Archive for ‘Marketing’
3 Ways a Renegade Cop Accidentally Exploded the Sales of a Product no One Wanted
In 1971, Dirty Harry held his empty Smith & Wesson Model 29 resolutely on a bank robber, and bluffed him down. I know what you’re thinkin’. Did he fire six shots, or only five? Well, to tell you the truth in all…
Timeless Content Marketing Lessons from the World’s Fastest Growing Online Publication
Have you heard of UpWorthy? It’s the new darling of the web, and the praise is well earned. In mere months, the site has managed to surpass the early record numbers of some of the web’s most trafficked online publications. Even more…
A Simple Framework for Creating a Viral Video
Do you ever wonder what it takes to create a viral video? Do you want your video content to spread to the masses? While creating a viral video is part science and part art, there are 5 key principles you must follow when…
Why Online Marketing is Like Being Attacked by Dogs – and 3 Principles for Sales Victory
My parents have two dogs—both very friendly Labrador/collie mongrels with nary a vicious bone in their sleek lil bodies. My daughter and trusty sidekick, who you may call Dingo, loves to play with them. And they love to play with her. They’ll…
7 Overlooked but Critically Important Details of Profitable Email Marketing
Jay Harper of Red Apple Lipstick made $10,895.54 from a couple of emails he sent out to the people on his email list. Nathan Barry, a web designer, launched an eBook that made $12,000 in sales in 24hrs and went…
How to Use Snapguide to Promote Your Mobile App
If you’re promoting a mobile app, you probably are taking the usual steps to publicize it. You’re telling friends and family about it and asking them to spread the word. You’re creating Facebook and Twitter pages and a simple website. And…
A Marketer’s Mobile Toolkit: Our 10 Favorite iOS Apps
Marketers are busy people. They are constantly creating, measuring, and refining their campaigns. Anything that will help them stay organized, save time, be more efficient, or help them improve will be valued. So we’ve come up with our ten favorite iOS…
How an American Company You’re Too Young to Remember Used Hilarious Marketing to Become a Household Name & Sail Through the Great Depression
Back in 1925, when cameras used film and Route 66 had just connected Chicago to Los Angeles, a brushless shaving cream company called Burma-Shave was on the rocks. Alan Odell, the son of the founder, was sick of working as a traveling…
50 Tools to Jumpstart Your Content Marketing Efforts
Companies are defined today by their unique story. Anyone can sell a product but why buy that product over another? Creating radio spots and billboard ads are not enough in today’s consumer centric marketplace to connect with customers, it’s content that…
App Store Optimization – A Crucial Piece of the Mobile App Marketing Puzzle
With over 2 million mobile apps in the major app stores, getting your app discovered is one of the biggest issues facing mobile app publishers today. If you’re in the mobile app space, it’s important to understand the various methods for…
Achieving Engagement with Email Marketing
One of the biggest challenges facing marketers is achieving engagement with email marketing. Obtaining someone’s email address is an awesome privilege, but getting that person to open an email can be an impossible task. In this post, we’ll be discussing three steps…
How to Hook New Customers with Your Explainer Video
Surf in any category on the Internet and you will find words, words, words, and more words. But our brains are hardwired to detect motion. So it’s easy to understand why YouTube is the #2 search engine and the #3 social media…
10 Journalism Rules That Can Teach You Everything You Need to Know About Content Marketing
The release of Penguin 2.0 confirms what we’ve known for a few years now: Content marketing is the new SEO. Yes, we all claim to abide by it. But few of us internalize what it truly means. Sure, everyone wants to…
Can You Buy Loyalty? The Downside of Discounts
1964 might seem like ancient history by now, but The Beatles were bang on the money when they sang ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’. Okay, so it might be a bit of a tall order to make people actually fall in love…
The 2013 YouTube Marketing Guide
How does a company that sells blenders attract over 220 million views on YouTube? How does Zappos drive over 250,000 visits a year to its website from YouTube? With over 72 hours of footage being uploaded to YouTube every minute, how do…
Truth Will Out – Why Authenticity is the Key to Growing Your Business
Authentic businesses inspire and prosper. A bold statement – but one that is very hard to argue with. You might think that by its very nature marketing isn’t authentic, but in the digital age where people are increasingly savvy that preconception is…
How to NOT Break the Law While Marketing
The internet is a great force for democracy, industry, the spread of information, and free speech. It’s also a breeding ground for plagiarism, copyright infringement, and libel. Add into the mix a very slow-moving government that not so long ago was calling…
10 Lessons on Marketing (Poster)
Marketing is one of those things that is tough to define when it’s good. Some forms of marketing resonate with people, but others do not. In my opinion, the “Get a Mac” ads were some of the best advertisements I’ve…
The 5 Biggest Mistakes in Mobile App Marketing
Mobile has changed the landscape of consumerism in a few short years by becoming our favorite tool for reading the news, watching television, communicating, socializing, shopping, making decisions, navigating…for just about everything! As a marketer, mobile is a very powerful place for…
How to Grow Your Email List to 5 Digits and Beyond
Email is a proven method for reaching prospects and cultivating long-term relationships with customers. You probably know it has one of the highest ROIs across online marketing channels, especially when used in tandem with social and search. Plus, email provides greater…
When the Apple Falls Too Far From the Tree – 10 Conversion Mistakes Being Made by the Tech Giant
Steve Jobs steered Apple to success with his obsession with perfection, such as limiting how many screws should be in a laptop and taking six months to finally sign off on the scrollbars for Mac OS X. Yes, Apple certainly…
Native Advertising: Marketing Flop or Marketing Future?
Pop quiz: Can you spot the native advertising on BuzzFeed’s homepage? Which piece of BuzzFeed’s homepage contains native advertising? If you answered “all of it,” you’d be exactly right. The entire front page, seemingly devoted to Instagrammers you should be following, actually…
10 Ways to Make Customers Fall in Love with Your Business
Nurturing relationships with your customers is a crucial part of growing a successful business. In this age of automation and innovation, caring for your customers has never been more important. At any moment, an unhappy customer can share their opinion with…
The Ultimate Guide to Customer Acquisition
We all need to acquire new customers to make our products and businesses work. Whether there are a few users paying big bucks or thousands visiting your platform for free, how you get and retain customers is what is important. But…
How to Market Your Mobile App
After doing some research in your industry, you discover that you need more than just a mobile website for your business. You are going to have to really grab the attention of the smartphone generation and get them to use your…
How Quibb Keeps Daily Email Open Rates between 50% and 70%
When fellow newsletter creators hear that the open rates of Quibb’s daily digest email hover between 50% and 70%, I get a lot of questions. People are curious to hear what has worked to keep the open rate so high and…
How to Become a Mobile Marketing Success Story
Although mobile marketing is in its infancy, that doesn’t mean you have to wait until the medium takes its first steps to be successful. Already, enterprising retailers and small businesses alike are testing the waters of advertising on smart phones, and…
Inside Google’s Culture of Success and Employee Happiness
It’s pretty well documented that Google has a unique culture. It’s not the typical corporate culture. In fact, just by looking at pictures inside the Googleplex, you can see that it looks more like an adult playground, not a place for…
How to Build an Email Marketing Machine: Gangnam Style
You’d be pretty hard pressed to argue that PSY’s Gangnam Style hasn’t been a runaway marketing success. With over 1 BILLION views on YouTube, Gangnam Style has firmly planted itself in our collective psyche. Love it or hate it, I think we…
9 Insider Tips for Creating a Killer Explainer Video
Are you considering investing in an explainer video this year? You know; the videos that explain your product or service in 60-90 seconds? Explainer videos are a great way to engage potential customers and familiarize them with your business. The hard…
How to Keep Email Marketing Manageable
In 2012, US companies spent about $64 billion on TV advertisements, $34 billion on print ads, and $39 billion on internet ads. How much did they spend on email marketing? Forrester estimates about $1.5 billion. Yet, it could be argued that…
The Science of Virality – Marketing Lessons from Internet Cats
We marketers would like to believe we dominate the web, but we secretly admit to ourselves that cats and memes are the true rulers. It can be frustrating to pour hours of work and hundreds or thousands of dollars into content,…
7 Things You MUST Understand When Leveraging Social Proof in Your Marketing Efforts
Smart marketers know that social proof is the marketing tactic for easing the minds of worried customers. In 2013 and beyond, social proof will gain in importance because customers are becoming more informed all the time. With the power of…
Sell More This Year by Not “Selling” at All – 3 Simple Guidelines, and One Perfect Secret Weapon
You’ve heard it said that people love to buy, but hate to be sold. Nowhere is this more epitomized than in the cultural archetype of the used car salesman—and its online equivalent, the yellow highlighter sales letter. Working in sales isn’t…
How to Make Your Email Open and Click-Through Rates Skyrocket
Are you getting what you want from email marketing? Many people who run an online business don’t have a great understanding of how email marketing works, nor do they know what they really can achieve with email marketing. And that’s not to mention…
The Top 50 KISSmetrics Posts of 2012
It’s a new year! And I would wager that it’s probably stacked with new and exciting goals, filled to the brim with marketing ideas to try out. Before you jump into this year’s awesome marketing plan, we want to take a…
The Ethics of SaaS
There are plenty of obstacles for people in the SaaS business to contend with. You have to worry about a customer’s privacy, security and ethics concerns, along with the fact that they might not trust you initially—and that you need to…
5 Ways Quentin Tarantino Can Help You Increase Reader Engagement
I’ll try to keep this clean—although Tarantino wouldn’t. This is, after all, a corporate blog, and there might be children reading. Although Tarantino has only directed 17 titles (one of them — Love Birds in Bondage — unfinished, and another — Kill…
Is Your Competitive Advantage Difficult for Your Competitors to Copy?
Think about this: Why do customers pay for your product or service? What makes it unique and better than that of your competitors? If a prospective customer approached you and asked: Why should I choose you over your competitor(s)? Would you be able to…
The Marketer’s Guide To SlideShare
I want to show you a big opportunity that leads to other big opportunities. This “opportunity” gets 60 millions visitors per month and has an Alexa Rank of 174. You don’t want to miss out on it, do you? The good news…
6 Ways You Can Improve Churn Rate and Increase Revenue
There’s a lot of focus in the business world on making sales. But a less talked about (and arguably more important) goal is ensuring your customers remain customers. Churn rate, also known as cancellation rate, is the percentage of customers who have…
6 Guaranteed Ways to Increase Your Customer Lifetime Value with Email Remarketing
Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) is one of the most important metrics when it comes to analyzing your online business. Sadly, it’s often overlooked! As this great infographic from KISSmetrics shows, analytics software can help you calculate and monitor your average customer…
Your Website and the Importance of a Value Proposition
A website tells a lot about a business. It shows how much thought the business puts into its brand and whether it values having a website. Unfortunately, far too many companies don’t really value their websites and don’t get the full…
34 SaaS Marketers Reveal What Inspires Them About Modern Marketing
Recently, we reached out to over 30 SaaS (Software as a Service) companies and asked their marketers one simple question: What have you read, heard or seen that has profoundly impacted the way you think about modern marketing? What we got back…
Why Understanding Expectations Is Crucial For Customer Service
Customer service is about expectations. And the expectations that customers have today were shaped by their previous experiences. Businesses need to meet or exceed these customer expectations. Service is praised or criticized because of expectations. After all, when do you hear people bring…
5 Email Marketing Lessons From The Obama Campaign
Politics is a subject that often gets a lot of people riled up… Fortunately, we’re here to talk about email marketing! President Barack Obama has been noted as one of the most “connected” politicians of his age, embracing social media and email…
The Secret Marketing Question: What Are You Really Selling?
Selling online or off can be tricky. In either environment, you’re trying to figure out what it is that people need or want and what it is that they will buy. And often, people aren’t interested in buying a product or service. They’re…
The Importance of Going Directly to Where Your Customers Are
We live in a very busy and noisy world. There is an endless amount of information to consume, millions of products offered (each promising their own benefit), and advertisements constantly thrown in front of us. Needless to say, it can be…
These 5 Squeeze Page Tricks Have Helped Me Get Up To 58.6% Opt-In Rates
Okay, right up front I need to call your attention to the fact that you’ll never convince anyone to opt in to anything if they aren’t right for your offer—or if your offer just sucks. In other words, these tricks aren’t magic…
Unforgettable: 10 “Purple Cow” Websites to Spark Your Imagination and Your Creativity
On this blog we talk a lot about websites that have effective calls to action, non-cluttered home pages, and trustworthy designs with the intention of showing what techniques help improve conversions. After years of showing our readers examples of what works and…
