How Well Do You Rank For Brand-Driven Search?
Have you Googled your company lately? I love a good how-to article and this one by Ann Smarty for Moz seems like a pretty comprehensive approach to creating a branded search optimization strategy.
Why go to the trouble?
Smarty says that ranking well is crucial because brand-driven search:
She details out a technical step-by-step process that you can implement starting with researching branded search queries, moving into optimizing for branded search, and ending with interlinking and monitoring.
Discovered via theCLIKK.
What The Sunset Of Facebook Analytics Means For You
Fact: Facebook analytics is going away. However, if you depend on these numbers for marketing insights, the good news is you’ll survive.
We are losing:
Here’s the deal. There are other paid (oh, hey, article publisher, HubSpot) and unpaid alternatives out there.
What are you using? Or does this sunset seem not-so-dramatic for your team?
Discovered via Social Media Today.
9 Customer Retention Strategies To Try
Retention marketing is important.
Not only is it easier and more cost-effective to retain customers than gain new ones, it also sets you apart as a brand that values relationship and experience. These 9 customer retention strategies from Brent Barnhart are worth considering.
Here’s my favorite:
“actively ask for customer feedback to improve your experience.”
Discovered via Social Media Today.
Are You Avoiding These 4 Content Marketing Pitfalls?
Anthony Gaenzle breaks down 4 pitfalls to avoid for the sake of your brand, strategy, and overall success in this piece for Content Marketing Institute. A quick look at the pitfalls he describes:
Click through for the full story.
Discovered via Social Media Today.
What Does Your Digital Marketing Future Look Like?
Marcel Schwantes sat down with Seth Godin, “the godfather of modern marketing,” to discuss the future of web creation, the importance of marketing evolution, and why creators need soft skills.
Here’s what I loved:
“Marketing effectively is about finding the smallest viable audience and not only earning their trust, but showing up in a way that’s worth talking about—not because you want them to talk about you and your work, but because they do.
If you are executing well on your marketing strategy, then the result is growth. Better clients and better work.
It’s not about hustling people. No one wants to be hustled.”
Are You Using These 42 Content Marketing Tools?
There’s a bazillion (precise, I know) content marketing tools out there, but which ones are actually worth it? MarketerHire did the dirty work of gathering the data for us.
Here are a few that got rave reviews:
Did your favorite tool make the list?
Related: Check out these expert takeaways from the Content Tech Summit for help with SEO, tech, strategy, and more. Discovered Via Smart Brief on Social Business.
Are You Treating All Your Marketing Segments The Same?
Do you know what’s annoying? Treating every segment of your audience as if they want the same thing at the same time.
You know the whole “put yourself in their shoes” thing?
Joe Sullivan calls us to apply that to marketing in this post.
He explains why treating ebook downloaders and email subscribers the same is not only wrong, it’s detrimental to accomplishing your sales goals.
Think about expectation and intent, then act accordingly.
To gate or not to gate, is that the question?
Jonathan Bland thinks you should stop gating ebooks. In this LinkedIn post, he walks us through the steps he thinks will help marketers convince leadership to drop the forms:
Where do you land on this issue?
Related: Here’s some more solid advice from LinkedIn, this time from Sidney Waterfall at Refine Labs. She explains how to ditch a press release announcement with these alternative approaches to new SaaS feature announcements.
Also Related (and also from LinkedIn): Content marketer Jacalyn Beales explains why you might want to ditch case studies.
Is Double Opt-In Always The Best Choice?
You know what they say about assumptions, right?
In this article, Jason Rodriguez takes a good look at the assumption that email signups should always use double opt-in. You know, the kind that sends you an email and asks you to confirm it’s really you who subscribed.
His conclusion?
You might want to consider mixing single and double opt-ins. It’s what the experts at Litmus do.
“We’re marketers focused on growing our subscriber lists, leads, and customer base. As such, we still love using single opt-in where possible. But, we have seen an increase in bot signups and fake email addresses on some signup forms... We implemented double opt-in for those forms.” —Jaina Mistry, Litmus Email Marketing Manager
The article includes a nice pros and cons chart and...
Something you should know about GDPR:
Double opt-in is not required, but clear sign-up forms and unchecked consent boxes are.
Definitely click through if you want some clarity on that.
Newsflash: The Writing Part Of Content Marketing Is Hard
This year’s Mantis Research State of Writing in 2021 survey results are a bit depressing.
Granted, it’s based on 204 responders (less than they’d hoped for).
But that just seems to support the general sentiment writer Sarah Mitchell reports in this article: the marketing and communications leaders who have a stake in this inbound game we call content marketing are all feeling a little “meh” about their work.
Some stats to illustrate the dreariness:
My thoughts:
On the bright side, those who are running their marketing teams like media companies seem pretty satisfied with the approach.
