Meghan Casey says, ““I got this content strategy thing,” you may think. You know your voice and tone, you know what formats and channels you’re going to create content for, and you know how often you’re going to publish or share content.Great! Except that’s not a content strategy. It’s an editorial plan.Don’t get me wrong. Content marketers need an editorial plan, especially if they’re regularly creating new content. At the same time, you need to figure out lots of other things before you plot your content ideas on a calendar.Enter — you guessed it — content strategy.What... [...]

Craig Simpson says, “Imagine you just spent $3,000 on a direct mail campaign, the mail pieces are out the door, and you’re finished with the whole process. Now it’s back to business, fulfilling all those orders that are about to flood in. There’s nothing more to do with the mailing, right? Wrong.Now comes one of the most critical parts of the whole operation. Assessing the results of your campaign so you know:Was it worth it to spend the $3,000 in the first place?Of the two versions of sales pieces you tested, which one did better?Which list of names did better?In other words,... [...]

Ginny Marvin says, “Google has been ramping its efforts to tie clicks on ads to store traffic. On Wednesday, the search giant said it has now captured over four million store visits after users have clicked on an ad, up from one billion a little less than a year ago, and is set to rapidly expand that number.In September, Google extended the now two-year old store visits measurement program to ads on the Display Network and said it had statistically significant visibility into visits to 200 million stores globally. The company says it is now positioned to make store visits data available... [...]

Mary Wallace says, “Marketing automation is on the rise. The reason? Marketing automation vendors are promising accelerated revenue and improved ROI (return on investment).How will it do this? With lead nurture campaigns that provide specific content aligned to the buyer’s needs and lead scoring models that deliver warmed leads to the sales team.Yet a majority of marketing organizations are not using their highly sophisticated marketing automation tools to their full potential. It’s mortifying to the marketers in the trenches trying to do what’s right.Worse, it’s beyond frustrating... [...]

Greg Sterling says, “Time spent with digital media continues to grow — but that growth is all mobile. Last week, comScore released its “2017 US Cross-Platform Future in Focus” report, which tracks consumer usage patterns across digital media channels and platforms.The measurement firm found that mobile “now accounts for 69 percent of digital media time spent.” By comparison, the desktop has fallen to less than one-third of total digital media time. Mobile apps are 60 percent of the total, with smartphone apps specifically commanding 51 percent of all digital media time.Remarkably,... [...]

Ariel Bogle says, “It takes only minutes on YouTube to find ads from major brands next to hateful videos promoting extremism and racism.Though the issue has been longstanding, a global brand boycott of the platform has been gathering steam. It’s now reached Australia, with Telstra and Foxtel swearing off YouTube. At least, for now.As first reported by Fairfax Media, the Australian arms of Vodafone and Nestlé have also joined the boycott.A spokesperson for the cable TV provider Foxtel said the company is “actively engaged with Google” to ensure its ads are not run next... [...]

Kate Leggett says, “Amazon just launched a preliminary cloud contact center offering, built on AWS. It offers an IVR, natural language understanding via Lex, queueing and routing and telephony infrastructure. It supports basic self-service interactions, and phone interactions. The best videos to explain what Amazon Connect does is at: Getting Started With Amazon Connect  and Introducing Amazon Connect.Even though this is a first step in the commercial contact center world, this offering is really cool. Why? Because Amazon knows how to build and run contact centers. They built their own... [...]

Samuel Timothy says, “Manufacturers have the chance to reach a wide audience, improve their sales, and increase their revenue with the help of inbound marketing and automation. While older marketing techniques such as cold calling, print ads, and trade shows remain effective to a degree, supplementing these strategies with effective online marketing can help you get better results.Why is Inbound Marketing Important for Manufacturers?A majority of B2B customers perform research online before making a buying decision, and the types of people that manufacturers target aren’t just any... [...]

Ben Davis says, “Local technology and expertise is the key to biddable media success in the APAC region.I recently spoke to Hannes Ben, EVP International at independent agency Forward3D, about the skills needed in APAC and the idiosyncracies of branded paid search.Strategy cannot be transferred from west to eastAccording to Ben, “brands fall down because you can’t automatically transfer your strategy in the west to these complex markets.”“By complex markets,” he continues, “I mean China, Korea and Japan. In China and Korea, nothing in those two markets... [...]

Loren Baker says, “In the world of SEO, user experience on websites has always been a factor, as has the time it takes for a site to load.However, with the use of mobile devices surpassing desktop use (in most consumer-facing industries) and the wide adoption of broadband, people expect sites to load instantly.Long gone are the days of waiting 10 seconds for a site to load.If a page takes more than a couple of seconds to load, users will instantly hit the back button and move on to the next result.Accordingly, Google officially started paying attention to site speed and declared its... [...]