Social media plays a huge role in establishing and nurturing relationships in today’s marketing and sales worlds. Used correctly, social media is a great enablement tool. But… beware of the “creepy factor”!

Join Mathew Sweezey, Marketing Automation Evangelist at Pardot, An ExactTarget Company, for a less creepy and more insightful view into the world of social media and how the different social media tools can be used to engage with prospects and clients. Mathew will share with us:

- When to engage - What avenues to engage through - How to engage without being “creepy”

Your Speaker: Mathew Sweezey, Marketing Automation [...]]]> Date: May 30, 2013
Time: 2:00pm EDT

Social media plays a huge role in establishing and nurturing relationships in today’s marketing and sales worlds. Used correctly, social media is a great enablement tool. But… beware of the “creepy factor”!

Join Mathew Sweezey, Marketing Automation Evangelist at Pardot, An ExactTarget Company, for a less creepy and more insightful view into the world of social media and how the different social media tools can be used to engage with prospects and clients. Mathew will share with us:

- When to engage
- What avenues to engage through
- How to engage without being “creepy”

Your Speaker:
Mathew Sweezey, Marketing Automation Evangelist – Pardot, An ExactTarget® Company
Mathew Sweezey is a leading expert in marketing automation, specifically lead flow analysis and nurturing execution. His primary focus is in advanced lead nurturing workflows. He has worked with numerous lead technology companies, helping them create and execute their lead flow and nurturing processes.

Register Now

It has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? For those who don’t recognize the slogan, it belongs to Reddit — a social news and entertainment website that allows registered users to submit content in the form of either a link or a text post. The submissions can then be voted “up” or “down” by other users, which determines the ranking of the post and its position on the site’s pages. “The front page of the internet” is a fairly appropriate moniker when you think about it, since Reddit functions much like a [...]]]> The front page of the internet.

It has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? For those who don’t recognize the slogan, it belongs to Reddit — a social news and entertainment website that allows registered users to submit content in the form of either a link or a text post. The submissions can then be voted “up” or “down” by other users, which determines the ranking of the post and its position on the site’s pages. “The front page of the internet” is a fairly appropriate moniker when you think about it, since Reddit functions much like a crowdsourced news aggregator.

We can trace Reddit’s roots back to 2005, when co-founders Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian started reddit.com with just a single subreddit (category of posts): /r/reddit.com. For the first few years, posts to Reddit were primarily centered around tech-friendly topics like politics, programming, gaming, and science. It wasn’t until 2008 that we started to see the Reddit that we’re familiar with today: a site full of subreddit after subreddit with a growing focus on images and video.

So what sparked this evolution from a political and technology discussion center to a popular news and entertainment community? In many ways, it was a change in the way that consumers digest content, which forced Reddit to adapt in the same way that marketers have had to adapt their strategies over the past few years. Let’s take a look at a few lessons that marketers can learn from Reddit’s continued success, despite the changing preferences and habits of their users.

The Importance of Community

One of the biggest draws of Reddit, and perhaps one of the reasons that the site has been so successful, is its community. Registered users of the site who post entries and comments are referred to as “redditors,” a mash-up of “reddit editor.” As registered users, redditors can vote for or against posts on the site, giving them the power to dictate what makes it to the front page. Redditors also have the ability to respond to conversations and friend one another, building a diverse user community that is now one of the largest on the internet.

Building a community should be one of the main goals of your marketing strategy. You should always want to encourage positive discussion around your brand, because getting people involved is what turns them into brand evangelists. There are countless ways to start building a community — you just have to find the ones that work best for your company. Try starting a weekly or monthly webinar series to get some additional face time and Q&A with prospects and clients, or consider hosting quarterly user groups. You should also be getting involved in social media, because that’s where you’ll find many of the discussions taking place around your brand.

Empower Your Consumers

Part of what gives the Reddit community its draw is the power that the site entrusts to its users. In addition to having the authority to determine submission rankings, Reddit also introduced the ability to “create your own subreddit” in 2008. Almost overnight, several subreddits sprung up dedicated solely to pictures. Within three months, a third of Reddit’s content was sorted into subreddits focused on specific topics. Giving redditors the tools to sort their own posts added another element of empowerment to the site, bringing in even more users who were intrigued by “the Reddit system.”

Marketing is also seeing a shift toward more empowered consumers, who prefer to seek out content on their own time rather than have marketing messages forced onto them. Consumers now control their own pace through the sales cycle, which means that marketers need to be taking certain steps to make the content that consumers need readily available. There are several ways to do this: include a thorough and easily accessible resources library on your site; create buyers guides that consumers can use to guide their decision making process; include customer testimonials and reviews on your site for consumers who are in the midst of the research cycle; and attend industry events and trade shows to ensure that consumers can seek you out when they’re ready to talk.

Videos and Images are Hot

Let’s take a look at the evolution of the posts that have appeared on Reddit’s front page since 2008. On January 1, 2008, only 1 of the top 100 posts was an image. Fast forward two years to January 1, 2010, when that number had grown to 27 of the top 100 posts. In 2011, we start to see bigger jumps in visual posts, with 60 of the top 100 posts being images. And one year later, in  2012, 77 of the top 100 posts were images. This means that while images only represented 1% of Reddit’s material at its inception, the site’s content now revolves around images, which represent more than 75% of their posts.

The transition toward more visual content has been readily apparent in the marketing industry as well. With the marketplace now being flooded with content, consumers are gravitating toward posts that are easier to digest, i.e. shorter and more graphics-oriented. Why spend ten minutes reading an article when they could just as easily watch a video about it, or view an infographic? For marketers, this has meant a change in content strategy. To cater to these changing preferences, make sure that you are regularly posting visual content, like helpful graphics, checklists, short videos, and infographics.

If you want to learn more about the evolution of Reddit, and see some pretty cool graphs of posts and subreddits over time, check out this article by Randal Olsen.

Are there any other parallels you can draw between Reddit and marketing? Let us know in the comments!

These meetings are great opportunities to: - Learn about the latest in Pardot features and functionality - Enjoy interacting with fellow Pardot u- sers - Participate in relevant round-table group discussions on audience-chosen topics

The meetings are also great times to share what has worked for you in your use of the Pardot system, as well as learning and being inspired by fellow marketers in how they approach marketing, too!

Refreshments will be [...]]]> Calling all clients and partners in the London and Toronto areas! We are excited to invite you to the Q2 2013 London and Toronto User Group meetings, to be held in June, 2013.

These meetings are great opportunities to:
- Learn about the latest in Pardot features and functionality
- Enjoy interacting with fellow Pardot u- sers
- Participate in relevant round-table group discussions on audience-chosen topics

The meetings are also great times to share what has worked for you in your use of the Pardot system, as well as learning and being inspired by fellow marketers in how they approach marketing, too!

Refreshments will be provided at each meeting, and seating is limited. Please reserve your free ticket now:

- Toronto User Group Meeting – 19 June 2013
- London User Group Meeting – 20 June 2013

Looking forward to seeing you there!

They do the research, their post has some interesting points and useful takeaways, but once they hit that “Publish” button, only the content gods really know what will happen. Will the masses find the post and share it like crazy? Or will it just be another piece of the digital scenery whizzing past? There’s no way to tell for sure.

If you’ve ever published a piece of content, you understand this uncertainty all too well. Wouldn’t it be great to know [...]]]> Most content creators are hiding a secret: they have absolutely no idea how well their content will do.

They do the research, their post has some interesting points and useful takeaways, but once they hit that “Publish” button, only the content gods really know what will happen. Will the masses find the post and share it like crazy? Or will it just be another piece of the digital scenery whizzing past? There’s no way to tell for sure.

If you’ve ever published a piece of content, you understand this uncertainty all too well. Wouldn’t it be great to know ahead of time if a piece of content will be a hit or a flop and adjust before you publish? As unlikely as it seems, a recent article in FastCompany highlighted how writers in Hollywood are paying big bucks to have that ability.

Vinny Bruzzese, the prototypical power-suit-wearing Hollywood exec, is charging top dollar to use data to analyze movie scripts and gauge their playability. With millions of dollars on the line for studios and writers, Bruzzese claims he can turn a potential flop into a box office smash based solely on consumer data.

Although it’s going to be tough to prove the impact of such analysis, Bruzzese was able to predict the success of Iron Man 3 over its predecessor through simple analysis of consumer preferences (for example, audiences prefer modest superheroes).

So how can you predict the success of your own content with such accuracy? It’s easier than you think! Here are a few simple ways to use some of this data magic in your own marketing.

Lay The Groundwork

If you are using an analytics tool like google analytics, your first step should be to grab a report of your content over the past few months. Make sure your content is sorted by page title with a column displaying pageviews. You can then export this file into a .CSV file format and open in a spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel. All of the analysis that follows can be done with the use of the SUMIFS formula to total pageviews that meet your criteria.

Analyze Your Title

Just like the title of a movie, the title of your content is the first thing an audience sees, and they will almost definitely judge a book by it’s cover. Conduct an analysis of your titles to see which keywords result in the highest number of pageviews. Do posts perform better with a number in the title (i.e. “5 Steps to Award-Winning Customer Service”)? Which numbers perform the best? What about titles with questions? Words like “How-to”? You can get as specific as you care to, and you should!

Find Topics that Resonate

Just as you analyzed your titles for keywords that capture your audience’s attention, you can use the same function to track the topics that interest your audience most. If your website segments out content by category, you can perform this analysis with a simple sort. If not, you can still analyze your titles based on their topic, finding out what interests your audience most. For example, if you sell HR software, is your audience more interested in posts like “Analyze a Resume in 30 Seconds or Less,” or “How to Mediate a Workplace Conflict with Ease.”

Experiment!

The most important thing you can do with your content is experiment. Try new things, explore new topics, and constantly change things up. The more variety you put into your subject matter and titles, the greater the chance that you’ll stumble onto the perfect formula for engagement. As you try new things, be sure to analyze your titles and topics at least once a quarter. You will start to see trends and correlations that can help you understand your audience and dramatically improve engagement.

Even if you don’t have millions of dollars on the line for a potential blockbuster, using data to analyze what makes your content effective is an important and easy step every content creator should be taking.

Want to learn more about creating content? Grab your free copy of our “Content Creation Guide.”

However, you don’t need to head to the box office to see exciting updates like these. They are happening every day in modern marketing departments.

Marketing technology seems to be moving at lightspeed, creating new roles, new responsibilities, and new capabilities for the marketing departments bold enough to implement them. Just like the characters in Star Trek, today’s marketers [...]]]> This past weekend, the newest installment of the Star Trek franchise warped its way to over $70 million at the box office, once again showing the appeal of new characters, new technology, and new stories applied to an old paradigm.

However, you don’t need to head to the box office to see exciting updates like these. They are happening every day in modern marketing departments.

Marketing technology seems to be moving at lightspeed, creating new roles, new responsibilities, and new capabilities for the marketing departments bold enough to implement them. Just like the characters in Star Trek, today’s marketers have an almost science fiction-like amount of technology at their fingertips. From the real-time customer communication of social media to the round-the-clock efficiency of marketing automation, marketing has entered an exciting new generation.

Let’s take a closer look at these changes in the paragraphs below and in our newest slideshare presentation, “Modern Marketing: A Bold New Frontier.”

New Worlds to Explore

Unlike most departments, marketers have the unique opportunity to discover entirely new areas of their discipline as technology evolves. In the past few years alone, marketing has expanded to include social media, big data, mobile marketing, and content marketing, all of which were new and relatively unexplored. Marketers have had the opportunity to explore these new territories together, learning the language of each, and discovering their advantages and disadvantages.

New Team Members

As these new worlds are discovered, they create a need for new team members (or new responsibilities for the existing ones) to manage them. Marketing departments have seen an influx of exciting new talents. From the creative types driving compelling and engaging content, to the number-crunching data experts sifting through endless databases of customer information, marketing is growing into a well-rounded and diverse discipline.

New Tools

As new resources and talents are discovered, marketers are wasting no time in crafting them into a new set of marketing tools.The rise of big data has led to the rise of robust analytics solutions like marketing automation. These solutions provide a complete view of how your campaigns are performing across multiple channels, how efficient your sales funnel is at moving leads to close, and even how your prospects are interacting with your marketing campaigns. In addition, automation does much of the major marketing legwork, automating repetitive tasks like lead qualification and lead nurturing.

Check out the presentation below for even more information on how marketing is moving into a new and exciting generation.

Email deliverability may not be as fun to talk about as creative marketing strategies like social media and video marketing, but email is the heart of your online marketing efforts and the “Report as Spam” button is an ever-present threat. Even without intentionally spamming recipients, you could be making small [...]]]> The modern-day marketer has more tasks to juggle than ever before — not to mention the fifty billion best practices to keep in mind while performing each of these tasks. But if there’s one thing that today’s marketers cannot afford to lose sight of amidst the mayhem, it’s email deliverability rates.

Email deliverability may not be as fun to talk about as creative marketing strategies like social media and video marketing, but email is the heart of your online marketing efforts and the “Report as Spam” button is an ever-present threat. Even without intentionally spamming recipients, you could be making small mistakes that can hurt your deliverability rates and your email marketing reputation. So, before you send your next email, check out the “7 Deadly Sins of Email Deliverability” checklist below, and make sure you’re not doing anything that could potentially harm your reputation.

Also download our free Email Deliverability Handbook for more help with everything from warming up your IP address to keeping spam complaints under .01% — and more!

But with limited time and resources at your disposal, planning your first webinar series can seem quite daunting. With speakers to line up, topics to brainstorm, registrations to plan, and webinar promotions to handle, where do you even begin?

Luckily, when it comes to brainstorming topics, we’ve got your back. If [...]]]> Webinars are one of our favorite content marketing tactics at Pardot, and for good reason. For businesses looking to expand thought leadership within their industry, webinars are a cost-effective method to reach both prospects and clients. Plus, you don’t even have to leave the comfort of your chair!

But with limited time and resources at your disposal, planning your first webinar series can seem quite daunting. With speakers to line up, topics to brainstorm, registrations to plan, and webinar promotions to handle, where do you even begin?

Luckily, when it comes to brainstorming topics, we’ve got your back. If you’re trying to think of some ideas for your first webinar series (or maybe you’ve done webinars before, but are looking for a fresh new topic to cover), check out the list of ideas below. Don’t forget to consult our Webinar Handbook for some additional insight into the full planning and promotion process!

1. Host a case study webinar series. Talk to some of your clients to see if they would be interested in sharing their stories in a brief webinar series. Your webinar attendees will be interested in hearing how other clients are using your product or service, as well as any tips or advice that they have to offer.

2. Conduct a short-but-sweet “how-to” series. People are always interested in hearing tips on how they can do things better. Focus on covering a different topic with each webinar, such as “How to Build a Landing Page That Converts” followed by “How to Qualify a Lead in 60 Seconds” a few weeks later.

3. Invite partners, clients, or other influential members of your industry to host a webinar with you. Let them speak to issues that your audience will find interesting and relevant. Bringing in a third party to help with your webinar efforts can also bring in new listeners who might never have heard of your product or service…until now.

4. Host a weekly or monthly Q&A session with your users. Have them send in questions beforehand that you can answer on air, and leave a little bit of time at the end for additional questions. Spending this extra time with your user base will show them that you’re willing to invest in their success.

5. Host online trainings. Your users will also find a lot of value in a webinar series that focuses specifically on training. Schedule recurring monthly trainings that focus on different topics relevant to your product, and be sure to leave extra time for questions at the end.

6. Conduct webinars leading up to an event. If you’ll be attending or sponsoring an important industry event or trade show, host a webinar series focused on related topics to generate hype leading up to the event. Consider giving away prizes to users who attend 75% of the webinars in the series and bring proof of their attendance to the event, or try ending each webinar with a trivia question that will only be answered during your company’s speaking session.

These are just a few ideas to get you thinking about your next webinar series. Want more webinar tips? Check out our full handbook on the subject here.

As always, let us know if you have any additional ideas in the comments!

Description: Marketers turn to many different marketing channels in today’s marketing world to increase visibility for their company and company’s products. So, which avenues are performing and which are not? Through marketing metrics, a marketer can identify where their time and money are best spent – quickly.

In this webinar, join Zach Bailey, Sr. Director of Engineering at Pardot, An ExactTarget® Company, as he gives us an overview of how marketing metrics can give us the tools that we need to work in a smarter and more efficient manner. Zach will help us understand [...]]]> Date: May 23, 2013
Time: 2:00pm EDT

Description: Marketers turn to many different marketing channels in today’s marketing world to increase visibility for their company and company’s products. So, which avenues are performing and which are not? Through marketing metrics, a marketer can identify where their time and money are best spent – quickly.

In this webinar, join Zach Bailey, Sr. Director of Engineering at Pardot, An ExactTarget® Company, as he gives us an overview of how marketing metrics can give us the tools that we need to work in a smarter and more efficient manner. Zach will help us understand and learn:

• The value of marketing metrics
• Useful areas to measure, increasing insight into our campaigns and efforts
• How to measure the areas that matter most

Encore presentation from January, 2013.

Your Speaker:
Zach Bailey, Sr. Director of Engineering at Pardot – Pardot, An ExactTarget® Company

Register Now

Alright, so it’s not as exciting as climbing aboard the starship Enterprise, but the modern marketing team has new roles, new capabilities, and new worlds to explore that marketers could have only dreamed of just [...]]]> The newest installment of J.J. Abrams gritty reboot of the Star Trek franchise hits theaters today and according to advanced reviews, Into Darkness dazzles audiences with its futuristic technology and exciting glimpses into stunning new worlds. However, you don’t need to head to the theater to see technology boldly taking crews where none have gone before– it’s happening every day in modern marketing departments.

Alright, so it’s not as exciting as climbing aboard the starship Enterprise, but the modern marketing team has new roles, new capabilities, and new worlds to explore that marketers could have only dreamed of just a few years ago. We’ve put together the infographic below to highlight the ways in which the marketing discipline is changing and the futuristic new technologies marketers have at their fingertips. Let’s take a look!

Want to learn more about taking your marketing to futuristic levels of awesomeness? Grab your free copy of our new ebook “The Art of Marketing Automation.”

The first step to building a truly effective digital marketing automation program is to integrate your email, search, social, CRM, and web analytics systems. From there, marketing automation can help you streamline traditionally manual processes like customer segmentation, email marketing, and campaign management.

Want to become a marketing automation pro? Get started by following [...]]]> If you’re just getting started with marketing automation, then you’re probably ready to begin learning how you can use it to strengthen customer relationships, improve lead generation, and boost ROI. After all, that’s why you invested in marketing automation in the first place, isn’t it?

The first step to building a truly effective digital marketing automation program is to integrate your email, search, social, CRM, and web analytics systems. From there, marketing automation can help you streamline traditionally manual processes like customer segmentation, email marketing, and campaign management.

Want to become a marketing automation pro? Get started by following the ten steps below, inspired by our new (free!) Mastering the Art of Marketing Automation white paper.

1. Choose a marketing automation tool—and learn how to use it. Most marketing automation providers have an extensive library of resources for beginning users. Attend online training classes or, if you prefer to learn at your own pace, seek out web-based tutorial training options or free webinars so you can learn how to get the most out of your new tool.

2. Integrate your existing CRM with your marketing automation tool in order to sync lead, prospect, and customer data across platforms. With this integration, you’ll be able to view all of your prospect activity from within your CRM, automatically assign leads to sales reps, and more.

3. Experiment with autoresponders by automating simple, recurring emails. Since welcome and thank-you emails will be sent over and over again as you gain new subscribers and followers, they are perfect for testing the marketing automation waters. Experiment with autoresponders (email communications that are sent automatically when a prospect takes a certain action, like downloading a white paper) to see what kinds of messages you can automate.

4. Try some simple email personalization techniques like using substitution strings for preset subscriber attributes. If you’ve integrated your CRM with your marketing automation platform, you have plenty of information you can use to start personalizing your communications, rather than sending a generic email blast to everyone in your database.

5. Schedule your first social post. Use marketing automation to start making both immediate and scheduled social posts to all of your different social channels, all within the same interface. Just remember not to get so carried away with scheduled posts that you never log on to your networks—your audience still expects a human on the other end of your social messages.

 6. Identify the information that you need to collect for your marketing campaigns. Start with first name, last name, and email address, and then go from there. For example, if you’ve always wanted to start a birthday club, make sure you’re gathering the data you need (i.e., birth date) to make it happen. But remember that people don’t like to feel interrogated, so limit your forms to the information you need to collect, rather than the information you’d like to collect.

7. Integrate Google Analytics and Google Adwords with your marketing automation tool to consolidate all of your important metrics into a single system. Using this data, you’ll be able to see where your prospects are coming from and their conversion points at the individual level. At this point, you’ll also want to establish the key performance indicators (KPIs) that you’ll use to track and measure success.

8. Begin building basic landing pages, email templates, and forms using industry-accepted best practices. Many automation providers offer implementation services that will walk you through creating these assets, from template design to the content included in each. Landing pages and forms are essential to lead generation, so it’s critical to start building them right away.

9. Start monitoring visitor and prospect activity by inserting basic tracking codes onto your site. The granular information (collected by your marketing automation system) is the fuel that powers the marketing automation engine, so this is an important step to address as soon as possible.

10. Build your first drip campaign. Drip marketing, or lead nurturing, is a powerful lead generation tool that works by sending a series of “drip” email messages to your prospects over time. Even the simplest drip campaign can help keep your company top of mind, so your prospects are already familiar with your product or service when it’s time for them to enter the buying cycle.

Want to learn how you can get even more advanced with marketing automation? Check out the full Mastering the Art of Marketing Automation white paper, which walks you through a 3-stage process for automating your marketing campaigns.