MarketingSherpa Blog

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.

Read more…

Ecommerce offers a great opportunity because it allows marketers to sell globally much more easily than opening brick-and-mortar locations around the world. This video from the MarketingSherpa video archive features Rob Garf, Vice President of Industry Strategy and Insights, Demandware, covering this topic with some tips on global ecommerce and insights from the frontlines of selling online in new geographies.

Preserving brand value across multiple cultures

According to Rob, global ecommerce is growing, and the first challenge is preserving brand value while meeting the specific needs of the new marketplace.

“First off, you can’t not pay attention to [global ecommerce]. Retailers — historically, how they grew globally was to have to stand up an entire physical location, retool their entire supply chain, and it was really expensive,” he said.

“The digital world really allows you to grow across boundaries in a real, more efficient way. Be able to test different markets. Be able to reach new consumers and ultimately grow the business,” Rob added.

Rob explained that it comes down to culture and being entrenched in how the consumers behave and how they want to interact with the brand, and those factors are affected by geography. In order to accomplish this in marketing, merchandising and promotional practices need to be adjusted. In Rob’s words, “Have a local presence in order to be local.”

Watch the video to find out more of Rob’s advice on marketing ecommerce globally:

When I first started at MarketingSherpa, I was hired under the title of “Visual Storyteller.” Although that title is ambiguous, I learned that I was hired to address a pain point that many professionals face: using PowerPoint efficiently.

My title has since changed, but I remain an advocate for fluent visual expression in the same way that editors are keen on using words efficiently.

As part of my position, I’ve consulted with many speakers over the past few years on creating effective presentations.

Time and time again, I find that confusion lies in how to treat PowerPoint. Many think of PowerPoint as a presentation buddy — that content is on the slides and coming out of the speaker’s mouth and bullet points are simply needed to reinforce the speaker’s message.

This is not true. A person can only process about 1.6 conversations at a time. He can choose to either listen to you or read your slides. The other .6 gets split between emails, texts and interior monologue, to name just a few other channels.

The dictators of any presentation include: audience, context, purpose and design.

Read more…

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

Inbound marketing is typically a term reserved for B2C companies striving to draw customers in with flashy social media campaigns, witty tweets and beautiful infographics.

B2B companies have the very unique challenge of asserting themselves and becoming a voice of authority in their respective industries, and inbound marketing can be a powerful way to do that – the nuances of which are not just reserved for those speaking directly to consumers.

Starting off, attracting the right people and the speaking to the right audience is essential in a B2B inbound marketing campaign.

Using three simple questions that you can use to structure your own campaigns, see how Stephen Bruner, Marketing Manager of Vertical Markets, Precor, detailed how the fitness equipment company successfully navigated an inbound strategy with a complex sale at Email Summit 2015.

Who are we speaking to?

Before you start sending a message, you first need to understand who it is that you’re communicating with. Different audiences require different perspectives, pieces of information and credibility indicators than others.

In the example below, Precor identified three key industries that it targets as customers. Each industry will demand unique selling points that will best serve the end user.

For instance, a traditional club gym might care more about user-friendly entertainment systems and headphone connectivity – features to distinguish them from competition — whereas an educational facility, such as a university gym, would want to know about longevity and quality of products.

What message are we trying to convey?

Once you’ve established who your audience is, establish how you fit into the conversation. This can best be done by either accentuating the positive elements that they already have or reducing, even possibly eliminating negative experiences.

In the Precor example below, the team focused on reducing a pain point or anxiety that a future gym owner is facing. (Realize that Precor first targets a specific audience before refining the messaging.)

Although the content is from Precor, notice that they are not selling product at this level. The content is simply establishing who the brand is in the mind of the future gym owner. The message being conveyed is simply presenting Precor as a resource for fitness center owners.

Creating this type of shareable and digestible content makes it easy to follow Precor on Twitter, with the understanding that these articles will help owners alleviate pain points throughout their careers – creating an association of credibility with the Precor brand at the genesis of the business.

What do we want them to do?

Lastly, establishing a year-long calendar for each persona is essential in maintaining a healthy relationship with your customers and followers.

In Precor’s example below, you can see the color-coded strategy for each persona across the year, having “flow-ups” through the second half of the year.

As you analyze the content schedule, you can see a very clear funneling throughout the year, pointing each group toward a purchase. Pointing, that is, but not pushing.

For example, from January to April, you can see the healthy content mix of infographics, videos, white papers, blog posts, with a few promos throughout. Fitness equipment is a complex sale, with expensive equipment and a limited budget.

This is a very intentional use of email and social content, driving the customer down the funnel with informative and sharable content. This plan establishes when a conversation will happen in a logical order throughout the course of a year, focusing on the long-term relationship between Precor and its customer.

By establishing such a plan and creating a hub of content, Precor is not only helping customers make decisions, but also creating fans and building credibility within the industry as a valuable resource.

You can follow Jessica Lorenz, Event Content Manager, MECLABS Institute on Twitter at @JessicaPLorenz.

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For email marketers, tackling mobile email is a relatively new challenge, but a challenge that needs to be addressed. According to research from Litmus, the email testing and analytics vendor, 49% of people access email via a smartphone — a figure that’s risen fivefold since 2011 and continues to trend upward.

To provide some insight for you, the MarketingSherpa Blog reader, I reached out to five email marketers who addressed the mobile email challenge with two basic questions on the topic.

Read on to find out what this expert panel had to say about mobile email:

MarketingSherpa Blog: What one tactic has the most impact on mobile email campaigns?

Justine Jordan, Marketing Director, Litmus

Ah, the million dollar question! As with most things with email, it’s hard to make a generalization since it can vary greatly based on your industry and audience. If I had to pick just one tactic, I’d go broad and say responsive design has the most impact on mobile email. MailChimp sends billions of emails every year, and they’ve seen a 15% increase in unique clicks for mobile users when responsive design is used. Even without huge gains in performance, sending responsive campaigns sends the message that you care about providing the best possible user experience for your subscribers.

 Brian Graves, UI Team Lead, DEG

Simplifying the experience. In addition to helping deal with the smaller amount of screen real estate available on mobile devices, statistics show that customers typically spend less than 15 seconds reading marketing emails, with iOS users spending the least amount at around 3 seconds or less. Look at repositioning your email layout to lead with your most important messaging. The most effective emails are typically concise and have a clear focus. This is not only a good tactic for mobile but is one way in which a mobile-first approach can help improve your campaigns across every platform.

Ted Goas, Designer and Developer, Canfield Scientific

Work as a unified team from day one. Having product managers, marketers, designers and developers working together from planning through to execution helps ensure a campaign’s quality doesn’t degrade as it gets ‘thrown over the wall’ in a waterfall process. Everyone knows what’s happening and why.

Dan Denney, Front-End Devevloper, Code School

Designing an email for scanability has the most impact. We want everyone to read every word, but people want to find what they’re interested in and move on. Make it easy for them.

Fabio Carniero, Lead Email Developer, MailChimp

Spongy development (sometimes called hybrid development), in my opinion, has the most impact. There are a fair number of pitfalls associated with mobile email, and the spongy development method — a combination of fluid and non-fluid email markup — can generally resolve most of them. The most pertinent example is the Gmail app on Android and iOS; the app doesn’t support media queries, which are generally necessary for responsive design. The spongy/hybrid technique serves as a work-around for providing ‘responsive’ email in clients that don’t support the technology specifically.

This development technique, with its inherent flexibility and robustness, also has the benefit of being stable in a very wide variety of email clients and platforms, from desktop to tablet to phones.

Read more…

When you’re running a small online business, what’s the fastest, easiest way to grow your business and save money? Automation, according to Lenny Kharitonov, President of Unlimited Furniture Group, a furniture retailer.

Kharitonov says his company was among the first in the furniture industry to automate the online order fulfillment process.

“The furniture industry in general is not very technology savvy,” he admitted.

The Unlimited Furniture website markets products from a variety of manufacturers that ship them directly to the customer. Before automation, the Unlimited Furniture team and its vendors handled every aspect of the transaction manually using a combination of spreadsheets and Google docs. Now customers can order online, and the details are instantly sent to the vendor. Once the vendor ships out the product, Unlimited Furniture automatically receives all of the information about the shipment and updates the customer without any manual involvement.

This automated process:

• Prevents mistakes. “When you do things manually, it’s subject to human error,” Kharitonov said. “For instance, somebody could put in the wrong quantity or wrong color; it could be done on our side or the vendor’s side.”
• Eliminates duplication of effort. Before automation, Unlimited Furniture would enter a purchase order manually then send it to the vendor, who would enter the same information manually.
• Saves money. Automating order fulfillment has slashed Unlimited Furniture’s administrative costs 40%.
• Speeds delivery. Orders are processed real-time now, instead of waiting for someone at Unlimited Furniture and the vendor to manually process it.“The quicker the service you give the customer, the more likely you’ll get repeat business,” Kharitonov said.

“We want to grow the business. We don’t want to spend all our time processing orders,” he explained. “In this day and age, it’s assumed that’s automatic, but it’s not. I know a lot of our competitors are still doing it manually.”

Watch the full interview and find out more about the power of automation here:

“The only reason any brand exists in the first place is because it helps people do something in their lives,”  Kevin Knight, Head of Agency and Brand Strategy, Pinterest said.

In his session at The Digital Marketing Conference — Adobe Summit, Kevin spoke about what makes Pinterest unique to marketers and brands in the social media sphere.

Mainly, unlike other social sites, it’s kind of a loner.

Not in the standing alone in the corner at the school dance kind of a way, but in a “Best All Around” superlative kind of way: independent, and not only party-planning the dance, but countless other activities and interests as well.

“They’re using it for themselves,” Kevin said, adding that many users don’t follow a lot of people, because they using the platform to fulfill their own needs, not to impress anyone else.

What is a Pin?

“Art and copy, as old as advertising itself,” Kevin said.

Who is on Pinterest?

• 70M+ monthly users in the U.S.
• 40% of women in the U.S. are on Pinterest
• 75% of usage is on a mobile device
• One-third of millennials are on Pinterest

*Based on comScore Sept 2014, desktop and mobile, U.S. users, and internal Pinterest data

Those 70 million monthly users utilize Pinterest to discover, save and then do, Kevin said. Over 30 billion pins ave been categorized by people into more than 750 million boards, and this is a highly personal interaction to them.

Pinners are sharing their interests, hobbies, hopes and goals, creating the narrative of their future through pinning actions.

Read more…

From the opening General Session at Adobe Digital Marketing Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, the speakers reiterated, in one way or another, the thesis statement made by Brad Rencher, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Adobe:

Consistent and continuous experiences only happen when marketing goes beyond marketing, and the reality is that brands have to earn it every day, with each experience. With each touch point, we either win or we lose.

Marketers need to fight every day to be personal with consumers — this isn’t a plane you can reach or a level to be achieved. It’s a consistent struggle won through consistently building up small interactions.

If those word choices — fight, struggle — sound harsh, forgive me. With Adobe Summit’s gigantic main stage, complete with three towering screens, impeccable design and A/V feats, it’s easy to lean into the theatrical feel of the event.

Digital marketing is certainly not real war or strife, but each speaker takes the stage not unlike the speech in “Patton,” commanding attendees to work for a better (marketing) world. The marketers here begin to feel like foot soldiers who believe they can engage customers with genuine interactions.

These aren’t actions savvy brands should be shirking from because they’re difficult, but running toward. There are an overwhelming number of opportunities to understand your customers in digital marketing.

These three takeaways are just a start.

Read more…

Two things come to mind for me when I think of the word social:

1. Social media
2. Pizza

Social media for brands is all about developing a thriving online community of fans and followers that engage with your content and (hopefully) become brand ambassadors. To do this, your content must have that “engage-ability” factor: what will make your content or social presence something that your audience will want to share and interact with?

Pizza is also something that we socially consume. Arguably, sometimes we don’t share it, but overall, when you have friends over or you don’t feel like cooking for your family, pizza is always a solid option. Social gatherings call for pizza.

In a way, you could say that pizza and social media go hand in hand — they definitely do for Mellow Mushroom Pizza Bakers.

I recently had a chance to chat with Steven Sams, Digital Content Manager, Dusty Griffin, Senior Graphic Designer and Robert Pierce, Social Media Manager, all of Mellow Mushroom, for a MarketingSherpa case study about their work with the brand’s email marketing efforts.

We had so much to talk about that I even asked the team for a second interview to discuss the brand’s social media efforts. Why? Mellow Mushroom has truly found a way to speak its audience’s language and cater to that via social media.

Even if you’re not a pizza restaurant, there are still great lessons to be learned from Mellow Mushroom’s efforts. Read on for those, as well as the team’s top tips for interacting with an audience on Facebook.

Facebook for Mellow Mushroom

Steven explained that for Mellow Mushroom, Facebook is the main social media channel. With more than 172,000 followers on the platform, average posts will reach up to 2,000 people — sometimes up to 46,000.

Mellow Mushroom has several elements of its Facebook strategy that the team lives by:

Frequency and timing

First, frequency is key. At the corporate level, the team aims to post twice a day. This was upped from once a day because of recent Facebook algorithm changes causing lower performance in posts.

“We’re trying out some different things with our frequency because not many people are seeing them in their News Feed based on the algorithm. We thought we should post a little bit more,” Steven explained.

Next, the time of day the team is posting is also important. If they are posting something food-related right before lunch or dinner time, they will entice followers to stop by Mellow Mushroom for their next meal.

However, a busy time on Facebook is later in the evening, between 8 and 10 p.m., and the brand will post more quirky content. This content isn’t aimed at driving people to a restaurant to eat, but rather, to simply engage and entertain their base.

Read more…

We don’t often think of business investors as marketing experts.

However, great marketing is grounded in a great value proposition. If anyone is good at finding a value proposition, it’s a (smart) potential buyer of a business. Great investors have a way of cutting through all the hype and finding the true value (or lack thereof) in a company.

It stands to reason, then, that a great investor would be a stellar resource to tap for your marketing efforts.

Enter Abe Garver, Managing Director, BG Strategic Advisors. Abe attended IRCE last year and was able to talk to former MarketingSherpa reporter Allison Banko about how ecommerce marketers can develop an acquisition mindset and help grow their business, whether they plan to sell or not.

In this interview he covers:

• How you value an ecommerce company
• The four keys to making your ecommerce company more investor friendly (and as a result, customer friendly)
• Why ecommerce companies aren’t really getting it right, and who really is

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