Ten Blogs Every Marketer Should Read

October 25, 2013

Ten blogs every marketer should read

Introduction

As marketers (or aspiring marketers), we have it pretty darn good. Why is that? Because marketers, by our very nature, are accustomed to sharing information, insights, tips and best practices. In fact, sharing (and publishing) knowledge is one of the things we love most about our job.

What can you do if you don’t yet have a body of knowledge to share? You follow and read the marketing thought leaders. Learn from the best, while getting a sense for how they share their knowledge. One day, you may find your likeness etched into the Mount Rushmore of Marketing thought leaders.

Let’s highlight ten blogs that every B2B marketer should read.

Follow Our Twitter List: Top 10 Marketing Blogs

Amy Porterfield: Social Media Strategy

Amy Porterfield is a social media strategist who helps clients “maximize the power of social media and increase the success of their online marketing efforts.” Amy provides actionable tips on social media engagement. She’s a great storyteller, as well – just read through the About page on her site.

Selected post: What to Do After People Opt In to Your Email List

As marketers, it’s quite easy to take our email opt-in list for granted. Source 1,000 new opt-ins last week? Great. We just completed a white paper yesterday, so we’re going to email all 1,000 of them, with “hot off the presses” in the subject line.

Instead, Porterfield encourages marketers to give email subscribers great value over time and make sure your messages resonate with them: in other words, treat them like gold. Your email subscribers should be valued on par with your customers. In fact, many of your customers are already on your email list. Wouldn’t it be bad if they opted out?

Moz: Content on SEO and More

Moz began life as an SEO consulting company and has grown into a content site, online community and software provider. For me, Moz has become a go-to site for all things SEO and Google, from Penguin to Hummingbird to “Not Provided.”

Selected post: Taking Advantage of Google’s Bias Toward Hyper-Fresh Content – Whiteboard Friday

While my schedule doesn’t always sync up, I like to set aside some time on Friday’s to catch the latest “Whiteboard Friday” from Rand Fishkin, Moz’s CEO and Co-Founder. Fishkin always has timely and interesting things to share – and the depth of his content is always impressive. As just one measure of content effectiveness, take a look at the number of Comments he receives (61 comments in the selected post above).

Ann Handley: Social Media and Content Marketing

I’ve been a reader of Marketing Profs for quite some time. I read the book Content Rules, which Ann co-authored with C.C. Chapman. I’ve also attended a number of Marketing Profs webinars and online events.

Selected post: A Simple Content Marketing Org Chart

My selected post is not from Marketing Profs, though. On her personal blog, Ann provides an org chart for the content marketing team. Some organizations have a single person allocated to content, while others may have teams of hundreds. It’s not the numbers that are important here, it’s the roles and personas that Ann outlines. Did you see a role here that’s not filled on your team? Think about filling it.

Seth Godin: Best-selling Author and Thought Provoker

Things I look forward to each day: the sun rising. And Seth Godin’s daily blog post. I’ve enjoyed a number of Seth’s books. On his blog, he takes a different approach. Each post is short and succinct. They deliver a key insight, or they make you think (or both).

Selected post: Marketing good…

This one made me think. My takeaway is: good is no longer good enough. Our marketing, along with the products we’re marketing, need to be great.

Jay Baer: Best-selling Author and Social/Content Guru

Jay Baer is founder of Convince & Convert, who “help you get better at social media and content marketing through audits, strategic planning and ongoing advice and counsel” (source: http://www.convinceandconvert.com/about-us/).

Selected post: 11 Big Myths About Social Media and Content Marketing

I’m not a big fan of myths: after all, if something’s a myth, I shouldn’t pay attention to it, right? Except that I should, when peers, colleagues or industry contacts believe in such myths. I may need to dispel a myth in order to gain budget or project approval.

KISSmetrics: Analytics, Marketing and Testing

KISSmetrics provides web analytics software. Each blog post they publish is so rich in detail, I almost feel guilty getting it for free. Their blog content covers a fairly wide range of topics (i.e. more than analytics and testing). Because I need to allocate a fair amount of time to read and digest their content, I usually save pieces for later (i.e. outside of the work day), when I have dedicated time to read them in full.

Selected post: 58 Resources to Help You Learn and Master SEO

Sometimes, content curation can be as big a task as writing original content. This post features a broad and comprehensive set of SEO resources. I may need to allocate an entire weekend for this one.

Paul Gillin: Speaker, Writer, Consultant

I’ve been reading Paul’s blog ever since I worked with him (a number of years ago). Paul has published a number of books, consults with brands and speaks and writes frequently.

Selected post: 8 Data Points about the Importance of Customer Experience

When assembling a presentation, I often need to find interesting and relevant statistics to include. Sometimes it can be very challenging to find them! If I was doing a presentation on customer experience (or, the related field of Customer Experience Management), Paul’s post would be my go-to source for related stats.

Brian Solis: Author and Analyst

Brian Solis is a best-selling author and principal analyst at Altimeter Group.

Selected post: Broadcast Yourselfie: How teens use social media and why it matters to you

If you’re in B2C, you probably know about the technology and social media habits of teens. If you’re in B2B, your knowledge of teens may related to the ones in your household. I’m in B2B and don’t have a teen at home, so I found this post fascinating. Today’s teens will be your target customer in a few years. It’s best to understand them now.

Jeremiah Owyang: Entrepreneur and Thought Leader

Jeremiah Owyang is Chief Catalyst (and founder) at Crowd Companies. Formerly, Jeremiah was a research analyst at Altimeter Group.

Selected post: Meet the Resilient Corporations

Jeremiah always seems to be at the leading edge of what’s coming next. His current focus area is the collaborative economy and in this piece, he explores the advantages gained by resilient corporations. They gain advantages “by reducing risk through variability, being agile by flexing when needed, and scaling by leveraging others to handle the load.”

I read Jeremiah’s blog for a big picture view of things coming down the road.

Marketo: Best Practices in Online Marketing

Marketo is a leading provider of marketing software. Nearly every week, I learn something new about Marketing via their blog.

Selected post: Here’s How to Maintain Your Email Marketing List for Engagement and Better Deliverability

Whoever proclaimed “email is dead” must not have been a marketer. For demand and lead generation, email is still an important tool in our arsenal. And I think a lot of marketers still struggle with things like subscription management and deliverability. Read this post from Marketo co-founder Jon Miller and your email management will be the better for it.

Our Infographic

We’ve assembled an infographic of these ten extraordinary thought leaders. Enjoy!

Originally published on the DNN Software blog.

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Posted by Dennis Shiao

Online Marketing Wisdom, Sales Funnel Sagacity and Lead Generation Genius from The @Funnelholic

April 16, 2013

The Funnelholic urges you to mind the funnel

Introduction

Craig Rosenberg, The Funnelholic, has been publishing a series of “madlibs” with marketing thought leaders. Here’s a set of the madlibs published to date (there are more to come):

  1. Steve Gershik
  2. Ardath Albee
  3. Michael Brenner
  4. Gary Hart
  5. Dave Brock
  6. Carlos Hidalgo
  7. Jill Konrath
  8. Your’s truly, Dennis Shiao

I love reading these madlibs. The only problem? We don’t get to hear from Craig himself. So I decided to come up with a set of questions and asked Craig to answer them. Here’s the Q&A.

Lead Generation

Q: Aside from folks like Marketo and HubSpot, what B2B marketer is doing lead gen really well?

A: Tough question. Kissmetrics is a model for online marketing but I’ll give you a surprise one: Sales Benchmark Index. They are a services company and these types of companies typically struggle with demand generation — they have built a content marketing, lead generation machine.  They post every day, create an ebook/month and do a webinar. Their content is specific and comprehensive. They offer templates for download.  They are an impressive use-case for content marketing.

Q: For lead gen, what’s one social network no one is talking about?

A: YOUTUBE. It’s the second most popular search engine and no one in b2b has it figured out.  There are about to be some amazing stories of b2b success on youtube.

Q: If you could select just one metric, what should B2B demand gen folks be measured by?

A: Influence on pipeline. In b2b, 9-25 touches take place before a buyer buys. Why aren’t we tracking every touch and attributing that to marketing success?

Q: Peanut butter is to jelly like marketing automation is to?

A: Demand generation success. Strategy, process, people, and then marketing automation/software. You don’t sell without CRM anymore, you shouldn’t digitally market without a platform. (Craig note: I added “/software” to marketing automation in order to include Hubspot who does not like the term marketing automation).

Q: Retargeted display ads to drive anonymous web site visitors back to your lead capture pages. Yes, no, maybe so?

A: Yes. I recommend retargeting. I don’t just worry about lead capture, I feel like retargeting is highly effective from just a pure branding perspective. I personally don’t click on display but when I get retargeted, I notice and remember the company. It’s like “everywhere I turn, I see you.” I know we are all metrics focused, but there is something to be said about the overall branding aspect to retargeting. You may even consider it another from of nurturing to go with a company’s frequent emails.

Selling and The Sales Funnel

Photo source: Carla Gates on flickr. Follow here here on Twitter: @CarlaGates247

“Cold calling doesn’t have to be cold any more.”

Q: What’s the number one thing to keep in mind when cold calling?

A: That cold calling does not have to be “cold” any more. There is so much information on social networks and the internet about your prospect that you can turn what was formerly known as a cold call into a warm call.

Q: Sales development reps are often disconnected from prospects’ activities in social. How can marketers fix that?  

A: The problem with social and sales isn’t the ability to get information, it’s teaching them to know what to do with it. There are a number of tools: LinkedIN Sales Navigator, Hootsuite, InsideView, for enterprise. Radius Intelligence for SMB that can give a rep social visibility. It doesn’t matter what you provide them if they don’t know what to do with the information. You have to coach reps on how to weave that information into your communications.

Event marketers: create video, white papers and webinars from your event content.

Q: With regard to the sales funnel, what’s the biggest opportunity that event marketers are NOT doing?

A: Here is my view on event marketing: they need to take a step back and try to understand what the buyer journey is today and how live events can fit in. Then they need to look at the vendors and understand how they are selling, and try to tie that back to live events.

What is going to add the most value to the buyers and sellers at my event? That may be too general, but I have a long list of things that I’d like event marketers to do besides re-think the overall structure. Content still has to improve to meet the standard set on the overall internet, one-to-many content (they are SO focused on the live event but they should be creating video, whitepapers, webinars, etc. from the event content), more digital interactivity during the event and after.

Miscellaneous

Q: It’s been said that Google tested 40 shades of blue to determine the right color for links. Email marketers talk a lot about A/B testing. What about A/B/C…N testing. Your thoughts on testing numerous flavors?

A: Let’s discuss pros and cons.

Pro: My belief is that is the consumer internet guys are typically the best at on-site conversion, etc. so copy them. If Google A-N tested to find the best conversion, b2b marketers should learn from that. Today’s agile marketer views the world as “stand it up, then test, test, test.” B2B marketers tend to focus on really big problems which is fine, but to really online market,  you want to optimize every conversion point.

Con: You need to have a big enough sample to even A/B test. When do you have enough data to make a good decision?

Q: I just graduated from college and started a career in B2B marketing. Besides subscribing to the Funnelholic RSS feed, what’s the first thing I should focus on?

A: Well you completed step one. When young people ask me about getting into marketing, I tell them: get a job in marketing anywhere, anyhow.

The problem with b2b marketing is there isn’t enough education on the discipline. You will not learn it in school. So get a job, then soak it in. Then educate yourself: build your feedly with 15-20 b2b marketing sites — but my favorite starter sites are Neil Patel’s QuickSprout and Kissmetrics blogs. My brother wanted to get up-to-speed on internet marketing: he started reading Neil’s stuff and is now pretty much up-to-speed.

“Set aside 1 hour to learn every day.”

The marketing software vendors have GREAT blogs like Marketo, Hubspot, Act-On. Set aside 1 hour to learn every day. The other thing is to find mentors and ask them everything you can. Also, network, network, network — I tell young people, network with peers and ask them everything. I still do that every day. I learn a little here and there from my friends.

Finding The Funnelholic

The Funnelholic is here to help

Q: You’re now providing consulting services for organizations’ sales and marketing teams. Tell us about your services and where can folks contact you for more information?

A: I am a consultant again! And I am having the time of my life. I forgot what it is like to work with amazing people on the complex challenges they face in today’s rapidly changing sales and marketing environment.

The supply chain of business has repeatable, metrics driven processes that deliver/over-deliver products. We help organizations design, build, and/or optimize their Revenue Chain to predictably deliver/over-deliver revenue. We create actionable, specific playbooks in the following areas: content strategy, social strategy, demand generation, lead management, marketing technology, lead qualification, inside sales, sales technology, and sales process.

People can find me on www.funnelholic.com.

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Posted by Dennis Shiao

To Promote Your Physical Or Virtual Event, Think Outside The Inbox

November 21, 2009

Source: flickr (User: Mzelle Biscotte)

For many, email is a constant stream, an endless loop – we receive too much of it, both “important” emails addressed directly to us and marketing emails that are sent as a result of opting in (or not) to past content, webinars, white papers and marketing lists.  Outbound, push-based email promotions face the following challenges:

  1. Imperfect delivery rates (mail server outages, spam filters, etc.)
  2. Decreasing open rates
  3. Perception of spam – if recipients don’t remember opting in to your list (even though they did), they’ll ignore your email – or, opt out from your list
  4. List fatigue due to overuse of marketing lists
  5. Decreasing click-thru rates (CTR) – once you’ve made it past delivery and open, recipients are clicking less on your embedded offers

Adding to this mix is the fact that many users now interact with brands (and by extension, promotional offers from brands) via their social networks, instead of email.  A user is more inclined to respond to an @reply or direct message (on Twitter) compared to a conventional email blast from a marketer.

Given all this, it surprises me that email is still a primary vehicle for promoting physical and virtual events.  Event marketers have much to gain by thinking outside the inbox.

Social media and social sharing

Your first step outside the inbox should be in the direction of social networks.  Build a presence in social communities and you’ll find that you naturally generate interest and awareness to your event.  Previously, I wrote about leveraging Twitter to promote your virtual event.  As Ian McGonnigal (GPJ) astutely pointed out, those same tactics apply quite well to physical events as well.

In addition to Twitter, consider the following:

Create a LinkedIn Event entry for your event

  1. Create a LinkedIn Event for your event – a LinkedIn Event page allows you to post relevant information about your event on LinkedIn (e.g. date, event content, etc.) – LinkedIn members can then indicate whether they’ll be attending, not attending or “interested”.  This can be quite useful, as folks often attend events based on knowing whom else will be attending.  By creating a LinkedIn Event, you’ll receive the benefit of having LinkedIn auto-recommend your event to other members, assuming their profile is a “match” with the profile of your event.  Members may also utilize search and find your event.  More info can be found on the LinkedIn blog page announcing the Event feature.
  2. Post videos to YouTube – it’s the #2 search engine after all (behind parent Google), so having event videos posted on the site will generate traffic from the millions of folks who visit YouTube.com each day.  Record videos of your host, keynote speaker, group publisher, etc. talking about your upcoming event – if your keynote speaker has a prominent name, your videos will attract interest from users who search on that name.  When you have a critical mass of videos, create a YouTube channel.  About.com has a neat guide on how to do just that.
  3. Create a Facebook Fan page for your event – with a fan page, you’ll generate interest for your upcoming event – and, you’ll build an ongoing community that you’ll be able to continuously leverage!  The All Facebook blog has a nice guide on how to build a Facebook fan page.
  4. Leverage blogs – author a blog posting on your corporate blog – or, if you don’t have one, ask a relevant industry blog site whether you can author a guest posting.  Alternatively, leave a comment on postings from relevant industry blogs with a pointer (link) to your event.  The key here is not to over-promote your event – your first goal is to provide useful and relevant content/commentary with your event being a secondary (and subtle) mention.

SEO and in-bound links

If you pay attention to search engine optimization (SEO), your event page(s) will receive “organic” traffic – that is, traffic that finds you, rather than you finding the traffic (i.e. the “pull” from users searching, rather than the “push” from your email promotions).  Think about the search keywords that you’d want to associate with your event [e.g. when users are performing searches] and make sure the content on your event page is rich in those keywords.

To increase the page rank of your event page, increase the number of inbound links that point to your page.  A few simple ideas:

  1. For all of your social media efforts (listed above), make sure they provide links to your event page – shazam, you’ve just created a number of inbound links
  2. For event staff (especially those with large followings on Twitter), ask them to temporarily point the “web site” URL in their Twitter profile to the event page
  3. Ask partners, associates, even clients to post a URL from their web site(s) to your event page
  4. Add a “Share on Facebook” capability on your event page – this may result in page rank benefit as search engines begin to index Facebook wall posts – until then, what this really does is generate awareness and outreach of your event to users’ Facebook friends.  If a potential attendee visits your event page and shares the page with her 100 Facebook friends, then you’ve just received 100 free advertising impressions

Advertise

Some affordable options to consider:

  1. Facebook advertising – purchase targeted ads on Facebook.  For a physical event, you can target by geography (e.g. starting with users who are geographically close to your event site).  For a virtual event, geography is less important, so you may want to target based on attributes in the users’ Facebook profiles.  You can pay per view (of the ad) or per click (on the ad), so the terms are flexible.  eHow has a good overview on Facebook advertising.
  2. Content syndication – purchase web syndication with online publishers in your industry – get your event listed in their directories, content sites, etc.  They may charge you per click or per lead (completed registration).  Not only can this generate registrants for your event, but it also improves your page rank by generating more inbound links to your event page.

Hopefully I’ve covered a few “outside the inbox” options for you to consider – certainly continue to promote your event via email – however, use some of these options to lighten the load a bit on your email marketing lists.

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Posted by Dennis Shiao

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