What To Do With $1,000, $5,000 or $10,000 (or No) Social Media Budget
Budget running low? Never even had a budget? Don’t let it get you down. On social media, you can get further than you’d think on low-to-no budget. You just have to focus on the right things. That’s what Karrie Sundbom, Act-On’s content marketing manager, proved when she ran social media at the non-profit Molly’s Fund […]
How To Get Website Traffic?
Traffic is to digital marketing like gasoline is to an engine. It’s what makes it go. So it’s not too surprising that web traffic usually comes in at the top of the list for content marketing goals. Trouble is, traffic can be hard to get. It’s not uncommon to invest months of work in content […]
Not Your Father’s Rebrand: Can the Old Be New Again?
Whether you love her or hate her, everybody has an opinion on the music of Lizzy Grant. A true pop star and style icon, she’s the most-streamed female artist on Spotify, not to mention her Grammy, multiple Billboard Top-10 hit singles, and infamous “Saturday Night Live” performance. What’s that? You’ve never heard of Lizzy Grant? […]
How to Select the Right Marketing Agency for Your Business
Finally. The economy is improving. Businesses are beginning to invest in marketing again. And, while many of us were hunkering down and doing the best we could during the recession, the whole marketing world has turned upside down in the past seven years. Consider the following: Marketing has become a technology-based practice. In fact, there […]
How to Perform a Social Media Audit: Measure What Matters
Social media is long past the novelty stage. It’s a critical part of your content strategy, and like the other tactics you use, it needs to be monitored and measured so you can spend your time and money wisely, while getting the best return you can. Before we dive into how to do that, let’s […]
Gap Analysis: Fill the Holes in Your Clients’ Marketing Programs
When clients call your agency, chances are, they’re hurting: Maybe they’ve been running things themselves, but have realized that running marketing campaigns today, including the use of automated platforms and sophisticated multi-channel strategies, is just plain out of their league and they’ve turned to you for help Or maybe they lack the resources to implement […]
Advocates and Influencers: Differences, Uses, and Red Flags
“Advocates” are customers who are strongly motivated to say positive things about your brand, as well as your products or services. They are critical in your branding efforts, as word-of-mouth is still the most powerful force for influencing potential customers. This isn’t a passing trend; people have always trusted their peers more than they ever […]
5 Ways Mobile Marketing is Affecting Social Media
How often do you check social media on your phone? In fact, when was the last time you even got through an entire day without your i-enabled device or Android-powered gadget? If you’re like most people, it’s quite hard – if not impossible – to recall such a scenario. Living without mobile technology is unthinkable this day […]
What’s Marketing Operations? Just the Fastest-Growing Role in Business
According to certain sources, the term Marketing Operations (MO) was formally coined by analyst firm IDC in early 2005. However, it wasn’t until about the end of 2011 that the term gained mainstream acceptance. Because the sets of associated systems that a marketing operations professional (MOP) are expected to use are still evolving, the MO […]
Three Content Strategies for Responsive Web Design: Plan, Prioritize, Distill
For most marketers, the term “responsive web design” most likely conjures up images of web developers and wire frames. But it should bring to mind strings of sentences and chunks of text. Content is the engine that attracts leads to begin with, then drives them through the sales cycle. And responsive web design’s chief job […]
How to Generate Leads Using Quizzes
Social media has taken to quizzes with gusto since the first one popped up on Facebook or Twitter. It didn’t take long before marketers noticed, and began to experiment with quizzes as a way to generate leads. As it turned out, quizzes have the ability to efficiently draw in a large audience, and have a […]
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 […]
Hackers Stole Your Data? Here’s What to Do
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 […]
Sharing Customer Information Without Consent? The FTC Wants to Know
Can a company share my personal information? A company can share your personal information if allowed by privacy laws, their privacy policy, or with your consent. Laws like GDPR in the EU and CCPA in California limit data sharing without clear consent or a valid reason, such as fulfilling a service. Always review a company’s […]
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 […]
Use the SMART Mnemonic to Identify Your Marketing Goals
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 still relies on our ability to set, implement, and track marketing goals. Goal setting is a powerful process that helps you […]
A Crash Course in Tumblr for B2B Marketers
I’ll admit it. I was a Tumblr lurker. I’ve been watching this social media platform for a while and recently I decided to dive in. I was particularly interested to see if this might be a viable channel for B2B marketers to publish (or re-publish) content. We all want to get more exposure for our […]
Long Tail Keywords: Win at SEO and Acquire More Qualified Leads
Would you like a way to drastically reduce the amount of search engine optimization (SEO) work you have to do, remove most of your competition, and find traffic that converts 2.5 times better than the average searcher? Sure you would. And that means you need to know about long tail keywords. They are today’s secret […]
Get Found Faster: 10 Tips for Successful Local SEO
Local SEO is big business. According to comScore, 88 percent of smartphone users and 84% of tablet owners conduct local searches on a regular basis. That works out to about 70% of all Internet users performing local searches regularly. And there’s more to this than volume. Local searches are also more than twice as likely […]