Authentic Design + MORE

Companies large and small are investing in content creation now, more than ever. Whether the investment in content marketing supports branding, sales, customer service, PR or recruiting, there are specific audiences and brand messages involved.
Kudos to companies making the effort to create more useful content to help answer customer questions…

The Most Potent Customer Experience of All written by John Jantsch read more at Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape MarketingI was recently talking to a group of small business owners and marketers about the notion of creating a better customer experience and I asked members of the group to share what works for them…

Welcome to the July Edition of Emails That Do Work, the blog series where we dissect some of our favorite user emails, and talk tips on how to optimize our own.Related Articles
Emails That Do WorkEmails That Do Work – June EditionGetting Social with Benchmark Email – the Weekly Recap

We’ve been keeping a secret. The fact is, each week the most popular Vines by a wide margin are coming from athletes, pop stars and brands with tie-ins to those folks. Singing celebrities like Little Mix or Harry Styles can do anything or nearly nothing at all and still have their Vine’s share…..

This morning, I visited the online portal for my local newspaper to check on my subscription. (I didn’t get my Sunday paper.) When I hit the page, I saw a story that interested me, so I clicked on the headline to read it and got this:

I understand their need to make money but there are several things that bothered me about this graphic…

How do you keep up to speed on what’s happening in business? Do you scan the Twitters, read your RSS feeds, or watch the news? For me it’s a combination of all of those things, though I will admit watching the news has become a rarity as I find current news in so many other forms. Following current news is great, but I find myself wanting something more…

Promoting products and services while trying to compete with mega-giants like Amazon and Walmart is often a daunting task for small business owners. The good news is that Google AdWords has created a way for advertisers to do just that. Bigger brands may have an advantage when it comes to PPC, but they don’t hold all the cards…

  

The recently popularized “flat” interface style is not merely a trend. It is the manifestation of a desire for greater authenticity in design, a desire to curb visual excess and eliminate the fake and the superfluous.
In creating new opportunities, technological progress sometimes leads to areas of excess…

Whether you’re a Harry Potter fan or not, you know who J.K. Rowling is. I bet you never heard of Robert Galbraith or “The Cuckoo’s Calling” until it was revealed on Monday that Robert is Rowling and that “Cuckoo” is about…. Forget what the book is about – the news here is that Rowling penned […

There are many complex decisions to be made when planning your company’s expansion into new countries. No culture is alike, and each country has a language and customs unique to itself. Ergo, you would think that culture and language research would be top of the agenda for every company planning to penetrate new markets…

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PPC marketing is like online dating: it’s all about making a match, baby! Online dating sites boast of their unique matching algorithms that pair lonely hearts with their perfect partner. Likewise, search engine algorithms assess how well your PPC marketing answers users’ needs. Your job as a savvy marketer is to maintain consistent relevancy at every step of the way to make the search engines happy, make your site’s visitors happy, and ultimately maximize your ROI…

This infographic has some great stats but I don’t think it’s a deep evaluation of the total impact of social media. One example is the impact of social media on search engine results. If you have great content that’s shared a ton socially, the chances of more folks citing your content within their relevant content increases and; as a result, your rank can substantially increase…

There’s a few things they don’t tell you about being on The Shark Tank.
One of them is that every pitch on the popular reality business TV show starts with a silent 10 second staring contest. I spent an afternoon talking to a former (winning) contestant from the show, and one of the the insights he shared was that the first moment you walk into “the tank” on the show is highly scripted…

Marketing is all about communication.
And when it comes to business writing, communicating your message clearly to your prospects is priority number one.
Unfortunately, this basic principle seems to go unnoticed far too often — especially in the world of business-to-business (B2B) marketing.
It doesn’t matter if you’re writing to the CEO of a billion-dollar corporation, an account executive, or the head engineer at a consulting firm — at the end of the day, they’re all people, just like you and me…