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Archive for November, 2015

3 Steps To Integrate Video With Email Marketing Automation

Many marketers have found that adding video to their email programs drives increased engagement and customer loyalty. People love watching videos online (4 billion video views on Facebook alone in 2014), and they aren’t all cat videos and sport bloopers.

Emails with “video” in the subject line have a 65% higher click-through rate on average, according to Vidcaster. When video is a central part of your email campaign, the CTR can be 200% higher than a similar campaign without video.

Email Video Strategies: Two B2C Examples

Video can help you cut costs and increase customer satisfaction as well as identify prospects and move them closer to a purchase decision when you integrate your email video strategy with your marketing automation and ecommerce platforms.

Read more: 3 Steps To Integrate Video With Email Marketing Automation

Content Industrial Buyers Want from Supplier Websites

Content Industrial Buyers Want from Supplier Websites by Achina Mitra

Manufacturers and industrial companies have shifted more of their marketing dollars to digital marketing channels for a very good reason. Their target audience—engineers and industrial buyers are using digital media to find components, equipment, services and suppliers (77%); obtain product specifications (73%); find product availability information (70%); perform research (67%); and compare products across suppliers (66%). (Source: 2015 Digital Media Use in the Industrial Sector; IHS Engineering360 Research Report).

And TotalWeb Partner’s Web Marketing Offers can help you do all of this.

The chart above shows how industrial professionals are using the Internet for work-related purposes.

The same study also found that the top three work-related digital resources used by technical professionals of any age have remained unchanged from 2014 to 2015: General Search Engines (89%), Supplier Websites (75%) and Online Catalogs (74%).

All those statistics are very encouraging but they only tell half the story because it only represents the demand side – how industrial buyers are making their purchase decisions. However, suppliers are falling short when it comes to providing content that industrial buyers want.

Read More…

It’s time to take social media marketing out of the silo

When retailers and other marketers talk about social media marketing, they’re really just talking about marketing, says Nate Elliott, a Forrester vice president and analyst. “Social networks’ ads aren’t social,” he says. “They’re just ads.”

What he means is that social networks like Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter are increasingly focused on delivering ads that seek to drive direct actions via remarketing or other advanced targeting options. rather than focused on building relationships or driving engagement with shoppers.

Despite the social networks’ strategic shift, most companies let the team responsible for producing and overseeing their social content handle their advertising on social networks. And that doesn’t make sense, says Elliott, who recently wrote a report that suggests marketers instead let their media buyers handle their social ad budgets.

“Social marketers might be great at social, but that doesn’t have anything to do with the advertising they’re running,” he says.

Advertising is where marketers are devoting the majority—83%, according to Forrester—of their social spending. That spending is on the rise; more than two-thirds of avid social marketers say they’ve increased their social ad budgets this year, including 29% who say they have added significantly more money to the channel. That’s because the ads are enticing; social media offers advertisers a ton of inventory—Facebook alone is expected to account for at least 25% of all U.S. display ad impressions this year, according to eMarketer Inc.—and those ads are far less expensive than ads on other platforms, Elliott says.

Read more: It’s time to take social media marketing out of the silo

5 rules for the new era of email marketing

Even amid the explosion of digital marketing technologies over the past few years, marketers keep returning to email. The reason is clear — for the 10th consecutive year, email is the highest ROI-generating channel for marketers. For every $1 invested, email marketing returns $38. It’s 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook and Twitter combined.

That said, email marketing today is far different than it was in 1995 when everyone was using AOL and Gmail was just a sparkle in two young engineers’ eyes. Modern marketers looking to engage customers, differentiate their brand, and grow their businesses need to live and breathe these five new rules of email marketing.

Long live the DIY marketer
The rule goes something like this: first technology makes things possible, then it makes things easy. We’ve hit that point in the marketing technology continuum. Sophisticated technology processes that were once left to the IT professionals are now possible for every marketer in any business or industry. Companies like Optimizely, Squarespace, Unbounce, and Shopify are leading the DIY marketing revolution. Complex tasks that used to take weeks (or even months) and an entire IT staff to accomplish can now be done in minutes. Marketers now own their destiny — and that means there’s no excuse for any marketing communications, including email, to be off-brand or off-message.

Read more: 5 rules for the new era of email marketing

5 Myths of Social Media Marketing

Have you tied your social media efforts to a positive ROI?

Or, have you heard claims that social media marketing just isn’t worth the effort for B2B companies?

B2B social media has gotten a bad rap in the marketing community, with many marketers claiming a low ROI and seeing a lack of interest from prospects. A 2014 report from Forrester found that 26 out of 30 B2B companies failed to create compelling content that engaged their audiences, losing sales and buyers to competitors in the process. With such dismal numbers, it’s clear that B2B companies need to rethink their content and the way they interest potential customers via social media.

With an increasing number of B2B companies adopting social media marketing, a number of myths about it have spread as well. These misconceptions can be laughable at best – but also damaging to your marketing and sales efforts at worst. In this article, I’ll dispel five myths about B2B social media marketing once and for all, and show you why a robust social media strategy is vital to increasing sales, expanding networks, and growing revenue.

Read more: 5 Myths of Social Media Marketing

 

5 Fast Fixes to Jumpstart Your Email Marketing Strategy

Sending out an email newsletter may seem like an easy task, but if you think that all you have to do is make a template, add in new content and hit send, you’re not likely to see the results you want.

Email marketing requires a lot of careful planning and work to be effective, but when it’s done right, it can drive traffic to your website, increase your customer base and boost sales. So how can you make the most of your email marketing campaigns? It’s all about getting to know what your subscribers want, creating quality content and taking advantage of all the great email marketing tools at your disposal.

Ready to improve your email campaigns? Here are five great email marketing tips from entrepreneurs and digital marketing experts.

Read more: 5 Fast Fixes to Jumpstart Your Email Marketing Strategy

 

4 Key Principles Every Social Media Marketer Should Understand

It’s not uncommon to encounter broad sweeping statements like “social media marketing is great for business,” or “social media is the future of online marketing.” However, while we’re subjected to the watered down rants of pundits who praise the perks of building huge followings on sites like Facebook and Twitter, many times we never really get to the real meat of the matter, which is how to do well with social media marketing (SMM).

Basic Fundamentals
Any company can set up a few social networking accounts and get started with SMM in a single day, but it can take months to years to become proficient at persuading an online crowd for the benefit of a particular brand or business.
Running comparative analysis tests and studying consumer and social psychology can help build experience over time, but prior to that it is imperative to become familiar with the basic fundamentals and components of a strong and well-diversified social media marketing campaign. In the following paragraphs we’ll reveal four key principles that every marketer should become familiar with on their road to social media success:

Read more: 4 Key Principles Every Social Media Marketer Should Understand

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