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Now that we're well into 2017, are you checking items off your marketing to-do list? Or, like many of us procrastinators, do you have a to-do list that consists of just one item: "Make 2017 marketing to-do list"? If the latter is the case, IBM has you covered. The software company has put together an infographic guide to help marketers prioritize their efforts this year, and it also explains the benefits that each idea can have on your program. For example, stories are up to 22 times more memorable than facts or figures alone, the infographic claims, and it gives tips on how to captivate your audience with better stories this year....
Now to be honest, sometimes the resources they send are great, and from time to time I’ll even link to them.
But what would go SO much better would be if someone offered me something, anything related to what I’m working on.
So, in light of this movement towards depersonalization, I’m going to pitch you all on how you can engage with people BEFORE demanding something from them, as well as give you some ideas for what you can offer in that outreach email.
Here are 11 ways to build a relationship before asking for something in return.
Social strategy. Digital strategy. Mobile strategy. Content strategy. Everyday we’re being urged to create a new strategy. But with all the chatter about new channels, it seems we may have lost sight of the concept of an overall Marketing Strategy. And this gap has huge implications for marketing effectiveness. The tactical programs we create need to rest on a single foundation, otherwise we’re just sending dollars out the door. Case in point, the biannual CMO Survey just released by Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, the American Marketing Association and Deloitte revealed that “marketers are expected to nearly double their social media spending in the next five years even though most can't show the impact of social on their business.”
Ya’ll as we say here in Texas, social media, direct marketing, public relations, advertising, etc., are not strategies -- these are tactics, and each of these tactics can potentially be deployed to support any number of strategic options. Marketers, I issue you a call to arms, it’s time to get serious about marketing strategy.
Marketing strategy, not a channel or touchpoint or tactic, is how your organization will achieve its mission. It is the critical link between marketing objectives and marketing programs and tactics. Your strategy selection (and just as importantly what is not selected) provides focus and enables your organization to concentrate limited resources on building core competencies that in turn create the sustainable competitive advantage needed to pursue and secure the best revenue opportunities....
Marketers are ramping up their technology investments to better understand consumer needs and behaviors. Technologies to power social marketing, digital commerce and marketing analytics are the highest priorities, per July 2015 research.
Gartner surveyed more than 330 organizations in the UK and North America on their 2015 marketing budgets and 2016 expectations. Almost two-thirds of respondents said that social marketing and digital commerce were leading technology investment priorities.
Additionally, 61% of marketers said that marketing analytics were a priority and more than half of respondents were prioritizing tech for customer experience and advertising operations.
What are your digital marketing goals for the months ahead?
If you’re looking to increase your content’s social shares (as so many of us are), we’ve got some amazing new research to share on how to create an ideal outreach strategy for your industry.
BuzzStream and Fractl have collaborated to give you a jumpstart on optimizing your outreach for social traction. We analyzed 220 high- and low-engagement websites from 11 major verticals that produce content.
The result? A roadmap for planning for social success with your outreach strategy....
Shoppers have always had different personalities. They are motivated to buy for all kinds of reasons, and their shopping strategies can be radically different.
In order to stay competitive in an increasingly challenging online ecosystem, marketers need to understand exactly what drives the behavior of the shoppers who frequent their online stores. Here are eight types of shoppers based on personality types and how marketers can provide the best online experiences to reach them...
Could social media have predicted the failure of 3D TVs and its successor 4K? Why did these products fail when they seemed nailed-on to be the next big thing? Naturally, like all tipping points, positive and negative, there was probably a mixture of reasons, but a new report from UK social media analytics company Brandwatch is a good starting-point.
In the company’s Consumer Technology report, it cites how social listening to research meant it knew what consumers felt about 3D TV’s successor, 4K. The data showed that the three target demographics; gamers, TV and film fans, and people with an interest in computing, all had concerns with the technology....
Are you trying to improve your content marketing?
Wondering how to connect the dots between content and customers?
In this article you’ll find important best practices, backed by research, to help improve your social media marketing.Brand new research from Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs shows that while there are universal challenges in content marketing such as measuring ROI and producing engaging content, there are certain best practices that mitigate these problems. Here’s our take on the research....
Read what top marketing analysts and experts have to say about the future of marketing.
...With attention spans dwindling and Polar Vortex induced cabin fever setting in, we tried to brainstorm a way that we could make use of the projections and thought leadership of pioneers in our field without an encyclopedia full of content.
Hence, the birth of Marketing Mad Libs: Expert Edition, in which we gave some of our favorite analysts, authors, and all-around awesome marketers the task of finishing a sentence with a prediction or insight. (The shorter and pithier, the better.) Take a look....
Want to make 2014 a great year for your brand and business? Here are the 10 trends we at Jack Morton believe will make a difference for brands in the year to come.
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On Monday, Gucci will release its latest fashion film, a Gia Coppola-directed spin on the tragic Greek love story of Orpheus and Eurydice, set in present-day New York City and starring Lou Doillon, Marcel Castenmiller, Laura Love, Rocco Di Gregorio, among others. Coppola and stylist Arianne Phillips worked in tandem with Alessandro Michele to capture the dreamy feel of the hot-shot creative director’s Pre-Fall 2016 collection, which the film — shot across five locations and broken into four episodes — was created to promote. Michele even designed a custom pink 10-foot long wedding veil for Doillon’s character.
But while shorts like these are nothing new, the genesis of the film was fairly unorthodox. Instead of tapping its internal marketing team or a traditional agency, Gucci worked with 23 Stories, the branded-content studio launched in January 2015 by publishing giant Condé Nast. Beyond Gucci’s own marketing channels, the film will be distributed through six Condé Nast (US) properties — Vogue, GQ, the New Yorker, W, Vanity Fair and Pitchfork — which, together, attracted a total of about 32 million unique visitors in April 2016, according to Comscore. Beyond their URLs, those six publications boast a cumulative social media following of nearly 67 million. The film will also be promoted via Vogue China and Vogue Japan. Gucci and Condé Nast suggest the project is bigger and more ambitious than anything else either party has previously done in the branded-content space, both in terms of the level of talent recruited and also the scale of the production.
To be sure, the Kering-owned Italian luxury house has the resources and capacity to create video content like this on its own. But Gucci is after Condé Nast’s larger, and presumably more diverse, audience. For instance, Gucci has 8.8 million followers on Instagram while these six titles combined have about 18.5 million. In this deal, Pitchfork’s millennial male followers — an important demographic for Gucci under Michele — are as crucial to the equation as W’s affluent luxury consumer....
Most inbound marketers spend a lot of time creating content, and it can be a struggle to constantly come up with fresh content ideas. However, the key to creating effective inbound content is to know what you have already in your content inventory. Creating an inventory of effective content means mapping your content to the appropriate stage in The Buyer’s Journey. Once you know what content you already have, you can analyze the entire library to identify opportunities and holes, and then create a new content offer that fills out the gaps in your content library. For those of you up to the task of doing a content mapping yourself, read on! This blog post will cover a three-step process to help you create the content you need to align with The Buyer’s Journey. Let’s get started!...
The way I see it, demand generation is the direct opposite of the old-school cold-calling approach. It's the process of turning cold leads into warm leads, then guiding those warm leads down your funnel towards a sales conversation. And for those who fall out of the funnel, it's the process of establishing regular touch points with them until they (a) become customers or (b) tell you to get lost.
What demand generation is not is a campaign. The goal of demand generation is to establish relationships, some of which can go on for months or even years before the prospect is ready to enter a sales conversation....
We asked innovators behind some of the companies on this year's Most Innovative Companies in Advertising/Marketing list, representing key constituencies in the ad landscape—creative agencies, brands, marketing technology startups, and media platforms—for five predictions for the next five years.
While some of their answers spoke to now-familiar trends—the continued growth of mobile and its attendant impact on brand messaging, the continued rise of video and virtual reality, the need for brands to work on a timeline that matches culture, not ad campaigns—their predictions touched on a much wider range of topics, from the shrinking of the product development cycle to data and the place of technology in the marketing continuum (and even a prediction that the banner will work!).
That range of topics, in itself, speaks to one, overall, very safe prediction, summed up by Percolate's Noah Brier: "The complexity of modern marketing is only going to keep increasing." See more forecasts below....
Have you ever heard of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs? It’s a useful concept for sales and marketing to create better connections and relationships with prospects and clients. Abraham Maslow wrote a paper in 1943, “A Theory of Human Motivation” and subsequent book, Motivation and Personality, where he summarized the 5 needs most people search for. The more basic needs are represented at the bottom of the pyramid.
Contently has applied this concept to content marketing which you can read below. It’s a more strategic approach to creating your content to better connect with readers. I think for each layer, we can add other elements depending on your target market. How are you or will you incorporate Maslow’s Hierarch of Needs into your content?
But before we dig deeper, here are two more facts for you: - According to studies, B2B companies with a blog generate 67% more leads than those that don’t have a blog.
- In another survey, 79% of best-in-class marketers rank blogs as the most effective marketing tactic.
Blogging is practically a given these days, regardless of your title or industry — and for good reason.
Though there are plenty of ingredients required to make it… rather than just write to an abyss, quality blog posts are one that you just can’t overlook.
But what exactly makes a great blog post? Here are eight tips to take your blog from good to great....
Humans will remember something longer if it made them feel rather than think. They gravitate towards provocative images -- think food, sex and danger. They’re drawn toward images of faces. The color yellow puts them on edge.
Understanding how the human brain works is fascinating, but it’s also good business.
Marketing campaigns rooted in neurology are more likely to get and hold attention. And in the attention economy we are living in, where consumers have access to more emails and tweets than they could ever manage to read and digest fully, being able to get and hold attention is what separates the wheat from the chaff. That’s what gets consumers to spend.
If you are looking to get more of your marketing efforts seen, then have a look at this infographic, embedded below, generated by Nashville, Tenn.-based Emma, an email-marketing software provider. The infographic highlights 12 biological trigger mechanisms that make the human brain light up....
A central problem for marketers is how to convince consumers of their products’ value. How long will customers listen to all the benefits of starting their day with Cheerios before they dismiss everything as manipulative bunk?
According to the 2 professors, Suzanne Shu of UCLA and Kurt Carlson of Georgetown, the answer is the rule of 3: Making up to 3 claims about a product’s value is effective advertising -- any more than that, and people’s cynical defenses kick in....
See what lies ahead for content marketing in 2014.... With so many companies now giving their marketers license to invest in content marketing, part of what a marketer needs to excel at is showing the ROI from that initial investment. How is it helping your business achieve their goals? If you're going to aim for scale in 2014, you need to show that what you're doing now is working, and will continue to work and warrant equal or more investment....
While most of the impact of technology on marketing has been tactical so far, over the next decade or so there will be a major strategic transformation.
Today, however, digital technology has enabled us to retarget consumers when they respond to a message and that has changed marketing forever. In effect, we must make the shift from grabbing attention to holding attention.
That means that brands will have to learn to be more like publishers and develop content skills. It also means that marketers will have to create a genuine value exchange rather than just coming up with catchy ad slogans and price promotions. Like it or not, we’ve entered a post-promotional paradigm....
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What should be on your 2017 marketing to-do list? Technology, content strategy, events, data, AI? Check out this infographic from IBM, and check off items on your marketing strategy to-do list.