I’m a Marketer – Why Should I Care About Sales?
Sales: “The leads from marketing are weak!” Marketing: “Sales can’t close on the great leads we give them!” And so went the age-old debate between sales and marketing … but times and tools have changed. There’s no longer a reason for a pointless battle between two departments that belong to the same company. Two little […]
5 Myths of Social Media Marketing
Have you tied your social media efforts to a positive ROI? Or, have you heard claims that social media marketing just isn’t worth the effort for B2B companies? B2B social media has gotten a bad rap in the marketing community, with many marketers claiming a low ROI and seeing a lack of interest from prospects. […]
Marketers: 3 Ways to Make Sales-Based Business Intelligence Work for You
Wikipedia: “Business intelligence (BI) is the set of techniques and tools for the transformation of raw data into meaningful and useful information for business analysis purposes.” The techniques range from strategies such as mapping business objectives to choosing which data to analyze. The tools include programs for data analysis, enterprise reporting, analytical processing, data visualization, and much more. Ashley Heath of Tour de […]
Do Hackers Have Your Stolen Data? Find Out
THIS LAST JUNE 10, 2015 in the wake of 4 million people having their data stolen, we did a blog post that addressed a crisis of data and identity theft. From that time until August 11, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center, another 124 data breaches have occurred (something like 2 each day) and […]
Did a Company Share Your Information W/O Your Consent? The FTC Wants to Know
On August 14, 2015, Lisa Weintraub Schifferle, an attorney with the Federal Trade Commission’s Division of Consumer and Business Education posted an open invitation on the FTC website: Want privacy? Tell us about it! Did a company share your personal information without your knowledge or consent? The FTC wants to know. And we’ve made it easier […]
How to Perform an Onsite Audit for SEO, Part 4: Improvement
The next article in our five-part series on how to conduct an onsite SEO audit will focus on that ever-important, and sometimes forgotten, step of improvement. Identifying, fixing and monitoring the progress of your organic search visibility must be a continuous activity. “Kaizen”, the Japanese concept of continuous improvement and managing by facts, very much […]
Buying Marketing Technology: Whose Recommendations Do You Trust?
My husband is an automotive journalist. At one point he had a column in a daily newspaper (remember those?) in which he reviewed new cars after driving them for a week. He wrote about cars from the perspective of someone who drove them every day, and he could take them to a track and push […]
How to Get a Bigger Bang from Your Press Releases
Once upon a time, press releases were events unto themselves, for the attention they commanded and masses they reached. Consider Michael Jordan’s famous, two-word fax announcing his return to basketball in 1995, as relayed by his agent, David Falk: … President Truman’s plea for understanding after Hiroshima … … and, of course, any number of releases […]
Digital Debris: Why Data Needs an Expiration Date
I recently received a letter from a large health insurance company. Not my current provider, mind you. One that covered my health care many years ago. In fact, I almost recycled the envelope without reading it, since I assumed they were just trying to get my business back. However, I decided to open it on […]
Fun with Mnemonics: Set SMART Marketing Goals
Ready, Set, GOAL! Yes, new technologies have changed the face of marketing over recent years (and wildly expanded the possibilities). But regardless of the new tools available to us, essential marketing strategies are still the same whether the tactic is traditional or digital. Our ability to attract, capture, nurture, convert and expand our customer base […]
Good Forms, Great Leads: How to Use Web Forms Strategically
In order to build a relationship with your audience, you need content – lots of it – and you need to make it available across various media and multiple channels. Lots of organizations make a common mistake: They wait until a prospective customer is 80% – 90% of the way through the buying process before […]
6 Things You Could Do Right with Facebook Ads
This blog post was originally posted on GoChime as “6 Things You’re Doing Wrong with Facebook Ads.” We liked it so much we wanted to share it with you, so here it is, thanks to Brian Falk. There’s a lot of uncertainty around Facebook ads. As a Facebook API partner and member of the Facebook […]
Join the i♥marketing Roadshow! Next Stop: July 9 in Boston
It’s the next stop in the i♥marketing roadshow, and you won’t want to miss this opportunity to join the fun! i♥marketing is a complimentary marketing workshop that’s been taking the country by storm. These half-day events are a great opportunity to fine-tune your marketing skills and get a look at the future of marketing automation technology. After the huge success of […]
How to Perform an Onsite Audit for SEO, Part 3: Take Action
In Part 2 of this series of posts on doing an online audit for SEO, we discussed the questions to ask yourself as you’re analyzing your website data. It’s our hope that those questions helped you tell an accurate story of your website performance in search and beyond. They’re a good place to start your journey […]
Your Email List: When Less (as in Fewer) is More (as in Results)
As we’ve written about before, deliverability is personal. Individual interaction with an email will determine where it will end up: the inbox or the junk folder or whether it will reach your recipient’s mailbox at all. It’s known now that ISPs and email providers value engagement above all else when filtering mail to their subscribers’ […]
SEO for Alternative Content Types, Part 5: Questions and Answers
In a recent webinar sponsored by Act-On, Thorin McGee, Editor in Chief of Target Marketing Magazine sat down with search engine marketing guru Kevin Lee to talk about how marketers can improve SEO for alternative types of content. That includes video, infographics, images, PDFs, and more. In this five-part blog series, you’ll get expert insights […]
Big Data Can Help Your Email Deliverability
It has been almost a year since CASL, the Canadian Anti-Spam Law, went into force. Wow! Since its inception, many marketers have asked us what information they need to keep in their database on their email recipients, to ensure they are doing their due diligence and are in compliance with CASL. The more I thought […]
Five Areas Where B2B Marketers Can Leverage Big Data
Big data is now the “New New Thing” in marketing and companies big and small are scrambling on what to make out of this emerging hot subject. The articles on this topic are often stark, with the implication of disaster if companies don’t embrace big data – like, your company will be eaten alive by […]
How to Perform an Onsite Audit for SEO, Part 2: Do the Analysis
This is the second post in the “How to Perform an Onsite Audit for SEO” series. In the coming months, we’ll cover the other essentials: test and improve/repeat. Our first post gave recommendations for the type of data you should use to inform your technical onsite SEO audit. We discussed some of the ways to […]