In this post, we’ll explore 15 surprising digital marketing trends that you need to know. The charts below are pulled from Google Trends and show search interest over the last decade.
This is the phrase that is changing the way marketing is done. You’ll see a VERY close resemblance to the graph below for “HubSpot”, the all-in-one Inbound Marketing software (and marketing content giant). (more…)
So what does Bernie Madoff have in common with the yellow pages? They both represent VERY bad investments. That may sound harsh, but follow me here and I will show you why. The yellow pages sales tactics have adapted to include some fairly modern buzzwords like SEO, landing pages, etc. Do not be fooled. Yellow pages exist for one reason – to make money selling real estate in a big fat book that nobody looks at anymore. (more…)
I read a study a few months ago about how hard it is to sell the CEO of a company on the business value of marketing. As someone who has been in the marketing industry for over 15 years now, my initial reaction was “absolutely – I can understand that!”. Those of us in the industry are always passionate about branding, awareness, market position, etc. But at the end of the day – it’s always hard to put a hard value on those things. When the CEO or CFO of a company is reviewing the budget for the upcoming year – they can easily look at production departments and compare what they spend to how much is produced. This is ROI – and these three little letters will get the attention of a company leader faster than just about anything! Marketing ROI is the missing piece of the puzzle to get your leaders excited about marketing and willing to divert more budget to the marketing department. (more…)
We live in a world of laws. I’m speaking of scientific laws, specifically. Think about it – everything that we know and believe in the scientific world is based on a relatively small set of laws that are irrefutable. Scientists build everything they study around these well known laws and theories such as the laws of thermodynamics, gravity, behaviors of sound waves, light, etc. For those of us NOT in the scientific community, we have discovered a lot of these laws independently. For instance, the heavier the object, the more it hurts when it gets dropped on your foot! This is based on Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation. Loosely translated, this means that the more mass and object has, the more gravitational pull it can exert on something else. Obviously it’s hard to notice this here on earth because we are standing on an object that has so much mass, everything is attracted to it. Planets really have a LOT of pull! (more…)
We are pleased to introduce a new video we produced to go along with The Gravity Strategy eBook and blog posts. We are excited about this concept because it makes it super easy to explain Inbound Marketing and it’s benefits for your business. Enjoy!
We were in a quasi-sales pitch meeting yesterday and the prospect began discussing the “break-even” analysis. (I used to hate it when sales guys told me how many sales I would have to make to break even. If I just break even , the only person who has made money is the sales guy. If I just break even, I’m working for him, not me.)
In the analysis, we brought out the tried and true “Customer Lifetime Value” (CLV). (CLV is “a prediction of the net profit attributed to the entire future relationship with a customer.”) And as content marketers, we have pretty firm ground to stand on when we do. Content marketing is all about educating both your potential and existing clients. Sy Syms made the following statement famous in the business world. “An educated customer is our best customer.”
As Syms understood, if your client or customer understands the full benefits of your service, they will have more confidence in the outcome when the critics show up. The spouse might say . . .
“You should try __________.”
“No”, your educated client says, “what we’re doing with this vendor works because . . . ” (more…)