Even those marketers with exceptional social-network-savvy can struggle to keep up with the latest developments in leading social media. Acquisitions, new features and new platforms are a daily occurrence, and it can be easy to get lost in the sea of updates in the social world. Similarly, it can also be easy to lose sight of which are actually of benefit to your business.
Despite shrinking budgets and resources, today's marketing teams have the ability to maximize their efficiency, with a critical tool at their disposal: marketing automation. With it, marketers can create complex campaigns and engagements with their prospects over time, priming them for an eventual conversion or purchase.
More and more companies today are latching onto the potential of gamification to drive engagement and awareness, and the number of companies delivering gamification-specific services has also increased.
For my travels to Austin and my work with Transverse (
www.tractbilling.com), I just became a
Car2Go customer.
Many of you have likely heard some buzz around Google's
Project Re:Brief, a new documentary/experiment that aims to inspire creative approaches to thinking about digital advertising and marketing.
There's no doubt that QR codes has been a very hot topic for marketers over the past couple of years or so...but the actual use of QR codes still remains somewhat dubious. They're a novel little tool, with fantastic applications in digital marketing campaigns, but naturally, QR codes have their own limitations (for example, you need to launch a QR-reader app each time you want to read one).
Wondering how to get people to land on your site and then go to the pages you want them to visit? Chris Goward has helpful information on how to use conversion optimization and create hypotheses to obtain marketing insights, along with lots of 'which page won?' examples.
What is content curation and how to get started? Donna Papacosta explains and gives tips on best practices, how to define a content curation strategy and offers some helpful tools. Also find out what the difference between aggregation and curation is.
2012 has brought with it a wave of web design trends. Keeping up with these constant developments is essential, but it's important to keep in mind that effective web design is more than just a coat of paint; it always needs to support your business goals. Good web design is a necessary part of your larger web marketing and user experience picture. In keeping with this holistic approach, we selected the following as the top web design trends to implement this year:
For me, one of the best Chapters in the book... Adam uses many examples of how SJ (Steve Jobs) drilled culture and acceptable behavior through the ranks at Apple and describes his fight against the bureaucracy that tends to cripple and slow organizations as they grow. SJ was fervent in his fight to maintain a start up type environment upon his return to Apple.
Are you a CEO? Do you tweet? If so, you are among the '8 percent'. Peter Aceto is and he explains why. Peter sees a dramatic shift in the way companies are now being run, as do other experts like Don Tapscott. Social business is here and one of its big requirements is transparency. Find out what social business leaders are doing to connect with customers and employees in new and exciting ways.
Although many people today associate digital "community" with a customer-facing space, B2B communities are also an integral part of social media. After all, businesses are comprised of (you guessed it), people.
Maria Ogneva, the Head of Community at Yammer, has pulled together the following
10 best practices for managing a B2B community. Has your organization followed all of these tips?
Many marketers (if not all!) have, at some point in their careers, come across basic principles of behavioural psychology. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is one prominent example that marketing professionals have historically drawn upon to understand some of the psychological motivations for action.
Recently had the pleasure of gaining
John Holland’s perspectives on the keys to high performing sales teams. The titles of John’s best-selling books, in many ways, nicely summarize his thinking.
CustomerCentric Selling and
Re-Thinking the Sales Cycle. A summary of our recorded 30 minute conversation:
On Tuesday, Facebook
annnounced that their Timeline profile would now be available to users worldwide. Although it's currently available only for personal profile pages, many have predicted that brand pages will soon follow.
When old becomes new again, ISVs look to telecom for pricing inspiration. For decades, the telecom industry has been honing what other industries are only now getting into – business models that start with simple subscriptions then add complex pieces such as sign-up/activity/event fees + bundles + add-ons + incentives + promotional products. SaaS operators are evaluating new ways to create multiple revenue streams from each customer by blending limits and usage (usage being the “activities” in which end-users engage in consuming or interacting with goods and services).
What is geosocial and how does it provide ways for people to link products and services?
Email marketing plays a fundamental role in today’s marketing efforts. Whether it’s attracting new customers, nurturing leads, developing loyalty or transactional messaging, there are standard best practices for email content. Marqui’s email content best practices can be applied to all emails including promotions, e-newsletters, triggered campaigns, drip campaigns, win-back or client education programs.
The importance of great content cannot be overstated. Without content, there is no marketing. Period. So what is content marketing? To make things simple, let's start with what it's not:
Content is part of the front line of your business which is why you can’t afford not to pay it the attention it deserves. What is content strategy? And what should you do once you've hired a content strategist?
Niel Nickolaisen poses the question, "How do we deliver the right products, in the optimal market windows, at the lowest cost, while increasing productivity and meeting customers' changing needs and innovating?"
Learn about understanding channels in terms of your customer, getting marketing campaigns to work together to achieve the outcomes you're looking for and measuring only what is important.
If you're a B2B company, LinkedIn’s network is the ideal platform to connect your business to over 120 million professionals. Here are five ways you can improve your company’s presence and begin increasing your lead flow.
It’s impressive to meet sales leaders with the confidence that they’ve locked into highly repeatable best practices with their sales teams. What we’re seeing with our clients is a vastly different picture. When viewed thru the lens of how much buyer response Reps are earning from their sales efforts, pretty clearly some of today’s practices aren’t nearly as valuable as some might think*.
My friend Ardath Albee regularly offers sharp perspectives on the effective use of content in sales and marketing via her
Marketing Interactions blog. She recently asked a brilliant question: ‘
what does a click really mean?’ She and I recently had great fun debating the issue.
You may have heard some buzz around the notion of gamification. The term has been characterized by some as the next frontier in web and mobile, one predicted to become as central to marketing as social media has become.
This year, the explosion of mobile internet consumption has brought with it an unprecedented wave of developments in mobile website design. In just one year, the mobile web landscape has changed dramatically, and the growing popularity of HTML5 and CSS3, amongst other developments, has played a pivotal role in expanding the realm of design possibilities. With that in mind, here are the top mobile website design trends for 2011:
Landing pages are an important aspect of higher education institutions’ conversion tactics, but, if your landing pages aren’t converting your prospects to leads, then they’re most likely not optimized. Your landing pages are meant to prompt a certain action and by make them appealing, targeted and credible you increase your chances of turning your visitors into viable leads. So—how can you improve your conversion rates?
As any sales manager or CFO can attest, improving sales performance is a tough, time-consuming, task. You implement enabling technology. You recruit great sales skills. You gain access to valuable information. Your team uses these resources and tries hard. Yet, still, sales performance lags what everyone senses it could be. If only there were a way to improve the sales impacts of sales efforts.
Recently had the pleasure of comparing notes with
Lisa Nirell, founder of
EnergizeGrowth, and a blogger with FastCompany. Following are excerpts from our conversation.
You have likely heard about the business benefits of a strong Twitter presence: competitive intelligence, increased brand awareness and customer engagement, to name just a few. However, if the Twitterverse is still foreign to you and your colleagues, check out these tips for starting and maintaining a meaningful dialogue:
Recently on LinkedIn, over 150 Sales + Marketing Executives shared their views on the #1 reason for failure in sales. Several things really struck me from the conversation to date. Learning’s gotten little air time. Nor has better coaching. The need for it. The lack of it.
Google's new +1 button, released on July 1st (try it yourself above this post!) is Google's foray into social or "curated" search
At the
AA-ISP Leadership Summit, forward-thinking sales leaders compared notes on what best-in-class inside sales teams are doing to improve their performance. Industry leaders briefed attendees on the results of their initiatives + reflections on industry trends.
