 Your new post is loading...
Your new post is loading...
“When you tell people you work at National Geographic, you get incredible reactions. It’s revered, trusted, and stands for quality. And, they’ve been at the content game for close to 130 years,” she says. On the other hand, Cress says her role feels more like being at the helm of a one-year old company. “National Geographic Partners is a joint venture between 21st Century Fox and the National Geographic Society. We’re like a well funded startup, working on reinventing and reinvigorating the brand,” she says. But with so much history to rely upon, however, the brand is hardly resting on its laurels. Instead, it’s continuing to push the boundaries of innovation and technology, just like it did back when Alexander Graham Bell was the president of the National Geographic Society. He was the one to make the then-controversial decision to start including photography in the magazine, something that was considered to be a lowbrow, tabloid way to sell magazines....
Millennials make up a crucial group of consumers.
Ad agency Moosylvania asked over 3,500 millennials — defined as 20 to 35-year-olds — to select their favorite brands over the past three years.
Great Questions, LLC helped rank the winning brands.
These brands are the ones that came out on top.
Some are surprising — others, not so much.
A common theme for successful brands? Engaging with millennial consumers via social media....
Every decision your customer makes consists of many conscious and subconscious emotions. The key to success in any business is an understanding of psychology and human behaviour.
We all have the same basic mental triggers and needs that drive action. If we understand these psychological triggers, we can craft more effective marketing messages and increase sales.
Below is an introduction to 7 important psychological and emotional triggers that can increase your sales, backed up with examples and further reading....
There’s no question that the Internet, social media, and digital technologies have changed the business landscape and the manner in which it operates. From the way business communicates with – and advertises to – consumers to how it conducts market research, and from the manner in which it hires new employees to how those employees are managed, today’s business blueprint is significantly different that it was just 15 years ago.
But is change always a good thing? The Internet has provided smaller businesses the opportunity to compete with larger brands and has certainly provided a more direct and meaningful exchange with a business’s audience. But are we becoming too focused on the technology of the day? Are we forgetting the basics of marketing?...
Digital marketing offers greater opportunities for businesses over the next year than more traditional channels, according to a new report.
When asked to identify which three marketing channels offer the greatest opportunities, half of brands (50%) mentioned social media followed by email (43%) and websites (35%).In fact the top 10 most cited channels are all online, with the most popular offline channel being direct mail at 8%....
A landing page is just the page someone “lands on” when an ad or email directs them to take a specific action such as sign up for a free webinar, subscribe to a newsletter, download free videos or buy a new product. The landing page is used instead a site’s homepage.
Effective landing pages make it very clear what a visitor is going to get from a page and how to get it. That’s it plain and simple. They don’t have links to other pages or any other distractions.There are many great articles on how to create better landing pages including this one from Unbounce but today I want to focus on some reason I think every business needs to create and use landing pages as a core online tool...
The desire to be part of something bigger. To really understand what it is about branding that appeals to people, we first have to understand the deeply entrenched set rules that we as people, animals, or however you would like to refer to yourself, actually work to, whilst observing the guidelines, parameters and systems that we work within…sure Brands act as a sign post for the product or service, building associations etc but that’s not all and not enough either.
To avoid going into the deep physiological motivations that affect all of us, for the purposes of this article I am forced to make some sweeping generalisations. The first of these is that beyond all other emotional requirements, we have an unending drive to be understood. Understanding is the lifeblood of our emotional state. For those of you that wish to do a little back reading about this somewhat broad statement, I can suggest several well written studies, that do a far better job of explaining why this is than I can deliver in this short thought piece.
To illustrate: have you ever noticed that most people actually quite like talking about their thoughts, feelings, opinions and emotions to other people. We see the evidence of this in the massive popularity of status updates and tweets etc…
Even if you’ve spent countless hours and dedicated resources to developing a thorough social media marketing strategy, you may find that you have overlooked some small, yet critical elements that could end up handicapping your efforts. For this reason, it’s always a good idea to get a second set of eyes to look over your internet marketing strategy, particularly a social media agency (heck, even having a friend look over it may dig up some missing elements).Mashable recently shared some of the most common elements missing from a social media marketing strategy. Check out some of these oversights below to see if your strategy needs some tweaking:...
It hasn’t been around all that long, many companies both large and small have adopted it but many have also shied away. If you are on the fence or just starting to get your toes wet, here are 20 things about social media marketing that you didn’t know....
Memes can be used as a tool for digital marketing and creating a more loyal customer on various social networks. ...Now how does this kid, or a cat that taught itself to write help you in luring that elusive client into buying your product? Simple, you use memes to connect with them. Memes are easy to consume, they’re shareable, familiar and funny. They really make a person feel like they are “in” on something, and that can be used by a digital marketer. From a B2B standpoint, an industry joke can grab a reader’s attention, and create a positive image of your brand. So here are five simple tips that will help you use these social phenomenons to their full marketing potential....
Guy Kawasaki once said: 'If you have more money than brains, you should focus on outbound marketing. If you have more brains than money, you should focus on inbound marketing'. We’d like to think that no matter what you have, money or brains or both, inbound marketing is the only kind of marketing that works today. Inbound marketing, by the way, has a lot to do with digital marketing. If you are a digital marketer, you are probably forgetting a few marketing principles. Here are some of them including: - be remarkable - not about you - big rocks first - and more...
For a recent presentation at a corporate communications and PR conference, I polled my network of digital marketing and PR pros working client-side about the most pressing questions they’re dealing with when it comes to integrating Marketing and Public Relations. Since we’ve been working in the digital marketing and PR space at TopRank Marketing for well over 10 years, it was interesting to see the diverse feedback from companies of various sizes and industries. But several themes revealed themselves that I think our readers will relate to. Thanks to feedback from Digital and Integrated Marketing Communications professionals like Corinne Kovalsky of Ratheon, Susan Beatty of Bremer Financial Corporation, Frank Strong of LexisNexis, Lesly Cardec from Randstad US, Sarah Skerik from PRNewswire and Pam Didner of Intel, it became clear that one of the key questions organizations are facing is the need to break down silos between marketing and PR....
In truth, ten years of material is a pretty conservative estimate but not because of the quantity. The way I see it, there is never any shortage of material as long as the instructor continues to explore, learn and grow. Ideally, they will with one foot in academics and one in the real world but sometimes one or the other will suffice. No one ever wants to feel dusty or complacent unless they've given up. Eventually, I settled on five things I wish every advertiser, marketer and PR pro knew because I think all of us, at one time or another, grows weary of watching people fail. That's the way marketing works. You can put in hard work or learn the hard way....
|
Just as with the polling numbers for the election itself, it’s difficult to tell what’s what with Ivanka Trump’s line of clothing. Is it benefiting from all the exposure, including that afforded the #GrabYourWallet boycott campaign started a few weeks ago after the videotape of her father’s salacious brags to Billy Bush surfaced, or is it taking a hit?
“The boycott was started on October 11 by Sue Atencio, a 59-year-old grandmother, and marketing specialist Shannon Coulter, who said they were shocked by Trump’s recently unearthed interview with ‘Access Hollywood’ in which the then-reality TV host bragged about his sexual conquests of women and his ability as a celebrity to ‘grab them by the p–sy,’” Itay Hod writes for The Wrap.
The New Yorker’s Sheelah Kolhatkar wrote an insightful look at Ivanka fighting to “save the brand” the following week.
“She embraced the family philosophy of turning everything into an opportunity for personal enrichment; the morning after she introduced her father at the Republican National Convention, she broadcast on Twitter an image of herself wearing one of her fashion label’s dresses on the stage with the exhortation: ‘Shop Ivanka’s look from her #RNC speech,’” Kolhatkar wrote....
CMOs have been grappling with the emergence of new technologies such as social, mobile and other digital channels over the past five years. The challenge — and perhaps opportunity — is about to go into overdrive over the next five years. Now, CMOs will have to grapple with the added complication and explosion of the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence and virtual reality technologies — technologies that will dramatically transform how buyers engage with brands. If you lose their interest, buyers can switch brands or cut the cord with a keystroke. Marketers need to be listening and responding, not just in every channel, but in every place and every moment. But what does this mean in practice? The path to 2020: Marketers seize the customer experience Marketo turned to the EIU to help with the answer. EIU surveyed nearly 500 CMOs and senior marketing executives around the world to learn what these experts thought about the technologies and customer trends that are most likely to change marketing over the next five years....
Ever since the commercial Internet emerged, content has been at the center. Bill Gates, quite famously, declared that content is king and called it the “killer app” of the Internet age. Inspired, media executives and internet entrepreneurs alike sought to marry content and distribution to create the perfect business model.
The problem is, as I’ve noted before, that content is crap. Nobody walks out of a great movie and says, “Wow! That was some great content.” Nobody listens to content on their way to work in the morning. We never call anything we like “content,” the term is a mere fantasy in the minds of business planners.
That, in essence, is why despite the predictions of digital pundits, the TV industry has continued to prosper. Through a series of disruptions—cable, DVD and now streaming video—programing has continued to evolve. Now, with the cable business model starting to unravel, we can expect an explosion of creative energy that will usher in a new golden age of TV....
...Marketing automation platforms save time, improve efficiency, increase productivity, and help manage big data. They give companies unprecedented abilities to understand buyers, identify opportunities, track campaign performance, and link marketing activities to business outcomes.
But they do not provide insight into the billions of bits of data being created as consumers move from screen to screen and interact online and offline with brands. According to IBM, 90 percent of all data in the world is less than two years old. Humans are not programmed to keep up. And yet, turning data into intelligence, intelligence into strategy, and strategy into action remains largely human powered.
What inevitably comes next are marketing intelligence engines that process data and recommend actions to improve performance based on probabilities of success. Think about it. Are we really that far off from an automated marketing strategy in which the marketer's primary role is to curate and enhance algorithm-based recommendations rather than to devise them?...
I love case studies, and so do potential customers. In my offline portfolio I have several case studies that I walk prospects through so they can see exactly how I can help businesses with their blogging and social media. Case studies are powerful because they allow the customer to visualise the success you bring easily, and it makes you memorable.
You have a blog and you share content on your Facebook page, Twitter account, and the next step is to convert some of those fans to customers without going all scary-sales on them. That’s where the good ol’ case study on your blog comes in....
Learn why context is so important not just for marketing, but also for sales and services, too.
Targeted emails are better than generic emails, but here's the thing: When that same email recipient then heads over to your website, interacts with you in social media, or calls your sales team, what do they get?
The same generic marketing everyone else gets. People are the sum of their entire experience, across channels, across devices, across their whole history of interactions with your company. And that experience, like water, should move and adapt around us. This goes beyond tossing their first name into an email.
Webber continues: "We should ... look at better ways to emotionally connect with people in meaningful ways; to understand where they are at, meet them there, and give them more than cheap digital parlour tricks.
"Having that context, and extending it through all the channels prospective customers use, changes everything for the relationship between a company and its prospects....
As digital communication continues to explode more organizations are recognizing its importance within the marketing mix. In order to develop strategy and allocate resources business leaders need to understand the effectiveness of their existing digital initiatives. A great way to do this is to conduct a digital audit – a study of your brand’s digital presence (on its own and in relation to your competitor set) across six key areas: Reach, Architecture, Content, Conversion, Integration and Measurement.
Before launching the digital audit it’s important to establish basic criteria with respect to rating status, structure and performance. To help guide next steps set up a simple decision filter that will aid in prioritizing your findings. One simple way to do this is to assign a color coding systems as follows...
As competition grew in the late 1960s and the phone stopped ringing, ad agencies turned to their public relations cousins and asked for help to stand out. From the mid ‘60s on, this took the form of pumping out press releases and cultivating media to cover agency activities. The vast majority of the content was announcing new clients an agency had picked up and awards won at the ever-increasing number of shows.
Both of these items quickly became table-stakes material, contributing no real differentiation for the agencies. Sadly, the biggest innovation agencies introduced in subsequent decades was hiring public relations professionals to work in-house.
All this did was reduce cost as these folks brought little new to the equation. The result is advertising agencies have confused public relations with brand building for the past 50 years. Do not get me wrong: Public relations has a part to play in ensuring an advertising agency is top of mind. However, most public relations practiced by agencies remain incredibly traditional and shockingly boring for an industry that prides itself on creativity. Avi Dan, founder of Avidan Strategies, wrote in a Forbes article that agencies that hire a public relations firm as a way to solve new business struggles are soon disappointed....
While social media has contributed many great things to marketers, all of the good stuff doesn’t come without its own baggage. We have talked about the good side of social media for marketing a lot on this blog, but we have under-reported on the negative aspects that social media has brought to the marketing industry. Stepping back to think about it, these seven negatives are clearly consequences of the growth of social media as a marketing discipline. Here are 7 Reasons Social Media Is Bad for Marketing...
To win over millennials, brands must incorporate participative benefits into their models.... In the new Millennial-inspired Participation Economy, the old definition of brand value — the one that worked for decades — is dead. As marketers, we knew that the sum of our core functional and emotional benefits divided by price would give us a proxy for brand value. Stronger brands had more price elasticity. However, the old definition no longer holds if you want to engage Millennials or older generations that are adopting a “Millennial Mindset.” THE NEW DEFINITION OF BRAND VALUE Millennials don’t just want to buy your brand, they want to be a part of it. They’re looking for ways to participate. And they want to understand why you do what you do not just what you want to sell. As a result, the brand value equation has morphed to include participative benefits. This is key for tapping into Millennial passion — and therefore, Millennials’ dollars. In The Participation Economy, (emotional benefits + function benefits + participative benefits)/price = brand value. We’ll explore this more in a bit. First, let’s review who makes up this generation — and how they influence your other consumers, too....
By understanding the customer journey across media, devices and platforms, marketers can better optimize search and social marketing performance.... On the one hand, there’s a temptation to spend a lot of time and resources developing “the perfect” strategy. On the other hand, you could also just start cranking out content and see what sticks. Neither of those approaches really work well in a practical way. What does work? There’s one thing that can help answer many of the concerns marketers have about content and that also helps you cut to the chase for practical implementation: Understanding the customer journey. Google Think Insights has a great post with tools to help marketers better understand how different content and channels affects customers during the buying cycle or customer journey to online purchase. Check it out and then come back....
So how did we grow the business to over 100,000 customers? Well for starters we used to have a free plan, which helped a lot. And you probably see advertisements for Crazy Egg all over the web, but we’ve been over 100,000 customers for years. Before that point we didn’t have a big marketing budget… all we had was $10,000. So how did we do it? 7 essentials to startup success...
|
At #ThinkContent 2017, National Geographic's CMO, Jill Cress, spoke about how the storied brand uses content and technology to innovate and reach an incredible 760 million consumers every month.