the best creative ideas ever

It’s no secret that businesses need to optimize their digital efforts in order to remain relevant and competitive. This means having a mobile-first web strategy, and strong SEO should be second nature by now — allowing you to focus on the next wave of tech trends.

Social Media is a constantly evolving space. It’s hard to keep up with the trends, algorithms, and updates within each app. It’s also hard to keep growing your following, increase engagement, and feel connected to your community. 

So what is the key to long-term growth? 

Meeting your customer where they are at has arguably never been easier. The average person in 2020 spent 145 minutes a day on social media. This may not be great news for mental health, but it’s pretty good news for marketers locating their customers. 

In addition to spending time online, there are 1 billion messages exchanged between people and businesses every month on Facebook Messenger, and 70% of people expect to message businesses more in the future for customer service questions. As customer expectations increase for businesses' interaction on social media, it’s essential to review your operations.

So you and your website have been through a lot. Ol' Faithful has been around since you landed that key client, hired your first employees, and started your newsletter. It's treated you well, but maybe, just maybe, it's time to move on.

Look, we know it's easy to get attached to your website. Especially if it's still sending traffic and sales your way. But sometimes, we stick with a good thing long after it's time to move on - often due to sentimentality, inertia, or even uncertainty about what's next.

With 1 billion monthly users, Instagram is no longer an “optional” social media platform for your business. It’s now a necessity—especially if you have products or food to sell. With the latest shopping and food delivery options on the Gram, you can both leverage the power of social media and the convenience of online shopping.

Every so often the marketing world gets itself a new buzzword. Some stick. Some don't. 

Actionable analytics. 

Brand identity. 

Content is king. 

And more recently: Surround sound marketing. 

Nowadays, the world is truly like a global village. Most people––voluntarily!––share a ton of personal information through social media. Granted, such habits could pose some safety risks. However, it may also have benefits. Intrigued? Keep reading, friends. 

What other people say about your business matters. But the new word-of-mouth is all happening online. An incredible 91% of people read online reviews, and 84% give those reviews as much weight as input from their friends. Great reviews are great for business (92% of people will check out a local business with a 4 star or more rating), and bad ones...well, 40% of people will walk away from a business with bad reviews.

From Google to social media to TV commercials, we're exposed to thousands of ads every day. We see so many ads that we're almost blind to them. That is until one breaks through the noise and pulls at our heartstrings. Suddenly, we find ourselves tearing up, clicking through, and even making a purchase. What is this phenomenon? Emotional marketing.

To achieve solid ROI on your advertising campaigns, you need to be both targeted and ubiquitous. Common wisdom says that it takes 6-8 touches (interactions) for a prospect to hand over money for your product. Basically, by putting your product or service in front of an interested prospect's face multiple times, you'll begin to build recognition, rapport, and trust. Once you've done that, conversion is just a step away. 

The best way to be targeted and ubiquitous? Retargeting.

In May 2020, Google announced that if sites wanted a ranking boost, they needed to meet its freshly rolled-out Web Core Vitals. The announcement gave site admins and marketing teams a year to get on top of things, but guess what? Yep, a whole year has passed, and that time is here.

When brands talk about social, it's mostly from a communications and marketing perspective. Which posts translate into the most likes? How much content should you create to meet your engagement metrics? Are you visible on all the right channels?

But social offers way more possibilities than ticking off some KPIs in your marketing budget (although those matters too!). Social media has grown to become a massive ecosystem where all of your existing and prospective customers hang out and talk about their interests and concerns, giving you a ton of opportunities to make sure your brand is delivering exactly what the market needs.

Are you sometimes amazed at how accurately you're targeted by ads—especially ads that pop up, say, for a store you're currently in? Of course, we all know that's no mistake. Marketers are getting savvier by the day in how they serve you ads and offers. And what's making that even easier? Geoframing.

As marketers and advertisers, we aim to create successful campaigns and motivate our target audience to take action. We analyze data, look at market research, and dive deep into how consumers or clients make decisions. 

Everyone wants to be the next Apple or Nike. Or so they say. What they really mean is that they want to be as successful, as awe-inspiring and as beloved as Apple or Nike. Because these two brands are irresistible. They’re among just a handful of brands that have superfans – fans that line up for a new product launch or stay up late to watch a new demo.

No matter how you slice it, catering your business to appeal to repeat customers just makes sense. Though one-offs or “one-night stands” can be fine and infuse some necessary capital into your business during a slow period, ultimately, it’s more costly and less efficient for you to chase after new customers day in and day out. 

It's hard for some of us to imagine a world without smartphones, the internet, and social media. Millennials and Generation Zers have always interacted with friends, family, followers, and even their favorite brands online.

Just like these two generations, there are also brands that are digitally native—meaning their business has only existed in the digital world, and their sales are almost entirely made online. Examples include Zappos, Casper, Bombas, and Warby Parker. On the flip side, you have legacy brick-and-mortar brands like Coke, Pepsi, Microsoft, and Nike that have existed for decades and have had to delve into the digital world to remain relevant.

This past year has required consumers to become intimately familiar with digital shopping and services. Even though stringent lockdowns are mostly in the rear window, people have shown a marked change in how they shop, consume content, and connect with people. ScreenTime reports are way up, and people are glued to their inboxes. The upshot? Email marketing is more important than ever - and so is capturing those crucial email addresses.

When making a sale, your customers need to know who you are. Nobody buys your product or service when they can’t find you. And in today’s world, this means visibility. Your customers need to find you online. Sure, it’s worthwhile to have a physical storefront. But—especially in the post-COVID world—most of our interactions are taking place online. This goes for business transactions as well.

Experiential marketing is about creating a meaningful connection between a brand and its customers. It’s more than just promoting the product or service, it’s designed for customers to actively engage with the brand and the company’s core values. This can look different for every brand, but common tactics are events, pop up stores, and interactive experiences in specific areas. However, what’s typically done in experiential marketing is likely unsafe and unsanitary in the new normal. So how do we adjust?

Successful marketing is all about standing out in the right ways. Great creative campaigns are memorable, appealing, relevant, and actionable. They get your brand out there in surprising ways that attract attention and engagement - and inspire sharing and discussion. Here's how to build a creative campaign that's as distinctive as it is unforgettable.

A growing trend among businesses is the use of retail media to influence their customers. This is mainly because brand loyalty is hard to come by. 

A Neilson study posits that only 8% of buyers are actually brand loyalists. That means that most purchases these days are decided upon at the point of sale, or at least very near to it. Enter the wielding of retail media tactics to capture those buyers. 

We all leaped into 2020 with big ambitions and lofty goals. But this year has thrown all sorts of twists, turns, and surprises at us. If you've fallen short of your resolutions for the year, now's the ideal time to start planning a major comeback for 2021. Not sure where to start? Here's our master list of marketing resolutions for 2021 to set you off on the right foot.

2020's Halloween festivities might be wrapping up, but we're already prepping our costumes, decorations, and content calendars for next year. Like the fiendish killers, fiends and foes who make the spooky season so great, we like to stay a step or two ahead of things, our industry included!

If we've learned anything from the horror films we've been watching this spooky season, it's that the best fictional killers are meticulous planners. If they want to come back for a second or maybe third installment of their franchise, they need to analyze their success rate, improve their methods and, of course, keep tabs on their victims. 

We all know that 2020 has brought an onslaught of shifts that we now have to navigate in both our personal and professional aims. Data Privacy isn't a new conversation but is one that Covid-19 has most definitely affected.

As we inch closer to Halloween, we've got all things creepy and kooky on our minds. Among them? Necromancy. Fortunately, in our field, that has less to do with resurrecting dead bodies and more to do with bringing content back from the dead. Here's how and why to give your content a second lease on life.

Marketing isn’t a cakewalk! It can be a real slog at times, and you might wonder if all your hard work is really making a difference. Plus, all these new ways to market… it’s not like the old days where you just stuff some mailers, lick envelopes, and say a few Hail Mary’s! 

Nothing is for everyone. Even Halloween isn't (although let's face it, the naysayers are wrong.) That same idea holds true for your content. To create truly killer content that gets inside your audience's brains and gives them a chill or two, you need to know who your audience is and how to capture their attention. We do this by fashioning audience personas. 

While a strong immune system is one of the population's best bet against viruses, brands need to focus on a similar approach: building up their own immunity. With 55% of temporary business closures since March now permanent, it's clear that COVID-19 presents a serious health risk to the nation's businesses. If the past few months have compromised the health of your brand, here's how to give your business a boost to keep it fighting fit. 

As Halloween approaches, we're all embracing our inner spookiness. We want our decorations to induce gasps, our costumes to elicit screams, and our trick or treats to be utterly memorable. But it's not just on Halloween that we should be thinking about making a killer impression. Our brands should be striving to create content that's a total scream all year round. Here's how to create marketing content that will cause a shiver down your fans' spines - and that will give your bottom line a bump in the night.

Social media is bursting with opinions; many of them shared in the 6,000 tweets we send a second. But Twitter barely scratches the social media opinion-sharing iceberg. About 500,000 of us browse Instagram every day, and when we're not doing that, we're watching 1 billion hours worth of YouTube videos. That doesn't even count all the commenting, sharing, hashtagging, and tagging what we're doing across the half dozen social platforms we're active on. To put it bluntly, social media is where all the important conversations are happening. And it's vital that your brand makes an effort to hear and respond to what users are saying about you, your industry, or your competitors.

There's no question that podcasts are popular, and the podcast listening demographic is on the rise, particularly during this Covid-19 pandemic. Podcasts are popular because they give listeners a way to consume information that doesn't require them to read or keep their eyes on a screen. They can simply tune in and listen, whether it's from their cell phone, their car on a long commute, working out, or catching up on household chores. In short, it's convenient! 

Whether you’re a fan of Discovery Channel’s Shark Week or not, we can most likely agree on one thing– it’s a highly anticipated event! For over three decades, they’ve attracted millions of viewers, and each year people come back for more. But aside from the amazing content produced, what contributes to Shark Week’s success? Marketing. Taking inspiration from Shark Week, let’s dive in (pun intended) to understanding how to build excitement with your marketing.

Google My Business is the online equivalent of a phone book listing. It tells customers who you are, where to find you, what your opening hours are, and how to get in touch. But My Business goes well beyond the typical phone book advert. In addition to serving up the basics about your business, it can be configured with photos, menus or services lists, and FAQs. 

Though we are living in trying times, and there are a lot of things that seem beyond the scope of our control, it’s more important than ever to focus on what we can control. 

In the digital realm, plenty of things are a mere flash in the pan: the viral hits, the trending topics, the memes, and the April Fool's Day pranks. Those are all great for a quick burst of traffic, but they don't necessarily have staying power. Evergreen content, on the other hand, keeps driving traffic to your page in the long term - and it's critical to a powerful content marketing strategy.

Marketing in the finance world can be a tough job, especially if you're marketing financial services. Younger customers are wary of traditional banks, inexperienced when it comes to investing, and unimpressed by insurance. But all is not lost. If you're determined to connect with potential customers, here's what to keep in mind.

Click Here. Learn More. Buy Now. There are so many different ways to craft a call to action (CTA), but not all are created equal. And there's actually a lot more thought put into them than you might think. Many companies test and retest CTAs to come up with the ones that convert the most successfully.

It goes without saying that our event and professional development calendars are looking very different these days. All those in-person conferences, workshops, and classes are now taking place online, which means a tremendous shift in how they're delivered. Instructors and mediators are working hard to figure out how to create a community amongst remote participants - not to mention how to create a sense of hands-on immediacy in a virtual environment.

In a perfect world, you build it, and they come. But business owners (and marketers) know all too well life isn't as easy as that. It takes time for a customer to move from the notion that they might want to buy something to the step of actually buying it. Brands need to make an ongoing, dedicated effort to courting customers in order to make that coveted sale. Enter the marketing funnel.

From the Curiosity Rover to singing astronaut Chris Hadfield to the recent SpaceX launch, NASA is never far from our newsfeeds. And with a whopping 58.2M followers on IG, 37M followers on Twitter, and 22.5M likes on Facebook, it's a staple of our social media accounts as well. Let's take a look at what makes NASA an enduring, inspiring presence that the world wants to get behind - and how you can use those same ideas to launch your business into the stratosphere.

If you have a little more downtime on your hands than usual, or you're starting to prepare to open back up for business. Now's the time to knuckle down and get ahead on those marketing tasks that you don't usually have the time to attend to. The hard work you put in now will pay dividends when the country reopens for business.

COVID-19 has ushered in new ways of living, working - and spending. With the majority of the nation currently under lockdown, non-essential businesses closed, and huge levels of uncertainty around the future of work and the economy, consumer mindsets are drastically shifting. 

With almost all workplace activity has shifted online, and social media engagement way up, keeping your brand active on social is more vital than ever. With that said, brands need to ensure that their approach to social considers the impact of coronavirus on how we live and work - and is sensitive to that at all times.

If your business is shuttered or facing reduced interest due to the impact of COVID-19, your social media presence may be the last thing on your mind. But now, more than ever, your social media presence matters. That's because social media engagement is spiking across almost all platforms. TikTok and Snapchat usage are up 47% and 18.5%, respectively, with Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram all seeing an increase in interest of about 15%.

I love college basketball, heck, I love all basketball, but I love the action and passion of college basketball most of all. I think one of the main drivers of our obsession lies in the marketing and advertising industry's focus on delivering content at an incredible pace, which delivers massive impressions and engagement.

America loves college basketball; the statistics are staggering with 11.3 million viewers on average over the last 22 years. College fans live-streamed a total of 80.7 million hours with a record viewership of 21.2 million for the championship game, which was a record. TV advertising spends from 2005 to 2015 were a total of $8,668,000, with 2015 coming in at $1,163,000. In 2015, the average cost of a 30-second spot was $1.55 million. Digital advertising spend by device in 2015 left smartphones & tablets getting $30.4 billion and desktops & laptops receiving $27.6 billion.

The Novel Coronavirus is rapidly spreading around the world, sickening hundreds of thousands and killing thousands. On US shores, multiple states have declared a state of emergency due to the virus. In addition to its medical impact, we're also seeing an incredible economic one. Supply chains have been disrupted, the market is in free fall, major events are being canceled, and small businesses are struggling.  

The speed at which the virus has thrown our lives into upheaval shows just how important it is to have a corporate crisis response ready to go. Here's how to approach yours.

Despite the pervasiveness of social media, it can still be daunting for some businesses to fully leverage it for marketing purposes. This can be especially true for government contractors. But no matter how intimidating, the benefits of social media marketing can't — and shouldn't — be ignored.

Let's look at some key reasons why social media should play a key role in any government contractor's marketing strategy.

Businesses know that websites are a critically important piece of marketing collateral. The digital equivalent of a business card, they serve to validate you as a business, while also generating trust, reliability, credibility and even sales. Your website is where people will arrive after Googling you or meeting you at a conference. And they can be the make-or-break between someone choosing you or a competitor. While the initial outlay for a small business website can seem hefty, a well-designed, strategically crafted website will recoup every penny.

When you begin to develop your marketing campaign, you'll start with your objective of the campaign. 

• Are you looking primarily to create brand awareness? 
• Are you launching a new product? Trying to improves sales? 
• Are you targeting a new customer? Trying to improve your relationship with your current customers? 

Whatever your objective is of your campaign will determine how you handle each marketing touchpoint.

Integrated marketing strategy. Your team comes in saying they want to develop a truly integrated marketing campaign. It'll produce results. It'll create brand recognition, lead to better cost management and ultimately make more impactful connections with customers. It's all so exciting.

We’ve moved from a one-size-fits-all economy to a mass customization economy, and we can examine the effects in many different aspects of business. The attention of marketing has since shifted from features to benefits, to experience, to tribal identification.

Selling has evolved from “what it has” to “what it does” to “what you’ll feel” to “who you are.” For certain industries, features and benefits are still extremely important— however, personal identity is on its way to surpassing them. A consumer’s personal identity and the brands they choose now go hand and hand.

Are your marketing campaigns falling on deaf ears? No matter how good your campaign is, it won't succeed unless you're targeting the right audience in the right way. That's where buyer personas come in. Buyer personas give you the information you need to make better decisions around how and where to reach your ideal audience. Without them, you're simply gambling your hard-earned money on campaigns with questionable ROI.

Here's how buyer personas can help you break through the noise in order to reach your target audience and convince them to make a purchase.

As you browse the internet, you probably get annoyed by intrusive display ads. You might even ignore them completely. And you're not alone: A study found that 86% of consumers suffer from "banner blindness" – where they can't even recall the last banner ad they saw. And these days, a lot of people are going out of their way to avoid display ads by using ad blockers.

The new year is fast approaching, and we all know what that means: new year's resolutions. It's a time to reflect on the last 12 months and make new goals. But it doesn't all have to be about more gym time and fewer carbs — this is the perfect opportunity to step back and assess your marketing efforts.

As you take stock of your company's marketing practices, be honest. What's holding you back from improving your customer attraction, engagement, and conversion? What could you be doing better?

We have a few ideas for marketing goals to set in 2020.

Welcome to the digital age in which Google is the yellow pages, Facebook is your billboard on the highway and Youtube is our television.

For the consumer, these entities are all tools and points of access to anything and everything they want. For the business owner, these are the platforms in which you can reach your potential customer.

Your brand's marketing mix is like the legs of a stool. Every leg is important. They all support the same thing and you need them all in order to hold it up. Your brand might not have all the same legs as another stool but it should definitely have more than one - you can't stand up a stool by relying on just one leg.

Let's go over some of the most valuable marketing 'legs'

Are you struggling to generate new leads or garner first-time customers? If so, you might have a discoverability problem. What does that mean? Quite simply, people can't find you online and may not even know you exist.

Boosting your visibility is a critical component of increasing sales and growing your business, and there are a number of ways to go about it. Read on to learn how to improve your discoverability!

Google BERT has been dubbed, "Google's biggest change in 5 years," and "One that will impact one in ten searches." But what exactly is it?

Rolled out on October 25, Google BERT is a deep learning-powered Natural Language Processing (NLP) model designed to help Google better understand language in order to serve more relevant results. Rather than returning results based on search strings, it looks at the relationship between the words in a sentence and at the wider context of a search.

The pharmacovigilance industry is poised to grow into an $8 billion market by 2024. That’s a massive increase of over 10 percent since 2017. And that means two things. First, there’s money in this industry. And second, it's going to become more competitive.

And when there’s more competition, companies need to work harder to reach their audiences. That requires marketing. But it requires more and better marketing than what most companies are doing right now. Here's why your organization needs to up its game.

You already do a lot to effectively market your company: You're on social media. You have a blog. You produce videos. Your email marketing program is humming along. But have you ever considered podcasting?

You might say this sounds like a difficult endeavor that would take too much time and resources. Besides, it's out of your comfort zone and you probably couldn't garner enough listeners to make it worth it. 

But to that, we say, not so fast! There are a number of reasons why podcasts are a powerful marketing tool and why they're not actually as daunting as you might think.

If you haven’t bothered developing a monthly content marketing strategy, we daresay, you’re behind in the times. However, you can’t just create content willy-nilly. There is no true success without a solid strategy, and strategy requires forethought, not mere execution. Without a strategy, creating content is a waste of time.

Creating a strategy to produce regular marketing content that engages and connects with your prospects is like making a plan to fill your car up with gas each week. Fail to fill, and you might find yourself stranded on the side of the road somewhere.

Content marketing is king, but especially when the right people are creating it. In today's media landscape, those people are users. In fact, both brands and consumers agree that user-generated content (UGC) is more influential than those created by brands. The reason? UGC is authentic, engaging and helps humanize brands. It's created by fans who want to give brands a boost.

UGC runs the whole gamut of media: blog posts, pictures, videos, Tweets, testimonials, reviews, and customer feedback. The possibilities for brands are huge, but too often brands fall short when it comes to fostering this content.

Let's say you just crafted a perfect email to your customers. It's clever, exciting, and beautifully designed. But what if that email doesn't get delivered to 50 percent of your list? That's frustrating, to say the least.

But how could that happen? It could be that your email sender reputation isn't up to snuff. Let's explore the factors that can impact your email delivery rate and how to boost your chances to get those important messages into inboxes.

With everyone and their brother using social media these days, standing out can be a challenge. If you want your business to be noticed on sites like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, you'll want to mix it up and stay on top of the latest trends.

Below are three ways to liven up your feeds and keep your audience engaged.

Despite the rise and success of social media, email campaigns are still a highly effective marketing tool. They give you a chance to reach your audiences based on where they are in the customer lifecycle, which is a key strategy to keep them engaged and coming back. Of course, you don't have the time to be manually pushing "send" on hundreds of emails every day. That's where email automation comes in.

Let's explore four key types of automated email campaigns you should be running.

In the last few months, how many Shark Week articles have you seen popping up? My guess is if you've been online, you've seen at least a whispering of Shark Week since about mid-July. 

From its first launch in 1988, Shark Week has been a hit. And in 2019 it seems to still be gaining momentum as it's adapted to new methods of marketing and technology. 

This year, Discovery Channel saw a 109.2% increase in their primetime TV ad impressions compared to the week before Shark Week (iSpot.tv). Then on Thursday (Aug 1st), a prime television slot, Discovery ranked three out of the top five rated shows with Monster Mako: Predator, Great White Kill Zone and Return to Shark Island (The Neilson Company).

Google makes the rules and we live to follow them.

Below are 7 things to AVOID doing, so you can stay on Google’s good side and rank high in their search results.

1. Absolutely "no thin" content.

A common practice among site owners trying to manipulate search results is to create thousands of pages targeting a different keyword search term and having very little useful content for its visitor. If a webpage's content consists of a short paragraph of text with a search term used abundantly within the text, it's not very useful to a visitor and is not worthy of a good ranking.

A solid content calendar is critical to the success of your company's content marketing program. And there's no one better to prepare that content than your employees. They know the information your customers want to know, and what kind of questions are being asked of you. Blogging is also a great way to keep your employees on top of industry news and trends.

Unfortunately, actually getting your employees to write those blog posts can be like pulling teeth. Even assigning blog posts to specific employees often doesn't help. Too often they struggle with motivation, with structuring their posts, and with writing something that doesn't require multiple rounds of revisions.

If you know anything at all about marketing in today’s technological landscape, you probably already know that having an email list is imperative. There’s just no getting around that fact that most of the world today communicates through a screen.

Even more important is having an email list that’s engaged, with people that actually want to receive your emails. That’s no small feat in an era of too much information and inbox overwhelm. So how does one go about building such a holy grail of modern-day marketing? There are several ways actually and implementing a few of them at once will likely give you the best results.

While there are various studies looking to determine exactly how many hours a day the average person spends on their phone, they all draw a similar conclusion – around 3.5 to 4 hours. That's nearly a quarter of time spent awake, not to mention phones are usually the last thing we connect with before falling asleep. 

What does this mean for businesses? 

It means everything must be designed with mobile in mind. There's a very high chance that when your target market sees your website, e-newsletter, or digital advertisement, it will be from their phone or tablet. So from marketing strategies to user experience, to graphics, mobile design needs to be a priority.

Good news! This shocking amount of 'screen-time' = a massive opportunity for your business to shine and to connect – as long as you're thinking ahead and staying up to date on trends in the mobile design world.

Hey, Alexa/Siri/Google/Allegra/WhateverYourName Is! How do I get you to find my content?

AI assistants and smart speakers are growing rapidly in popularity. Currently, at least one in six Americans are using a smart speaker, and it's estimated that about 8 billion voice assistants will be in use by 2023. This means that people are starting to replace their traditional internet searches with voice search. In fact, Gartner predicts that 30% of web browsing sessions will be done without a screen by 2020.

In the big world of government contracting, many contractors are beginning to realize the necessity of social media marketing in getting attention, messaging, and building relationships with government decision makers. If you haven't already built a strong system of communication tools, including a robust social media strategy, now is the time to get going.

Here are eight steps to getting started:

Establishing and evaluating metrics for your business campaigns require a solid understanding of the differences between quality and quantity. The debate is age-old. Is it better to have a ton of web traffic and eyes, or better to have less traffic and eyes, but more sales and conversions? Some camps will tell you quantity is always better, whereas others believe quality is paramount. After all, isn’t the sale the whole point? Well, yes, and no.

You’re ready to start investing a solid monthly budget in content marketing for your business.

It might be because you’ve been told a good content marketing strategy is going to increase traffic on your website and leads for your business.

Maybe you like the idea of establishing yourself as an authority in your industry and know a quality blog can do just that.

Perhaps you’re BIG on meeting your customers where they spend their time so you know your business needs to find a way to be on social media.

Regardless, you know not only is content marketing a thing, it’s THE THING.

And if you don’t know it yet...well we're telling you now.

In the era of social media and digital marketing, email lists may seem like an old-fashioned marketing strategy, but there’s no denying the results that occur when a budding brand or business successfully rolls out a stellar email marketing campaign.

Being able to target your audience by directing your copy straight into their inboxes is one of the fastest and easiest ways to get your point across.

If you’re venturing into the big bad world of online or b2b marketing, there’s no better way to start growing your business than developing a solid email strategy. And the secret to any great email campaign starts with developing and build a solid email list.

Everyone wants their content to go viral. It's the dream! But is that something you can really do on purpose? Maybe, maybe not. But one thing is for sure: If you want your content to be shared, there are several strategies you can employ.

Keep in mind that just because you have high traffic to your website, blog, or social media channel doesn't mean that your content is actually being shared. And sharing should be a top goal, as it immediately amplifies your audience – for free.

Below are eight ways to pump up the shareability of your content.

What's black and white and read all over? A newspaper. Bada-ching. While that joke may never get old, newspapers have aged quite a bit over the years. Still, even though media has evolved from its print days, its soul remains the same. 

Social media is a powerful tool to expand your reach, strengthen your brand, and build relationships. And if you think of your website as a country, then you could argue that your social media channels are your embassies – the outposts you have in other communities to communicate about your company.

So how do you make sure you're fully leveraging your embassies? Take a look at the tips below to make your social media presence all it can be.

Touchpoints play a vital role in the marketing strategy of any business. Properly leveraged, they're the key to taking a customer from the initial awareness stage all the way through to conversion. When you get touchpoints right, you can create customers who are more than loyal. They're obsessed with your brand and what you offer.

Let’s face it. Social media isn’t going anywhere. Neither is the internet.

So, it just makes good business sense to learn how to utilize one of the most powerful tools at our disposal in this new era of marketing and branding. While it may seem like a footnote for many busy business owners, neglecting your social media presence and failing to build a community around your loyal clients and customers is setting you up for failure over the long-term. Remember that the people you connect with online aren’t just “online.”

There are a number of ways to influence the perception of your company in the public eye. From advertising to marketing to public relations, you have a cornucopia of options before you to solidify your brand and interact with customers. But what's the difference between them all? Read on to find out.

For many years, marketing and advertising have used rationality behind their advertising campaigns. After all, it just makes sense. The reasoning is that if you hit people with enough information about features and give them a cool USP (unique selling point), logic will prevail. The consumer will digest all the facts and data, realize your brand offers exactly what they’re looking for, and make a perfectly rational buying decision. Except erm… no. That’s rarely what happens.

Content marketing is on another rise in popularity and has been for quite a while now. If you’re a business or a brand, chances are, you’re doing a lot of it as a way to promote your brand, without actually promoting it.

This means that now more than ever, your brand is part business, part publishing company. Blogs are the new norm for many businesses, with pressure to publish engaging content that search engines love on a regular basis.

They very well could be.

If you are noticing a spike in your email click activity, and you don’t have a valid explanation for it, then you could be the victim of an email click bot. You may have heard of SPAM bots before, designed to collect or farm email addresses from the web, create lists, and spam people with unwanted emails. Bots are actually the source of quite a bit of traffic on the internet. It’s estimated that around 48% of web traffic originates from a bot, and they are far more sophisticated today than even a few years ago.

The internet abounds with articles on how to write for SEO. Conventional wisdom says that search engine ranking is the only metric that matters. With a high ranking comes clicks, and with clicks come monetization and conversions. But writing for bots and SEO is hardly the way to optimize your content. There's little point in getting those clicks if your readers immediately bounce. After all, those bots may determine the rankings - but it's people who determine your success.

Gone are the days when social media was “merely social.” In today’s landscape, social media is now just another form of advertising, similar in many respects to traditional media. It’s a pay-to-play system, one that requires money to gain traction and to build a targeted audience. That’s not to say you can’t still build an audience organically, but it is probably about a gazillion times harder than it used to be. (Yes, we checked. Gazillion is a statistic.)

Blogging is part of any good content marketing plan. But writing a blog isn't as easy as firing off a tweet or uploading a photo to Instagram. A blog needs to appeal to a time-poor audience, hit certain beats, and present key insights and takeaways - all while staying on brand. Sound scary? Don't despair! Here's how to write a blog post in twenty minutes that will get clicks, inspire shares and encourage comments.

No longer is it enough for a business to merely be a corporate brand and business entity. The companies that are succeeding in today’s culture are the ones that are learning how to humanize their brand and resonate not just with customers as a whole, but customers as individuals.

No longer is it enough for a brand to merely do business with people. No longer is it enough for brands to merely be social and engage their customers and clients. Now it is important for businesses to do both of the above, as well as humanize themselves and simply, “be real,” with customers today.

It's the start of the new year and everyone is talking a big game about the goals they want to achieve in 2019. The gyms are packed with new members. Scales are purchased. Whole30 is started. Motivational quotes fill Instagram feeds and seem like they'll never end. These people are really determined. 

Millennials used to be the biggest buzzword in marketing. For years, brands were scrambling to find new ways to tailor their content to meet the younger demographic. Sometimes it worked (like with Spotify’s New Year’s campaign) and sometimes it didn’t (see: Pepsi’s disastrous Kendall Jenner commercial). However, as 2018 comes to a close, we’re faced with another grim reminder that we’re not only getting older, but Millennials are too. In fact, Generation Z is set to outnumber Millennials in 2019 and is set to become the next biggest target group.

Social media is a wonderful way to expand your customer base, interact with followers, and show the world what your company is all about. But we all know how easy it is to mindlessly scroll through your feed, barely paying attention to anything you see (Facebook users spend an average of 1.7 seconds with any piece of mobile content).

Our attention spans are getting shorter, and so are our videos. Today, short-form videos are the secret to winning the attention of your fans - and their fans. And the social media titans know it. From Twitter to Instagram to Facebook, every major platform has rolled out short-form video functionality. Even Pinterest and LinkedIn are in on the game. 

What's the Deal With E-Newsletters?

Remember the "club fair" when you first started college, everyone with great enthusiasm signs up for way too many clubs but in the end only really joined one or two. Similarly, it's become an all too familiar occurrence, email inboxes brimming with newsletters we signed up to receive. The realization usually starts with a Monday morning inbox mess, and a when did I sign up for that moment?

If you know anything about the internet and marketing your business online, you probably know of or have heard of landing pages. Essentially, a landing page is a web page created so you can drive targeted traffic to it, using various methods like FB or Google ads, banner ads, marketing emails and more.

More content marketing has become something of a business mantra over the past ten years, but how do you know if the content you’re producing is doing your brand any good? Clicks can be deceptive, and sales don’t always mean long-term revenue.

Studies show that 33% of B2B marketers and 41% of B2C marketers have no idea how to measure their content marketing efforts effectively. If you’re wondering whether your efforts are hitting the mark, here are a few simple tips to help you measure its worth of your business publishing efforts.

Compared to Google AdWords, Facebook Advertising ranks as the reigning champ. You can advertise with them for mere pennies on the dollar, which means you can pimp out your products or services not only effectively, but cost-efficiently too.

Provided, of course, you’ve gleaned a bit of know-how and aren’t flying blind. To really see returns you can bank on, we strongly suggest using the Facebook Ads Manager to run your campaigns.

Everyone loves a shiny new lead. It's easy to be tempted by new possibilities and unintentionally neglect the customers or prospects already on your database.

But the old saying goes, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Don't let your pursuit of growth impact your existing customer base.

After all, you've already spent time and effort courting them. And they've responded by paying attention, signing up or even paying for your product or service. You want them to stay engaged and loyal to your brand - and continue to buy your solutions.

Increasing retention by just 5% can boost revenues by up to 95%. Why the huge figure? It's much cheaper and easier to hold on to existing clients than it is to find new ones. 

Retention matters!

To run a successful business, a strategy for data analytics is a must. Analyzing data is how savvy leaders collect information, wring it out, and extract quality, timely, actionable intel they can then use to run their business better. Thankfully, in the era of smartphones, access to personal data about customers has never been more abundant or more accessible to obtain. We are living in a new economy, and data is the driving force behind every successful brand making waves today.

It's no longer enough for your business to simply sell a great product or service. Plenty of businesses do! Increasingly, consumers shop based on whether a company aligns with their goals, purpose or outlook. To reach them, your business needs to stand for something. 

But in a world of content marketing, standing for something is about more than simply listing a handful of pillars on your website. It's about showing those values through your actions, partnerships, and campaigns. 

With a massive 95% of millennials following a brand on social media, it's no wonder that it's the golden child of today's marketers. Social media marketing is an affordable, low-barrier way to build your brand and reach your audience - an active, engaged audience that wants to hear from you. 

As the modern market becomes more fragmented -- and, ultimately, more digitized -- those who aren’t able to keep up with all the new and emerging trends will be left in the dust. That’s why it helps to outline your marketing strategy so you can have an easier time engaging with prospective customers and building your brand. How, you might say? By owning your own buyer’s digital journey!

SEO, or search engine optimization, is the science of making sure that your website shows up when people are searching for terms related to who you do and what you are. We've all seen the stats that show that no one scrolls through more than a page of search engine results. That's why it's a must to rank as highly as possible for your chosen keywords.

They can make or break an email campaign, because the subject line is the only thing—read that again—the only thing that prompts someone to open your email and read it. Unless it's an email from Grandma that you have to open, you'll look to the subject line to either pique your interest or trash it. 

You've put together a brilliant marketing strategy underpinned by valuable, relevant content, but you're not getting the results you anticipated. 

Don't worry. It's normal. And fortunately, it's an issue you can easily deal with. Sometimes it's a matter of being patient. Other times it's a matter of tweaking your approach. Here's what to do if your content marketing campaign has stalled.

Opti ­– wait for it – mization! As social media has grown to become one of the top places to reach your audience, we've had to adapt our business strategies. The "build it and they will come" method is no longer enough. 

One of the go-to strategies used by individuals and businesses alike, is social media optimization. Simply put, optimizing means fully updating and populating your profile in order to maximize visibility to your target audience. 

Writer's block. You know it happens. You’re staring at a blank page with a blinking cursor, wondering what the heck you want to say and how you want to say it, and can’t come up with a single viable idea. Some might call it the “writer’s block” of the digital era.

Looking to boost your web traffic and grow your leads? You need to start blogging — and regularly. B2B companies that blog 11+ times a month get almost 3x the traffic of those who blog only once a month, and 4x the leads of those who blog 4-5 times a month.

If you’ve ever heard the old adage, “It takes a village to raise a child,” then you have some idea of what it takes to run a successful and quality email marketing campaign that generates results in your business. You may have also heard the old adage, “The money is in the list.”

Sign up! Reserve your spot! Download now! We all encounter a ton of call-to-action (CTA) buttons every day. But which ones do we actually click? And what motivates us to click some but not others?