The Most Shared Articles from MarketingSherpa Blog in 2016
While the jury may be out on 2016 as a whole, marketers have had a very exciting year, and MarketingSherpa (if we may say so) has hopefully shown a spotlight on it through our content.
In light of celebrating the good of 2016 as we’re all madly planning what 2017 will bring, we’re revisiting the most popular articles from the past 12 months. Looking back at top content helps us see what our readers found to be the most helpful and valuable content, and it helps you to know what your peers are looking for.
Below, see where we’ve been this past year using the nine most popular articles to find what elements you might want to bring with you into 2017…
#1. Six Places to Focus to Make your Website a Revenue Generator
We have more digital marketing channels than ever before, but it’s become even harder to connect with customers.
One thing’s become clear, that there is a growing divide between those who are fully engaged with digital marketing and those who are still figuring out the fundamentals. This interview with Kristin Zhivago, President of Cloud Potential, goes over her report on “revenue road blocks,” as a deep dive into what she’s discovered to help marketers quickly close this digital marketing gap and do better.
If marketers directly address getting the six key focuses covered in this blog post right, you can move forward and close the gap between digital and customers.
#2. Mobile Email Marketing Optimization: Tips for beginner and advanced marketers from four experts
In the article from MarketingSherpa Chart of the Week newsletter, we share data produced exclusively for MarketingSherpa by Adestra and Econsultancy, which identified the mobile email marketing optimization techniques that most commonly produce excellent email marketing ROI.
You can take a closer look at the data in the article – Email Marketing Chart: ROI from optimizing email for mobile devices – but here’s the punchline: Optimizing emails for mobile is more than three times as likely to generate ROI.
If you need data to help justify the budget, resources, and buy-in you need from business leaders or clients for optimized mobile email marketing (or if you’re already optimizing your mobile email marketing but need resources to move to the next level), the chart is an excellent asset.
So now what? Let’s say you get the resources … where do you begin? Or perhaps you’re already several years down the road, but are running out of ideas on what to do next.
To help with your mobile email marketing, we interviewed four experts who gave us invaluable tips for both beginner and advanced mobile email marketers. We’re including all the tips in one blog post to allow you to easily scan because, let’s face it, one marketer’s “beginner tactic” is another marketer’s “advanced idea.”
#3. How to Be Ready for the Future of Marketing in 3 steps
Marketers by the very nature of what they do are constantly trying to predict what’s going to happen next. That could include answering questions like: What’s our next big campaign? How will this new channel perform at generating leads? Will this strategy work?
But marketers seldom — if at all — get to sit back to wonder about or predict the broader future of marketing.
In this blog post, our reporter spoke to Nick Johnson, Brand Director, Incite Group, and the research he did to understand the future of marketing, and later writing a book about it. It dives into what he learned and how marketers can get ready for the future of marketing.
#4. Brand Marketing: 5 tactics to understanding customer experience
U.S. media ad spending will hit $200 billion in 2016, according to eMarketer. And yet, when we asked 2,021 customers how they discover new products, advertising was the fifth most popular response with offline and online advertising tied for fifth with 27% of responses.
“In-store browsing” was the most popular (59%), and the focus of today’s MarketingSherpa Blog post — “word of mouth from friends, family, colleagues” — was a close second at 57%.
However, when we asked marketers how they actually helped customers learn about products, there was a bit of a disconnect from customer preferences. Online advertising was the most frequently used tactic (60%), while “encouraging word of mouth” was only the fifth most popular tactic (chosen by 45% of marketers).
This blog post answers the question, how can you increase word of mouth for your products and services?
#5. Email Marketing: Ideas and inspiration from 11 years of award-winning campaigns
The challenges of today scream at you. How can I increase sales? Get more people to subscribe to my opt-in list? Ensure my emails end up in the inbox? What is the next technology to keep up with?
Sometimes it’s helpful to take a look back to see the future more clearly. Getting a sense of where we have been as email marketers helps us to better understand where we’re going. To quote Isaac Newton, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”
To help you do that, and find inspiration and ideas for your current email campaigns, this highly shared blog post takes a look back through the archives of the MarketingSherpa Email Awards.
#6. Email Marketing: 6 steps to re-engaging subscribers and cleaning your list database
With spring now upon us, are you ready to “spring clean” your email lists?
It’s a hard task to take on. No one likes to see their list decline. However, list hygiene is an important part of any email strategy.
If many of your email addresses are undeliverable or people are marking you as spam, your email reputation suffers. You could be causing yourself to be flagged as spam in your customer’s inboxes — and that won’t get your campaigns very far.
To get your list back to a healthy state and stay that way, we’ve outline six steps for your team to take.
#7. Marketing Basics: Don’t overlook these 5 digital marketing tenets
There are so many impressive things you can do with your website these days. Augmented realty. Rich animations. Micro-interactions. Interactive infographics.
Your website, content, and digital marketing is often presented the same way. Advanced, flashy user interfaces are great. But looking in our own analytics, covered in this blog post, we were reminded there are probably a few unheralded, down-to-Earth, un-buzzworthy basics that should still power your online marketing.
#8. Four Simple Ways to Become a More Customer-Centric Marketer
This blog post is a companion piece to one about our need to guard against company logic. It is very easy for us as marketers to slip into a mindset that ignores the ultimate desires of the customer. This is a struggle experienced by all companies, big or small, new or old, well-known or unknown.
Ironically, as one commenter posted, perhaps even that blog post suffered from a little company logic as it seemed to focus on what the writer wanted to say rather than what would have most served the audience: more application.
So, in that spirit, this companion piece was published as an attempt to be a little more customer centric and suggest four ways in which we can practically guard against company logic and become more customer-centric marketers. These are not the only four ways, but they are a good place to start.
#9. Gotta Catch ‘Em All: How to get new customers from the Pokémon GO phenomenon
Marketers learned a lot (not all of it good) from social phenomenon Pokémon GO, and it all came down to one mantra: Gotta catch ‘em all.
Except in our case, we’re talking about our customers. While not everyone can create a social phenomenon out of their product, you can definitely capitalize on one to pique your customer’s interests and stay top of mind.
Pokémon GO, which is an augmented-reality smartphone game that has players exploring the real world to find virtual Pokémon, at its peak rivaled Twitter when it comes to daily active users. This means you couldn’t afford to just ignore it. Especially for reaching out to millennials.
Categories: Uncategorized 2016, B2B marketing, b2c marketing, best of, customer-centric, Email, Inbound Marketing, list cleansing, revenue
