Wednesday, February 11, 2015

Marketing Tips For Utilizing the Private Social Network MeWe

From James: Today’s post is part of a TopRank Marketing employee series in which staff members volunteered to write a blog post in exchange for a chance to win the opportunity to live-blog from Social Media Marketing World in San Diego next month. A winner will be selected based on criteria including post quality, relevance and [...]

7 Must-Have Salesforce Apps and Plugins to Grow Your Sales and Revenue

If you’re looking for ways to make sure your sales hit the ground running this year, you need more than just a great marketing team. You need maximum productivity, impressive reports and smart analytical analysis that doesn’t just drop a pile of data in your lap – but rather gives you the insights to take […]

[PODCAST] Can Exit Overlays Increase Conversions Without Pissing People Off?

There’s a reason that exit overlays are so controversial: they convert, but not without pissing certain people off. In this podcast episode, we discuss how you can use them to collect conversions – without affecting user experience.

Tuesday, February 10, 2015

How Dollar Shave Club Could Shave Costs & Grow Its Business With KISSmetrics

Dollar Shave Club is one of the frontrunners in the new subscription economy that seems to be getting more traction by the month. These businesses offer consumable products delivered to customers’ doors on a recurring subscription. Dollar Shave Club hit it big with their viral video that’s been viewed over 18 million times. After it […]

5 Trends Driving The Marketing Cloud Revolution

Editor’s Note: Today’s post comes courtesy of John Bara, the President and CMO of Mintigo, an enterprise predictive marketing platform and proud Oracle Marketing AppCloud partner. John specializes in fast growth marketing with 25 years as an executive in Silicon Valley, including CMO and SVP of Marketing roles at companies such as XenSource, Interwoven, and Genesys Telecommunications Labs. You can follow John on Twitter at @John_Bara.

Big data and marketing clouds require modern marketers to further embrace analytics. For some marketers, this means getting out of their comfort zone.

The stereotype of marketers is that they are in marketing because they are not good in math or science. That myth is not exactly true. Most marketers choose the career because they enjoy the energy of a dynamic environment, and have skills in creative, planning and project management. Increasingly, people come into the new world of modern marketing because they enjoy math, science and analysis.

The explosion of big data across all market segments has led to the need for a more analytical approach to marketing. Understanding the big trends behind the cloud and big data phenomenon and some of the resulting major trends in marketing will empower the CMO of the future.

I believe there are five trends that are driving the marketing cloud revolution:

1. Computing is now a utility. As a cheap utility much like electricity, cloud computing is enabling a whole new breed of uses, applications and appliances. This is perfect for marketing because it enables rapid iteration, experimentation and, ultimately, more success. It also enables pay-as-you-go marketing services for software-as-a-service (SaaS) basis that is friendly to a marketer’s budget.

2. Mobile is everywhere. Mobile computing is cheap, pervasive and increasingly high performance. Now, even menial tasks such as ordering food (Door Dash, Order Ahead) or getting a ride (Uber, Lyft) are being mobilized and showing remarkable growth rates. Expect more of these revolutionary apps just as we saw when the Internet first became ubiquitous. Marketers are building “mobile first” or “mobile only” websites to optimize for the new demand.

3. Big Data is expanding yet accessible. With much of humanity now having cheap, connected mobility combined with new cool apps and a tech savvy millennial demographic, big data is exploding. Big data means a big opportunity for companies who are gathering new outputs from new users and new uses. Tools are needed to analyze the flood of data pouring into the enterprise. Savvy CMOs recognize this and are investing in data analysis and marketing cloud technologies. Some are even hiring data scientists within the marketing group.

4. Enterprise marketing technologies are moving to the cloud. According to Scott Brinker from ChiefMartec.com, there are now close to 2000 marketing technology vendors. With the big data explosion and Amazon Web Services enabling cheap, easy-to-spin-up machines as a utility, smart technology vendors have shifted their business models to the cloud and built new enterprise application clouds.

5. Predictive marketing helps tie it all together. Marketers need to embrace the math and science behind what powers the new marketing clouds, and not ignore lead generation or treat marketing automation as a “black box”. By leveraging the combination of both public and private data, marketers can create models to automatically identify trends such as lead scoring, fit, and buyer intent before the sale occurs. Intelligence and predictive analytics stand as keys to the new enterprise marketing clouds to empower the CMO of the future to embrace their newfound love of math and science.

To learn more about “Data, Predictive Analytics and Marketing Clouds: The Platform For The Modern Marketer”, join John Bara (Mintigo), Jay Famico (SiriusDecisions) and John Stetic (Oracle Marketing Cloud) in an upcoming live webinar on Wednesday, February 25, 2015. Register here to save your seat!

As a Business, We Are What We Aspire to Be

As a Business, We Are What We Aspire to Be written by John Jantsch read more at Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

The title of this post applies to most things in life I feel and certainly in business. Unless we have goals and aspirations for our business, it’s hard to imagine arriving at a destination of our own control. Businesses have long espoused the virtues of mission statements, but it’s only when you live these statementsContinue Reading

As a Business We Are What We Aspire to Be

As a Business We Are What We Aspire to Be written by John Jantsch read more at Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

The title of this post applies to most things in life I feel and certainly in business. Unless we have goals and aspirations for our business, it’s hard to imagine arriving at a destination of our own control. Businesses have long espoused the virtues of mission statements, but it’s only when you live these statementsContinue Reading