How To Spice Up Your Content Marketing With Animated GIFs [And Other Animated Visuals]
Images are powerful tools. They can attract and hold attention, or capture and convey an emotion in a way words cannot. Add some movement to your images and they become downright irresistible. Video is still a powerhouse, but the humble animated gif is enjoying a rise in popularity, too. It’s always been a fun way […]
How to Fail at Content Marketing? Make it Advertising
I’m a lucky guy. In my career I’ve held a variety of positions: operations manager, marketing director, director of business development, customer success manager, regional sales manager. Each of these has given me a slightly different angle on how to approach a business problem, and I’ve come to see how to synthesize a solution that […]
10 Ways to Use Images for Memorable Marketing Results
There’s no shortage of content on the Internet. Every day, more than 2 million blog posts are published. If you’re a content publisher or a company that does content marketing, all that content creates a challenge. How can you stand out? Is there any hope of getting your audience’s attention? Being memorable? Some content publishers […]
Let Content Strategy Define What You Won’t Do (As Well As What You Will)
Content Marketing World, probably the world’s premier event for content marketers, was held September 8–11 in Cleveland. Did you miss it? Me too. But Carmen Hill was there, and she wrote about what she heard and saw in a LinkedIn post. We really liked what we read (it resonates with one of our recent posts, […]
5 Power Players You Need On Your Lead Management Team
If you could diagram the complexity of modern marketing and sales operations the intersecting lines of software, social, content, design, email and data would turn into a morass of cross hatching. The org chart of today’s sales and marketing departments includes people in overlapping roles in left- and right-brained tasks: creatives, web developers, data analysts, […]
How to Use Survey Questions to Create Better Content
Marketers can use questions from simple, straightforward surveys to build more effective content marketing assets and strategies.
4 Steps to Creating Content That Converts
As any seasoned content marketer should know, there’s a lot more to content marketing than simply creating a flashy infographic or writing a blog post, publishing it, crossing your fingers and hoping for the best. In order to generate leads from your content strategy, you need to consider both the content and the content experience. […]
A/B Testing: Optimize Your Emails and Landing Pages and Improve Conversions
One of the tough things about being a marketer these days is the fact that what worked in the past doesn’t always work anymore. Our B2B customers and prospects are changing the way they search, consider, and buy. They’re also spending much more time doing their own research. According to Forrester, B2B buyers may be […]
The Role of Emotions in B2B Marketing: Telling a Story, Making a Sale
It seems dead-simple common sense that B2C buyers are emotionally driven to purchase the products they do (does this Apple Watch make me look cool? Rich? Fat?); after all, it’s all very personal. And B2B buyers are more cold-bloodedly concerned about product details, payment schedules, and competitive differentiators. It’s not as personal … right? If you think that’s […]
The Power of the Quiz in Marketing: 6 Lessons from The New York Times, BuzzFeed, and B2B Marketers
In 2014, digital marketers started hearing a lot about quizzes. Did you take BuzzFeed’s “What City Should You Actually Live In?” quiz when it was hot? As of March 3, 2015, it had racked up 20,738,516 views, and is generally credited with launching the BuzzFeed quiz empire. Or remember this one from the New York Times: […]
Why Blogging Is More Important Than Ever
“Content marketing” (which is really just distributing marketing content) is the hot buzzword for modern marketers. But there’s already a lot of content out there, and content marketing isn’t nearly as good as “interesting marketing.” Without interesting content, all these media channels are toothless. And (you know this already) interesting content is one of the top […]
17 Smart Ways B2B Marketers Can Use Pinterest
Here’s a list of 17 ways B2B marketers can use Pinterest, with examples to inspire you to get pinning.
How to Create an Editorial Calendar
Last week we talked about why you might want to use an editorial calendar. Now that you know how editorial calendars can help you and you’ve got a few ideas for how to use them, the problem becomes finding (or creating) one that’s right for you. For most people, that means an editorial calendar which […]
15 Ways to Repurpose Your Content and Find Eternal Happiness
Think of evergreen trees or that soaring last note held by Barbra Streisand in the song “Evergreen” – she held that for 20 seconds.
Content Marketing Insourcing: Turning Internal Resources into Content Creation Machines
The argument has long been settled, supported by volumes of data points, papers, posts, and countless real-world experiences by marketers of all stripes, types, and industries: Content marketing works. Especially for businesses that have the luxury of sizable marketing teams. Nothing says content-marketing success like an army of cross-specialty writers marching in lockstep to […]
Write a Standout Case Study: Turn Your Customer’s Success into Your Best Marketing Asset
Recently, as I was writing a case study about the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce (GPCC), I started to wonder just how many case studies I’ve written over the years. (Too many to count, it turns out.) I’ve written them about everything from large software companies to small scuba diving schools, global snowmobile manufacturers to […]
Getting Started with Video Marketing: Q & A
This post is a continuation of last week’s “Is 2014 the Year of Video Marketing?” This week, I’ll be recapping Richard Boehmcke of Vibrant Motion, Kristen Craft of Wistia, and Zach Cole of Lyft as they A your Qs. Q: Which companies are doing video “right”? A: I think the question should actually be “Which […]
Customer Lifecycle Marketing: Reporting, Part 2
This series looks at the five sequential stages in the B2B marketing lifecycle, and discusses the key metrics for each that can be used to gain key insights. In Part 1, we covered the first two stages: Attract and Capture. These are typically the stages that garner the most attention, as lead generation remains the […]
Customer Lifecycle Marketing: Reporting, Part 1
In regards to analytics and reporting, B2B marketers tend to focus on early-funnel leads and their conversion. That’s practical; generating enough qualified leads remains the #1 concern for many marketers and their organizations. However, there is much more useful information to be gained through careful reporting and analysis of key metrics at all stages of […]