The holidays are upon us! Thanksgiving has just past and Chanukah, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve are coming up on us like freight train in a tunnel. Besides a time to spend with families, the holidays are also a time for bad marketers to do awful holiday-themed marketing and annoy everyone. Don’t be that marketer—here’s […]

To be successful in marketing and in business in general, strategy is essential. Key to developing strategy is positioning. Strategic positioning—how an organization serves its customers and differentiates itself from the competition—is an often overlooked element of marketing. Without defined positioning, marketing lacks strategy and initiatives are ineffectively carried out piecemeal. Here are 5 Tips […]

Content marketers have it tough sometimes — creating all that content is no easy matter and staring down an empty editorial calendar with nary a tweet in hand is enough to give any content marketer pause. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Done judiciously, repurposing existing content can help fill in those gaping […]

Ever receive a gift that totally doesn’t fit who you are but makes you think “I know why you thought this was a good gift for me”? There is a fine line between a great gift and a bad gift and you really have to know the person well to know what would be a […]

I’ve talked before here about how important—and easy—it is to do things wrong quickly with digital marketing. That is, to try an idea out and then adjust it or even abandon it if it’s not working. One of the ways to do this is through A/B testing. Here are five tips:how to do A/B testing […]

I recently stumbled across an interesting website: Unroll.me. It’s a free service that helps people batch unsubscribe from email newsletters and subscriptions and in January, they gave out “awards” to the companies who lost the most email subscribers in 2013. 1-800 Flowers topped the list with a 52.5% unsubscribe rate. Yes, 1-800 Flowers lost over […]

There are many ways to learn about your customers—focus groups, surveys, etc.—but one method that doesn’t get a lot of attention is ethnography. This is too bad, because ethnography can be a very powerful tool for marketers. When marketers think about leveraging customer insights via non-traditional research, ethnography is likely to come up. Here is […]

Most people tend to assume that content marketing is just an inbound marketing tool, but that’s like saying butter is only good with bread. (Wrong, butter is good with everything!) True, content marketing is an important part of inbound marketing, but did you know that content marketing is also a customer service tool? Think about […]

We’ve all heard that content is king, but for many marketers the difficulty in content marketing is in creating all that content. Enter journalists: Journalists are content creation professionals, trained to churn out reams of quality content on tight deadlines. Here’s why you should hire journalists for your content marketing and what to look for […]

I want to talk to you today about a pyramid scheme — the content marketing pyramid to my exact. Just like the food pyramid helps you categorize your food and know how much of each type you should consume, the content marketing pyramid is a great way to help you create your content.   The […]

Marketing is hard work. It’s even harder when on top of fighting to create new content and reach more customers, you have to fight your own IT team. In many companies, IT and marketing often don’t play well together and each one becomes a ball-and-chain weight on the other, hampering productivity for both departments. It […]

  When it comes to content creation, you’ve probably heard the old maxim “COPE—Create Once, Publish Everywhere.” The COPE method maximizes your content’s usefulness and ensures it will reach the most people. The best way to do this is by writing your story, and then sharing it in different forms. This is content creation for […]