Musical artists don't become famous just because their music is good. (Just watch Katy Perry's lip-sync malfunction at the NRJ Music Awards and you'll see my point.) Believe it or not, pop stars have to market themselves just like we have to market our businesses.
And often, artists will hire entire marketing teams to do this, especially those trying to build their brand or rebrand entirely.
Riddle me this -- why do people buy quarter-inch drill bits?
While there are a million possible answers to this question, Leo McGinneva offers perhaps the most interesting explanation.
"They don’t want quarter-inch bits. They want quarter-inch holes," he explains.
SEO is constantly evolving, leaving marketers to either keep pace with the updates or run the risk of falling behind.
While this is stressful in and of itself, these constantly changing tides lead to a ton of questions when it comes time to actually optimize a web page. Do social signals carry any weight? Should I still invest in pay-per-click advertising? How much does mobile really matter?
When most people think about email marketing, they picture one-off emails sent to targeted portions of their database. While those emails are certainly a very important part of a healthy marketing strategy, there's another type of email that can be a powerful addition to your mix: transactional emails.
What is a transactional email? U.S. law defines it as any email with a primary purpose "to facilitate, complete, or confirm a commercial transaction that the recipient has previously agreed to enter into with the sender."
How do you decide which topics to write about on your blog to attract the most traffic and leads? What about which types of blog posts to write? How many to publish in a week? How to promote them?
These are just some of the questions you might have when creating your blog strategy -- and knowing a thing or two about your top performing blog posts will help you find the answers.
Today, Facebook announced three brand new updates to the News Feed algorithm specifically meant to improve user experience. How? By providing a better balance of updates from friends versus updates from businesses, publishers, public figures, and local organizations.
Every time Facebook updates its algorithm, brands and marketers freak out. To help you quickly get to the bottom of this change, here's a quick rundown of the three News Feed algorithm updates and how they might affect your Page.
It sounds so promising. Create compelling content (consistently). Share and promote the content. Prospects engage, download stuff and become qualified leads.
Those leads are passed on to the sales team, who instantaneously reach out and are immediately welcomed into the prospect’s world. The meeting quickly turns into a bona fide sales opportunity. Proposals are requested, immediately acted upon and sales are made.
For most marketers, this will sound familiar. You’re sitting around a conference room, trying to figure out how to best engage your leads and customers, sell more products, or just “stay top-of-mind” for your target audience, and someone decides there’s a solution that can solve all of those problems at once: an email newsletter!
Suddenly you're "volunteered" to do it. And you've got make sure that open and clickthrough rates don’t dip. Oh, and the first one needs to go out tomorrow.
As a marketer, you may feel that getting anyone to buy anything at all is hard enough. What happens when you build a company entirely around something people don’t really want anyway? Maybe you sell memberships to the local gym. Maybe you provide tax services or software to help people manage their money. What happens then?
The live video streaming app Meerkat was the talk of the town after its appearance at SXSW in March 2015 -- but its popularity was shortlived. Just a few weeks later, Twitter released Periscope, a similar live video streaming app. Although Meerkat kicked mobile video streaming off with a bang, you'll see in this Google Trends graph of each app’s interest over time that Periscope might be winning the race:
Body language: It's one of the most subtle, yet important things to master at work. If you're not in tune with what your posture, facial expression, and other nonverbal cues are telling others, you could be setting yourself up for failure.
For example, let's say that you're in an important meeting and want to show your boss that you're a leader on the team.
Event planner, lawyer, daycare owner, tow truck driver. Regardless of our chosen professions, it’s fair to say that we all want to build our businesses’ customer bases. It’s how we thrive. So it’s only natural for us to want to market our products or services to everyone, in hopes of capturing a larger audience, and thus making more money.
If you've ever wondered how designers at Apple defined every little element in iOS as they were building it, then you're in the right place. Ready to nerd out and get inspired all at the same time? I sure am.
You might be familiar with the concept of content style guides, which align members of a company on all the grammar and punctuation rules they should follow. In this post, I'll be showing you examples of the version of these style guides for web designers, which we call digital style guides.
How often should you post to your business' Facebook Page?
"It depends." Hmph. Not the definitive answer most people want.
Truth is, this response isn't wrong, as frustrating as it is. It does depend -- on your followers' age range, interests, Facebook habits, and so on. But that doesn't mean we can't glean some valuable insights on how post frequency affects clickthrough rate.
This post originally appeared on HubSpot's Sales Blog. To read more content like this, subscribe to Sales.
Go to any grocery store and walk to the condiment aisle. You’ll see dozens of varieties of mustard -- Dijon, honey, whole grain, yellow, spicy, brown -- but probably fewer than five types of ketchup from a small handful of brands. Of those brands, one reigns supreme: Heinz, boasting a number one or two market share position in over 50 countries.
This post originally appeared on HubSpot's Agency Post. To read more content like this, subscribe to Agency Post.
I made a big mistake.
I broke up with Google. And it was much harsher than a "let's just be friends" moment.
Most people believe that if you are ranking well with Google, you must be doing well with Bing and Yahoo, but that is just not the case. Unfortunately, I found that most of the blog posts on this topic were favoring one search engine over another. However, I believe that it is important to optimize for all three-- you could be missing out on some great business opportunities if you are not optimized correctly for each of these search engines.
Let me tell you a quick, cautionary tale about copyright law and using photos and images online. A couple years ago, a popular stock photography vendor claimed copyright infringement on an image we used in one of our ebooks.
Embarrassed, I quickly investigated.
As it turned out, another internet user had purchased the offending image from that same stock photography service and uploaded it to a photo-sharing website under a Creative Commons license. So while on the surface it looked safe for the taking, it was in fact falsely promoted as a royalty-free image ... and we were in the wrong. Scary story, right?
Have you ever spent a big chunk of time analyzing your marketing data, only to realize partway through that you didn't approach the analysis correctly? This happens to me from time to time, and trust me -- I know how frustrating it can be. I find myself wishing I could go back in time and warn my past self about the mistake so I could avoid losing all those hours.
Trial and error is the nature of analysis, though.
Great storytelling is a great differentiator.
Imagine you're walking down the snack aisle at a grocery store. How do you make sense of the hundreds of choices on either side of you? What's going to be on your mind when you decide what to buy? Perhaps you choose one product over another because that company donates a percentage of their proceeds to a great cause.
