A Marketing Mix

I love data, stats and research so I was uber excited to find some new blogger outreach research and of course; I had to share! Econsultancy recently surveyed over 250 of the UK’s top bloggers to provide insights into what bloggers really want when it comes to working with brands and agencies. You can read the study here or keep reading for my summation and what I believe these findings mean to us marketers....

Story time isn’t just for kids. In my analysis, top sales reps use stories at almost every stage of a deal -- clarifying the product, overcoming objections, answering questions. No matter what step they’re at or what the issue might be, they have a story on hand.

But the powerful art of sales storytelling is only mastered by a few. One reason is that salespeople aren’t taught how to talk about case studies and other marketing content as stories. It’s great to create written case studies, film an accompanying video or two, and put those resources on the website for potential customers. But the next step should be to provide training that walks salespeople through the talking points in the context of a story.

Also, too many sales reps use case studies as a way to puff out their chests. But they’re much more effectively put to use as a way to talk through challenges from the buyer’s perspective. Less “look how great my company is” and more “here’s how our client’s life got better thanks to our help.”

Here are the elements that should be in every sales story, to help both sales and marketing determine how to structure these valuable tales....

Native advertising is flourishing across social media, content portals, news properties, video-sharing sites and streaming services. Increased mobile use of these venues has fueled much of the growth, since native ads work best in the content streams that people tend to access on smartphones and tablets, according to a new eMarketer report, “Native Advertising: Difficult to Define, but Definitely Growing.”

Perceptions about what constitutes native advertising are as varied as the ads themselves and the places where they appear. There’s still disagreement over basic terminology such as “native advertising,” “sponsored content” and “branded content.” Some make distinctions among those terms, while others use them interchangeably.

Now, you might think that anyone with a blog or website would know how inappropriate and annoying spam comments are, but a few of them sincerely seemed unaware that what they’d done was poor form. So here’s my quick attempt to educate folks on the subject.

Leaving spam comments isn’t just poor form — it’s a poor thing to do for many reasons.

First of all, despite what some poor &/or ignorant marketing folks will tell — and sell — you, spam links are not good for SEO

Sorry. I’ve been toting this one around in my pack for a while now and haven’t yet shared it with you. Here you go, the most effective content marketing tip you can possibly ever hope to hear.

Answer your prospects’ top 30 questions.

That’s it. Do it and enjoy the magic.

I’ll expand on the idea ever-so-slightly…

Your prospects aren’t going to buy your stuff until they get the answers they seek. Listen closely to the questions. Write them down. Then make each question the title of a blog post and publish the answers....

This sort of “blogging is dead, especially for business” thinking as shared in Beyond Blogging: 13 Content Marketing Opportunities for Ecommerce by Linda Bustos drives me nuts: Remember when business...

If you define influence by the size of your Klout score, you can stop reading this right now.

If you believe influence is driven by the creation of a relationship between two parties, where one sees the other as truly knowledgeable about a particular product or service, then let’s talk about the science behind that influence.

A couple of weeks ago, I redid all my Internet properties, including my website. One thing I really wanted was to show all my latest articles on the landing page. If you have followed my career for...

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