Anyone that knows me also knows I have a passion for public speaking. So far in 2015, after the first 6 months, I’ve given a total of 51 presentations and keynotes in roughly 20 different states/countries. For me, this is a full time job. I love it and some people say I’m pretty good at…
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Author: Shanna Cook
Have you “liked” all of your Social Media Manager’s posts today? If you haven’t, then you should. Why? Because today is officially Social Media Day! June 30, 2015 marks the 6th annual global celebration of social media’s impact on global communications and the contributions that social has made to our lives.
We all know how social looks on the outside—hashtags, sponsored Facebook ads, viral videos, and selfies on selfies. But what do Social Media Managers really do all day? Hint: we do a lot more than just getting paid to tweet (yes, I get that question a lot!) In celebration of Social Media Day, I’m pulling back the curtain to give you a sneak peek into a day in the life of a Social Media Manager, alongside some easily actionable tips on how to incorporate social into your daily routine.
BUZZZZ! First alarm goes off. Hit snooze. Wake up to second alarm five minutes later (an important five minutes, I may add) and immediately open Twitter app to scroll through my feed and check in on what happened overnight around the world. I’ll favorite and engage with posts on both my personal and corporate Twitter accounts and send a note to my teammates if there’s anything of PR interest or any product-related questions. I’ll also send myself articles to read on my walk to the gym or when I get a break later in the day. I’ll then work out, respond to emails, and then drive in to the office.
Tip: Use social media as a way to quickly find out what started trending worldwide or learn about breaking news. Gone are the days where we had to tune in to the local television news broadcast while making breakfast to find out what’s happening in our communities. Use this morning time to read press releases and check in on what new things your competitors have announced. Reading quick, 140 character social posts in the very early morning before checking my email inbox allows some of my creative juices to start flowing and gives me some things to ponder while I’m sprinting on the treadmill (OK, maybe not actually sprinting…)
Meetings, meetings, meetings! As marketers, we all know the tune to that song. This is when I attend the planning meetings for other teams within the marketing department to find out what’s happening in their unique worlds and determine how we can best work together. I get briefed on their plans and I present the social plan that I have created for each event, definitive guide, product announcement, sponsorship, webinar, customer testimonials, and so much more. I also meet with a teammate to schedule upcoming social posts on every platform.
Tip: As a marketer, working one-on-one with your Social Media Manager helps you both figure out the best plan of attack to amplify your individual programs, giving them the right understanding of the audience, the project timelines, and how it all fits in to the company’s larger set of priorities.
While I check in on our corporate Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook accounts to see how promoted and organic posts are performing, respond to any comments that we may have received, and pull metrics, my teammates and I have lunch and chat over our favorite drink (Can you say Kombucha?!) I also tend to discover some pretty funny slash crazy posts that are being shared on social around this time (what are you guys drinking during lunch?! Because it sure ain’t Kombucha!) and share them with my teammates. These jokes coupled with my team’s catch-up sessions have actually inspired some real social campaigns that I have developed! #JokesOnJokes
Tip: Ideas and inspiration are everywhere—not just at your desk. Go ahead and engage in water cooler talk and see what’s on your colleagues’ minds. You never know when a light bulb will go off simply based on something said to you in passing!
Also, know that you don’t always have to be so serious on social media—even in the corporate world. While social is known as an amazing place to build your professional brand, I also more than encourage my colleagues to be human. It’s OK to share something witty and funny. My simplified golden rule for social media is “Be nice. Be smart. Don’t be mean”. So if you really like that cat video, go ahead and share it!
If the first half of my day is Community Management, then the second half is Social Strategy and partnerships. This is the time when I work with my creative team to get artwork created, develop storyboards for social videos, and brainstorm new brand awareness campaigns. I also use this time to meet with our external partners—the platforms we use, like Hootsuite, Track Maven, GaggleAMP, and Twitter, to learn about new beta tests and product optimization strategies. I also meet with the Social Media Managers at other companies to explore cross-promotion strategies.
Tip: Social strategy is key to marketing at any company. Your Social Media Manager does WAY more than just play around on Facebook all day. There is a fine art and science to social, just like any other marketing strategy, and it should be baked in to any program from the start. As Marketo’s CMO likes to say—“Social should be an ingredient in the cake, not the icing on the cake”.
Drive home, grab dinner with my boyfriend, and engage in some pub trivia with our friends (side note: I’m the resident pop culture expert, and the answer is always Carly Rae Jepsen). While I might not be in the office, it doesn’t mean that I’m not working (in fact, tonight’s work is writing this blog post!) I’ll also check in on our corporate social accounts one more time before going to sleep. I almost always have posts automatically go live in the evening, and I like to make sure that they’re performing properly.
Tip: Don’t assume that your Social Media Manager isn’t working if she’s not at her desk. This week I am remote-live covering an event that Marketo is at in Cannes, France. Social media management can and does happen everywhere. Similarly, you can do social while waiting in line at the grocery store!
Social doesn’t need to be as engrained into your life as it is mine—after all, it’s my bread and butter…and my job! However, storing one or two of these tips in your mind will help you become more comfortable using social media, enabling you to build your online brand, which is definitely a must in our digital marketing-dominant world!
The Secret Life of a Social Media Manager was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com
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Author: Kimbe MacMaster
Video is on the rise. In fact, video will account for nearly 80% of all internet traffic by 2018, according to Cisco.
But it’s not just consumption patterns that are on the up and up. Video is also driving some serious business results.
Just consider these high-performing video stats:
The days of video as solely a top-of-funnel, dare we say “fluffy” asset, have passed. With the intense focus on guiding buyers through the purchase process with valuable content and targeted nurture streams, as well as the development of video-based technology, marketing with video is a whole new ball game.
And that’s why, over the last couple of years, we’ve seen a phenomenal shift in the way marketers are using video.
Video is one of your strongest marketing and demand gen assets. Not only can video help you generate leads directly with the help of email gates, pop-out CTA, and in-video forms, it can also be used to measure buyer interest and tailor content journeys accordingly. Just like you’d do with any other piece of content, your marketing automation platform is a key piece of the puzzle here to map content to the lead profile.
But chances are, you’re not using video in your marketing automation platform to help you better understand your leads.
And you’re not alone.
In a recent Demand Metric study, nearly 70% of respondents agreed that video engagement data is effective as a lead quality or business opportunity indicator, but only 9% of companies have actually integrated video viewing data with their CRM or marketing automation systems and are actively exploiting that data. 9%!!
If video is so much more than a top-of-funnel, brand awareness medium, then why aren’t marketers looking beyond video views and diving deeper into viewing behavior and influenced pipeline?
Picture this: a prospective buyer comes to your site and watches 10 videos on one page and then leaves. Would you know? Would he be ranked as a highly qualified prospect? He certainly should be, as the consumption of your video content is just as strong an indicator of buyer intent as any other type of content consumption. In fact, according to Unruly, the enjoyment of a video increases purchase intent by 97%!
And due to video’s linear nature, it’s actually easier to measure viewers’ engagement with these assets than many text-based content assets. In other words, where you can only tell if a prospective buyer downloads or doesn’t download your whitepaper, you can see in-depth consumption metrics for your videos, like what parts of a video she’s watched, re-watched, or skipped altogether.
With this viewing data in hand, marketers can feed their lead scoring and nurture programs to better qualify leads and nurture them for sales. If Julie watched one video while Jackson watched six, you’d likely score Jackson higher. And if Jackson only watched 10% of the Product A feature video but 95% of the Product B feature video, you better bet you’d be sending him more information on Product B!
Vidyard and Marketo partnered to produce an ebook on making the most of video in marketing automation. Download it now to learn:
Have you used video in your marketing efforts? Let me know your experience in the comments below!
Why Video Is Crucial to Your Marketing Automation Strategy was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com
The post Why Video Is Crucial to Your Marketing Automation Strategy appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.
Hey folks, it’s podcast time! And in this fast and furious episode of Mad Marketing, we’ll be discussing: Why so many larger companies just can’t seem to get out of their own way when it comes to producing content How to manage content brainstorms with your team The power of understanding how search engines like…
The post Mad Marketing 60: Why Large Companies Struggle w Content Marketing appeared first on The Sales Lion by Marcus Sheridan.
Author: Stacey Thornberry
They’re eager to learn, they’re discovering their career path, and they’re ready to help YOU. Yes, they’re interns!
Whether just out of their freshman year or exploring the “real-world” post-university, your interns are looking to you for guidance as they navigate the marketing landscape. Here are some helpful tips on how to engage your interns for maximum growth and effectiveness, and most importantly, how you can help them learn.
Your team has been provided an intern for the summer. Awesome! Now what?
As a marketer, you have practice engaging your customers with engagement marketing strategies, many of which can also be applied to engaging your intern. Cool! How? Let’s take a look.
Create a 1:1 personalized relationship to build trust and respect that will hopefully last through the years, even after your intern flies the coop. How do you get started? Here are a few things you can do:
No. Please don’t do that. You’ll burn him out very quickly! Of course, you can certainly give him some data projects (we all have to start somewhere), but build in some projects that feed his interests as well. But, you may have been blessed with an intern who wants to dive head-first into some marketing analytics (I see a future marketing operations role in his future!), so, I say, let ‘em do it! The key is to find a balance between your team’s needs and your intern’s interests. Here are some examples of projects that data-hungry interns can nosh on:
For the less data-eager crowd, here are some other examples of intern-worthy projects:
There are plenty of other ideas depending on your team’s needs–from helping with customer advocate campaigns, to writing promotional email copy for your upcoming webinar series, to creating real-time personalization campaigns targeting specific accounts or industries. Again, think about your intern’s skills and passions, what you actually need done, and how these ideas can complement each other.
Yes, your intern is there to help support you, but she is also there to learn from you! Work together to identify projects that fit her interests as well as support your goals:
I was lucky to have an amazing first internship experience my junior year of college. As an event intern for Stratus Performance Group in Santa Barbara, CA, I helped plan the first ever Elite Meetings Alliance, bringing together prequalified corporate and association planners with leaders in the luxury hotel industry to cultivate relationships and conduct business. My managers entrusted me to make decisions and empowered me to do my best, which allowed me to truly shine. I’ll never forget one attendee being astonished that I was an intern still in college and not a full-time employee. (That sure made me feel good)! Overall, it was a memorable, enriching experience that ultimately led me to pursue a career in event marketing. Now imagine that—you could end up influencing your intern’s entire future!
Here’s the bottom line: Think about your past internships and those managers and teammates that helped you learn the most. Those experiences serve as your model for how to interact and work with your intern. Be inspiring, be inspired, and give back to the marketing community—adopt an intern today!
Do you have any stories from your past internships and how they helped you learn and grow? Have you had the privilege of managing a rock-star intern? I would love to hear your own experiences, so please comment below!
Summer Is Here—Bring on the Interns! was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com
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In this interview, I get to talk to Ezra Fishman from Wistia. We sit down and chat about all things video, inbound and Wistia. My favorite part of the interview has to be the “hidden” features found in Wistia. There are a ton of hidden gems in this interview. If you are like most of our TSL…
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The Hubcast Podcast Episode 048 Welcome back to The Hubcast folks; a weekly podcast all about HubSpot news, tips, and tricks. Please also note the extensive show notes below, including some new HubSpot video tutorials created by George Thomas. Show Notes: HubSpot Strategy This week we talk about the role of…
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Author: Ellen Gomes
I think you’ve probably heard the buzz…mobile marketing is HOT, and that’s true, but instead of convincing you why mobile is important (it is), I want to take a look at how marketers are communicating to their customers via mobile devices. Marketers communicate with their audiences via mobile on virtually every channel and that’s because people spend tons of time on their mobile phones. In fact, according to the Marketo Mobile Benchmark Survey, 72% of people spend two or more hours a day on their mobile devices.
You need to consider creating a mobile experience when you craft your social media messages, develop your responsive website and landing pages, and send emails, but there are three types of messages that are specific to mobile that marketers use to communicate with customers: SMS/MMS, push notifications, and in-app messaging. These three types of messages are similar in that they uniquely exist on mobile devices, but different in the marketing objective they fulfill. Check out our handy video blog here to quickly get up to speed on this topic:
Now, let’s dig deeper into each of these types of messages:
SMS, or short message service, is a mobile text that can be sent peer-to-peer (like a standard text message) or from a mobile messaging service provider (a marketing message). A consumer must opt into this type of messaging either on your website, through an email subscription request, or through your mobile application. SMS can be a great technique to get directly in front of your consumer in a fast, effective, and concise manner. This is because SMS is:
Push notifications are messages or alerts delivered by your app to the user. A push notification is typically a text that appears on a user’s home screen of her mobile device. This notification appears whether or not the user is engaged with the app or has it open. For a push notification to work, the user needs to have already downloaded your app, and in most cases, agreed to allow push notifications. The text is often an alert about an event, activity, discount, or something actionable that prompts the user to open the app or click on the notification to complete the action. It’s up to the marketer to recognize opportunities for push notifications, compose the message, and measure the impact.
In-app communications direct your user’s attention to specific actions, messages, and features within the app. They are an important way for you to engage your users and lead them to complete actions that keep them returning to your app. Notifications allow the marketer to communicate and engage with users while they are actually using the app—from introducing new features, to offering coupons, to notifying them of their usage, and more. You can also test features, messages, and promotions within the app to see what does best and then optimize based on user response. In-app messaging enables marketers to be more personal and creative than with SMS or push notifications because they already have the user in-app and are not limited by space constraints or message volume issues.
Here’s a helpful chart from our Definitive Guide to Mobile Marketing that helps define the differences and similarities between the three types of mobile messages:
How are you using mobile messages in your marketing today? I’d love to hear about your experiences in the comments below!
[Video] 3 Types of Mobile Messages Marketers Must Know was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com
The post [Video] 3 Types of Mobile Messages Marketers Must Know appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.
Author: Joe Ariganello
It’s your biggest time of the year. The super bowl for your industry, and you and your team are firing on all cylinders. Your ad agency came up with a killer campaign and you’re ready to deliver it to your customers and prospects to drive them back to your site to make that purchase.
You give your team your best “take it away!” scream to give the green light and get the show on the road! Now it’s time to sit back and watch customers arrive in droves to buy your amazing product, right? Wrong.
You wait. And you wait. Why isn’t anyone coming? You’ve delivered the greatest campaign you and your team have ever come up with. (You even gave each other literal pats on the back.) So, where is everyone? You ask your team to find out what’s going on. They toss, they turn, they dig. But then, the light bulb goes off: No one checked the data.
You had the data list pulled from your demand gen team a month ago—but your CRM data has not been refreshed in a while. As a result, your message was only successfully delivered to 20% of that list. The other 80% have no idea about your latest and greatest product. And they may never will (sound the horror movie music).
But, this all could have been prevented if you had had the proper procedures in place to ensure you had the right data, automatically.
As marketers, we spend millions of dollars to reach prospects and turn them into customers. Whether it’s through online marketing, direct mail, or email blasts, we’re constantly trying to reach our target audiences. And it goes without saying that we don’t want these efforts to go to waste.
But do we have the right steps in place to capture the correct data on these coveted individuals? And are we ensuring that the data we collect is current? And what do we do once we’ve collected it? How will we know we’ve correctly identified the particular individual in question?
Questions like these highlight why it’s important for us to identify customers and prospects as best we can the moment they show interest in our product, service, or company. Not doing so will not only result in wasted resources but can also hinder our messages from getting to our intended audience.
The real question is: Why is it so hard to identify customers and prospects? The reason is change. On a daily basis, thousands of people change their phone numbers, mailing addresses, email addresses… and even their names! To keep up with these constant changes, you need to make sure you have the right tools in place to track and capture them and then separate what’s accurate from what’s not. This is why it’s imperative for your CRM data to be of the highest quality, which means having high quality identity data. How can you ensure you have high quality identity data? Here are two steps to getting there:
Once you capture identifying data, you need to ensure that it’s relevant and correct. Bad data can have you spinning your wheels, wasting time and money on marketing that will never reach the intended recipient. Name, phone number, mailing address, email address—it’s all information you should be capturing and then verifying for authenticity. This is also the first step in helping you create the right profile for your customer so that later on you’ll be able to deliver targeted and personalized messages and offers. Is Jimmy Smith really at 215 Mockingbird Lane? Or is he at 45 Third Street? You need to ensure you have the right steps in place to identify and verify exactly where he is, before entering this information into your database. Remember—it’s better to have no data than incorrect data.
Next, you need to ensure that your CRM database is up to your standards with complete records. That means you have to cleanse and append: Purge the bad data and replace it with correct information. This includes adding additional information to your database that you might not have had before. For instance, you may have had Mary Johnson’s address, but you did not have her phone number, until now.
Working with an information and analytics company, such as Neustar, can help you integrate robust solutions into your CRM system to ensure that your data is of the highest quality. Capturing the information is half the battle. It’s what you do with that information that’s important. Whether you’re verifying that it’s valid and complete, or you’re appending additional data, you need a partner who can ensure your data is authoritative.
To illustrate, let’s walk through an example. Say you’ve recently moved to New York from Virginia and you call the local cable provider to set up TV service in your new home. Because you call in using your cell phone, the number captured by the cable provider has a Virginia area code. Naturally, an uninformed customer service rep would be caught off guard seeing that number come across.
But with a powerful solution in place that can identify who you are at the time of your call, the service rep could verify and match that information to you as soon as you enter the queue. The solution would also provide any other available and current information that could be associated with you through your phone number. In effect, the service rep would instantly know that though your call originated from a Virginia number, you recently moved to New York, because your new address is now being associated with that phone number.
This is just one example of the various every-day real-life situations where data affects how you communicate. Whether you’re sending out an email, a piece of direct mail, or someone is visiting your web site, your message will only reach its intended recipient if you know the identity of that party. The key that holds all of this together is having identity data that’s correct, complete, and current—data that’s authoritative.
Finding a solution to augment your data that integrates with your marketing automation platform can make it much easier to ensure you have authoritative data. A data tool that integrates into your marketing activities will help improve your lead data management by cleansing customer and prospect data in real time by verifying contact information and scoring prospect data. And with that, you’ll connect with many more of the prospects you’re bringing to your door through all of your marketing efforts.
As you’re planning your next campaign, take a step back from the creative. Think about the data. Consider how much better your campaign could perform if your data were the best it could be. Because then you’ll know your message will be received…and that kind of reassurance is priceless!
Solid Identity Data – Unlocking the Secret to Higher Marketing ROI was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com
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