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Archive for the ‘Marketing communications pointers’ Category

Jun

Build Authority to Build Your Audience and Brand Recognition [featuring Prezi]

Thought leadership: the term’s become inescapable in marketing circles. You might have read my article, “7 Things Thought Leaders Don’t Think.” It invoked a lot “hell yeahs” here at our blog, The Point, but caused a bit of a commotion in a LinkedIn group where I apparently teed-off a few thought leaders (or wanna-be’s). For the record, I want to make my position clear:

I do not have an anti-thought leadership stance.
My aim was to say that calling yourself one is a turnoff. 

Striving to be a thought leader is a solid marketing strategy.

By building authority in your industry and earning recognition as an expert (especially from those with influential voices), you’ll effectively expand your audience. More—and greater—opportunities will follow.

The strategy surfaces more often than ever before for a couple of reasons. One, this is the age of specialization. Identifying and pursuing a niche can be a highly effective way to speed your path to success. Secondly, marketers, personal branders, or anyone aiming to establish a reputation as an expert, has more chances to do so. The publishing doors have all swung wide open. If you have advice and innovative ideas to share on your subject, nothing should stand in your way. The web is yours. Start publishing.

(more…)

May

Enlarge Your Digital Footprint for More Effective Online Marketing

Your digital footprint is huge. Okay, well, truthfully, I don’t know what size it is. But here’s what I do know: your digital footprint has a huge effect on your online marketing.

When it comes to factors you can control to improve your website traffic, it’s Mr. Big. You do want to improve your website traffic, correct? Let’s have a look at how it’s done.

footprint

Take charge, woman. Get large, man.

Why do I feel like I’m hawking Viagra?

But seriously ladies and gentlemen, we have one humdinger of a topic, which in my biased opinion, has yet to inspire a truly helpful online article. So, here and now, I set out to offer you the ultimate list of easy and effective ways to enlarge your digital footprint, increase your findability factor (otherwise known as search results), and drive traffic to your website. (more…)

May

The Most Effective Online Marketers Focus On One Thing

effective online marketing - you

You devour online marketing lessons. You feast on articles, reports, books, and eBooks. Perhaps it’s so important to you, you spend some of your precious time attending webinars and conferences and you can’t help but join the conversation on blogs and via social media.

Good for you.

There’s a ton of information to take in, the rules change daily, and if you’re going to succeed with online marketing, you must master a good many practices, techniques and tools.

The experts keep serving up specialized dishes: content marketing, social media marketing, search marketing, permission-based marketing, inbound marketing and any (fill-in-the-blank-here) marketing.

The more these ingredients get heaped onto our plates, the more the meal calls for a bowl and spoon. It’s digital soup, my friend.

Clarity is hard to achieve.

Pencils out. It’s pop quiz time. (more…)

Feb

How Does Your Email Rate for Open Rates?

An overwhelming majority of the potential audience is not interested in what us marketers have to say.

 

Ain’t nothing new there, but in the mail business, things have changed. I’ll try to illustrate my point by comparing direct mail and email, both of which are usually considered to be forms of direct marketing measured largely by response rates.

With direct mail, you do your best to guess who should get the mail, open it, read it, and then be a good consumer and do what you told them to. If 1, 2, maybe 3 percent of them actually do, you can bet the marketing team will be uncorking the bubbly and partying down with Kool & The Gang.

Yet even in a hugely successful mail campaign a seriously large portion of the money pumped into the program might as well have been flushed. Another sad truth is the marketing team has no clue as to who did or didn’t open the mail, which makes it that much more difficult to refine the program to work better next time.

But now, with email, short of knowing what the recipient had for breakfast, we feast on a ton of data. Email marketing may not deliver every day in every way, but you can rest assured it’ll deliver a mountain of metrics.

So what kind of response does your email get?

(more…)

Sep

Free Webinar: The Value of Content on Today’s Web

Let’s talk on Tuesday.

I’m excited to announce I’ll be joining a small panel of content marketing experts for a fun, informative, and interactive webinar this coming Tuesday, October 2. The webinar is free and open to all.

Register here, now.

Here’s a preview of some of the things we’ll be talking about.

My 2-cents worth.

The topics we’ll cover include “the skills content creators must have.” I’ll speak to this and tell you:

•  Why some content is treasured and other is trashed

•  How to sharpen your content creation skills

•  What the process of delivering content successfully looks like.

Some big thinkers will be there with us.

What a panel we’ll have. Social Media Today’s CEO, Robin Carey will host the webinar and she’s invited two of the top influencers in online media to join the program:

Arnie Kuenn

Arnie Kuenn—He’s the author of “Accelerate: Moving Your Business Forward through the Convergence of Search, Social & Content Marketing,” CEO of Vertical Measures, and an in-demand speaker on all types of intelligent Internet marketing.

Saul Berman

 

Saul Berman, Ph.D — The Global & Americas Leader for the IBM Strategy & Change Consulting group within IBM Global Business Services (GBS).

 

the value of content webinar

 

Talk to you Tuesday.