Tips, Trends and Best Practices

Hi-yah! Even though some business owners might not be able to fight at a martial arts competition like our own John Wood, they can still use martial arts principles in their product development and marketing strategies  to win business.

Move Faster to Beat your Competitors

The concept of speed and surprise  is often found in the Brazilian Ju-Jitsu fighting style. It is a martial arts principle which determines the best way to win a competition when the opponent is larger. This principle removes fear from the equation by teaching that a bigger opponent can be defeated if the smaller, weaker opponent is faster. This concept relies heavily on the element of surprise. Many small businesses can feel backed into a … Keep reading

A recent Hubspot blog post caught my attention as it attempted to highlight the right and wrong way to use SMS marketing.

In it, Eridon points out that SMS marketing works best when integrated with other digital marketing channels as opposed to being used alone for lead generation.

“[SMS] is most successful when it’s leveraged for its superpower … a real-time, interactive method of communication that’s promoted through an integrated marketing campaign leveraging social media, email marketing, landing pages, and more.”

Adding SMS to your cross-channel mix can provide remarkable results for businesses who do it right, but a lazy approach may do more damage than help. Eridon highlights that the intimacy of receiving text messages means SMS marketing deserves … Keep reading

Everyday it seems I get more and more emails from retailers like Fab.com, Gap, and Gilt Groupe. While I’m sure there’s something nice inside, like a new deal or sale, I don’t bother to open it. I simply get too many of them. Like many relationships, this started out exciting and intriguing, and I just couldn’t get enough (ask my Amex card)! Recently though, it’s different; I’ve been feeling overloaded and suffocated by my retail friends. When this happens I tend to shell-up and avoid the situation, neglecting them all together. When I open my email, I can see them there, staring at me amidst the pile of other personal inbox mail that I have not the time nor energy … Keep reading

Congratulations! If you’re searching for a single platform to unify your customer database and email, mobile & social marketing efforts, you already understand the critical importance of using one tool to rule cross-channel marketing. You’re one step ahead of your competition.

That said, you’re probably also struggling with how to make sense of this emerging space. Lots of providers claim to unify these channels and it’s hard to really understand the specifics of what they mean by that.  It’s also hard to know what to look for – what are the key ingredients a provider must bake into their product in order to offer you a successful cross-channel solution?

Enter Signal. In working with our terrific roster of customers, … Keep reading

Google Analytics is probably the second most effective (free) tool you can use to make your digital marketing work harder for you (guess which is the #1 most effective marketing tool?).  Google Analytics gives you tremendous insight into your website’s audience; it will tell you what keywords brought a person to your website, what page they came to your website on, what page they left your website on, how long they stayed on your website, and more. This is the sort of information that can be vital to the success of your site.

You may already be aware of all the great metrics Google Analytics provides to track vistor behavior on your website, but did you know it can … Keep reading

In case you don’t follow Fred Wilson’s blog, he included a video in this post which I found to be be great mental fodder. In it, Forrester CEO George Colony is presenting their research on emerging social trends at the Le Web conference in Paris. Colony describes the evolvement of personal engagement that have come from rapid gains in processing power and disk space, saddled by slow gains in network speed. If you’ve ever had the app vs mobile web debate, I think you’ll find this 20-minute video interesting:

I could care less about evaluating which technology company will fall where in the Forrester Wave in the future, I was much more interested in the overlay of those three … Keep reading

With Oktoberfest well under way, It’s only appropriate that we shift our focus towards something we enjoy just as much as building great products: beer. Being a craft brewer has more challenges than just making a great tasting beer; you actually have to continually engage consumers to buy your products. To do this, you must rely heavily on word of mouth as a way of getting customers into your bars, and talking about your products outside your bar. Fighting breweries that have larger distribution channels and marketing campaigns can be an uphill battle. But fight them where it hurts… at the consumer. One thing craft breweries can do to even the playing field is generate tremendous demand for their beers.  … Keep reading

This just in, T-Mobile has revised their USA Mobile Playbook, releasing “T-Mobile Direct-to-Consumer Go-To-Market Guidelines Version 2.1.” immediately replacing Version 2.0.

The following change should be noted:

To align with the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) Consumer Best Practices Guidelines Version 6.1, the guidelines associated with standard rated non-recurring messages have been updated to remove the requirements for referencing the Msg & Data Rates May Apply disclosure, Stop, and Help information in the MT message.  However, for standard rated non-recurring programs, these disclosures are still required in the call to action.  Refer to Section 8 of the Playbook.

 … Keep reading

We still get questions every day on the mysterious MMA guidelines, and the recommended rules of the mobile marketing ecosystem. Since I happen to have a fresh copy of the 165 page Version 6.0 on my desk, I thought I’d take the time to pullout some of the most useful guidelines into a consumable format.

I’ll try my best to highlight some of the most frequently asked questions.   

Campaign Types

What’s the difference between a Standard Rate, Premium Rate, and Free-To-End-User program?

• Standard Rate means that the consumer is charged standard messaging fees (per message, or decremented from their messaging bundle) when participating in the program, and no Premium fees are charged. Standard Rate programs are the most common messaging

… Keep reading

There have been many attempts to pin down the value of a Facebook fan/like, Twitter follower, Linkedin connection or similarly engaged person across the social media landscape. Personally, I’ve always been a little dubious of the methodologies employed to reach these conclusions.  As a researcher in my past life, I expected better.

Recently, my former colleagues at top brand research consultancies Millward Brown & Dynamic Logic, in partnership with the World Federation of Advertisers, tackled the topic of fan value in a two-phase research project across 24 WFA member brands.  Their goal was to understand what marketers wanted out of fans, how fans impacted brand equity and determine what consumers most wanted from brands they interact with on Facebook.… Keep reading