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Articles by Liz Bedor
11 Marketing Books Every CMO Should Read | Oracle Marketing Cloud
It’s safe to say that marketing isn’t the same industry it was even five years ago. If you’re a CMO, you know how crucial it is to stay ahead of industry trends — and how challenging that can be when the industry is constantly evolving. Although we receive the majority of our news through sound bites and social posts, there’s nothing quite like sitting down with a good book to learn new perspectives on such a dynamic field.
Unlikely Lessons Email Marketers Can Learn From theSkimm | Marketing Insider Group
Without fail, every few years something comes out that’s supposed to “kill” email. Whether its a new platform, like Facebook, or a new feature, like Gmail’s tabs, marketers are constantly rushing to figure out the next “new” way to connect with consumers. But recent research actually found that consumers, especially Millennials, prefer email to other forms of communication from brands.
Should Brands Rely on Social Media to Connect with Consumers? | Marketing Insider Group
Since social media channels have come into existence, brands have been trying to figure out how to leverage them as sales channels for consumers. If brands wanted to sell to women, they thought they had to get in front of them on Pinterest. Needed to reach young men? YouTube was the channel of choice. However every few years, a new social channel manifests claiming to be the new way to connect with younger generations.
Customer Spotlight: 10 Questions with Tommy Lamb, Director of Retention & Loyalty at Teleflora | Bluecore
Although we have many eCommerce industry experts internally here at Bluecore, we know that marketers also like hear directly from those who share similar challenges, solutions and experiences. And so, we’re excited to announce the launch of our Customer Spotlight series, where we’ll be sharing tips, best practices and advice from our very own customer experts. First up: Tommy Lamb, Director of Retention & Loyalty of Teleflora.
What Content Marketers Can Learn From Craig Hatkoff, Co-founder of the Tribeca Film Festival
Immediately following September 11, 2001, businesses in downtown Manhattan were suffering. People didn’t want to visit New York City – most especially the neighborhoods affected directly by terrorism. Lower Manhattan needed an economic push to get it back to where it was before the attack. In December of that year, Craig Hatkoff, Robert De Niro, and Jane Rosenthal decided to do something about it.
How to Create Authentic Marketing with User-Generated Content
Over the past decade, social media has completely transformed the way people create, consume and share content. Year over year, the sheer volume of content in the world has grown exponentially, and today, more than two billion user-generated photos are posted and viewed across social media platforms daily. But social media has not only changed how people share, but what people share as well.
How to Create Authentic Marketing with User-Generated Content
Over the past decade, social media has completely transformed the way people create, consume and share content. Year over year, the sheer volume of content in the world has grown exponentially, and today, more than two billion user-generated photos are posted and viewed across social media platforms daily. But social media has not only changed how people share, but what people share as well.
73 Questions with a Marketer: Michael Brenner
For young marketers, finding the right mentor is critical to professional growth and success. The right mentor can teach you invaluable lessons, open doors to new opportunities and provide guidance that is imperative when navigating the (sometimes) treacherous waters of a career. But finding the a great mentor isn’t easy. Paths and opportunities don’t always cross and those struggling to find guidance are often left feeling lost and discouraged.
What to Do in Your First 30 Days as a Content Marketing Manager
Recently, I decided to take a new role as a Senior Content Marketing Manager at Bluecore, an email marketing automation startup. Bluecore had been doing content marketing for some time, but was looking for someone who could bring a new perspective and strategy to the program. Today, I’m six weeks into the role and needless to say, it has been a whirlwind. While the first few days were certainly overwhelming, my consultative experience helped me attack the challenge pragmatically.
Content Marketing Influencers: 3 Tips to Drive More Traffic Using your Current Visitors
When we think about content marketing and demand generation, it’s easy to get caught up in the acquisition bubble. How much did that lead cost? How many new leads did we generate this week? Particularly for marketers who come from a direct marketing background, it can be hard to see past the allure of the net new lead. However, in our new world of content marketing, correctly retaining and nurturing existing visitors with content is often the real key to driving more traffic.
How to Write the Perfect Headline + 37 Templates to Get You Started
Over the past few years, we’ve seen an exponential surge in content on the web. Competition for online attention is more cutthroat than ever, and as a result, marketers have come up with new strategies to get their content read. “Clickbait” headlines that end with, “…and you’ll never believe what happened next” have become the norm in today’s world.
5 Proven Ways For Driving Traffic to Your Website With Visual Content
Driving traffic to your website has become a major marketing priority. But with so much competing advice, contributing factors and variable opportunities it’s often hard to figure out exactly how to get the best results. When putting together a traffic-driving strategy you need to get a little creative, because one of the most effective ways to drive website traffic is to leverage visual content. The Visual Content Era We are living in the era of visual content.
How to Write the Perfect Headline + 37 Examples
Over the past few years, we’ve seen a exponential surge in content on the web. Competition for online attention is more cutthroat than ever, and as a result, marketers have come up with new strategies to get their content read. “Clickbait” headlines that end with, “…and you’ll never believe what happened next” have become the norm in today’s world.
Newsletter Optimization: 5 Ways to Take Your Newsletter Strategy to the Next Level
When it comes to marketing channels, the newsletter is the dependable workhorse. New and flashier channels come and go, but the trusty newsletter has continued to be the backbone of content marketing distribution strategy – delivering vital traffic on a measurable and predictable basis. Setting up an infrastructure for your newsletter program is as important as the content that fills it and, sadly, many companies are operating blind when it comes to their newsletter success metrics.
Giving Order To Chaos: How to Organize Your Content Marketing
A huge pain felt by many content marketers is a blog feeling like a kitchen sink catch-all. Content seems impossible to find, there’s no rhyme or reason to how things are structured, you’re adding new tags and topics for every post and constantly trying to organize content in a way that makes sense. And with all of that chaos, just think, if it feels like that to you, imagine what it feels like for your audience.
The Future of Content Marketing Is Mobile
At the beginning of each year, business thought leaders from every industry announce their predictions for new trends and innovations. In previous years, popular predictions have been the internet of things, omni-channel and personalization, among others.
The Best (And Most Beautiful) B2B Instagram Examples
B2B Instagram accounts tend to have a bad reputation. They usually feature a lot of employee group shots, maybe some at industry conferences, or even office images if they’re lucky enough to have a sleek design. Unfortunately, many of these accounts are not very exciting. The surprising thing is, however, that many of these brands have great content marketing hubs. So why the disconnect?
Why Content Marketing Needs a Balance of Art + Science | Marketing Insider Group
The content marketing definition that has probably been quoted about a thousand times comes from The Content Marketing Institute. It has been quoted this many times for a good reason.The reason I, like many others, love this definition is because it points out the two distinct aspects required to make content marketing work: art and science.Let’s begin with art. There’s no point in doing content marketing if you can’t commit to creating good content.
6 Important Features Every Content Marketing Site Should Have
For some reason, website design always seems to be the forgotten red-headed stepchild of content marketing. We see brands exasperate budgets on creating amazing content and distributing it to all the right channels, only to drive their traffic back to a website that hasn’t been updated since 1999. The truth is, you can create the best content in the world, but if you site’s user experience is awful, no one is going to give you a chance.
The Best (And Most Beautiful) B2B Instagram Accounts
B2B Instagram accounts tend to have a bad reputation. They usually feature a lot of employee group shots, maybe some at industry conferences, or even office images if they’re lucky enough to have a sleek design. Unfortunately, many of these accounts are not very exciting. The surprising thing is, however, that many of these brands have great content marketing hubs. So why the disconnect?
4 Content Marketing Tips For Highly-Regulated Industries
Trying to execute a successful content marketing strategy within a highly-regulated industry can oftentimes feel like an uphill battle. Like a really steep uphill battle. Compliance and regulation teams seem to rain on the content marketing parade and reject many ideas that fall outside the safe editorial box. This makes it difficult to provide the content financial services or insurance industries feel their audiences actually need and want.
How To Create A Content Marketing Editorial Calendar
Surprisingly (or not), many content marketers aren’t the best planners. We scramble last minute to fulfill our publishing commitments or worse yet, lag behind and go radio silent on our readers. As a result or poor planning, our content marketing strategies become a reactive efforts of throwing together what ultimately becomes disconnected pile of assets. With this disconnected pile of assets, we’re unable to measure the efficacy of our program because, well, it’s not a program.
How to Craft a Content Marketing Mission Statement + 9 Examples
A content marketing mission statement is the first step you should take when crafting your strategy. In our strategy workshops, this is often anticipated as a quick exercise that actually ends up spurring long debates. This happens, however, for good reason. Your mission statement should be the foundation for what your content marketing hopes to achieve. This should concisely summarize the value you hope to provide to your audience.
How Deluxe Earned Over A Billion Impressions With Small Business Revolution
Oftentimes we only talk about awesome examples of content marketing from sexy brands with interesting products. I mean, really, how could GoPro not have amazing content marketing? But for those of us who work in industries with lesser cool factors, how do we compete? How can we also produce great content that inspires and engages an audience and also drives business value? Deluxe Corp. is a company that’s done just that.
How PR + Marketing Can Work Together On Content Marketing Campaigns - Insights
Content marketing campaigns cannot exist within the marketing bubble at your company. Instead, they have to be all encompassing, and involve employees on every level and in every division. One department that should be closely tied to marketing is public relations. When the two teams collaborate, they can create content marketing campaigns that are going to receive more exposure and attract additional customers.
7 Steps To Globalizing Your Content Marketing Program
For some brands, creating a content marketing program from the ground up is just one piece of the puzzle. Many international organizations must tackle an entirely different beast of localizing their content marketing programs for their global audiences. Reaching these audiences in a locally relevant way is critical for their businesses.
How To Create Content People Love
Over the past few years we’ve seen a fundamental shift in the way we create, consume and share content. Every single day: The sheer speed and scale of content creation and distribution has drastically changed from even a year or two ago. And as a result, we tune out the noise. As consumers we’re hit with over 5,000 marketing messages a day, and yet 90% of them go ignored. Because, as consumers, we choose only what matters to us.
How Branded Should Your Content Hub Actually Be?
Every brand doing content marketing should create a space or central hub for the content to live. Doing so allows teams to get the most out of their marketing by consolidating fragmented digital content to a one-stop-shop. While creating a central hub is a universal best practice, the amount of branding that a hub should have is a different story. This is a challenge many marketers face and is one they all have approached very differently.
How To Search For Authentic Photos
Now that we know what characteristics to look for in authentic photos, the next step is to actually find that perfect authentic photo to complement your content. Easy right? Not so much. Because the web is filled with terrible photography, it can take seemingly forever to sift through countless images to find the right one. Fortunately, there are a few tricks you can use to make this process less painful and quickly sift out the bad photos, leaving you with the cream of the crop to choose from.
5 Best Paid Distribution Methods And When to Use Them
The fundamental core of successful content marketing programs is, well, creating great content. Even great content, however, needs a push. Paid distribution a great way for brands to quickly grow their audiences and jumpstart engagement with their content. The average Hollywood movie spends 50-60% of its production budget on distribution, and the ratio for creating and distributing your brand’s content should be similar.
5 Best Paid Distribution Methods And When to Use Them
The fundamental core of successful content marketing programs is, well, creating great content. Even great content, however, needs a push. Paid distribution a great way for brands to quickly grow their audiences and jumpstart engagement with their content. The average Hollywood movie spends 50-60% of its production budget on distribution, and the ratio for creating and distributing your brand’s content should be similar.
Why Amex OPEN Forum Is Still the Gold Standard For Content Marketing
Since its launch in 2007, American Express’ OPEN Forum has been considered the poster child for content marketing. The highly innovative program for its time single-handedly proved the business value of brands providing useful content to their customers. Year over year, OPEN Forum continues to succeed and is known for being the American Express’ #1 source of leads for new card members. But what is it about this content marketing program that makes it so powerful and successful?
3 Audience Growth Metrics To Calculate Brand Health
Brand health measures how your digital audience feels about you. In our first post, we covered how we can measure this through engagement metrics. For this post, we’ll focus on how to measure this with the audience growth metrics below: Because content marketing allows you to gain additional reach, engagement and conversion without having to pay for it, you can literally earn your audience’s attention versus buying it.
3 Ways To Calculate Conversions from Content Marketing
Perhaps the most valued business case for content marketing is driving conversions. When done properly, content marketing attracts prospects at the top of the funnel and guides them through the buyer journey until they convert to become customers. Therefore, content marketing conversions are the prospects who became customers because of either helpful, useful and/or entertaining content your brand provided them.
4 Steps To Building The Content Marketing Business Case
Despite a huge surge in adoption of content marketing, many marketers still struggle to build their own business case internally. Some executives still view content as “just the latest trend” in marketing and don’t see the value in providing useful, educational and/or entertaining content for their customers and prospects.
Want To Play This Or That? Better Options For Bad Stock Photos
If I had to take a wild guess, I’d say 90% of content marketing marketing hubs are filled with bad stock photos. This is not necessarily the fault of content marketers, however, because finding authentic photography is actually really difficult. Why? While finding authentic photos for your content marketing is difficult, it’s not impossible.
Want To Play This Or That? Better Options For Bad Stock Photos
If I had to take a wild guess, I’d say 90% of content marketing marketing hubs are filled with bad stock photos. This is not necessarily the fault of content marketers, however, because finding authentic photography is actually really difficult. Why? While finding authentic photos for your content marketing is difficult, it’s not impossible.
The Beginner’s Guide To SEO
Ranking high for SEO keywords is a core objective of most content marketing programs, and rightly so. According to Eyetools Inc: Essentially, if your brand is not ranking as a top organic result, your prospects probably aren’t going to find you. Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s unpaid results. In laymen’s terms, it is showing as the best answer on the Internet for a given search.
Van Winkles Makes Strong Case for Un-Branded Content Marketing
Casper is a startup that provides “outrageously comfortable” mattresses sold directly to consumers — eliminating commission driven, inflated prices. Since its launch in April 2014, the brand has grown rapidly, generating $30 million in revenue over a 10-month period and expanding its team from five to 70 people.
How GoPro’s Content Marketing Puts Experience Before E-Commerce
GoPro has always been a brand that represents amazing experiences and adventure. The wearable digital camera brand began as an idea to help athletes self-document themselves in their sport, but has since expanded to become the go-to solution for people wanting to capture themselves engaged in their interests, whatever they may be.
The Best In Energy Content Marketing
Editor’s Note: Much of our work in content marketing strategy consists of defining content marketing best practices. And then showcasing brands and sites that act as examples of great content marketing. This help us demonstrate what best practice content marketing looks like in real life and helps our customers to really see what is possible. Then we’re able to get into the discussion on how to implement a content marketing plan for their business.
The Best In B2B Technology Content Marketing
The B2B technology process is complicated. The marketplace is crowded and the complexity of the sale only increases as more stakeholders get involved. Technology marketers, however, can leverage content marketing to simplify their message and connect to these decision-makers. A recent study by MarketingSherpa surveyed 4,000 b2b technology business professionals to understand what types of content these buyers are looking for. The types of content most requested?
39 Perfect GIFs For Your Next Presentation
Bad presentations are painful. For both the presenter and the audience suffering through it, these can feel like dying a slow death. Unfortunately, many of us have sat through a countless number of these. So how can you ensure your presentation doesn’t result in your audience falling asleep in front of you? While there are many approaches one can take to incorporate these aspects into a presentation, there is one thing you can do to include both at once.
7 Common Content Marketing Mistakes And How to Avoid Them
Very few content marketers hit a home run each time they step up to bat. We’ve all had our fair share of strikeouts. Failures, however, are also learning experiences, especially those made by others. Mistakes provide insight into what to avoid in the future. As the content marketing space grows overtime, so have the number of trials and errors we’ve found many marketers make. Don’t make the same mistake twice and learn from the most common ones we see brands making in their content marketing efforts.
4 Tips for Brands Handling Haters on Social Media
The use and purpose of social media for brands has evolved dramatically over the years. In one aspect, its a great way for fans to engage and stay current with the brands they love. On the other hand, its a great way for customers to bash and publicly shame brands that have provided a poor experience.
11 Key Questions to Ask When Creating a Content Marketing Strategy
According to the Content Marketing Institute’s 2015 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends report, only 35% of B2B marketers and 27% of B2C marketers have a documented content strategy. Not surprisingly, those marketers who have a documented strategy also report being more effective in their content marketing efforts. So why do so many marketers skip this step? Oftentimes, they don’t know what questions to ask to formulate the strategy they need.
Quick Guide to Email Newsletter Distribution
An email newsletter is a tremendously valuable distribution outlet many brands overlook. Often times, they get focused on distributing through social and paid resources, forgetting that the option of showing up in their customers’ or prospects’ inboxes on a regular basis is still an option. Below is a break down of everything you need to know to get started to put an email newsletter distribution strategy in place. WHY AN EMAIL NEWSLETTER? 1.
The Best In Automotive Content Marketing
In a recent study by J.D. Power and Associates, new-vehicle owners were asked to cite the reasons they chose a particular make and model of a vehicle they purchased. Not surprisingly, out of 10 factors, the most frequently cited was, “like the image the vehicle portrays.” So what if an automotive brand doesn’t portray the image it wants? Content marketing can help.
How Retailers Use Content to Tie Online And Offline Experiences
People today don’t shop like they used to. Over the past few years, e-commerce and mobile shopping have experienced radical growth, shifting retailers’ focus, rightfully so, on improving those digital user experiences. Those experiences, however, are still inherently limited. People want the in-store benefits of seeing, touching and feeling products, and to do so surrounded by fellow brand loyalists.
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As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.Get in touch with Liz
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