If you were among the 14,000 marketers who bought Explaindio 1.0, you will be excited to know about Explaindio 2.0, which went live at Midnight for current customers, and will go live at 11AM EDT for new customers. If you are upgrading there’s an even better deal: if you buy before 2 PM EDT, you get the first year of use for half-price. Whenever you invest, you are getting one of the best video tools available. It produces whiteboard sketch videos, animated videos, live videos, or a video consisting of a combination. Explaindio 2.0 is a major upgrade from the first version. New features include: •... [...]

Baer says, “Facebook doesn’t just want to help you promote your website. Maybe they want to replace your website? Facebook announced that they are making yet another change to the news feed algorithm. This time they have determined that if you spend a disproportionate amount of time on a particular Facebook post, even if you do not engage with that post, even if you do not like it, if you do not comment on it, if you do not share it, if you just spend time on it, so you stop scrolling and you watch, read, etc., if you’re reading the comments, etc., then they will give it extra love, and... [...]

Amy Gesenhues says, “After announcing e-commerce plans earlier this month, Pinterest launched its buyable Pins today on iPhones and iPads, making it possible for iOS users in the U.S. to purchase products straight from the site. According to the announcement, the buyable Pins are now appearing in home feeds, boards and search results, and include the item’s cost in blue, along with a blue “Buy it” button to mark that a product is available for purchase“. Pinterest Takes E-Commerce To Next Level With Launch Of Buyable Pins On iPads & iPhones Marketing Land  [...]

Joe Pulizzi says, “Through keynote talks, workshops, and webinars, I’ve had the opportunity to present on the topic of content marketing more than 200 times in the past four years. In almost every one of those presentations, I relayed the following information: “Content marketing doesn’t usually fail because of content quality. The main reason is because it’s inconsistent or it stops.” Most marketers simply don’t want to hear this. With all the exuberance around content marketing, they want to hear that if they execute against a reasonable strategy, success will come in six months... [...]

Sonia Simone says, “There are a million techniques that make your content better and more popular. (Probably a half-million just here on Copyblogger.) Strong headlines, smart copywriting techniques, storytelling, humor, etc. But there’s one insider trick that makes the rest of it easy. It starts from the very beginning, when you’re figuring out what type of content you want to produce. Start by picking a crowded topic Copywriter Gary Halbert famously advised copywriters to look for a “starving crowd.” In other words, if you want to open a restaurant, put it where there are already... [...]

Doug Davidoff says, “I have a confession to make. I’m a revenue (sales) guy. I can think about, conceive and vision growth opportunities without even trying. On the other hand, thinking about (and understanding) costs doesn’t come so easily to me. I’ve learned that understanding your costs is crucial to creating profitable revenue consistently, sustainably and scalably. Unfortunately, very few small and mid-sized companies understand their sales cost structure well enough. This creates two potential problems (one obvious and one not-so-obvious): If your costs are too high, you’ll... [...]

Ayaz Nanji says, “Some 21% of advertising and marketing executives plan to expand their creative teams in the second half of 2015, compared with 33% in the first half of 2015 and 12% a year ago, according to a recent report from The Creative Group. The report was based on data from 200 phone interviews with marketing executives randomly selected from companies with 100 or more employees and 200 phone interviews with advertising executives randomly selected from agencies with 20 or more employees. Most respondents (65%) say they expect to maintain current staff levels through the end of the... [...]

Jack Simpson says, “Recently I wrote a post covering what the top five UK ecommerce brands are doing on Pinterest.  But why should corporate giants have all the fun? I’m sure there’s an oxymoron somewhere in that sentence, but in any case I thought I’d look at some smaller ecommerce brands to see what they’re doing to compete. Farmdrop When it comes to shareable content on social media, everyone loves a good food pic. That’s why people in restaurants pick up their phone before their fork when their dinner arrives (*unimpressed face*). London-based local produce delivery firm Farmdrop... [...]

Anca Bradley says, “Businesses these days have many avenues through which they can reach consumers with content: social media, videos, apps, in-person and online events and much more. One of them—blogging—has become a very powerful marketing tool, ranking as one of the top five most effective content marketing tactics, according to the Content Marketing Institute’s reports on B2C and B2B Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends in 2015. Writing in-depth articles and blog posts is now almost a necessity for businesses, as it not only helps drive traffic to websites but communicates the business’s... [...]

Baer says, “Posting on social media sites, sending out e-newsletters, creating videos, and blogging are some of the preferred content marketing tactics among companies. However, one tool that is often overlooked is the webinar. According to the Content Marketing Institute’s 2015 B2C Content Marketing survey, 93 percent of marketers utilize social media content, 80 percent use e-newsletters, 74 percent produce videos, and 67 percent blog. Only 31 percent hold webinars or webcasts. Webinars can be extremely valuable to a company’s marketing strategy. Some advantages include: The opportunity... [...]