How To Define Your Brand Personality

How to define your brand personalityDid you know your brand has a personality? At least, it should. And it’s better to define it before someone else does. A given brand’s personality is a set of human characteristics that are relatable to your target audience – just like a person. It’s an important way marketers can control how customers view brands and organizations.

Defining a brand’s personality does require some thought on how you want to be seen. It should be a reflection of your organization’s personality as well as your ideal customers. If they are young, edgy and urban, then you will market to them differently than you would to affluent, settled suburbanites.

Successful brand personalities also frequently tap into our fantasies, whether to connect us with the fierce athletes of Nike or the adventuresome rebels of Harley Davidson.

Online Marketing Strategy

Marketing Email Subject Lines That Work

Marketing email subject lines that workMarketers hoping to entice prospects to open, read, click or act on emails face the need for a delicate balance. How do you write a subject line that’s urgent but informative? Enticing, not off-putting?

Online email marketing consultancy Phrasee studied the click rates and open rates of about 700 emails. It found that even very subtle differences in word choice can have a major impact on the likelihood of the recipient taking the action you want. While the right phrasing in email marketing helps increase business sales, language that suggests boasting or too much urgency can backfire on marketers. Even minor grammatical distractions like too many commas or capitalized words can land an email in the trash folder.

Email Marketing

7 Things To Include In Your Lead Generation Forms

Lead Generation Forms

The last stop on the journey to lead conversion, your website’s lead generation form is a crucial step in the process of creating prospects for your business. Whether it converts visitors to subscribers or puts prospects in touch with your business, there are key ingredients any form should have to optimize its success rate.

Do all of your lead conversion forms contain these seven elements?

1. Social logins: Social logins can make it fast and easy for visitors to sign up for content access with essentially one click.

2. Testimonials: In addition to compelling copy, Business 2 Community explains that marketers can boost their credibility through testimonials because they introduce you and your business as an expert resource. They function as compliments to the copy on your landing page, which entices visitors to provide their contact details for further interaction.

Lead Generation

How To Create A Content Calendar

How to create a content calendar

Whether weekly, monthly or quarterly, every marketer should have a content calendar to keep them on task. Doing so not only helps marketers organize content more efficiently, but it will help you formulate a strategy for connecting with your target audience, customers and other stakeholders. A calendar can include upcoming campaigns, product launches and social media pushes, in addition to important publishing dates. Most important, the calendar is a shareable resource that will help your team visualize how blogs and other content will be distributed throughout the year.

What you need
You content calendar will highlight industry events and other important dates, telling you what to schedule and when. Either a common software system or a free online tool like Google Calendar will be necessary to alert you when to line up content based on your marketing plan. As a rule, it should provide reminders of when to start and finish each piece of content with ample time to publish.

Everyone on your team will use it to plan together and share updates. In Google Calendar, you can invite new members by clicking Share this Calendar under the My Calendars setting. There are also permission settings to help ensure there aren’t too many cooks in the kitchen. And you can all share those calendars with one another for a single-screen view of everything that’s going on so you can coordinate more easily.

Content Marketing, Online Marketing Strategy

What’s Missing From Your LinkedIn Profile?

Whats missing from your LinkedIn profileWe tend to think of LinkedIn as an online resume, but marketers should consider it as an important social media tool and an integral part of any program.

LinkedIn has more than 300 million members, and the membership is continuing to rise. So be sure you’re taking advantage of the many different ways your LinkedIn profile can help you do your job.

Does your profile include these strategic marketing components?

Headshot: This should be a professional image that expresses both you and your brand.

Headline: As Business 2 Community points out, your headline appears in search results and is the first thing that people see. For that reason, be sure it includes keywords to help others find it. Think of something enticing that will help you stand out.

Social Media

3 Common Pay-Per-Click Pitfalls

3 pitfalls to avoid in PPC

The abundance of information on pay-per-click solutions can make it hard to know whether each new development will help you improve your overall PPC revenue – or leave you spinning your wheels. Even seasoned marketers and PPC managers struggle with figuring out which trends will help them boost ad revenue through website traffic.

If you face one of three common pitfalls, you are not alone:

Pay-Per-Click

7 Ways to Measure Your Content Marketing Success

7 ways to measure your content marketing successAs marketing becomes central to digital marketing strategies, marketers should measure their program’s success on more than a hunch. More and more, we’re expected to quantify the success of our content marketing to justify our budget. The best measurements look beyond a shopper’s initial response and gauge sustained engagement compared with downstream revenue.

In other words, retweets and likes may not matter as much to your business objectives as actual leads and sales. Here are seven ways to prove your content marketing program is worth the investment:

Online Marketing Strategy

Tips for Managing Your Affiliate Marketing Program

Tips for managing your affiliate marketing program

If you’re managing an affiliate marketing program on a low budget – or outsourcing the task out to someone else – you may be left with ineffective strategies, sluggish growth or dissatisfied clients.

Affiliate marketing should be a measurable way to boost sales. But how do you ensure your program has the potential to take your brand awareness to the next level? Does your program provide constant recruitment of new affiliates? Does it align with your clients’ strategies, as well as your own? American City Business Journals urges you to first be sure affiliate marketing fits into your company’s overall marketing and brand strategy before diving in. For this to happen, you’ll need to devote attention to all of your affiliate programs or find someone who can.

Some marketers get so bogged down in the weeds they end up actually wasting company resources, rather than addressing the nature of the challenges to their program. Digital marketers in particular should review their management techniques for new ways to grow strategically. With the potential to represent 5 to 15 percent of online sales and performance based payout structure, affiliate marketing is a necessary part of the digital marketing portfolio for retailers looking to grow their online sales, Multichannel Merchant reported.

Affiliate Marketing

How B2B Buying is Evolving

Digital Marketing - B2B

Traditional business-to-business buying involved two things: wooing customers at live events and buying ads in hopes of hitting the jackpot. Between the digital revolution and a younger demographic dictating new buying trends, things are not so straightforward anymore.

Now there are more players than ever and many more layers to the B2B buying process. The way buyers conduct their research and make purchasing decisions has changed with the times, as well. MarketingProfs reported that millennial B2B buyers want to interact directly with vendors’ representatives far more than Gen X or baby boomer buyers when researching products and services. If you’ve been out of the game for a while, expect to see three major factors affecting the field:

Online Marketing Strategy