B2B Marketing, Digital Media and Marketing Strategy
Marketers, encouraged by self-proclaimed gurus, experts and thought leaders, are increasingly misusing and abusing research and statistics when developing their marketing approach.
Yes, market and audience research can be incredibly valuable. But when it is misused, even the best information can lead you in the wrong direction.
Here are four mistakes marketers make when using market research data. [Read more…]
Marketing budgets are often one of the first budgets cut, time and time again, yet marketers continue to claim companies are making unwise decisions. To support the case, you point to research and cases showing companies who invest in marketing during a downturn come out stronger.
Is the answer turning marketing into a profit center, as some have claimed? For a few companies, particularly those with a direct response marketing model, this might work. But it isn’t the solution in most cases. [Read more…]
We have all seen the lackluster corporate blog. Some days, I wonder what went wrong. Others, I wonder why they thought they could get it right.
Corporate blogs are increasingly standard in B2B organizations. Some companies even have an entire suite of blogs.
However, for every great corporate blog, there are a dozen corporate blogs that just shouldn’t be. Too often, it is clear they made one (or more) of these mistakes. [Read more…]
Data is reinventing the online advertising market. Today, algorithmic media buying is one of the fastest growing areas in online advertising and without data, it wouldn’t even exist.
This isn’t just a consumer advertising trend, increasingly B2B advertising is being driven by data as well.
However, the problem with online data is it is inherently dirty. Collected from registration forms, browsing behavior or appended offline data sources, collecting online data is an imperfect process at best.
So what is the smart way to use dirty data to improve your advertising? Glad you asked.
Here are three steps that will guide both media and creative. [Read more…]
We see the predictions every year: This will be the year of mobile!
Every year, the prediction falls short and every year the pundits dust it off and bring it back out.
It isn’t because mobile adoption is slower than expected, or even because marketers aren’t paying attention to mobile. [Read more…]
B2B marketing organizations in particular seem to be drawn to the newest shiny marketing object.
Pinterest? Native Advertising? The World Wide Web? Responsive Design? Inbound Marketing?
Before diving headfirst into an empty pool, yes, you need to take the time to determine if you should be diving in the first place. (No duh, you already knew that).
But the real million dollar question is this one:
Why is everyone throwing themselves at that shiny object in the center of the bandwagon like a bunch of teenage girls at a Justin Bieber contest in the first place? [Read more…]
Last week WSJ ran an article entitled “There’s No Avoiding Google+” on the front page. In short, it highlighted the drive by Google to make Google+ pervasive across other Google services.
In one of the most telling quotes in the story, Bradley Horowitz, a VP at Google, says “The entry points to Google+ are many, and the integrations are more every day.”
However, despite reaching 105.1 million global unique visits in October (via Comscore), Google+ is struggling to drive real usage, with users only spending 12 minutes a month on the site (via Google in June). (Stats from this Mashable article) [Read more…]
You strive to improve the performance of your email marketing. You test exhaustively. You pore over every benchmark and research study.
Subject lines, call to action, offer, design, images. You examine everything in your bid for more opens, more clicks, more leads and more sales.
These recent statistics and anecdotes point to a clear way to increase email open and click rates, but read on before you decide to test these approaches. [Read more…]
I’m sure it has happened to you too. You look someone up on LinkedIn only to find they are a third degree connection (or not even!) and you get a profile page with basically no information.
LinkedIn profile access is even more restricted, today you now need a premium account to view third degree connections.
Of course, you can solve this with a premium membership, but here is how to view the full public profile without a premium account.
Here is an example using Eric Cantor, a Congressman from Virginia that I don’t share any groups with and isn’t a connection. Searching in LinkedIn, this is all I was able to see of his profile: [Read more…]
As a marketer it may be difficult to believe, but marketing is not a business objective.
Marketing must maintain or advance the business in order to be valuable and there is no single right way to do this.
Unfortunately, when ideas need to be encapsulated in 140 characters or forced into a list post template, marketers end up talking about a path instead of how to select the right path or uncover new innovative solutions. [Read more…]