Advocacy Marketing Part 1: End-to-End Advantages You Can’t Ignore

Act-On Adaptive Web

If you’re not taking advantage of advocacy marketing (aka influencer marketing, referral marketing, and word-of-mouth marketing), you should give it serious consideration. Here are a few reasons: According to McKinsey & Company, word-of-mouth (WOM) is the primary factor behind 20%-50% of all purchasing decisions. A Zubrance white paper states that for every $1 a company invests […]

Dealing with Difficult Co-Workers

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Into everyone’s life, a little rain must fall. To put a finer point on it, most of us, at some point in our careers, must spend time dealing with difficult co-workers. Unlike that drunken brother-in-law you have to be polite to on holidays, your  co-workers are waiting for you five days a week, testing your limits […]

Understanding Cookies Part 2: A Guide for Marketers

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Digital marketers are also online consumers, and most of us understand how cookies work. (Or at least, we know that they work, without worrying too much about the how.) And yet, we too can sometimes be taken by surprise at the level of behavioral targeting enabled by cookies. There’s nothing inherently wrong with cookies, and […]

What Is an Internet Cookie? A Guide for Consumers

Act-On Adaptive Web

Everywhere we browse, every time we buy online, cookies are there, waiting for us. And while that situation sounds delicious (and somewhat sinister) in theory, most of us know that browser cookies just a fact of everyday life in the digital age. That’s why it’s important to understand cookies and to understand how we can […]

Small Business Saturday – November 29 – Shop Small and Local

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Black Friday’s for big box stores. Cyber Monday’s devoted to online shopping. And for those of us who are small business owners (or who prefer to shop at small businesses), there’s Small Business Saturday. Just how important is small business? Small and new businesses create two out of every three net new jobs in the […]

A Salute to Service

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Today is Veterans Day, the day that honors the service of all U.S. military veterans. It began nearly 100 years ago as the day commemorating the temporary cessation – an armistice – of hostilities between the Allies and Germany at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918. This cessation […]

How B2Bs Can Beat the Black Friday Blues

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Black Friday has long been the kick-off of the holiday shopping season, a day famous (and infamous) for big advertising pushes, big crowds, and – fingers crossed – big revenues for retailers. Here are the U.S. numbers from Black Friday 2013, as reported by statisticbrain.com: $57 billion:  Total spent 307 million:  Average number of consumers shopping […]

Does Google’s Penguin 3.0 Have a Bite?

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Just a few weeks ago, around October 17, SEO professionals received confirmation that Google was rolling out a much-anticipated algorithm update dubbed “Penguin 3.0.” As recently as August, some people predicted that this update would “bring tears to your eyes.” But when it finally arrived, it seemed less impressive than past updates. (Caveat: It’s been a […]

How to Create an Effective Video Marketing Strategy

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We’ve all heard the adage “show, don’t tell,” and video gives us a great opportunity to show what we’re talking about in a more engaging way. This affinity for seeing something via video plays out in a number of key metrics: video on a landing page leads to greater time on site and higher conversion rates.

Turning Website Visitors into Leads

Act-On Adaptive Web

Jim Obermayer is the host of the Sales Lead Management Radio Program, which goes out to over 8,000 worldwide members of the Sales Lead Management Association (SLMA). Recently, he interviewed Janelle Johnson, director of demand generation at Act-On, about the art of turning website visitors into leads. This blog post is an edited transcript of […]

Survey Says: Variety Paves the Marketer’s Path

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The path to becoming a marketer is often circuitous, wending its way through career stints, starts and stops. For example: “I was a graphic designer for a newspaper.” “I was a dancer and actor in a theatre company.” “I was a ghost writer and research assistant.” “A park ranger who told stories.” “Lawyer.” That’s a […]

LEGO Education North America Builds a Winning Strategy Using Marketing Automation

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For over 30 years, LEGO® Education has been working with teachers and educational specialists to provide solutions and resources that bring subjects to life in the classroom – and make learning fun. Brandee Johnson, Senior Marketing Manager at LEGO Education North America, recently had a conversation with Leo Merle, Marketing Programs Manager at Act-On Software, […]

Getting Down to Business: Nurturing Leads

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Serial entrepreneur and small business expert David Weatherholt is the host of Getting Down to Business®, a radio talk show focused on the small business. Recently he interviewed Aaron Bolshaw, Act-On’s Group Manager of Database Marketing, about the fine art of lead nurturing. This blog post is an edited transcript of their conversation. DAVID:        Welcome […]

What Do Fashion and Marketing Have in Common?

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Attended a marketing conference lately? Take a tour of just about any trade show floor today and you’re bound to see more than just an undistinguished, logo-branded tee with no-name jeans; on the contrary, you’re sure to encounter a wide array of personal styles – the prepster, the hipster, the techie. Nowhere was this diversity […]

Semantic Search: Keyword Choices and Relevancy

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Have you read the recent SearchMetrics ranking factors survey? SEO experts Marcus Tober, Dr. Leonhard Hennig, and Daniel Furch are back with another edition of ranking correlations and ranking factors in the 2014 Ranking Factors Study. The report showcases four content factors which the authors feel correlate to higher rankings: Semantically relevant and semantically comprehensive […]

5 Email Metrics that Matter to Marketers

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The great thing about email marketing (well, one of the many great things) is the instant insight you get after sending a message. Did your audience love it? Did they hate it? Which links are getting the most hits? You can see the results roll in as time goes by. But it can be easy […]

Customers are still King.

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Even if you were nowhere near San Francisco last week, you probably got a bit of the Dreamforce buzz. Some 135,000 conference attendees took in 1,400 expert-led sessions, soaking up fast-forward tips from all types of industry experts and meeting new technologies screen-to-screen. A lot’s been written about this year’s Dreamforce (DF-14), so I’m not […]

The High-Payoff Referral Question No One Ever Asks — But Should

Act-On Adaptive Web

Chances are you’ve heard the saying, “referral business is the best business” more than once in your career. And there’s plenty of hard research to support that. For example, there are approximately 2.4 billion brand-related conversations every day, according to data from the Word of Mouth Association. People often talk about products or services, and […]