Images Define Your Brand: Five Stages of the Image Processing Maturity Model

Images have become a defining factor in how brands communicate online—from social media posts and e-commerce product galleries to blogs and digital ads.

Many organizations follow a set of stages in their use of images, beginning with simple image resizing, then gradually evolve into more sophisticated, data-driven strategies.

Understanding and embracing each phase of that “Image Processing Maturity Model” is essential for businesses looking to stand out … [ Read more ]

Four Things You Should Know About Email List Validation

Letting go of contacts you’ve worked so hard to gather isn’t pleasant. Even more unpleasant, though, is getting bounces and seeing your engagement decline because your emails are going to the spam folder. Cleaning obsolete data from your email list is best-practice if you send mass emails.

Most marketers know that a high number of bounces indicates that it’s time for an email list cleaning. But … [ Read more ]

Five Best-Practices for Managing Digital Marketing Content and Assets

In today’s digital world, marketers manage thousands of images and videos. These digital assets consist of a variety of file types, from JPG and TIF to PNG, GIF, RAW, MPEG, MP4, and many others. Marketers use these digital files for e-books, whitepapers, infographics, social media, webpages, and other branded materials. Finding the right version of the right file—right when you need it—is key for staying … [ Read more ]

Five Marketing Strategy Frameworks to Choose From for Business Success

A marketing framework brings a structured approach that helps you to understand your business and its place in the market. It outlines how you’ll achieve your marketing goals. However, there are many types of marketing strategy frameworks. Unsure which marketing strategy framework to choose? Let’s explore some of the best options.

What to Keep In-House and When to Use an Agency: A Four-Part Decision Framework

What should I keep in-house (i.e., do with teams inside the company’s four walls), and when should I use an agency? That marketing/advertising dilemma may be one of the most persistent. The decision is hugely consequential, and so it would be ideal to apply some sort of lens that can help you make some sense of all the noise around this topic.

I’ve worked at agencies … [ Read more ]

The Psychology of Persuasion: Understanding Customer Behavior in Marketing

Customer behavior and the study of why people make the purchase decisions that they do can be a complicated landscape to navigate in marketing.

The psychological tool of persuasion and the use of established persuasion techniques can help cut through the nuance of customer behavior to influence purchase decisions. That influence shapes customer behavior by helping them form useful mental shortcuts during the buying process.

Five Serious Content Marketing Mistakes You Need to Avoid

Done well, content marketing helps businesses build brand awareness, increase visibility, and generate more leads—ultimately driving sales and growth. Yet, many businesses struggle with their content marketing.

26 Universal Questions for Brand Positioning (and Creating Your Brand Story)

An analysis of over 1,000 case studies from around the world of successful brand building has found that there are 26 different “approaches” to telling a brand story, each representing a different but proven opportunity to positioning your brand and telling your brand story. Each approach can be summarized by a key question (or set of questions), which I share below.

How to Create a Social Media Style Guide in Five Steps

Your brand needs a style guide to ensure that everyone who posts on your social media platforms speaks in one voice and tone. A social media style guide will help ensure your audiences recognize your brand, regardless of the social media platform they go to. It also helps ensure brand recall, which may, in turn, translate into conversions.

But how do you create a social media … [ Read more ]

A Framework for Getting Started With Customer Journey Mapping

How does a business start with customer journey mapping? Before attempting any customer journey map exercise, organizations must answer two questions.

  • Are we a customer-centric organization?
  • Is customer experience a measured focus of our business?

Assuming the answer is yes to those questions, the next step is to build out journey maps using the following general framework.

The Five Layers of the Modern Martech Stack

Martech stacks provide the tools organizations need to determine marketing success at every potential touchpoint.

A well-built stack increases marketing effectiveness and generates tangible value. A convoluted stack increases complexity. But what makes martech stack creation so difficult is that so many solutions are available and no one tool or platform can handle every marketer’s need.

The key is knowing what other marketing functions can be digitized … [ Read more ]

Effective Content Writing in 15 Steps

Great content creates brand awareness and brand visibility; plus, it grows a loyal audience that knows and likes your brand. Ultimately, it can help you increase sales. Here are 15 tips for approaching content writing.

Finding Your ‘Y’: How to Measure Marketing ROI Without Third-Party Cookies

As a marketer, you absolutely have to be able to show that you’re generating ROI. Your stakeholders deserve to know whether and how their investment will help grow their business.

Measuring ROI is simultaneously the easiest and most difficult task for most marketers. And it really comes down to two reasons.

How to Conduct Effective Audience Analysis in Six Steps

Audience analysis is the assessment and identification of interests, attitudes, preferences, behaviors, demographics, needs, and other data points of a particular group. In a business setting, audience analysis allows businesses to understand current and potential customers.

Here’s how to conduct audience analysis effectively.

The Most Important KPIs to Track the Effectiveness of Your Email Marketing Strategy

For capturing and retaining customers, the importance of a successful email marketing strategy is paramount. In fact, 81% of small and midsize businesses (SMBs) rely on email marketing as their primary customer acquisition channel, and 80% for customer retention.

But to make the most out of your email marketing goals, you need to align them with those of your business. How can you do that, and … [ Read more ]

How to Make Your Brand’s Storytelling More Compelling

In recent years, it’s become fashionable for marketers to describe themselves as “storytellers” for their brand. But many brand narratives are deadly dull. That’s because they lack the one element that every good writer uses: conflict.

So, You Want to Be a Thought Leader? A Framework and Guide for Your Thought Leadership Strategy

Thought leadership is not a new topic. In fact, the term was coined by Joel Kurtzman back in 1994.

In the two-and-a-half decades since, we’ve seen the rise of YouTube experts, Instagram influencers, and the Kardashians.

But are all of those people thought leaders? Are any of them thought leaders?

To answer the same questions about yourself or the people you’re trying to build into thought leaders on … [ Read more ]

Three Marketing Metrics to Stop Tracking—And What to Measure Instead

Marketing teams need to be agile and lean to bring the most value possible to the wider organization, so they don’t have time to track metrics that don’t bring value. Here are a few examples of marketing metrics that are ready to be retired, and suggestions for better metrics to replace them.

Keep It Real: How to Not Over-Automate Email Sequences

Email automation was sent from Marketing Heaven. Without it, drip campaigns and email sequencing would be nigh impossible, no matter what you are trying to achieve with it. Whether you’re a marketer, a lead-nurturer, or a sales pitcher, you know the value of email automation.

However, you can have too much of a good thing. In your quest for an easier working day, the steady drip-drip-drip … [ Read more ]