Mobile Search Engine Optimization Best Practices
By now, we all know that mobile searchers outnumber desktop searchers. It may have been true once that you could assume that a mobile user looking for your products or services would also be looking on the desktop, but a 2014 study from comScore indicates that there is a growing percentage of websites with a sizable […]
Ready, Set, Tweet! Twitter Basics for B2B Marketers
Are you spending time on Twitter? I don’t mean reading everyone else’s posts. I’m talking about actually engaging with people, posting relevant tweets with images and calls to action, favoriting, reweeting, and following like-minded marketers and relevant companies. Because if you’re not, you’re not alone – according to Rocket Post, only about half of the people […]
Should Marketers Be the Stewards of the Customer Relationships? Gleanster Research Results
If you’re lucky, your business has a lot of customers. And if you’re really lucky, you’re connecting and communicating with them in many different ways over the span of your relationship. Managing, understanding, and optimizing every experience your customers have with your brand is important – and it’s also problematic. Throughout every stage of the […]
How to Use Hashtags on Twitter With #Confidence
I tried to explain Twitter to my father over the Christmas holiday. He’s 78. He particularly wanted to know what a hashtag is. So I started talking about how the pound symbol always precedes a hashtag and he interrupted: “They’re like tags, right?” Hashtags are indeed like tags, and they’re used to identify the text […]
How to Know Which Hashtags to Use in Your Social Media Posts
So you’re all ready to launch a bunch of tweets to promote your newest piece of content. You’ve got a great headline, an awesome image, and a shortened URL. And now… the hashtags. But which hashtags? How many hashtags? Do you really even have to use hashtags? Let’s take a look at the basics of […]
What It Takes to Optimize Your Brand’s Organic Search Visibility
When did SEO become so complicated? It seems like only yesterday that a brand new company could launch a site, bake some bolded and italicized keywords into each page, prop up a few cookie-cutter articles on free blog platforms for instant backlinks, and watch the organic search traffic start rolling in. Back when SEO was […]
5 Warning Signs that You’re Working at a Dysfunctional Marketing Agency
The average marketing agency is anything but average. The combination of creativity, ego, and intense pressure can often result in some bizarre situations that are as far from ordinary as you can get. In my experience, the only time you’re likely to get a zanier group of people together is when you’re working on a […]
What’s Your Type? Personality Tests in the Workplace
People are different, and that’s a good thing. However, because we all convey and gather information in different ways, sometimes the lines of communication break down. It’s a big challenge in today’s workplace, where remote workers and virtual teams are becoming the norm. What can managers do to create functional – and harmonious – teams, […]
20 Social Media Terms for Non-Digital Natives
Here are 20 terms you’ll hear in everyday conversation when discussing social media.
Making the Connection: 7 Tips to Grow Your LinkedIn Network
It’s not easy to add connections on LinkedIn anymore. Everyone wants to protect their network – and with good reason. Many of us have been spammed by companies and sales professionals with a hard-sell approach. Decision makers and influencers realize that most of the people trying to connect with them are also looking to get […]
Advocacy Marketing Part 2: Building Your Plan in 5 Steps
Welcome to part deux of our 2-part series on advocacy marketing. In part 1 we answered two burning questions about the practice: What is advocacy marketing? and Why is it awesome? This installment will unpack the How (as in How is it done?) and provide some nuts and bolts that will help you build a […]
Advocacy Marketing Part 1: End-to-End Advantages You Can’t Ignore
If you’re not taking advantage of advocacy marketing (aka influencer marketing, referral marketing, and word-of-mouth marketing), you should give it serious consideration. Here are a few reasons: According to McKinsey & Company, word-of-mouth (WOM) is the primary factor behind 20%-50% of all purchasing decisions. A Zubrance white paper states that for every $1 a company invests […]
Understanding Cookies Part 2: A Guide for Marketers
Digital marketers are also online consumers, and most of us understand how cookies work. (Or at least, we know that they work, without worrying too much about the how.) And yet, we too can sometimes be taken by surprise at the level of behavioral targeting enabled by cookies. There’s nothing inherently wrong with cookies, and […]
What Is an Internet Cookie? A Guide for Consumers
Everywhere we browse, every time we buy online, cookies are there, waiting for us. And while that situation sounds delicious (and somewhat sinister) in theory, most of us know that browser cookies just a fact of everyday life in the digital age. That’s why it’s important to understand cookies and to understand how we can […]
Semantic Search: Keyword Choices and Relevancy
Have you read the recent SearchMetrics ranking factors survey? SEO experts Marcus Tober, Dr. Leonhard Hennig, and Daniel Furch are back with another edition of ranking correlations and ranking factors in the 2014 Ranking Factors Study. The report showcases four content factors which the authors feel correlate to higher rankings: Semantically relevant and semantically comprehensive […]
5 Email Metrics that Matter to Marketers
The great thing about email marketing (well, one of the many great things) is the instant insight you get after sending a message. Did your audience love it? Did they hate it? Which links are getting the most hits? You can see the results roll in as time goes by. But it can be easy […]
Ad Retargeting 101
Every business discipline has its own lexicon. (You could make a game out of matching the buzzword to the industry…rightshoring? SOX? Reverse fulfillment?) We certainly have our share in marketing, especially in the digital marketing industry, but some are actually useful. Take “ad retargeting.” It began as a concept, then became a buzzword, and now, […]
How Data Science Is Transforming Sales and Marketing
What in the world is data science? And why should you care? Data science – and predictive analytics, in particular – is moving the goalposts for salespeople and marketers alike. In fact, it’s moving the entire stadium. Predictive analytics is the foundational discipline that can make marketing more effective and targeted, and your salespeople better […]
Cohort Analysis: 2 Simple Steps to Better Understand Your Leads
Cohort analysis is an often-overlooked area of marketing analytics. It involves tracking a group that shares a common characteristic (a “cohort”) over a certain period of time and evaluating outcomes. In this post, we will talk about cohort analysis of leads. This involves following a group of leads which were created in a certain period, […]