MarketingSherpa Blog

Editor’s Note: One of the prizes of winning the MarketingSherpa Reader’s Choice Awards is the chance for a guest post here on the MarketingSherpa blog. Today’s post is by Amanda Gagnon of the AWeber Communications blog, chosen as best email marketing blog … by you.

It’s critical for any marketing email to be labeled with an appealing, even gripping, subject line. Since the subject line acts as the email’s introduction, if it deflects attention, the rest of the message never gets seen.

The question is, what do consumers find appealing? What grips them?

The AWeber team investigated results from recent email broadcasts promoting posts on our blog to find out.

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Since cavemen gathered around the first fire, technology has changed the way humans relate to each other, and modern times are no different. For marketers, it’s about figuring out at which fire their consumers are.

So W. Jeffrey Rice, Senior Research Analyst at MECLABS, has a point when he says, “I believe smartphones have changed not only the way we interact, but what our expectations are.”

For more than half of Americans, 50.4%, their smartphones are that gathering place, according to a March 2012 study by Nielson. Really, that number only stands to grow (and it already has — up from 47.8% in the same study in December 2011) since 33% of Gen Y Internet-user moms have let their children use a smartphone by the age of two, according to a BlogHer study. Laptops barely beat them out at one percent more.

Essentially, smartphones are babysitting your future consumers.

According to research by Antenna Software, many businesses are planning to invest in mobile projects in the coming year, but where to begin? Jeff’s advice when entering the world of mobile email marketing is simple:

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“How many of you believe you are more fascinating than the average person?”

Keynote speaker Sally Hogshead, who goes by Chief Fascination Officer at Fascinate, presented this question to the MarketingSherpa B2B Summit 2012 audience Tuesday afternoon.

Not many hands in the room went up, which supported Sally’s findings: Only 39% of people believe they are more “fascinating” than “average.”

What is fascination? According to Sally, it’s a moment of total emotional focus.

She has developed the 7 Triggers of Fascination, “which are deeply-rooted means of arousing intense interest.”  Each person, and brand, has primary and secondary triggers. These triggers indicate where your strength lies in fascinating others.

When your company fascinates your audience, your will get more engaged and loyal customers who are more likely to refer others.

That leaves marketers asking, “How can we create the moments of fascination with our consumers that use the same triggers we experience when we are fascinated?”

The seven triggers represent different paths or ways to fascinate your customers with your brand. So, let’s break down each one:

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Day one of B2B Summit 2012 has finally arrived.  Today, I had the opportunity to listen in on the panel discussion “5 B2B Social Media Career Killers … and how to overcome them.”

This session went beyond simply helping your company, and on to improving the future of your personal career.

MECLABS Director of Editorial Content Daniel Burstein moderated the panel of three B2B social media experts: Eddie Smith, Chief Revenue Officer, Topsy Labs; Chris Baggott, Chairman, Compendium; and Nichole Kelly, President, SME Digital.

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With the introductions made, they jumped straight into the first B2B social media killer …

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According to the MarketingSherpa 2012 Lead Generation Benchmark Report (free excerpt at that link), 71% of survey respondents indicated that generating high-quality leads was a top challenge.

So, in today’s blog post, let’s look at lead generation budget trends (hint: money is moving to online tactics) and provide some resources to help you make wise use of that budget.

To help you get the most effective use of your budget, here are several case studies and how-to articles for some of the tactics mentioned in the above chart.

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One of the prizes of winning the MarketingSherpa Reader’s Choice Awards is the chance for a guest post here on the MarketingSherpa blog. Today’s post is from gnome Flash blogger Emily Taylor. Please note, at gnome Flash, they use toys to represent themselves instead of the traditional bio picture.

It is too easy for a brand to lose its artisanal flare as it grows into a larger organization or corporation. The American spirit purveyor, Jack Daniel’s, has made a commitment to taking an equally homegrown approach to their campaigns. They have a series of videos that document the making of promotional posters by local artists that harken the Americana of the brand.

Related Resources:

much ado (via gnome Flash)

brand recognition (via gnome Flash)

Kodak’s Award-winning Online Launch Campaign (Great Creative on a Tight Budget)

How Annies Homegrown Uses the Web to Generate Consumer Passion for Boxes of Macaroni

Data collection and analysis is a topic near and dear to most digital marketers’ hearts. Social media interaction is another topic that fits the same bill. What happens when you combine data mining with links shared on a social platform? Measurable and actionable insight that can inform your marketing planning and tactics.

Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, co-founder and Chief Scientist of Topsy Labs, took the time to explain to MarketingSherpa how marketers can mine Twitter for links, hashtags and topics to learn more about influencers, trending subjects and how your brand is perceived.

Data collection and mining is Topsy’s core business, and Rishab shares the types of data that marketers should be tracking on Twitter and what marketers can, and should, be doing with this social media information.

Eddie Smith, Chief Revenue Officer, Topsy Labs, will speak on this topic at the upcoming MarketingSherpa B2B Summit, August 27-30 in Orlando.

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At Optimization Summit 2012, Michael Lykke Aagaard, Online Copywriter / Landing Page Fanatic, Contentverve, pulled me aside for an interview about content marketing. Below is an excerpt where we discuss three tips for getting started …

Let me (I hope) exceed your expectations in this blog post by adding three more tips for how to get started, helping you, in this case, to overcome common objections you might receive in trying to launch or expand content marketing in your organization …

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With B2B Summit 2012 right around the corner in Orlando, let’s take a quick look at your peers’ top takeaways from our last Summit – Optimization Summit 2012. In case you couldn’t be there, listen in to what fellow Web marketing directors and optimization managers learned at the Summit to help guide and prioritize your own A/B testing and landing page optimization efforts.

0:34 – Celeste Parins of Mindvalley on value proposition

1:11 – Matt Silverstein of The Elevation Group on radical redesigns

1:40 – Matt Brutsche of Austin Search Marketing on getting into the mind of the customer

2:00 – Mike Weiss of Internet Sales Experts on understanding the customer’s path on your landing pages

2:42 – Ray Lam and Victoria Harben of the University of Denver on live optimization

3:03 – Suzette Kooyman of Enhance Your Net on taking a consumer-centric approach instead of a corporate approach

3:37 – Suzanne Axtell of O’Reilly Media on determining where to start testing and optimizing

4:10 – Reagan Miller of Financial Times on having a testing methodology

4:23 – Alan Markowitz of Ellie Mae on friction and anxiety points

4:50 – Diane Baker of netDirectMerchants on value proposition

Related Resources:

Optimization Summit 2012 Event Recap: 5 takeaways about test planning, executive buy-in and optimizing nonprofit marketing

Demand Generation: Optimization Summit 2012 wrap-up for B2B marketers

B2B Summit 2011: 5 takeaways on social media, lead generation, building a customer-centric approach, and more

You network with the most interesting people at a MarketingSherpa Summit, and Optimization Summit 2012 was no exception for me. I caught up with one of the top optimizers from Denmark and a nonprofit marketer heavily engaged in A/B testing, and I also met two professors in the increasingly popular Web analytics field.

With our next event, B2B Summit 2012 in Orlando, just around the corner, I wanted to take a moment to look back at our last event in today’s MarketingSherpa blog post and share an interview with those professors, who can provide a unique viewpoint on Internet marketing.

With their experience teaching others in the classroom and having to convey overall marketing principles, they are a step removed from the average in-the-trenches, brand-side marketers, overly focused on the “putting out today’s fire” crises that sap so many marketers’ attention.

And, since they’re not vendors of platform providers, well, they’re not trying to sell you on their unique marketing buzzword approach that just happens to map very nicely to the products and services they are trying to sell.

Ray Lam and Victoria Harben are adjunct faculty and teach Web Analytics, a graduate-level course in University College at the University of Denver. During Optimization Summit 2012, they live-tweeted the event to their students from @COMM4324.

MarketingSherpa: What were the top lessons you learned at Optimization Summit that you think could be helpful to brand-side marketers?

Victoria: The main point that was reiterated throughout Optimization Summit was to always test; don’t rely on assumptions, intuition, guesstimations, or theory — rather, get out there and test it. It’s always best to back up a hunch with data, and that’s exactly what the Summit instilled in me: test, test, test! We’re teaching a Web Analytics class at DU through the New Media and Internet Marketing program, and this is the first thing we tell our students.

Ray:  The top lesson I learned was Dr. Flint McGlaughlin’s conversion formula: C=4m+3v+2(i-f)-2a. Where m=motivation, v=clarity of value proposition (why), i=incentive to take action, f=friction elements of the process, and a=anxiety about entering the process. This simple formula helps marketers think about the different elements that need to be considered when constructing a landing page.

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