing inspiration from some of the brightest B2B content marketers, here are five ways to help solve the problem of planning your content marketing and elevating the content experience of your customers to meet their evolving expectations.
In today's consumer environment, we marketers must take risks, otherwise we risk getting lost in the clutter and sinking into irrelevance. Success lies in understanding the difference between taking risks... and being risky.
The point of sale (POS) has evolved from the cash register to the online cart and now to voice-activated devices—and soon to virtually anywhere, anytime, in myriad automated ways. The one constant for marketers: user experience.
Developing new products and services in today's economy requires adaptive innovation—an ability to adjust to the fast-changing needs of target markets. Three fundamental steps are necessary to support that process.
Indecision, internal squabbles, poor protocols, and fear of finishing and "shipping" can paralyze marketing initiatives. But your content program doesn't have to go down that rabbit hole. Here are tips for quickly instituting a content marketing program.
Marketers have lately been talking much more about how augmented reality and virtual reality will change marketing. It's time to take a step back and put a practical spin on AR and VR—on what is likely to happen and what is simply hype.
Budgets aren't sexy, but they are vital for high-performing marketing organizations. If you can master these three keys, you'll create a best-in-class marketing budget—and you'll be well on your way to marketing success.
From raising awareness, to educating prospects, to completing the transaction, to enhancing customer service and beyond, predictive analytics can help you anticipate customers' needs and desires throughout their circuitous buying journey.
Do email newsletters still work, or are they a thing of the past? See what 17 successful digital marketers have to say about the effectiveness of email newsletters for online stores.
The potential power of the press release is sometimes misunderstood by marketers who aren't studied PR practitioners. Acting on those false beliefs, however, can be fraught with problems, so here are some best-practices regarding press releases as marketing tools.
The appeal of some products is obvious; they practically sell themselves. Other, "boring" products? Not so much... There is hope, though. Here are 11 powerful ways to market products that, on the face of it, seem totally unsexy.
Why in this digital world would you operate your digital marketing communications without a solid strategy and plan? Set your foundation on the right footing now, and you'll save time (and money) later. Here's how.
Influencer marketing grew out of celebrity endorsement, but with nearly everybody now on social media... it turns out that relatively ordinary, down-to-earth people are often the best influencers. But how do you find the influencers most suitable for your business?
Businesses resistant to new tech and ideas have often fallen behind or lost the ability to compete. VR and AR may still feel out of reach, but the technology will quickly become more accessible both to creators and to users.
From rules such as think big but start small and with the basics, to take an action-based approach, pick your battles, and beware of small sample sizes... in this article you'll get sound advice about data-driven marketing.
B2B mobile usage is intensifying throughout the entire buying cycle. Here are four ways B2B companies can use mobile marketing to keep pace with the customer journey.
If you've never done it, working with a B2B digital marketing agency can feel like a bold exploration of unknown territories. To make sure you don't lose your way, ask these 10 questions of your potential marketing partners.
As an email marketer, you test subject lines and calls to action for optimal performance, but are you submitting your copy to the ultimate test? If you're not testing it for readability, you may be missing out on clicks, conversions, and revenue.
You lost your prospect to a competitor you've been enviously watching win again and again. What's happening? And how can you stop it from happening yet again?
Content is still one of the best ways to engage your customers—but you must rethink it... It's not about beautiful stories about your brand; it's about high-value, behavior-changing content about, and for, your customers and their aspirations.
In today's digital world, marketers manage thousands of images and videos. What's the best way to manage your marketing materials? Here are five best-practices to consider.
Communication matters. In organizations without effective communication, leaders can't lead, products don't sell, and projects don't get funded. Which presents a paradox: if it's that important, why does most communication fail?
To stay competitive post-IPO, Snap needs to not only maintain and grow its user base but also convince marketers of the value of using the platform for marketing and advertising. Here's what it has going for it.
We now live in the Testimonial Economy, where what we say about ourselves doesn't matter, what others say about us is what sways opinion, and bad reviews can override even the best marketing plan and the most strategic sales plan.
To join the growing number of businesses using the proven power of influencer marketing—to the tune of a $6.50 return on each dollar invested—take these 5 steps to ensure a successful influencer marketing campaign.
You want your customers and potential customers to think of your content less as annoying advertisement and more as valuable, useful, or enjoyable marketing. Consider these seven types of content proven to help you increase leads and optimize conversion rates.
Learn how we marketers can graduate from the tried-and-true daily blast email to take a more personalized, targeted approach—and why it is so critical to our businesses that we do so.
Just because freelance writers aren't employees doesn't mean they aren't a valuable part of your marketing team. Here's how to seek out those who are right for you and bring them on board, and what signs to look for that they might not be working out.
Sometimes, your content crashes and burns. That might mean no one reads your article, it doesn't get shared, or you get bombarded with nasty comments. But, all that's OK. In fact, it might be for the better.
When a brand story is crafted correctly, consumers will be proud to associate with and represent your brand, and they will market it of their own volition via word-of-mouth.
Branding is vital in today's crowded marketplace of companies, ideas, and products. And though most of us understand visual branding with images, colors, logos, etc., few understand that sounds and music can align perfectly with brand attributes—and set your brand apart.
Videos are one of the most effective types of marketing content around. But using the right type of video for each marketing goal is key.
Black Friday might seem like it's a long time away, but some of the most worthwhile holiday marketing activities require months of planning. If you want to build out a micro-influencer program for the holiday season, this 5-month plan will get you started.
Copywriters know that creativity doesn't always come right when you need it. Here are four common causes of creative block—and ideas for overcoming them.
Before salespeople can convince a prospect to buy, they have to convince that buyer of the need for change. Facts and figures that are devoid of emotion often fail to persuade, but stories based on these four plots often succeed.
The Web continues its march toward becoming more image-centric, and any e-commerce site not willing to invest in product photography or video is already being left behind.
Brand tracking—collecting data from a static group of consumers on a regular basis—can assess and scrutinize shifts in KPIs and consumer attitudes and behaviors. You can track and benchmark everything from brand awareness to customer satisfaction to the effectiveness of an ad campaign.
A hook is the initial sentence (or single word) that grabs the attention of readers and entices them to keep reading. Here are six ways you can approach writing a tantalizing hook.
Today's marketing software landscape is flooded with thousands of solutions offering myriad features and benefits. It can be nearly impossible to find the right software for you. But fear not, here's some help.
Rather than sticking to time-tested basics, marketers sometimes jump into channels they know little about. After all, what if that shiny new platform is the one you've always dreamed about? In the end, though, you're only hurting yourself.
Today's survey tools allow marketers to add more flourishes than ever to customer feedback surveys. But, it turns out, less is more when asking customers for input. See which top 3 feedback misconceptions most need busting.
Email is a highly effective channel for delivering loyalty program content and experiences that get your first-time shoppers to stick around—and drive up your customer lifetime value.
As Google's deep-learning algorithm assesses what is the most relevant and authoritative Web content, LSI keywords will continue to become more important. Jump on the bandwagon now to stand out before your competition does.
2017 is nearly halfway through, and you may already be feeling you're behind your 2017 revenue goals. No need for your anxiety to turn into a midyear panic attack, however. Instead, keep your eye on some key strategic areas and avoid these three mistakes.
Determining which technology pieces matter to your marketing team can be daunting. You need tools that help you navigate omnichannel shopping behaviors, meet customers where they are, and deliver useful experiences. Here are three essential tools road-tested by leading retail brands.
Digital video's best-practices are becoming increasingly apparent—and, with them, ROI performance is improving. Digital video is moving from a branding to a sales and branding tool. Here's what you need to know.
Marketers know: The need to create great content will only increase. And so, doing things the usual way—the way everyone else does it—may help you tick the quantity box, but you'll fall short on quality... And that won't drive results.
Tired of brainstorming? It works if done right, but it's not the only way to shake loose creative ideas. Here are 5 effective ways to uncover core brand elements, reframe concepts for stronger appeal, generate fresh approaches—and unravel other marketing and communications problems.
Small content teams are expected to do big things these days, even though no company—large or small—has enough time or budget for content. So how can you create enough content to satisfy the voracious demand for it?
Long-form content is highly effective, but producing it can burn through time—our most precious resource as marketers. What can busy content marketers, who must create more and more high-performing content, do?
Infographics are everywhere on the Web, but it isn't easy to come up with good designs to create your own. Here are five the most popular types of infographic templates, the reasons they work so well, and tips and tricks to help you make them your own.
A friend shared an image on Facebook. Intended to be a funny political meme, it instead offended many who saw it... Should she have shared that post? Could she have lost her job? Might the issue have been avoided? Are people just overly sensitive? Let's explore those questions.
Combining creativity with B2B marketing is an ongoing challenge. How do you build an emotional connection with your customers and inspire deep-seated brand loyalty when you lack the direct tactics of B2C campaigns?
Marketers know they should be following up leads with an email autoresponder sequence. But many don't know what to write, and so never get around to creating follow-up emails. Use these five approaches to stay top of mind without annoying your prospects.
Facebook is intentionally giving more organic exposure to live videos, which is why Facebook Live dominates the News Feeds of most users these days. What does that mean for businesses and B2B marketers? Here are a few ways to use Facebook Live to benefit your business.
It's jarring to realize you've been designing customer experience all wrong because you've prioritized scale over end-user satisfaction... But how do you set things straight? Change is notoriously difficult, but it is possible; these three steps will set you well on your way.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the sexiest conversation in email marketing, but few marketers are ready for it. Here's what the buzz doesn't tell you, and what you can do now to prepare for an AI-empowered future.
Everyone is publishing content today, at a blinding rate, and your undifferentiated content is getting lost in a sea of equally indistinguishable content. Bad news: Your content has become a commodity. Here's what you can do about it.
People's product preferences are undoubtedly influenced by media, and your audiences have no qualms about using media to share stories about their brand experiences. So here's how you can harness UGC to influence your target audience.
What's so hard about engaging people who were already convinced enough about you to have made an initial purchase? These are five big mistakes companies make in their relationships with customers.
Social media's importance in the sales/marketing funnel is by now undisputed, but visibility into the insights each platform can provide is often clouded by meaningless metrics. Here's how your team should be using social insights to guide major marketing decisions.
Communities offer you an opportunity to better understand your customers by capitalizing on the data they provide online. You can then use that data to offer personalized content at various points in the customer journey.
It's no secret that video has become a more and more significant piece of the content marketing mix—and livestreaming has become a rapidly growing and effective tactic. The tips and tricks in this guide will help you get live video right.
Machine-learning (ML) startups are flourishing, and companies are predicating their value proposition on artificial intelligence (AI). That's because both ML and AI will likely have immense impact on profitability—and transform marketing.
How can you ensure a constant flow of new and engaging content to maintain your following and reach new audiences? And how can you improve your SEO? By cleverly recycling old content, you can solve both problems.
Coca-Cola has decided to eliminate the position of CMO; instead, Coke has created a chief growth officer role, in charge of both its customer and its commercial teams. Here's what marketers can learn from the shakeup.
Over 2 million blog posts are published each day. No wonder many marketers struggle with generating fresh content ideas to fuel their marketing efforts. Here are seven tactics to overcome your idea-generation hurdles.
A good content workflow makes your publishing process a lot more effective. Here's how you can organize the work of your content team and simplify the production and distribution of marketing content.
Go figure... The online reputation management industry has an image problem. So it's time to pull an Elon Musk and share a blueprint of how to do it right. These are the details you won't see anywhere in public, not even at conferences.
If you want your marketing and your business to succeed, you need to make the most of your lead generation campaigns and achieve the highest-possible ROI. Here are a few ways you can do that.
We've become used to hearing about Millennials as "the next generation of consumers." That's no longer the case. Millennials are adults now. They're the current generation. And they're your customers. Here's how to reach them.
The revenue number can hide successes as well as problems, and it tells you little about your customers. Here are six key performance indicators that are better at measuring the pulse of your business.
Many components of content marketing are controllable and predictable. What isn't? Your audience's response. Here's what you can do when a piece of content you've created simply doesn't produce the right results.
In the past year, Google made changes to AdWords intended to open up new channels for marketers on mobile devices. Here are four easy tweaks that will make the most of those new channels to get you more leads and conversions.
Moments that lead to a mobile or digital action in a consumer's daily life may seem trivial, but they can hold large opportunities for brands. Those "micro-moments," as Google has termed them, occur when consumers turn to a device for a specific need, anytime and anywhere.
Too often, salespeople don't understand the buyer's world or needs, and don't know to communicate real value. But whose fault is it? The sellers'? They often get the blame, but it might well lie with Marketing...
We've seen the shocking viral videos. The rage-inducing photos. The fire-and-brimstone calls for a boycotts and firings. How did it all go so wrong? More important: What lessons can we learn from United Airlines' ongoing struggles?
Here's what you need to know about fake news, why you should consider fact-checking in your own content marketing, and how to implement a fact-checking process.
Instead of hypothetical ways that might increase your site's organic traffic, here are proven approaches that 17 SEO experts themselves use.
The proliferation of digital devices, coupled with a deluge of short, "snackable" content, has given consumers greater choice than ever in how and where they consume media. How can you get them to notice your ads?
Just 18 words. Marketing and Sales pros who know this powerful stat, fly; and those who don't, die. (Well, their emails do.)
The time for personal branding is now, and today is the best day to start developing your personal brand. Here are 26 tips, from A to Z, to help your personal branding efforts.
From the tiniest startups in Silicon Valley to the largest global organizations, consumer and B2B marketers are pouring more resources than ever into video. But if you're just now getting into video marketing, these tips will help you catch up quickly.
To garner full value from their social intelligence strategies, CPG companies should be mindful of incorporating these three initiatives into their social plans.
Too many nurture touchpoints, too many pieces of outreach, too many really bad email messages. Buyers are beginning to shut down, and that's going to be a big problem for marketers. Unless...
It seems so obvious: Businesses that take a proactive approach to customer success, going out of their way to anticipate customers' needs and offer help rather than waiting to be asked, are more likely to have loyal and repeat customers.
Let's be honest: Website visitors hate to fill out your lead generation forms. Luckily, there are proven ways to reduce form friction and get prospects to hand over their valuable information.
The good news: The proliferation of new ad platforms and formats has created a lot of opportunities for publishers. The bad news: The proliferation of new ad platforms and formats has created tons of confusion and a whole new set of challenges.
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