A simple settings change in Google’s Chrome browser is going to wreak Y2k-like havoc on the entire digital marketing industry by the end of 2024. That change? Third-party cookies will default to being blocked.
Chaos looms in the online advertising industry. Chrome, the web’s biggest browser with a 65% market share, plans to eliminate support for third-party cookies by the end of 2024. Other browsers, notably Firefox, Safari and DuckDuckGo, already block third-party cookies by default. But Chrome’s massive market share is making the earth move under advertising’s feet.
Third-party cookies are...
Modern marketers are facing more and more responsibility to make sure leads come in and close. It’s enough to scare the bejeebers out of anybody. Some are eyeballing direct mail as one more solution to help move prospects along. However, a recent report from PFL and Forrester Consulting, “Hybrid Experiences Bring Direct Mail Into The Digital Age,” (click here to download; easy registration require...
That moment, argues Krug, can be enough to derail the purpose of their visit. “When we’re using the web, every question mark adds to our cognitive workload, distracting our attention from the task at hand,” he writes. Behavioral economists like Daniel Kahneman, who won the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for this work, go further: The easier it is for people to understand any inform...
That was a huge factor in the internet’s acceptance so early, so quickly, and by so many. It was cheap to produce and cheap to deliver. And while physical marketing (particularly direct mail) had good trackability, it was scant compared with the data digital marketing could deliver. But the ensuing years have shown that many of the cost-savings of digital have been offset by increased expenses...
Just north of 20 years ago, a book about how the internet impacts marketing was written. “The Cluetrain Manifesto,” by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger, was centered on one big idea: “Markets are conversations.” By arguing that “markets are conversations,” The Cluetrain Manifesto was pointing at a fundamental change that the internet—which was just becoming a c...
Content marketers rally behind the banner of producing ever more excellent content marketing. Without a doubt, excellence has rightly become the baseline. But excellence, in and of itself, doesn’t guarantee a first-page ranking in Google. Nor a viral share in social media.
...The confluence of internet infrastructure, truly useful web-based publishing applications, and web search enabled the company to popularize a shift in the marketing eco-system paradigm. It makes perfect sense: instead of carpet-bombing your market with interruptive messaging, create the content that will attract the people you want to reach. Create good content, the argument goes, and the pe...
The shift to remote and hybrid work over the past year and a more mobile workforce has made the matter worse, as attacks rose and workers became more susceptible. More than half (51%) of respondents to The State of Email Security 2021 report (SOES) reported an increase in BEC attacks that exploited brand impersonation, and 63% reported an increase in phishing attacks that targeted their employees....
How is your martech stack working for you? For the uninitiated, a martech stack (or marketing technology stack) is the set of technologies that marketers use to perform various marketing activities. How you collect leads and nurture them along the path to becoming a customer are just some of the activities that are handled by a martech stack. For many growing companies, the martech stack can be...
In one experiment into the value of randomness, Ellevate showed three groups of consumers the same movie trailer. One group was told it was randomly selected from a set of 100 trailers. Another group was told the trailer came randomly selected from only 10 options. A third group was shown the trailer and told that a marketer had selected the trailer. Who reported more satisfaction? Consumers pref...
Depending on the industry, marketers are projected to spend between $31 and $208 per lead in 2021, according to the latest research.[1] And with business-to-business (B2B) leads requiring up to 13 or more touches before they convert, it’s critical that lead-gathering be as frictionless as possible. The last thing a company needs is to do all the work prepping prospects, only to have a cybercrimina...
The customer service confirmation scam, whether by phone or phishing email, is just one example of how bad actors are hijacking hard-earned brand equity and using common marketing tactics to make their con. In fact, cybercriminals are deploying a complete range of marketing tactics to try and separate people from their money, as described in Mimecast’s The State of Brand Protection 2021 (SOBP) rep...
In the Google Universe, there is a position referred to as Position Zero. It appears at the top of the organic results. Sometimes it displays as a list, sometimes a table, sometimes a snippet. It's an enviable spot which boosts click-through anywhere from 114% to 516%, according to Hubspot and SearchEngineLand. It's a smart bit of programming on Google's part. For SEO, though, it has some compl...
With so many B2B products being consideration-heavy purchases, requiring the buy-in of a range of people within an organization, B2B marketers could be making better use of Influencer partnerships to get their products on the awareness, engagement, and purchase path. B2B influencer marketing is as different from B2C influencer marketing as B2B marketing is from B2C marketing. They might be the...
Why is good content important? Because it turns out that if your story reads well to humans, then it's indexed well by Google. And if it’s indexed well by Google, it will show up in relevant searches for the people you want visiting your site. There is no silver bullet SEO that will get organic traffic to a poorly-written page. If the content on the page is not well-written and compelling, no a...
An example of the former comes from the publishing industry. A publisher creates books which they sell to bookstores and bookstore chains at a steep discount in exchange for a bulk purchase. Historically, the discount offered to bookstores is 40%, allowing the book store room to make a profit by selling it to consumers at a higher price.
Review your marketing personas, interview key SMEs, review analytics and editorial efforts of competitors.
Assess what kinds of content will appeal to your ideal customers.
Write and promote content that meets their needs and wants.
Use analytics to determine how well the content did.
Revise and improve content plan based on what was learned.
Here's how we can work together.
