04 Apr 2019
Brand Awareness, Content, Lead Generation, Marvel Marketing Minute Permalink

Marvel Marketing Minute – Surefire Ways to Establish Thought Leadership

April 4, 2019

“Thought leadership” is one of those buzzwords that gets tossed around all the time. But unlike other buzzwords that are trendy one day and groan-worthy the next (I’m looking at you, “guru”, “blogosphere”, and “low-hanging fruit”), this one is actually vital to your marketing efforts.

As a thought leader, you’re a go-to authority in your industry. You’re the first person (or company) that everyone thinks of. You’re the one that everyone looks to when there’s a new industry development. In other words, you’re the top dog.

So, how do you actually establish thought leadership?

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01 Apr 2019
Additional Resources, Best Practices, Marketing Automation Permalink

Systems in Control Part 1 – Keeping Marketo Healthy

April 1, 2019

How long should marketers and salespeople wait for the technology that enables them?

For example, what if you were trying to send an email but it didn’t send right away? How long would you wait before you had to abort an email launch?  What if you were trying to push data to Salesforce from another system but it took more than one business day? Marketing and sales users obviously find these situations frustrating, and enough system delays can silently wreak havoc on your business.

As a senior business partner at Marvel Marketers, I’ve spent much of my time helping larger clients improve their systems, especially when it comes to delayed business processes.  I’ve seen synchronization delays lasting longer than a week between marketing automation systems (like Marketo) with CRMs (like Salesforce). I’ve also seen a Marketo instance with so many workflows firing at once that the initial backlog resulted in multiple delayed email launches and other key data changes that took more than 3 full business days to resolve.

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28 Mar 2019
Best Practices, Marvel Marketing Minute Permalink

Marvel Marketing Minute – It’s OK to Manage Your Manager

March 28, 2019

Really, it’s okay to manage your manager!

I don’t mean to micro-manage your manager by walking to their office, demanding answers, and giving them tasks. You’d have to have one heck of a professional working dynamic to pull that one off.

Instead, my definition of “managing your manager” is to reach a point where the communication between you and your manager becomes bi-directional, and you feel empowered to provide valuable input and drive conversations. As a senior level marketer, I’ve been extremely fortunate to have come across strong and passionate leaders that encourage this type of interaction, and who provide their team opportunities to grow their skills.

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25 Mar 2019
Brand Awareness, Content, Lead Generation Permalink
Processed with VSCO with kp8 preset
Processed with VSCO with kp8 preset

Strategize Your Way to Video Marketing Success with This Superhero Step-By-Step Guide

March 25, 2019

Whether they’re product demo videos, videos that welcome people to your website, or video newsletters that nurture leads, video marketing is one of the best tools in a marketer’s arsenal.

Just how effective can video marketing be?

  • 5 billion videos are watched on YouTube every single day
  • 100 million hours of video are watched on Facebook every single day
  • Marketers who use video grow revenue 49% faster than marketers who don’t 
  • Using video in an email can lead to click-through rates that are 200%-300% higher
  • Including video on a landing page can increase conversions by 80%
  • 90% of viewers surveyed say that product videos help them make purchasing decisions

However, with so much competition in today’s landscape, you can’t post a video or two and call it a day. One-offs will not lead to success. Instead, you need a bonafide video marketing strategy.

Here’s a three-step plan for creating one:

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18 Mar 2019
Best Practices, Marketing Automation Permalink

A Superhero’s Guide to Flawless Marketing Automation Campaigns – 5 Steps That Prevent Villains from Tarnishing Your Brand

March 18, 2019

Growing up, my father used to say, “If you don’t have time to do it right the first time, what makes you think you will have time to do it again?” He was an absolute perfectionist. He was also one of those people who would sit down at a restaurant and find the typo on the menu before anyone else had even picked theirs up. One of the greatest lessons I learned from my father was about quality and the impact of quality on my brand.

Today, as part of the Marvel Marketers team of superheroes, our namesake commands quality. After all, a superhero has very little room for error. I find myself being called in to save the day on campaigns where all the information we have is “something isn’t working.” Almost always, I find that a solid quality assurance (QA) process would have caught the problem. The difference between good and great is frequently just the simple step of slowing down and checking it twice.

With these 5 easy steps, you can keep the villains out of your marketing automation campaigns.

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14 Mar 2019
Best Practices, Marketing Automation, Marvel Marketing Minute Permalink

Marvel Marketing Minute – 3 Things You Have to Do to Make Marketo Programs and SFDC Campaigns Work Together

March 14, 2019

As marketers, we are always trying to find ways to make sure our marketing efforts are tracked and receive credit when they drive or influence sales deals. Before we can start taking credit to closed deals, we need to take a few steps back and make sure we have our Marketo programs, channels, and status set up and in-sync with our SFDC Campaigns.

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04 Mar 2019
Marketing Automation, Optimization Permalink

The Time I Had to Import 50,000 New Leads into Marketo…

March 4, 2019

It wasn’t an unusual request from a client. Waiting for a data file to import leads into Marketo is one of the many things a marketing automation consultant does in a normal day.

Except this time, the list contained 50,000+ rows.

When I first opened the giant file, I crossed my fingers that it wouldn’t make my computer crash. After my silent wish, I knew I needed to quickly get a handle on this massive amount of data. At first glance, I could see a bunch of typos, and I knew this was going to be an issue.

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