Marketing encompasses countless business activities aimed at stimulating business growth. With a wide variety of tactics to implement and an increasing level of expertise required, it’s easy for marketing teams to go on overload. To accomplish goals and drive real results, it may be time to outsource. When organizations recognize the need for an outsourced partnership, they free up time for in-house teams to focus on their priorities, while bringing a fresh perspective and new skills to the table.
Category: Marketing
Self-Promotion or Thought Leadership? When and Where It’s Okay to Beat Your Own Drum
There’s one cardinal sin when it comes to thought leadership: self-promotional content. In fact, it’s often the first guideline marketers will hear when talking with editors, event planners and podcast hosts. Self-promotion is for marketing assets and advertising, not for thought leadership.
5 Tips for Creating Powerful Calls to Action (CTAs)
In marketing, a “call to action,” or “CTA,” is a small but mighty element of every marketing initiative. It answers the question “what now?” after a prospect consumes a blog, article, video, advertisement, email or other types of content. The call to action, whether digital or print, encourages prospects to take immediate action. Whether you urge a prospect to buy now, subscribe to a newsletter, schedule an appointment, download a white paper or connect with a customer service rep, effective CTAs keep potential customers engaged and guide them through the buying journey. How can marketers maximize these small but powerful tools in a strategic way?
Is Wikipedia a Viable Marketing Tool?
Wikipedia may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think about content marketing. Yet, despite the lack of traditional peer review, Wikipedia pages rank at the top of Google search results. This makes it a pillar resource for initial research of all kinds. But can it play a part in your marketing strategy?
Supply Chain Challenges and the Role of Marketing
A supply chain is the network of those involved with the production and distribution of a company’s products or services. Supply chain operations include the internal and external steps and processes required to design, create, market and deliver products and services to customers. They cross department lines and involve multiple activities, people, entities, data, information and resources.
How to Incorporate the Holiday Spirit in B2B Marketing
There’s no doubt that the holidays are a big part of business-to-consumer marketing. Consumer holiday ads from companies big and small are sometimes as familiar to us as decorations and time-honored, family traditions. But is the season ripe for B2B marketers as well?
4 Marketing KPIs That Matter
Using key performance indicators (KPIs) in marketing provides information that, when identified and harnessed, helps keep your business on track for continual growth. These measurements, however, are not just about sales revenue or clicks. To use marketing KPIs requires a deeper understanding of behaviors and data which tell the “rest of the story.”
Trends in Marketing: Reaching Your Audience Through Personalization
Personalization is becoming a strategic marketing imperative. Marketing personalization uses data to deliver customized brand messages to individual prospects and customers. Unlike traditional marketing, which casts a wide net, personalized marketing delivers the most relevant message at the ideal time through the right channel.
Do Traditional Marketing Values Still Matter in a Digital World?
When it comes to marketers, there are two basic groups of professionals. The first, considered the “old guard” takes a traditional approach with marketing values, tapping into the subconscious of their target audiences, digging deep into buying motives and psyche. The newer generation of marketers was raised with the internet and has been trained in a digital-first era. But what would happen if we could combine both skill sets?
How to Unify Sales and Marketing Teams Through Sales Enablement
Business leaders have discussed the differences and similarities between sales and marketing for years. Too often, the conversation ends there, without any clear and actionable takeaways. Yet, there are many insights to be gained that can lead to better sales results, deeper understandings of one another’s needs, and more camaraderie, collaboration and engagement. This process is known as sales enablement.
What Can Upstream and Downstream Marketing Do for You?
Most companies understand the importance of the marketing planning process. They create plans that include quantifiable goals, activities to engage in, assignment of responsibilities and a budget to fund the plan. That process, however, overlooks one key element: a strategic approach to marketing. When it comes to marketing, strategy should be the foundation or cornerstone of the marketing plan.
Event Marketing in 2021: In-Person, Hybrid and Virtual Events
In 2020, we faced significant challenges in the way we communicated, engaged and conducted business. From a marketing perspective, trade shows, conferences and other events were among the traditional initiatives that suffered the greatest losses. Cancelations due to the COVID-19 pandemic negatively affected revenue and profits for hotels, convention centers, restaurants, transportation, travel and others that sell at these venues or support events on a global scale. To compensate, event marketers needed to adapt quickly. And one of the solutions that evolved was the shift from in-person to virtual events.
4 Types of Media to Enhance Your Multichannel Marketing
There are four categories of media that help shape and define multichannel marketing—an essential strategy to use to expand marketing outreach. While 95 percent of marketers say they know how important multichannel marketing is for reaching their target audiences, only 73 percent say they have a multichannel program in place.
How to Develop a Unique and Memorable Brand Identity
The American Marketing Association defines a brand as, “a name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller’s good or service as distinct from those of other sellers.” While a brand is about distinction, it’s not just differences in products or services. Instead, a brand is about the unique perceptions and experiences you want to be known for in the marketplace.
How to Apply Mindfulness in Marketing
A recent Kaiser Family Foundation study found that nearly 40 percent of Americans believe the stress of the COVID-19 pandemic has negatively affected their mental health. While recognizing the need to encourage good mental health in the workplace is not new, it has become more complex.
Debunking 5 Myths of Public Relations (PR)
Since the introduction of the first public relations agency more than 100 years ago, public relations (PR) has evolved significantly. Our communications channels shape and reshape public relations. These channels include traditional mediums such as newspapers, radios and television. Newer channels used by PR include the internet and digital communications.
Target Marketing: Who Is the Right Audience?
Four Types of Target Marketing Before you can dive into the details of target marketing, consider these common marketing approaches to identify the best communications strategy for your audiences. Mass marketing (or undifferentiated marketing) is the most encompassing marketing technique and essentially ignores segmentation. In mass marketing, the organization sells to the largest audience possible
Adaptability: The Name of the Game in Event Marketing
While event marketing looks different in 2020 (and perhaps into the future), it doesn’t mean it is any less powerful. If anything, buyers and sellers are looking for more effective and efficient ways to connect. For organizations whose lifeblood is event marketing, consider some of these alternative methods in our new normal environment.
Marketing ROI: What It Is and How to Use It
Companies invest a lot on marketing communications. In the United States alone, in 2019 businesses spent more than $197 billion on marketing. In B2B companies, marketing grabs an average of 11.5 percent of the total budget. But is all that money well spent? And more fundamentally, does marketing actually work? A marketing ROI analysis can help answer those questions.
What’s the Greatest Marketing Challenge You Face?
It’s an understatement to say that 2020 has been a challenging year. And to make matters worse, the dust hasn’t settled yet. When it comes to global health crises, social upheaval, major job losses and business closures, the resulting social challenge and economic hardships are overwhelming. “We’re all in this together” is the common refrain. Yet, knowing that we aren’t alone in these struggles is not particularly comforting.
Marketer’s Mad Libs: Fill-in-the-Blank Brand Guide
A reputable and robust brand is essential to any company’s marketing arsenal. However, a brand is much more than an eye-catching logo and color scheme (although those are important too.) A brand represents the totality of who the company is as an organization. It captures and communicates the values it holds and shares with its stakeholders.
How to Create a Multicultural Marketing Strategy
Multicultural consumers represent approximately 40 percent of the population, yet only five percent of marketing spending is multiculturally oriented. When executed well, multicultural marketing—the targeting and reflection of different ethnicities and cultures within a brand’s overall audience—can unite people, empower groups and capitalize on culturally connected populations. When executed poorly, it can lead to backlash and a potentially devastating brand image.
The Art of B2B Storytelling in Marketing
The business-to-business marketplace is built differently than its business-to-consumer counterpart. B2C sells products or services directly to individuals. B2B targets organizations where the sales process can be longer and more complex. This reality makes the B2B marketplace more resistant to the sometimes whimsical, flashy or ostentatious marketing tactics used in the B2C space.
Increase LinkedIn Engagement With Their New Features
Similar to other marketing outreach initiatives, LinkedIn is not a one-and-done tactic. To get the most from it requires constant time, attention and learning to keep up to date with its newest features, algorithms and technologies. Here are some recent LinkedIn engagement changes that will give you more and better ways to take advantage of this powerful platform.
