Usually I am recommending that you have ads with strong calls to action for an offer (sign up for our webinar, download our market brief, get our infographic, etc). Those lead people to click, complete forms, give you their contact information, and enable you to further market to them.
However, you can use Google AdWords inexpensively to grow awareness by running display network ads that you pay for on a cost per click (CPC) basis that don’t have any calls to action at all. Continue reading
You can achieve constant, incremental improvements to your marketing results with tweaking and testing. But just as in the startup world you can sometimes get huge improvements by trying something out of the box. It might be in the area of creative, or offers, or forms, or places to place your ads or content. Continue reading
The 1950s and 60s were dominated by “big ideas” in advertising as advocated by the great David Ogilvy. Companies spent millions of dollars for large national TV buys for The Jolly Green Giant, Maytag repairman, Avis trying harder, never squeezing the Charmin, and the Marlboro Man. Continue reading
In online advertising you either pay by click (CPC = cost per click) or impressions (CPM = Cost Per Thousand, “M” being the Roman numeral for thousand. This method has been around for a long time).
But what is an online impression? Continue reading
You don’t need to post to Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms in real time; you can schedule them in advance.
There are many tools that support this, including marketing automation platforms and enterprise social media tools. If you’re just getting started with it, though, you might want to check out Hootsuite and Sprout Social. Continue reading
A common recommendation in investing is to ride your winners and sell your losers, and the same could be said for marketing. (If only we could get someone to pay us anything for our unsuccessful ads and campaigns 😉
You will get lots of feedback on your various campaigns and campaign elements. Use it. Continue reading
There are literally thousands of companies providing some flavor of marketing technology in dozens of categories such as software to help manage email marketing, social media, advertising, conversion optimization A/B testing, predictive analytics and on and on. I’ve written reports on martech vendors for The Real Story Group. Continue reading
People buy with emotion and justify with logic. Sales people have known this forever and good marketers do, too.
Bob Johnson at IDG Connect and Kim Wallace of Wallace & Washburn had done research into the behaviors of B2B buyers. They found that in 97% of cases vendors introduced in the first buying team meeting were the ones that made it to the short list, so if you weren’t a pre-favorite it was almost impossible to get in on the opportunity later. Marketing is critical for becoming a pre-favorite. Continue reading
A lot of digital marketing is a form of direct marketing. And because of the experience of firms in doing direct mail and other forms of direct marketing we know what are the most important factors in successful direct marketing campaigns. Continue reading
Notice that I didn’t ask, “Does your marketing team HAVE skills gaps?” These days it’s virtually impossible for a team to not have some. Continue reading