Lead source is a critical piece of data you need in order to assess the value of your marketing campaigns and part of proper lead management. When done right, you can measure the value of your marketing campaign efforts and ROI. When done wrong, they can become “fake news.” DemandRamp Marketing Operations Manager Ronnie Duke explains how to set up your lead sources to get better data and better analytics and avoid them becoming fake news. 

A CaaS strategy reduces your marketing workload while yielding incredible results. This approach makes it possible to store and manage content from a single place, delivering relevant material to any device or channel precisely when it’s needed. For marketers, this fuels content reuse, multichannel distribution, and contextual delivery (i.e., content personalization).

Multiple factors contribute to the success of your Facebook advertising campaigns. Copy, imagery, optimization, strategy, and countless other factors all matter. But nothing will affect your results more than your audience and how you go about targeting them. Learn how to utilize Facebook ads correctly, and you are sure to see success. 

Personalization is about targeting content that is tailored to individuals based on their needs and interests. Why is this important? With the flood of content people are exposed to every day, they will only read what is relevant and valuable to them. The rest will just get ignored.

Flow is the feeling of complete and energized focus in an activity, with a high level of enjoyment and fulfillment - and when you’re in this state of flow you undeniably produce results and feel a deep sense of accomplishment. So how can we create more of this state in the workplace? Blueriver’s Senior Project Manager, Christine Ballisty gives her seven keys for creating Flow for her team.

Ad-blocking software has never been more in vogue, helping millions of consumers avoid disruptive marketing on a daily basis. Odds are that you might even rely on the software yourself. Given this trend of tuning out intrusive ads (which shouldn’t surprise anyone at this point), why do so many marketers insist on interruption as a tactic? Full-screen modal windows, this generation’s version of annoying pop-ups, somehow remain quite popular on the internet.

While interruptive tactics can be effective, marketers must first weigh short-term benefits with long-term costs. Full-screen overlays, modal windows, and interstitials may be highly visible, but they can damage the overall user experience and leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths. These modern pop-ups are simply a new breed of interruptive marketing that prioritizes business needs over the experience we’re creating.

Do you have clothes in your closet that you’ve just never worn? For a lot of companies, that t-shirt with the tags still on it is a lot like some of their marketing technology - purchased with the best intentions but never used.

Content Personalization has become a hot topic and many organizations are worried about missing a great opportunity to connect with their audiences and customers by not knowing where to start.

Marketing in a way that’s personal and yet automated is usually a point of confusion. However, according to Mautic Founder David Hurley, it is possible to do both of those things at the same time. Join Hurley to learn how marketing automation can be used to personalize campaigns, plus, four other marketing automation superpowers.

In order for businesses to continue to provide customers and prospects with the right content, via the right channel at the right time, they will need to embrace CaaS.

Designing a website requires more than a consideration of aesthetic principles. Between the growing complexity of brand storytelling and the role websites play in driving these content experiences, UX design has never been more important in making sure your content can do its job.

Content personalization has been talked about a lot lately. With so much content being created every day, content personalization is one of the most effective ways to help brands stand out from the crowd and get their target audience’s attention. The best marketers are delivering the right content to the right customer at the right time. But this is easier said than done.

We are drowning. From ads to content marketing and everything in between, we are drowning in a sea of branded messaging that is almost impossible to keep up with. But why?

The next time you're tempted to overlook the small details of whatever you're working on – whether that's a technology for a digital interaction or something as simple as a well-thought-out meeting agenda, remember this: How you do the little things determines how you deliver the big things. No grand experience ever came from blowing off the details.

I was first introduced to the concept of Flow as we reworked our brand story. The brainchild of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, flow is the engaged focus in an activity that brings an elevated level of enjoyment and fulfillment.

Creating a brand story and Unique Value Proposition isn't easy. But it's imperative if you don't want to fall into the "low cost leader" category of commoditization.

These days it's hard to get very far, when considering a new site launch or refresh, without coming across WordPress. Which is no surprise, considering it powers almost a third of the internet.

What is surprising is how often it's considered for larger organizations, especially when security and compliance with regulations like the GDPR can create significant risk.

It might sound crazy, but a few rounds of Cards Against Humanity can teach you quite a bit about content personalization. Players quickly learn that no content experience is neutral. A combination of cards that delights one player might flop with everyone else.

Getting your content marketing analysis right isn’t just about finding out how successful your strategy is and validating it to stakeholders. It’s the only way you’ll be able to make your content marketing strategy better and use it for achieving business goals.

Data visualizations that don't communicate a larger story don't succeed. While data lends authenticity to a story, when the story is overwhelmed by it, and context takes a back seat, you run the risk of completely losing your audience. Jon Gatrell from Pragmatic Marketing explores the steps to balance your data, design, and messaging.

Once we understand what influences how people make decisions, we can look at how they rationalize the decisions they end up making. By understanding the interconnected and constantly shifting decision-making framework buyers use, it makes it easier to get our heads around how 21st-century customers make choices with their money.

As marketers adapt their strategies to enhance personalization efforts to a human level, an ongoing challenge is to scale that personalization to stay consistent through multiple channels.

With the rise of the Internet, consumers today have access to gazillions of information pieces. It is the dialogue between consumers and companies which is critical to the practice of creatin

When it comes to lead generation with Facebook ads, your digital content plays a much bigger role than with AdWords or traditional display ads.

Wise business executives, content marketers, developers, and programmers understand that clarity is king in every aspect of their digital careers. And they use story to hack through the clutter, rise above the noise and be heard. Join Park Howell from the Business of Story in this webinar that will show why storytelling is much more than a marketing buzzword. Learn how to use this critical human skill to cut through the digital noise with your code, content and career.

Business storytelling in the digital world is like programming code: The cleaner it is the better the user experience. Park Howell from The Business of Story explains why the power of person-to-person communication is much more than a “soft skill”.

Contextually aware content can enrich online experiences by anticipating user needs, but it also demands that users have a firm grasp of the customer journey and information architecture already in place.

Join Peg Miller as she teaches you how to ask the right questions of your vendor to make better MarTech decisions, identifying common pitfalls and how to avoid them, at MuraCon 2018 in Sacramento.

While marketers are being charged with making technology decisions, we often lack the experience in evaluating technology and driving implementations, which can cause marketing technology implementations to fail.

What can marketers learn from Cards Against Humanity and how can you apply those learnings to your content personalization strategy? Sean Schroeder explains.

As this year's keynote speaker at MuraCon 2018, The Business of Story's Park Howell will show us how using the power of story to communicate what you make happen as a Wisdom Worker can advance your personal and professional missions further, faster.

In this first half of this conversation between blueriver’s Sean Schroeder and the Content Marketing Institute’s Robert Rose, they overviewed the current fragmented marketing landscape. To help marketing teams make sense of the terrain, both are ready with sound advice and critical thinking in part two of this discussion.

What does the future of marketing look like? No one has a crystal ball, but the rise of constant connectivity and an ever-growing list of channels is making marketers’ heads spin.

So what can marketers do to more effectively reach their target audiences in this increasingly fragmented landscape? To dive into the future of marketing, blueriver’s Sean Schroeder recently sat down with one of the foremost experts on the topic, Robert Rose of the Content Marketing Institute.

Describing the value in an audience is one thing, but how can marketers obtain one in the first place? If existing marketing efforts aren’t making the grade, and data stores in place now are incomplete, then where do you begin? Marketing expert Robert Rose suggests using great content marketing experiences.

Most creative individuals — whether we’re talking about rock stars, actors, or artists — don’t start with the audience in mind. Although they deliver content that appeals to widespread audiences, the creative process often begins as a personal journey.

Even though Steve Jobs is gone, Apple remains a premier storyteller in tech. Not every company is ready to emulate this example, but Apple provides a shining example of how to transform product messaging into authentic conversations.

We often talk about sales and marketing alignment, but there’s another alignment that needs to happen: marketing and IT. It would behoove us all to get these disparate departments on the same page.

As marketers, trying to keep up with today’s fast-changing marketplace can seem like a herculean task. Not only are there dozens of channels (everything from traditional print to the wide array of digital channels like social media and email, just to name but a few) but there is often increasing pressure on marketers to bring in more leads with fewer resources. To say marketers are stuck between a rock and a hard place today would be an understatement.

By combining the talents of many different diverse individuals, from executive to technical staff to content marketing teams, businesses can effectively SEO themselves and position themselves for years or even decades of success.

Software providers have responded to the demand of an ever-expanding, technologically evolving marketing realm with “plug and play” marketing solutions that promise to handle everything at the push of a button. It might sound like a dream come true, but is it?

We can get so caught up in the product and features that we forget who it’s actually for and why they benefit from it in the first place. “It's not about your products first and your company second. It has to be about the buyer. The buyer's at the center of the world." It has to be a marketing strategy based on the experience itself.
 

The binge-watching phenomenon has taught cable networks and digital content providers important lessons about customer preferences. The behavioral shift also offers invaluable insights for savvy marketers about messaging, storytelling, and customer delight.

By rebranding the city as America’s farm-to-fork capital, Visit Sacramento rewrote its narrative and brought it out of the Bay Area’s shadow. Sonya saw an opportunity to take advantage of the rising popularity of foodie culture while expanding Sacramento’s brand. Most importantly, the shift inspired residents to become brand advocates for their hometown.

With the advent and popularity of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and solutions based on it, there’s been a lot of discussion about which jobs will be replaced by increasingly intelligent technology. Previous jobs were eaten by the information age and gave birth to the Knowledge Worker. So what comes next? The Wisdom Worker.

Content personalization is commonly misunderstood. In this post, we define what it is, why it's important and provide an example of how we can use it as part of our B2B marketing mix.

Technology is constantly changing the way we live. From self-driving cars and omnipresent chatbots to automated marketing tools, it sometimes feels like humans are being edged out by our robotic overlords instead of fulfilling "the promise that technology allows humans to be better humans."

Personalization is all the rage in marketing, and for good reason. In a B2C context like e-commerce, it can dramatically improve shopping experiences but personalization in the B2B world is a completely different animal.

By now, most marketers have been schooled on the importance of lead nurturing. We know that, according to Forrester Research, companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales leads at 33% lower cost per lead. And we know that in order to keep our sales teams happy, we should educate and engage prospects before we pass them off to sales. But how do we nurture leads beyond the inbox?

Can you really talk about something as “way back when” when the “back when” is really just 20 years ago?  Well, you can when something as significant as the rise of the internet sits in the divide.  So here we are, talking about “way back when” in the late 90’s…

The difference between a drive-by view and a meaningful engagement with your audience is based on the perceived value of the experience—by the audience. Unfortunately, customer experiences are often defined by the experience we want our customers to have, rather than those they expect and need to have with us.

Our audiences don’t just want experiences from us as brands. They want creative experiences. They want us to surprise and delight them. But instead of doing just that, we marketers fall back and resort to the same old everything that we’ve always done, succumbing to all the reasons we hear about the ridiculousness of creativity.

Nurturing a lead shouldn’t be a disjointed series of assets delivered sequentially. It should reflect a progression of narrative, focused on the customer and across channels to create a connected experience. 

“When you think about people’s needs, you need to ask yourself what you already have that can help. The harder thing is aiming to meet the wants of your customer. That’s harder because those wants usually require something that you haven’t created yet.”

Content idea generation is both an art and a science, as you need to balance creativity with firm ROI. Like a gymnast, achieving this balance is no easy feat.

Described as a “rock star” of the marketing world, Robert Rose, the Chief Strategy Advisor for the Content Marketing Institute and host of the This Old Marketing podcast, knows how organizations of all stripes can create experiences that go beyond what we typically define as success.

Marketers have lost control of their brand conversations. Back when only a handful of channels existed, marketing and sales controlled the flow of information — particularly in the medium and high-consideration buying decisions.

When you hear “audit,” what do you think of? Taxes? Banking? The IRS? Either way, audit is too often akin to a four-letter word. In the world of content, however, audits are wonderful things. If your content strategy isn’t up to par, then an audit can be the jolt it needs to work effectively.

A day-long educational event focused on creating compelling, content-driven experiences by some of the best in Marketing.

Avoid the trap of putting your cart before the horse. Focus instead on creating the relevant, rather than the personalized.

With content marketing in the B2B segment, the increased competition for engagement has made traditional methods of distributing content obsolete. What you need is a more targeted content marketing approach, made possible by these 3 essential resources.

Marketers typically don’t think of themselves as storytellers. Creatives? Yes. SEO experts? Sometimes. Wordsmiths? You bet. But “master storyteller” doesn’t usually fall under their job description. Yet that’s exactly what marketers are.

If you want to craft content that generates results, embrace these tips to ensure that it’s well-planned and truly speaks to your target audience.

When creating relevant, content-driven experiences one of the important steps is mapping—and creating—content for these experiences.

Play Cards Against Humanity a few times, and you quickly find out that there are a few cards you can count on to get a reaction every time—and a few duds. Surprisingly, it shares an M.O. with what some are calling an integral part of Content Marketing’s future: Intelligent Content.

In an age where relevance is not only desired, but expected, we can’t underestimate the value and opportunity this dance with the customer creates. What’s interesting and unexpected, is how this dance becomes a conversation in which your response begins to tell your own story, even while you learn your customer’s.

Not all Nurture Streams in Marketo need to behave the same way. Learn how we used Marketo to create an advanced nurture campaign to convey a rather complex idea to our leads.

Marketers have their fair share of challenges these days, but delivering relevant content experiences doesn't have to be one of them. Learn what it means to Connect Content Marketing Experiences and how it enables building rich customer profiles and the opportunity to deliver increasingly relevant content experiences. 

In CAH, players tend to gravitate toward the most offensive pairings they can find in order to elicit the biggest response. Sure, this usually works great the first few times around, but as the game progresses, we learn more about each player—both by what cards resonate with them and by which cards they play. Once you learn that, you realize that if you want to win, you need a strategy to tailor your pairings for the wry, unassuming type as well as the bold guy with bravado.

“It’s getting tough out there.” So begins “Connecting Content Marketing Experiences: Three Keys to more connected and aligned technology and marketing agendas.” Author Robert Rose (Digital Clarity Group, Content Marketing Institute) is commenting on a particularly sticky challenge marketers face.

In the spirit of Cards Against Humanity, we’ve created our own expansion pack, “Marketers Avoid Calamity.” A mashup of digital marketing references and jargon, the pack is designed to mix in with the original game to create some, ahem, interesting content experiences.

Marketing Automation is great for users who enter your database via online methods such as landing pages or email, but what about people you meet in person? 

At its most sophisticated, intelligent content adapts according to what it “knows” (hence the termintelligent) about the person on the receiving end. Or should we say the persona? The Content Marketing Institute's Marcia Riefer-Johnston examines the apparent contradiction between "personalization" and "persona-ization."

Email marketing has historically been one of the most effective methods of digital marketing. But what do we do when email fails? How do we ensure our leads are seeing relevant content on our websites even when they aren't opening our emails?

We all know what it’s like to get that spark of an idea. We feel inspired and ready to take on the world with our blog post. The bones of the idea are there, but to make sure we’re credible, we need to see if the facts and figures back up our claims. With research, we can feel solid about the questions we’re asking and what we have to say in response.

As video marketing becomes more and more important, marketers need to look beyond the play count and access more detailed analytic data on users' activity to see not only who's watching these videos, but which parts they watched or which they skipped over completely.

Justin Gray from LeadMD shares with us why user behavior doesn't necessarily dictate the buying potential of that lead. 

When an industry gets caught in an economic downturn, it can be a challenge to not only generate leads, but to nurture them as well. For marketer Bridget Kulla of James Hardie Industries, it meant pivoting from B2B to B2C and going beyond digital to weather the housing market crash of 2008.

In the first of 3 interviews from Marketo Summit, Michael Litt shares with us some proven metrics on how you can use video to add more value to potential customers throughout their buying journey.

Marketo is great for tracking page-based activity on your site, such as the user landing on a particular page, or clicking a link. But what about non page-load actions?

Page views, and bounce rates tell only half the story. Here are some tips on the additional data you should be capturing to give you more insight into what your users actually do once they're on the page.

Personalization and the use of personas have both been hot topics for awhile now. Some argue that using personas just isn’t personal enough, while others argue that personalization doesn’t scale. But which is it?

There’s a lot of talk out there about personalizing content and having “one-to-one” conversations with buyers. And while personalization can yield some great benefits, it’s difficult to scale, with marketers citing the ability “to personalize every single customer interaction with relevant data and offers” as their biggest challenge according to Forrester. There's an easier way.

From Content Shock to CRaP--and an all around lack of quality content--the biggest threat to Content Marketing seems to be Content Marketing itself. By identifying some serious issues with the prevailing wisdom about messaging, we can see what we might be overlooking and how we might do better.

From our favorite sessions emerged a theme: No technology can drive results in the absence of thoughtful strategy with clear goals and tactics. 

We understand the benefits to our employees to create content, but how do we create an environment to give them the opportunity to see the benefits?

Useful advice on how to get your employees to generate great content and how to avoid common issues along the way.

Marketing, when done well, is both an art and a science. In an age where analytics and metrics tend to dominate marketing discussions, it can be easy to forget the creative side of the equation.

Personalization is, at its heart, simply tailoring a combination of specific messaging and content from a predefined menu.

If you’re a business owner or marketer, there may be a battle going on in your head.The conundrum you’re facing: How are you going to grow your business reach, brand awareness, and bottom line? The two opponents: content marketing and PPC (pay-per-click) advertising.