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: 

Braving new frontiers: five pointers to help travel brands in 2013

Nobody said it was going to be easy for online travel businesses and it isn’t. EyeforTravel has been hearing from some of our top speakers at this year’s Travel Distribution Summit Europe to find out what keeps them on their toes and awake at night.

In this multichannel, digital world, the landscape continues to shift and change. Newcomers pop up daily and entrenched players are upping their game with new products and services. Mobile transactions will soon be mainstream, the technology is here to truly deliver on the promise of ‘big data’ and driving compelling, personal and relevant messages to the customers’ device of choice is no longer a nice to have. Let’s take a closer look at the big issues this coming year? 

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. 

New Sales Compensation Plans

Over time, even the best sales compensation plan will go stale. It might not represent the industry as it now stands, or product changes within the company might have made it obsolete. But even salespeople who really need a new compensation plan will resist the idea. After all, change is frightening, and when the change will affect your livelihood in a big way it's even more frightening. So when you begin working on your new plan, you'll need to keep that attitude in mind and prepare for it.

5 Pay-Per-Click Mistakes That Can Cost You Money

One of the fastest ways to draw more potential customers to your website is pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Using tools such as Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing and others, business owners can display ads in the sponsored results section of search results pages and pay a fee each time someone clicks through from the ad to their site.

But PPC can be risky if not executed correctly. You can wind up spending a significant amount of money without getting the number of new customers you were hoping for.

If you're new to PPC advertising, don't panic. It is possible to learn how to run a profitable campaign through practice and experimentation. Here are five costly PPC mistakes you'll want to avoid when starting out: 

You Don’t Have to be a Genius to Master Internet Marketing

Something tells us you’re just … well … smarter than most people looking to market online.

You’re not interested in lame “get rich quick” schemes. You’re not looking for a magical silver bullet that involves no work, no time, and no sense.

In other words, you don’t have to be Einstein to “get” this stuff. But you’d have to be an idiot to believe some of the stuff peddled by traditional Internet marketing “gurus.”
Introducing Internet Marketing for Smart People

Here’s what we’ve got for you:

• A systematic, simple way to understand and implement effective online marketing.
• A clear tutorial approach to the “Copyblogger method” of creating a profitable online business or marketing your offline business online.
• An organized reference guide to the “best of the best” that’s appeared on Copyblogger over the years, and how it all fits together.

The four pillars of online marketing success

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?

Pareto Analysis Step by Step

Pareto Analysis is a statistical technique in decision making that is used for the selection of a limited number of tasks that produce significant overall effect. It uses the Pareto Principle (also know as the 80/20 rule) the idea that by doing 20% of the work you can generate 80% of the benefit of doing the whole job. Or in terms of quality improvement, a large majority of problems (80%) are produced by a few key causes (20%). This is also known as the vital few and the trivial many.

In the late 1940s quality management guru Joseph M. Juran suggested the principle and named it after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who observed that 80% of income in Italy went to 20% of the population. Pareto later carried out surveys on a number of other countries and found to his surprise that a similar distribution applied.

5 Ways to Improve Your Sales Skills

In a perfect world, your company would provide all the sales training you need. In reality, most salespeople have to take responsibility for their own sales training and either request the training they need from a sales manager or find another way to get it. However skilled or experienced you may be, you still need to constantly hone and improve your sales skills if you want to succeed. Here are some ways to keep that improvement going. 

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.

Mobile Provides Promising Revenue Opportunities for Media Sellers

From the Borrell Local Online Advertising Conference 2013

One of the more interesting sessions at the Borrell Local Online Advertising Conference I recently attended was “What SMBs are planning to spend on mobile and when.” Researchers Greg Harmon and Larry Shaw from Borrell shared some data from their latest research on mobile trends. They surveyed nearly 2,000 local SMBs between December 2012 and January 2013 to find out what their marketing plans were for the coming year.

“How Much Does That Cost?”

A natural question customers always ask is, “How much does that cost?”  Unfortunately, too often sales people answer incorrectly, responding with, “The price is……….”

Cost and price are very different!  If we answer with our price, we’ve immediately transformed the conversation into a pricing discussion.  The end of this conversation is always the level of discount you’ve provided.  We totally miss the opportunity to really talk about costs when we shift the conversation to pricing.

5 Steps to Creating a Content Marketing Budget

According to an Ad Age survey presented by Marketing Charts, content marketing comprises an average of 12% of overall marketing budgets. A full 10% of marketers spend more than 30% on content marketing, and 9% spend 19-30%. This means that approximately one in five marketers with a budget of $100,000 would spend up to or more than $30,000 per year on content marketing. Also worth noting is that 55% of those surveyed indicated that they would be increasing their content marketing budget for 2013.

The results of the survey are below:
 

8 Social Media Blunders to Avoid

Are you still making these major social media mistakes? Here's how to stop, or at least control the damage.

You would think that by now most people would have learned the dos and don'ts of using social media in business. Certainly some are more careful than others in managing messaging, but there are still plenty of people who seem clueless about communicating effectively on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

In the last few weeks I personally witnessed each faux pas listed and am sharing below remedies to fix each one. Next time you experience an error, help the offender by sending him or her this column. Perhaps you'll inspire them to stop annoying other people and doing damage to their own reputations.

1. Your Picture Sends the Wrong Message About You

The Silver Bullet for Effective Social Media Measurement

I have been doing a lot of work lately with clients on social media analytics and using several different tools to do so.  Thus, I thought it would be worth passing on some of my latest thoughts as it relates to leveraging different social media analytics platforms and actually making them useful for your business.

First off, I have had experience with many of the major social media anlaytics platforms (including Radian6/Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Sysomos, Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Google Analytics and others).  I actually really love most of the platforms and they all are exceptional... at something. So what is the silver bullet for social media measurement?  Sorry to get your hopes up, but there isn't one.  Regardless of what a sales rep might tell you, there just is no silver bullet for social media measurement. Here are six reasons why: