Saturday, August 31, 2019

Weekend Favs August 31

Weekend Favs August 31 written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you to check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from an online source or one that I took out there on the road.

  • Rvw – Build a page to request reviews from your happy customers.
  • Grafiti – Search for charts and graphs with accurate data.
  • ScreenSpace – Create a promo video for your app.

These are my weekend favs, I would love to hear about some of yours – Tweet me @ducttape



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Skills for the Coming Years

Friday, August 30, 2019

Does your company really need a CDP?

Check out our marketer’s guide to CDPs and ask yourself these 9 important questions.

Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.


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YouTube to phase out exact counts for public-facing subscriber numbers

Starting September 2, the platform will begin showing abbreviated subscriber counts for channels with 1,000 or more subscribers.

Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.


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Social Shorts: Facebook Messenger updates, more AR effects in Snap Lens Studio, new CMO hires

The social media marketing week in review: A round up of news and announcements you may have missed.

Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.


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Is There Any Value in Blogging and Podcasting and All That Media?

Digital Marketing News: Influencers Trusted More Than Friends, LinkedIn Expands Audience Data, New B2B Studies & More

The post Digital Marketing News: Influencers Trusted More Than Friends, LinkedIn Expands Audience Data, New B2B Studies & More appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.



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The Quest for the Data-Driven Email: How Your Team Can Come Together on a Digital Marketing ...

Creating an effective and engaging email that will garner the results you want, such as higher open and click-through rates, might require the whole marketing team to come together.

You might need your marketing director to help shape the vision for your campaign and drive the team forward. The content manager might work on where the email fits in your content strategy or even write the copy for the email. Your designer will provide the visuals, and a campaign manager well versed in marketing automaton and email marketing might send the email (or emails) out. A social media specialist or director will then use the appropriate platforms to promote the content or offer in the email, and the content manager might also feature the same offer or message in your blog. Of course, someone on your team who works with data management will have to track the results.  

Of course, your entire team would have had to come together in the first place to plan the email and use the appropriate data to make sure that it’s personalized for its target audience to hopefully get the best response possible. Such data-driven emails garner the best results, as they speak more directly to your audience and are tailored to their preferences and interests.

Certainly, today’s digital marketing requires multiple moving parts all coming together with the same vision and goals in mind to shape an email with the right data. It is a game that you play to win ample rewards and also an adventure you go on with your team. Using data to craft an impactful email is truly a quest, and those that succeed are heroes.

In fact, you can use the analogy of a roleplaying game’s campaign to illustrate how all a marketing team’s different members and skillsets come together to solve problems and create an email. RPGs rely on cards that stand in for special abilities and tools, and each marketer on your team will also their own set of talents and tools that they use to play a vital role in winning the day.

You are all digital marketing knights of brave renown, and here are some of the trials you might face on your quest:

Scenario #1: The Rhyming Imp from Corporate Marketing

An imp comes down from Corporate Marketing and claims that they are there to look everything over. They want to see if your emails are working, and if not to instruct you on how to take things slower. As your budget will be cut, your leads will be given to another marketing team who has had better luck.

Rather than despair, your campaign manager mage will conjure visions of numbers from how previous email campaigns with your data and email copy and design did swell. This will show that you are on course to do good with this email as well.

This banishes the imp back to Corporate Marketing, and repeated status reports on your campaign’s success keep him there, and numbers do not lie, so he won’t come back soon, he won’t dare, he'll hide. 

(Having data to back up and justify the decisions you make during campaigns can please your CMOs and other marketing executives and give you more confidence and freedom when planning and executing your campaign.)

Scenario #2: The Content Audit Dragon

To see what content will work well with his magic spells to entice prospects into becoming customers, your content wizard must do an audit of his old spell books to see what worked before and what needs tweaking, revising, a dash of midnight, a four-leaf clover, and other magical ingredients.

This knowledge can help in crafting future emails, as the wizard will have an idea of enchantments his team’s audience likes to fall under. However, it has been an age since the last content audit. The spell books have piled up high and fill an entire cave. The magic has leaked out of them to form a dragon, one your wizard is reluctant to face, as it will take much tedious work to formulate the magic charms needed to tame it and organize the spells (the content) along with the data of how well it all performed.

However, the SEO paladin and the designer bowman both lend a hand, and together with an agency of noble knights and the wizard, they defeat the dragon and organize all the spells into a framework that is readable, understandable, and actionable to use in emails and other spells and content.

(Content audits can be long and tedious work, especially if you leave them go for too long. However, they can provide great insights into your content and help you with you with your strategy and campaigns. A content manager does not have to perform an audit alone. You are part of a team, and your teammates also need to know how well past content has performed, as it might help inform their SEO, design, campaign, and other strategies. Making an audit into a team effort promotes teamwork, invests everyone in its results, and lets everyone have a look at the content in order for them to provide their own feedback. You might also call on an agency you work with to help with the audit, as the information it provides will help them in their projects and the direction everything is going in, too.)

Scenario #3 The Gnome from Sales

A gnome from sales appears in your office. He sits in on all your meetings and looks over everyone’s shoulders at what they’re doing. He appears to have no other purpose but to try to tell everyone how to perform their duties better, with an emphasis on giving the people spread across all the kingdoms a hard sell. About what, pray tell? Well, they need your team to provide them with the lucky charms to send the bothersome trolls packing. He and the other gnomes are always talking with the people, and they think your emails need to reflect what they’re hearing from the traveling minstrels in the taverns about the trolls, while your information comes from the townspeople themselves.

You share what you’ve heard with the gnome, and he describes in better detail what he’s gotten from drinking mead with the minstrels. Once you have shared information and come up with an agreed-upon way to approach your emails that the gnomes can follow up on, your gnome thinks it will work and turns to stone. He only transforms back to check on your open and click-through rates and see if they are turning into revenue.

(Contrary to what some might believe, marketing and sales can work together. In fact marketing can empower sales. You are both on the same side and want the same thing: leads to become customers. By sharing data, you can align on your approaches, so marketing can prime and ready a lead to be turned over to sales.)

Not a Roll of the Dice

Campaigns might experience many other obstacles. If pirates from the competition have beaten you to the punch and are using messaging, themes, and an offer similar to what you were going to do in your email, you might spice up the copy and design, and work with sales on making a different offer—as long as it all aligns with what your data says your customers want.

You might feel that a rival marketing magician has placed a hex on you and that is why your open and click-through rates are low, even though your offer, the copy and design, they’re all good. However, you can overcome that hex by having your team remain in good spirits and come at their approach to email marketing in a different way, by trying to derive different insights from your data and using different topics, themes, writing, and visuals to enchant your audiences. 

Of course, RPG campaigns often count on a roll of the dice to win their battles. Digital marketers do not. What they do is not random but comes from a strategy and plan they all contributed to. Rather than dice and playing cards, they have an array of marketing methods and best practices to utilize. They do not have to draw a sword from a stone but are working off a strong set of data that comes from their customers’ preferences, A/B and multivariate testing, analytics showing the results of their past campaigns, and their own experience and talents. Coming together as a team of digital marketing heroes, they can count on each other and that their approach to marketing draws upon solid numbers and their own ingenuity.

                                              

What are the tools a digital marketer needs on their quest to reach and connect with their customers? Marketing automation can be a great help, but you can also create magic with cross-channel orchestration, data management, testing and personalization, and digital analytics. Find how Oracle Marketing Cloud can make a difference with your campaign.

 

 



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Thursday, August 29, 2019

DUDE Agency Podcast – The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur

DUDE Agency Podcast – The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

John Jantsch, author of Duct Tape Marketing, shares how his marketing consulting firm grew from a book published in 2002 into a marketing system that’s used to help agency owners and their clients achieve great results.

He shares how he developed the system, what goes into building a successful agency, and what it is that keeps him hungry for success. He also shares a bit about his latest book, The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur, due to be published in October 2019.

Have a listen – DUDE agency podcast episode with John Jantsch



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How to Start an Online Store That Drives Sales

The best platform for starting an online store is Shopify. That’s what we use for all of our ecommerce websites. Creating your online store, is just 1 of 6 critical steps, which this guide will take you through in detail.

Start your free trial with Shopify today and create your online store in just minutes.

There’s a bunch of things to think about when starting an online store:

  • What tool do you build your store with?
  • What do you name your company and how do you get a domain?
  • Do you dropship or not?
  • How do you deal with taxes?

All of these are important decisions. For now, one thing matters more than anything else to get your first sale.

What’s that one thing?

Your marketing.

That’s right, how you choose to market your store completely determines how much money you’ll make. Get the marketing right, everything else falls into place. Get it wrong or neglect it, you’ll spend years on your store without selling a single item.

There’s 6 Steps to Starting and Launching Your Online Store

  1. Pick your marketing strategy.
  2. Find the right product niche.
  3. Pick a name for your brand.
  4. Create your online store.
  5. Do a 60-day marketing burst.
  6. Build your marketing flywheel.

Step 1: Pick Your Marketing Strategy

Before you open your online store, you need to pick your marketing strategy. Don’t even look at templates for your storefront, or color palettes, or logo designs, or anything yet. (We’ll get to the how to setup an online store stuff soon — I promise.) First, pick your marketing strategy.

If there’s one step that will make or break the success of your online store it’s this one. It’s not a hard choice, but it is one that you need to make thoughtfully and in advance.

Most online stores use one of three marketing strategies:

  1. SEO
  2. Paid marketing
  3. Platform marketing

Let’s go through each.

SEO for Online Stores

This marketing strategy is pretty simple: find keywords for products that you want to offer, then get your site to rank in Google for those keywords.

Google Search Marketing - Bookcase

In this example, IKEA, Wayfair, and Walmart.com are winning the organic spots (the ones underneath the carousel and the ads) SEO for the search term “bookcase.” If you get this strategy to work, you can make a lot of money with your online store.

SEO has a few benefits that are ideal for a businesses:

  • The traffic streams are very dependable, which means dependable revenue for your business.
  • Search traffic usually has the highest volume of traffic of any traffic source.
  • Even at scale, search traffic can be enormously profitable.

Dependable, high volume, and profitable. It’s everything you could want.

There is one major downside: SEO takes a lot of time and effort. Even if you’re pursuing a product category without any competitors, it can still take a good 3–6 months to see your site appear on the first or second page of search results for a keyword. The traffic volume will be pretty small until you get your page into the top 1–3 rankings on a keyword. If your category is even modestly competitive, it can take years of effort to get to that point.

If you go with SEO as the marketing strategy for your online store, you’ll focus on three things:

  1. Optimizing your product pages for product keywords.
  2. Building useful and engaging content for non-product keywords that are also in your category. This helps your product pages rank.
  3. Making your content so good that people will link to at as a resource.

When playing the SEO game, there are only two things that matter: content and links. So that’s where you’ll spend the bulk of your time.

Paid Marketing for Online Stores

Some online stores do exceptionally well with paid marketing. This includes sponsored posts on Instagram and Facebook, and paid results in Google search. Paid marketing are ad placements you buy.

Instragram Paid Ecommerce Ad

But is paid marketing right for your business? My general rule of thumb: paid marketing is a great option if your product is the type of thing that could be featured in a mall.

Why?

The biggest paid marketing channels right now are Facebook and Instagram. Instagram in particular has gotten very popular for online stores in the last few years.

But think of the frame of mind that someone has while scrolling through a Facebook or Instagram feed. They’re relaxing for a few minutes, laughing at a few photos, and leaving quick messages for a few friends. They’re enjoying themselves. It’s a lot like how people shop at a mall. Sometimes, people are looking for a particular item, but a lot of people go to the mall to enjoy themselves. Malls have known this for a long time and stores have optimized around this browsing experience.

Products that sell effectively in a mall are also likely to do well with a paid ad in Facebook or Instagram. These products typically:

  • Consumer products. Business products have a much harder time in these channels.
  • Highly visual and eye-catching. This is why apparel companies do so well in malls and why apparel companies have been really aggressive on Instagram the last few years.
  • Simple to understand. The offer needs to be understood within 3 seconds. If you have a more complicated sales process that requires more explanation, people will have scrolled past your ad long before you have a chance to make the sale.
  • An impulse friendly price point. If the price is too high that people need to carefully think through the decision, they’ll skip your ad and quickly forget it.

If your product meets all these criteria, you should seriously consider going the paid marketing route.

Google Ads (formerly AdWords) is one exception to this. Since you’re bidding on keywords within Google, you put your ad in front of people who are already actively searching for that type of product. As long as the keyword has enough search volume and the ad bids aren’t too competitive, it’ll work very nicely.

The biggest downside to paid marketing is that you’ll have to invest a bunch of money up front before you know whether or not you can turn a profit. Many of us don’t have those thousands of dollars to invest without a reliable chance of getting it back.

Most paid campaigns don’t turn a profit initially; they usually take a lot of iteration and work before they start making a profit. Most professional paid marketers need 3–6 months before their campaigns become profitable. So be careful and make sure you don’t invest more than you can afford to lose here. If cash is too tight for you, choose one of the other marketing options.

Platform Marketing for Online Stores

This is a completely different direction than the two methods above.

Instead of creating your own store and using a type of marketing to acquire traffic, you’ll leverage one of the main ecommerce platforms:

  • Amazon
  • Etsy
  • eBay

Amazon Platform Marketing - Broom

It’s definitely possible to be successful at any of these three. We recommend that most folks go after Amazon. Amazon’s audience is much larger which gives you more upside and just about every product niche already exists on Amazon.

The main exception is if you’re doing a craft business of some kind, like making your own bookends to sell to people. In that case, Etsy is a better fit since the audience expects more craft-oriented products.

eBay is still great if you’re doing a bunch of buying and reselling. But if you’re producing the same types of items consistently, the potential on Amazon is much higher.

You treat whichever platform you choose as your marketing channel. First, you’ll create your store on that platform and list all your products. Second, you’ll optimize your store to the best of your ability so the platform wants to feature your products.

Optimizing your store usually involves focusing on two areas:

  • Targeting your product pages to specific terms searched for within the platform
  • Getting as many 5-star reviews on your products as possible

As you improve your search terms and reviews, more people will see your products on that platform, which will produce more sales for you.

How to Choose the Best Type of Online Store for You

Let’s recap what we’ve covered so far. There are three types of online stores you can open. These types are based on the marketing strategy you employ.

The three marketing channels for an online store are:

  1. SEO — You’ll focus on content and links. Requires: time and patience
  2. Paid marketing — You’ll pay for placements. Requires: 3–6 months, money upfront, and a highly visual, simple-to-understand consumer product with an impulse-friendly price point.
  3. Existing platforms like Amazon, Etsy, and eBay — You’ll focus on winning the search terms within that marketplace and stacking up 5-star reviews. Requires: Committing to understanding that platform.

I strongly recommend that you pick one of these and build your entire business around it. That’s right, just one.

“Why can’t we do more than one? Wouldn’t we want to use multiple marketing channels for our store? More marketing means more sales right?”

I’ve made this exact mistake so many times myself. After a decade working in online marketing alongside some of the most well-respected marketers out there, I’ve noticed one overwhelming trend: folks that are good at one type of marketing are generally pretty bad at the others.

Why would this be?

A couple of reasons why it’s hard to be good at more than one kind of marketing:

  • Every marketing channel is completely unique. While some marketing principles apply across all channels, you’ll have to learn all the tactics from the ground up. Constantly trying to learn new channels really slows you down.
  • Online marketing channels constantly change. What works right now won’t work in 12 months. Even though I’ve spent a decade doing SEO, I still feel like I’m relearning it every year. If you’re focused on a single marketing channel, you’ll have a much easier time keeping up.
  • Online marketing channels are power laws. That means the majority of the profits go to a few big players — everyone else fights for scraps. If you’re not one of the winners, you won’t be making much.

If you stick with one marketing channel, you’ll get through the learning curve a lot faster. The faster you unlock your marketing channel, the sooner you’ll be making real money with your online store.

OK, step one is done. It was a long one, but it’s important that you spend time on it — it’s the very foundation of every other choice you’ll make in the process of setting up your online store.

Step 2: Find the Right Product Niche for Your Online Store

After choosing your marketing strategy, picking your product niche is the most important decision that you’ll make. Slow down and take your time to do some genuine research here.

A huge mistake that I’ve made in the past was jumping into hobby categories. Yes, being personally interested in the category really helps with building the business. But it’s also a common trap for picking a category that won’t support a thriving business. If there isn’t much demand in my niche, it doesn’t matter how great of a job I do, I’m doomed to fail from the beginning.

There are a few things I look for in a good product category for an online store.

First, avoid picking a category that’s too unique.

A common best practice in marketing is to differentiate yourself. And this is powerful advice — it’s a huge advantage when you have it.

It’s also tricky to find a genuine way to differentiate yourself that the market is willing to pay for. There are countless ways to differentiate any given product, but only 1–2 actually matter.

Does the top-rated toothbrush holder on Amazon need to do something wacky and unique? Not at all. It needs to be simple, easy to use, reliable, have a good price, and have a ton of reviews on Amazon. That’s it.

Instead of trying to differentiate yourself from every other product in your category, find a category with competitors that aren’t dominating their marketing channel. Are the Amazon reviews low for all the top products? Are the SEO results low quality? Are there no companies putting serious ad dollars behind a product? If the answer is yes, there’s an opportunity for you to out-compete them with your marketing.

A moderate price is also key.

Avoiding product categories with a low price makes a lot of sense. After all, if you only earn $1 in profit for each sale, you’ll have to sell 100,000 products every year to support yourself. After taxes and overhead, that’ll give you about $50–60K per year to live on.

Selling 100,000 of anything is a lot of work. No easy task.

Now let’s assume that you’re selling something for $80 and making $40 in profit on each sale. To make $100,000 per year, you’ll only need to sell 2,500 items. That’s much more manageable.

However, you also want to avoid selling something with a price that’s too high. As price goes up, so does buying behavior. Prospects demand more proof. They may even demand a completely different buying process. How many people buy cars without test driving them at a dealership? Most don’t. They want to see the car and talk to a real person before making a purchase that big. Cars require a lot of extra work and sales skill to sell effectively because of their higher price point.

We recommend finding a product that you can sell between $50 and $100 dollars. It’s high enough that sales will add up quickly for you. It’s also low enough that the buying process will be straightforward.

Lastly, make sure there’s demand.

You can usually tell if there’s demand by doing some category research on your marketing channel. For SEO, Google Ads (formerly AdWords) has a Keyword Planner that tells you how many times something is searched in Google every month. If the keyword for your product gets less than 1,000 searches per month, it’s probably too small to build a business on.

Same thing with Amazon, if you have trouble finding products in your category with more than 100 reviews, it’s probably too small.

These days, I’d much rather pick a category that I have zero experience in but has genuine demand. That’s much better than realizing that a passion category of mine has zero demand later on.

Step 3: Pick a Name for Your Brand

The bad news: everyone hates this step.

Trying to find a good name that’s not already taken gets really annoying. The websites are taken, the best names have been trademarked, and you’ll feel like you’re hitting dead-end after dead-end.

Good names are tricky to find.

Whenever I look for a new name, I feel a temptation to cut corners. After several full days of brainstorming names and hitting dead-ends, all I want to do is pick a less-than-ideal name just so I can move on to the next step.

I have to tell myself that it’s worth the effort to keep looking. It’ll pay off if I keep going and it always does.

Here’s the naming checklist I use:

  • Easy to spell. I never want any friction when people are trying to find my site.
  • 3 words or fewer. I like to keep it at short as possible so it’s easier to remember. 1 or 2 words is ideal, 3 is still good.
  • Pass the Bar Test. I should be able to say the name in a noisy bar without repeating it. That’s a great sign that it’s easy to understand. This is huge for word-of-mouth marketing later.
  • Can get the .com domain. Every online story needs a .com. It’s become too much of a standard. Some folks use weird domains like company.online or company.io. In my opinion, this causes problems later because whoever owns company.com will know how valuable it is once you try to buy it. I either buy the domain early or find one that’s instantly available.
  • Relevant to your category. Make sure the name relates to your product category in some way.
  • No trademark conflicts. Any corporate law firm can do a quick check for you on this. Since legal time is expensive, find 3–5 name options that check all the above items. Then have an attorney check for the trademarks all at the same time. It’s rare to not have at least one of them work.

We have an in-depth guide on how to pick and buy a domain name here.

Once you have your name picked, grab the domain using your domain registrar. Or if you’re buying the domain from someone, get it transferred into the domain registrar that you want to use for the long term.

Step 4: Open Your Online Store

If you’re pursuing an SEO or paid marketing strategy, this is a super important step. The quality of your site has a huge impact on how much of your traffic will turn into buyers.

First, we strongly recommend Shopify for building your site.

There are other tools out there like Magento and Bigcommerce — none of them compare to Shopify. It’s super easy to use, has all the features that you’d ever want, and has a very reasonable price.

The one exception to this is if you’ve already built out a blog with a large audience and want to add a small online store to it in order to sell a few items. In this case, adding WooCommerce to your WordPress is a good option.

Otherwise, always go with Shopify.

We’ve put together a detailed guide on creating an ecommerce website here.

And if you’ve picked one of the platforms like Amazon, treat your company and product pages with great care. Make the copy as compelling as possible. Use every feature that they give you. Get the highest quality photos that you can. Do everything. Really make your pages stand out.

Step 5: Do a 60-day Marketing Burst

All of our stores start from scratch.

When we’re just getting started, any bit of momentum goes a long way.

That first review, that first page that ranks in Google, that first purchase using a paid ad — it’s life changing.

At this stage of the process, I never worry about systems, scalability, or trying to do things in an efficient way. I’m looking for momentum any way that I can get it, no matter how much outreach or personal work I have to do.

The goal at this stage is to put in a huge burst of personal effort and get some momentum. Even if you have to do things that you know aren’t sustainable over the long term.

Here are a few examples:

  • I might tap my personal network to see if anyone is willing to do an interview with me and publish it on their own site. This will help me get a few initial links to my site.
  • I could ask personal friends and relatives to leave the first couple Amazon reviews.
  • I’d try spending some of my own cash on paid ads to test if the offer produces revenue at all.

I’m looking for any marketing idea that involves my time but also allows me to quickly get my first few wins.

At this stage, do some research on your marketing channel and come up with a list of 50 ideas that you could personally do yourself. Then prioritize them and plan a 60-day Marketing Burst. Ship as many of those ideas that you can within those 60 days. Work long hours, drink too much coffee, and really push yourself during that period.

By the end of the 60-day Marketing Burst, some of your marketing ideas will have worked and you’ll have your first couple sales. You’ll also have a small but steady stream of sales coming in because you’ve focused on a single marketing channel. That steady stream is enough to start building your marketing flywheel on.

Step 6: Build Your Marketing Flywheel

Once you have some initial momentum, it’s time to start building the marketing machine that will grow your business around the clock without you having to personally accomplish every task.

In the early days on Amazon, you’ll need to personally ask for a lot of your first product reviews. But that’s not sustainable.

Instead, look for marketing tactics that help create Amazon reviews for you without you asking for them.

Here’s an example.

A popular tactic on Amazon is to ask customers to leave a review. Some will even promise a discount code on the next purchase if a review is published.

You can automate that tactic. Have an assistant send the same templated email to every new customer, asking for a review and promising a discount code on their next order. All the platforms allow you to message customers personally through the platform. So while you can’t email blast all your customers at once, you can have an assistant send messages out one-by-one every week on your behalf. That’s a repeatable flywheel that doesn’t take up your time.

A quick side note on this review tactic: Before you try something like this, make sure to check the guidelines and policies of the platform you’re on. There are always rules about these sorts of things and every platform is slightly different. Be careful to not push things too far, putting your store in danger of getting removed entirely.

Look for as many of these repeatable marketing flywheels as you can.

Instead of creating content yourself, can you pay someone for content? If you did the keyword research, made a list of requirements that you want on each piece of content, and hired someone else to write the post itself, you could create a lot more content to help you win with an SEO marketing strategy. That’s a flywheel.

Instead of optimizing your paid ads yourself, can you delegate that? If your conversion rates are consistently improving and your cost to acquire a customer is going down, that lets you buy more customers with the same amount of capital. That accelerates your business without your personal effort. Another flywheel.

Focus on your core marketing channel and then build a marketing flywheel that will keep your online store growing without any effort from you. This is the key to opening an online store, generating sales quickly, and accelerating its growth.



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Spotify’s rumored ‘Create a podcast’ feature could be a valuable resource for marketers

The “Create a podcast” button discovered in the Spotify app would allow users to create podcasts via Anchor, an app Spotify purchased in February.

Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.


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Buying martech is easy, managing the process to use it effectively is the hard part

Shifting priorities wreak havoc on our best intentions as martech buyers so it’s important to take the time to plan and avoid random acts of martech.

Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.


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Facebook rolls out automated lead generation feature for Messenger to all advertisers

First announced in May, the lead gen platform works with Facebook’s click-to-Messenger ads.

Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.


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Will Rich Communication Services (RCS) revolutionize business messaging?

Brands and consumers are excited about RCS messaging, but without networks and major tech companies on board, adoption is far behind.

Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.


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3 Trends from Prime Day 2019 to guide your Black Friday and Cyber Monday Amazon strategy

Sellers focusing budget and discount efforts on specific, strategic product lines, rather than an entire catalog, are likely to see the biggest sales bumps.

Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.


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A Farewell and Some Advice to Keep You Moving Forward

Well, our big news this week is that I’m going to be moving to a more solo career. The ultra...

The post A Farewell and Some Advice to Keep You Moving Forward appeared first on Copyblogger.



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5 B2B Brands Delivering Great Customer Experiences

Colorfully painted wooden planks image.

Colorfully painted wooden planks image. Today’s B2B customers expect more B2C-like experiences, and here are five brands delivering great customer experiences that go far beyond the tired tradition of boring-to-boring. Research from Gartner has shown that 89 percent of firms compete primarily on customer experience. Not all companies may be taking this to heart, however, as according to additional research some 60 percent of marketers fail to take into account consumer expectations, despite 95 percent seeing increasing expectations from customers. Making memorable customer experiences a priority can help build successful campaigns and make for delighted customers, and with further recent research showing that just 14 percent of B2B survey respondents view customer experience and support as a top priority, there may be no better time to work on delivering great customer experiences. 2019 July 5 MarketingCharts Image In the following randomly-ordered list, we’ll look at five B2B brands that are innovating with customer-pleasing digital experiences.

#1 IBM — IBM Industries Magazine

IBM Industrious Screenshot Image IBM publishes both a print and digital version of a magazine, with its award-winning Industrious quarterly publication, featuring the top content from IBM Industries blog combined with exclusive insight from a variety of industry influencers. Industrious was the winner of the Best Content Marketing Campaign at the B2B Awards USA in 2018, and offers a compelling example of how a large B2B firm is delivering great customer experiences. IBM senior vice president of digital sales and chief marketing officer Michelle Peluso recently offered insight into some of the ways IBM has worked to deliver more agile experiences both internally and on the customer experience front. You can hear her episode of The CMO Podcast here. [bctt tweet="“Client and customer needs are changing at a very rapid pace. We want to make sure IBM is interacting with the people who use our systems, software and services—not just the person making the purchase decisions.” @MichelleaPeluso" username="toprank"] Adding relevant influencer content is a proven method to drive engagement, build trust, and create digital experiences that are truly interesting and helpful. [bctt tweet="“It’s not enough to simply make people aware of our brands — we need to instill an immediate sense of credibility, so that trust is being established in the very first interactions.” — Nick Nelson @NickNelsonMN" username="toprank"]

#2 3M — Science Champions Podcast

3M Science Champions Screenshot Image At TopRank Marketing we are B2B influencer marketing specialists, and have recently worked to feature influencers in our client 3M’s Champions of Science series of podcasts. Recent industry experts appearing on Champions of Science have included Professor Stephen Curry, Department of Life Sciences at Imperial College London, Dr. Suze Kundu, Materials Chemist and Science Presenter, Chris Gammell, Principal, Analog Life, LLC, and Matt Hartings, Associate Professor of Chemistry at American University. Using podcasting can be a great way to up your customer experience game, and we’ve recently taken a look at how B2B marketers can promote podcasts, and have also gathered together an industry-leading list of top marketing-related podcasts, which you can find here: [bctt tweet="“If you’re at an enterprise-level organization, you have a built-in audience. Encourage your employees to listen to each episode and share it with their social networks.” — Joshua Nite @NiteWrites" username="toprank"]

#3 Businessolver — 2019 State of Workplace Empathy

Businesssolver Screenshot Image Employee benefits administration technology firm Businessolver sought to connect with customers through conducting a study of empathy in the workplace, causing professionals to take a close look at what has recently been seen as the rising importance of empathy among workers in all fields. Businessolver's 2019 State of Workplace Empathy study highlights why workplace empathy should be an important part of company efforts, offering an online asset that can be cited and used by customers and their firms. [bctt tweet="“93 percent of employees say they're more likely to stay with an empathetic employer.” @businessolver" username="toprank"] At this year’s Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, greater incorporation of empathy and intuition in marketing processes was seen as a key trend for 2020, along with learning to better recognize the individuals behind the data. Take a look at more in “6 Cannes Revelations About B2B Marketing in 2020.” [bctt tweet="“Content marketing requires putting the empathy you have for your audience to a constructive purpose.” — Joshua Nite @NiteWrites" username="toprank"]

#4 Marketo — Guide to Lead Generation

Marketo Lead Generation Screenshot Image Each year marketing software firm Marketo creates a Guide to Lead Generation, with helpful insights for customers made available on an array of easy-to-access social media platforms including Facebook, LinkedIn, SlideShare, and Google, as well as the firm's own site. [bctt tweet="“We live in a hyperconnected world where our brands aren’t controlled by us anymore. They’re controlled by our customers. The brand is being defined by the buyer.” — Marketo CEO @nstevenlucas" username="toprank"] Offering helpful digital assets is just one of many successful methods to deliver great customer experiences. We've explored numerous additional ways savvy B2B marketers can offer memorable customer experiences in these recent articles: [bctt tweet="“If your lead gen efforts aren’t connecting, start by getting a more accurate picture of your buying audience. Use social listening. Ask them questions. Talk to sales and customer service to refine your personas.” — Joshua Nite @NiteWrites" username="toprank"]

#5 Emerson — We <3 STEM / 2019 STEM Survey

Emerson STEM Screenshot Image Global technology and engineering firm Emerson has worked to increase the next generation’s interest in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM), and has conducted and released its 2019 STEM Survey. Emerson CMO Kathy Button Bell recently shared some of the innovative initiatives the company is taking to build successful customer experiences, in an interview with Drew Neisser of AdAge. “Empowering individuals of all ages and backgrounds with the tools necessary to thrive in STEM is a crucial step in solving the growing talent gap across several key industries,” Bell recently told Power Engineering. “We have long been dedicated to fostering a culture at Emerson that attracts and advances women through a variety of initiatives, including our 4,000-member Women in STEM group, which provides support and mentoring for our female engineers globally,” Bell added. [bctt tweet="“To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.” — Albert Einstein" username="toprank"]

How To Deliver Great Customer Expectations

Expectations Typewriter Image When it comes to delivering great customer expectations, IBM, 3M, Businessolver, Marketo, and Emerson have given us five examples of what can be done with award-winning effort, sizable resources, and an abundance of time. Considering the extensive effort required to produce top-quality customer experiences today, many B2B brands are turning to professional agency help from firms such as TopRank Marketing, the only B2B Marketing agency offering influencer marketing as a top capability in Forrester’s most recent “B2B Marketing Agencies, North America, Q1 2019” report. You can also learn more on these subjects by joining us at upcoming speaking events and conferences. Our CEO Lee Odden will be speaking at Content Marketing World next week, where on September 3 he'll be presenting "How to Develop a B2B Influencer Marketing Program That Actually Works" with Amisha Gandhi of SAP, and a solo session on September 4 exploring "Content Marketing Fitness - 10 Exercises to Build Your Marketing Beach Body." Our Senior Director of Digital Strategy Ashley Zeckman will also be speaking at Content Marketing World, in "Guardians of Content Vol 1: How to Scale B2B Influencer Content to Save the Galaxy."

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