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MarketingProfs How-To Articles

Marketing Resources for Marketing Professionals

Copyright: Copyright 2000-2010 MarketingProfs, LLC

Six Reasons Print Belongs in Your Media Mix (or Why Digital Popularity Brings Print Opportunity)

Just because marketers are jumping on the interactive-marketing bandwagon doesn't mean things on the interactive side are all rosy. The decreasing numbers for print don't necessarily mean a particularly high ROI for all digital initiatives. Still, there is opportunity—but you need embrace a multichannel approach. Catalogs are a great example.

How to Identify and Avoid This Survey-Questionnaire Design Problem: Mixed-Mode Scales

Data from mixed-mode questions are hard, if not impossible, to interpret accurately. But such flawed survey questions abound, perhaps because at first blush they seem entirely workable. Here's why they're not—and how to avoid them in your survey instruments.

A New Job-Search Paradigm: A Darn Good Resume Is Not Candidate Marketing!

Most job seekers start their job-search process with many of the same ineffective steps—holdovers from a time before the rise of technology and social media. A job search, like successful business projects, should be expertly strategized, organized, and implemented.

Formulate Your Content Strategy in 10 Simple Steps

Content is moving from being among the final considerations of a Web-development project to being front and center in a digital-marketing strategy. And, more and more, brands are recognizing that a strategic approach to content is becoming important. To help, here's a simple 10-step systematic process for formulating a content ...

Building Loyalty and Corporate Profitability in Eight Productive Steps

It's no secret that loyal employees are the driving force behind solid, stable, and profitable companies, whereas unhappy, disgruntled, and disloyal employees can quickly bring any company to its knees. Companies that lack employee commitment can change their culture and build loyalty from the inside out by following these eight ...

Tips for Creating Traffic-Stopping Tradeshow Booths

If you've ever manned a tradeshow booth, you're familiar with that sense of urgency to bring back home a stack of qualified leads. And, with so many other exhibitors vying for the same prize, you may find yourself behaving a bit like a carnival barker in your efforts to lure ...

Eight Questions to Ask When Buying a Marketing List

Targeting the right audience is the key to success for any marketing campaign. Up-to-date contact information, valid email addresses, and the tools to segment a list accurately are must-haves for any marketer, yet they are by no means assured in the lists purchased from business-contact vendors.

Five Fatal Social Media Errors (and How to Avoid Them)

More and more businesses are using social media to get their messages out. And because they are user-driven, implementing them is relatively easy and inexpensive; too often, however, social-media marketing communication is undertaken without an integrated strategy. Below, the resulting five most common errors that businesses commit in using social ...

59 Proven Ways to Electrify Your Offer and Make More Sales

If you're using direct marketing to sell your products and services, then you know that it's all about making an offer. But are you testing your offers to find out what work best? There are hundreds of offers and thousands, perhaps millions, of offer variations you can test. However, some ...

10 Tips for Building a Revenue-Generating Mailing List for Email Marketing

If no one's reading your email campaign, no matter how great it is, it's not going to make any sales. You need a great email list filled with customers and prospects who have said yes to receiving information from you and who will be moved to action if the time ...

What Online Content Will People Pay For?

Since the Internet began, some 40 years ago, most of its content has been free to access. Today, that is still the case. However, paid content is one of the fastest-growing areas of Internet business, generating more than $15 billion in revenues in 2009 in the US alone. With so ...

Four Social Media Tips for Small Businesses

Social media can be an effective marketing tool for small businesses. However, different businesses have different needs and different reasons for adopting social media. Regardless of the reason, social media can serve as an efficient, low-cost marketing tool for businesses seeking to generate measurable business results.

Marketing's Missing Link

Perhaps because the difficult economic climate has forced marketers into a more tactical mode, with leaner teams trying to execute more with less, marketing strategy has taken a back seat. Whatever the reason, the lack of a strategy has huge implications on an organization's marketing effectiveness.

Eight Ways to Improve Your Site Search and Capture More Conversions

Whether you're marketing an e-commerce, informational, or B2B site, your site search is a critical feature of your site and deserves your time and attention. And by making some small improvements to your site search, you can reap higher conversion rates, more leads, and happier repeat customers.

URGENT: Bussiness moneys for you Dear, sir!! A Reformed Spam Writer Helps You Stay Out of the Junk Folder

About 10%-20% of all emails you send—even to people who requested them—will get accidentally routed to the junk/spam folder. What about that other 80%-90%? Those emails may not be spam, but they will have definitely broken some of these six rules for avoiding a one-way trip to email oblivion.

How to Use Direct Mail to Drive Targeted Website Traffic

If you want to drive traffic to your website, which media should you use? Too many people suffer from an "oil and water" mentality when it comes to mixing online and offline media. But they work well together. And when you need to drive online traffic, an integrated approach can ...

Five Reasons Why Deep Links Help—Not Hurt—Your Site

Historically, companies that monitor links to their websites haven't looked kindly upon inbound "deep links"—links to site pages other than the homepage or other top-level pages. But the truth is that deep links can actually be really good for a website. Here are five benefits they provide.

Marketing Dashboards: Great Investment or Huge Expense?

Marketing dashboards are all the rage. Perhaps because every other management function has a dashboard, VPs of marketing feel they need to have one, too. Or maybe because dashboards can be a great tool to help you manage your business processes. But it is entirely possible you could be ...

How to Demonstrate and Deliver Lead-Nurturing ROI

Lead nurturing has high potential value when your acquisition programs have generated responses from interested prospects, but those prospects are not yet ready to buy. The 2010 Lead Generation Marketing ROI Study found that six in 10 lead generation marketers (58%) agree that nurturing stalled leads is under-funded relative to ...

Five Ways to Get Unique, Keyword-Relevant Content on Your E-Commerce Site

E-commerce sites can be particularly challenging for search-engine optimization (SEO) because they tend to lack unique, relevant content. The challenge can be easily (though not necessarily quickly) overcome with these five content techniques that can help you search-optimize e-commerce websites.

Two Survey Questionnaire Flaws to Avoid: Scary Matrix Questions and Unbalanced Scales

Poorly designed questions and scaling problems can derail your research efforts faster than you can say "the cat in the hat"! To help you avoid a few of the more common and onerous problems, this article explores two separate but related questionnaire-design issues: matrix questions and unbalanced scales.

Shattering Five Branding Myths

When people think of branding, they often think of just a logo or business card. Or they think of the opposite extreme, such as Apple, and so assume they will never have the resources to "brand effectively." But branding on a budget is more than possible, and dispelling these five ...

Gone Phishing: Why eBay Emails Can Be Hard to Trust

People tend to open an email based on the two things they can see in their inbox: the From name and the Subject line. If recipients receive an email from a sender they do not recognize or trust, they are less likely to open it. If an email with a ...

Six Questions to Answer Before You Launch a Mobile SMS Campaign

Organizations need to understand the logical progression of leveraging mobile short-message service (SMS) technology in enterprise environments. Here are some common questions and concerns companies have when considering SMS—and some answers to help them jump over the hurdles.

Marketing Lesson From the Grateful Dead: Loosen Up Your Brand

The Grateful Dead teaches us to show our brand's playfulness and to trust that our customers will recognize our brand even if it looks a little "different." By loosening up your brand, you allow your company to show its personality—and, by extension, its ability to roll with the punches.