A Keyword Primer: Finding and Using Keywords Effectively
Keywords are important for every business online today.. They help drive traffic to your website and, when chosen and used well, draw visitors who become customers. Keywords define a business, and represent the essence of the products and services that are offered. In the context of search engines, keywords help users find your website when […]
5 Tips for Marketing in a Highly Regulated Industry
Marketers working in highly controlled industries face multiple challenges when it comes to reaching their audiences in a personal, relevant way. Industries such as financial services and healthcare have a variety of protocols around how they can market to consumers – especially where personal or financial information is concerned. In the new world of marketing, […]
Marketing Agency Leaders Discuss: The New Agency Model for Success
It used to be that companies hired advertising agencies to come up with exciting new ways to popularize their brands – and that was mostly it. Sometimes that meant developing a new logo and corporate identity; almost always it was all about brainstorming ideas and developing creative executions for magazine ads, billboards, radio spots, direct […]
How to Use Forms for Lead Generation
When used correctly, forms can be one of the most important tools in your lead generation strategy; for many organizations, forms are the #1 way to capture leads on websites. The main purpose of a form is to get permission to interact and continue to engage with a potential customer, gain insightful information on that […]
5 Tips to Get Listed in Google News
100,000 business opportunities every minute. That’s the number of clicks Google News gets, as reported in The Atlantic. It amounts to a cool 1 billion unique users per week who are viewing articles that are algorithmically harvested from more than 50,000 news sources across 72 editions and 30 languages. And you want a piece of […]
10 Tips to Master the Art of Writing Micro-Copy for Social
Mark Twain hit the nail on the head when he said, “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”* This is the challenge of writing micro-copy. If an elevator speech needs to be conveyed in the amount of time it takes to get from the first floor […]
Choose the Right Social Networks to Boost Your Business
Find Kelly Jo on Twitter: @KellyJoHorton I have some good news … and some bad news. Let’s start with the bad news. You have to embrace social media and integrate it into your marketing strategy. I know what you’re saying; it doesn’t work for my industry, we tried it once and nothing happened, I’m a […]
Show Them the Money! (Or at Least the Marketing Performance Report)
In two previous blog posts (Five KPIs to Track and Marketing Accountability from the Lead Up), we laid out an analytic framework for evaluating a company’s marketing performance. In this post, we will discuss how to showcase the fruits of that labor in terms of useful, actionable marketing performance reports. The ideas presented here are […]
A New Framework for Sales Enablement
Is “sales enablement” just another buzzword? Yes, and no. Yes: A quick Google search returns just over a million hits, and many are insipid. (“Is ‘sales enablement’ the new black?” I’m paraphrasing, but you know what I mean.) No: In a 2010 blog post, Forrester’s Scott Santucci described the struggle an executive roundtable composed of […]
Act-On Announces $42 Million in Venture Financing, Led by Technology Crossover Ventures
I’m very pleased to announce today that Act-On has secured $42 million in new venture financing. Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV) led the round, with existing investors Norwest Venture Partners, Trinity Ventures, US Venture Partners, and Voyager Capital also participating. Palo Alto-based TCV is one of the largest providers of growth capital to premier technology companies, […]
5 Tips for Maximizing Your Marketing with Google AdWords
The answer to your question is “probably yes … and definitely probably.” The question: “Should my company use Google AdWords?” As the interweb’s dominant pay-per-click platform, AdWords is Google’s pretty baby: It’s self-absorbed, incredibly time-consuming, demands constant attention, and costs money … yet most still say it’s worth it. And for many companies, AdWords definitely […]
How (and Why) to Use Social Media Meta Tags (Part 2 of 2)
This post is the second in a series that looks at social media meta tags and the ways they can power up your social content. In Part 1 we looked at tags that work with Facebook and Twitter (OpenGraph and Twitter Cards); in this post, we’ll examine the tags for Pinterest and Google+. As a […]
How (and Why) to Use Social Media Meta Tags (Part 1 of 2)
Everybody knows you need to use metadata to optimize your web pages, right? Well…raise your hand if you’re using it to optimize your social media. As a baseline: “Metadata” (literally, data about data) is plural for all the bits of information that get coded into something, to define what it is and what it contains. […]
7 Tips for Brand Consistency Across Social Channels
Imagine that you’re relaxing in a movie theatre watching an old classic western movie. On the screen, the hero gallops into the frame. You know he’s the hero immediately – by his branding. He’s riding a beautiful horse, the music is swelling, and he’s wearing a white hat. If he’s typecast, you might see this same […]
B2C Marketers: 4 Reasons Why Webinars Are Worth the Investment
Webinars have long been a top-ranking tactic among B2B marketers and for good reason: They work. More often than not, webinars deliver measurable upside across the entire customer journey by incrementally building and strengthening brand awareness, trust, preference, and loyalty among prospects and customers. But it’s a different story in the B2C world where anecdotes, casual conversations, and bona […]
“Why” is the Marketer’s Secret Sauce: 5 Buyer Persona Insights
Do you know why buyers choose your products, solutions and services? Or why they don’t? If your answers resemble this: “Meh.” “Ummm, kinda. I hope.’ “Yeah, I think so. Maybe.” … it’s a good bet that your marketing content is missing the bull’s-eye and you’re leaving money on the table. Is it possible to deliver […]
A Newbie’s Guide to Link Building
We have a few posts coming up in the near future about the role of anchor text in link-building, so let’s lay some groundwork. Here’s an excellent post by Maggie Walsh of Vertical Measures that explains the basics of link building, and introduces anchor text. A Newbie’s Guide to Link Building We all know what […]
Best Practices in Social Influencer Marketing
“Try this,” said the first caveman to his friends. And so what we know as “social influence” came to be. In the mid-1950s, sociologists Paul Lazarsfeld and Elihu Katz published the book Personal Influence, introducing a two-step communication model which shows that ideas flow from mass media to opinion leaders, and from them to a […]