6 Direct Mail Marketing Strategies That Work

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  Recently, we provided you with tips to improve your direct mail marketing campaign for the holidays. Now that the holiday season is coming to a close, it is time to start thinking about what direct mail marketing strategies your business can use in 2014 and beyond. There are many tried and true ways to use direct mail in your marketing strategy, from the 40/40/20 rules to the high performance of postcards. With these six direct mail marketing strategies, you can develop a direct mail marketing campaign that works. Read More

Babies And Bathwater: Does New Marketing Mean Old Marketing Has To Be Thrown Out?

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  Just because something is “established” or has been “done before” doesn’t make it worthless—even when it comes to marketing. As a matter of fact, sometimes it’s the integration of old and new methods that ends up working best. So as you evaluate your marketing efforts this year, don’t be too quick to jettison everything you’ve done before in favor of “new” methods. If you do, you could end up throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Read More

Social Media: What’s Behind the Numbers?

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  At times it seems that the only constant with social media is that it’s constantly changing. Not only is there a steady stream of new social media tools, but there also seems to be a never-ending series of reports about which tool is capturing what percentage of usage. There is new data from the folks at TechCrunch about how people are using social media. The headline of one of their recent posts proclaims: “73% Of U.S. Adults Use Social Networks, Pinterest Passes Twitter In Popularity, Facebook Stays On Top.” But does that mean you should be pumping more time, effort, and money into Facebook marketing? Should you dump your Twitter account and pump up your Pinterest posts? What’s behind those numbers, and what do they mean for you? Read More

Are You Only Telling Half Of Your Story?

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  It’s easy to assume that your customers and prospective customers know you better than they really do. So many times, however, that’s a faulty assumption. A lot of companies are multi-faceted: they have capabilities on a number of different levels. But their customers’ view of them can often be one-dimensional. Are you missing out on business because potential clients simply don’t know about your capabilities? Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. A number of our clients are in the custom homebuilding and remodeling industry. Several of them started doing marketing with us right about the time that the new housing market went into the tank. What a terrible time to be marketing homebuilders, right? Read More

How Xerox Is Helping People Get a Handle On Healthcare

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  Jan. 1, 2014 was the all-important, looming deadline for everyone to be registered for health insurance. For many Americans, details about the new healthcare law and what it meant for them were vague at best. What did they have to do before the deadline? What would happen if they didn’t? What options were there available? Lots of people had lots of different questions. But the answers came from a rather unexpected place: Xerox. The company most famous for its copy machines now hosts a website called HealthBiz Decoded. And not only is it clear and helpful, it’s an example of content marketing at its finest. The site features copious amounts of articles on every conceivable healthcare topic. There’s information on doctors and providers. There’s information for doctors and providers. There’s information on payments, procedures, the latest technological innovations, and much more, along with plenty of articles about the new law. Read More

“It’s Too Expensive!” – 4 Objections Bosses Have About Content Marketing And How To Change Their Minds

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  It’s a new year, which means a new budget. So it’s time once again to renew your pleas to your boss, to let you have some money for a quality content marketing strategy. And once again, it’s time for your boss to ignore your requests and tell you that it’s too expensive. There simply isn’t the money for such nonsense! But you can’t just let it go at that. You know that content marketing is the most effective way to promote your brand. You just need to be able to convince your boss of it. So here are 4 common objections that CEOs and other executives have to content marketing, and what you can say in response. “It’s not worth the money!” Content marketing is new, which tends to mean more money spent. Your boss isn’t about to pour company resources into some hair-brained scheme. How do you even tell if it’s working, anyway? “So we’ve got a blog. Can you really measure its success in terms of sales?” Yes. Not only does content marketing produce better, more accurate statistics for measuring ROI than traditional forms of marketing, but content also produces better overall results, for considerably less money. “It’s just a fad!” Creating a brand new marketing strategy for your brand is a big commitment of time and resources. Every other week, some new approach is touted as the greatest marketing tactic since sliced bread. Your company isn’t going to overhaul its entire strategy to implement some technique that everyone will forget about soon afterwards. But content marketing isn’t just some passing fad. It’s here to stay. It’s been building up momentum for years, and is rapidly becoming a mainstream marketing method. So if your company doesn’t get onboard soon, it’ll be left behind by those who do. “This content is irrelevant to our brand!” So you start a blog. You give people advice about how to do certain things. You keep them informed about the latest news and events in your industry. It’s a nice thing to do for people, but what good is it to your company? Where’s the part where you say, “This is our company! This is our product! You should buy it!”? And how will people know to buy from you if you don’t say that? In fact, that sort of blatant, in-your-face advertising is exactly what people don’t want. It turns people off and drives them away from your brand. But content marketing targets the people who are already looking to buy your type of product. It engages them and steers them towards your company without hitting them over the head with branding. By providing them with the content they need, it creates a face the customer can trust, and will thus be more willing to buy from in the long run. “The marketing strategy we’ve got works just fine!” So content can help you make sales. But you’ve already got a traditional marketing strategy in place. It’s served you well for years. It brings in new customers perfectly well. Why change things? Because “perfectly well” isn’t really good enough. Your company is under constant pressure from its investors to improve sales. Content marketing can increase your company’s growth much more effectively than traditional marketing tactics. Read More

Shouldering the Load – 3 Ways To Get Others To Create Content For You

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  In order to maintain an effective content marketing strategy, you need to churn out new, high quality, engaging content like clockwork. While there’s no end to ideas for new content, if you know where and how to look, the simple act of creating all of these videos and blog posts, day in and day out, can grow tedious and cumbersome after awhile. Can’t the Magic Content Fairy just wave her wand and create new posts for you? Well, not quite. But with a little innovation, it IS possible to get other people to create some of your content for you, easing the burden on your own office. Here are three ways of acquiring content without having to make it yourself.  Read More

Using the Buying Cycle To Create Effective Targeted Content

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  Here’s a pop quiz: What’s the purpose of creating content for your brand? Is it to drive people to your site? To generate leads? To increase sales? Or to stay on customers’ radars after they’ve made their purchases, so that they’ll buy from you again next time? The answer is, of course, all of the above. There are all different things you can use your content for. And each of those uses requires you to have a different type of content. So how can you plan your content for maximum effect at all levels? Our friends at HubSpot suggest that you link your content to the five stages of the buying cycle, in order to stay connected with customers throughout the entire process.  Read More

5 Ways To Use Video In Social Media Marketing

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  We’ve discussed before how important videos are to your content marketing strategy. But what’s often overlooked is the role that videos play in social media marketing. For one thing, YouTube isn’t just a platform for hosting videos. It’s a whole community, whose users often interact with one another. And it’s important to consider that when creating your channel and deciding what content to post on it. Not only that, video can be an effective tool to use on your other social media platforms as well. Particularly now that Facebook has begun playing videos automatically in users’ newsfeeds, your video content needs to be tailored for social media. How do you do that? Here are five types of videos you can post to engage your social media circles. Read More