The Top 5 Marketing Tips for 2016

The end of the year is one of the busiest times for everyone – between Christmas parties, end of year reviews and analyses for 2016, we’re all pretty busy. Marketers are busy shaping up their strategies for the next few quarters and with marketing constantly evolving; here are five strategies you need to keep in mind in order to begin the New Year with a bang:

16 Ways To Get More Comments On Your Facebook Page

Getting fans to comment on your Facebook Page can take a lot of time and effort. And it can sometimes be painful seeing other Facebook Pages who make engagement look easy.

But even the most active Facebook Page began from a standing start. And many of them got to where they are today by making it easier for fans to comment on their Page.
Facebook fans hate homework

How to Identify Marketing Tactics that Support Your Marketing Strategy

  Marketing Tactics Checklist
The company you work for has just asked you to come up with a new marketing campaign.  You review the information, frame your mind to come up with the right strategies and you start to map out how you’ll succeed in your marketing efforts.Once you’ve developed your marketing strategy it’s time to start planning out the tactics. How do you actually get from A to Z?  This is where the planning really counts.

As marketers we are equipped with various marketing channels and at times that can often make it difficult to choose which one to use without worrying about opportunities that you might miss.

Marketing Research Chart: Channels tracked by marketers

SUMMARY: In this week’s chart, we learn about the types of channels marketers track and analyze to make improvements to their marketing efforts. Be sure to share your own analysis of this chart in the MarketingSherpa LinkedIn Group for a chance to be published in a future blog post.    

When selecting email marketing metrics, identifying what to measure and understanding a metric’s purpose are the first steps. Selected metrics should be actionable, helping organizations consistently make improvements and gain necessary budget approvals.

We asked marketers … 

4 Things to Look Forward to at the Digital Marketing Summit

The WhatCounts 2013 Digital Marketing Summit is only a week away, and if you’re one of the people who has perused our agenda and bought your tickets, congratulations! You’re in for two days of sessions that we hope will blow your marketing minds. Here are a few reasons why you are going to love the Summit: 

Five Ways to Inspire Yourself and Push Through a Marketing Mental Block

It's true as marketers we can hit dry spells and for some reason our creative brain cells seem to be sleeping. It doesn't matter what we do we just can't generate a new idea. It's frustrating, so what is one to do?

I've found that when I run into this problem and I need to push through it I start a serious of actions that eventually give me the spark I need to being in the development of new ideas. I have also found that this is usually the time that I generate my best work by pushing through the mental block. I know in speaking with other colleagues I'm not the only one who goes through this, so I wanted to pull together the actions that I implement that help me move into my creative zone, perhaps you'll bookmark this resource and visit it the next time you come across your own creative block. 

The Intersection of Context and Customer Lifetime Value

I just ran a Google search: year of content. According to the results, some people were saying (in 2011) that 2012 would be year of content marketing, while others are saying 2013 would be that year. Pam Moore wrote a great post in June reminding us that content is not a shiny new object. I, for one, completely agree. Certainly, since the dawn of marketing, we have used content in all our outreach efforts. After all, what is marketing without content? A blank page!

Now it isn’t a secret that, over the past several years, consumers have become active participants in their marketing experience –essentially being able to call up marketing messages when they want them. Social media has given our audiences the tools they need to communicate and to talk to, and about, us (brands). At the same time, all the digital evolution has given us a slew of information we’ve affectionately called big data. And it is in this realm that we’ve started implementing content marketing, because this information empowers us to build more effective content to reach our audience. Right?

How to Structure a Modern Marketing Department

We engage with a lot of marketing leaders.  Some have come from other companies and taken over the role.  Others are in the seat for the first time.  Either case, Year 1 is tough.  It’s make or break.  The question we hear most often is “Can I make it with the current team?”  My colleague John Staples wrote a great blog on hiring the best talent. In this post I want to focus on the marketing department’s org chart.

What should the org chart for your marketing department look like?  What are the roles you need to fill?

Not all marketing departments are created equal.  Structuring your team depends on your industry, your offering and your customer.  The overall business goals also play a major part.  These factors all contribute to formulating your marketing strategy and consequently your org chart.

Market Segmentation for the Small Business

Market segmentation is one of the steps that goes into defining and targeting specific markets. It is the process of dividing a market into a distinct group of buyers that require different products or marketing mixes.

A key factor to success in today's market place is finding subtle differences to give a business the marketing edge. Businesses that target specialty markets will promote its products and services more effectively than a business aiming at the "average" customer.

Η Σημασία του Μάρκετινγκ για τον Ελληνικό Τουρισμό

Η συμβολή της τουριστικής οικονομίας το 2011 στο ΑΕΠ της Ελλάδας έφτασε στο 16,5%, με έσοδα που ξεπέρασαν τα 10,5 δισ. ευρώ. Παράλληλα, η συνολική απασχόληση στον τουριστικό τομέα (758.300 θέσεις εργασίας) αντιστοιχεί στο 18,4% των απασχολουμένων της χώρας. Συγκρινόμενος σε παγκόσμιο επίπεδο, ο ελληνικός τουρισμός καταγράφει ικανοποιητικές επιδόσεις. Σύμφωνα με στοιχεία του Παγκόσμιου Οργανισμού Τουρισμού (WTO), η Ελλάδα το 2011 ήταν 17η σε επίπεδο διεθνών αφίξεων και 19η σε επίπεδο εσόδων. Επίσης, σύμφωνα με το Παγκόσμιο Οικονομικό Φόρουμ (WEF) το 2011, η χώρα μας καταλαμβάνει την 29η θέση μεταξύ 139 χωρών στο Δείκτη Ταξιδιωτικής και Τουριστικής Ανταγωνιστικότητας, ενώ στο Γενικό Δείκτη Ανταγωνιστικότητας καταλαμβάνει μόλις την 83η θέση.

Σε μια περίοδο στην οποία οι επιπτώσεις της οικονομικής ύφεσης αποτυπώνονται με ιδιαίτερα αρνητικό τρόπο στη καθημερινότητά μας, τα παραπάνω στοιχεία αποδεικνύουν ότι ο τουρισμός αποτελεί κεντρικό πυλώνα ανάπτυξης της χώρας, ενώ ταυτόχρονα είναι και ένας από τους ελάχιστους τομείς της εθνικής οικονομίας ο οποίος είναι ανταγωνιστικός σε παγκόσμιο επίπεδο. Ο τουρισμός μαζί με τη ναυτιλία αποτελούν τους πιο εξωστρεφείς κλάδους της ελληνικής οικονομίας, με ιδιαίτερα θετική συνεισφορά στο ισοζύγιο τρεχουσών συναλλαγών. 

The Ten Commandments of Great Customer Service

Customer service is an integral part of our job and should not be seen as an extension of it. A company’s most vital asset is its customers. Without them, we would not and could not exist in business. When you satisfy our customers, they not only help us grow by continuing to do business with you, but recommend you to friends and associates.

The practice of customer service should be as present on the show floor as it is in any other sales environment.

The Ten Commandments of Customer Service

1. Know who is boss. You are in business to service customer needs, and you can only do that if you know what it is your customers want. When you truly listen to your customers, they let you know what they want and how you can provide good service. Never forget that the customer pays our salary and makes your job possible. 

Is Marketing About To Get Really Creepy Or Really Good?

Apple acquired a company last week. It's something to pay attention to.

There is still one slightly unchartered territory that will - without question - be the last mile in marketing. It is the ability for a brand to deliver contextual and highly targeted marketing at the local retail level. We may be inching ever-closer to this reality. On March 23rd, 2013, The Wall Street Journal reported that Apple acquired a company called WiFiSLAM for an estimated $20 million (not bad for a two year old company with just a handful of employees that includes some ex-Googlers). WiFiSLAM is billed, according to AngelList, as a technology that, "allow(s) your smartphone to pinpoint its location (and the location of your friends) in real-time to 2.5m accuracy using only ambient WiFi signals that are already present in buildings. We are building the next generation of location-based mobile apps that, for the first time, engage with users at the scale that personal interaction actually takes place. Applications range from step-by-step indoor navigation, to product-level retail customer engagement, to proximity-based social networking." If you can get beyond the marketing jargon, WiFiSLAM is, essentially, GPS for the indoors. It is able to triangulate the location of consumers, track their every move and deliver contextual marketing messages to them while capturing a tremendous amount of consumer data. 

Superior Marketers And Their Brain

One of the reasons I love marketing is because it requires both sides of the brain to be a truly skilled marketer. While some highly intuitive leaders have achieved great success from their intuition alone and while some advertising agency “creatives” have created brilliant campaigns without the benefit of research, most truly gifted marketers know how and when to use each side of their brain.

For instance, it is important to create “out-of-the-box” stimulus to present to customers in research, but it is also important to know which research technique to use and in what order questions should be asked to minimize biasing. It is even more important to know whether the research was constructed in a valid way that can be relied upon. If you are a marketing researcher, CRM expert, direct marketer or product manager, analytical skills and metrics are very important. If you are developing advertising campaigns, you had better have a very active right brain. The same is true if you are developing out-of-the-box publicity approaches.

B2B Marketing & Sales Insights from Lori Wizdo of Forrester Research

I had the great the opportunity to interview Lori Wizdo, B2B marketing analyst at Forrester Research. Lori is a senior analyst with extensive marketing, sales, and operation experience in the information systems and software industries.

In our discussion, Lori shared key insights into the B2B buyer's journey as well as marketing and sales alignment.

There's a lot of discussion in the marketplace about articles you've written, including "The Lead-Nurturing Payoff For The Tech Industry." In that article and elsewhere, you've suggested that many buyers get as far as 70 percent through the sales cycle before they find it useful to engage the sales teams. Does that figure depend on the type of solution? Does the complexity of the solution change things?

The Top Social Media Topics On the Minds of Real Marketers

In Marketo’s recent Social Marketing Rockstar Tour, we visited 15 cities to talk about implementing, executing, and measuring social strategy. We met marketing interns and CEOs and all levels in between; spoke to marketers from every industry; and networked with marketers from large companies with 10,000+ employees and small companies with fewer than 10. The common denominator? An intense interest in social media and a desire to learn how to use it more holistically in every marketing campaign.

Every organization uses social in a different way. At each stop on the tour we collected insights from over 2,000 customer attendees on how they are using social in their marketing today, plus any tips and lessons that they have learned along the way. We have gone through each entry and have compiled the best of the best! For the full list, be sure to download our ebook 50 Tried and True Social Insights from Real Marketers.

So what are the top six social subjects that our customers cared about? Let’s take a look!  

4 Buyer Trends That Will Shake Marketing in 2013

If you believe buyer behavior would stand still for a short while, you better let go of this belief.

Technology interruption, good and bad, continues to alter buyer behavior and disrupt marketing. For CMO’s today, staying abreast of shifts in behaviors associated with content consumption and purchase decisions is becoming job one. Without this understanding, leveraging marketing spend can turn into a wild guess.

Let us look at four buyer trends bound to shake up marketing in 2013:

1. Turn off the fire hose please!

The amount of information overload is increasing significantly. With over 2 billion Internet users active daily, to be heard above the constant din of clicks is a supreme challenge.  Buyers are getting smarter at filtering what information they choose to view.

The 5 Key Marketing Metrics You Should Be Watching

We’d like to welcome Justin Gray as a guest blogger in today’s post. He is the CEO and chief marketing evangelist at LeadMD. The company helps businesses generate and manage leads better through marketing automation processes and technologies. He can be reached at jgray@leadmd.com.

Marketing metrics often go wrong, so what’s the right way to go?

It’s common wisdom that metrics are the foundation of successful marketing. Yet all too often B2B businesses focus only on measuring number of net new leads, a simplistic focus that ignores the growing complexity of the marketer’s scope.

Ήρθε η Ώρα του (Πραγματικού) Marketing(;)

Θα ξεκινήσω με μια σύντομη αναδρομή του Marketing στην Ελλάδα, όπως τουλάχιστον το έζησα και το είδα να εξελίσσεται κατά τη διάρκεια της τελευταίας 25ετίας, με τη διττή ιδιότητα του καταναλωτή και του επαγγελματία του χώρου. Στη συνέχεια ακολουθεί μια αποτύπωση της σημερινής πραγματικότητας ως προς το Marketing, οι ενστάσεις μου ως προς την αντίδραση των περισσότερων επιχειρήσεων σε αυτή την πραγματικότητα και, τέλος, παρατίθενται απλές, γενικές προτάσεις που αφορούν κυρίως την «κλασσική», μικρή ελληνική επιχείρηση.

4 Marketing Methods More Powerful Than Advertising

The balance of power has shifted in marketing. It’s like being on a seesaw with a growing child. Over time they become bigger and bigger, to a stage where they are bigger than you. Now they’re the heavyweights bossing you around.

You can’t just dumbly advertise. You need to do things differently. Here’s 4 marketing approaches which are much more powerful than advertising.

Give earth-shattering customer service

Take a Holistic Approach to Marketing Metrics

Marketers today are under increasing pressure to measure the impact of their marketing efforts.

In fact, thanks to the ubiquity of online marketing—where responses and actions of one form or another can be relatively easily tracked—along with the growing use of marketing automation systems, marketers have more data at their disposal than at any other time in human history.

Nevertheless, as Jim Lenskold pointed out in last week’s episode of Marketing Smarts, just because marketers have access to technology that allows them to capture data and just because they are beginning to manage marketing activities according to specific metrics, they aren’t necessarily using the available data and technology to maximum effect.

What’s missing? A holistic approach to marketing metrics.