Marketing, Simplified

I know, telemarketing is an easy channel to hate – I’ve been on the receiving end of plenty of those calls, too. Hate it all you want, but the fact remains that when it comes to B2B lead generation, telemarketing continues to be an extremely powerful tool for a lot of companies. If you’re considering using telemarketing for your business, there are about two million and three resources for your callers with tips about how to avoid rejection, maneuver past gatekeepers, use “interest-creating opening statements” to hook your decision-makers and so on. I won’t add to that pile here. Instead, I’d rather take a step back and consider how to plan for a telemarketing campaign that’s built on a foundation of sound strategy and ROI-based objectives right from the beginning. It’s a demanding, resource-intensive channel; by entering with the... Read more »

It doesn’t matter what type of a website you run – ecommerce, blog, news aggregator, etc. – the key to your success is ease of use for your visitors. Don’t roll your eyes! I know it sounds obvious, but you and I may have different definitions of the term “ease of use.” I’ve found that the clients we work with are becoming increasingly aware of common tactical “best practices” for homepage and landing page components – things like contact forms, newsletters sign-up fields, download buttons, videos, and social media buttons. As such, they are more frequently requesting that lots extra things are added to their websites. There’s a common belief that a site is easy to use if most of its content is clearly accessible from the entry point. If you believe in these tools and their ability to demand attention, it’s very eas... Read more »

If you’ve been at the helm of a business as it launched its online presence in the past decade, you probably remember a period soon after launching where you started to feel pretty popular. Out of nowhere, you were getting all sorts of calls, contact form submissions and emails from people who ensured that they would optimize your site for search, have you listed in every directory under the sun, increase your website’s traffic by 1000% and flood your pipeline with leads. Welcome to the overcrowded and overpromising space of digital marketing services! The Commoditization of SEO and SEM Because there are a whole lot of digital agencies, business directories, media partners, SEO freelancers and other variations thereof competing for overlapping business, there has been some level of perceived commoditization of ... Read more »

If you happen to work in marketing at an agency or on the brand side, chances are good that you want content marketing and authorship to be a big part of your marketing strategy in 2013 — if it’s not already. Every day, we see more evidence of content’s importance in inbound marketing and its brand-building potential; at the same time, we’re witness the fading effectiveness of old school anchor text and link building tactics in the race for SERP.   Now, if you're a business owner or executive who oversees your marketing, your valuation of content marketing is coming from a different place. You likely don't have the time or inclination to research the details of changing search algorithms or the evolving relevance of Google authorship in the post-Panda landscape. You want to hear about ROI, profit and the botto... Read more »