MarketingSherpa Blog

We asked for your nominations, tallied up the results, and now we want to know who has earned your vote … for the marketing industry blogs that you find most helpful.

What blogs have made you better at your job? Helped you garner impressive results for your company or clients? Reward those blogs by using the poll feature to vote for your favorites in the poll below, a list of the most-nominated blogs chosen by you, the MarketingSherpa audience.

It’s an interesting list. Some very established industry blogs; some I had personally never heard of before. You can vote in the poll below (in just one category, or in all the categories) and then scroll below the poll for links to these blogs if you’d like to learn more.

The top vote getters will receive the MarketingSherpa Reader’s Choice Award in their category, as well as be invited for a very rare opportunity – to write a guest post on the MarketingSherpa Blog.

UPDATE: Voting has now ended. We’re now tallying up the votes, so be sure to check back later for the winners.

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We want to serve you better, so we’re conducting a quick survey to determine the best way.  We’re interested only in aggregate needs and preferences, so individual responses are anonymous.  Every respondent will, however, earn a free copy of a MarketingSherpa 30-Minute Marketer report – How to Integrate Social Media with Email and SEO.

And if there’s anything we learn from the survey that we think you might find valuable, we’ll publish it.

Take the survey now

Please forgive me for opening this post with a trite statement, but I simply cannot believe we’re already approaching the end of 2011.

(That was for my dad, who spent most of his 50s lamenting the speed in which 365 days can pass.)

Platitudes aside, the end of a calendar year marks a time of reflection, where marketers look back at the year, and use this knowledge to better plan for the one ahead.

This also means that it’s time for you to send us your wisdom for the MarketingSherpa 2012 Marketing Wisdom Report (sponsored by HubSpot). Our 10th annual collection of anecdotes, ideas, test results and inspiration from marketers like you, will be distributed for free in January to all MarketingSherpa and HubSpot readers and customers.

As I prepare to digest a slew of submissions for this year’s go-round, I felt it was only right to take one last look at the 2011 edition, to see where we were a year ago, and what we’ve learned along the way. While combing through the pages, I was reminded of some notable pieces of advice, as well as a prominent common thread that ran throughout:

Communicate.

You’d think with all the exciting new technologies that have come about, 2.0 would have dominated the marketing landscape in recent years. But that’s not what marketers told us in our last wisdom report. No, it was the basics — the most fundamental marketing practices — that helped marketers achieve success in a questionable economy.

In 2010, you sowed the seeds of “back-to-basics” efforts, all centered on communication, and built forward-thinking campaigns around them. From stories of elaborate, innovative social media outreach, to the most basic expressions of thanks, it was clear that communication – both internal and external – was a foundation of your 2010 marketing efforts.

Below are some of the memorable entries from last year’s report. Read on to see if last year’s wisdom still proves valuable as you prepare for 2012.

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