A couple weeks ago Facebook made an announcement that they are changing their news feed algorithm to emphasize posts from friends and family over those from brands and publishers because that’s what people prefer to see.

It’s not uncommon for people to Like over 100 brand and interest pages, and the median number of friends is 200. If even a few of those friends are active in posting it’s impossible for a person to see everything. So Facebook needs to prioritize and personalize what you see. Continue reading

This is the final chapter of Louis Gudema’s Bullseye Marketing book, which can be bought on Amazon.

It’s one thing to create a marketing strategy based on an understanding of your customer personas and touchpoints, an informed media mix, and constant optimization based on feedback and data. It’s another thing entirely to execute on that.

Many marketing teams start off with the best of intentions but get distracted along the way by shiny objects, competitor efforts — or simply a lack of discipline.

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It’s often said that acquiring new customers is something like five times as expensive as retaining existing ones. As a result customer retention programs tend to be much more profitable than customer acquisition programs. A study by Bain and the Harvard Business School said that increasing customer retention by 5% increased profits by 25-95%. Continue reading

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

moonshot 190You 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

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