The information age can be a gift and a curse. The good news is that you can learn about practically anything you want, but the bad news it that you no longer have an excuse of “not knowing”. In general, anything we don’t know now is by choice. The internet is the printing press of…
How do you pick a refrigerator? If you ask most people, they will tell you that they are rational shoppers, but we live in a busy and complex world that makes it nearly impossible to be rational. We need to have the ability to make decisions from the gut or we would be in an…
People take pictures, not cameras. A camera is simply a tool that a photographer uses, but it does nothing on it’s own. If you put a camera on a counter, it will no spontaneously start taking pictures. Even as just a hobbyist, I hear “wow, you’re camera takes really nice pictures” so I can only…
Collecting data from UTM tags using Marketo forms is incredibly easy. I use them to capture lead (person) source data using the utm_medium and utm_source tags. Example Let’s say we are doing a promotion with a partner of ours where they are going to place display ads on their site as well as send an…
When we transitioned from Eloqua to Marketo, one area that I found confusing was the difference between programs and campaigns in Marketo. The easiest way to explain it is that programs are where your store things such as assets, period costs, reports and more. Smart campaigns is how you tell Marketo what to do. Smart…
If you are looking to create a website built on WordPress but have limited html/css knowledge, there are a few things you should look for in a theme. Must Haves Responsive Design In this day and age this really shouldn’t be an issue anymore but just do a quick check to make sure the theme…
Much is made about brand storytelling and how brands should incorporate storytelling into their content strategy. The truth is, brands can’t stop telling stories. Every brand has a story; the story that’s told and the story that “is” and the story that “is” is ten times more powerful than the story that’s “told”. Dyson Dyson…
IN today’s content focused marketing space, brands have a choice on who the hero of the story is, the brand or the customer. Most brands make themselves the heroes. They talk about awards they’ve won, projects they’ve completed and spend a lot of time, energy, and resources to prove that they are awesome. A better option may be making…
If you work for a business that has made it your responsibility to grow their email database, you’re in luck. I have a surefire way to increase your list size free of charge. It’s fast (relatively) and simple (relatively). There are multiple ways to do it. The first way is much easier than the second….
When many hear the term ‘marketing automation’ they think of just automated email programs like MailChimp or Constant Contact but true marketing automation is so much more than just automated email sends. The major marketing automation players will have other tools to help marketers better understand their customers and help nurture them along the customer journey….
Traditional advertising was based on screaming at groups of people (that hopefully contained customers) about their brand, their products and their services. But then, the social media revolution came about and now most companies are using social media to… scream at random people about themselves and their products and their services. D’oh! You can go on…
I have statistical proof, down to the week, of when MySpace died. It was between August 4th and August 11th in 2007. Using my good friend Google Trends, we can see the peak of the mountain and the steady decline. This graph is looking at data from 2004 until 2015. As you can see, it…
Although I am encouraged by the growing number of businesses that are using blogs as part of their marketing plan, I am sill astonished at the number of business websites that still don’t have a blog in this day and age. I have a hypothesis about this and I believe it has to do with…
Ridge Road is one of the streets that surrounds Lambeau Field. It’s not a booming retail area but there are a few businesses and strip malls along the road. Most days there aren’t many cars in the parking lots of these businesses but on Packers game days, you can’t find a spot. If I looked…
Registering domains is one of my favorite past times but finding a good domain is getting harder and harder. As more of our daily lives move online, anyone starting a business has to do some research before naming it to ensure that a good quality, relevant domain is available. There has been some relief with…