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Luckily, I have the privilege of working on a team of 150+ other marketers who specialize in different functions than I do. And because of that, I was able to curate this list of the top 58 tools every marketer should know about and being using in 2017. I'll make it easy for you. I broke up my list of recommended tools into different sections so you can get a better sense of what tools are available for different functions of the job. At the end, you'll see the whole list of 58 tools that you can skim and bookmark for later....
“The right thing at the wrong time is the wrong thing.” - Joshua Harris Have you ever called a lead on a Tuesday morning and heard nothing, but tried that same lead two days later and they responded back almost immediately? That’s not luck -- there’s some science behind why this happened. According to research from James Oldroyd and InsideSales.com, effectively reaching out to prospects comes down to one thing: timing. For example, did you know 4-5 p.m. had a 164% better connection rate than 1-2 p.m.? Or that connection rates drop by 400% if you respond in 10 minutes instead of five? The following infographic reveals the best times and days to connect with respond to prospects. Science and data are starting to dominate sales. Are you keeping up?...
... because fake reviews are not only immoral -- but also illegal
It's never been easy to earn customer's favor, especially in terms of explicit public appraisal like an online review. As responsible business owners we all strive (or at least we should) to encourage our clientele to share their experience with our service and product. Unfortunately, waiting for a natural regular inflow of customer reviews is a "plan" that will often bring rather disappointing results.
The thing is You Need a Strategy. A strategy that is better than the one already adopted by your strong competitors. A strategy that will turn your customers into your private brand advocates. It will not take overnight to plan it and execute it but it will make a difference in the long run.
Having your own Review Gathering Strategy is important. So, if you are clueless of how your business could benefit from it, you've finally found out the reason why you suck at securing customer reviews, now you only need to work your way around it....
Did you know that 59% of B2C marketers and 55% of B2B marketers are planning to increase their content marketing spend this year? Content marketing has become an extremely competitive arena now. For this, you need to understand the buyer’s journey. It’s interesting to note that 70% of the buyer’s journey gets complete before they even reach out to a sales rep. So focusing just on sales would make you miss out on a major part of the buyer’s journey. With marketing automation tools, you can influence this journey at different stages: -. Awareness: This is the start of the buyer’s journey, where your buyer is probably unaware of your business and that they have a need. At this stage, you should focus on creating awareness for your business and offerings so that your buyers start to understand what you do, and how you can help them address their needs/overcome their pain points. -. Consideration: Buyers now have already shortlisted a few companies and start to do deeper research to arrive at a decision. You should use your marketing automation tools to keep track of their growing interest and adjust your content so that they see what can influence their decision in your favor. -. Decision: Buyers are ready to make a purchase and start thinking and comparing about implementation, costs, customer support etc, which will decide the company they’ll finally buy from. This is the time to get brand-specific with your content. You can use customer testimonials and case studies to brag about how others have had a positive experience with your offerings. Let’s have a look at some tools that will help you experience content marketing success, and nurture buyer’s all the way along this journey....
In this post, we’re going to review 15 marketing guides that can speed up your success.
We’ll look at the finer details of each guide, ensuring that you have a clear understanding as to how you can use each one to your advantage.
By the end of this post, you’ll have a better idea of how each guide can push you down the path to reaching all of your content marketing related goals....
In this post, I’m going to show you 5 marketing tactics that are effective for most businesses.
The only catch is they can be difficult or scary to do.
I’m going to break them down as much as possible so that you can determine why they might scare you and what you could do to overcome that fear.
This is going to take a lot of honesty on your part, but if you’re willing to give me that, it could have a huge impact on the success of your marketing....
If last year taught marketers one thing, it’s that digital marketing is moving beyond cookies and browsers to deliver the seamless, personalised experiences customers have come to expect.
To help cut through the noise in 2016, Neil Joyce, MD EMEA from marketing technology gorup Signal, zooms in on four problem areas of 2015 and the solutions that will make all the difference in 2016....
Are your marketing efforts falling a bit flat? Are open rates, click-through rates, and lead flow less than stellar? If you were 100% honest, would you click on your brand’s latest “download our new white paper” call to action?
For many marketers, the challenge isn’t just creating content – it’s making it remarkable. Prospects crave something different. You can pique their interest and curiosity with more compelling calls to action that offer something unique or unusual. Following up a unique CTA with an unusual piece of content is even more powerful....
Think of what you did this past weekend. Did you watch a summer blockbuster? If you're anticipating crowds for new releases, chances are that you ordered movie tickets from your phone and visited the theater to actually watch the movie.
Maybe you used Seamless or another service for meal delivery, but that was probably just a fraction of the meals you ate - you also went to a summer barbeque or local restaurant. That's pretty typical. In fact, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce, over 90% of commerce activities still occur offline.
Yet, until now, we haven't been ability to directly tie physical visits and sales to mobile activity. Location unlocks insights into physical behavior as they occur. By knowing the places people go, marketers gain visibility into who their customers are, what they need, and how to influence their decisions.
In fact, location is becoming one of the fastest growing segments in media, especially in mobile. Researchers at BIA/Kelsey predicted that location-based mobile advertising will grow faster than overall mobile advertising, and will represent 43% of mobile ad budgets by 2019....
Disrupters are no longer chomping away at your market with lower priced alternatives. They are fundamentally changing the rules and dynamics of industries and creating new markets and economies. They attack markets with new business models that are agile and scalable. And they let their customers do their marketing, creating ripples across industries and redefining customer expectations.
Looking at the key characteristics of disrupters and the implications they have on the market, disrupters are fundamentally different to traditional competitors. They develop their products through rapid low-cost experimentation utilising popular platforms. Products are marketed to all customer segments immediately, enabling them to trial and perfect their products as they learn about their users. As a result, the adoption of product and services is significantly accelerated....
Most marketing writing blows.Yeah, I said it. It sucks trying to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to reading marketing content online. It takes forever, everything is optimized clickbait, and let’s face it – most of it is rehashed and lousy. That’s why today we wanted to highlight the top marketing blogs on the web right now to get you the information you need and none of the garbage you don’t....
Not only are you hectically hurrying to close out the year on a good note, you’re also pressured to produce your budgeted marketing plan for the year to come. It can often feel like the month itself is draining your very life force… but maybe it’s not just the month. Maybe, you have something stalking you from the shadows… Maybe something is steering you down dark paths you’d normally avoid… Maybe… you have a vampire in your midst, and nowhere would it be more apparent, than in your content.
Your content, you see, is a reflection of the lifeblood of your organization. It carries all the qualities, characteristics, and attributes that make your organization unique and valuable to your target audience. Certain dark forces, however, can eat away and this energy in your content. These marketing vampires can manifest themselves in multiple forms, so to swiftly slay these evil spirits, here are 5 of the most common vampire varieties along with their most effective weaknesses.
Yes, we do have empirical proof that using promotional products does work. Businesses that properly integrate a promotional product into their marketing repertoire do seem to fetch increases in brand awareness, sales, and customer satisfaction.
Proponents of promotional products (many of them members of that industry) have no shortage of enthusiasm for these items, sometimes nicknamed schwag. I’m talking about little widgets bearing a company’s name: key chains, bath mats, coffee mugs, gloves, hats, flash drives, golf tees: you get the idea.
The draw of these is your brand immersing itself into the lives of potential customers, existing customers, and the families and friends of these folks. Your brand is riding a bullet train into the subconscious minds of thousands. Further, these items make your brand look assertive, hungry, willing to give out free stuff. The impression of brands that dole out schwag have been measured to be high....
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Toronto's Spin Master has done it again. The toy company that brought kids to a fervour over Zoomer robotic pets has created the hottest toy of 2016: Hatchimals. But they're already sold out everywhere, leaving parents in a panic.
WTF is a Hatchimal? Good question.
Imagine a large, speckled egg that hatches as a result of touch and sound. Inside, your child will find a bright, fuzzy robotic creature. It could be a Draggle, Penguala, Owlicorn, Burtle or Bearakeet (don't worry if you can't tell the difference, they look pretty similar.) That's when the fun starts. Kids then teach it to walk, talk and play using specific phrases.
"Hatchimals incorporate the very best elements of nurturing play with the interactivity of robotics in a truly innovative and entertaining way," Ben Varadi, Spin Master's chief creative officer, said in a press release. "This is one of the most unique products Spin Master has ever launched and we're confident that the consumer response will be strong."
Well, that's putting it mildly. The toy retails between $60 and $90 and it has sold out online everywhere. Sears, Toys R Us, Mastermind, Chapters... no one has it....
Princeton psychologists learned that first impressions form in less than a second. Sounds crazy but it’s not. Even though we consider ourselves logical and modern human beings, the majority of our decisions are made by the ancient, instinctive subconscious part of our brains, sometimes referred to as our “reptilian brain.” That doesn’t mean that the quality of our decisions is lowered; some, like Malcolm Gladwell in Blink, argue that quick, gut-level decisions are actually better and save us time and agony. Let’s explore how emotions play into modern-day marketing and why....
How do successful authors engage their fans on social media? And what can authors post on social media besides links to their own books?
Below you’ll find 23 ideas, along with examples from successful authors. Many of these tactics can help promote a book, but in more creative and engaging ways than simply posting a link to a book’s retailer page.
Publishers and agents, this post is written for authors. We encourage you to share it with your authors to help them build more engaging profiles.
Authors, we hope hope you find the list useful — and please share your great ideas in the comments!...
Marketing audits are the dental checkups of the business world. Sure, you dread your regularly scheduled cleaning, but you know it’s good for you and your pearly whites. More importantly, it’s really the only thing standing between your dubious flossing regimen and a traumatizing root canal.
In similar vein, a marketing audit is designed to catch any major flaws in strategy, process and implementation before a costly mistake. If done right, they can save your company thousands of dollars, keep marketing aligned with revenue goals and serve as a safety net for preventing anything that could detrimental to the future of the company.
The best kind of audits usually begin at a holistic level, dive into deeper detail and end with a prioritized list of action steps. While not all marketing strategies are created equal, here are a few ways to go about auditing yours...
Retention marketing, the mysterious form of marketing that seems to be popping into your favorite ecommerce blogs, podcasts, and even into conversations with your other merchant friends. The whisperings have started, but do you really know what retention marketing is?
What is Retention Marketing?
Retention marketing is a new form of marketing that is becoming more and more prevalent in the ecommerce world. The focus of this school of marketing is to create engaged customers that return to your store to shop again. It is a shift in focusing only on the acquisition of countless new customers, to also focusing on the profitability of those you already have!...
There was flash sales, which, with a few exceptions, are dead as a model that can sustain a huge, profitable standalone business. There was the daily-deal phase, which is also essentially dead as a standalone business, outside of Groupon. The rise and fall of LivingSocial is a good cautionary tale.
And then there is subscription commerce: Products delivered in a box to you on a regular basis. This model has experienced a bit of a renaissance in recent years, with companies like Honest Company, JustFab and Blue Apron landing valuations of $1 billion or more. But there have been flameouts, too, and I think there is the potential for many more.
It’s been fun, but the party could be over
Together, these categories have been responsible for a significant portion of breakout commerce companies during this time. The first two categories are built on the back of impulse-driven purchases, with the help of a time-sensitive offer that seems too good to...
If you’re a small- or medium-sized business (SMB), money and time are often rationed like water during a drought. But you still need ways to find and maintain customers.
The good news: some marketing platforms that target this market offer freemium levels without a time limit and/or inexpensive plans. Here is a sampling of ones that have at least three different, integrated marketing or customer relationship management functions for free or under $100/month....
Consumers will only pay attention to you when they’re motivated to do so. Interaction and education along the buyer’s journey is the best way to gain their attention and keep it. Obviously, you need to understand your target consumers before you can offer something valuable or helpful to them, but, once you’ve gained their permission to market to them, you can be strategic about guiding them along the buyer’s journey and positioning offers at just the right moment.
What is the Buyer’s Journey?
The buyer’s journey includes the steps that consumers take in the buying process. After buyers become aware of their needs and begin researching solutions, they generally proceed to three additional stages: Consideration, Recommendation and Purchase. These buyer journey stages map closely to the Lifecycle Marketing stages within the Sell phase: Educate, Offer and Close....
When’s the last time you watched just one episode of House of Cards in a sitting? As marketers, we’ve entered a new era of content engagement—one in which interested buyers consume content much in the same way they “binge-watch” their favorite shows on Netflix.
We’ve put together a new infographic to help you understand, at a glance, what the Netflix era means for marketers and why leading brands are shifting from scheduled to always-on marketing. Here’s a quick summary of the key takeaways....
In an effort to capitlize on the undeniable power of word-of-mouth, many agencies are turning to referral marketing techniques as a means of increasing customer sharing to connect with more qualified prospective clients. If you're looking for some tips on how to break into this space, we've put together a list of highly effective ways to squeeze more business opportunities out of your existing client base....
When we set out to design, build and deliver a great customer experience or anything else for that matter, we can tend to make assumptions about who it is for, what they like, what they prefer and what they enjoy.
However, in the face of ever changing consumer behavior, can we be sure that our assumptions are correct? Here’s a few examples of assumptions that we many of us may make and some new, alternative and conflicting data that might make us pause for thought....
The one critical step you must complete before planning your marketing strategy?
There are 3 phases to the Segmentation step:1 - Market Segmentation Divide the broad target market into subsets of buyers who have common needs and priorities.
The Problem Not all markets are created equal... Determining which customers to serve with which marketing channels can be difficult. Multiply your customers’ diverse needs by the many marketing channels available. Pursuing markets that are too wide often means that you’re aiming off-target. Gain a clear understanding of market segments. This will prevent limited sales and marketing resources from misallocation. Broad markets need to be divided into subsets of buyers who have common needs and priorities.
The Solution To complete the Market Segmentation phase, you need to answer the following questions: - How big is our market? - What is its growth rate? X- What are the needs of the market? How are these changingd?x - What should be our go to market strategy for each product/service/solution? - How do my competitors go to market? - What are the strengths/weaknesses of our marketing team? - What are our opportunities/threats in the market? - For our solution set, what is lifecycle stage of adoption are our buyers?...
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![The Best Time to Call Prospects, Based on Data From 100,000 Calls [Data] | Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/yhuIPF32t5WqfnU8bJrF1jl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVvK0kTmF0xjctABnaLJIm9)
Looking for new marketing tools to make your job easier and your marketing better? HubSpot has a roundup list and tool for every function.