How Ron Swanson Can Help You Find A/B Testing Ideas [PODCAST]

Who knew binge-watching Parks and Recreation could make you a smarter marketer? Listen to this episode of the Call to Action podcast to find out how learning your prospect's favorite TV show can help you formulate smarter A/B testing hypotheses.

How to Multiply App Downloads with One Simple Localization Test

As of last July, there was a combined total of 2.5 million apps in the Google Play App Store and the Apple App Store. The app stores get more and more competitive every year, and app publishers are using every available advantage to increase their downloads. Number of apps in each of the app stores, […]

How to Efficiently Use Solar Panels for Your Home

Finally decided to go solar? Fantastic! You will find some great energy savings in your near future. Plan to install yourself? There are some things you should know before buying. Read on for more information. To determine how many panels you will really need, you will need to do your homework. The first thing you ...

New Report: Content Marketing Performance – A Framework to Measure Real Business Impact

It’s safe to say that in 2015, the vast majority of businesses are creating content for marketing (B2C 77%, B2B 86%) 2015 CMI/MarketingProfs. But to what end? Content can create impact for a business in many ways, including boosting reputation, increasing revenue, improving operational efficiencies or growing the value of the brand. Unfortunately, most companies are chasing ROI [...]

3 Ways to Mine a Marketing Pot of Gold

Thanks to silos of data about customers from different channels—such as website visitors and behaviors, search, CRM, purchase data, email, and social— valuable attributes often aren’t unified in one location. As a result, it's challenging for marketers to intersect their knowledge of the customer profile across these channels to better refine their targeting, communications, and strategy over time.

While marketers are harnessing the power of technology platforms to better sort through information, it’s critical to develop and document strategies that will help you react more intuitively to the behaviors and reactions of your audiences.

Think of these strategies as a means of building a “treasure trove” of data that can be used to support your marketing activities, ensure that customers getting the most relevant message, and help progress these important relationships.

In the spirit of the St. Patrick’s Day holiday, here are three tips to help you mine a marketing pot of gold via channels native to your every day marketing activities, as well as the audiences you serve.

1. Dig through social media data- Use data to figure out the sentiment of the conversations happening on social media around your brand. Listen and respond to both positive and negative comments about your brand, products, and services. Whether someone is desperate for help posting to your Facebook wall, or just had a great call with a customer service rep and is tweeting their thanks, users deserve responses, and social sentiment data can help. Take record of the words used most frequently to describe these experiences to refine your reaction strategy.

2. Drill down the rainbow of your assets- Measure the performance of supplementary campaign assets to improve prospecting. For example, create a video to support an eBook launch to entertain and engage. This type of content offering enables demand generation but also can garner significant and repeated engagement with current customers. The use of “reciprocal” content, such as an ungated video with gated follow-up content, can provide lead scoring and interest qualification opportunities that can be strategically used to better prioritize outreach with people from your audience most likely to respond.

3. Excavate better segmenting knowledge via email- Pay close attention to all reactions to your email messages, including open, consumption, and sharing metrics. Understanding email patterns can be helpful in developing a more behavioral-based engagement model. Armed with the proper information about which actions your email recipients are taking, marketers can refine copywriting and design elements to suit a desired course of action. For example, if sharing content appears to occur across one or more specific social channels, highlight an easy-to-use sharing mechanism with language-appropriate calls to action, such as “Like this on Facebook” or “Get connected via LinkedIn.” You then can improve segmenting efforts by sharing behavioral specifically.

Implementing the right data management strategy in more intuitive ways can help marketers be more empowered to use information from disparate channels to define target audiences, understand the impacts of specific behaviors, and act accordingly.

For more tips on mining your marketing pot of gold, check out our SlideShare with tips to “Create Your Own Marketing Luck.”

Would You Rather? The Marketing Edition [Interactive Infographic]

What'd you rather quit for a week: coffee or Twitter? (Ugh.) As a marketer, you're probably used to picking the lesser of two evils, but you've never faced situations quite like these. Let us know what you'd do in the most brain-busting marketing scenarios — and see what others would do, too!

SXSW Preview: Mind the Modern Marketing Vision Gap

Editor's Note: Today's post comes courtesy of Roland Smart (@rsmartly), Vice President of Social and Community Marketing at Oracle.

This Tuesday, March 17th at SXSW, Roland will be speaking on a panel about the future of marketing technology platforms. In Austin? Click here to RSVP for this 3/17, 3:30pm CDT session.

There's a battle going on today in the marketing technology world. On one side, smaller and more agile firms pitch their self-proclaimed "best-in-class" marketing tools. On the other side, the world's biggest enterprise companies (such as Oracle) promise a one-stop shop for integrating your most crucial marketing systems—including CRM, marketing automation, content marketing, data management, and social advertising among other business functions.

The related side story is supposed to play out like this: the enterprise incumbents ultimately use their deep pockets to acquire up-and-comers. By doing so, these acquirers invest in proven tools and rare product talent, and in turn shore up their own platform portfolios.

By all accounts, this story agrees with recent reality. If you're a digital marketer, you've probably witnessed the voracious pace of mergers and takeovers in just the last few years. Arguably, these are simply the moves that established players must make in order to survive your classic and stubborn Innovator's Dilemma.

However, I think there's a bit of hyperbole in this tidy narrative.

When it comes to marketing systems integration, a number of the small guys are getting really smart when it comes to building interoperability into their products. And on the innovation front, large vendors are taking the lead in forging a vision for how consumer and B2B modern marketing should be done. Consider, for instance, the products that enterprise technologists are building to prepare advertisers, publishers, and brand application developers for the Apple Watch and similar smaller-screen devices – even before these wearables hit stores.

In short, a race to the middle—that desirable intersection of best-in-class and most complete—is now fully underway. As enterprise vendors acquire newer technologies and incorporate them into their marketing platforms, they must accept the fact that such projects require a certain amount of time, resources, and process adjustment. And that, in turn, gives marketing technology up-and-comers room to compete on the same terrain (or else pivot drastically if need be).

What does this state of affairs mean for smart marketers? Three things mainly:

1) It's important to heed the modern marketing vision gap. As marketing technology providers compete with each other, it's reasonable to expect that you will continuously dream up ideal-world (if not outright futuristic) scenarios that cannot be accommodated 100% by one or some vendors. Can you currently use permissions-obtained biometric data (heart rates and glucose levels), for instance, to avoid sending messages to customers who are verifiably tired/grumpy/in high-stress mode? Not yet, but perhaps your organization has an opportunity to prepare for such a future. What's more, you should be evaluating your vendors on the basis of their ability to help you manifest your own vision as well as navigate never-ending technological uncertainty and disruption.

2) Don't indulge in the hyperbolized dichotomy of best-in-class versus deeply integrated—because that will lead you down the wrong path. For instance, if you assume that best-in-class solutions are all point solutions, you might spend too much time and money having an agency duct-taping together these disparate tools.

3) In evaluating the current landscape of marketing platforms, consider these additional factors/dimensions:

• Will you develop and manage your organization's marketing stack and services internally—with your own developers, designers, brand strategists, project managers, product marketers, data analysts, etc.?
• Or, will you rely on partners and/or third-party agencies to support the stack?

In fact, the boundaries distinguishing internal management and external management are often times blurred, given the reality that the vast majority of companies rely on hybrid marketing stacks—on both the people and product levels. Maybe your internal marketing team manages the reporting for your main website, while an outside agency generates the reports for your social media channels. Perhaps some of your marketing applications are managed on-premise, while others are powered by a combination of private and public clouds.

One last word: modern marketers have their work cut out for them, especially since they're being asked more and more to take the lead on marketing-related IT procurement. If you need a place to start, I think it makes sense to focus first on the core components of your platform. Namely:

• The foundational technology of any marketing platform is the database—ultimately, structured and unstructured data must be aggregated across all marketing systems in order to extract and deliver insight.
• In addition, the ground level of your marketing stack includes a customer relationship management platform and a marketing automation platform. If your CRM data doesn't have a high level of integrity, and if you're forced to conduct a lot of your marketing activities manually, your chances of being able to handle the rest (i.e., simply giving yourself enough time to write great marketing content) are slim.

By taking good care of this foundation, you'll uncover what you need exactly to build and maintain a first-rate, integrated, and complete marketing technology platform.