Saul Medeiors Affiliate Marketing: March 2017

Friday, March 31, 2017

Infusionsoft vs. HubSpot: Which is the Best Marketing Automation Software?

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Pre-Roll Ads and Analytics Coming To Periscope Video

On the heels of the scoop that Twitter is considering paid premium subscriptions comes news that Twitter will be expanding pre-roll ads to live video streaming app Periscope to help boost the company's dwindling ad revenue.

"As video viewership on Twitter continues to grow, video has become an increasingly important channel for publishers, creators and brands to reach their audiences. Today, we’re introducing a new opportunity for publishers and creators to monetize their content, and for brands to advertise against it, with pre-roll ads on Periscope video within Twitter."

"The experience will mirror how ads currently appear on all Twitter video: when consumers scroll through their timelines or search for content from a specific publishers or creators, Periscope videos - live and replay - can start with a short ad."

The Amplify program that manages ads in Twitter video will now allow creators and publishers to monetize their live video content on Periscope while marketers "...will have a new source of brand-safe video advertising."

Periscope also announced that videos can now be watched directly in Twitter Moments which should boost both live video viewership and advertising. Additionally, two new important features have been added to Twitter Periscope: Activity to see how people are interacting with users's livestreams and Analytics Dashboard whichs gives broadcasters an in-depth look at their viewership and engagement on their videos over time.

With Wall Street having seen a Q4 revenue shortfall from Twitter, expect more programs expansions like this to be announced in 2017.

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Amazon Announces Cloud-Based Contact Center Service

Amazon has released Connect, a contact center as a service hosted in the AWS cloud. The service is based on the same contact center technology Amazon has built for their own use.

AWS says that setting up Connect can be done in minutes with only a few clicks in the AWS Management Console. No specialized skills are needed to set up and operate Connect:

“Amazon Connect’s self-service graphical interface makes it easy for non-technical users to design contact flows, manage agents, and track performance metrics…The service also makes it possible to design contact flows that adapt the caller experience, changing based on information retrieved by Amazon Connect from AWS services, like Amazon Redshift, or third-party systems, like CRM or analytics solutions. “

Fees for the service are based on the number of customer minutes used and time spent on the phone. Calls cost $0.03 or $0.06 for toll free numbers. Amazon Connect offers direct inward dial (DID) numbers and toll-free numbers in the United States and 18 countries throughout Europe.

IDC estimates that worldwide contact center application software revenues were about $5.8 billion for on premises and $1.9 billion for public-cloud in 2016; by 2020, on-premises will be $5.5 billion and cloud will be $4.3 billion, representing a compound annual growth rate of -0.8% for on-premises and 22.9% for the cloud over that time.

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Major Study Reveals What Kind of Video Content Drives eCommerce Sales

As the eCommerce industry has matured in sales and reach, it has realized it still has obstacles....namely engaging and persuading real people. To take this on, successful brands have embraced digital content to add a pop to their product presentation. But as recent survey from Episerver found, 98% of shoppers have been deterred from completing a purchase because of incomplete content.

Research has shown that video is a valuable content form for online shopping engagement. Put simply, it helps overcome the advantage of tangible interaction provided by in-store experience.

So that being the case, what kind of video content works best to boost eCommerce sales? A new study from the UK has found some insightful answers.

Alex Connock of EndemolShine North in MediaCityUK wanted to examine how differing editorial styles and durations would impact the customer journey. “Around the world there are many territories which have a more relaxed approach to brand integration into mainstream or OTT programming, and here it is possible that e-commerce ‘clickability’ will be included in factual and fiction programming of a mainstream variety. Testing what works in terms of functionalities and styles of integration of that technology is fascinating and seriously useful. We already have interest in this study from colleagues all over the world, from Spain and Holland, to the US and China” he recently told Prolific North.

A survey was conducted of 2800 UK respondents, in 28 standalone representative groups of 100 people each. Before they watched any of the test videos:

30% said have clicked on an online video to find out more detail
29% had actually made a purchase through an online video
49% usually have the sound on, when shopping online
They were then shown the video and asked: would you have bought the product?

The study found that among other things: short videos worked the best, videos with people work better, branded content works better than a hard sell, marketing multiple items works well and leads to more “buys”, and waiting until the video ends before offering click to buy.

“What didn’t surprise me was that short videos do very well as drivers to purchase, as I think we have seen that worldwide. But what was surprising was HOW short that took effect. Notably 15 seconds resoundingly beat 40 seconds as a shoppable video length,” Connock told Prolific North.

“I was very surprised, as are most people who see the survey, that user-generated content ranked so badly as a driver of purchase. It’s definitely one to avoid and that’s a real learning for many ecommerce platforms.

A lot of other surprising findings came from the study that are well worth any eCommerce/eTailer business to consider. The video below shows a summary of the research and results.

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Google’s Fred Update Confirmed

An update to the Google algorithm reported to have begun on March 7th has been confirmed by a Google’s Gary Illyes.

The Google Fred algorithm update has been confirmed by @methode ? https://t.co/vfe0gIyIcK pic.twitter.com/8qK2ERUELw

— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) March 24, 2017

Google has had little to say about the recent update which reportedly has had a large impact on content sites. An analysis of content sites by Barry Schwartz found a “50 percent to 90 percent traffic declines from Google organic search. This was a massive organic ranking drop for these sites.”

“After reviewing well over 70 sites that were hit by this update, 95% of them share two things in common. The sites all seem content driven, either blog formats or other content like sites and they all are pretty heavy on their ad placement. In fact, if I dare say, it looks like many (not all but many) of them were created with the sole purpose of generating AdSense or other ad income without necessarily benefiting the user.”

Why is it called Fred?

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Twitter Considering Premium Subscriptions for Marketers

The 11 year history of Twitter is a compelling model of how a simple and free user-centric content service, supported by advertising, can grow to have tremendous reach and an huge impact on culture. Facebook is another example on a larger scale. But the key difference between the two services is ad revenue. Unlike Facebook, Twitter just hasn't been able to attract the ad dollars.

Journalist Andrew Tavani's scoop a few days revealed what may be Twitter's new initiative to drive revenue not from paid ads, but from paying users:

Scoop: Twitter is developing an 'advanced TweetDeck' that would be available for monthly subscription fee & feature a range of new features: pic.twitter.com/MlKw8xZlVS

— Andrew Tavani (@andrewtavani) March 23, 2017

Tavani also noted that the 'advanced TweetDeck' monthly subscription fee Twitter is exploring in the survey is $19.99 and would have a list of marketer-centric features.

Shortly after Tavani's sharp-eyed reporting took over the Twitterverse, company spokeswoman Brielle Villablanca confirmed with Reuters that Twitter is conducting a survey "to assess the interest in a new, more enhanced version of Tweetdeck. We regularly conduct user research to gather feedback about people's Twitter experience and to better inform our product investment decisions, and we're exploring several ways to make Tweetdeck even more valuable for professionals."

This move is very similar to LinkedIn's paid premium memberships and could prove to be a successful revenue booster for the Twitter. But as pointed out here, it won't cure what fundamentally ails the business of Twitter.

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Pre-Roll Ads and Analytics Coming To Periscope Video

With Wall Street having seen a Q4 revenue shortfall from Twitter, expect more programs expansions like this to be announced in 2017.

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Hubcast 132: Great Questions, Forms, Update Video, & Video Agency

The power of asking great questions, HubSpot's new product update videos, and getting started with video marketing, all this and more on this week's Hubcast

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What’s Ahead for Social Media: Live Video, Influencers, and Content

Author: Lisa Marcyes

Every year I look forward to the opportunity to travel to San Diego and attend Social Media Marketing World (SMMW) where I get to attend thought-provoking sessions, learn from top leaders in social media, and meet tons of brilliant marketers.

This year was no exception, I found myself furiously jotting down key takeaways I could implement in my everyday strategy. While every session was chock-full of knowledge, here are three takeaways that were echoed across sessions and throughout the conference:

1. Go Live or Get Left Behind

With a quarter of the breakout sessions addressing video this year, it’s clear that marketers need to keep video top-of-mind.

Let’s take a step back and look at the power of live streaming. According to We Are Social Media, Facebook generates 8 billion daily video views, up from 700% just 3 years ago. And people are watching live video three times more than pre-recorded videos on Facebook. Three times! With the advent of easy-to-use apps on mobile, the ability to go live has never been easier, and all of the major social media platforms are betting on a future embedded in live video. In fact, to encourage more video viewership, Facebook adjusted their algorithm so that live videos are more likely to appear higher in news feeds than those that are not.

Still not convinced to go live? Consider the fact that video posts on Facebook have a 135% greater organic reach than photos. In a world where your organic content is seen less and less, that’s a huge advantage you don’t want to miss out on!

We are on the forefront of video becoming the norm. It’s imperative we start incorporating video into our strategies moving forward. But how can marketers ensure they’re doing it right? Create content that educates.

If you create good content, people will engage. I know this can seem oversimplified, but take a step back to think about how YOU can help YOUR CUSTOMERS. Develop an editorial calendar based on what your target audience is most interested in, or challenged by. One of the biggest benefits of live streaming is the ability for your followers to engage with you directly. They can ask questions during the stream and get real-time answers from you. This is an invaluable platform to encourage two-way conversations, opening the door for you to create brand advocates.

When you’re ready to jump all in with live video, here are a few tips to consider:

Test your connection. I’ve had multiple live streaming broadcasts drop due to bandwidth issues (lesson learned). I recommend using a dedicated hot spot, but if you can’t manage that, use a 4G connection at the very least. Facebook’s “Go Live” button will be grayed out if the signal is not strong enough to support it.
Use customer-centric titles. People will join your live stream based on your headline. Be sure to address the “Why should I watch this?” question when creating a live stream title.
Promote your live stream. Let your audience know when you’re going live to encourage participation. Best-selling author Kim Garst says that in order to ensure success, “Have a set time, schedule your event, shout it from the mountain, and use teasers to give a sneak peek.”
Sound matters. It seems like a small thing, but believe me, it can make a BIG difference. Background noise can really make or break a live video. There are now several inexpensive microphones you can get that will provide targeted sound amplification.
Plan for audience participation. To increase engagement, set aside time during your broadcast to ask questions and encourage audience participation. Also, have a strategy in place to capture questions from audience members. Questions can come in quickly, and if you’re mid-thought, you may not catch them. Ask a team member to monitor your stream to catch any questions you may miss.
Repurpose. Extract more value from your live videos by repurposing them. Create short clips, GIFs, image quotes, and Stories. The options are endless.

2. It’s Time to Think About Engaging Influencers

In his session, Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank Marketing, cited some pretty interesting statistics. According to his research, businesses that include influencers in their marketing campaigns have seen a 10x increase in conversion rates. Not only that but those customers who convert stick around–influencer campaigns tend to achieve a 37% increase in retention.

Follow these tips to define influencers in your space and start building relationships with them:

Invest in an influencer marketing program. According to Lee, the best way to approach influencer marketing is to “develop relationships with internal and industry experts with active networks to co-create content that helps drive mutual value and measurable business goals.” That seems easy, right? Well, not really. Developing a relationship takes time. Too often marketers approach influencers with propositions for one-offs, failing to see the value in developing a long-term engagement strategy. Ensure you have the dedicated resources in place to develop and implement a program around influencer engagement, rather than looking at it as a project that gets funding here and there when there’s extra budget.
Obtain the right tools. According to the TopRank Blog, nearly 55% of consumer brands have an integrated influencer marketing program that they invest in annually, while only 15% of B2B marketers do. I think this can be attributed to the fact that it can often be easier to identify influencers in the B2C realm (think YouTube sensations, celebrities, athletes, etc.). If you’re a B2B marketer, it may require a little more research to figure out who the movers and shakers are in your industry, but know that they exist. I guarantee there are experts in every field that have credibility and sway. Obtaining an influencer marketing tool will help you to not only identify who you should be interacting with but also help you engage and measure your return on those relationship investments.
Think outside the box. Think about the different ways that you can create and build a sustained relationship with each influencer. Develop microcontent like quotes, tips, and tricks you can incorporate throughout several pieces of content. Interview them and resource the answers into blogs, ebooks, and guides. Ask them to join a Tweet Chat. The more creative you can be, the better! We created a 31 Influencers to Follow in 2017 holiday campaign that revealed a new influencer to follow each day with animated bitmojis.

3. Content and Social Are in This Together

Content and social media are intersecting more and more frequently. This is no surprise to those on the front lines because we’re increasingly seeing the need for closer collaboration.

Quality content is the key to any successful social media strategy. Users who find content interesting, unique, and informative will freely share it on their social channels, leading to higher engagement. In turn, analyzing that engagement can inform marketers how their content is resonating with their target audience. It’s a cyclical relationship—informing and depending on each other. This relationship is even more critical as we jump into the realm of live streaming and video.

For example, in her session, Kim Garst revealed how she scales live videos into a plethora of content to post. Here are a few of her suggestions:

Turn a live video into a blog post on the same topic.
Create 1-minute video clips of your main talking points.
Highlight a few quotes from your live stream and in graphics.
Strip the audio from your video and convert it into a podcast.

Whether you’re new to the world of social media marketing or a seasoned professional, the one thing you can depend on is change. The good news is that you’re not alone in your endeavors. There are leaders in the field who are willing to share what they’re learning, providing us with fresh ideas and new ways to look at things. I’m so excited to see what’s next!

Do you have any social media marketing best practices you’d like to share? If so, I’d love to hear them in the comments below!

What’s Ahead for Social Media: Live Video, Influencers, and Content was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

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Thursday, March 30, 2017

Amazon Announces Cloud-Based Contact Center Service

Amazon has released Connect, a contact center as a service hosted in the AWS cloud. The service is based on the same contact center technology Amazon has built for their own use.

AWS says that setting up Connect can be done in minutes with only a few clicks in the AWS Management Console. No specialized skills are needed to set up and operate Connect:

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4 Big Mistakes You Might Be Making with Your Marketing Personas

Author: Hally Pinaud

Creating and maintaining buyer personas has been an important task in every role I’ve held as a marketer. Why is that? Personas–when built and used correctly–are a very effective way to channel real empathy for your buyers. That empathy makes it easier to drive winning strategies across the customer lifecycle through campaigns, content, nurture paths, account plans, and sales collateral.

They also happen to be one of the things I speak with our customers about most frequently–hence this blog post! So, whether you’re looking to create your first persona or double-check your approach, here are four things that can limit the impact of your personas:

Mistake #1: Your Personas Were Made in a Vacuum

Have you spoken with your personas lately? No, I’m not talking about some kind of weird, talking-to-a-PDF kind of activity. I mean, have you interviewed the people who would correspond to each persona’s defining factors, specifically to validate that persona? From what I’ve observed, this is one of the most common mistakes when it comes to creating personas.

These “lab grown” personas stem from assuming you know your personas well enough without external validation. Maybe because your organization is pretty open and you have good proximity to prospects and customers. Or maybe you’ve lived in the persona’s shoes yourself (this is a big one–it’s something I struggle with here at Marketo). Lived experiences are valuable, but me, myself and I is a limited and biased sample. Customer and prospect pools are inherently exclusionary.

Luckily, it’s easier to fix than you think: send out some emails and set up some 30-minute interviews. Start with a handful of people–a mix of customers, prospects, and total strangers who look like your persona–and ask them about the details your persona documents. Pro tip: It can be tough to find willing strangers to interview, but a combo of colleagues’ networks, LinkedIn InMails, and $50 Amazon gift cards will get you anywhere.

Mistake #2: You Aren’t Sharing

Hey there, persona hoarder. I see you. You made that great persona and you’re using it to drive your messaging and marketing programs, aren’t you? But have you walked your demand generation team through the persona they’re creating nurture programs for? What about sales or customer success? Have you printed it out so they can tape it to the inside their decks like a Leonardo DiCaprio poster circa 1997? (Always an option.)

Your customer-facing colleagues need to exercise those empathy muscles to do their jobs well. If you aren’t sharing your fresh, validated persona knowledge, they’re going to make it up as they go. So, train and retrain on buyer personas often. Ensure they’re easy to find among your internal content resources and welcome questions, contributions, and ideas from folks who deal with these people each and every day. Personas should make us all better at what we do.

Mistake #3: You’re Fixating on Cute–Not Helpful–Details

A lot of marketers characterize their personas with photos or names. To be clear, those details can be a good thing. It helps humanize a generalized portrait of your buyer and makes it easier for folks on your team to use a persona as a reference point. For example, “Would Emily the Email Specialist want to read this blog post? What tone would she respond to?” The problem I have is when those details run amok.

Emily has a French Bulldog. She drives a Jeep Liberty. She only reads People Magazine when she gets her hair done.

Really? Do those details help your team make better decisions about how to reach Emily? Maybe, if you sell dog sweaters or hair products. Otherwise, elevate your persona details to focus on what will drive business outcomes and catch yourself before you get carried away on the nitty gritty when it doesn’t.

Mistake #4: Your Persona Is Frozen in Time

This is an easy one: update your personas! Revisit them every quarter or two, especially if they’re critical personas like a budget holder or key decision-maker. Yes, we’re busy as marketers, but if your personas haven’t been touched since they were researched during the last Winter Olympics, your hopelessly out-of-date Rip Van Persona might not be helpful anymore. In fact, it may be causing more harm than good–buyers’ challenges, goals, and trusted resources can evolve rapidly in the digital age.

Want to learn more about creating and maintaining personas? I share these tips and a few other persona perspectives in a recent Marketo Live interview with the delightful Ellen Gomes.

4 Big Mistakes You Might Be Making with Your Marketing Personas was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

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Wednesday, March 29, 2017

Major Study Reveals What Kind of Video Content Drives eCommerce Sales

Research has shown that video is a valuable content form for online shopping engagement. Put simply, it helps overcome the advantage of tangible interaction provided by in-store experience.

So that being the case, what kind of video content works best to boost eCommerce sales? A new study from the UK has found some insightful answers.

A survey was conducted of 2800 UK respondents, in 28 standalone representative groups of 100 people each. Before they watched any of the test videos:

A lot of other surprising findings came from the study that are well worth any eCommerce/eTailer business to consider. The video below shows a summary of the research and results.

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Marketing Lessons Learned from a Life of Swag Hoarding

Author: Caroline Ruggiero

It’s 10:24 p.m. on Friday night after a long week on the road talking about the Engagement Economy. Instead of relaxing, I am attempting to chalk paint V-Bot, the mascot of Marketo’s LaunchPoint partner Vidyard, in time for my son’s 5^th birthday party tomorrow morning.

Vidyard's V-Bot mascot

So how on earth did I get here?

Well, I have been swayed by good swag, which has taught me several great marketing lessons that I’ll share with you in this blog.

Why Swag?

Throughout my 20 years in marketing, I have been to many conferences. Along the way, I’ve collected a bevy of swag–the good, the bad, and the boring. I will fully admit that I am a total swag hoarder. As an event marketer, swag can be a decent ticket item on your budget, but unlike, say, the upgrade to the carpet in your booth, it has greater potential to provide dividends after the conference ends.

Swag is a universal tool that can help drive brand affinity with customers and partners as well as create brand awareness with net-new prospects. Swag gives you a chance to show your brand’s personality, and it makes its way home with attendees if done well. It’s like free advertising.

At this point, you might be asking the style versus substance question: Should I bring good swag or good collateral? The answer? A mix of both. There is absolutely a time and place for distributing content at your booth, but in some cases, you’re better off keeping things short and sweet–welcoming the opportunity to engage and follow up with visitors post-event using your marketing platform. Far too many hard copy materials end up in hotel room recycling bins than make it home in attendees’ suitcases. But good swag has a way of finding its way home.

4 Elements of Good Swag

To accomplish #SwagGoals, finding the perfect items that are both right for your brand and a hit with your audience, aim to meet one or more of these branding goals:

1. Be memorable, fun, or useful. Any combination of these characteristics can land your swag right in the sweet spot and make a lasting impression that makes your brand human. Not to toot Marketo’s own purple horn, but one example is the Marketo munchkin we gave out last year. The little purple guys were adorable, but by naming it “Munchkin,” we also gave a playful insider’s nod to our Munchkin tracking code, a powerful feature of our product. Munchkin swag at Summit

2. Get exposure immediately at your event. Wearable swag has immediate returns and can be leveraged to drive brand awareness or even foot traffic on-site. Consider giving way accessories, such as glasses, hats, and socks, since attendees already have their conference attire planned out. One big potential billboard you might want to target is conference badges. Everyone loves a little flare, and Marvel Marketers tapped into that and got free on-site exposure. For small surfaces, keep design elements simple so they stand out. conference badge swag

3. Amplify in social media channels. If you’re going to shell out the money for a higher ticket item like a photo booth, be sure to brand the printed images and encourage people to follow your company’s social media pages and share their photos with a hashtag that ties into your brand. Lattice Engines tapped into that with their #mktgnerd concept. This is also a great way to build your following.

branded photo booth

4. Maximize post-event exposure. Providing attendees with practical swag increases the likelihood they will take it home–and your brand along with it. Jennifer Clegg, Marketing Nation veteran and 2017 Summit presenter, said the most useful swag she’s ever received is a luggage tag. In my case, as a road warrior and parent, anything cute that I can repurpose as a gift to my kids wins every time.

After my session at last year’s Marketing Nation Summit, I returned home with some fabulous swag from the killer Speakeasy Party thrown by our services partners Elixiter and Mambo. Perhaps feather boas and cigarette holders were not the best idea for 1- and 4-year-old boys, but it was hilarious. Fun? You bet. Memorable? Check.

take swag home

Have a Plan B

Once you nail your concept for swag and your attendees are clamoring for it, you might end up running out. But this is a good problem to have—it presents a new opportunity for follow-up.

If you run out of swag, don’t close up shop. Make sure you capitalize on the booth traffic and engage with visitors to learn more about who they are. From there, you can give them something else at the booth or offer to send them something later. The latter offer is a judgment call you need to make since postage can get expensive. If you know the conference audience is right in your target sweet spot, it might make sense to go the extra mile across the board–or you could coach your booth staff to make the call on a case-by-case basis.

For example, at Marketing Nation Summit last year, Vidyard ran out of their very popular V-Bot stuffed toy by the time I visited. But they took my card and said they would send me one afterward. It arrived a week or so later, and it was my “gift” to my 4-year-old. You can guess where this is going, right?

Fast forward to a year later, and the only thing my son wants for his birthday is a robot party featuring his Marketing Nation robot friends. My swag-as-gift parenting move may have backfired on me–I now know swag hoarding is apparently hereditary, but it also proves the success of good swag.

Are You Going to Marketing Nation Summit?

This year’s Marketing Nation Summit is right around the corner, with visionary speakers, amazing partners, and a passionate tribe of thousands of marketers all gathered in one place. It is a firehose of cutting edge technology, a booster shot to your marketing chops, and has the vibe of the most fun family reunion ever.

For those coming to the event as a sponsor or partner, remember that you are marketing to marketers. Bring your A-game to cut through the noise and impress. Make the most of your field marketing spend–focus on not what is most expensive but what makes a memorable connection. And to my fellow swag hunters, there is sure to be some of the coolest stuff out there. I can’t wait!

So until then, what is the most creative swag you’ve gotten at a conference? Fellow working parents, anyone else pulled the swag-as-gift move?

Marketing Lessons Learned from a Life of Swag Hoarding was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

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Tuesday, March 28, 2017

Google’s Fred Update Confirmed

An update to the Google algorithm reported to have begun on March 7th has been confirmed by a Google’s Gary Illyes.

The Google Fred algorithm update has been confirmed by @methode ? https://t.co/vfe0gIyIcK pic.twitter.com/8qK2ERUELw

— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) March 24, 2017

Why is it called Fred?

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4 Content Promotion Strategies to Increase Engagement

Author: Alan Cassinelli

There’s no doubt that inbound marketing has fundamentally changed demand generation.

The strategy of attracting prospects through content, social media, search engine optimization, and more has taken over the B2B world and for good reason: inbound marketing costs 61% less than traditional advertising and produces 54% more leads than outbound marketing.

Your prospects and customers don’t want to be targeted with disruptive and annoying advertisements. They want to engage with quality content that educates, entertains, or inspires them.

There’s just one problem…

Businesses are investing more in content marketing, which focuses on creating valuable content to guide buyers through the customer journey. Now, every marketing team worth their salt is publishing content for their audience, from blog posts, to whitepapers, webinars, ebooks, newsletter, and more. The bar has been raised and now creating more content isn’t enough. In order to get your content seen by your intended audience, you need to differentiate your brand and rise above the noise by offering value.

The New 80/20 Rule

If you were an early adopter of inbound marketing, you might have spent 80% of your time creating content and 20% of your time promoting it. With all the noise out there, the formula has flipped. Derek Halpern of Social Triggers popularized the new 80/20 rule that has resonated with marketers who haven’t seen the results they wanted from creating more and more content. To increase engagement, you need to spend 20% of your time creating content and 80% of your time promoting it.

Becoming more strategic in your content promotion requires taking a fresh look how you communicate with your audience and ensuring that you are providing not only the right content, but that it’s in the right spot, at the right time. Here are four ways you can promote your content to increase engagement:

1. Promote Content Across Your Website

Your whitepapers and ebooks don’t have to be hidden away and confined to your resources page. Give them the visibility they deserve by promoting them all across your website.

It just makes sense. If a visitor is browsing your website, there’s a good chance they’ll be interested in or want more information about related topics. You can provide that to them with your content. Aside from improving the user experience, it also increases conversions by making your gated assets more visible. This can be especially impactful if you are using web personalization to offer your known visitors the next relevant step in their content journey. Zuora does a great job of this, recommending related guides and ebooks at the bottom of their product page for subscription billing.

promote content across your website

2. Promote Content in Your Email Signature

Did you know that the average office worker sends or receives 121 emails a day, according to a report by the Radicati Group? By encouraging employees to promote content in their email signature, you can take advantage of this under-utilized channel and increase the visibility of your content.

While you can be scrappy and just add these to your footer or signature yourself, there are also solutions, like Sigstr and Exclaimer, that allow you to quickly change the content of email signature as needed depending on the recipient. This way, you can offer a tailored experience and different content to employees, customers, prospects, and partners like Canvas Solutions does below.

email signature marketing

3. Use Ad Retargeting

Many marketers are running retargeting campaigns to re-engage prospects who previously visited their website and drive them back to complete an action like starting a free trial or requesting a demo. It’s extremely effective because you’re only investing in qualified leads who are interested in your product or services. However, don’t be a marketer that misses the opportunity to use retargeting to drive traffic to gated content, which you can track conversions from to prove the ROI.

Using a comprehensive marketing platform, you can listen to website activity and then retarget visitors with digital ads to promote relevant content. For example, if someone browsed your website for information about your account targeting solution, you may want to serve them an ad that promotes your latest gated asset on account-based marketing.

4. Pin It to Your Twitter Profile

Last but not least, pinning a tweet to your Twitter profile is a quick (and free) way to increase the visibility of your content. While other social platforms like Facebook offer similar features, Twitter Pins are shown by default at the top of your profile page no matter how old they are. In this example, you can see industry influencer Michael Brenner has pinned a blog article to the top of his Twitter profile.

Pin Content In Twitter

Not sure this is worth the time? You might be surprised how much traffic your pinned post gets. In fact, when Buffer pinned one of their Twitter cards, they saw 10x as many conversions. To glean insights on your own posts, use Twitter Analytics to see how people engaged with your profile and posts in a 28 day period.

With the competitive landscape of B2B marketing, getting your content to stand out is harder than ever. Have you tried any of these strategies? What other ways are you promoting your content? I’d love to hear in the comments below.

4 Content Promotion Strategies to Increase Engagement was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

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Monday, March 27, 2017

Twitter Considering Premium Subscriptions for Marketers

Journalist Andrew Tavani's scoop a few days revealed what may be Twitter's new initiative to drive revenue not from paid ads, but from paying users:

Scoop: Twitter is developing an 'advanced TweetDeck' that would be available for monthly subscription fee & feature a range of new features: pic.twitter.com/MlKw8xZlVS

— Andrew Tavani (@andrewtavani) March 23, 2017

Tavani also noted that the 'advanced TweetDeck' monthly subscription fee Twitter is exploring in the survey is $19.99 and would have a list of marketer-centric features.

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How to Scale Your Marketing Strategy Without Sacrificing Engagement

Author: Patrick Groover

Companies are always looking for a new edge to capture mindshare and differentiate their solution within the marketplace. As people continue to diffuse their communication preferences across a growing number of channels, the role of the marketer can feel more and more like mission impossible.

To keep pace with the proliferation of new touchpoints, marketers need a scalable strategy for managing programs and tracking revenue that tips the balance of campaign cost vs. results in their favor.

Prove How Marketing Contributes to Business Growth

With marketing being seen as a cost center, it’s critical for you to understand how the dollars you spend translate into revenue growth. While you may be able to justify net-negative ROI in the short run, your marketing efforts need to result in positive ROI in the long run. However, one of the largest challenges that marketers face is determining how to properly attribute revenue across marketing activities.

You should measure your campaign performance based on two factors:

Did your efforts produce the desired outcomes?
Did the outcome justify the resources required to deliver on the objective?

First-touch attribution identifies which programs are delivering the most new names and last-touch attribution identifies the final call-to-action that helped push the conversion over the finish line, but most marketing activities that influence the overall buying decision are distributed across multiple points in time. Healthy reporting requires multi-touch attribution, which allows you to evaluate all the touchpoints needed to make an impact.

As an initial starting point, it is important for your campaign reporting to help you visualize the total contribution from touchpoints along the buyer’s journey towards a conversion or sale. Your marketing platform should be able to capture specific campaign successes, interesting moments, and ultimately report on cost per new name, cost per success, and automatically assist your team in distributing the reported revenue value across touchpoints.

Adopt a Solution That Grows with Your Needs

Unfortunately, many marketers struggle to measure their programs, let alone run their programs in a scalable and repeatable manner.

Do these inefficiencies sound familiar?

Copying the same email or content to make only minor changes to personalize the message for a new audience
Manually rebuilding programs, materials, and workflows from scratch for new campaigns
Rebuilding audiences within new platforms to support cross-channel marketing
Manually updating banners or materials for each piece of content within a program.

While it is difficult to eliminate all of the rework, it is possible to leverage marketing automation to keep repetitive tasks to a minimum, eliminating steps that do not add value. More importantly, an advanced marketing platform will offer features that support a true marketing ecosystem to help your team deliver engaging experiences within the Engagement Economy.

Here are three ways to help your marketing team stay lean while continuing to deliver high-quality campaigns that drive ROI:

1. Scale Your Campaigns

Analyzing your campaign management process can reveal inefficiencies that impact your performance. With the right platform, even non-technical marketers can make brand-approved adjustments to programs and content, without having to involve your creative services team.

Rather than creating emails from scratch, you can focus on developing user-friendly, modular templates that can be edited by typical marketing end-users. This will not only streamline campaign execution, but it will free up time so your creative services team can optimize the look-and-feel as well as the deliverability of the email templates.

Similarly, instead of building out new designs for each and every campaign, your team can agree on a set number of pre-formatted layouts and standard content adaptation rules. Striking a balance between creativity and timely execution can make a huge difference in the number of messages that can be supported by your limited marketing resources. These standards also help your organization set appropriate expectations for what your marketing team can deliver.

Another way to scale your campaigns is through the use of dynamic content and program tokens. “Tokens” or “Merge Fields” are system-referenced data points within an automation solution hat adjust contact-presented information based on field values. For example, marketers in a certain industry may need personalized content to capture their audience’s attention around industry-specific trends. Instead of creating multiple emails, you can reference the data values connected to your marketing database and customize content within the same email, landing page, or any other asset.

2. Scale Your Data

Many marketing teams spend hours pulling, uploading, and re-pulling lists over-and-over again. Centralizing access to data and personalization based on shared data points can be a huge time-savings to the marketing team. This is also a great way to eliminate the number of mistakes that can be made while setting up messaging audiences.

To leverage the principles of data scalability, it is important to have a true engagement platform. The right solution will allow marketers to access automatically updated data values and audience membership throughout programs, channels, and content.

Additionally, the ability to pass a pre-built marketing audience from your platform to other marketing channels such as Google AdWords or Facebook can reduce the amount of time you spend aligning and executing multi-channel marketing. And with a platform built on well-designed and well-connected architecture, you can centralize audience management to free up more time for your campaign managers to focus on high-powered messaging and content instead of building lists.

Listening and responding to interactions across touchpoints from a central platform will continue to be a growing component for delivering personalized communication at scale. As the number of solutions increases each year, it will be critical to reduce the number of systems that your marketing team must access to deliver a connected experience.

3. Scale the Replication

While efficiencies occur at the campaign level, advanced marketing teams have the capability to clone and replicate entire programs, including all workflows and content. Leading marketers devote a portion of their practice to strategically defining best-practice programs, layouts, templates, and more so that automation is not a laborious process.

Instead of recreating all of the materials and flows, scale your performance through template programs that require only minor adjustments before placing them into production. A great example of this is the ability to clone an entire event program, then update the banners, date and time, location, and speakers for the event from a central location that then populates all assets and program timing. Companies that leverage this approach are seeing dramatic improvements in available time for managing and improving go-to-market strategies.

As the number of marketing solutions continues to grow, process and program sustainability will be an increasingly important consideration. Take a critical look at the number of systems required to deliver your multi-channel marketing strategies and seek out platforms that can integrate scalability while delivering personalization across the buyer’s journey.

If your team is feeling the stress of campaign execution, ask for their input on which tasks are repetitive and non-value adding. Central campaign execution within a scalable marketing platform delivers unique benefits and efficiencies that help marketers keep pace with the new and unique ways to engage with customers.

As always, please feel free to ask questions or add your thoughts in the comments below.

How to Scale Your Marketing Strategy Without Sacrificing Engagement was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

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Friday, March 24, 2017

Google Spanks Symantec for Mis-issuing 30,000 EV Certificates

Google has announced a plan to punish Symantec by gradually distrusting its SSL certificates. The move comes after Google says it caught Symantec issuing more than 30,000 “improper” Extended Validation (EV) certificates. Symantec issues more than 30% of the web’s certificates.

The plan was announced in this blog post from Ryan Sleeve Google software engineer on the Google Chrome team.

Extended Validation certificates are intended to give the highest level of authentication. Before issuing a certificate, the Certificate Authority must conduct a detailed investigation confirming the requesting entity’s legal existence and identity.

The punishment takes the following steps, starting with a downgrade of Symantec-issued EV certificates:

1. EV certificates issued by Symantec till today will be downgraded to less-secure domain-validated certs, which means Chrome browser will immediately stop displaying the name of the validated domain name holder in the address bar for a period of at least a year.

2. To limit the risk of any further misissuance, all newly-issued certificates must have validity periods of no greater than nine months (effective from Chrome 61 release) to be trusted in Google Chrome.

3. Google proposes an incremental distrust, by gradually reducing the "maximum age" of Symantec certificates over the course of several Chrome releases, requiring them to be reissued and revalidated.

This could mean that many users will will get warnings from Chrome that sites are insecure and may block access. Should sites with Symantec EV certs be concerned about the changes?

A Symantec statement says don’t worry: “Our SSL/TLS certificate customers and partners need to know that this does not require any action at this time."

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3 Can’t-Miss Learnings at Marketing Nation Summit 2017

Author: Chandar Pattabhiram

The countdown is on! In just one month, I’ll be taking the stage for my fourth Marketing Nation Summit and I couldn’t be more excited.

This year is going to be bigger and better than ever before. What I love about Summit is that it gives everyone a chance to learn, share, and grow in the world’s most vibrant community in the world for engagement–The Marketing Nation.

And while it will be the best party in town (Train, anyone?), my favorite part is that no matter what stage you are in your career, you will walk away with more knowledge that you arrived with.

That said, here are three can’t-miss learnings that you can expect at Marketing Nation Summit 2017:

1. Innovation Always

This year’s Summit is for every marketer–anyone and everyone passionate about customer engagement and digital marketing. With more than 5,000 people in one place, marketers will walk away with how-tos and inspiration around how to innovate in two ways: within their current tools and by combining their technology with partners to win more in the Engagement Economy.

A core characteristic of the Engagement Economy is that there are more points of interaction between buyers and sellers than ever before, a trend that is not likely slow down. It is imperative for marketers to be able to adapt to new touchpoints as they develop and utilize new technologies to engage more effectively than ever before. With the theme of “Leading in the Engagement Economy,” our 2017 focus will be just that.

That said, it wouldn’t be Marketing Nation Summit without some exciting product and innovation announcements from Marketo. Next month attendees can expect news around our Engagement Platform, further innovation regarding sales and marketing alignment, a new vision for marketing analytics, and much more.

2. The Synergies of AdTech and MarTech

This year at Summit, we’re introducing a unique content track to specifically address one of the most powerful trends in today’s marketing industry: the convergence of advertising technology and marketing technology. To do this, Marketo has partnered with Adweek to bring together some of the smartest and most innovative brand marketers, AdTech executives, and even brilliant agency minds to speak to our attendees. Think Morgan Flatley, CMO of Gatorade and Propel at PepsiCo; Shiv Singh, SVP of Global Brand and Marketing Transformation at Visa; and Gunther Schumacher, President, Global IBM Brand Services and WW President and COO of OgilvyOne Worldwide.

We often talk about MarTech and AdTech coming together as a collision, but it’s really a perfect marriage. When occurring individually, digital advertising and marketing automation play two completely different roles in getting consumers to purchase products or services. When you bring these worlds together, marketers can personalize and contextualize their conversations with potential and current customers at scale. The net result: Marketers can maximize the value of every advertising dollar they spend. Personal, authentic, and at scale are three of the most important attributes of effective marketing in the Engagement Economy!

3. The Art of Storytelling

We’ve spoken a lot about the science of marketing, brought to you courtesy of technologies like Marketo. This year at Summit, you’ll also see a return to the art of marketing, which lies in effective and authentic storytelling. How do you make your brand, product, or service visually and emotionally appealing to your prospects and customers? You tell a story that connects with them in an authentic way and provides them with something valuable.

As a CMO, I find it incredibly valuable to take a break from metrics and hard numbers to remind myself that the true roots of marketing lie in effective storytelling. Marketing at it roots is all about using emotion as a weapon of mass influence to tell compelling stories and build lifelong connections with customers. And who better to learn from about storytelling than two artists who have truly perfected this craft: James Corden and Queen Latifah. The award-winning host of “The Late Late Show” on CBS and the First Lady of Hip Hop, respectively, will help marketing executives and practitioners alike to return to marketing as an art form.

Have I convinced you? If you haven’t signed up yet, register for Marketing Nation Summit.

I’ll see you in San Francisco.

3 Can’t-Miss Learnings at Marketing Nation Summit 2017 was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

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