AT&T (then known as American Telephone and Telegraph) first described the idea of a network effect a century ago. They noted in a report that the more people who were on their network, the more valuable it became. Today network effects are central to growing many Internet companies. (They don’t affect, of course, companies with products and services that are valuable by themselves such as cars, food, clothes, health care, and so on.) Continue reading
A few years ago I attended one of those multi-city marketing tours that software companies do – this one was by Eloqua, a major marketing automation company. Held in a hotel downtown it was a full-day event with probably 150-200 people attending. Continue reading
The Internet is full of bots, which means that not only may the traffic to your website be inflated but so too your social media following.
Twitteraudit.com is a site that quickly analyzes a sample of an account’s followers to estimate how many are fake. For Trump and Clinton, TwitterAudit estimates that about 40% of their followers are unreal. But fake follower accounts are so prevalent on Twitter that TwitterAudit gives 40% a green thumbs up! Continue reading
A/B testing is a traditional technique in direct marketing, and it’s common in digital marketing, too. People test alternate versions of landing pages, images, email subject lines, colors, offers, creative, and on and on. (In some cases when they have large volumes they may do multi-variate testing, too.)
But don’t necessarily assume that just because one option won that it’s always better. Continue reading
The amount of content (blogs, videos, infographics, webinars, market research, etc. etc.) being developed is increasing so rapidly that you could call it a tsunami. Unless you’re one of the fortunate few who’s in an industry where your competitors are not yet generating much content, it gets harder and harder every day to get your content noticed. Continue reading
You can use three types of marketing data to enhance your customer and prospect targeting:
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- First party data is your data. It includes previous customer buying history, how a person interacts with your website and emails (what Eloqua calls their digital body language), their attendance on webinars or physical events, and so on. First party data rules, and it’s inexpensive for you to gather and use.
In the age of social media, where customers are sharing experiences and reviews on brands constantly, and making buying decisions based on those reviews from anonymous others, providing a great customer experience has never been more important.
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Can people tell what your company does in just a few seconds after getting to your website? And why they should care? It’s important that they can.
The home pages of many websites suffer from diffuse messaging. This is often the result of internal political struggles over that most valuable of Internet real estate. Continue reading
I can’t tell you how many times SMB owners and senior executives have said to me, “We can’t afford to do marketing” as if it were a cost center. Marketing done right returns many times in revenue over what it costs.
Companies aren’t always willing to share their marketing ROI data, but here’s a greenfield example I ran across in the annual report of AFA Protective Systems, a $70 million company that installs fire and burglar alarms and other types of security systems. In their 2014 annual report the CEO wrote: Continue reading
As marketers we should be talking with customers ourselves and bringing research to sales. But whether it’s an enterprise sales rep closing $1 million deals or a retail salesperson in the clothes section helping people buy something that looks good on them, salespeople have orders of magnitude more customer contact than we ever will. So be close to your salespeople and learn from them about your customers. Continue reading