Marketers Will Define Company Strategy.

We’re living in a Marketing First world. If you haven’t yet experienced this shift for yourself—bear with me; it’s coming.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve dug deeply into the results of “The Rise of the Marketer,” a survey from the Economist Intelligence Unit on behalf of Marketo, to highlight some of the study’s key insights. Last week, we explored the changing attitudes towards customer engagement. This week, I’d like to explore another finding from the survey—how marketers will play a larger role in company strategy. This is a huge development, and a dramatic shift in many organizations from how marketing was asked to contribute in the past.

Marketers Will Earn a Position on the Starting Line

In our survey, when asked if marketing would shape company strategies over the next three to five years, roughly 80% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that it would.
As we heard in our previous conversation with visionary Seth Godin, marketers have historically been like runners in the final leg of the relay race. We take a product or service and determine how to help it reach the intended audience. But this approach is going to change. In fact, the race will be redesigned entirely, and it will no longer be a relay. Instead of being handed the baton, marketers will be in the race from the beginning, playing a greater role, and having more influence in setting strategy to determine which product, service, or market a company should even pursue.
Why is this happening? Because, the shopping and buying process has changed forever. Buyers have more information at their fingertips than ever before and they are using it to self-educate. They’re reaching out to companies later and later in their decision-making cycles. As a result, if a company hopes to engage and influence that shopper, they have to do it earlier. This new digital, social, mobile world, is the domain of the marketer. That means that marketing is the only function that has a chance to influence buyers before they have all but made their decisions—putting the marketer in the driver’s seat, or at the starting line—either way, it’s Marketing First.
Marketers everywhere should be excited about this. Across the board, marketing has the chance to play a bigger role in company strategy than ever before. Validating this fact, in our survey, “Strategy and Planning” was nearly tied for the top spot in terms of skills that marketers felt like they needed to develop in their organizations .
When you look more closely at the data, you can see this change emerging even further; marketing teams are doing far more, and they expect to expand their reach in the future. Here’s more from our survey:

• 75% of marketers believe they will be responsible for the end-to-end engagement and ownership over the customer’s lifetime—not just marketing, but support and continued engagement as well.
• More than 80% of marketers agree with the statement, “We need to change the structure and design of our marketing organization to meet the needs of our business over the next three to five years.”

When asked which areas of business areas marketing teams will drive in the next three to five years, the answers were also intriguing: The focus on advertising and branding will decrease compared to today. More than 70% of respondents indicated that marketers are currently focused in these areas. When asked if their focus would remain the same in the future, only about 40% believed they would even have a person focused there. Instead, marketers will put more energy, time, and effort into areas such as strategy, digital, and customer lifecycle engagement..

From Participating to Leading

In many ways, this is already happening. Marketers have been leading strategy for years in many organizations. And, it has been accelerating in recent years as marketers have become increasingly responsible for customer relationships, and, perhaps even more importantly, increasingly responsible for being the source of customer engagement data. The marketer knows the customer better than anyone else in this digital world. They are the keepers of customer data, which means they can spot trends before anyone else can—trends in customer behavior, needs, and interests. These are core components of a successful business strategy.

• Marketers Know Their Customers: Marketers share a deep intimacy with their customers that is simply unmatched by any other business function in a company. We understand what channels customers’ use, where they come from, and how their unique backgrounds contribute to their unique behaviors. This ability to resonate with customers is absolutely critical to business growth.
• Marketers Know How to Leverage Technology: It’s a digital-first world, and marketers have a stronger command of the most forward-thinking technology. We know and use the tools needed to better understand our audiences and reach them more effectively.
• Marketers Drive Revenue: With better technology and tools, marketers can effectively demonstrate our ability to drive revenue for our companies. With the data to prove our initiatives are driving revenue, we’ve earned a seat in the boardroom.

If you are the steward of the customer and you are driving revenue, you probably should have a strong hand in leading company strategy—don’t you think?
I, for one, am excited to see how this Marketing First world develops. How is this movement toward the next generation of marketing happening in your organizations? Do you have any insight or personal experiences to add? If so, please share in the comments. I’d love to hear what you think.

Content Curation: Pruning Old “Fresh” Content To Reveal The Evergreen.

Most sites deliver regularly-produced content as part of their architecture. At its simplest, it might just be a blog section through which company news, updates and outreach are posted. At its best, however, it’s a carefully pruned source of evergreen SEO traffic and a lean component of your site indexing strategy.

The General SEO Theory

Most SEOs that have been in the industry for a while would largely agree that overall domain SEO performance can be generalised to be a balance between the total backlink profile of the site (its “Authority”) and the total number of pages indexed on the domain (the total “Domain Sprawl”).
Obviously, this is a massive generalisation. But, in my experience, it is a fundamental axiom for SEO that’s stood the test of time and is a component of SEO that still moves the needle when SEO strategies built around it are executed.
With that in mind, it’s apparent that any content which is indexed (and therefore contributing to domain sprawl) has to pull its own weight or it will drag down the overall performance of the site.
This requirement is the basis of site architecture optimisation but is often ignored in the day-to-day management of a site’s SEO campaign. Why? Freshly generated content will always be a crucial part of a good domain architecture, but without a regular review of effectiveness, it can simply drift into long-term domain sprawl with little traffic return to show for it.
There are a couple of neat, quick search tricks we can use to find older content that’s failing to deliver return for its indexed SEO value. Let’s walk through them.

Finding The Old “Fresh”

Given that we’re in the business of reducing our indexed pages, the first tool you should turn to is Google. Using a combination of site index operators and indexed date range tools provided by Google, we can get a list of indexed URLs within any range of dates we’d like.
Let’s take a look at the BBC to see how this might throw up some opportunities to prune.
Chaining our operators and setting an earliest first index date of two years ago, we can dig out some cruft pretty easily:

I think we can agree that content like this and this are not necessarily of the highest value in the index (though they do now have extra backlink value, of course!). Though not necessarily “out of date” — their contained data is dynamically updated by the BBC — their indexing makes them landing pages without the surrounding BBC website. This makes for a very poor searcher experience; thus, this content is best cleaned away from the index.
On a side note, we can then quite easily find the BBC’s xml sitemap listing these pages. This strategy isn’t ideal, as it would override any canonicals and is just promoting the indexing of effectively frame pages.
We can take a more extreme view of the indexing date range to dig out some better examples of old content that could well be retired to benefit the domain as a whole. Tweaking the search to set the latest first index date to 2001 hits a goldmine.
By further refining our operators, we can dig out all examples of particular types of content that would do well to be removed from Google’s index. In this example, chaining an intitle operator of “VOTE2001″ with the site operator and setting a comprehensive date range will allow you to hoover up all example URLs that should be canonicalised into more useful content in the same section.

Additionally, if your underlying CMS system is flexible enough, you may be able to use the URL/Content patterns identified using this process to export and redirect all relevant content instead. Just beware that if you use a hard 301 redirect, and you leave link references to the content elsewhere on the site that are likely to be visited by real people, then you would be creating a poor user experience by forcing a redirect on them.
This is why I favour a canonical solution, as only the search engines are “redirected” — this means that for the edge cases where the old content is still relevant to users arriving from elsewhere on the site (like your own internal search function), the content is still accessible. Crucially, your old content is no longer pulling SEO value away from the rest of the domain.
With a site as large, and a history as long, as the BBC, this technique can be dramatically influential in improving overall rankings across the board for more relevant terms with tomorrow’s fresh content.

3 Things You Can Do To Push Through Your PPC Plateau.

It can be hard to keep the magic alive when you're in a long-term relationship with a PPC account, but columnist Pauline Jakober has some tips to reignite your creative spark.

Online advertisers are in it for the long haul, and like any long-term relationship, it takes work to succeed.
If you’ve been working on a PPC account for a long time, you’ve been through the ups and downs together. You know what works and what doesn’t. You “get” the business, and you know just how PPC can support it.
But sometimes, you reach a plateau. It’s not necessarily a bad one – in fact, everything can be going great. ROI is up, things are running smoothly, and everyone is happy. No one may even be questioning your work.
Still, it can be tough when you feel you’ve reached that point where you’ve run out of creative ways to advertise the business.
Luckily, there is hope. In fact, this time of year is a perfect time to start thinking about how you can infuse that smooth-going PPC account with a little more creativity and rouse things up a bit in 2015.
So in this post, we’ll go over three things you can do to push through the PPC plateau (plus a bonus tip at the end).

1. Pretend The Account Is New

Do you remember all those strategic conversations you had in the beginning, when the PPC account was new to you? Have those again. It’s not a bad idea to set up an annual or biannual conversation with stakeholders to create that fresh pair of eyes that can be hard to use once you’ve been in it for so long.
Whatever your process is with a new account, go through it again. This can be everything from discussing business goals to auditing the account structure. Even the most efficient accounts are bound to amass some errors over the months – it happens to the best of us.
And if the team or client you’re brainstorming with is fresh out of ideas, prompt them with some. Have conversations around:

• If there will be any new website updates in the next six months.
• If there will be any promotional events to garner leads, like a webinar.
• If there are plans to launch a new product, service or variation of anything being sold.

Basic PPC account auditing activities can include:

• Analyzing the settings to make sure everything is still on the up-and-up.
• Auditing sitelinks to ensure you’re taking full advantage of this AdWords feature.
• Exploring the Google Display Network (GDN), Google Shopping campaigns or retargeting if you’re used to doing text-only search network ads.
• Investigating any geographic hot spots serving the highest ROI that might be worth isolating for a campaign.
• Laying a fresh pair of eyes on the times of day or days of the week you serve your ads.

2. Make Proactive Research A Process

How many times have you accidentally discovered the business has a new product line months after it was launched, yet no one on the paid search team was the wiser?
An annual or biannual “fresh eyes” approach may be a great start, but for the remainder of the year, you’ll want processes in place to ensure you’re plugged in. Whether you’re an in-house PPC manager or an agency, sometimes a lack of communication can be the reason you’re not working on new ways to advertise the business.
Often, something as simple as surveying a business’s teams on a regular basis to see what’s on the horizon can give you plenty of fodder for coming up with more advertising campaigns.
You can also make it a regular habit to check the website to see if anything new has popped up. Larger companies may not even think to alert their PPC manager when new sections of the site have been added, and paid search managers are often too involved in their AdWords account to notice.

3. Discover Trending Keywords Monthly

Managing negative keywords is something that every aged PPC account should have built in on a monthly basis. And when performing negative keyword research for a PPC account, you have access to query data that could yield some interesting trends.
For example, were people searching more this month for a specific color of a product you sell? Perhaps a change of seasons creates demand for autumn colors. This type of trend could spur a product-by-color campaign. If you dig a little deeper, you might find specifications like size also matter.
These type of opportunities present a profitable, low-cost addition to a PPC program, and they don’t take a lot of time to discover.

Bonus Tip: Explore Bing Ads

Yes, there is life after Google AdWords. No, it won’t yield the same results and you might be targeting a slightly different demographic, but depending on what you’re selling, it might be a prime audience. And if it will increase your bottom line, even just a little, why not?
comScore data for October show Microsoft sites and Yahoo sites (remember, Bing Ads targets both Bing and Yahoo) have a combined search share of roughly 30 percent. Microsoft sites garnered 3.7 billion searches in October, and Yahoo saw 1.8 billion searches – not exactly small potatoes when you put it into perspective.


So, to recap: It’s never easy being creative all the time, especially when you’ve been in a “long-term relationship” with your PPC account. But next year, vow to push through that PPC plateau by doing what you do best: finding creative ways to advertise a business online.

Using Analytics To Measure SEO Success.

I’ve previously discussed why rankings are a poor measure of success, but only touched upon how to instead use web analytics to measure SEO success. My hope is that once you have a good grasp of what to review and how to use that info, you’ll be more inclined to wean yourself (and your clients) off rankings reports once and for all!

For purposes of this article, let’s assume that you’ve already optimized your website for a number of keyword phrases across a variety of pages within your website. Let’s also assume that you’ve kept a list of those phrases handy, as you’ll need to refer back to them. In addition, let’s assume you’re using Google Analytics since more companies appear to be moving in that direction.

While heavy-duty analytics programs can be quite daunting at first because there’s so much data provided, for SEO purposes you can concentrate on just a few key areas when starting out. The place to start is the “traffic sources” section—more specifically, the “search engines” and the “keywords” sub-sections.

Clicking on the search engines sub-section will show you all the search engines that brought visitors to your website. If you’re running AdWords campaigns, be sure to click the “non-paid” link so that you can differentiate your organic traffic from your paid (you will have had to previously linked your Adwords account with your Analytics account in order for this to work). If you’ve done a decent job with your SEO, you’ll likely see most of the search engine traffic comes from Google, then Yahoo, then MSN with a bunch of smaller search engines trailing behind.

You can see how you’re doing with your keywords in all the search engines as a whole by then clicking the “dimension” dropdown box, and setting it for “keywords.”

This will show you all the keyword phrases that drove traffic to your website. As above, if you’re also doing paid search campaigns, be sure to click the tab that says “non-paid” so that you’re only looking at organic traffic.  Depending on how many keywords are showing up, you may want to change your settings to show you 100 rows at a time (or more) so that you can have a good snapshot. By default, you’ll see the keyword phrases that have brought the most traffic at the top.

Are you seeing the keyword phrases (or some variation) for which you originally optimized? If they are not readily apparent, scroll down to the bottom and put an exact phrase or a word from one of your optimized phrases into the “find keyword: containing” box. Searchers use a variety of phrases at the search engines so you’re likely to see numerous related phrases that go beyond the exact ones for which you optimized. This is a good thing, and something that you don’t get from ranking reports.

For example, when reviewing the keyword phrases driving traffic to one of our clients’ websites, I found over 100 variations of one phrase for which we optimized, and they were all highly relevant to what the client offers.

Next, you’ll want to see which pages of your site are bringing keyword traffic and whether they are the specific ones for which you optimized. To view this, click on the “content overview” section and then on the right hand side of the page, under “landing page optimization” click on “entrance keywords.”  This allows you to view specific stats for each page of your site.

The first screen is the entrance keywords for the page that receives the most pageviews (typically your home page), but you can click to other pages via the drop down box that says “content.”

If you don’t immediately see a page for which you are interested in viewing entrance keywords, you can type a word that you know is in the URL of that page in the search box that’s contained in the content dropdown. So if you’re looking for a page that has a file name of /green-widgets.php you can type just “green” or “widgets” into the search box and you’ll see all pages that have that word in the file name.

Now you should be able to see all the entrance keywords for that page. Are they ones (or variations of) those for which you optimized?  If so, then your SEO is taking hold! If not, you’ll want to determine why. Perhaps it’s just too soon after your SEO work was completed. Perhaps they’re highly competitive phrases which will need more anchor text links pointing in.

Rankings don’t always equal traffic, and vice-versa

Something interesting that I’ve noticed a lot lately is that while my optimized pages are getting good search engine traffic for their optimized keywords, they may not show up in Google when I do a spot check of rankings. This is especially true of newly optimized pages. It seems that this could very well be personalized search in action. While I might not see the pages ranking in Google, others obviously are as the web analytics don’t lie. Had I been relying on rankings reports to measure our success, I would be thinking that not much was happening yet.

Of course, the best indicator of SEO success is conversions. Those can be measured via your analytics as well, so you’ll want to be sure to have all your forms’ thank you pages set up as conversion goals. That way, when you’re viewing the “traffic sources -> keyword” data, you can also click the “goal conversion” tab and learn very easily which phrases convert for you.

For those keyword phases that you find convert very well, you can work on additional optimization efforts to gain even more traffic. For phrases that don’t convert well, you may want to think about why they’re not converting. It’s possible that they’re simply too general, and thus you’re pulling in people who are just in the research phase, or it might be that they don’t accurately describe what you offer on your website.

Don’t forget about old-fashioned conversions!

In addition to using your web analytics, don’t forget to take note of any increases in emails and phone calls. That’s the best way to know if your SEO campaign is going as planned. Our clients typically call us up very happy within the first month or two to let us know that their phone has been unusually busy all of a sudden. This usually makes them happier than any ranking reports we used to send!

5 Old (But Still Relevant) Content and Link Building Strategies….And 1 New One.

Infographics still work….sort of

Infographics started to gain traction around 2010 and then saw an explosion across the web for the next 2 years as they grew in popularity. As with all new content and link building strategies SEO and marketing firms were all over them like a bad rash until Google stepped in (as they always do) and reduced the effectiveness of signals from links within infographics. However this doesn’t mean you can’t still use them. The field is pretty crowded these days so you really need to dig deep to come up with an interesting topic and get the data to go with it, after that you really need a killer design with the information displayed correctly to get your message across. This is really the hardest part as if you have an infographic on a unique and interesting topic then people will still accept it to be published on their sites and people are more likely to share it and link back to it. On top of that there are many infographic galleries you can seed your design on and again, the better the design and unique the topic is the more likely gallery sites will accept it. The links from infographics will not carry the same weight as they used to but are still a solid link-building strategy.

Refreshing or updating old content

This is a a great tactic as it gives you a legit reason to push some old content to the front of your website or blog again and share it across Facebook and Twitter. If you have any kind oflist post you wrote in the past or resource post then go over it again, is there any new content or information you can add there? Nothing ever stays the same and there should always be something new you can add., a resource page that is contently evolving is more likely to be linked to.

Guest Blogging (yes this is still an option)

Guest blogging was the new ‘go to’  and popular link building option throughout most of 2012 and 2013. As with all of the latest SEO tactics it was abused and Google once again had to take action. Matt Cutts first made some warnings and noises about the quality of the content and links that people allow from guest bloggers at the end of 2012 and then again several times in 2013 and early 2014. Finally in spring of this year My Blog Guest and many blogs and websites associated with it were heavily penalised. In the days and weeks after the guest blogging ‘scene’ went very quiet as no-one knew what to do next. Slowly it has been coming back though but what we are seeing now is that many sites and publications have taken a much stricter stance on what they accept, this means guest blogging is moving back to what it originally was and reclaiming its position as trusted content and links.

Sponsoring events

‘Sponsored’ is a dirty word in SEO and link building, if you pay for a link then it should not be a normal and followed link. But if you help out at and event or on a podcast then your name is going to be mentioned anyway and this is more than likely to bring links also and links that have been earned naturally.

Interviews

An old strategy and still a good one. Many people make the mistake of trying to interview the biggest names in their niche, if you can get these people then that’s great but chances are they won’t have the time. Look for people who are new to the scene or have just started a new project, they are more likely to be keen to talk or have something to say. A good example of this is over at our new crowd-funding site Stiqblox.com, we often reach out to creators with the offer of an interview when they launch their campaigns on Kickstarter or IndieGoGo as this is when they are hungry to talk to the press, but you need to catch them before they hit the funding target as after that they simply don’t have the time and/or don’t need the coverage anymore!

An ice bucket challenge?

I’m sure you have seen different celebrities across the globe doing this for the past month or so for the ALS charity, it’s guerilla and viral marketing at it’s best and companies should get involved by taking the challenge while it’s still viral, this way you get to help out a good cause while at the same time getting a little exposure and coverage for your brand.

[Infographic] The 3 Rs of Content Marketing.

Every content marketer knows about the investment it takes to create awesome content. We’re not just talking about time and money, but the blood, sweat and tears it takes to create an amazing piece of content — from ideation to completion. So you know that after you’ve traveled that path, and created great content you don’t really want it to fall flat, like a soda left out on the counter.
This is where the 3 R’s of content marketing come in – they put the pop and fizzle back into your content and make sure each piece has a good, long shelf life.  So, in order to get the most out of your content marketing efforts, keep the 3R’s in mind:

Reorganize: Pumping out solo pieces of content can be exhausting. Take a look at the content assets you already have, and those that you plan to create and ask yourself, “How can I reorganize this information?” Reorganization can mean creating an infographic from an ebook, a cheat sheet from a guide, you get the idea. But the essence of reorganize is to give your audience different ways to consume your content and to work smarter, not harder.

Rewrite: Inevitably you will create content that goes a bit stale – it could be the design, or some of the predictions, statistics, or technology moved on. One way to fix this is to rewrite your content. Before you begin, look at a piece of content with a critical eye to make sure it is worth investing more time to rewrite – was it high performing to start with? Once you have decided to rewrite, identify the aspects of the piece that make it stale and fix them; take out language that dates your piece, update old statistics, and get fresh quotes and contributions for Subject Matter Experts. Also, don’t underestimate the power of a simple design refresh.

Retire: Even with an eye towards extending the life of your content, even good content does not last forever. Content that is past its “expiration date” can be brand damaging, and effectively undo the good work your content did in the first place. In order to avoid keeping content around too long, ask yourself these questions: Is the content asset performing well? Does the content cite reports or ideas that are no longer accurate? Was the content created to support a particular moment in time that has now passed? And, most importantly, does my audience still care about this topic?
We created an infographic to help you remember and practice the 3 Rs of content marketing, check it out:

Fury Movie Review

Genre: Drama, Action.

Director: David Ayer.

Cast: Brad Pitt, Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman, Michael Pena, Jim Parrack, Jon Bernthal etc.

Synopsis: April, 1945. As the Allies make their final push in the European Theatre, a battle-hardened army sergeant named Wardaddy commands a Sherman tank and her five-man crew on a deadly mission behind enemy lines. Outnumbered and outgunned, and with a rookie soldier thrust into their platoon, Wardaddy and his men face overwhelming odds in their heroic attempts to strike at the heart of Nazi Germany.

Review: It's been a long time since we've had a good World War II film that's in the middle of combat. It seems to have been topped by the twofer of Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line 15 years ago. The thing with war films is that no matter how intentional or not the approach is, it holds an inherent social commentary on the development of how violence and conflict between two countries is portrayed. It goes for western too, there's politics. If the film is smart, it'll do something with it. Fury doesn't seem to have anything to say. It doesn't have to, but it results in a film that doesn't have anything to take away from it. Perhaps on a deeper level there's something to study regarding it's theme of masculinity, given the all-male cast (save for an appearance from Anamaria Marinca) and the phallus symbolism of guns and tanks, but it's not coherent enough to take anything from it. Instead, it seems it has some small things to say about ends justifying means and religious morality, but it doesn't exactly resonate or feel fully developed. However, Fury is generally inoffensive.

The biggest problem is that it lulls too often. We spend 24 hours with this unit on their journey and it suffers from constantly stopping and starting the story. It inches character development, but not enough to really chew on outside of archetypes. The performances are generally strong, especially from an underused Shia LaBeouf, with the highlight being Logan Lerman. I couldn't really enjoy Perks of a Wallflower but here he showed his chops, even if he isn't quite measured. Brad Pitt is always a good presence to have and he certainly anchors the movie in a comfortable place. Unfortunately it's just quite sloppy. It achieves a gritty and gory atmosphere of war by being utterly drenched in smoke, though evidently they had to borrow the lasers from Star Wars so we could see the bullets. It struggles to hold tension due to the liberties in logic it takes and not being able to invest in and follow the action. Its best chances are nominations are with the sound categories, but they're kind of a given in this genre. It is good to see a film that doesn't rush, which happens far too often these days with hyperactive editing, but Fury drags in places where it doesn't have to go.

6 Ways to Create Rocket-Fuel Content for Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is one of the fastest growing technology segments in business, and analysts predict it will grow to a $4.6 billion industry by 2016. But marketing automation can’t run without content. 
More than three-quarters of those invested in marketing automation say that developing processes and content is instrumental to success with the technology. Without content, there’s nothing to send to potential and current buyers, nothing relevant to plug into specific nurture tracks, and nothing valuable to exchange for their contact information.
So how can marketers create optimal content for marketing automation — the kind of content that spurs action, moves potential buyers toward purchases, and gives your marketing and sales teams insight into your buyers?
Here are six ways to align content marketing and marketing automation:

1. Target Specific Segments and Personas

Personalization is one of the best ways to drive engagement with your brand and interest in your products. It’s even been shown to increase content consumption by 113%. Marketing automation software allows you to collect demographic and firmographic information about who your buyers are as they enter your database. The trick, then, is to use this information to identify people by persona, and create segments and nurture tracks that allow you to deliver highly relevant content to those people based on the information you’ve gathered.
With that in mind, every piece of content you create should target at least one persona or theme. Once you have the relevant content, you can deliver that content to the right people using marketing automation.

2. Align Content to Sales Stages

Using scoring and deep-dive analytics, marketers are able to track and monitor behavior as their customers move down the sales funnel. Similar to aligning content to the interests and needs of your personas, creating content for specific sales stages allows you to automate the delivery of timely information to buyers. And it works. The best content marketing companies are 25% more likely to have a process in place for aligning marketing content with marketing and sales funnel stages.
Combine sales-stage specific content with scoring, and you have a powerful way to move your buyers efficiently toward purchase.

3. Create Different Kinds of Content

Part of personalization is understanding buyer preferences – and understanding how these preferences change based on buying stage.
This means knowing which types of content work best for each buyer, and when they work best. Different types of content have different strengths. For example, webinars are great for explaining new product features or for covering in-depth topics. Infographics capture attention, and can be used to deliver data-heavy information in a compelling way.
And don’t be afraid to take risks when it comes to this stuff — there’s no hard-and-fast rule here. For example, infographics are normally considered great early-stage assets, but KISSmetrics used this format to deliver case study data. Testing different content types allows you to understand your buyers and how they like to consume information—invaluable knowledge for optimizing your marketing efforts.

4. Write Better Emails

On any given day, the average customer will be exposed to 2,904 media messages, will pay attention to 52, and will positively remember only four. If you’re not delivering well-written, compelling messaging to your buyers, they won’t engage with you or remember your product.
High-quality emails that compel buyers to take action are crucial to your success with this platform. Every email, after all, is content, and should be approached with the same standards as your blog posts, ebooks, and other assets. To create better emails, make sure you test subject lines, keep copy concise and punchy, and include focused calls-to-action.

5. Get Teams on the Same Page

If your demand generation team and your content-creation team aren’t on the same page, you’re going to have trouble implementing the tactics mentioned above. Make sure everyone understands exactly how personas and sales stages are defined — otherwise, the content won’t be relevant or useful.
Along these same lines, define your processes for incorporating new content assets into nurture campaigns and outreach efforts. Without them, your marketing team will be missing opportunities to engage users with fresh content.

6. Track What Matters

Analytics are the cornerstone of intelligent modern marketing; they are the quantifiable metrics that CMOs and CEOs want to see. Marketing automation and deep-dive analytics make it possible to understand how exactly your marketing initiatives drive new names and profits for your organization. This is no small thing — in fact, these tracking capabilities are the basis for modern marketing.
Make sure you’re tracking which content assets — emails, whitepapers, blog posts, landing pages, etc. – drive the results that matter to your organization. Unless you’re measuring your major successes and/ or your biggest failures, you won’t be able to optimize marketing automation technology or content strategy.

6 Ways to Make Guerrilla Marketing Work For You.

For marketers with big dreams and small budgets, “guerrilla marketing” has a strong appeal – it’s often seen as a low investment, high impact strategy. But while these campaigns do tend to be inexpensive, they also require a big imagination.

But before we dive in, what exactly is guerrilla marketing? The term was actually coined in 1984 by American advertising executive and writer Jay Conrad Levinson. Its meaning is relatively simple – in essence, the art of getting consumers to pay attention – but its execution is no easy feat.

The effectiveness of guerrilla marketing campaigns can be measured by the amount of attention they attract – in contemporary marketing terms, the amount of engagement they incite. Remember, consumers are inundated with as many as 2,904 media messages on any given day, and will positively recall only four. Guerrilla marketing campaigns, which typically involve some seriousthinking outside of the box, can be a smart way to grab attention.

Interested? Here are six tips (with examples!) for creating low-investment, highly innovative, epic guerrilla marketing campaigns:

1. Make it Clever

The “memory retention” approach relies on displaying your offering from a new, clever point of view. The smarter the campaign, the more memorable it will be.

Here’s a great example from Reynolds Wrap Aluminum Foil. They simply put what looks like their standard packaging on the top of a store-front gate, and presto! The gate now looks like a supersized aluminum foil roll. Clever, no?

2. Make it Dynamic

Another way to do guerrilla marketing is to enlist unknowing participants. Frontline covered a mall’s floor with this advertisement for flea and tick spray. As you can see from the photo, the shoppers walking across it looked like fleas to those up above. Wouldn’t you take an extra moment to stare at this?

3. Make it Endearing

People LOVE all things free, which is why some of the most engaging guerrilla campaigns are tied to free giveaways. Coca-Cola recently turned a standard vending machine into a ‘Happiness Machine.’ Consumers who used the machine were rewarded with free bottles of Coke to share with friends, beautiful flower bouquets, and even entire pizzas!

The results were incredibly positive – one person in the video can even be heard saying, “I love you, Coke.” This might be a more expensive example of guerrilla marketing, but even a small giveaway can go a long way.

4. Make it Memorable

Want to make a busy New Yorker stop and pay attention on their way to work in the morning? You’ve got to get coffee involved. Folger’s Coffee printed stickers which transformed manholes into freshly brewed cups of joe.

The steam coming from these manholes, which is a typical sight in NYC, transformed the eye-sore into a brilliant advertisement. Now every time you see a steaming man-hole, you might think of Folger’s.

5. Make it Interactive

It doesn’t get simpler than this Tyskie Beer ad. By placing decals around door handles, the door opener feels as if they are holding the handle of a beer mug. Each time an individual enters through that door, Tyskie beer is on the top of their mind.

6. Make it Subtle

Not all campaigns have to stock people in their tracks. This Mr. Clean ad uses no words, just their well-known logo. By painting the single cross-walk line with fresh white paint, the message is being unassumingly conveyed to the viewer. Mr. Clean makes surfaces cleaner!

If you’ve got a limited budget, but exponential creativity, take a cue from these six guerrilla examples. Readers, what are some of your favorite guerrilla marketing campaigns? Let us know in the comments below.