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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....
I’ve put together a list of the eight best tools for getting inside your readers’ heads.
They will give you tangible data you can use to produce content that resonates with your readers.
Finally, I’ll show you how to use the key features of these tools. I promise that none of them are difficult to use and that they are worth your time....
Are you looking for more business?
Wondering how social media can shorten the sales process?
Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook make it easy to develop relationships with potential customers before you ask for a meeting.
In this article you’ll discover how to connect with prospects on social media....
Tech giants like Oracle, Adobe, and Salesforce are battling it out to create THE premiere marketing cloud that provides complete measurement, attribution, and automation. Essentially, one marketing cloud to do it all in an omnichannel world.
Marketers are investing billions in technology in the pursuit of true omnichannel marketing, which we all know is important — I’m just not sure we all know what omnichannel means or what it looks like in practice. Let’s take a step back and explore the real definition of omnichannel marketing, and how you can take advantage of it in 2016....
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...
While many people agonize over their email copy and then slap a hastily written subject line on two seconds before hitting "send," sales reps know that the situation should actually be reversed.
After all, there's no point in crafting a beautiful message if buyers don't even open it. And what prompts the all-important open? The subject line.
But with only a tiny bit of real estate to work with, there's no room for mistakes. With this in mind, we took to Reddit's Sales channel to round up subject lines vouched for by real sales reps. Instead of reinventing the wheel with your messages, use these subject lines knowing that they've been tried, tested, and verified to work by reps around the world.
Interested to learn why these subject lines do the trick? We've also included the logic behind each for your knowledge....
Why does certain content get shared so much and go viral? Last year we looked at 100m posts and highlighted the common characteristics of viral content. This year we added over 1 billion articles to our content database and looked again at the most shared posts. Our analysis shows that viral posts remain outliers, and unfortunately there is no magic formula to go viral.
However, there are insights from viral content that we can use to improve the shareability and engagement of our own content. Below we have provided examples of the most shared posts of 2015 and tried to break down why they went viral. If you haven’t got time to review them individually, you can jump straight to our conclusions.
Our review has identified four different elements which occur frequently with viral content. A combination of these elements may not guarantee viral success but they can improve shareability. Look out for these elements in each of the viral posts below....
There are a boat-load of marketing blogs out there today and filtering through the garbage to find worthy information can be a daunting task. Marketing blogs can provide tons of useful information to help with all aspects of your marketing: content, social media, SEO, email, and on and on and on.
There’s no doubt that all of these things are important marketing hot points, but how do you know when you’re reading tips and strategies that are actually beneficial? The answer is easy, you follow the blogs on this list! So, take a few minutes to read through the list, follow the links, and get yourself on the path to marketing domination!
This list is no specific ranking or order. These blogs have multiple aspects proving their validity: number of readers, author qualifications, content relativity, and some of them I just really like! Enjoy!...
Understanding the psychology of consumers at different moments is more effective than just knowing their demographics or interests. Timing is everything in advertising, and mobile can wait for just the right moment to reach consumers.
Here are examples of brands that have successfully used a moments-based approach to mobile advertising....
This free tool will analyze your headline to determine the Emotional Marketing Value (EMV) score. As you know, reaching your customers in an deep and emotional way is a key to successful copywriting, and your headline is unquestionably the most important piece of copy you use to reach prospects.
Your headline will be analyzed and scored based on the total number of EMV words it has in relation to the total number of words it contains. This will determine the EMV score of your headline.
In addition to the EMV score, You will find out which emotion inside your customer's your headline most impacts...
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....
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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...
From a small business perspective, case study #2 is not feasible. Overall, though, this post features some very good examples of what you can achieve if you take the time to study the Reddit user base.
The social media platform is notorioous for being anti-self-promotion. So anyone who is able to get traction as an entrepreneur deserves some kudos.
Via Os Ishmael
Online, everything is a competition. If your website isn’t healthy enough to compete, you lose, which in many cases affects the profitability and viability of your business.
If you want your business to win the online marketing race — or at least place in the top 10 — you have to train for it.
Here is a five-point training regimen that will help you whip your website into shape and be a true contender in online marketing...
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!...
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....
The research found that retail therapy is an emotional rollercoaster for consumers, with a high proportion of shoppers worrying about making a mistake when buying a product, despite the endless opportunities to compare and contrast online.
When it comes to bigger purchases, two-thirds of shoppers often choose between just two brands from the outset. For consumers who have only one brand in mind before shopping, seven in 10 do not even try another brand.
The research shows that shoppers with brands in mind before they start looking to buy are less likely to worry about the choice they’ve made after buying (27%)....
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....
How best to get more visitors to your site? It’s a problem that never quite goes away.
The internet is riddled with shady communities full of snake-oil salesmen busy peddling techniques “guaranteed” to make your website go viral with little to no effort. The real “secret technique” is simple – consistently deliver high-quality service and killer content that engages your audience.
There are however some genuinely useful tactics you can use to turbo-charge your traffic, and running tightly organized contests is at the top of that list.
In this article, we’ll walk you through seven of the best contest plugins for WordPress. Let’s kick things off with a look at just why this is such a powerful traffic-building tactic....
I recently attended a workshop in which we created a customer-journey map for content planning. Before doing this exercise, I had only a fuzzy notion of what a customer-journey content map might look like, how to make one, and why anyone would bother.
It turns out, this map looks like a spreadsheet. You make one by filling the cells. You bother because doing so helps you answer the perennial question, What content shall we create?...
The brainiacs at Harvard and Stanford are at it again. Just this past month in the Journal of Marketing Research, several Ivy School consumer neuroscience researchers led by Dr. Uma Karmarkar, whom I had the opportunity to interview for this piece, explained to me how putting the price first (called price primacy)—before a user sees the actual product—affects buying behaviors.
Specifically, according to the researcher’s comments in a Working Knowledge magazine exposé, “that price primacy (viewing the price first) makes consumers more likely to focus on whether a product is worth its price, and consequently can help induce the purchase of specific kinds of bargain-priced items.”
Mind. Blown. Let’s look at three pricing strategy examples and some specific takeaways from Karmarkar’s findings to see how we can repurpose her research and turn it into actionable solutions....
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....
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![Wonder What Content to Create? Try a Customer-Journey Map [Template] | Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/PrvWQ3EiXv1Xn1MMMUbw5zl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVvK0kTmF0xjctABnaLJIm9)
Useful tools for a Content Marketing toolkit.