This week's big story comes from the world of politics. President Barack Obama delivered his second inaugural address Monday, January 21, 2013, becoming only the second U.S. President in history to take the oath of office four times. The inauguration signals to many CMOs that it's time to buckle down to face what will likely be their toughest challenges of the year. See what those challenges are as well as a review of everything else from the minds of our inbound marketing bloggers this week below.
So you've taken the leap and set up business accounts on not just Facebook, but Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ and other social channels to create brand awareness, encourage engagement and stir up conversation about your products and services. But there are challenges that still stand in the way. To help out, we've created a list of five top social media behavior tips for businesses. Check it out.
With Barack Obama’s second Inauguration, everyone is busy writing up the biggest challenges for his second term in office. Likewise, CMOs are considering their top challenges and seeking solutions to turn things around in 2013. At the top of the list—how to make better use of their marketing automation software investment and turn marketing into a profit center. With a slightly deeper dive, several important challenges present themselves. See them here.
Endorsements are those pesky little gray bars that pop up with random words written on them when you view a connection's profile, or in LinkedIn's words: an opportunity to "endorse your connections for a skill they’ve listed on their profile or recommend one they haven’t added yet"—in just one click. But when it comes to LinkedIn endorsements, what is proper etiquette? Here are a few thoughts.
When marketing and sales aren't working together, it shows. According to Aberdeen Group, companies with poor marketing and sales alignment saw a 7 percent decrease in annual revenue. But companies with good alignment saw a 20 percent increase. Follow our 5 steps for creating lead hand-off plans for better marketing and sales alignment.
Infographics are visually appealing with unique design layouts that allow the eyes and mind to easily take in the content. According to Stew Langille, the CEO of data visualization start-up Visual.ly, the average pageview for a newspaper infographic is about 30 times that of a text-based article. See why infographics are beneficial and our tips for creating infographics with purpose here.
Before embarking on a lead nurturing campaign, there are a number of steps you should take to ensure your campaign is well-strategized and executed. You need to understand your target audiences, what appeals to them, what their pain points are and what offers you have to address each of those. If you try to launch a campaign without properly preparing, you can bet you’ll feel unorganized, reactive rather than proactive, and doomed to fail. Lead nurturing should be all about getting the right message to the right person at the right time, and that requires a lot of good planning. See our four steps to better lead nurturing campaigns.
Have a great Sunday! We'll see you tomorrow!
Photo Credit: NY Daily News
Known as Hawkeye for her near superhuman copy editing abilities, Lisa Gulasy applies her unique experiences in agency and journalism to manage strategy and day-to-day engagement of client social media profiles and assist and researching and writing blogs, press releases and advanced content. Find her on Twitter and LinkedIn.
