MarketingSherpa Blog

For most companies and its marketers, ensuring good placement in search engine results is crucial.

In 2015, Google updated its algorithm. The update earned the name “mobilegeddon.” Why?

“If someone is doing a search on Google using their mobile device, Google is going to show websites that are mobile friendly before websites that are not mobile friendly,” said Danny Gavin, VP, Director of Marketing, Brian Gavin Diamonds, in his interview at the MarketingSherpa Media Center at IRCE. “You can imagine that people who don’t have a mobile friendly site they lose a lot out because naturally they’re going to fall to the bottom of the first page or even on the second page.”

Danny sat down with Courtney Eckerle, Managing Editor, MarketingSherpa, to discuss how his company addressed the update and the impact seen from the rollout.

As a high-end jewelry retailer, Brian Gavin Diamonds didn’t see the early mobile traffic burst that some companies saw online. Danny shared how their mobile traffic was very small in 2012, but steadily increased as the years went by.

“As we saw that our customers are using their mobile device more so naturally we need to make sure that our website is more mobile friendly,” Danny said.

This became even more evident with the announcement of Google of the new algorithm.

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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.

“Blasting your emails to an unqualified list could result in account suspensions from your email platform, penalties, or even fines, not to mention dismal marketing results,” according to the Salesforce article “How to Keep Your Email Lists Sparkling Clean.”

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.

Step #1. Delete fake, role-based and misspelled email addresses

To start your email spring cleaning, examine your list for the addresses you won’t hope to win-back. This includes those that don’t actually make it to someone (and probably never have).

For various reasons, consumers don’t always provide the correct information online. As an initial step into cleaning your list, you’ll want to delete all the bogus email addresses. These could include emails like:

• test@gmail.com
• 123@company.com
• asdf@asdf.com (This address even has a fake website to go with it.)

You’ll probably want to eliminate role email address as well. These are typically groups, not individuals, where no one will actually open, read or click your emails. A few examples include:

• admin@example.com
• info@example.com
• media@example.com

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No matter which division of marketing your team works in, you’d probably love to grow your team. You know your team is doing well, achieving great success, but how do you get that success noticed by leaders in your organization?

During Day 1 of MarketingSherpa Summit 2016, Brian MacDonald, Senior Manager of Digital Marketing, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, shared his journey to overcome this challenge.

Brian is a huge movie fan, and drew inspiration from Pixar director and screenwriter, Andrew Stanton, in his quest to get his team noticed and gain more budget.

Storytelling became his strategy. Brian is responsible for the IT Experts Community, as well as community strategy and blogging. His previous team of three did some great things that he didn’t feel were well seen by higher ups.

“How can we build a story around it to get people to care?” Brian said.

With movie making as a basis for his strategy, Brian came up with a five-step process for storytelling to internal audiences and stakeholders.

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“Your strategy has to be evolving. As the platforms continue to evolve, you have to evolve,” Peter Stringer, Vice President of Digital Media, Boston Celtics, said at the MarketingSherpa Media Center at DMA’s &THEN 2015.

As new social media platforms emerge and others change their algorithms, digital marketers must be nimble in their strategies. However, even in the midst of new social platforms, you still have to focus on fans.

“You really can’t have a great strategy until you start using the platform and try to understand how your fans expect to use it. Realistically, if you’re using [it] in a way that doesn’t match up with the way people actually use this platform in the wild, it’s not going to work,” he said.

Watch the interview to learn how Peter and the Boston Celtics have evolved to meet the needs of fans on social media platforms.

How an impromptu change in the approach to Facebook video led to a major shift in strategy

Peter discussed the responsibility that is on marketers to figure out if changes in how platforms work mean a change in strategy is in order. He provided an example around Facebook video and the viral trend for taking the Ice Bucket Challenge.

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“I think content is becoming the forefront for any ecommerce or digital strategy,” Andy Wang, Digital Brand Marketing Manager, World Kitchen, said.

The struggle, though, can come in creating that content. In 2014, 45% of B2C marketers reported “producing enough content” as a top challenge, according to the B2C Content Marketing 2014 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends – North America report. And that’s just creating it. Moreover, 51% of marketers struggled with “producing the kind of content that engages.”

How can marketers meet the content amount demands while still producing quality content that resonates with customers?

At the MarketingSherpa IRCE Media Center, Andy discussed with Courtney Eckerle, Manager of Editorial Content, MarketingSherpa, how his team worked through these challenges.

“For us at World Kitchen, it was critical for us to bring in valid content that would showcase some of our passions that our consumers have for our products,” Andy said. “Giving them a voice was critical and allowing them to contribute to our website and be a part of our campaigns. That was one of the things we really enjoyed and were hopeful for.”

You can watch his full interview to learn how his team invited customers to share pictures and stories and integrated this user generated content into their digital marketing strategy.

For decades, people have been pulling leadership and life lessons from film and television. From sports and war inspired movies to law dramas and comedies, we see characters make tough decisions, lead their teams to victory or support them through the losses.

For me, apocalypse stories often have some of the most dynamic and interesting characters to watch. To survive in such circumstances, they often learn important lessons that you just don’t think about or encounter as dramatically in a normal day-to-day life. Stripping them of their modern conveniences and the restraints of society and laws, you quickly get to see who they really are as a person.

Even though the office place doesn’t require the same life-or-death decisions, we can still draw out valuable lessons from the decisions these characters make.

The Walking Dead fans like me know that Season 6 has finally arrived. To celebrate, I’ve rounded up six lessons marketing leaders can take away from the drama and apply to their teams.

Lesson #1. Don’t let your guard down (and keep testing)

“You’re not safe. No matter how many people are around, or how clear the area looks, no matter what anyone says, no matter what you think. You are not safe. It only takes one second. One second and it’s over. Never let your guard down. Ever. I want you to promise me.”

—    Rick Grimes, Season 5 

You might be asking how this relates to marketing. Replace “you” with “your webpages” and switch “safe” to “bulletproof.” Your webpages are not bulletproof.

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In my four years at MECLABS Institute, the parent company of MarketingSherpa, I’ve held a few different roles on the Editorial Content team.

However, my very first role was junior copy editor. Having been there and done that, it provides me a unique perspective to manage our current copy editor, Shelby Dorsey.

It’s a unique role. No one seems to know you’re there until you mess up. I can still remember that first email forwarded to me after a director in the company found a small mistake I overlooked in a newsletter send. It was horrifying.

Recently, Shelby and I have set out to help improve some of the processes around the copy editing role, and I know we aren’t the only ones who need help streamlining this area of marketing.

First on the list was increasing the turnaround times for the various content pieces.

To start the presentation, I wanted to find a quote that embodied what a copy editor is. In my search, I found the copy editor description Merrill Perlman wrote in her CNN article, “Why ‘America’ needs copy editors.”

It’s with this quote that I started a simple, but detailed internal PowerPoint deck outlining the copy editing process, requirements and timelines. To help you implement or improve your own copy editing process and procedures, we’re giving you an inside look at that deck.

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An image is a powerful tool in the digital world.

It can draw attention, communicate value, increase shareability and so much more. In fact, HubSpot pulled together the “17 Stats You Should Know About Visual Content Marketing in 2015” to display this. From what your peers are doing to how effective visual content is for social sharing, the stats of recent studies are certainly interesting.

Two stats stuck out to me while researching this topic.

First, tweets with images were clicked 18% more and retweeted 150% more than those without, according to Buffer.

Second, when looking at the most shared posts from Facebook pages, a photo post made up 87% of interactions.

Even better than stats, I came across four success stories that show how visual content can greatly impact your content and social media marketing efforts, from blog views to Facebook shares.

Case study examples

Content Marketing: Interactive infographic blog post generates 3.9 million views for small insurance company

As a smaller insurance company, HCC Medical Insurance Service (HCCMIS) needed a way to stand out in its marketplace. While insurance can typically be thought of as a boring product, the HCCMIS team decided to make their blog content more exciting with interactive infographics.

The result? The team saw a 1,000% lift in blog traffic, as well as significant lifts in social media followers and email revenue.

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Marketing is continually changing and evolving, and nothing has propelled that more than the Internet.

This means marketers must grow with the industry. According to Formstack, those in digital marketing now need seven skills beyond the norm to succeed:

• Analytics
• Social media
• Data visualization
• Technical skills
• Teamwork
• Newsjacking
• Soft skills

While the digital age has created a need for new skills, it has also enabled marketers to learn those skills with the click of a button, without going back to college.

It’s possible to learn these skills through books, blog posts, podcasts and more, all with little to no cost commitment. There are also moderate to expensive online courses available. However, for those who might want a more structured or interactive learning experience without the cost, we have a few options for you to check out.

Read on to learn about five different sites that can help expand your skills in a variety of areas.

Google Analytics Academy

Skill: Analytics

Google offers free online courses to improve analytics skills in its Analytics Academy. It’s an at-your-own-pace format. You can watch lessons from Google’s experts, then test your knowledge through quizzes and practices exercises. They have also created a learning community with course forums so you can engage with other students and experts.

After you’ve mastered the courses, you can earn Google Analytics Individual Qualification by taking the IQ test, which is now free of charge.

Codeacademy

Skill: Coding

Codeacademy’s mission is “teaching the world how to code.” For no cost, users can learn to code in multiple programming languages:

• HTML and CSS
• Javascript
• jQuery
• Python
• Ruby
• PHP

It also offers courses on to make a website, an interactive website and a Rails Application, where students build their own versions of popular websites — Airbnb, Flipboard and Etsy.

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If you haven’t noticed, #SherpaEmail has taken over Twitter.

Well, maybe not in a break-the-Internet scale of Kim Kardashian, but your marketing peers have been tweeting their hearts out with all the good information they’ve learned at MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2015.

With Day 2 of Summit underway, we wanted to share some key nuggets your peers found valuable on Day 1. (I might have smuggled a few of my own in too.) Check out some key takeaways from each of yesterday’s insightful sessions.

Humanizing Your Email Program: How to transcend the digital revolution by using the essential ability to communicate person-to-person

Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director and CEO, MECLABS Institute

Flint revealed four fundamental principles that guide effective communication and provided examples of how these principles can be used to transform your entire email program.

“People don’t build relationships with companies or organizations. People build relationships with people.” @FlintsNotes #SherpaEmail — Rachel Perry (@rperry110) February 24, 2015

There is a gap between what you know and what you need to know about your customer. Testing is the bridge between the two. #SherpaEmail — Ann Pohl (@nanoanno) February 24, 2015

Use tests to aggregate customer wisdom. Become the customer expert/the customer philosopher. #SherpaEmail #wise — Amy Schamp (@THEschamp) February 24, 2015

The lift alone won’t help you in the long run. Your tests must be designed to know “why”! Then you can apply to later efforts #SherpaEmail — MarketingSherpa (@MarketingSherpa) February 24, 2015

Any data that can’t help you predict customer behavior is useless. #SherpaEmail — Scott Cohen (@scottcohen13) February 24, 2015

#testify RT @DelaQuist: @jacaldwell Actually its worse most marketers think Segmentation IS personalization #SherpaEmail — John Caldwell (@jacaldwell) February 24, 2015

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