Search Our Marketing Resources

CONTENT TYPE: Article | TOPIC: None

Color is powerful. It's an important personal-branding tool, so use it wisely and consistently to support your personal-branding activities. To make the most of your color, follow these five rules.

CONTENT TYPE: Article | TOPIC: Social Media Marketing

Twitter may be the all the rage, but it's not yet time to pull the plug on your corporate blog and stop monitoring all the blogs where people talk about your brand. The emergence of Twitter as a hyper-popular social-media tool for marketing is not the death knell of the conventional blog; if anything, it highlights just how necessary blogs still are.

CONTENT TYPE: Article | TOPIC: None

Consumers have begun to suffer from "green fatigue." It's not hard to understand why when you can buy organic gummy bears and free-range beef jerky nestled between the six-packs and the rolling paper in a convenience store. For your green message to be heard and translated into sales, you have to make your message relevant not only to the fate of the planet but also to the fate of the people living on it. The question is, How?

CONTENT TYPE: Article | TOPIC: None

The focus group has lost favor in recent years as marketers seek a more experiential process for gathering customer insights. Although it has lost some luster, the focus group still holds the potential for providing powerful, usable insights. The trick to moving it from something parodied on sitcoms to a credible research tool again is to change how we think about and execute focus groups.

CONTENT TYPE: Article | TOPIC: Writing

You just sent out a request for proposal (RFP). Will it give you the responses you want? Will it set the stage for a great long-term relationship? An RFP is a key step in engaging an outside marketing partner. Don't underestimate its importance. It's not simply a straightforward business communication; it's a brand opportunity. If you're seeking a smart, strategic partner, your RFP should reflect that. Here are seven guidelines to help you create a great RFP—or what I like to call a "really fine publication."

CONTENT TYPE: Article | TOPIC: None

It's tough out there. Budgets are being cut. Markets are shrinking. Prospects aren't buying the way they used to. But you can still sell effectively. You just have to think differently. The message is important, but it's effective only if the right people read it. The process that you use to present your message is what makes the difference. Here are eight tips for securing meetings with the right executives.

CONTENT TYPE: Article | TOPIC: None

In every email campaign, you should have direct links to specific pages on your website, helping you gauge and track what's moving the meter in your emails. If you're using a proper email service provider (ESP), you should be able to easily see in real time who clicked on those links at what time and on what day.

CONTENT TYPE: Article | TOPIC: Social Media Marketing

Facebook Pages are good for building your brand and creating conversations, allowing users to get more deeply connected with your business. Recent changes have improved their functionality. Check out the following strategies for leveraging some of the key features.

CONTENT TYPE: Article | TOPIC: None

Marketing analytics used to simply be about measuring the hits on your website and the number of opens and clicks on emails. But as marketers we know that the times are changing. Today, marketers must find a way to manage leads through the lead life cycle, which requires visibility into how you drive, track, and evaluate leads, and it requires the ability to determine when leads are "sales-ready" and when they are not.

CONTENT TYPE: Article | TOPIC: None

Banner ads are tried-and-true forms of advertising that can deliver great results while driving a return on investment. So why are advertisers so hesitant to use them? Maybe it's because they have been overrun with cheesy, annoying, misleading, and downright dumb content, creating an aversion to this otherwise effective form of advertising. In their design and potential effectiveness, banner ads are very similar to outdoor billboard advertisements. They have to be quick, catchy, and well planned out to be effective.

CONTENT TYPE: Article | TOPIC: None

What to send, and how often, are the top questions facing any email-marketing-program manager today. Yet, all too often, frequency for the sake of frequency trumps relevancy in this channel. It's a classic catch-22: Email works so well that it runs the risk of undermining its own potential.

CONTENT TYPE: Article | TOPIC: None

In Part 1 of this series, we discussed leveraging site-search data about the terms your customers use on your site and the items they click on most in your search engine optimization and paid-search efforts, email marketing, and other promotional campaigns. Here, in Part 2, we'll talk about how to put your site search to work in even more ways to improve the return on your site-search investment and create a richer search experience for your customers. Thanks to Web 2.0 technologies and social media, it's easy to add content that showcases your products and helps build your brand.