Categories ArchivesMarketing Best Practices

Plan a Campaign Around Small Business Saturday image

Small Business Saturday

Small Business Saturday (SBS) is right around the corner on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, November 24th. It offers businesses the opportunity to capitalize on the momentum of Black Friday and create some excitement of their own. For some companies it will be a way to start off the holiday shopping season, for others, it may be even more important. Small businesses that are more seasonal in nature, especially those with traditionally spring and summer products or services, can use SBS to offer a special promotion for consumers to consider their offerings during a time they otherwise would not. It can play an important role in facilitating business all year long. Not sure if it’s worth pursing? Consider the data from last ...

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Packaging Trends Important for Brands Continued Market Success image

Packaging Trends

Product packaging has become more important as changes and challenges continue to reshape how businesses, consumers, and governments deal with sustainability and the shifting demands of ecommerce. Packaging must bridge the crucial connection between consumer trends, behaviors, and values and the innovative role companies must uphold in order to accurately interpret their markets’ unique needs. Packaging today needs to reflect the most forward-looking attitude of a circular society. This year Nestle made an announcement that it plans to make 100 percent of its packaging recyclable or reusable by 2025. Stating that they believe, “plastic waste is one of the biggest sustainability issues the world faces and that there is a urgent need to minimize the impact of packaging on the ...

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Quality Content Needed at Every Phase of the Sales Cycle image

Quality Content

Quality digital content has the potential to help B2B marketers cost-effectively reach annual company goals. The key to pulling this off requires a commitment to providing content that puts your audience’s needs first. And it must happen at every point in the selling cycle. A recent survey by Clutch Research finds that 88 percent of B2B audiences read business content online at least once weekly to stay informed, research companies and make purchasing decisions. The report identifies four stages in the sales funnel and the content consumers consider during each phase in the sales conversion. Taking a look at their findings can help companies understand how to interact with B2B audiences and take advantage of opportunities to engage potential customers ...

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Mobile Messaging Helps Overall Customer Experience image

Mobile Messaging

Creating the ultimate customer experience today requires a whole organization approach. As it should, and it requires you to expand your thinking to encompass the entire experience. Meaning you care about what happens to or with a customer before, during and after purchasing your company’s product or service. Therefore, from a marketing perspective many businesses have invested time and money to reach customers where they spend most of their time – on their phones. This has meant carefully considering consumer app usage and preferences. As mobile has exploded in growth in recent years, app downloading and usage has grown exponentially as well. Forrester data as well as a 2016 study by App Annie found that users access approximately 30 apps a ...

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Organizational Commitment Key to Delivering Quality Customer Experience – Part 2 image

Customer Experience Part 2

In our previous blog, we discussed the necessary integration of systems to deliver real-time, meaningful customer interactions. Organizations seem to understand the importance of gathering and utilizing data to help create a seamless customer journey, but are struggling at getting it in the hands of the right people at the right time to be truly impactful. You can see how valuing the customer experience requires an organizational commitment to embracing the concept that customers rule supreme. Clearly, every team member from every department needs to be on board with delivering your brand’s strategy. This will lead to less customer turnover and strengthen your position in the marketplace to continue attracting new customers. To effectively focus on the customer experience though, companies ...

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It’s Time to Deliver a Consistent Customer Experience Across Multiple Platforms – Part 1 image

Customer Experience Part 1

Today’s clients are interacting with your company through multiple channels such as your website, your Facebook page, your loyalty program or any number of other ways. And the ways are increasing every year as technology advances, right along with customer expectations right too. So it’s important to create a consistent customer experience across every channel now and for the future. According to Forrester research the customer experience will be more important than price in determining customer purchases and customer retention by the year 2020. Customer brand relationships will require companies to deliver personalized, relevant experiences that empower customer behavior based upon them receiving the right message, at the right time, in the right place. Are companies prepared to do that? Apparently ...

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Align Marketing and Sales Initiatives to Drive Success image

Align Marketing Sales

Do marketing and sales really need to be aligned for a company to be successful? The answer today is still “Yes”.  While historically any misalignment was often blamed on the nature of organizational structure that supported two different and separate departments. It’s probably not as accurate an argument anymore, as it is now more about how the buying the process has changed over the last 10 years. The Internet offers customers new and numerous ways to gather information. Social media now has its influence in the buying process along with other digital channels too. Customers are inundated with products and services, making the marketplace highly complex to navigate. This is especially true of the B2B market today, where buyers believe it’s ...

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Integrating Digital Signage to Deliver Customer Engagement image

Digital Signage

Digital signage is growing in marketing and advertising usage across industries. In 2015, the digital signage market was valued at nearly $17 billion and is expected to continue growing to reach approximately $33 billion by 2023. Multi-screen video walls, free-standing kiosks, tablet devices, and other products can deliver information about a company’s products and services through quality graphics and videos. The very nature of digital signage allows for companies to really showcase new promotions, important announcements, and real-time product descriptions to gain the edge over their competition. You might not even realize how prevalent they are today, but your daily life is full them. Think the mall, grocery store, health club, financial institution, provider office visit, etc. all of which ...

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5 Reasons to Consider Outsourcing v. In-house Marketing image

Outsourcing In-House

In the beginning of the year, Forbes ran an article about 10 Great Marketing Jobs for 2018 based on average salary, number of postings for the positions on Indeed.com, and three-year growth percentage. Here are four of the positions – Senior Social Media Specialist, Community Manager, Digital Strategist, and Brand Ambassador. Does your company have those positions? It’s okay if your answer is “no.” Marketing has evolved into this multi-faceted, multi-channeled far-reaching pursuit for brand awareness and market share in a highly information-filled digital world. It requires roles with very specialized skills and the need for strong team leadership to successfully guide marketing organizations’ endeavors. However, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a senior-level marketing executive with all the skills to orchestrate ...

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Facebook Dimensions Cheat Sheet (2018) image

Dimensions Cheat Sheet

No one wants to post the perfect image and caption, only to find that the photo is cropped all funky on Facebook, and crucial details from the caption are out of view. To make sure that all social content displays appropriately, it’s important to know the platform’s ideal dimensions. Here are the ideal dimensions for a variety of content, according to Dreamgrow. Profile Picture: The picture displays at 160 x 160 px. Square images work best. Facebook Business Cover Photos: Ideal size is 828 x 315 px. Facebook Video: The thumbnail image is 1200 x 675 px. Aspect ratio can be either 16:9 or 1:1. The file itself can be as large as 4GB. Characters are as follows: desktop displays 500 characters, ...

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Text Messaging: The Neglected Marketing Channel image

Text Messaging

It’s difficult to find someone these days that doesn’t keep their phone nearby. Text messages, in particular, are opened far more often than almost any other marketing channel. With this in mind, why wouldn’t marketers want to use it in their marketing efforts? We’ve compiled some important statistics about text message marketing and its usefulness. Keep reading to discover just how effective a tool text message marketing can be. When Is It Being Used? Understanding how fellow marketers are using text messaging will help you better understand how to use it for your business. For one, marketers like using it for important and urgent messages. It’s also an effective tool when other channels prove ineffective. How Quick is Response? Everyone acknowledges that text ...

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Email Marketing – Valuable Business Tool for Growing and Retaining Clients image

Email Marketing

Email marketing remains one of the few media where you can engage with customers who signed up to communicate with you and are truly interested in your company. Reaching an audience who has agreed to receive your messages is becoming more and more rare these days. While social media is a necessary marketing channel, you’re not necessarily reaching people who are always interested in you. This makes email marketing an important tool. A recent State of Email Marketing in 2018 survey report by Clutch looks at how and why companies utilize email communication. Taking a look at the results might help other companies consider objectives that fit their organization as well. Almost three-quarters of businesses across most industries utilize email ...

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Create An Inspired About Us Web Page image

About Us Web Page

This post isn’t about us, as in Modern Marketing Partners. It’s about you. More specifically, it’s about your company’s website’s About Us page and why it probably needs some attention. Marketing professionals know (we look at Google Analytics) that About Us pages are some of the most frequently visited pages by customers, or more importantly, potential customers. They are one of the important stops a visitor on your site makes when considering to do business with you. And yet, many About Us pages are poorly written, lack creativity and are just plain boring. Think for a second about the last time you visited a company’s About Us page. You wanted to get to know the people behind the company, right? You ...

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Remarket Like a Professional Stalker image

Professional Stalker

Yes, so maybe that headline gives remarketing a bad name. But we’re actually all for it. If done well, there’s real value in remarketing to visitors who have taken time to view your website, PPC landing pages, Facebook page, etc. Since only about 4% of people convert on their first visit, remarketing provides a powerful way to reengage those who have previously interacted with your company. Remarketing requires inserting a small amount of code onto your website and then once a visitor lands on a particular page, you follow them around (with targeted ads you’ve created, of course!) More specifically, once the visitor has left your site and then goes back online, whether to Facebook, into his or her email ...

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The Guiding Principles of Agile Marketing image

Agile Marketing

Agile Marketing is a relatively new concept in the world of marketing. It takes its name from agile processes used in software development around the late 90s. The real simple explanation of this approach is that marketing teams identify high value projects, usually centered around providing value to the customer, to focus their collective efforts on, work transparently and cooperatively until the task is completed, and then measure the impact/success or failure. Ever-Evolving Marketing Environment This approach is gaining traction because the marketing climate in so many organizations has become so fast-paced and unpredictable it needs some lean and agile principles to follow in order to remain productive and successful. Principles that take into account this volatility and uncertainty, and manage ...

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4 Steps for Choosing a Successful Company Name image

Company Name

Creating a name for you new company may actually be your first foray into the world of marketing, whether you realize it or not. Your name begins the branding process of your organization and is a crucial first step towards its success. You’re setting the tone for how people will initially perceive your company. And remember the old saying, “You never get a second chance to make a first impression.” Everyone is bombarded with thousands of names daily. Only the really good ones are going to stick in anyone’s memory. So if you’re a start-up, you need to put some time and effort into creating a name for your company. You’ve got to hit the right chord in your market ...

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Good Marketing is Like Dieting image

Good Marketing

No pain, no gain. Dieting and marketing actually have a lot of similarities. Primarily, success doesn’t happen overnight; it takes place long-term. Finding out what works for the brand and implementing a plan to do those things is key to good business. Check out some dieting idioms and how they compare to marketing below. Set Realistic Goals 10-year high school reunion in September? It’s the end of the summer, so it’s unlikely you’ll be able to drop 50 pounds. 5 pounds? That sounds like a realistic, achievable goal. Same goes for marketing strategy. Your brand won’t achieve 100k new follows over the next month, but 50-100 is definitely doable. Set goals that the company can realistically reach, then take the steps ...

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Page Speed is More Critical Than Ever image

Page Speed

Users hate slow sites; pages that take longer than 3 seconds to load see significantly higher bounce rates. Internet giant Google has noticed. To improve user experience and combat long wait times, Google is launching its Google Speed Update, expected to roll out in July. One reason for the update? Because of the increasing importance of mobile devices. Google has increasingly focused on becoming more and more mobile friendly. Recently, they began indexing mobile-first, so it’s clear this is priority. Because phones make it harder to multi-task than desktop, page speed is increasingly critical, because users are often staring at their phones as they wait, instead of opening another tab. Want to learn more about this critical update? Read further and ...

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4 Types of Business Blogging Content image

Types Blogging Content

Business blogging requires genuinely engaging prospects and customers. The thing is people are all different. This means you need to have some different types of content on your blog to attract and retain readers. You must also have diverse content to help you accomplish the various goals of your blogging program. You need the right blend of content to grab the attention of visitors, gain rapport with readers, educate them on your approach, and establish your expertise in the industry. A tall order, really, but doable. Many posts about blogging list anywhere from 10-80 different types of content you can utilize. It may almost be overwhelming to think about blogging if you start with this approach. However, there are probably about ...

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Simplifying Marketing in a TMI World image

Simplifying Marketing

In the age of information, it’s easy for a company’s audience to feel overexposed to marketing and ads. It’s also a lot of extra work for an organization’s staff to keep up with a multitude of platforms. It’s time to simplify marketing efforts, for the benefit of both the organization and purchasers. 6 Tips for Simplifying a Marketing Plan There are a number of ways to simplify your organization’s marketing process. Follow any of the following tips below for a simpler process. Zero in on Who Your Business is Selling to 50% of marketers use 10 or fewer profile segments, while the other half use up to 100 segments. Clearly, many businesses aren’t as focused as they believe they are on target audience. ...

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Blogging Challenges and Tips for Success image

Blogging Tips

Your company started a blog maybe a year or so ago for all the right reasons. As a marketer you know the value of having new, relevant content on your website. You created a posting schedule, worked hard at writing many of blogs, maybe even found some company guest bloggers, and now the whole process seems, well, a bit melancholy. Many companies experience some bumps in the road regarding their blogging efforts. Here are five common challenges and tips for getting your blog back on track: Challenge: Missed deadlines. Tip: Everyone at your company is busy, including you. Your posting schedule may get off track. Energy suddenly becomes low around writing more blogs. Initially, the interest was there, but now other priorities ...

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Direct Mail House Lists Rule – Part 1 image

Direct Mail Part 1

The debate over which is better email vs direct mail may continue on into the next century. And that’s okay. It’s often been said that email generates a quicker profit and direct mail produces more engaged customers. So for many businesses there is value in using a mix of both direct mail and email marketing. Over the years, direct mail has proven its ability to drive growth for companies. A well-thought out and executed direct mail campaign can provide profit, sustainability and security perhaps better than any other media. Some may think direct mail is outdated, too expensive or cumbersome. But just because other ways may be faster, easier or less expensive, doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll see profitable, long-term ROI. ...

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Leveraging Millennial Engagement on Instagram with Influencer Marketing image

Millennials on Instagram 2

Instagram has a far-reaching effect for brands trying to engage Millennials. Instagram, which delivers an entirely mobile experience, has seen huge growth over the past few years, in part because 60 percent of its active users are Millennials. Due to their very connected nature, Millennial marketing should focus on social media apps, which function primarily on mobile. Instagram is a natural fit for the Millennial lifestyle. They are the largest group of consumers who use mobile and social media. Their reliance on peers, family, friends and experts to provide trusted information is substantiated in Edelman’s annual Trust Barometer. The survey’s 2018 numbers indicate again that these are the people they most trust, whereas in general, trust among the informed public ...

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How to Implement Experiential Marketing for your Brand image

Experiential Marketing

The movement towards building a customer centric company is leading marketers to consider a shift toward experiential marketing. Experiential marketing or engagement marketing puts the customer and their needs squarely on center stage. It is a strategy that immerses the customer and engages them to experience a brand in creative and unique ways. This helps customers form memorable, emotional connections with a company’s products and services, creating strong customer loyalty. It also allows for customers to have a conversation with a brand rather than just have messages pushed at them. The event or experience may be offline, but that doesn’t mean it can’t generate online content. You might not think that it can create dialogue, but according to the 2016 ...

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What is the Next Big Thing in Marketing? image

Big Thing in Marketing

It’s important for all marketers to stay on their toes and adapt to the ever-changing marketing climate. At the very least, it’s critical for their survival against rivaling companies; if they aren’t adopting the newest practices, they can easily fall behind. At the very best, marketers can spot a new way to gain an edge over competitors. So, what is the next big thing in marketing? We explore some possible theories. Voice Search Alexa, Google Voice, Siri - voice search is becoming widely adopted, and quickly. Consider that the trend is one of the most quickly adopted trends in history. 40% of US adults are using voice search at least once per day, and 60% of those have only started using ...

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