Competitors: A MICRO-STORY (400 WORDS)

“Step back!” security snapped at me as I tried to catch my builder team already walking towards the arena. Two homemade robots attempted to complete an obstacle course of ramps and doors obstructed by scattered rubble from an abandoned construction site. Each carried a red metal box filled with prize money. The team that found the key to open their box first would be the winner. Competition was serious with ten thousand dollars up for grabs during each round. Of course there was a glitch — two boxes, one key.

Your Competitors Are NOT Sleeping Under Their Desks Every Night...

… Unless you’re 21 and live on Red Bulls and pizza.

IMPORTANT: Before we start, if you can answer “yes” to ANY of these questions then this article does not apply to you and I suggest NOT reading it because your competitors probably ARE sleeping under their desks:

What's Driving the Internet's 5 Hottest Trends

As the CTO of a marketing technology company, my main challenge is to keep up with rapid changes in technology and consumer behavior in order to create differentiated growth. In the last 10 years, mobile and social media have disrupted advertising, software and consumer electronics. Just like the rise of the PC and internet a decade before, these are foundational disruptions. Multiple groundbreaking technologies are looking to change how we interact with products, companies and each other, and they are being driven by a perfect storm of dependent innovation.

It's an exciting time, particularly in five key ways.

Neuromarketing: The Science, Art and Opportunity

Image Credit: Shutterstock

What if you could read minds? I'm slowly becoming more and more intrigued by neuromarketing and the science of being able to read a consumer's mind.

Although, neuromarketing is nothing new. It’s been decades since advertisers, product developers and marketers first started using social psychology to influence what we buy. Companies have learned how to exploit basic human behaviors, and use science to understand how consumers react to marketing campaigns, products and eye-deceiving designs.

Traditional market research has undoubtedly brought great success for big corporations. That’s why companies have no issue spending millions of dollars on such studies. But as modern science and technology develop, companies hope for even more accurate answers about consumer behavior towards their products or services.

The Message Your LinkedIn Connections Are Praying You Send

With it becoming easier than ever to quickly identify and engage your ideal prospects on LinkedIn, a critical component is knowing what to send those professionals in order to turn new connections into paying customers.

Are You Investing In Personalized Marketing

Large, sweeping marketing campaigns are officially out. If you aren't currently investing in personalized marketing, then you're missing out on the new wave of digital marketing and may actually be teetering on the edge of irrelevancy.

How Uber, Airbnb, and Etsy Attracted Their First 1,000 Customers

New businesses often struggle finding their first customers. The challenge is even more difficult with startups in the sharing economy that launch as platforms connecting independent service providers with consumers.

Are Marketers Satisfied With How They're Using Data?

Are senior marketers happy with how their organizations are collecting, analyzing, and utilizing data?

To find out, 3Q Digital and March Communications surveyed 315 marketing leaders in March and April 2016.

Enjoy The Great Influencer Marketing Takedown While You Can

Nearly a decade ago, I had a boss who was skeptical about social media. His first tweet went something like…

“Trying out this Twitter thing”

His second tweet read…

“I don’t get it. It’s a fad”

Fast forward to present time—Facebook alone looks to be the second coming of Google and billions of dollars are being made and funneled through social media in some form.

Display Advertising is Failing. What’s Next in Digital Marketing?

Recent trends have not been kind to disruptive advertising tactics such as banner, display, and PPC ads. It’s been well documented that display ads and PPC are becoming the bane of people’s online existence and ineffectual. The elements that have been the backbone to digital marketing practices are beginning to show their age and according to Unbounce, 98% of advertisers are wasting money on ads.

3 Simple Marketing Methods To Make You Stand Out

Your MVP is finally finished and you are building a beta user base.

You’ve got 1100 downloads, and you get about 10 to 12 new sign-ups per day. Things work, but they need to go faster. You spend too much time everyday checking for iTunes download notifications. You check, but don’t see any emails. Something is wrong. Your pitch deck projected 100 downloads a day.

What will your friends and family who helped fund your seed round say?

Crap.

Marketing 101: Conversations with myself.

“What is it you do for a living?”

“Me?”

“Who else have I been talking to for the past month?”

“My official title is User Experience and Interaction Lead.”

“Right. But what  does that mean?”

The Shocking ROI of Influencer Marketing

Four trends are converging to make influencer marketing an increasingly important part of any B2C or B2B marketing program:

1. There is a glut of content being created, and breaking through the noise is more difficult than ever
2. The precipitous decline of organic reach on Facebook (and now Instagram) makes social media promotion of content a trickier proposition
3. Ad blockers make amplification of content through display ads (even hyper-specific remarketing) less appealing
4. Americans trust recommendations from real people significantly more than we trust advertising and promotions from brands, in any guise

Solving the 10 Most Common Social Media Marketing Challenges

Today, there are 2.307 billion active social media users around the world. That’s nearly one-third of our planet’s total population of 7.125 billion!

As social media marketing professionals, we’re lucky to reach even .000001% of that population with any one of our posts. This can feel a bit underwhelming for businesses and marketers looking to demonstrate the true value and ROI of social media.

The error 404: taking a second look

Nobody would want to relive their heartbreaking experience as a person? Certainly not. When a relationship is broken, it is often difficult to repair. There are often times that you may not rebuild with that person again and therefore it is important to put in measures to keep a good relationship with your friends and loved ones lest you lose them for good. This is applicable in various areas. Let’s look at this from the business point of view.

                               

Renny Gleeson, a marketing and advertising expert gave insights at TED Global on errors that come up on web pages when you misspell a website, input wrong information into a web search menu or look up broken experience that users have with their website. 

Your next product is a community And why it matters

The iPhone product is at the core of Apple, but what exactly is the “product”? Is it a phone with a camera and a touch screen? Does it include the experience of managing communications, music, and photos in iOS? And, what about the friendly faces at the Apple Store that help us pick out, get started with, and support our iPhone? Your definition of a product like the iPhone has a big impact on how you go about building a product. So how do we think differently about product development when we realize that products must be created in the minds of people.

Product Differentiation with Win Win Pricing

Using marketing and pricing to create meaningful product differentiation separates you from competitors and allows you to command price premiums by eliminating bad discounts. Product differentiation is possible with win/win pricing.

Discounts should never lead to a loss of margin. Instead, discounts should reward customers for activities that improve their value — either by reducing your costs or improving overall demand. As a first step, evaluate and build systems that reward customers based on desired behaviors.

Marketing Ethics

The Right and the Good

In the modern marketing, marketing strategy has become a critical step of the survival and development of the enterprise. However, marketing ethics also become a major contradiction between corporate and social responsibility. Therefore, this article mainly expressed that corporate marketing activities need to base on moral categories, and companies should assume their social responsibility.

17 Quick Wins to Boost Your Social Media Marketing Right Away

When I set up a daily to-do list, I often have a spectrum of tasks that need to get done. There are the big projects that figure to take multiple days to complete. There are medium-sized tasks that will require some long stretches of intense focus. Then there are the quick wins.