Category: Curated Content

Get out your wallets, CMOs, because chances are you will be spending more on marketing in the next twelve months. In fact, a recent survey by CMO Survey (that’s right—all these folks do is survey and gather data from CMOs like you) gathered answers from over 300 Chief Marketing Officers and collectively reported an average 8.9 percent projected increase in marketing dollar spend over the next year. That number’s in the double digits if you are in healthcare (13 percent), technology (12.4 percent) or energy (21.4 percent).

Beyond this general indication of needing deeper marketing pockets, there are loads of other interesting points in this year’s results. Let’s take a look.

How Much Is Too Much?

Everything is relative, so let’s talk about ratio. The study let us know that on average, a firm’s marketing budget is 11.1 percent of its overall firm budget. This is up from 8.9 percent in February 2011. Compared to revenue, marketing budget is 7.9 percent proportionally. The big spender here is consumer goods, which reports 21.9 percent of total revenue going to marketing budget alone.

Content marketing is hard.

Content marketing in healthcare is REALLY hard.

The good news is that healthcare content marketing has a very large audience. The bad news is that competition is fierce, and the breadth of potential topics is almost too vast.

Let’s say you’re tasked with building an engaged audience for your healthcare company, using content marketing and related tactics. About what do you create content? Wellness? Food? Maladies? Trends? You can’t be topically authoritative about everything, so what topics do you pick?

Our friends at Ceralytics shed some light on this tricky question with their new research: 2018 Healthcare Content Marketing Report (grab it at no cost here).

In this research, the Ceralytics team analyzed more than 16,000 healthcare topics and evaluated more than three million social shares. They also looked at search engine popularity, web traffic, and other inputs.

They also ingested every speck of content fr… Read More

The ecommerce industry has become a very competitive space over the last several years.

In fact, more than half of Internet users across the globe made a purchase online in the last year. Younger generations with a strong purchasing power lead the way in this trend.

In fact, 67% of Millennials would rather shop online as opposed to going to a physical store. This is great news for your ecommerce brand.

Yes, obviously you’ve got lots of competition when it comes to selling products online. But if you have the right tools and marketing strategy, you can do a lot of things to gain an edge over your competitors.

You should know how to design a homepage that converts. It’s also important for you to know which elements add credibility to your website.

While all of this is necessary, it’s not enough. In addition to your website, you need to be taking advantage of as many platforms as possible to effectively sell your products.

That’s because you can’t always rely on consumers navigating to your website. You need to make sure your products are readily available for purchase in places where your customers spend lots of time.

Enter social media networks.

Just like ecommerce, social media continues to be a growing trend. There are nearly 2.5 billion social media users across the globe.

Effectively marketing your business has always been about finding a way to stand out from the pack. After all, grabbing their attention is the first step in client conversion. But the act of drawing customers in has truly become an uphill battle in a world so heavily saturated with choice.

Hick’s Law, which is often summarized as “the paradox of choice,” states that when people are presented with more options, the time they take to make a decision actually goes up rather than down. We need to learn to empathize with the paralysis customers feel when trying to make a choice and actively address it if we want to win their business.

But in a world of too many options, what tactics can you use to make their decision easier?

I recently partnered with my friends over at icuc.social to unpack this heady subject. We put together both a webinar and an ebook that delve into why you need to start focusing on online reviews today if you want your business to thrive. It’s all about understanding and harnessing the power of reviews and how you can turn ratings into revenue. Below are just a few highlights from our collaboration.

1. Reviews Equal Visibility

The goal of every single busines… Read More

Blogging is one of my favorite ways to drive traffic to websites and engage with audiences.

But those of you who have been staying up-to-date on the newest marketing trends know video content has been on the rise.

In fact, experts predict that by 2019, 80% of the global Internet traffic will be videos. More than half of marketing executives say video content is their most profitable ROI.

Blog posts containing videos have triple the amount of inbound links compared to blog posts without videos.

It’s understandable why you might be interested in starting a video blog.

Based on all these numbers, it’s safe to say people love consuming video content. But establishing yourself as a prominent video blogger can be a daunting task, especially if you’ve never done it before.

There are many factors to take into consideration.

What kind of equipment should you use? How do you behave in front of the camera? How do you promote your new video blog?

You’re not the only one who has recognized these video trends. Research shows businesses plan to add more content distribution channels in the next year.

Do you see a commonality in the top three responses? All of these are platforms for video distribution.

If you need some pointers for launching a new video blog or improving your existing… Read More