Andrew Carvenho says, “Leads are those magical things that can change a company’s fortunes. Good leads can transform them completely. Before we go further in our discussion about how to acquire more leads and better leads, let’s try and understand what a lead stands for in the first place. A lead is a consumer who has the potential to turn into a paying customer for a business’ products. Acquiring leads and building a solid pipeline of future leads is the most common stumbling block that stumps businesses. They spend all their time with just one or two methods that might have worked... [...]

Ben Goodsell says, “Many marketers have a vague awareness about server Log Files, but few know that they can be used to clean up the analytics data you’re using to make decisions about your site. You can do that by using them to identify bad bots, which, more and more, are executing JavaScript, inflating analytics numbers, expending your resources and scraping and duplicating content. The Incapsula 2014 bot traffic report looked at 20,000 websites (of all sizes) over a 90-day period and found that bots account for 56% of all website traffic; 29% were malicious in nature. Additional insight... [...]

Ken Bowen says, “For over a decade, MarketingExperiments has stressed the importance of customer reviews. When our Customer Ratings Tested Web clinic was originally broadcast in 2004, Shopping.com was the third-most popular ecommerce site in America, and Amazon’s annual revenue was a mere 7% of what it has since become. In the ten years since, customer reviews have gone from being a supplemental component of our marketing strategy to the single biggest influencer of consumer behavior. In a 2013 survey by Dimensional Research, 90% of customers responded that their buying decisions are influenced... [...]

Jason Richman says, “As a sales manager, a huge part of my job is coaching new sales development representatives — salespseople who act as dedicated prospectors for deal-closing reps. Coaching SDRs is a two-part task. On one hand, I need to show them how to overachieve in their current roles and be rockstars for their sales reps. On the other, most SDRs don’t want to be SDRs forever, so it’s also my job to set them up for success if they get promoted into a sales representative position. I espouse a mix of coaching, shadowing, and practical exercises to train new hires. The five activities... [...]

Shelly Kessler says, “Our quarterly email performance benchmark report has been released for Q2 2015, and it has some exciting numbers for email marketers. In April, May and June of this year, email volume rose by 16.1 percent year-over-year, yet response rates remained as high as they were this time last year.  This means that despite an increase in number of emails in each customer’s inbox, subscribers are still engaging with the brands that prove their relevance“. Customer choice drives responses, and other email performance benchmarks ‘Experian Marketing Forward’ Blog  [...]

Murray Newlands says, “A pitch deck has many moving parts, and one of the most important pieces is building an opportunity that an investor can’t pass up.  Creating an alluring opportunity takes finesse, research, number crunching and the ability to tell a compelling story while showing investors you have an empathetic understanding of your target customer. Here are six steps to achieve just that… Step 1: Research Determining your market opportunity should have been done in conjunction with building your product, to know if it’s actually viable. Good research takes one... [...]

Brian Hughes says, “Do your clients secretly hate the content you produce for their brands? Or worse, do you secretly hate the content you’re producing for your own brand? According to a recent survey from Chief Marketing Officer Council and Content ROI Center, only 12 percent of marketers are satisfied with their branded content. The survey of 200 marketing leaders across the United States asserted that somewhat surprisingly, even though content marketing is hot, marketers continue to struggle with creating customized, authoritative and engaging content. Worse, while 90 percent report... [...]

Tessa Wegert says, “Marketers shouldn’t discount the power of long-form blogs because they’re conducive to high levels of engagement from potential consumers. Blogs have long been part of the content marketing conversation. But with exciting storytelling formats like brand magazines and films getting all the buzz these days, one has to ask: are blogs still as useful to advertisers as they used to be? Last year, digital data collection provider Research Now conducted a study in the U.K. on blogs’ influence on consumers. It found that the decades-old medium still has pull. According... [...]

ClickZ is holding ‘ClickZ Live Chicago’ event on November 17-19. The three-day event will educate the marketers with latest digital marketing tips, tricks and tools. ClickZ team says, “Educating marketers for over 15 years, ClickZ Live (formerly SES Conference & Expo) is the most cutting-edge, all-encompassing digital marketing event series in the world today. Join us November 17-19 as we return to Chicago with our action-packed, educationally-focused agenda that will cover the latest digital marketing tips, tricks and tools that will blow your mind, make you rethink your... [...]

You typically make whiteboard videos using pre-designed components; a picture of a man, one of a desk and one of a chart, for example. There are a lot of packages of graphics available for use in whiteboard videos, but many of them are overused and many others are of low quality. Now, there’s a package you can be proud of using: Cartoon Video Graphic Kit by Andri Youris and Abd Rahman. These 300+ graphics are in SVG format, so you can resize them bigger or smaller without any loss of quality. And they have another benefit, too. They are just what you need for your whiteboard videos. Put... [...]