Marketing Articles

Article / Updated 08-03-2022

Nothing undermines a good white paper faster than poor design. No matter how compelling and persuasive the text may be, if people can’t read it because of a poor design, they’ll quickly move on. Then all your effort and expense are for nothing. Here are ten down-to-earth tips for anyone designing a white paper. If you’re not sure how to design a white paper or you’ve never done one before, read on. If you’re a marketing manager who needs to direct a designer to format your white paper, this is for you. If you’re a white paper writer stuck trying to use Word to turn out respectable-looking pages, you’ve just hit pay dirt. Design to enhance the content A white paper isn’t a brochure, so it shouldn’t be as slick and colorful as one. But it needs to be more appealing than your father’s business report. Think of a page from a magazine, like Scientific American or Vanity Fair, or the front part of an annual report, before all the numbers. That kind of crisp, elegant editorial design is what to shoot for with your white paper. Effective design enhances the content of the white paper instead of drawing attention to itself. Your design must add value and clarity to that content instead of adding distractions or hurdles to legibility. Let the white paper’s message shine out from your pages. Consider your readers' eyesight Most people’s eyes begin to change in their 40s, and they start to need larger type to read comfortably. By coincidence, most B2B white papers are aimed at business decision makers, most of whom are in their 40s and older. And many people this age prefer to read on paper, so they likely print out a white paper rather than read it on-screen. Younger designers, take note: You’re not designing white papers for yourself and your peers; you’re designing for older people. That means forget gray text and color backgrounds. Black text on a white background has been the standard for legibility for hundreds of years; why change it? Bump up the body size type to 10 or 11 points; it’s free. Realize that text isn't a graphic The text is the content of a white paper. Look at your pages as text-driven content, where your challenge is to make the text as inviting and easy to read or scan as in any magazine you pick up — any magazine, mind you, aimed at people in their 40s and older. Make every page count Sure, every white paper needs a little front and back matter, but when the front and back matter add up to nearly two-thirds of a white paper, something is terribly wrong. Some misguided software templates lay out a white paper like a two-sided book, with a blank page on the back of the front cover and a back cover to tie it all together. Forget it! Most B2B buyers either look at your white paper on-screen or print it out single sided. Those other pages are just a waste of time and money. Be sure to compress the front and back matter, cut the worthless blank pages, and make every page count. Control page breaks Avoid starting a major section at the very bottom of a page, with only a line or two of text after it or cramming a new section beginning near a footnote or footer. There’s nothing wrong with leaving a little white space at the end of a major section. Just start the new section on a new page. White space gives readers a momentary visual and mental break and helps them understand the structure of the document. Avoid a wall of gray Some designers have the idea that a white paper is supposed to be serious, and by that, they think “a wall of gray.” They think all they have to do is just pour the text into the pages and be done with it. Any white paper with text formatted as a wall of gray may look serious, but it won’t invite anyone to read it. Leave lots of white space Another symptom of the wall-of-gray approach is teensy-tiny, itsy-bitsy, little margins around the text. Long horizontal lines of type are hard for readers’ eyes to scan and tough for their brains to process. If you format a white paper with minimal white space, you’ll lose most of your readers. Again, white space is free. So what if your final document is eight or ten pages long? If the content is compelling and the design is inviting, your readers won’t mind. Avoid smug shots So you’re looking for a stock shot for a white paper. That’s a fine way to break up the wall of gray. But by all means, skip the shots of the beautiful people wearing impeccable suits hunched over a pristine PC or shaking hands in some foyer drenched in sunlight. Everyone knows those are fake, posed shots. Pick photos that show average-looking people wearing typical clothes, doing something a little more interesting than shaking hands or peering at computer screens. Control hyphenation Most software does a terrible job of hyphenating English. Traditional typography called for at least four letters before any hyphen and at least three letters carried to the second line. Most typographers wouldn’t hyphenate a word with fewer than six letters. So don’t rely on automated hyphenation, and leave your text ragged right. Then scan your right margins, and if you see a major white space that you absolutely must eliminate, take two seconds to insert a manual hyphen. Refine a corporate template Some companies have a corporate template that they expect all designers to follow. These layouts may be perfect for a press release, an internal business report, or a data sheet, but they’re not always ideal for a white paper. If you feel strongly that the corporate template detracts from the readability and undermines the white paper content, make your views known. If you have the scope, make up two versions of the white paper: one following the existing template and another with your recommended changes. Circulate both versions to your team, your customer advisory board, and your manager. Get a second opinion from an experienced designer or a white paper expert.

Article / Updated 07-18-2022

Defining niche marketing is a little difficult. Niche marketing is actually the conjoined Siamese triplets of niche market, niche product, and niche audience. Think about niche marketing in this context. You can’t really choose the products you’re going to market until you know the niche you’re going to address. You can’t really choose the niche market unless you know there are niche products that you can promote profitably. Of course, you can’t choose either the niche products you’re going to promote or the niche market you’re going to address without knowing that a smaller, well-defined niche audience of buyers ready, willing, and able to buy exists. What is meant by this? Niche marketing is going after a smaller, specific, defined area of the market. You’re interested in serving the subset of customers who are interested in this smaller, specific market area. So the first benefit of niche marketing is that you can more closely customize your approach to meet the customers’ needs and desires. The second benefit of niche marketing is you’re able to avoid being crushed by either well-funded corporations or experienced marketers fighting for top position in areas where the potential payday is much higher because of the higher number of searches. Do you want to be going head-to-head with the NFL, BBC, ESPN, and other well-funded corporate giants? Niche marketing is crucial to the beginning affiliate marketer. It’s even more important to the beginner than a more experienced affiliate marketer who has built up some credibility and a reputation. Why is that? Two words: competition and position. Today many affiliate marketers are looking for affiliate profits. Many of those affiliate marketers may be competing against you. They may be more experienced than you; their domain may be older and more established, which gives them more credibility. The products and niches that pay the best and have the most searches — which mean the biggest paychecks — have the fiercest competition. Do you want to go up against these affiliate marketing gladiators, who are often major corporations armed with million-dollar budgets? You could try, but getting in on this subsection of niche marketing would be like pounding on a brick wall. Rather than being a small fish (you) in a big pond (a high-competition area), you have a much higher chance of success being a big fish in a low-competition area (your niche). Beginning affiliate marketers are often seduced by the dancing dollars of high-competition markets. They start calculating in their heads — “Well, if Google says football gets 7.5 million searches a month and I target football, I’ll be rolling in dough even if I get just a tiny, tiny fraction of those web visitors visiting my site and making a purchase.” The Google search also shows there are 4.3 billion results (competitors) for this niche. But Google tells a different tale than the one the dancing dollars are telling you. In your Google search for football, you can see the top listings are the National Football League, ESPN, Wikipedia, BBC Sport, and CNN. As you can see, the first page of results consists of all major corporations or news organizations that have multimillion-dollar budgets, are well established on the internet, and surely have staffs of hundreds if not thousands of people to run their websites. If you were trying to get on the first page, you’d have some formidable competition. Enter niche marketing. A niche is a small, specialized area that may not get many searches. Since the imagined income is so much less, it attracts fewer affiliate marketers, which means less competition. Less competition means you have a reasonable chance, as a new affiliate marketer, to build a website or develop a social media campaign that will rank reasonably high, and you will make money. You’re also looking to cultivate a small, specific group of potential customers who are looking for the product you’re offering. For comparison, take the niche “football snack helmet.” It has a very low search volume, which means a much lower potential income, but it also has less competition. Google tells a much different story when you type “football snack helmet” into the browser. The top listing on the page is an affiliate marketer’s site selling Amazon football snack helmets and making a profit. So you, too, can find your own specialized niche, build your website to address the needs of your specialized market, and start to build your affiliate business around this niche by answering the needs of this specialize audience. How do you do this? By writing informative articles that answer the needs and questions this group may have or provide information they may find helpful. Niche marketing can help you from drowning in the competitive pools and let you find that specialized audience.

Article / Updated 07-18-2022

Snapchat allows snappers to use different lenses and filters to add whimsy and personality to snaps. Lenses can illustrate a mood, show holiday spirit, or add life and color to an image. Filters can display causes, show attendance at events, and promote a business. Lenses A lens adds special effects to your face, such as cat ears or a Santa hat. You set the lens in place before taking your selfie snap: In the main Snap screen, just before taking your selfie snap, press the middle of the screen (not the camera button).You’ll see a series of bubbles containing pictures. Each bubble contains a lens. Select the lens you’d like to use. You may have to drag the image around to position the filter to fit a face or head.For example, you might need to raise your eyebrows — or in the case of the vomiting rainbow, open your mouth. Follow instructions and adjust your position as needed. Take your snap and share as you normally would. Filters Unlike lenses, filters are added after you take your snap. For example, you can add the temperature, or a holiday garland to frame your snaps, or use a special geofilter to add your location. Many filters are available for a limited amount of time. If you love a certain filter, make sure to snap a screenshot or save it to your Memories. You might not be able to find it again later! To use a filter, do the following: Make sure location services is enabled on your smartphone.You can’t use filters without it. Take your snap as usual. Swipe right or left to see the different filters. Select the filter you’d like to use. Tap Send To to share as usual. To jazz up your snaps, try using both a lens and a filter. But be careful about over embellishing. You don’t want your snap to look so busy that it loses its essence. Geofilters In the past, people could create on demand geofilters for special events, such as weddings and milestone parties, with the caveat that no business-related logos or branding could be used. However, Snapchat now offers brands the capability to create their own branded on-demand geofilters. Unlike the geofilters used for weddings and parties, businesses must disclose that they are behind the on-demand geofilter they created. The benefit of an on-demand geofilter is that everyone in your community can use them to commemorate an event. For example, if 1,000 people use your geofilter during your event, your branding might be seen by tens of thousands of people, if not more. Geofilters are a form of advertising that will reach Snapchat’s demographic. Businesses must follow Terms of Use when creating geofilters. For example, brands can use logos or other branded content but can't use emails, phone numbers, personal information, or images of people. Also, it should go without saying that brands can’t use illegal drugs or illegal activities in geofilters. Take some time to familiarize yourself with Snapchat's rules regarding on-demand geofilters at its Submissions Guidelines page. To create an on-demand geofilter for your brand, you have to use Snapchat’s website — not the app. You have to pay to create an on-demand geofilter. Filters start at $5 but prices can go much, much higher (think $400+), depending on how much space your geofilter will encompass and how much time you want it to be available. Take these steps to upload an on-demand geofilter: Go to Snapchat’s on-demand link and click Create Now. Log into your Snapchat account. Download a template.Your design team much create the geofilter according to Snapchat’s specifications. Images should be 1080 px by 1920 px and saved as a PNG file. To upload your geofilter to Snapchat, click Choose File. Select the date range in which people can use your on-demand geofilter.For example, if you are marketing for a convention, you want to select dates coinciding with that event. Select the location in which your geofilter will be used. Confirm your geofilter, and select whether it’s for personal or business use. Add payment information. Snapchat will review your on-demand geofilter to ensure that it follows their submission guidelines. You can check on orders at the Snapchat website’s My Orders page. Snapchat will also send you an email confirmation.

Article / Updated 07-18-2022

After you’ve established your content marketing mission statement, you can focus on your company goals. Here is a brief look at how to formulate goals. Uncovering your content marketing goals When looking at formulating your own goals, it can be useful to see what other marketers set as their top goals for B2B content marketing. According to the “2015 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends — North America” report by the Content Marketing Institute/Marketing Profs, (see the following figure), the top organizational goals for B2B content marketing are the following: Brand awareness: 84 percent Lead generation: 83 percent Engagement: 81 percent Sales: 75 percent Lead nurturing: 74 percent Customer Retention/Loyalty: 69 percent Customer Evangelism: 57 percent Upsell/Cross-sell: 52 percent 2015 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends — North America Survey. The report indicates that 2015 was the fifth year that brand awareness came in at the top spot and that customer evangelism shows up on the list. Picking KPIs After you establish your goals, you need to develop Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). KPIs are the measures you choose to help you determine whether you’re reaching your business goals. You need them to keep your strategy on track. If you don’t measure yourself against your business goals, you won’t know whether your content marketing strategy is working and supporting your larger business goals. To help you think about how to craft your KPIs in relation to your marketing goals, check out the table. You can apply the table to your marketing plan as well. List your goals and then choose some metrics. Then refer back to this list when you check your progress. Choosing KPIs CMI/Marketing Profs B2B Top Goals Suggested Metrics Increase brand awareness Social media shares, social media likes, email forwards, referral links Lead generation Lead nurturing Blog signups, blog comments, conversion rate, form completions Increase engagement Comments, page depth (how many pages consumed), downloads, page views, back links, time on site, click through rate Grow sales revenue by X percent Revenue influenced by content (which content was consumed before sale), offline sales Improve customer retention/loyalty Bounce rate, followers, retention rate Encourage customer evangelism Social media shares, comments, follower count, word of mouth Increase upsells/cross-sells Measure conversions in shopping cart and on landing pages, number of conversions

Article / Updated 07-18-2022

In the same way that your brand name is the key that unlocks your brand image in the mind of consumers, your domain name (the string of characters web users type into a browser to reach your site, such as www.yourbrandname.com), and your social-media handles or monikers are the keys that unlock your brand online. Ideally, your domain name is comprised of your brand name plus .com or .org, depending on whether your brand represents a commercial business or a nonprofit organization. The Internet is populated with millions of websites accessed by domain names that tie up most of the words in the English language. Beyond that, cyber-squatters camp on attractive unclaimed domain names, registering and tying them up until someone pays what can feel like a ransom to free them for use. Landing on your website’s domain name By a mile, making your brand name the centerpiece of your domain name is the quickest route to establishing your online identity, and here’s why: A good portion of web traffic takes the form of type-in traffic, a term that describes users who bypass search engines and simply type the name of the company they’re looking for, followed by .com, in the address bar of the web browser. If you’re developing a new brand, don’t settle on a brand name until you’ve checked it out at a domain name registry to confirm it’s available as a domain name. Research availability on registry sites like GoDaddy.com, NameCheap.com, or NetworkSolutions.com. To shortcut the process, avoid choosing a brand name that’s straight out of the dictionary. You can preempt a ton of frustration by coining a word that you can use in both your brand and domain names. Microsoft, DreamWorks, Netflix, and Firefox are just a few examples. If your brand name isn’t available as a domain name, try these Plan B approaches: Come up with a tagline or slogan that becomes a major part of your brand identity and the basis for your domain name. For example, type in www.justdoit.com and you land on the Nike site. Look into purchasing your top-choice domain name from its current owner. This process can be costly and time-consuming, but if you plan to build a valuable brand, it can be worth the investment. Domain name advice As you plan your domain name, consider the following points: Keep your domain name short and easy to remember. Some of the best-known web addresses provide good examples: www.ebay.com, www.google.com, www.yahoo.com. If your brand name plus .com or .org is taken, don’t try to end-run the system by using your brand name plus .net. If web users instinctively type .com, they’ll go straight to someone else’s site. Don’t get clever by adding hyphens or making unusual alterations to your brand name. For instance, a domain name like www.cookeezncream.com may be available, but the chances that most users will remember and instinctively type it correctly are slim. Don’t invent an abbreviation for a long brand name unless you’re sure it will be easy to memorize and recall. For example, the Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau can be reached by typing www.hvcb.org, but they don’t ask you to remember the lineup of initials. Instead, they market the domain name www.gohawaii.com, which offers an easy-to-recall address. Think globally. If your business plan calls for international presence, register your name with international codes to specify your global offices. Registering your domain name When you find the domain name you want, register it immediately. Most registration services charge somewhere between $25 and $75 for a three-year period of domain name ownership. When registering your name, consider this advice: The first domain name you need to register is your site name, as in www.yourbrandname.com. Consider also registering your site with various extensions, such as .net, .org, .info, or .biz so others can’t later grab the alternative addresses. You can redirect the traffic to your main address. Consider registering versions of your domain name that people are likely to type when trying to find your brand online. For example: Register your tagline as a domain name so people who forget your brand name but remember your slogan can reach your site. Register your brand name with misspellings. For instance, if you type www.googel.com, you’re redirected to www.google.com. Register additional domain names as you discover new user-error tendencies. After your website is up and running, regularly check error logs to see what kinds of mistakes people are making when trying to reach your site. Creating a multiple-domain-name strategy costs very little. You can use a process called URL redirection to point all traffic to the website that carries your primary domain name, incurring no additional site building or hosting fees. Registering your social-media name While you’re choosing and registering your domain name, register your name across social-media networks as well. When deciding how to present your name, follow this advice: Decide on a social-media moniker that’s short and memorable. If your brand name is available, use it as both your domain name and your social-media handle. Sites such as knowem.com, checkusernames.com, or namechk.com will tell you on-the-spot whether the name you want is taken on various networks. If it’s available, click to claim and protect it. If your brand name isn’t available on the social-media networks you want to use, consider this advice: Avoid adding odd hyphenation or characters that people are apt to forget or mistype. Invent a version of your name by combining your name with a word that describes or reflects your brand promise, business arena, or niche. Use one name on all networks to build brand awareness. Reserve your name on the networks you plan to use immediately.

Article / Updated 07-18-2022

All lead-generation campaigns need to be tested to make your campaigns better over time. By testing, you also gain insight into your programs — you'll know what's working and what isn't. A marketing team that doesn't test often is a marketing team that is blind to what their leads are doing. So what do you do? Build testing into your campaign creation and measurement process, and make sure testing is ingrained in each and every team member's minds. Each of your marketers should test his campaigns on a regular basis, or you can even have someone on staff who specializes in (or who highly enjoys) testing. Testing in lead generation and marketing is akin to the scientific method: Communicate a question. Hypothesize the answer. Formulate your predictions. Test those predictions. Analyze the results. Marketers typically use a few standard testing types to test their campaigns. You can test just about any aspect of a campaign — from channel used, to copy created, to subject line, time of day sent, and more. So get creative with what you're trying to find out. The more you know, the more you grow! Depending on what you want to test, you can use Your marketing automation platform A solution that specializes in testing, such as Optimizely Google Analytics to track changes you have made In some cases, you may not even need additional testing help. For instance, if you post two messages on a social channel, you can track yourself which post has more shares and engagement.

Article / Updated 07-07-2022

In web marketing, it’s important to make sure your site is visible. Checking your robots.txt file and meta robots tags is a good place to start. Errors with these can make your site invisible to visitors. Check your robots.txt file Go to www.yoursiteaddress.com/robots.txt . You might get a Page Not Found error. That’s okay for your purposes: A no robots.txt file means you’re not placing any broad limits on what search engines can and can’t index on your site. You might also see something like this: User-agent: * Disallow: /blog.htm This file is called the robots.txt file. It tells search engine crawlers, also known as robots, what to do when they visit your website. In this example, it’s telling all search engines to ignore the blog.htm page. All other pages are searchable. If you want to become a robots.txt geek, visit the Web Robots Page. You can find out everything you ever wanted to know about guiding robots around your site. What you don’t want to see in your robots.txt file is this: Disallow: / This line tells a visiting search engine crawler to ignore every page on your website. A developer may add this line when he is building the site to prevent search engines from crawling it while it’s under construction. If it is left there by accident, your site is invisible to search engines. If your robots.txt file has any Disallow commands in it, check with your webmaster or developer to make sure that a reason exists. Disallow can be used to hide pages that change a lot, hide duplicate content, or keep search engines out of stuff you just don’t want them crawling. Just make sure that you’re not accidentally hiding content they should see. Check for meta robots tags Using the meta robots tag is another way to hide pages from search engines. Go to any page on your website and view the source code. You don’t want to see If the meta robots tag is there, and it contains noindex , nofollow , or both, remove it. You have valid reasons to use this tag: You might want a search engine to ignore this page because it’s a duplicate; you might feel the information on the page is inappropriate for search results; or the developer might have hidden the page during development. If you don’t know the reason, delete the tag. Do not trust your developer to remove the meta robots tag. When he builds your site, he’s working hard, writing code so fast that his fingers smoke. Forgetting to remove that one little line of code is easy when you’re facing a tough deadline and still have 4,000 lines of code to write. Remind your developer!

Cheat Sheet / Updated 05-09-2022

Account-based marketing flips the marketing funnel on its head. You start with your best-fit prospects and turn them into resources for both long-term business and new prospects.

Cheat Sheet / Updated 04-25-2022

The world of marketing, sales, and lead generation has plenty of jargon, so here's a glossary of terms to help you know what's what. Also, here is a round-up of eight incredibly useful free apps that help you with everything from evaluating your website for broken links and good search engine optimization (SEO) to determining how engaging your marketing emails are.

Cheat Sheet / Updated 04-25-2022

Effective SEO (search engine optimization) is critical for any business that has a website. You want your business’s website to show up on that first page when people search for what you’re selling, and that’s where SEO comes into play. Here you’ll find the key components of a website that should be crafted with care to help a web page rank, the server status codes that help or hinder SEO, and advanced search operators that will have you searching the web like a pro.