If you`re a social media manager, salesperson, customer support rep, or executive, you’ve likely experienced social media overload or exhaustion. Each and every one of these roles requires busy people to go above and beyond to respond to fans, deal with people’s problems, or dig deeper to find unique opportunities.Continue Reading
Yes, it feels good to feel comfortable saying hello — and even sitting down for lunch — with your fellow coworkers. But did you know it can also make you better at your job?
Having friends at work directly correlates with engagement and productivity at the office. According to Gallup’s State of the American Workplace report, strong social connections at the office can make you more productive, and can even make you feel more passionate about your work and less likely to quit — and these are only a handful of the potential benefits.
Sometimes, I wish Google would just read my mind.
I usually have this thought after trying variation after variation of pretty specific search terms, like “recent social media statistics,” without finding what I’m looking for. You’d think those search terms would return relevant results — it’s not like I typed in “cool shoes” and hoped for the best. But they don’t — and after a few attempts, I just want to hand over the reins to Google and say, “Can you please just find me what I’m looking for?”
Alright, so Google can’t quite read your mind (yet …), but they do have lots of operators in place to help you find more relevant search results.
Pretty much all marketers are pressured to do more. Get on more social networks, write more blog posts, send more emails, run more reports, generate more sales …
And sometimes, doing more works. Blogging more, for example, can increase traffic and leads.
But other times, doing less is actually a much better idea.
Adding more and more and more to your plate can stretch you thin and make your marketing activities less effective. And with only so much time in the day, you’ve got to figure out how to get more results without actually doing more work.
When you’re first starting to create visual content, one of the easiest things to overlook is the image file type. It’s easy to get caught up in picking the right fonts, colors, and graphics to support your final project, so when you get to that final stage to pick a file type … you just breeze on past it.
But picking the wrong file type can be more disastrous than you’d think.
Pablo Picasso once said, “Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing? Can one really explain this? No. Just as one can never learn how to paint.”
Ladies and gentlemen, Picasso was wrong.
You actually can figure out why “two colors, put one next to the other, sing.”
Let’s face it: growing a company is as big a struggle as ever. The rules have changed, and will continue to change. What used to be effective, even just 5-10 years ago, no longer works. There’s an oversupply of vendors in most markets and customers have changed the way they buy.
For inbound marketers, we’re ahead of the trend in many ways.
What’s the toughest part of writing a blog post?
For a lot of people, it’s the conclusion. You spend a long time — maybe hours — writing the perfect article. You do all the outlining, research, formatting, and then you get to the end. Now what do you say?
A lot of writers whip out a half-baked conclusion, or shirk it altogether. But if your conclusion is lame, then the whole piece falls flat.
Every single day, 196.3 billion emails are sent or received. That’s about 26 emails per day for every single human being on the planet — and since, of course, not everybody on the planet is online, the number of emails per head per day is actually a lot higher.
The frequency of email sends, and the pressure many people feel to check their email constantly, makes it an appealing channel for marketers trying to reach their customers and prospects.
This post originally appeared on Agency Post. To read more content like this, subscribe to Agency Post.
We’ve all heard LeBron James talk about how he wants to be a tight-end in the NFL. People laugh at that. The youngsters don’t remember Deion Sanders and Bo Jackson played two sports.
For most marketers, the buyer persona is one of the first things developed when beginning work on a new campaign. In an ideal world, you have time to carefully craft personas through a combination of internal stakeholder discovery and direct customer interviews.
Unfortunately, timing can sometimes cut the schedule short. The number of customer interviews could be reduced, or maybe eliminated completely. You find yourself relying on internal institutional knowledge for your customer insights because your team already “knows” your customer.
This post originally appeared on the Sales section of Inbound Hub. To read more content like this, subscribe to Sales.
One of the biggest perks of a client-facing role — that you get to travel throughout the year — can also be its biggest drawback. As enjoyable as it is to grab a meal or coffee with your favorite clients, it can be incredibly stressful at times, too. Meetings take time away from deals you could be closing.
The best marketers I know are always on the lookout for clever hacks and tools to increase their conversion rates. They’re the ones to jump on Snapchat, or experiment with animated GIFs in email, or hack together a parallax scrolling landing page.
The best marketers I know also understand that these new tools and ingenious hacks don’t always pan out.
Our marketing agency Revenue River’s blog was boring.
Scratch that. It was boring and ineffective.
As an inbound marketing company that specializes in creating custom, beautiful websites for our clients in HubSpot’s COS, we were embarrassed when we looked at our blog compared to the designs we had implemented for others.
