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The Curse of Knowledge. Many sensible strategies fail to drive action because executives formulate them in sweeping, general language. “Achieving customer delight!” “Becoming the most efficient manufacturer!” “Unlocking shareholder value!” One explanation for executives’ love affair with vague strategy statements relates to a phenomenon called the curse of knowledge. Top executives have had years of immersion in the logic and conventions of business, so when they speak abstractly, they are simply summarizing the wealth of concrete data in their heads. But frontline employees, who aren’t privy to the underlying meaning, hear only opaque phrases. In 1990, a Stanford University graduate student in psychology named Elizabeth Newton illustrated the curse of knowledge by studying a simple game in which she assigned people to one of two roles: “tapper” or “listener.” Over the course of Newton’s experiment, 120 songs were tapped out. Even a Captive Audience Needs Creativity to Care.

Troubleshooter’s Guide: Why Aren’t They Clicking Through? » Adestra Blog. Three proven tips to help improve click through rates on your future email marketing campaigns Convincing would-be customers to click through your emails has always been a challenge for marketers. Getting your message into inboxes is relatively easy, but why aren’t your clients responding to your email marketing campaigns? First of all, you must consider the customer’s position: Nearly one in five (19%) of all emails received in 2012 was spam.89 billion business emails were sent and received every day last year. (Source: Email Statistics Report 2011-2015: Executive Summary – The Radicati Group) Email is becoming more time consuming and intrusive, leading many recipients to delete anything which: Is clearly unrelated to the task in hand.Arrives when they are too busy. Here are six areas to improve in future email marketing campaigns to try and address low click-through rates. Shonky subject lines Your ideal subject line: (Source: Adestra Subject Line Analysis Report 2013) View the infographic.

The 15 ‘power words’ proven to drive web traffic | BlogStar - Content Agency London. We create shareable and engaging content for blogs and social media. A long time ago in a galaxy far far away from here, old school copywriters spent their time creating copy for print, radio and TV ads to entice people to buy products and services. To do this successfully, those skilled in their craft knew that certain key indicators – for the sake of snappiness let’s call them ‘power words’ – did the job extremely well. Power words are those linguistic gems that jump out at people screaming ‘look at me!’ Audiences have learnt to recognise them, be drawn to them, and when they see them, to react in some way. Power words are the semantic signposts that steer their readers towards what they have to do. And there’s a good reason these words have survived the history of copywriting and become assimilated into our era of social media-driven content creation – they work.

Curious to know what these exceedingly useful words are? Another savvy way to use power words is across your social media platforms. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. You’re Doing It Wrong: 5 Email Marketing Conversion Killers. Today, Chris Hexton, founder of targeted email marketing software, Vero, is going to look at 5 email conversion killers and teach what you can do not to make the same mistakes. Better yet, Chris is going to be the special guest on our free webinar next Tuesday, September 24th entitled: 5 Steps to An Email Campaign That Converts. Watch and learn as we take a look at some common mistakes that can really put a dampener on your conversions and what you can do about it.

In tomorrow’s webinar Chris will cover even more examples like this and provide you with a plan on how to structure your email marketing campaign lifecycle to produce a conversion machine. 1. Do You Overuse Images? HTML-rich emails are here to stay. …but it’s all too easy to forget that up to 60% of customers have images disabled and that many customers will be viewing your emails on small, mobile devices. You don’t want your email to look like this: Click for full-size image With images disabled (Click for full-size image) 2. 3. Sales - What Works When Selling to Marketers [Infographic] Marketers are 25% more receptive to lead generation efforts than most professionals, according to a recent report by LeadJen. The study, based on an analysis of 1.45 million call and email outreach attempts by marketing technology vendors, found the average contact rate for lead generation efforts directed to marketing professionals was 13%—or 8% to 30% higher than other professions (the contact rates for which ranged from 10% to 12%).

Below, additional key findings from the report. How to Reach Marketers Marketing professionals may be more responsive to lead generation campaigns, but they are not necessarily easier to reach by phone. 20% of appointments set with marketers were via email, a higher percentage than other professions. Marketers are quick to say "no" to solicitations, but the are open to second attempts. Follow-up calls and emails to an initial “no” response resulted in 13% of appointments set. Best Days of the Week to Contact Marketers. "I am not an SME, you patronising ***!" Big businesses and governments are totally, hopelessly clueless about small businesses, says Robert Craven.

Governments and big blue chip corporates think they're talking and marketing to the smaller or owner-managed businesses but they’re not. They're not talking to these business people. They don't know how to talk to owner-managed businesses and they don’t even realise that small businesses have a separate language and a separate way of being from the world that they live in. There are four million small businesses in the UK and that's just the bosses, accounting for 99.8% of the UK business names and employing 12 million people. All my qualitative research shows that owners of the so-called ‘small and medium-sized’ businesses feel ignored and sold to in an insulting manner.

Small businesses are not the same as big businesses and they do not make purchasing decisions in the same way. Small businesses are small by choice. They do not have the same mindset. I am not an 'SME'. How to tweet individual articles from emails. 18 Jul 2012 Using the social share within email is an extremely good way to gain interest from your contacts via your social space. At Pure360 we use social share functionality all the time when sending out our newsletter and other emails. I’m the Inhouse Graphic Designer at Pure360 and I design and create the Email Marketing Manual, our monthly newsletter to prospects and clients.

We’ve recently introduced a cool new function within it which allows you to tweet an individual article rather than the whole email with just a simple piece of code. Let’s begin with a visual of how it looks within our email newsletter: As you can see from the visual I have just used the standard “Tweet” button which was simply added in as an image. Then, for the magic to happen, you just add this special piece of code on the link. The code may look a little confusing at first but once you take a closer look, it’s pretty easy to understand. This is how it looks when the user hits the tweet button in the email. How To Embed A Google Plus Profile. Do you know how to embed a Google Plus profile? Recently, I wrote a post called The Men To Follow On G+ that seemed to baffle a lot of people. The reason for the questions that they had was that I used a cool form of embed code to display other people’s G+ profile cards in my post for the simple reason of allowing my readers to click on these people’s name and add them to their circle’s without having to do any extra steps like search for them on G+.

It looks like this: So as you can see, this makes it very easy for the reader to follow you or any other person you are promoting at the time. And, as you already know, the easier you can make it for someone to do something online, then they will choose to do it because you have made it quick and easy for them to do. Since I got so many questions on how I did this last week, I thought I would just create a small tutorial that showed you the simple steps.

As you can see, Google has found me and is showing my G+ profile already. See? Why Isn’t Anyone Reading My Blog? Here's How to Get Your Customers Interested - The Go! Agency - Online Marketing Specialists. So you have created a blog. A wonderful, action packed blog. You have poured much time, effort and probably a bit of cash in it to take it live. So now you sit back and wait for the traffic to flood in, right? “Build it and they will come” and all that. Unfortunately not. Well, that isn’t always the case. What is the first step? Is the design easy to navigate? These four questions will truly help you understand if you need to do any retooling. Now promotion. Remember: it takes work to earn readers….that’s right, I said EARN readers. With that in mind, let’s share some tips to getting people to read your blog! Email Blast: Send an announcement to your database of contacts telling them about your blog.

This is a good starter list to get you on your way. Social Media – Building Credibility As an Expert | As you are building your credibility, there are many things that you can do before you actually meet a single client or prospective client. Positioning your brand is critical before you do anything else. Everything else will follow after that. Your first step Laying the groundwork is extremely important for your business. Content creation Once you have been able to successfully build meaningful relationships with people, your next step is “putting your money where your mouth is.”

There are many different places that you can publish and share your content so that it falls into the correct hands: Blogs: A blog is an excellent place to share your content marketing materials. Whitepaper: A whitepaper is a great place to publish your content. Video: A video is another excellent expression of content marketing materials. It is critical that you make your content easy to be found. Conclusion By Trinity Arthurs.

Brand Management - Three Ways to Juice Your Marketing Results Using Color. Imagine heading to a local café and ordering hot chocolate. They serve it to you in a white cup. Chances are, you won't like your drink. That's not an indication of the quality of the café or the hot chocolate, but rather the color of the cup. This conclusion is based on a study by the Polytechnic University of Valencia and the University of Oxford. The universities served hot chocolate in white, cream, red, and orange cups. The drinks were identical, but volunteers claimed that the flavor was better when the drink was served in an orange or cream-colored cup. Surprised? Imagine landing on a website filled with clashing blue, orange, and pink. When prospects arrive at your website, see your display ad, or click through to your landing page, they make decisions within seconds.

Here are three ways to juice your marketing results using color. 1. Your branding dictates prospects' expectations of your company, helping them decide whether to do business with you. 2. 3. Color Matters. 15 Online Marketing Must-Dos In 2013. How to Dominate Search Results With Your Brand – @Copyblogger Tells All at #CMWorld. If you create content and no one can find it, then what is the point? On TopRank’s Online Marketing Blog we know that SEO is a crucial step in the amplification of content. As Lee likes to say, “Content isn’t really great until someone finds, consumes and acts on it.” Yet, I know from working with clients ranging from enterprise to small business, SEO is not always part of the content development process.

Whether it’s a lack of SEO know-how or a fear of old fashioned ideas like keyword stuffing, Brian Clark, CEO of Copyblogger Media aimed to break down those walls and show online marketers how to dominate search results with content. The modern consumer goes to the search engines with questions seeking answers. As good content marketers we are tasked with creating content that is found for the key questions our customers are asking, and that is also readable and awesome. The 5C Approach to Dominating Search Results 1. 2. 3. This is the type of content you do in order to get attention. 4. 10 Steps to Social Media Sales Success. Can Social Media Marketing lead to Sales? – YES! Unlike traditional/online advertising where an immediate sale is sought, Social Media Marketing requires the commitment of time and the ability to nurture relationships with individuals. Social Media can be used like a “sales funnel” to help guide prospects from initial contact to the end sale by following these 10 simple steps: 1) Identify Build up a list of potential targets by using the search functions in the various Social Media platforms. 2) Post Refrain from posting only sales-orientated content by sharing blogs and articles from external sources that provide rich content which adds value in some way to your audience – Give them something for free – Interesting, Relevant & Engaging Content. 3) Like/Follow Follow & be followed. 4) Ask Questions If your company is able to solve problems experienced by your audience then you have a higher chance of converting the sale by satisfying their needs & demands. 5) Engage 6) Offer 7) Signpost 8) Enquiry.

10 Steps to Social Media Sales Success. How to use Google+ for marketing. This is the first of three posts we’re publishing this month on Google+ for marketing. Here we tackle Communities, SEO, Authorship, Authority and Hangouts. Our next two posts will explore Google+ Hangouts and Google+ Pages in more detail. Enjoy! The first thing you need to grasp about Google+ is that it isn’t a ‘normal’ social media platform; it’s essentially the ‘social layer’ upon all of Google’s products and services. Because of this it really needs to be a vital part of your marketing arsenal. Here’s how and why you should be thinking about developing a Google+ marketing strategy. 1. In my opinion Google+’s communities are one of the best features of the platform. Here’s a community that I run for Social Media and Community Managers.

So, why are these communities so vital for marketers effort? Firstly, good social media citizens don’t just drop links and run. Secondly, you need to reach out to plenty of communities. 3. Google hangouts are a great way of increasing brand awareness. #Top Ten Tips For Getting Past The Gatekeeper - SEO-SEM-Telemarketing and Lead Generation. Preparation is the key to success, most companies will go through a decision making process which will involve a number of key personnel.

Build up a profile of your prospect, look on their website for key personnel, case studies and regional offices. Look on Linkedin for their company's page here you will find additional personal. Begin with the full name of the top person and work down. Find out their direct number if they have one and their email address.

If you know the email format firstname.lastname@ then you have everyones address, the quickest way is googling @companysdomain.com. Take the time to write a generic letter of introduction advising the contact you will be calling in the next couple of days to discuss your letter . Email your letter to everyone you think will be involved in the decision making process. If someone believes that you are important, they will treat you differently. Use this opportunity to check your facts with them. How To Get The Most Out Of Social Media | Digital Information World.

So your customers are showrooming? Big deal. 6 Sales Questions You're Afraid to Ask. Customer Relationships - Why You Should Make Follow-Up a Priority: Six Questions and Five Tips. Insanity Planning | Thomas Cox's Blog. 3 Social Media Automation Tools for Marketers. B2B Video Marketing: Tips for Successful Business Video Marketing. See Who's visiting your website with CANDDi insights. Google logic: why Google does the things it does the way it does | Technology.

How To Promote Your Blog Without Losing Your Soul | Internet Marketing Profits Joint Venture Strategies. Succeed With Video Content Marketing: 5 Tips and a Case Study. The Power of a Share and Why Google+ is Boss | MommiFried. How to Hack LinkedIn. Best Villa Rental Agencies. LTR – Loyd Townsend Rose | Exclusive luxury accommodation in castles, mansions and stately homes across the UK and Ireland.

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