How To Spice Up Your Content Marketing With Animated GIFs [And Other Animated Visuals]
Images are powerful tools. They can attract and hold attention, or capture and convey an emotion in a way words cannot. Add some movement to your images and they become downright irresistible. Video is still a powerhouse, but the humble animated gif is enjoying a rise in popularity, too. It’s always been a fun way […]
10 Ways to Use Images for Memorable Marketing Results
There’s no shortage of content on the Internet. Every day, more than 2 million blog posts are published. If you’re a content publisher or a company that does content marketing, all that content creates a challenge. How can you stand out? Is there any hope of getting your audience’s attention? Being memorable? Some content publishers […]
How to Use Survey Questions to Create Better Content
Marketers can use questions from simple, straightforward surveys to build more effective content marketing assets and strategies.
4 Steps to Creating Content That Converts
As any seasoned content marketer should know, there’s a lot more to content marketing than simply creating a flashy infographic or writing a blog post, publishing it, crossing your fingers and hoping for the best. In order to generate leads from your content strategy, you need to consider both the content and the content experience. […]
The Role of Emotions in B2B Marketing: Telling a Story, Making a Sale
It seems dead-simple common sense that B2C buyers are emotionally driven to purchase the products they do (does this Apple Watch make me look cool? Rich? Fat?); after all, it’s all very personal. And B2B buyers are more cold-bloodedly concerned about product details, payment schedules, and competitive differentiators. It’s not as personal … right? If you think that’s […]
The Power of the Quiz in Marketing: 6 Lessons from The New York Times, BuzzFeed, and B2B Marketers
In 2014, digital marketers started hearing a lot about quizzes. Did you take BuzzFeed’s “What City Should You Actually Live In?” quiz when it was hot? As of March 3, 2015, it had racked up 20,738,516 views, and is generally credited with launching the BuzzFeed quiz empire. Or remember this one from the New York Times: […]
Why Blogging Is More Important Than Ever
“Content marketing” (which is really just distributing marketing content) is the hot buzzword for modern marketers. But there’s already a lot of content out there, and content marketing isn’t nearly as good as “interesting marketing.” Without interesting content, all these media channels are toothless. And (you know this already) interesting content is one of the top […]
17 Smart Ways B2B Marketers Can Use Pinterest
Here’s a list of 17 ways B2B marketers can use Pinterest, with examples to inspire you to get pinning.
How to Create an Editorial Calendar
Last week we talked about why you might want to use an editorial calendar. Now that you know how editorial calendars can help you and you’ve got a few ideas for how to use them, the problem becomes finding (or creating) one that’s right for you. For most people, that means an editorial calendar which […]
15 Ways to Repurpose Your Content and Find Eternal Happiness
Think of evergreen trees or that soaring last note held by Barbra Streisand in the song “Evergreen” – she held that for 20 seconds.
Customer Lifecycle Marketing: Reporting, Part 2
This series looks at the five sequential stages in the B2B marketing lifecycle, and discusses the key metrics for each that can be used to gain key insights. In Part 1, we covered the first two stages: Attract and Capture. These are typically the stages that garner the most attention, as lead generation remains the […]
Customer Lifecycle Marketing: Reporting, Part 1
In regards to analytics and reporting, B2B marketers tend to focus on early-funnel leads and their conversion. That’s practical; generating enough qualified leads remains the #1 concern for many marketers and their organizations. However, there is much more useful information to be gained through careful reporting and analysis of key metrics at all stages of […]
Duplicate Content, Curation, and – What’s a Rel=Canonical?
It’s a cold, hard world for a search engine. People ask you for guidance; you scan millions of pages for them, give them the best results you can find, and they never say thanks. You’re treated as a functionary, ignored until they need you again. (Sniff.) Still, it’s an engine-eat-engine world. You’ve got a job […]
6 Copy Starters for Emails & Letters
Copywriting – what you say and how you say it – is still one of the most important disciplines in marketing. Sometimes just getting started is the hardest part. The first sentence of copy is critical for grabbing attention. It sets the bait for hooking scanners – who become readers – who then turn into […]
Top Online Marketing Power Words (Hint: Free Is King)
Every year-end brings pundits’ lists of words to stop using. In pop culture and ordinary conversation, “awesome” and “literally” seem to top the lists (again) this year. In business, Jeff Haden took us to task for describing ourselves (or our companies) on our websites or in social media using words such as “world-class” or “motivated” […]
6 Content Marketing Insights from Joe Pulizzi
Joe Pulizzi of the Content Marketing Institute was in our town last week, speaking to a Meetup group about content marketing. (Thank you to sponsors Content Strategy PDX, Social Media Club PDX, and Babcock & Jenkins). After a bit of palaver on the state of marketing (prognosis: marketers are doing okay and if we keep […]
A Content Marketing Strategy Using Paid, Owned, and Earned Media
“Content marketing” is a perhaps the fastest-growing marketing tactic being used today. While it’s definitely become mainstream, there are lots of issues around how to create it, how to manage it…even how to think about it. The Content Marketing Institute has a new study, “B2B Content Marketing 2014: Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends–North America”, that shows […]
What Is Nudge Marketing?
Rand Fishkin of Moz visited Portland tonight to deliver an interesting talk: “The Nudge Is Mightier Than The Sword.” Rand’s presentation borrows from the behavioral economics theories of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, a book by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, and employs “choice architecture,” a concept holding that you can affect […]