People who work in email and CRM are having a hard time with Gmail’s new spam rules. To stay below spam limits, responsible list management means that the number of subscribers will probably go down over time. It’s already hard enough that iOS 15 keeps throwing wrenches into the works. Marketers who use open rates to figure out how engaged their customers are are trying to make sense of a cloudy picture. To deal with these new situations, here are some good ways to handle your email lists, get new subscribers, and......
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Around 150 years ago, skilled artisans and makers were needed to make things. Now, flexible, computer-driven, and automated manufacturing systems are used. The same thing will happen in marketing in less than 50 years, as AI completely changes the way marks work. But marketers can easily lose the productivity gains that AI brings if they don’t change how they do marketing generally. We’ll talk about the history of marketing systems, how AI flips these systems on their heads, and some new ways to do marketing in the AI era. What marketing tools......
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Do you know that you have your own info on intent? You don’ need to get it. If you run campaigns, especially on accounts you already have, you have access to much more detailed info than you could buy. It’s only important that you know where and how to look for it. When you find it, you’ll know that what people are selling or telling you about “signals” isn’t really true. What intent signs really mean People who work as marketers have told us that a prospect’s desire for information is linked......
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The most important thing in a friendship is to know and be known. You need to listen to your people to get to know and understand them. Even though it seems so clear, a lot of marketing misses this point of view. Brand stories focus too much on the brand itself and not enough on why the brand exists, even though companies say they are “customer-obsessed.” When deciding to buy, B2B buyers need even more understanding, knowledge, and reassurance. To build a long-lasting connection that benefits both parties, here are some important......
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Early this month, the Association of National Advertisers had some good news for people at Cannes Lions. A shocking 15% of all ad spend in 2023 went to media buys on mostly fake made-for-advertising (MFA) websites. That went down to 4% after a year. The news is a little less good because digital ad spending is expected to rise by 16% in 2024, which is only 4% of a bigger number. Also, 4% is still a lot. Of course, one type of ad fraud is tricking brands into buying programmatic advertising on......
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DAMs are pieces of software that help a company store, organize, and make better use of all of its digital assets. A DAM is the “single source of truth” where marketers can find all versions of media assets that are useful. This includes photos, PDFs, images, audio, video, and even VR or other new forms. A DAM adds metadata to these files that tell marketers everything they might want to know about the file before they use it, like: Does the company have the right to use a picture forever, and if......
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We know that martech and demand generation tactics work best to get prospects interested when the brand is already well known. So why don’t we always use those strategies on customers who already know our company better? Many marketing teams miss the chance to connect customers and upsell by using tried-and-true prospecting methods that are based on data. Market to customers and find new customers are not the same thing. But some ways of marketing can help bring in more customers and keep the ones you have. Some content that is made......
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You think that “the customer” means the same thing in all of your use cases when you organize your data around that word. That’s not always a good guess. An important job of a customer data platform (CDP) is to collect data from various sources and put it all together in one record. That one customer record can hide bigger problems if you’re not careful, and it can make some of your use cases impossible. This guide will help you understand how to organize customer data in a way that helps your......
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It is said that David Ogilvy once said, “Give me the freedom of a tight brief.” It is thought that briefs that are focused and detailed, leaving little room for interpretation, lead to the best creative results. The idea for creative briefs came from advertising companies in the 1960s. They were a way for the account planner, who was closest to the client, to start the creative process. Well-done creative briefs are still an important basic tool for marketers today, but they take time, which is something marketers don’t have much of.......
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You’ve made a good business plan, gotten the money you need, and are excited to tell the media about your brand. People tell you that you need PR, which stands for “press release,” right? People often think that public relations (PR) only includes news releases when they talk to startups about it. When you add earned media, which is a type of PR, things become even less clear. Start-ups that think their names don’t need PR because they haven’t had any “bad press” are even worse. For the record, crisis communications is another type of PR that deals with bad news......
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