MarketingSherpa Blog

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.

Read more…

We wanted to get you gifts this holiday, but all we have are some GIFs. Our bad!

Here are some more marketing mishaps, one for each night of Hanukkah.

1. When you use best practices on the internet even though they are typically just pooled ignorance…

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Since it’s the end of the year, we like to revisit the most popular articles and case studies from the past 12 months — the collection of which can be found on our homepage. 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.

This year, we published two case studies back-to-back in the B2C and Inbound marketing channels covering the efforts of My Pooch Face, a site that provides acrylic and digital pet portraits. Both popped up as the most popular of the year, so I decided to dig back in and focus on a portion from my notes that was previously unpublished.

David Lefkovits, Founder and CEO, My Pooch Face, and his team launched a Pet Photo Contest on October 26, with the aim of running it six days until the end of the month. They used a dedicated page www.mypoochface.com/photo-contest and also the link www.vote4mydog.com, which re-directed to the same page.

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The trouble with human relationships is that at the end of the day, all of us are alone — trapped in the cosmos of our selves. Add to that the problem of our own mortality, and you’ve got a perfect recipe for failed relationships.

Yes, it’s a grim place to start a marketing blog post, but bear with me for a moment. If you’re smart, you’ll be thinking about what relationships have to do with marketing (if you’re really smart, you’ll know they have everything to do with it) while you wade through the next few of paragraphs.

I’m stretching the definition a bit, but Kierkegaard and the 20th century existentialists called the result of this fundamental human condition “angst.”

Whatever you want to call it, it’s most likely the main problem humanity has faced since the beginning of consciousness.

The good news is that there are a number of ways to deal with our angst:

• We can try to deny it by becoming a part of the herd
• We can try to medicate it with sex, drugs and rock & roll
• We can try to avoid it with power and money
• We can try to displace it with masochism or sadism

But the healthiest way humanity has found to deal with the problem, as many Beatles songs attest, is love.

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Pretty often with complex B2B products and services, it can be difficult, even for customers to show off the intricacies and value of the entire process.

With more than 4,000 construction companies and 45,000 end-users on HCSS software, the company was looking for a way to leverage clients’ stories and turn them into usable and compelling content.

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“Our main focus [in email marketing] is making sure we’re saying the right thing at the right time to the right person,” said Jessica Vogel, Global Marketing Consultant, Dell.

Having an efficient and effective direct marketing vehicle such as email is critical for the success of Dell’s sizeable direct business. Jessica is part of a team that continuously focuses on email user experience and channel optimization through efforts like responsive design, dynamic content and engaging content integration.

As the email vehicle has evolved into a complex and highly automated direct marketing medium, the team audited its email program (including customers’ mobile and desktop preview-pane experience) and discovered a key challenge to email engagement — its legacy email template.

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As marketers become fully entrenched in the hectic holiday season, it’s easy to just keep to the schedule while letting customer engagement opportunities pass by.

Derek Kazee, Director of Retention Marketing, Ebates, and I spoke about this issue in the Media Center at MarketingSherpa Summit 2016 about how his team overcame the biggest holiday season obstacle — cutting through the noise.

By reacting quickly after some holiday inspiration, Derek and his team quickly mobilized to engage with members about current and upcoming promotions in a fun and informative way.

“I got an idea to do something different, which was actually to remind and to preview all of the promos we were going to launch because I was having trouble keeping track of it myself,” he said.

Derek came into the office with that idea and challenged his team to come up with something that would be informative, non-promotional and engaging at the same time. As a result, one of the copy writers rewrote “’Twas the Night Before Christmas,” and it was designed in just one day.

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It’s the morning of game seven of the World Series, and two of the longest droughts in Major League baseball history are hanging in the balance. Social media across the city of Jacksonville, Florida is lit up, talking about nothing but baseball.

… and shellfish.

On the morning of the historic game that ended the Chicago Cubs 108-year drought, Jacksonville, Florida’s minor league baseball team swept in and stole the news cycle with a re-branding from the Jacksonville Suns, to the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp.

Hello Jacksonville!!! pic.twitter.com/6rnpjsU1ce

— Jax Jumbo Shrimp (@JaxShrimp) November 2, 2016

There he is, in all of his muscular glory. Bustin’ out the pot, and ready to play some baseball while viciously guarding the state of Florida. The shrimp that boiled the waters (wink) in the “Bold New City of the South.” 

For better or for worse, people flipped out. Whether it was praise or backlash, everyone was talking about a team that won’t have its first game for six months. 

.@JaxShrimp pic.twitter.com/lRewgURvLW

— Dr. B (@BlakeTheRxGuy) November 2, 2016

Twitter went to work doing the marketing team’s job for them, even coming up with gold taglines like, “Shrimpin’ ain’t easy,” and promoting George Costanza to Assistant to the Traveling Secretary.

Fans dreamed about the delicious possibilities a Shrimp and (Montgomery) Biscuits matchup could bring and wondered if mascot dog Southpaw would have his name changed to “Grits.”

The new Assistant to the Traveling Secretary for the Jacksonville #JumboShrimp. Previous experience with NY Yankees. pic.twitter.com/6ku2Ehw3SV

— Tim Bee (@TimBeeSports) November 2, 2016

Soon this was even garnering national news thanks to the uproar, with Fox News, NPR and Deadspin all writing pun-filled articles about the change and social media frenzy surrounding it.

So what can we learn about branding initiatives from this minor league mayhem?

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What do you do when optimizing customer engagement means transforming the way an entire organization thinks and functions?

Making a transformational shift in any company is a huge undertaking of thousands of details. In the midst of all of those details, you absolutely cannot forget to ensure that everyone, company-wide, is on the same page and focused on a unified value proposition.

When I spoke with Eric Martin, Vice President of Marketing, North America, SAP, the company had just undergone a transformation to account-based marketing, specifically in North America.

“It was a matter of bringing together a lot of existing marketing resources, and creating some new ones, and focusing them on a sub-segment of customers, a small group, that really you could consider the most strategically important customers,” he said.

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Twitter is a tough place to be for anyone; large brands are no exception. But in addition to the cynicism, it has to balance pleasing customers and its shareholders – a fine line to walk when you’re trying to grow an account.

But what if you were a large brand that sold toilet paper? What if all you had to tweet about was little pieces of paper that people use to wipe their asses with?

For Marie Bonaccorse Hackman and her small editorial team at Charmin, it was a playground of nutrient-rich material for tweeting.

“I was there from March of 2011 until probably, my last tweet was February or March of 2015 … I was there four years, I started the Twitter feed. I was there from its infancy…” Marie told me in an interview.

“We knew we were toilet paper, we had no qualms about it. We knew we were not inherently cool, but we knew that we could have a lot of fun with it.”

And have fun with it they did.

In that four years, the team organically grew their Twitter account from zero to 66k followers. While it was slow at first, the team grew the audience as much as 1192% year over year.

But not only did they experience explosive growth, they got picked up by almost every major media publication for their hilarious, snarky tweets.

How did they do it?

Here’s three key takeaways from Marie Bonaccorse Hackman – the woman at the helm during Charmin’s explosive (and award winning) growth on Twitter.

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