Category: Curated Content

 

Do you hear that spooky rustling of the leaves outside your window? It’s artificial intelligence and machine learning, creeping around in the marketing woods like a Blair Witch comprised solely of ones and zeroes.

The story advanced by MarTech companies is that robot marketing assistants, powered by the big data gleaned from customers and prospects, will automagically create hyper-relevant landing pages, emails, social posts, display ads, push notifications, and all matter of digital communiqués.

There are two benefits, they say. Because they use first-, second-, and third-party data, the resulting messages should be more palatable to recipients. Also, the labor necessary to create such finely targeted marketing executions falls to near zero (once you’ve paid your license fee) because the robots do the drudgery.

This is inexorable and unavoidable, at some level. Unless we have a TOTAL and COMPLETE reimagining of data gathering and usage norms, artificially intelligent digital marketing will quickly come to dominate the landscape, especially in mid-sized and large organizations that need scale.

It’s not dissimilar from the long-ago move from… Read More

We have two recently released, well-authored research reports on email marketing that provide some very different—not contradictory, but different—assessments of email marketing as it stands today and where we’re headed. In this article, we’ll give you a concise look at each and the most relevant takeaways from each report, as they pertain to you and your business. Presumptuous of us? Nah. We know how marketers—and their extended teams—tend to think about such things.

You can access the full reports from the Litmus 2018 State of Email and the Campaign Monitor 2018 Email Predictions.

What makes this mash-up so interesting is that one is based on a great deal of quantifiable backward-looking data, and the other is based on predictions from a number of experts in the field. Does the analytical data support the forward-looking recommendations? Read on.

We’re big fans of Litmus and the services they provide, yet we’re not a shill for their services or offerings. They just provide really good and essential services to email marketers. So, it will not come as a surprise their report is chock full of solid insights, technological changes across th… Read More

No matter how simple and common the job of a sales rep sounds, it still requires a lot of patience and steady positivity to drive leads from the initial contact stage to the final deal closure stage.

Every business thrives on customers and with a good sales team, more leads mean more customers.

So what exactly is a sales pipeline you may ask? Sales reps acquire leads, connect and capture their interest, market products and services to solve pain points and ultimately close the deal; all these steps constitute a process that’s called a sales pipeline.

Building a successful sales pipeline mainly means that sales reps are able to lead more contacts from the initial stage to the deal closure stage to become customers.

The possibility of a high win rate at sales may seem like a distant dream for every salesperson, but it isn’t impossible. The key step in this process- Prospect, Prospect and keep Prospecting!

Brian Tracy of Brian Tracy International has rendered some sound advice in this perspective – “Keep your sales pipeline full by prospecting continuously. Always have more people to see than you have time to see them.”

Setting up a process to increase y… Read More

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Social Media Marketing Talk Show, a news show for marketers who want to stay on the leading edge of social media. On this week’s Social Media Marketing Talk Show, we explore Facebook F8 announcements, new Facebook Group features, Instagram video calling, Messenger updates, and other breaking social media […]

This post Facebook F8 Announcements: What Marketers Need to Know first appeared on Social Media Examiner.

… Read More

Social media can be pretty overwhelming sometimes.

Especially if you’re running an agency or managing the social media accounts of other businesses.

How do you juggle and manage the many hats you need to wear as a social media manager?

Creating content, scheduling shares, engaging with followers, repurposing content, sharing others’ content, community management… This list could go on forever.

The only way to effectively manage social media at scale is with the use of social media management tools that can improve your efficiency, and over time get you better results.

The tools we discuss below help you do that. Many of them have similar features, however, they are all different in terms of the BEST way to use them. Choose the ones that fit your needs and give them a whirl.

Here are 17 of the best social media management tools available:

1. Agorapulse

Agorapulse is first on the list because it’s the social media… Read More