By Hailley Griffis
Every Friday, we round up some of the best articles we’ve come across in the past week and share them with our readers. Front and centre this time around are Marketing Tech Blog, TopRank, CopyBlogger and Business2Community.
Expectations on your marketing investment
Douglas Karr, President and CEO of DK New Media, goes over the importance of understanding where your marketing dollars are going, and how to optimize that. He compares outbound, advertising and inbound marketing, concluding that for a lot of people, inbound marketing is one of the best investments if you have the right resources and strategy.
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By Leo Valiquette
“True trumps clever any day of the week … It’s far more important to tell a true story even if it’s not perfect in all the details than to make up a clever lie.”
Character actor and memoirist Stephen Tobolowsky spoke these words during a September 2012 interview with National Public Radio. MarketingProfs contributor Jay Pinkert quoted Tobolowsky last week in an article about the value of using honest customer stories to create truly powerful content marketing material.
I’ve written more than once about the power of endorsements willingly provided by those precious entities who validate your existence by giving you money for your product or service. I’ve also emphasized the value of truth and sincerity in advertising, where real people sharing their real stories is far more potent than some paid actor posing as a happy customer, working from a script that has been derived from a variety of customer experiences.
But that article by Pinkert and that quote from Tobolowsky got me thinking about something else, a discharge of clever verbiage that can distort, distend and otherwise bloat marketing copy until it has a poor chance of hooking its intended audience.
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By Leo Valiquette
Every Friday, we round up some of the best articles we’ve come across in the past week and share them with our readers. Front and centre this time around are MarketingProfs, Ventureburn, Search Engine Journal, Fast Company and Convince and Convert.
Make content marketing authentic: The case of customer stories
Although many see content marketing as just that — marketing — smart marketers know that what they’re delivering is a great story. At the heart of that is truth, education, and personality — however imperfect it all may be. Jay Pinkert talks about the power of the customer story.
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By Leo Valiquette
I recently worked on a client’s blog post that discussed how an IT project can easily stray far from its original problem statement as it moves through an RFP process and the creation of a statement of work to the point where it finally reaches the implementation stage. What seemed obvious at the outset sometimes gets lost in process and procedure and in the desire of any external vendor to protect its own interests.
Does this sound familiar?
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By Hailley Griffis
Every Friday, we round up some of the best articles we’ve come across in the past week and share them with our readers. Front and centre this time around are Gigaom, Memeburn, Search Engine Journal and Spin Sucks.
4 tips for developing applications that end users will actually end up using
Jordan Novet dives into the world of applications and notes that although companies are realizing that complicated enterprise applications don’t cut it anymore, a lot of applications still end up getting deleted. He looks at how to give employees applications that hold real value.
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