Your company’s best advocates aren’t in your marketing department; they’re your current customers. Customer success stories are among the top five most popular forms of content marketing, and 64% of B2B marketers consider them the single most effective form of custom content. Consumer research is more self-directed than ever before, and case studies are a powerful way to demonstrate real applications of your product or service without a hard sell.
Continue readingDid you know that 91% of marketers are using custom content, but only 34% consider themselves effective at it? It’s pretty safe to assume that more than half of us struggle with publishing professional blog posts. Whether you’re failing often, or afraid to fail to begin with, you probably can’t escape the fact that content marketing is quickly becoming the norm. 78% of CMOs think content is the future of marketing ideas and strategy. Mistakes can range from egregious to subtle, and we’ve compiled a list of the most-common errors we see often:
Continue readingI’m confident that for most social media managers, the path to gaining engagement isn’t always simple.
While research is pretty clear that visual content reigns supreme, this rule isn’t always absolute:
Every marketing professional knows what it’s like to pen a brilliant post, create a custom image, source the perfect quote, and…hear crickets. Your fans just don’t see the brilliance behind your post the way you do. While there’s no substitute for mapping out your brand’s unique buyer persona profiles, learning from the best in the business could be just the inspiration you need.
Want to learn what 73% of inbound marketers say their #1 metric is?
Or do you want to find out if you fall into the same categories as a typical inbound marketer?
Well, you’re in the right place. We had some questions about the process of inbound marketing, as we wanted to know how often they create content, what challenges they encounter, what problems they wish they could magically solve, and how they measure success on both the blog level and blog post level.
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Does it ever feel like you’re struggling to gain any traction on Twitter?
You’re definitely not alone. With over 6,000 Tweets published each second, Twitter has a well-earned reputation of being something of a noisy network. Your lack of engagement could result from boring Tweet structures. Here are 11 tried-and-true Tweet writing formulas that really change everything:
60 million visitors a month head to Slideshare.
If you’re unimpressed, think about this: it’s considerably less social than other networks.
While users can follow others, it’s primarily a center for information discovery.
The most-common tags on the network are business, market, trends, research, social media, and statistics.
Email newsletter marketing definitely isn’t dead. In fact, it’s just as viable of a platform for marketing as ever. The most recent studies by the Direct Marketing Association found that the average return on investment for email was around $25.80 for every dollar spent on the platform. Perhaps most impressively, 8% of companies are directly able to attribute more than half of their total revenue to newsletters.
While it’s clear that outstanding email newsletter content is key to success, there are myriads of other factors which can affect your results. Are the majority of emails you send bouncing back to you? Is your spam complaint rate so high your messages aren’t even being read?
Continue readingIt’s a pretty terrible time to be in the traditional advertising sector. The Wall Street Journal recently named advertising and promotion management the “fastest disappearing” jobs in the US.
As HubSpot blogger Dan Lyons points out, it’s not like the situation is going to improve next quarter, either. The internet has severely disrupted traditional marketing techniques, including advertising and the newspaper industry. Inbound and content marketers are most definitely here to stay.
Continue readingForget Facebook. The hot new topic in social and content marketing is definitely podcasting. The Social Media Examiner’s 2013 Marketing Industry report found that while just 3% of marketers are currently using custom podcasts, 24% plan to figure out how to create a podcast, and implement the practice in the near future:
If you’re hoping to gain an edge above your competition, or position yourself as a thought leader, a podcast could be just the ticket for your content marketing strategy.
You know there are people who just enter the room and the atmosphere changes. You feel their energy, feel their attitude to life, feel their wisdom and strength. I got a chance to sit down and talk to such a person.
Lights on. Guy Kawasaki.
Venture capitalist, entrepreneur, a former evangelist at Apple and the author of 12 books now.
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