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...The latest research from the Content Marketing Institute showed us that everyone is creating content and yet only about a third of us have a document content strategy. We’re struggling to rise above the marketplace noise and we need a plan to get there. So, we have all have a content problem, whether we have accepted it or not. We need to create more of the kind of content our customers are looking for and less of the stuff no one reads, or acts upon. Are you looking to define your content strategy? Before you start, it’s important to identify the questions you need to ask before you can really get started? In my latest presentation, I outline the questions you need to ask before you can define your content strategy. I have embedded the slides here and also will provide a high-level overview of the main points....
A one-size-fits-all content marketing strategy doesn't work. Read on to determine why location, size, and scope are critical to being effective in your unique market. As marketers, we hear a lot about content marketing for all sized businesses. In the midst of the tips and how-to guides from industry experts, there’s a lot of white noise. A sound content marketing strategy is integral to a company’s online success, but a one-size-fits-all approach to content simply doesn’t fly. When it comes to content marketing, there are three major components to consider: - Location: Do you own a brick and mortar business? Do you operate exclusively online? What if your business is a hybrid of both? - Size: How many employees does your company have? Seven? Seven hundred? Is it just you? - Scope: Who’s your business trying to reach? Do you consider yourself B2B? B2C? What exactly does your business do?...
As the controversy swirls over publishers selling advertisers bogus nonhuman traffic, many of the accused have screamed, "It wasn't me! We bought bad traffic from somebody else!" So, who are these traffic dealers? At Adweek's request, close to a dozen industry experts—representing publishers, ad buyers, DSP and other ad tech execs—have identified six companies that they believe may be selling low-quality, potentially bot-generated traffic—starting at half a penny a click. They are AdOn, Adknowledge, eZanga, Jema Media, MGID and BlueLink Marketing....
Just when you got your SEO mojo, out comes Penguin 2.0, trippin' up your flow. Here's what to do about it! ... Post-Penguin 2.0, the message is clear: if you want to rank and drive real traffic, you need to build your online brand. By strong branding, I’m not talking exclusively about giants like CNN and Zappos et al. I mean a strong brand in relation to the other sites in your industry fighting over specific SERP territory. Say you're a local dentist trying to rank for your best keywords. You won’t ever have brand recognition equal to that of Apple. But you can have an amazingly strong web brand for your local market. And if you do, you’re much more likely to rank. When you think about branding as a ranking factor, it makes a lot more sense. Google is trying to replicate the logic of the “real world” and apply it to the online world, after all. For instance, if you have a business and you’re trying to build your brand as part of a local marketing blitz, how would you do it? What constitutes a strong brand offline? Well, you might have printed ads in the local magazines and newspapers, or maybe radio and television ads -- you know, the kinds of things that might help create some brand recognition for your target market when they're not at a computer or mobile device....
At almost any given time, it seems, someone is hosting a Twitter chat somewhere. So, how do you decide which ones to attend? To help you decide, I made a list of the best chats for marketers. In this article from MarketingProfs, author Amy Vernon shares a thorough list of top Twitter chats for her fellow marketing professionals. While giving an initial nod to the originals, like #UsGuys and #SMGirlfriends, she shines a spotlight on smaller, sometimes niche, Twitter chats that users should also consider joining.
Chats include: #WGBiz, which discusses marketing for women growing businesses; #Pinchat, which holds Pinterest as its topic centerpiece; and #SWChat, which covers the social media impact on today’s workplace.
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....
Go to the home page of your business website. Do it. Yes, right now. How long does it take you to locate your phone number? Okay, now, look at an interior page, like a product page or “About” page. How long did it take you to find your phone number then? Last test: find a smartphone or tablet and pull your website up. You guessed it – how long did it take to find your phone number here? If it takes you more than five seconds to locate your phone number in any of these scenarios, your website has a serious problem....
Instead of relying on cheap spam emails, marketers need to embrace strategies that really work.... Digital's ROI is better than the ROI on analog marketing for one reason: Because it is cheaper. Cheaper equals more emails, which in turn equals more noise. Nearly 145 billion emails are sent daily and, of that, 94 billion is spam. Banner ads, pop ups, and other forms of intrusion marketing are growing and becoming more invasive. This is only going to get worse. There are two opportunities to improve this. First, by focusing on the 'return' portion of the ROI equation, not just the investment, we can use the power of digital to be more effective, not just cheaper. Second, we need to fundamentally re-think digital marketing. Digital can both shrink the path to purchase — and in some cases it can eliminate or even reverse it....
Terms like agile marketing, infographic and gamification aren’t marketing buzzwords, they’re actual terms that every marketer needs to fully understand. Some of the other terms are buzzworthy, but still not that bad. The folks at Mashable have put together this infographic on 30 days of Marketing Buzzwords. As a guy who can’t stand marketing speak, I always appreciate when we take a good look at marketing BS. I’ll be honest, though, and admit that I think this infographic just may be full of it.Terms like agile marketing, infographic and gamification aren’t marketing buzzwords, they’re actual terms that every marketer needs to fully understand. And my biggest problem is with the term Return on Investment being listed as a buzzword. ROI isn’t a buzzword… it’s an absolute necessity. ...
If you run a small business, one thing that you probably don’t have a lot of- is time. You don’t want to spend a huge amount of time learning how to find and learn how to use the best tools to achieve your goals. Since my business is social media and web development I actually enjoy researching the best tools and have developed a portfolio of great tools and a workflow that works well for me. In this article I list the main tools I would recommend to most small businesses. Of course every situation is unique so I do recommend tailoring a system that works for you...
Who cares if you have 25000 followers on Twitter if youre not doing anything with or for them... A recent CMO Survey reported that while B2B social media spending increased 9.6% last year, the majority of B2B companies failed to integrate social media into their business practices. “The biggest challenge is that many companies see social media as a cute promotional activity when it can be a strategic marketing activity,” says Christine Moorman, director of The CMO Survey and T. Austin Finch senior professor of business administration at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. We’re in the “silo” stage, according to Brian Kardon, CMO, Lattice Engines “where most social media is generally segregated from the rest of the organization.” A big part of the problem is that most B2B companies don’t understand that social media requires both a technology and a business approach. Who cares if you have 5,000 or even 25,000 followers on Twitter if you’re not doing anything with the followers? Instead, companies leave the heavy lifting to “some kid out of college who tweets with no knowledge of business processes, says Joe Chernov, VP of Marketing at Kinvey....
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...
The Customer Journey to Online Purchase: an interactive infographic that explores typical customer behavior to improve marketing programs. These days, the customer journey has grown more complex. Before making an online purchase decision, a customer may engage with your brand through many different media channels over several days. This tool helps you explore and understand the customer journey to improve your marketing programs....
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I’ve spent the better part of the last 10 years telling any small business owner that would listen that marketing isn’t really that complicated. Here's how to create a marketing system... ...Marketing is just a system and, operated as such, it isn’t any different from many of the other systems needed to run a business. A system creates control, a system guides priorities, a system creates process, a system generates accountability and a way to measure and win the game. I developed my own view of “marketing as a system” after discovering that working with small business owners in the way I wanted wasn’t possible unless I was willing to change my view of marketing....
Try speaking the language of value. Here's four ideas how: ... Trying hard is important, but if all you’re doing is trying really hard at the same low value thing that isn’t working, it can be frustrating, futile and not very helpful at all. The Language Of Value What is the language of value? Here’s four biggies that have gotten me a lot of the right kind of attention lately: - Asking Constructive Questions - Presenting Compelling Arguments - Stimulating Genuine Learning - Facilitating Positive Change...
You may come to understand which types of content drive more leads and conversions for your business, but another factor to consider is the time and money that goes into different types of content. I recently read an estimate that content marketing is now a $44 billion industry. This got me thinking – what does that even mean? Did “content marketing” even exist ten years ago? The reality is that content marketing has always existed. It’s the labelling of it and the tactics within it that have evolved over time. Thirty years ago a big-time professional services firm (accounting, law, consulting – pick your poison) still put together whitepapers, articles, graphs, and videos for the purpose of positioning themselves as thought-leaders and to ultimately drive leads. Where things have changed is the delivery of such content. Whereas before content was delivered primarily through ads, mail, memos, and events, today content is delivered digitally. It’s delivered through email, social media, and search engines (SEO). It’s delivered across device platforms, browsers, screen sizes, and even countries....
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....
Download and use these 86 inbound marketing charts from HubSpot’s 2013 State of Inbound Marketing Report in your agency's next client presentation.
The world of mobile is getting faster and faster, and that means more LTE everywhere. It also means less talking, more Facebook and, of course, more video. The bottom line — we are only just getting started. Some data points from Ericsson’s mobility report. We all must love watching video on the go, or else why would Ericsson say that video traffic is growing on the mobile networks by 60 percent annually. Ericsson, which released a new mobility report this morning, says that we will continue to see this trend as more people start to use smartphones and use them for everything.... It all adds up to powerful marketing potential...
Overall usage on social media platforms is exploding. Millions and millions of consumers are expressing likes on Facebook, tweeting about products on Twitter, and pinning on Pinterest every single day. Retailers and brands are therefore increasingly focusing their attention on social commerce. But, many struggle with the question: how do you convert a "like," a "tweet," or "pin" into a sale? In a new report from BI Intelligence, we look at successful examples of businesses and business models for generating commerce via social media-based strategies, analyze Pinterest's success as a social commerce platform, look at Facebook's potential as a social commerce contender, and examine the e-commerce conversion and order value gap. Here's an overview of the converging trends that promise to transform social media into a viable commerce platform....
Whether your job is to sell cars, homes, insurance, antiques, camp, or widgets, you absolutely can use social media to your advantage. But just like hard-selling doesn't work in person, it doesn't work with social media. Here are five simple reminders about the best processes to use when selling through social media...
Digital marketing has experienced not so much a revolution but a rapid evolution and transformation in the way we market.... It is not so much a revolution but a rapid evolution and transformation. The growth of digital media, the convergence of paid, owned and earned media practices and the rapid growth and adoption of mobile and video have fueled change in the way we work in 2013. If you add to this equation the technological changes and innovation and the catalyst that is social media and content marketing it becomes apparent that dealing and adapting to change is a digital marketing necessity rather than the option that it used to be. ...
...He's also a data guy. An MIT alum and lecturer, Brian knows how to separate useful data from vanity metrics, and he's quick to let you know what truly counts as an indicator of how our company is faring at delivering on its promise. While we proudly think of Brian as a unique leader, this laser focus on measuring the right metrics is something I'd wager he shares with CEOs across the board. And when it comes to social media, in particular, vanity metrics abound. So here are some social media metrics that actually matter to our CEO --- and likely yours, too! ...
You have a local based brick and mortar business, so no reason to invest in online marketing, right? Location based businesses couldn’t be more wrong. Do not miss out on sales and customers by ignoring or avoiding online marketing. One of the key principles of business is to be where your target audience is looking for you. A growing number of consumers are searching online before making a purchase decision, so your business needs to be there in order for them to find you and include your company in their decision making process. According to the BIA/Kelsey report, 97% of consumers use online media before making local purchases. Google Research showed that 9 out of 10 internet searches resulted in a follow up action, such as calling or visiting the business. Mobile searches triggered an additional action or conversion 73% of the time; and 28% of mobile searches resulted in a store visit or purchase. Since mobile searches are on the rise, this behavior is only going to continue to increase.... Four takeaways for brick and mortar businesses looking to take advantage of online marketing...
Many social media campaigns focus on individuals, missing the relationships among individuals and the economic power of those relationships. A recent report from Forrester Research found that a third of U.S. marketers surveyed were dissatisfied with their social marketing results. Meanwhile, only 38 percent of those surveyed targeted their fans on social networks, and just 38 percent targeted friends of fans. You would think those results would give marketers pause. Forrester also reports, however, that U.S. marketers are pouring more than $2 billion annually into social media—including ads and promoted content—to try to reach the 1 billion-plus social media users. What many big social media advertisers have failed to grasp is the “social” component of social media. To date, many brands have focused on individuals rather than relationships among individuals and the economic power of those relationships. Who is most likely to influence their friends? Who is most likely to share with friends? Who is most likely to buy or take some other action? Those are vital questions to address to truly unlock the social value of an audience....
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Yes, good questions that will make you think.