Saturday, January 31, 2015
Heat and Solar Energy
Friday, January 30, 2015
Online Marketing News: Mobile Drives Digital, Search is Number One, Twitter Digits
The Beginner’s Guide to Podcasting
How Well Do You Know Marketing Data? Take Our Quiz
Marketers have long known the importance of good data management and data cleansing. Yet we all know that, in practice, few have mastered the skills necessary to truly understand and successfully manipulate marketing data.
According to recent Econsultancy research, managing customer data - the crux of any customer engagement strategy - is particularly challenging. Some 35% of the senior level executives surveyed said they work within a “siloed organisation lacking coherent approach to marketing”. Only 8% said the technology their company uses to deliver an integrated customer experience is a “single integrated platform”.
We’ve created a fun quiz highlighting some of the more random buzzwords correlated with marketing data right now. Test your knowledge and find out how savvy you are when it comes to data lingo. Don’t worry if you don’t feel confident with your answers, there’s a marketing lesson in it for all of us. Once you’ve uncovered your score and taken some good advice as to how you can improve your marketing data knowledge, share your results and test your fellow marketers too!
For more strategies on how to leverage the data in your marketing arsenal, download the Modern Marketing Essentials Guide to Data Management.
How to Incorporate Quizzes To Amp Up Your Content Marketing Reach
How to Incorporate Quizzes To Amp Up Your Content Marketing Reach written by Guest Post read more at Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing
When you put together your annual content marketing strategy, you may not have incorporated quizzes — and that’s okay. However, that doesn’t mean it’s too late to update your content calendar with a quiz or two, because they are easy to put together using quiz software, and they generally require no help from your developmentContinue Reading
The Perfect Execution of Conversion Rate Optimization
Online Marketing News: Most Remain Unanswered, Not-So Responsive, Twitter Digits
How Gail Goodman Optimized Constant Contact’s Funnel To Build the $1 Billion Email Marketing Empire
Thursday, January 29, 2015
4 Promotion Strategies Used by the Best Business Bloggers
Editor's Note: Today's post comes courtesy of Michael Gerard, CMO of Curata. He is responsible for Curata's marketing strategy and all related activities. Michael has more than 25 years of marketing and sales experience, having successfully launched and sustained three start-up ventures, as well as driving innovative customer creation strategies for large technology organizations (IDC, Kenan Systems, Prospero (mZinga) and Millipore).
Curata's Business Blogging Survey of 428 marketers revealed what it takes to develop and sustain a highly successful blog. Key findings of the study demonstrate that blogs have most certainly not disappeared. Instead, business blogs have morphed into a mature part of enterprises’ content marketing and publishing ecosystem. For example:
●80% of marketers use blogs as part of their content marketing strategies.
●70% of business bloggers have had their blogs for more than two years.
●44% of business bloggers have more than two blogs.
There is an exclusive group of business bloggers, which we’ll call “The 10K Club”, who receive more than 10,000 page views per month. This groups represents 21.8% of all business bloggers in the study. These bloggers certainly create great content, but they are also experts at thinking “out of the box” when it comes to developing innovative promotion strategies.
Here are 4 promotion secretes of the "10K Business Bloggers Club:"
1. Reuse- Repurposing content is a fantastic way to better promote your blog content, and create new resources at a lower cost versus creating new content. The Content Marketing PyramidTM provides a useful framework for creating and repurposing content.
The top of the pyramid contains heavy content, typically gated. (e.g., eBook) As you move down the pyramid, content is lighter and more easily absorbed and “digestible” for your audience. The base of the Content Marketing Pyramid is curated content, which is relatively low effort and lends itself to high frequencies.
Although this framework is commonly used to create smaller pieces of content from large surveys or thought leadership pieces; the best content marketers have learned that content can also flow upwards in the pyramid from items such as blog posts. Several of our 10K Club members have already discovered this; for example, one survey respondent said:
“We are preparing to package our best blogs into subject matter-specific eZines, which we will post on our website and promote”
2. Sales Enablement. Sales enablement, as defined by IDC, is:“The delivery of the right information to the right person at the right time in the right format and in the right place to assist in moving a specific sales opportunity forward.“
Why should content marketers and bloggers care about sales enablement? Because it is a fantastic opportunity to increase content marketing’s impact on the sales pipeline. Bloggers, in general, are under-utilizing the potential impact of their own content on sales enablement; however, not 10K Club members. The 10K Club are taking full advantage of this opportunity; for example, 10K bloggers:
•Are equipping sales reps with content they can forward to their prospects. The best sales folks understand the importance of maintaining frequent communication with their prospects; and these sales reps would like nothing more than a link to a valuable blog post published by their own organization that they can send to a prospect. The best bloggers understand this, and frequently email content to their reps to share with prospects.
•Repurposing the best posts as sales enablement assets. Great content marketers and bloggers are always thinking up new and innovative ways to deliver valuable content to their audience. 10K Club bloggers often repackage their own blog posts into content/assets that can be used by their sales team. For example, the Curata blogging team developed an in-depth post on Content Marketing Analytics & Metrics. This post was transformed into a tool for use by the Curata sales team. Posting these types of content assets into sales enablement tools such as SAVO also represent a best practice.
3. Influencer Marketing. Wikipedia defines Influencer marketing as a form of marketing in which focus is placed on specific key individuals (or types of individuals) rather than the target market as a whole. The following examples provide insight into how bloggers can use influencer marketing to promote their content and company:
- Buzzsumo: How to Assess Content Marketing Performance
- Not only did Buzzsumo use curation in this post, but they also cited a number of key content marketing influencers throughout the post. (i.e., Rebecca Lieb of Altimeter and Lee Odden of TopRank Marketing)
- Curata: Content Marketing Predictions: 6 Big Themes for 2015.
- By creating an infographic made of all expert predictions for 2015, we were able to target this specific group of influencers. This also helped promote the piece because these influencers, who have very large followings, are likely to share the post.
4. Advocate Enablement. Top bloggers know how to turn their most passionate customers into a community of advocates who will amplify their messaging. This is achieved through:
●Providing exceptionally valuable content.
●Ensuring that customers grasp an idea within 30 seconds.
●Using the customer's own information where possible to further engage them in the content, thereby providing more motivation for them to promote the blog.
●Providing customers the opportunity to easily share content with their own social community.
Some examples include:
- Enabling sharing directly from a blog site.
- Using advocacy tools such as GaggleAmp or influitive to identify and mobilize your audience.
- For additional examples, check out Neal Schaffer’s post on “11 Effective Ways to Use Social Media to Promote your Content” for additional insight on advocate enablement.
To learn more about the strategies and tactics of the best business bloggers, check out the survey results in Business Blogging Secrets Revealed.
A Marketing Process That Built Two 7-Figure Companies in Three Years
Email Marketing: How responsive design might improve your emails
What Customers Want
What Customers Want written by Guest Post read more at Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing
It’s guest post day here at Duct Tape Marketing, and today’s guest post is from Mark Kirkpatrick– Enjoy! The only consistent in the wants and needs of internet users is change. This has less to do with finicky temperaments and more to do with the change of the infrastructure of the internet itself. The gap inContinue Reading
7 Conversion Marketing Terms as Explained by Urban Dictionary
From Journey to Destination: How Marketing Automation Can Fill Your B2B Funnel
Wednesday, January 28, 2015
6 Steps to Ramp Up Trigger Marketing
Are you in the "old habit" of aligning customer communications solely around your marketing calendar, product launches, and company events? Are you finding that’s not really working for you anymore? That’s probably because customers today have high expectations from the companies they engage with. It’s the era of buyer-centric digital marketing. Customers expect us to know who they are, understand their challenges as much as their goals, and anticipate their future needs. And when we engage with them, they want us to interact on a personal level that is responsive, highly relevant, and consistent across all channels. To be honest, the customer has every reason to expect this from us. In today’s digital world, companies have access to the tools, data, and skills required to create a highly personalized digital experience.
One modern marketing tactic, which puts the customer in the center of the digital experience and harnesses the power of marketing automation, is triggered programs. Triggered programs are based on a customer’s profile data, preferences and digital body language. They engage with the customer, when the customer is ready to engage and help to increase the speed in which he/she moves through the customer lifecycle.
"Old habits die hard," sings Mick Jagger, but don’t worry, getting started with triggered programs and becoming a "trigger happy" marketer is much easier than you think.
Here are 6 simple steps to help get you started with triggered programs:
Step 1: Define and map out your customer’s lifecycle. Assess all the different stages that your customer goes through when making a purchase, such as identifying the need, conducting research, purchasing the product or service, and so on.
Step 2: Identify opportunities to implement triggered communications at every stage of the journey. You want to create programs that give your customers the right information at the right time so that you can help move them through the customer lifecycle. Determine which type of email communications you can build into your automated triggered programs that will align with your customer’s lifecycle stages identified in step 1.
Need some ideas to get started? MarketingSherpa created a list of the most common types of B2B and B2C triggered email programs:
Top 10 B2B triggered email programs
1. Thanks
2. Welcome
3. Transactional
4. Post-purchase
5. Triggered based on website behavior
6. Activation
7. Up sell/cross-promotional
8. Date triggered
9. Event countdown
10. Win-back/re-engagement
Top 10 B2C triggered email programs
1. Welcome
2. Transactional
3. Thanks
4. Up sell/cross-promotional
5. Activation
6. Date triggered
7. Post-purchase
8. Triggered based on website behavior
9. Event countdown
10. Win-back/re-engagement
Step 3: Prioritize your triggered programs in order of their importance. While there are seemingly endless opportunities to create triggered programs, you will need to prioritize them based on the biggest impact they have on revenue, profits, and customer loyalty. If you are new to marketing automation, consider starting with a simple triggered campaign, like a welcome nurture program.
Step 4: Design your trigger program. Define the goal of your trigger program and what success looks like. Start mapping out the message flow and define trigger rules based on the data available. Conduct a content audit and be sure to include only content types and communication channels that are relevant to your audience. Modify the campaign flow based on the contacts tracked behavior and engagement with your content.
Step 5: Establish communications rules. When you have multiple trigger and nurture programs in place, you want to make sure to establish communications rules, which determine the priority of different programs, as well as the frequency in which contacts can be emailed. You don't want a new prospect to enter your database and suddenly receive five emails within an hour. You will see how quickly the unsubscribe rate will sky rocket, if you don’t build rules around your communications architecture.
Step 6: Measure success and continuously optimize your trigger program. Define your success metrics. Some common ones include: unique click-through rates, active contacts and form conversion rates. Create a baseline which you will use to measure the success of your trigger program. Start tracking and analyzing the results from your trigger programs. Come up with a set of recommendations on how you could optimize your trigger program.
If you are just getting started with trigger programs, or want to further develop your knowledge on this topic, request to have the Engage Customers with Trigger-Based Programs Facilitated Discussion with a marketing advisor today! Oracle Marketing Cloud customers can check out our full menu of Facilitated Discussions!
7 Proactive Ways to Get Backlinks That’ll Actually Boost Your Traffic
How Locally Laid Got Paid by Turning Customer Feedback into Brand Storytelling
[PODCAST] What Online Dating Can Teach You About Your PPC Campaigns
Tuesday, January 27, 2015
I Like Facebook More Than Twitter These Days and Why That Doesn’t Matter
Lately, I’m finding lots of interaction and fun on Facebook. I once wrote a post about how I was leaving Facebook for Google+ because whoa, that’s the future. Until Google decided it wasn’t. And I’m reasonably well known for loving Twitter and being an early adopter of it. Which social network is right for you? […]
The post I Like Facebook More Than Twitter These Days and Why That Doesn’t Matter appeared first on chrisbrogan.com.
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is the art of using content of any kind (blogs, podcasts, newsletters, and much more) to reach prospects and customers and influencers, and warm them up for the potential of a purchase. You can have an offline business and use content marketing. You can promote yourself, a book, a store, a church, or […]
The post What is Content Marketing? appeared first on chrisbrogan.com.
5 Ways to Differentiate Your Marketing Content
Editor’s Note: Today’s post comes courtesy of Simon Jones, a vice president at Blanc & Otus, a communications agency headquartered in San Francisco, where he leads the development and execution of integrated communication programs for some of the world’s largest technology brands. He has managed teams in Europe and North America, led the integration of social media for B&O for the best part of a decade and is the architect behind B&O’s brand journalism program. Follow Simon on Twitter @mrjonesinsf. The following post originally appeared under the headline '"Don't be Content with Your Marketing Content" on the Blanc & Otus "Above the Fold" Blog.
It’s a cliché that I personally dread, but in 2014, content certainly made a strong claim to the marketing throne. It was as if everyone that worked in any flavor of marketing job suddenly thought, we need more content in our lives. We need to produce more. And we need to talk about it more.
One problem. A lot of that content was…well, how can I put this? Not exactly worth sharing. This thing is, with so much content being produced by so many people every minute of every day – the stats are kind of crazy – the bar for what constitutes “good content” keeps rising. Mark Schaefer’s Content Shock concept analyzed the situation perfectly in what must have been one of the most talked about pieces of content on content of the year. And that post was from January 6, 2014.
Despite the obvious diminishing margins of return, marketers still wanted more. It was the key to unlocking the value of social media. It would transform SEO. It would engage audiences in new and exciting ways. It was very cool stuff and like Oliver Twist, all you needed was more. Except that wasn’t really the case.
Marketing content had already been increasing like crazy for years. It was just 2014 when it seemed to become vogue. But instead of looking for simply more content, brands should have been looking at things a different way. After all, simply writing more newsletters, automating social media feeds, producing more infographics or launching more company blogs/magazines/YouTube channels/LinkedIn profiles/Facebook pages/carrier pigeon programs (well, that one might work) was never going to be more than a very short-term solution.
So as we enter another content-full year, I wanted to share some thoughts on how we are helping our clients differentiate their content storytelling:
1. Be Targeted: Funny how we often miss the most obvious things. And while I know the obligatory goal of any piece of content is to go “viral,” you haven’t got a hope in hell if you start by targeting the masses. All too often sweeping statements are used to describe target audiences – “IT decision makers” and “the C-Suite” are classics – when in reality, we need to really invest the time to understand exactly who we are hoping to talk with. What are they interested in at work? What are their interests outside of work? Where do they go to find information? Who do they trust? What makes them laugh? By answering those kinds of questions, you suddenly have a wealth of information to inform your storytelling.
2. Be Real: I was going to call this authentic, but that in itself felt a little fake. As if the aim of your content is to engage an audience in some way or another (in other words, the aim of 99.999% of all content marketing), then it has to be like a real conversation. That means the content won’t have marketing messages masquerading as stories. It could reference interesting data/insights your competitors have shared. It will be designed for the real world rather than your executive suite and it may not even refer to your company, product or service at all. Crazy? Maybe. Interesting, different and shareable? Definitely.
3. Go Visual: Simply put, a picture tells a thousand words. You can no longer afford to ignore video and other visual assets. In an increasingly mobile and social world where your story might have a solid five inches of real estate, they are now the price of admission. And don’t just think infographics. Think instead about the cool content you share with your friends – everything from gifs and Vine/Instagram videos to video-embedded content and video storytelling. A couple of great examples are GE’s cool #6secondscience and #GravityDay campaigns and the YouTube Rewind series.
4. Integrate It: Yes, it’s cheaper. Yes, it’s simpler. Yes, it’s faster. But just producing standalone pieces of content is, in most cases, a waste of time. Content now needs to not only integrate visual and written assets, but also be a fully integrated part of your social, SEO, PR and advertising strategies. Don’t just think in terms of “one-offs” and instead take a leaf out of the HBO or Showtime book and think of entire series. That gives your audience something they can rely on, a reason to come back. And what’s more, developing content should be a core part of your team’s skills, because with so much integration required, outsourcing content to separate departments or teams is counter intuitive at best.
5. Be Part of It: Don’t be the person that walks into the bar and immediately tries to change the conversation. Listen, watch, care, and ask. We have talked a lot about the power of the right question, but great content is about more than just that. It needs to be in the right voice, be relevant to popular culture, timely and something that people not only find helpful, but also enjoy. A tough ask, but we now have the listening and measurement tools that give us unprecedented insights into our audience’s likes and dislikes. By using that information correctly, content can be constantly fine-tuned.
That’s right. It’s a lot of work. But when we get it right, the payback is huge. And of course, telling a story that gets people talking is the really fun part about our jobs, and with all the changes that have taken place in PR, we now have more opportunity to do that than ever before. So rather than just focusing on “more” content in 2015, think bigger and look at how you can produce “different” content. It will lead to a very different year.
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What You Need to Know About Content & Influencer Marketing. BONUS: Case Study
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What a Long Time Friendship and Partnership Looks Like
I started stalking Brian Clark of Copyblogger back in 2006. Hard to imagine that I’d already been blogging for eight years when he showed up, but I knew from the start that Brian was smarter at a lot of things than I was, and that he’d go far. He, on the other hand, thought I […]
The post What a Long Time Friendship and Partnership Looks Like appeared first on chrisbrogan.com.
What You Need to Know About Content & Influencer Marketing in 2015
Social Media Video – Essential Tips and Takeaways from #SMBMSP74
Monday, January 26, 2015
3 Google Analytics Reports to Help You Find Blog Post Ideas Your Readers Will Love
How To Install Marine Solar Panels
Solar panels can be a great help to sailors, keeping vital lights and appliances functioning, even when batteries run low or a generator malfunctions. They are also a much quieter way of recharging batteries! Learning how to install marine solar panels will be vital for the sailor who wants their advantages, but first he or ...
Marketing Classics: Four principles from the book that changed David Ogilvy’s life
How to Find out What Marketing Campaigns are the Best for Acquisition, ROI, & Retention
4 Ways to Differentiate Your Marketing Content
Editor’s Note: Today’s post comes courtesy of Simon Jones, a vice president at Blanc & Otus, a communications agency headquartered in San Francisco, where he leads the development and execution of integrated communication programs for some of the world’s largest technology brands. He has managed teams in Europe and North America, led the integration of social media for B&O for the best part of a decade and is the architect behind B&O’s brand journalism program. Follow Simon on Twitter @mrjonesinsf. The following post originally appeared under the headline '"Don't be Content with Your Marketing Content" on the Blanc & Otus "Above the Fold" Blog.
It’s a cliché that I personally dread, but in 2014, content certainly made a strong claim to the marketing throne. It was as if everyone that worked in any flavor of marketing job suddenly thought, we need more content in our lives. We need to produce more. And we need to talk about it more.
One problem. A lot of that content was…well, how can I put this? Not exactly worth sharing. This thing is, with so much content being produced by so many people every minute of every day – the stats are kind of crazy – the bar for what constitutes “good content” keeps rising. Mark Schaefer’s Content Shock concept analyzed the situation perfectly in what must have been one of the most talked about pieces of content on content of the year. And that post was from January 6, 2014.
Despite the obvious diminishing margins of return, marketers still wanted more. It was the key to unlocking the value of social media. It would transform SEO. It would engage audiences in new and exciting ways. It was very cool stuff and like Oliver Twist, all you needed was more. Except that wasn’t really the case.
Marketing content had already been increasing like crazy for years. It was just 2014 when it seemed to become vogue. But instead of looking for simply more content, brands should have been looking at things a different way. After all, simply writing more newsletters, automating social media feeds, producing more infographics or launching more company blogs/magazines/YouTube channels/LinkedIn profiles/Facebook pages/carrier pigeon programs (well, that one might work) was never going to be more than a very short-term solution.
So as we enter another content-full year, I wanted to share some thoughts on how we are helping our clients differentiate their content storytelling:
1. Be Targeted: Funny how we often miss the most obvious things. And while I know the obligatory goal of any piece of content is to go “viral,” you haven’t got a hope in hell if you start by targeting the masses. All too often sweeping statements are used to describe target audiences – “IT decision makers” and “the C-Suite” are classics – when in reality, we need to really invest the time to understand exactly who we are hoping to talk with. What are they interested in at work? What are their interests outside of work? Where do they go to find information? Who do they trust? What makes them laugh? By answering those kinds of questions, you suddenly have a wealth of information to inform your storytelling.
2. Be Real: I was going to call this authentic, but that in itself felt a little fake. As if the aim of your content is to engage an audience in some way or another (in other words, the aim of 99.999% of all content marketing), then it has to be like a real conversation. That means the content won’t have marketing messages masquerading as stories. It could reference interesting data/insights your competitors have shared. It will be designed for the real world rather than your executive suite and it may not even refer to your company, product or service at all. Crazy? Maybe. Interesting, different and shareable? Definitely.
3. Go Visual: Simply put, a picture tells a thousand words. You can no longer afford to ignore video and other visual assets. In an increasingly mobile and social world where your story might have a solid five inches of real estate, they are now the price of admission. And don’t just think infographics. Think instead about the cool content you share with your friends – everything from gifs and Vine/Instagram videos to video-embedded content and video storytelling. A couple of great examples are GE’s cool #6secondscience and #GravityDay campaigns and the YouTube Rewind series.
4. Integrate It: Yes, it’s cheaper. Yes, it’s simpler. Yes, it’s faster. But just producing standalone pieces of content is, in most cases, a waste of time. Content now needs to not only integrate visual and written assets, but also be a fully integrated part of your social, SEO, PR and advertising strategies. Don’t just think in terms of “one-offs” and instead take a leaf out of the HBO or Showtime book and think of entire series. That gives your audience something they can rely on, a reason to come back. And what’s more, developing content should be a core part of your team’s skills, because with so much integration required, outsourcing content to separate departments or teams is counter intuitive at best.
4. Be Part of It: Don’t be the person that walks into the bar and immediately tries to change the conversation. Listen, watch, care, and ask. We have talked a lot about the power of the right question, but great content is about more than just that. It needs to be in the right voice, be relevant to popular culture, timely and something that people not only find helpful, but also enjoy. A tough ask, but we now have the listening and measurement tools that give us unprecedented insights into our audience’s likes and dislikes. By using that information correctly, content can be constantly fine-tuned.
That’s right. It’s a lot of work. But when we get it right, the payback is huge. And of course, telling a story that gets people talking is the really fun part about our jobs, and with all the changes that have taken place in PR, we now have more opportunity to do that than ever before. So rather than just focusing on “more” content in 2015, think bigger and look at how you can produce “different” content. It will lead to a very different year.
7 Lessons and 3 New Strategies I Learned From Launching My 5th Blog
Sunday, January 25, 2015
What Marketers Need to Know About the Pinterest Update
With a projected valuation by investors at $5 billion, Pinterest, the image and discovery focused social media network, knew it was time to follow in the advertising footsteps of their older social network siblings and compete for marketers’ ad dollars. According to comscore, Pinterest has about 70 million active users who visit the social scrapbooking mecca at least once a month.
Over the past 9 months, Pinterest rolled out a beta advertising program to a few select brands to try on their new ‘Promoted Pin’ feature for fit. There has been a lot of marketing chatter following the brand's January 1st open invitation to all brands to participate in this evolving, but very promising advertising platform for consumer brand marketers, hopefully also luring even greater interest from investors.
The 411 on Promoted Pins
So how exactly do Promoted Pins work? You choose the pin you want to promote, select keywords, define your targeted audience, allocate your budget and select a start and end date to your campaign. “Pinterested” advertisers can add a tracking pixel to the promoted pin to narrow in on their target user, whether broad or geo-focused. Pinterest is naturally concerned in striking a balance between their loyal users who covet organic pins and these promo pins, cautious not to over-saturate, slowly eroding the “home-spun prideful” creativity and individuality at the heart of this still growing bulletin-board network.
Pinterest will try to ensure the quality of the promo feeds via a Smart-Feed algorithm that will analyze, sort, and score the highest quality pins to spoon feed the most valuable, visual appealing promo pins at the top of the users specially prepared “daily meal.”
Not much will change for pinners. These promoted pins aim to look like any other organic pin, but they are paid ads. The whole idea is for these promoted pins blend in with all the other organic content. Users will be able to tell whether they are looking at a promoted pin by small text at the bottom of each pin reading “promoted pin.”
So what does this mean for marketers?
Although results are limited from the select beta test group, brands using the Promoted Pin function saw roughly a 30% jump in earned media. Joanne Bradford, Head of Partnerships at Pinterest, says that these Promoted Pins performed just as well, if not better than regular organic pins. Pinterest embodies an evergreen platform, meaning pins are continually shared and last forever, unlike the standard news feed on other social media platforms. This type of landscape is beneficial for both Pinterest and marketers because these promoted pins have the potential to extend and perform even after a campaign ends.
Pinterest not only has great hopes for promo pins, but also has plans in the works for creating new brand ad platforms, all reliant on continuing to make all the right moves to fine tune their targeting abilities and stay focused on their loyal pinners. As one of the younger siblings in an elite social media family, Pinterest has the distinct advantage of learning from it’s older siblings like Facebook and Twitter what works and what doesn’t, what turns users on and more importantly, with pinners what turns then off. Joanne Bradford sums up the Pinterest mission to stay on track to build a scalable business for partner brands, “This year we’ll provide the best ads canvas with the most actionable insights to reach and engaged and passionate brand-centric audience.”
Heating Your Home With Solar, But Without Panels
With rising energy costs and massive stress on our electrical grids, solar is gaining in popularity. Not everyone realizes you can heat your home without buying big panel systems. Heating Your Home With Solar, But Without Panels – Gain You can use solar energy to heat your home through a concept known as gain. While ...
Saturday, January 24, 2015
Get Great Tips About Solar Energy From Experts Who Know!
Solar panel installation is a green solution. This is an investment that is important. You have to understand if it will fit into your budget. Continue reading to educate yourself about solar energy so that you can decide whether or not it’s the right choice for you. If you’re prepared to stick with the investment ...
Weekend Favs January Twenty Four
Weekend Favs January Twenty Four written by John Jantsch read more at Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing
My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week. I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from Flickr or oneContinue Reading
Patrick McKenzie on Using Funnels and A/B Testing To Grow a Business
Friday, January 23, 2015
How Not to Commit This Awful Landing Page Error
The Scientifically Proven Best Time to Think and Write Creatively
6 Key Tactics Agencies Use to Help Local Businesses Rank Higher in Google
6 Key Tactics Agencies Use to Help Local Businesses Rank Higher in Google written by Guest Post read more at Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing
It’s guest post day here at Duct Tape Marketing, and today’s guest post is from Dan Olson – Enjoy! Small businesses today, more than ever, rely on agencies to help with organic search and local results to drive business in their local markets. The challenge for most is ranking in the top spots to be noticedContinue Reading
Online Marketing News: Psycho Selfies, Twitter Beefs Up, Google Still Searchin’
Thursday, January 22, 2015
5 Tips For Marketing Leaders To Bridge Organizational Silos
Marketing used to be easier, wasn't it?
You’d have one team doing broadcast and print, and another in the back room doing direct mail. That was about it. The “barriers” between disciplines could be breached with a few steps down the corridor.
No more. Esoteric functions like Conversion Rate Optimisation and Behavioural Analytics are specialized skill sets, often not even located in the same country, let alone the same office. Yet they can all add value to each other - if they’re truly (to paraphrase David Ogilvy) one department indivisible.
Here are some best practices for taking integrated marketing to the max.
1. Dump separate P&Ls and adopt combined financials. This is where to start: the money. No matter how much lip service you pay to integrated marketing, if you reward each team by the revenue it wins you’ll never break down departmental walls. How can you, when success on this metric depends on not sharing success with others?
So take a long hard look at your P&L. If each marketing function is a standalone profit/loss column - instead of what these functions jointly bring to your customers - look at how you could configure it to demonstrate what your people add when working together as a team. You may find there’s a heap of hidden value to be unlocked.
2. Organise projects by customer journey, not skill sets. To unlock that value, you need organising principles all marketers can agree on. The customer journey is one such principle. Use it to unify your marketers by making it the basis of every new project.
(Ultimately, helping people along the customer journey is the only thing marketers do!)
If your typical B2B customer starts at an advert, then goes to your website, books a webinar, and subscribes to your RSS feed for three months before agreeing a sales appointment, share that journey with your teams. If they’re used to silos, they’ll be fascinated to see where their work fits into the bigger picture - making them more willing to co-operate with colleagues from different disciplines.
There’s a useful side-effect: healthy competition. If everyone notices that one discipline is a bottleneck in the customer journey - choking off leads and conversions - there’ll be huge pressure on that discipline to resolve matters.
3. Make your organisation chart hub-and-spoke, not hierarchy. Give your broadcast team a problem to solve and the solution will be a TV spot. Give that same brief to your SEO guy and he’ll do it with AdWords and metadata. That’s natural behaviour, but it reinforces silos.
What if every project started with triaging, not competing? Imagine a multidisciplinary person acting as the “hub” of every client relationship - taking each project brief and breaking it down into tasks best met by different disciplines.
This person then briefs the project in terms of how everyone’s work is an essential part of the whole, everyone doing what matters for the customer rather than with one eye on their personal KPIs.
Hub people are hard to find. They need broad experience and an impartial approach to life but the result is golden. Different disciplines work as an integrated project team. No more treating BTL as a poor cousin to mass media; no more SEO guys feeling they’re second fiddle to Creative. When each role feels equally valued for their part in a job, you’ve succeeded in breaking down barriers beyond your wildest dreams.
4. Make sure cross-disciplinarians get ahead. If your rewards and bonus structures are set up specifically to reward matrix working, you’re on your way to a fully integrated department. Here’s an off-the-wall idea: what if you rewarded your project leads… in inverse proportion to the revenue they keep within their discipline?
It’s radical but you can see the potential. A conversion rate specialist gets a bonus for deciding his project is best handled as a DM campaign. The web team gets cold hard cash for letting the CRO guy redesign “their” website. Wins all round: rewards aligned with doing the right thing.
5. Look for metrics that bring them all together. Once you’ve integrated the financials, make sure everyone’s KPIs and KBDs reflect it. Tease out metrics that deliver best results when people work together. Perhaps apply a multiplier depending on how many disciplines took part in a job. Or a metric that measures what percentage of your customer journey a single project covered. There are dozens of simple (but effective) measures you can use to drive people together.
The path may be paved with challenges but the destination is worth it.
Remember:
- Make sure your financials and metrics are set up for integrated working.
- Plan revenue allocation around customer need, not discipline size.
- Make it concrete. Set rewards and bonuses for people to work together.
For some ideas on how cross-channel marketing can knit your marketing team together, check out the Modern Marketing Essentials Guide to Cross-Channel Marketing.
6 Data-Driven Strategies to Get Your Content Published on Influential Sites
The State of Marketing Technology in Asia
Editor's Note: Today's post comes courtesy of David Ketchum, CEO and Founder at Current Asia and author of the book BIG M, little m Marketing: New Strategies for a New Asia. David is a strong advocate for the business value that marketing and communications add at every level of the sales funnel, from building brand awareness, to engaging customers, to driving sales, to CRM. Follow David on Twitter @ketchum.
Marketers worldwide know that the dynamics of business have changed, and that the customer journey from awareness, to consideration, to purchase, to loyalty is no longer linear and manageable. They also increasingly use the marketing technologies and platforms that can automate many of their processes, and engage customers and prospects efficiently and effectively at scale.
The marketing technology wave has not yet broken in Asia, but it is coming. Marketing automation is growing faster in Asia Pacific than anywhere else in the world, up 51% over the last 4 years. Software as a Service (SaaS) sales in this region is estimated to be growing at more than 20% a year, with vendors such as Oracle, and platforms such as LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, reporting big jumps in usage and revenue. Business practices that are on their way to being mainstream in Silicon Valley, London – and increasingly Australia – are only just emerging in Asia. Most marketers in Asia are deploying a small percentage of the tools and resources available, and those who do often use just a fraction of the capability these technologies and platforms offer It’s like owning a Ferrari and using it to drive to the 7-11!
The phrase “Modern Marketing” describes the systematic use of software, data-driven insights, and campaigns with compelling content to engage and track customers throughout the sales cycle. One approach to becoming modern is to adopt bits-and-pieces for incremental success. It’s another thing entirely to be "awesome" and transform the way you do marketing. That requires more than just signing up for some software – it requires a comprehensive look at your people, processes, content and technologies. Only when all of the parts are brought together to work as a system can you recognize the quantum benefits of modern marketing.
So what does awesome look like? Here’s a checklist of the elements for success in Asia:
1. Put the customer, not channels, at the center of your marketing strategy. TV advertising is still dominant in Asia, but marketers are increasingly trying to attribute lead generation and sales to customer personas and behaviours, rather than simply to response rates in specific media. Customers have cross channel relationships with brands at different times and in different stages of the sales cycle, and the right message at the right place at the right time is what matters.
2. Allocate time, effort and budget to customer engagement and interaction, not just acquisition and monetization. There is a great deal of evidence that it is less expensive to retain and grow and customer than acquire a new one, and the value – especially using social media – of turning your customers into evangelists is clear. Asia has a long tradition of mixing personal and business activities to build relationships, and that approach remains as valid online as offline.
3. Use real time feedback to generate insights and facilitate true dialogue with customers. Too many marketers spit out reports that are mostly intended to document or justify their activities. Data on interactivity, content and response jumps in value when it is used to personalize communications, react more swiftly, and maximize the value of cross-channel engagement. This is not difficult to set up but challenging to actually do, especially as many Asian marketers are fragmented and don’t generate enough data to draw meaningful conclusions at this stage in the market’s development.
4. The marketing technology “stack” must all work together and, match the behaviors of your customers throughout the sales cycle. You may well work with different vendors to pull together the functionality that you need, but integration – both technical and campaign – is key. For example, data from search and display advertising should be used to shape your content strategy. Salesforce.com or other CRM systems should be integrated with outbound messaging. Email should be used as a trigger for response as well as a broadcast mechanism. You’ll need technologies that are equipped not only to handle Asian languages, but also the way customers interact on the web and mobile.
5. There must be a robust process between marketing and sales within your organization. For example, a clear, shared definition of a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) is essential, or else marketing will expend resources to produce outcomes that sales does not value. Similarly, automation does not replace personalised follow up. In some cases, there is a frictionless path from engagement through to an e-commerce sale, but more often than not (especially in B2B) the true value of automation is optimizing the value of the sales teams’ time. Today in Asia, Sales still gets a lot of the “last mile” credit for driving revenue, but in today’s increasingly iPhone/Alibaba/Google/Baidu-dominated world, that’s changing. The process works best when the two teams have a shared KPI of generating and closing leads.
6. Compelling campaign content is essential. It’s a cliché but it’s true. Marketers often set up the right processes and technology, and then put rubbish into the machine: the ensuing results are not a surprise. Content is like uranium in a nuclear reactor: it contains customer activation potential that must be released consistently to generate energy.
It’s OK to not be awesome – for now. Most companies are on a journey to move from campaign-focused digital marketing to becoming true digital businesses. This process is hard, expensive, and takes time. To get to awesome, marketing departments must change the way they operate, secure significant funding and staff resources from management, and demonstrate they can drive sales and increase profitability. This track record cannot be built overnight, and the whole transformation is hard, as it requires an occasionally mystifying combination of people, processes, content and technologies. And there are numerous sticking points along the way: campaigns that fail, opportunities lost, customer complaints, technology glitches, privacy concerns and dozens more obstacles need to be vaulted. Perseverance pays off, however, with stronger competitive advantage, demand generation, and business results that earn Modern Marketers the position they deserve in their organizations.
How many of these practices has your business adopted, and are they integrated into a scalable, efficient discipline that generates leads, drives sales, increases revenue per transaction, and retains customers?
Which Conference Should You Attend? Your Own
I’m working through a few ideas, but I’m a little bit stuck. And as I haven’t been invited to speak at a conference this week or next (where I get a lot of thoughts and ideas), I decided to put on a conference in my living room. The content doesn’t quite matter, because it’s my […]
The post Which Conference Should You Attend? Your Own appeared first on chrisbrogan.com.
5 Annoying Barriers to Conversion on Your Mobile Landing Pages
4 Ways Marketers Can Learn From a Journalist’s Approach to Content Planning
Wednesday, January 21, 2015
Online Testing: Why are you really testing?
The Ultimate Guide to 150+ Google Analytics Resources for 2015
3 Lessons Marketers Can Learn From Social Apps
Vine. WhatsApp. Tinder. Very different apps, doing very different things - most of them social. Surely nothing there is of interest to a professional marketer dealing with B2B Big Data every day?
Surprisingly, there is. While these little phone apps look simple, what they do is actually the essence of Big Data marketing - distilling a mass of hard-to-quantify inputs into easy-to-understand outputs. (With clearly measurable results.)
So what’s the secret of their success? Here are three thoughts for marketers, all applicable to database-driven marketing at all levels.
1. Trade a long questionnaire for a simple action. Take Tinder. It’s an app that lets people meet interesting strangers nearby, such as in the same gym or bar. (All the app does is scroll through photos of consenting users and invite a “swipe” left or right to indicate approval - or not). Mutual approval frees them to exchange messages and meet up.
Compare that to the long questionnaires found on many dating websites, or sadly, on many marketing signup forms. By attempting to squeeze every morsel of pre-qualifying data out of the prospect, signup forms scare away almost all of them and conversion rates nosedive.
Hence our first learning: trade precision for appeal by making it easy for prospects to express interest. The size of the potential sale should not be proportional to the number of fields on a newsletter signup. (As the classic Lightspeed study confirms.) For cold suspects, your goal is to get a friendly touch in… not a stern winnowing.
2. Look to remove that fraction of a penny of cost. Many professionals don’t “get” short messaging app, WhatsApp. It seems to offer little more than SMS messaging - with the added hassle of a download.
WhatsApps’s mostly young users see it differently. Their contacts run into the thousands; they manage such lists through social media - not a list of phone numbers. Predictive text to them isn’t a useful extra, it’s a fundamental human right.
WhatsApp messaging uses a Web connection, with no impact on the user’s SMS monthly allowance. For anyone on a student budget or studying abroad, that’s a big benefit.
These tiny savings of cash and effort, multiplied by many millions of users, add up to a lot of brand value for WhatsApp. So to our second learning: what tiny extra can you offer that customers might find disproportionately loveable?
Perhaps a Call-me-now button on your marketing emails, instead of a phone number? Or an alternative to Captchas as they work but everybody hates them? Look for that bit of effort that may result in an abandonment and remove it.
3. Learn the principles of gamification. Six second videos? What’s the point of that? It’s what Vine does: let users upload and share (very) short videos they’ve made.
Vine’s real USP, however, is murkier: it’s a game. Videos on Vine must “loop” - end their six-second run with roughly the same image they started. It’s hypnotic, gives rise to clever creativity and leads to videos being watched millions of times.
Vine’s success lies in the way it specifies a narrow rule with a big reward. That’s a principle of gamification, making people work harder by making aspects of their jobs game-like. Any gamer who’s spent an entire weekend searching for that unusual laser gun in an apocalyptic wasteland knows what effort he’ll put in if the weapon’s rare enough.
At six seconds, a Vine isn’t asking for much investment of your time. (Especially compared with the minutes the average marketing presentation movie takes to get started.)
Hence our last and broadest learning: make engagement rewarding.
There are numerous ways to do this. Instead of your Security Question being the usual Mother’s Maiden Name, ask for their favourite colour. Then use that colour as the backing on the thankyou page. Or add “Do you know your name’s an anagram of XXXXX?” to your acknowledgement email and ask them to enter it at your website for a special offer.
(Back in the 1970s, Epson asked for prospects’ favorite singer on its magazine ads - and briefed telesales on greatest hits before the prospecting call. A creative use of customer data.)
Such little twists do what Vine does: keeps prospects in the loop. (And gives your sales executives some free icebreaking facts to use in that first meeting.)
Three little apps - with three Big Ideas. B2B marketers can use the same principles.
Takeaways:
- Don’t ask a prospect for too much info - concentrate on getting one simple action.
- Every sliver of effort you can take away boosts your clickthrough rate.
- There are ways to make the engagement process fun!
Learn more about how to use your marketing data! Check out the Modern Marketing Essentials Guide to Data Management.
5 Tools that Changed the Way I Do Business
5 Tools that Changed the Way I Do Business written by John Jantsch read more at Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing
I write about lots of tools, but mostly tools that help you do a better job with marketing or social media or SEO. Today I want to spend some time sharing tools I use to run my business. Like so many folks these days, I’ve assembled a team that includes in office staff, remote staffContinue Reading
Content Marketing is a Team Effort
How to Increase Your Website’s Traffic Without Any Marketing
Tuesday, January 20, 2015
Seth Godin on Marketing in The Connection Economy
Traditional Media for Content Marketing: Pros, Cons, Examples and Best Practices
3 Tips For Creating Killer Event Agendas for 2015 (and Beyond)
The start of a New Year, for many marketers, is an opportunity to revisit some of your annual strategic measures. Perhaps you’re knee deep in event planning for an early Q1 event, or just now starting preliminary planning. Here are some tips to help you maximize your event agendas for 2015 and beyond.
1.Look for ways to re-purpose marketing messaging. It can be helpful to start with a specific theme to carry out across all event activities. This is a great way to reinforce your brand’s messaging to existing customers in attendance, as well as the press and media who will be reporting from the show floor. It also helps support the discussions that prospective customers are having with your sales and marketing teams by demonstrating continuity.
For instance, during Eloqua Experience 2013, we aligned our session tracks with messaging previously used in our content collateral, “The 5 Tenets of Modern Marketing.” It was a natural fit to tie in messaging points from verbiage that we knew what relevant and successful in speaking to our communities.
2. Cast a wide-open net with a public call for speakers. While this may be more challenging for companies with fewer resources, a great place to start in your search for session speakers is with a public call to action. Work with your event stakeholders to determine a 3-to-5-point criterion that highlights your speaking priorities (i.e. case study examples; metrics-driven stories) and create a short framework that can be shared across your social media, blog, and email channels.
Our event team creates templates that sales, field, and marketing professionals can use to do personal outreach to encourage customers and prospects to get involved by submitting a speaking proposal for the event. We also empower our internal teams with pre-crafted tweets and social media copy because getting the word out is beneficial to not only the speaker, but the company they’re talking about. Our internal employees love to use speaker submissions, and eventual on-site speaking presentations, as a great way to promote their customers and congratulate them on the great work that they’re doing.
2. Think big about an event-driving keynote speaker. And never assume that someone is out of reach. Think of someone you’d want to hear speak, as well as how that speaker can offer value and inspiration to your audience. For Interact 2014, we knew John Legend would be a substantial name, given his hit single, “All Of Me” at the time, and we envisioned him talking about his creative process and marketing himself. He really delivered on the promise of value and inspiration, and surprised many in the crowd with his business acumen.
When working with notable figures, their management contact typically will initiate a preparation questionnaire asking for relevant event highlights and themes pertinent to your event. They’ll share this with the speaker so he or she can develop an appropriate abstract. Be sure to schedule advance preparation calls to review this material with your speaker to discuss any necessary clarifications to maximize your investment, as well as the speaker’s time.
When creating your event agendas, make sure to tap the wisdom of the crowds, both internal and external. Host brainstorming calls with relevant team members to help inspire and ignite ideas. While there can be such a thing as “too many cooks in the kitchen”, event agenda planning is often a “more the merrier” task. Happy event marketing!
Tell us how your teams manage your resources and budgets to create killer event agendas! Check out our agenda for Modern Marketing Experience, March 31-April 2 in Las Vegas!
A Step-by-Step Guide to Running Successful Marketing Campaigns (+ 9 Tools to Help)
Monday, January 19, 2015
How to Squeeze Every Drop of ROI from Your Lead Sources Using Salesforce
Measure Your Wealth in Options
I was lamenting the fact that business has been slow over the last handful of weeks (end of the year and first of the year aren’t exactly the roaring seasons for keynote speakers and professional development experts), but a little change of perspective really turned me around. Because there’s a lesson in it that would […]
The post Measure Your Wealth in Options appeared first on chrisbrogan.com.
Social Media Advertising for Content Marketers: Insight from Salesforce’s ‘2015 State of Marketing’ report
The Ultimate SEO Checklist: 25 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Your Next Post
Testing and Optimization: How to get that “ultimate lift”
Sunday, January 18, 2015
Data is In the Driver's Seat for Effective Cross Channel Marketing [eBook]
Yesterday we launched the newest addition to our Modern Marketing Essentials series - the Modern Marketing Essentials Guide to Cross-Channel Marketing.
The guide is a highly useful for marketers looking to repair the broken customer cross-channel experience as witnessed by the 78% of customers who state they receive a fragmented experience as they move from channel-to-channel according to research from Accenture.
Among the key parts of the guide are the three core points that we’ve compiled to support your ability to ramp up your cross-channel marketing activities. Over the next couple of weeks we'll dig into each of these core points.
- Data is in the Driver's Seat
- Attribution is riding shotgun
- The experience is the engine
Data is in the Driver's Seat
Big data. Little data. In-between data. Face it, data is everywhere and is at or near the top of marketers' minds at all times, especially when it comes to cross-channel marketing. How we do know that?
Well consider the fact that in a study done by Forrester, when marketers were asked about their biggest challenge with their cross-channel marketing programs, the #1 answer was: Understanding customer interactions across channels.
In the same study, marketers were also asked where their current marketing technologies fall short. The top three answers all dealt with the subject of data:
- Having the ability to use cross-channel analytics to improve performance.
- Tracking standard Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) across channels.
- Having access to a unified customer view based on in house data. 
Lots O' Data = Lots O' Trouble
Did you know that a single customer or prospect of yours could have 10 or more IDs that can stem from emails, social handles, or device IDs?
Now you can see why so many marketers have trouble understanding customer interactions across channels and having access to a unified customer view based on in house data as aforementioned.
How can you, as a marketer, hope to understand interactions across multiple channels and have a unified or integrated view of a customer with so many disparate IDs floating around?
Identity mapping, as it is commonly referred to, is a critical component for being able to carry out and deliver a true cross-channel marketing experience. A marketer needs to be able to make all these connections across channels and devices (and real world actions) to provide a more consistent and relevant cross channel experience.
Fortunately for marketers, a major innovation that is in play right now that’s critical to carrying out true cross-channel marketing will be to provide the ability to accurately identify a person or audience across these touchpoints and IDs.
The short answer is, you can’t.
But what you can do is download the Modern Marketing Essentials Guide to Cross-Channel Marketing to learn about the help that is on the way when it comes to dealing with data and cross-channel marketing.
Plus, to learn more about the importance of data from an overall perspective you will want to download the Modern Marketing Essentials Guide to Data Management.
But Wait, There's More!
Be sure to check out the entire Modern Marketing Essentials Library, your one-stop shop for the resources and insight into best practice marketing, including Marketers' Blueprints to help your teams collaboratively map out strategies for success.
