By now, you've most likely seen many agencies, publishers and marketing gurus make predictions about what will completely redefine marketing in 2017. They'll tout things as turning points and say some new thing will revolutionize the way in which marketers work. Groundbreaking changes, major milestones and entering new eras of this or that happen every year. In an industry that never seems to slow down, it can all feel a bit overwhelming. Here are three marketing truths to keep you grounded as you embark onto another year full of buzzwords, evolving tech, new platforms and more.
What Texas Taught Me About The Most Important Part of Marketing
In the 1970s, Texas had a problem - littering. Keeping true to it’s “everything is bigger in Texas” motto, it was quite a big problem. So big that the government took notice and decided to do something about it. They wanted to clean Texas up. They directed sizable funds to address the problem and hired some people to create a campaign in order to stop people from littering. This is how Woodsy the Owl was born.
How Salesforce became a billion dollar SaaS company using inbound marketing
Salesforce is a Fortune 500 company with close to $10 billion in revenue. Like many other behemoths in tech, Salesforce started in an apartment in San Francisco almost two decades ago.
In 2010, Kieran Flanagan (now VP of Marketing at Hubspot) joined Salesforce as their Inbound Marketing Manager. He created and implemented Salesforce's first ever inbound marketing strategy in EMEA. 70% of the traffic they usually received in a year was met within three weeks. That was NO accident. How did he do it?
3 Lessons I Learned from Advertising Week NY 2016
Last week I was at Advertising Week in New York. I came across some very influential thought leaders with such incredible insights and learned a lot. Here are the top 3 lessons:
How Storytelling Generates Revenue
When asked about where marketing is headed, Jonathan Ehlrich, former Director of Marketing at Facebook, said "At its foundation, marketing is about storytelling. The best marketers are the best storytellers."
In the last post, we learned about how stories move people, how they help others remember your brand, how they plant ideas and thoughts that take root in our brains, sometimes for hours and sometimes for years. Stories can do a lot more than that. Stories move us emotionally and they can also move us to take action. All that from a story? Oh yes. But don't take my word for it.
How To Create A Connection With Your Customers
People will forget what you said
People will forget what you did
But people will never forget how you made them feel
[WARNING: Game of Thrones fans, Season 6 Ep "The Door" Spoiler Alert in this article]
We discussed the power of emotion in our first segment, "How do you sell?" TL; DR / Recap: To sell, you have to move people, to connect with their emotions and build a relationship.
How do you create a connection with your customers? Through storytelling.
The Surprising Thing That Helps You Sell
As a marketer, one of the most frequently asked questions I get are "how can I sell more?" My answer is "first, tell me how they buy." It's not usually well received. ;)
Most people (that includes you and me!) make about 10,000 decisions a day. Some of them are buying decisions. Most of us are led to believe that decision making is a rational process. Logic, of course, leads us to the best choices and the best solutions. But what really goes on when we (and other consumers) are making decisions?