Every other week, we search the web for the best pieces of must read marketing articles with informative, cutting-edge marketing content, wrap them up nicely and bring them directly to you, come rain, shine or sick time. Arm yourself with this week’s most innovative tips, tricks and tools to step up your marketing game.
Media Mix Marketing Strategy for the 21st Century
Adobe
“Marketing has undergone many changes over the past few decades. As the Internet has grown, the ability for marketers to increasingly capture and analyze patterns of customer behavior has brought new insights to the way people consume products and services both in-store and online. The availability of these new data points has changed the way businesses must both plan and execute their marketing strategies.”
What Can Marketers Learn from the Presidential Race?
Social Media Today
“Modern politicians have more in common with marketers than you might think. To survive in the cutthroat world of politics, they have to pay close attention to their personal brand and storytAelling. Nowhere is this more important than in the battle for the highest office in all of the land – the Presidential race.”
Social Selling – Fish Where The Fish Are
Business 2 Community
“With a rise in online influencers, and 67% of the buying cycle occurring online even before a sales rep is contacted, it’s more important than ever that you influence buyers at an earlier stage. If you interject earlier then you’re ahead of many of your competitors.”
How The North Face Uses Hardcore Exploration to Inspire Everybody Else
Fast Company
“[The North Face] is a $2 billion brand that dominates the outdoor market, and is just as popular among people who never set foot on a mountain. President Todd Spaletto says its popularity comes not from pandering to a broad consumer base, but instead doubling down on its ties to the hardcore.”
Market to Millennials by Getting Out of the Way
Harvard Business Review
“For brands to seduce the Millennial consumer, they’ll need to differentiate themselves from the traditional advertising methods around banner ads and pre-rolls that I’ve found Millennials typically ignore.”
Proof That Visual Social Media and Marketing-Sales Collaboration Drive Results
Forbes
“Taking a more modern approach, the company’s sales and marketing leaders saw an opportunity to use the company’s existing social presence—more than 600,000 fans across multiple social channels—to share its Baltic Sea success story. The field marketing team assembled a set of beautiful photographs of the harsh conditions at sea, and then promoted them across social media. Each image linked to an article on the company blog, which in turn promoted a link at the end of the blog to download — wait for it — the white paper!”
4 Ways to Tailor Your Marketing to Each Customer
Entrepreneur
“From pre-identifying customers when they call into your customer care numbers to sending out e-commerce shipments with little personalized notes inside, you have the option of going as high or low tech as your budgets permit.”
15 Ways to Boost Your Brand’s Social Media ROI
Entrepreneur
“Social media marketing is both a bane and a boon to business owners. If it’s working for your business and driving traffic, you love it. If it’s not bringing in results, you hate it—and feel that you’re wasting your time. So, stop wasting your time. Drive results, with the right tactics and appropriate planning. Here are 15 strategies to improve your social ROI that every business owner should practice.”
How to Advertise on Instagram for Business
Hootsuite
“Since Instagram altered its API this past August to allow for companies to schedule ad campaigns more easily and reach the over 400 million members of the Instagram community, advertising on the image-sharing platform is a no-brainer for many organizations. If you feel that your business could benefit from promoting on the platform but you don’t know where to start, we’ve put together the following guide showing you how to advertise on Instagram.”
When Landing Pages Go Wrong: 7 Mistakes That Hurt Conversions (And How to Fix Them)
SEMrush
“We’ve all been there. You’re gearing up to launch your next campaign. You spend weeks (or perhaps months) making sure your product or service is ready to sell. You’re ready to take payments. You have traffic sources lined up, to drive potential customers to your site. Your sales team is ready for calls. Your support staff is standing by for questions. Now, your final step: You create a new landing page – a sales page that will generate interest in your product and drive your first sales. You go to publish your new sales page, you start driving traffic to it, and . . . Nothing.”
3 wise Lessons Taylor Swift Taught us about personal branding (Infographic)
Viralify
“Taylor Swift is one of the best-selling digital music artists of all time and the only female artist in music history to twice have an album hit one million sales in its first week. She is a household name whose insanely catchy yet deeply personal songs transcend music genres . Taylor Swift is the “Princess of Pop.” How did she get to be the megastar that she is today? “
3 Steps to Effective Brand Storytelling Using Emotion
Social Media Today
“Every year, we spend millions upon millions of dollars to go see films that tell us good stories. We crave the emotional experience of being told a story, and brands are wise to take a cue. In an age where the market is inundated with brands clamoring for customer attention, the only tactic that consistently cuts through is telling resonant stories.”
7 Billion People, One Story: The Power of Content Curation
Marketing Land
“In a real-time world where marketers don’t have a minute to spare, creating fresh content is a headache, and creating a lot of it is a pipe dream. So I’m going to let you in on a little secret: sometimes the best content isn’t original. While DJs pull creativity from other artists’ music, marketers have more than seven billion people in the world to draw inspiration from. The solution is the same. In the marketing world, the tactic is known as content curation.”
How Do I Choose the Right Content for Content Amplification?
Adobe
“With today’s focus on customer experience, smart brands are looking for ways to boost content marketing strategies for stronger relationships with potential customers. Yet time and money spent creating in-depth, well-articulated content is just the beginning. The best content in the world is meaningless if no one is paying attention to it. The days of using ad-hoc tactics to promote content are over, and savvy brands are employing content amplification strategies to place valuable information in front of the right people at the right time. Moving your content from publication to distribution seamlessly requires a plan. What does it look like, and how do you choose the right content for amplification?”
Thirteen Instagram Strategies to Turbocharge your small business
Viralify
“If you have multiple Instagram accounts, you probably dread the process of constantly having to login and logout. Don’t you wish there was a way to simply switch between and manage your content without that inconvenience? Yeah, us too. Good news: there is.”2.
3 Brands That Dominated Cyber Monday and What They Can Teach Us About Consumer Engagement
MarketingLand
“Each holiday season, brands bombard consumers with advertisements — billboards, TV spots, radio ads and promoted social posts. Yet younger consumers don’t feel connected to traditional advertisements the way older generations do; they feel the old car-with-a-bow-in-the-driveway antics are superficial, staged and hard to relate to.”
How to Curate Content for Your Social Media Pages to Boost Engagement and Save Time
Business 2 Community
“Social media marketers today almost unanimously agree on the significance of content curation. Brands and businesses have realized that continuously creating original content is challenging, in terms of both, the creative capacity it demands and the time it requires. Content curation, on the other hand, comes with several advantages, including its ability to help you establish thought leadership within a niche.”
5 Social Trends Marketers Won’t Be Able to Ignore in 2016
Ad Age
“When it comes to social and digital marketing, 2016 is going to be an adapt-or-die year, one in which marketers will need to evolve as tectonic shifts in the way people use social networks and consume media on them will force massive change.”
How to Convince Customers to Buy From You and Not the Competition
Entrepreneur
“Do you know what the most common [unique selling proposition] is? The one business owners give most frequently when customers ask why they should buy your product instead of the competition’s? Strangely enough, it’s also the weakest USP. It’s ‘We’re better.’”
4 Ways to Use Marketing Automation to Boost Leads and Conversions
Business.com
“Automation is often seen as a dirty word, but it can actually be the one saving grace for companies seeking to provide an image of an agile social butterfly. However, using automation doesn’t have to be synonymous to having cold and impersonal conversations with your prospects. There are platforms aimed at personalizing the engagement process, even if it is automated. The trick is in custom-tailoring messages in such a way that prospects will feel that these interactions were built for them specifically.”
Governing Brand Identity in the Age of Social Media
Content Marketing Institute
“With each new wave of social software and tools, marketers have more prominent and sophisticated ways to adopt an online identity and interact with audiences – for better and for worse. The good thing is that organizations now engage with prospects, customers, and the world at large in ways inconceivable a decade ago. The not-so-good is that organizations no longer control their brand identity as they once did.”
How to get and leverage user-generated content
CIO.com
“Adding user-generated content (UGC), such as ratings and reviews, to your website can enhance not only your search engine ranking, it can build trust between you and prospective customers – and mean the difference between you getting the sale or a competitor getting it. But how do you get customers to give you their honest feedback and how (and where) should you feature that content?”
5 Ways to Improve Your Inbound Marketing Strategy
Adobe
“Embedding mobile messaging as part of an inbound marketing strategy is still in its nascent stage. Many marketers are confused about what messaging actually is in mobile today and how they can deploy messages effectively. Part of the confusion is that there aren’t enough real-world, tactics-related studies to follow. The other part is that there isn’t enough guidance around the strategic requirements for deploying a winning campaign. Here are a few thoughts on how to add mobile messaging with a good degree of success.”
Why User Generated Content is the Key to Brand Relevance [Infographic]
Business 2 Community
“Do you hear that sound? It’s your users talking to you. Are you listening to them? User generated content positions your product or service in the day to day lives of your users. What’s more, it doesn’t carry the same strong implication of brand bias as other marketing content because it’s candid and authentic. Research has shown that millennials trust user generated content 50% more than other forms of content.”
The Five Dominant Models of Branding
Viralify
“How do you keep the holiday success going after the world moves on to 2016? The brands that stood out this past year didn’t just ask users to post on social media; they took it a step further and made users instrumental parts of their campaigns.”
Content Marketing for People Who Hate Writing
Contently
“Instead of thinking of content marketing as the mother of all term papers, companies should look at it as a byproduct of their business model. Here are some stories of how successful content marketers have gone beyond words to strengthen their bottom line using toys, puppets, and even cereal boxes.”
Marketing in the Moments, to Reach Customers Online
New York Times
“Companies that buy and sell online advertising are increasingly taking aim at these fleeting instances. They are hoping that targeting people based on what they are doing on their mobile devices at a particular time might make them more receptive to the message.”
What’s Getting In The Way of More Effective Content Marketing?
Associations Now
“As the amount of content marketing continues to rise, a new survey of B2B and B2C marketers looks into some of the factors that may be cutting into the effectiveness of this type of marketing. Is your content marketing effective?”
How a Business Can Rely on User Generated Content
Forbes
“How long could a job board survive if there were no jobs uploaded? Not very long. Would Craigslist be a household name if there weren’t millions of ads to browse through? Absolutely not. And herein lies something unique about websites that rely on user-generated or user-uploaded content: The users themselves must be really engaged. They have to like your business, trust your business, and not mind being associated with your business.”
Fifteen Ingenious ways to build Online Sales
Viralify
“The dimension of online sales is often confused with e-commerce. E-commerce is the ability to sell from your website. But you do not necessarily need to have e-commerce enabled site In order to generate sales online.”
