Tips and Tricks to Make Your Brand Stand Above the Competition

The Key to Marketing Success

Ebook

3 Overview

4 Why Only Strategic Marketers Will Become Leaders and Brand Champions

6 Why Every Marketer Has to be a Real-Time Reporter

8 How Far Out Should You Build Your Editorial Calendars?

10 Why Content is the New Advertising

12 Why Neuromarketing Is a Must in Today's Advertising Landscape

14 Three Keys in Unlocking Email Marketing Success

16 How to Get Your Marketing Team Back in the Game 18 Featured Resources

Contents

In today’s world of marketing there is no shortage of approaches that professionals can take in order to positively position their company as a thought leader and innovator in its space, effectively rising above the competition. But which methods are most advantageous and which are archaic, ineffective or slow to yield measurable results? In this eBook from The Mad Marketer, you’ll learn about the most effective practices that enable marketers to elevate themselves in today’s ultra-competitive marketing arena. Whether it’s fast facts, quick tips and tricks or exploratory, avant garde methods, this eBook will keep you covered with an abundance of fresh concepts and game plans to take your marketing strategy to the next level.

Overview

Marketers today have had a large portion of their day-to-day activities moved to content creation,

such as writing email marketing messages, blog posts, white papers and case studies, just to name

a few brand assets. With that said, it’s clear that marketers need to be strong writers to succeed in

the 21st century digital marketplace that places a premium on these types of assets. As more and

more brands get into the content marketing space, however, solid writing alone won’t be enough to

make your brand stand out amongst the competition.

Rather, marketers need to be strategic in their

marketing forays and understand how seemingly

disparate pieces of content can be used together to

increase visibility, optimize content and maximize ROI.

To start, marketers need to be able to leverage

content by moving it from one asset to the next

quickly. For instance, a well-written blog post should

be translated into an email marketing message

for promotion, and then be posted on social media for even more exposure. In this way you can

weave content into a web that captures your target audience. If your marketers are unaware of how

these assets play together, the results will be disappointing.

Next, the strategic marketer will want to use neurological triggers to engage potential consumers in

their writing. In short, these triggers jumpstart neurological connectivity in consumers’ brains that

help them determine value in your products and/or services. When used properly, these triggers

(e.g., strategic pricing) are only noticed by the reader’s subconscious and are proven effective at

driving purchasing behaviors. If you’re not strategic about using triggers, they can be dead

giveaways of a sales-driven approach, which will likely repel customers.

Finally, marketers today need to be able to apply analytics to their content creation.

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Why Only Strategic Marketers Will Become Leaders and Brand ChampionsBy Sal Trifilio - Managing Editor, Mad Marketer

5

In doing so, marketers can leverage content that has proven successful to

craft new and original content similar in structure and delivery. For instance, keep

an eye on click through rates and impressions to see which types of content attract

the most attention to your brand’s site.

As the content marketing space becomes more crowded, strategic marketers will emerge as

leaders and champions of their brands’ values.

Become a Mad Marketer!

What makes a Mad Marketer? Mad Marketers are the

innovators, the first to step out of the box and those who are

always pushing boundaries to get their brand to the next level. You

don’t become a Mad Marketer over night. It takes experience, instinct

and an ear to the ground for tips, tricks and expert insights. And that’s just

what we want to provide to our readers: an online resource for all things marketing.

So take a chance, be an innovator, and click here to start being a Mad Marketer today.

Since CNN became the first network news channel to introduce the 24-hour news cycle,

journalists have been working around the clock to

bring breaking news to their readers in print,

on television and online. In fact, the ability to

break news faster and more accurately than

the competition is what separates a good

reporter from a great one.

Likewise, with the influx of content being

created and distributed by brands today,

marketers must put on their reporter cap

and create real-time content that touches

on popular trends, breaking news and real

world events to help their brands rank higher in

SEO results. In so doing, marketers can effectively

drive ROI and conversion from their content marketing strategies.

This emerging marketing trend is called real-time marketing and it involves the rapid creation of

marketing content to coincide with a popular event or breaking news event either as it is happening

or immediately after. By publishing content in this manner, marketers can get more eyes to their

copy by using the same terms and keywords that are ranking higher based on recent real world

events. Just consider that 2 million blogs are posted to the Internet each day, and you’ll quickly be

able to see why content centered on current events is more likely to stand out.

However, marketers—some of whom do not have the same formal training as journalists—are

struggling to keep up with their newsy counterparts. Recently, the social intelligence and visualization

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Why Every Marketer Has to be a Real-Time ReporterBy Sal Trifilio - Managing Editor, Mad Marketer

7

software company Wayin surveyed 200 top-level marketers to see how they

are dealing with real-time marketing. According to their survey, 98 percent

of marketers reported a positive impact from leveraging real-time marketing but

only 4 percent say they’ve been successful in responding to breaking news and trends.

Furthermore, the study showed that real-time reporting can be used to grow more

than just revenues. Some other key findings include:

• 56 percent used real-time marketing to successfully form customer relationships

• 55 percent used real-time marketing to successfully promote events

• 51 percent used it to promote existing content

• 49 percent used it to increase their social reach

Real-time marketing is an emerging trend that can

quickly separate your brand from the rest of the

competition. To learn more about content

marketing, check out this blog here.

Become a Mad Marketer!

What makes a Mad Marketer? Mad Marketers are the

innovators, the first to step out of the box and those who are

always pushing boundaries to get their brand to the next level. You

don’t become a Mad Marketer over night. It takes experience, instinct

and an ear to the ground for tips, tricks and expert insights. And that’s just

what we want to provide to our readers: an online resource for all things marketing.

So take a chance, be an innovator, and click here to start being a Mad Marketer today.

If you’re building out an editorial calendar for the content your marketers will create for your

brand, then congratulations: You’re on the right track for success. Since marketers today are

working in a landscape where more than 50 percent of both B2B and B2C businesses don’t have

a documented content creation strategy in place, building editorial calendars is a great first step to

getting out ahead of your competition.

To be successful in calendar creation, however, you’ll have to be meticulous about marketing

deliverables and how they fit into long-term brand

planning. Your calendars must augment the

effectiveness of your overall brand strategy to be

effective themselves. And the more forward-thinking

your strategy, the more built out your calendar can and

should be. So, how far into the future should you

extend you content planning?

To determine the span of time that your editorial calendar will cover, consider these three key

elements that go into every schedule:

• Marketing focuses: Your marketing focus should be the backbone of every calendar. Are you

trying to hit a new target audience? Are you releasing a new product or two? Have you decided

to rebrand? Whatever your focus, consider your short- and long-term strategies to address it.

Once you’ve identified your marketing objective, you can then determine the content load

needed to support it. Soon you’ll begin to see how far in advance you must build out

your calendar.

• Upcoming corporate events: Take a look at upcoming events for your organization. Smart

marketers will want to “swarm” these events—cover every angle—as they are great for

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How Far Out Should You Build Your Editorial Calendars?By Sal Trifilio - Managing Editor, Mad Marketer

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Are you a thought-leader or want to establish

yourself as one? Do you have a success story you

want to share? The Mad Marketer is seeking contributed content to

feature on MadMarketer.com. This is a great opportunity to feature

your brand and display your marketing expertise.

Writers interested in contributing can contact Mad Marketer directly

at contributor@madmarketer.com.

Marketers - We Want to Hear From You!

brainstorming multiple pieces of content to support the event before and

after it has taken place. Therefore, you’ll want to identify the events that have

the most potential for attracting attention and schedule content development

around them on your calendar.

• Yearly happenings: Annual occurrences both in your organization and around the

world in general can be marked on your calendar for content creation as well. For

instance, back-to-school season, New Year’s and the start of summer are all

“yearly happenings” outside of your company that can inspire content crafting

that will boost SEO, as seasonal searches are popular. Likewise, if there

are yearly fundraisers or events your company hosts, they should have

content created around them as well to show off some of your

brand’s personality. Pinpointing recurring annual happenings

that typically drive sales for your industry will help determine

when you should schedule content releases for

greatest impact, and will provide benchmarks for

calendar building.

There is no one-size-fits-all answer to the

calendar question; rather, each marketing

department or agency must determine

its own best schedule based on

an astute understanding of your

brand’s marketing focus,

upcoming corporate events

and yearly happenings.

Consider this: more than a billion videos are uploaded online every year; even if a tenth of

those were interactive, it creates an enormous opportunity in terms of ROI. An interactive,

motion-tracked video containing clickable “hotspots” creates a tangible emotional link between

viewer and the object they click on. That tangible link alone generates nine times more

engagement than a static link in bottom of a video frame. In a market worth billions of dollars,

advertisers who are able to create video experiences that are interactive have nothing to lose, and

everything to gain.

There are many barriers to entry for content, pre-roll

being one of the most common. While pre-roll

can be forced upon viewers ahead of content, its

presence is ultimately ineffective in that it cannot

compel views or force engagement. Advertisers need

to integrate brand presence within content and make

it something that viewers want to engage with by

welcoming it as part of their experience. Essentially, content itself is now advertising and the best way

to take advantage of that is by making it interactive.

There’s been a shift in consumption habits. The uptake in mobile is growing and more people than

ever are watching video via their mobile devices. Advertisers have a unique opportunity to leverage

the devices’ always-connected, inherently interactive touchscreens by making their video interactive

and compelling for consumers to engage with. Research from the IAB supports the importance of

video as an advertising channel, revealing that more than two-thirds of digital marketers and agency

executives expect to increase their digital video ad budgets within the next 12 months.

Whether it’s providing interesting content features that viewers can unlock by clicking right into the

video or taking an ad and making products within it shoppable at a touch, making content engaging

through interactions not only creates a bond between the consumer and the brand, but also makes

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Why Content is the New AdvertisingBy Sal Trifilio - Managing Editor, Mad Marketer

WIREWAX CEO Steve Callanan, an Electronic Engineering major, started his career in television – creating shows with

record-breaking audience share for all the major networks. He established his first production

company in 2001 producing movie trailers, motion graphics, music videos and commercials; and

was also producing over 400 hours of branded, short-form fashion and beauty content for the

four biggest lifestyle publishers. Steve proposed that online video content should be as ‘connected’

as the rest of the web; linking pixels to people, products and information was the goal. He engineered the world’s first

shoppable video player which lead to the most powerful interactive video platform to help hundreds of global

brands realize their video potential. Nike, Target, BBC, NBC, TBS, Xbox, Coach, Best Buy, and many more

have already enlisted WIREWAX to ensure their videos work harder.

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measuring ROI more possible and likely. The need for interconnectivity in

video also applies when a video is optimized for mobile. Interactive video views

coming from mobile devices continue to increase, from 23% of interactive views

coming from mobile in 2013 to as high as 50% in 2014 – and the trend continues to rise.

As an example, in working with Peugeot on an interactive “test drive” page, we

found that viewers of this pages were spending 1 minute, 48 seconds on average

interacting with the test drive functionality, as opposed to viewers of the rest of Peugeot’s

media campaign (ads, banners, etc.), were spending only 32 seconds engaging with the

brand. There was a 237% increase in brand engagement by making the advertisement creative

and interactive.

Advertisers must think about creating an experience rather than just creating video for mobile. The

endgame shouldn’t be just about re-purposing a TV ad and putting it on a mobile device –

advertisers also have to think about how to optimize the content itself to be more impactful on

mobile. Does the creative content view well over mobile? Is it engaging on a smaller screen? Are

there opportunities for viewers to swipe, click or otherwise interact with the content on their device?

These are all questions that must be considered by creative teams making content that’ll resonate

well on mobile.

Although not as obvious as Instagram disrupting photography or Uber the taxi industry, the simple

fact that video and mobile have indeed been on the rise for some time is not insignificant; their

impact on how we behave and interact with content has changed the game for advertisers.

“Hi, I’m branded content and I’m here to clog your feed. But don’t let me distract you,” says a

smiling Joel McHale as he delivers T-Mobile’s elevator pitch in a new online advertisement of a

multi-channel campaign from “The Un-Carrier.”

During the 15-second ad spot, McHale—who is best-known for his E! show “The Soup”—quickly

turns his jab at sponsored advertisements that clutter social media feeds today into a pitch for

T-Mobile’s cell phone upgrade program. The advertisement concludes, “See, while you were trying

to disable this ad, I snuck in more of the ad. How does that feel? Yeah, you just got advertised at.”

While this T-Mobile marketing approach might be

seen as snide, it’s a prime example of how

neuromarketing is changing the industry as a whole.

Simply put, neuromarketing is marketing ads,

campaigns and strategies that are based on the

human response at a very basic scientific and

psychological level. In large part, this newer marketing

approach is on the rise because consumers are

ignoring traditional advertisements.

According to a Goo Technologies/Harris Interactive

2014 report, 82 percent of American adult consumers

are ignoring online advertisements most frequently, compared to other channels such as television

and radio. Furthermore, while the report found that only 37 percent of the study group ignored

TV ads most frequently, the television advertisement sector is suffering as millennials continue to

“cut the cord” and dump their TV subscriptions for online streaming services.

To engage consumers in today’s advertising landscape, marketers will have to focus more

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Why Neuromarketing Is a Must in Today's Advertising LandscapeBy Sal Trifilio - Managing Editor, Mad Marketer

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heavily on consumer psychology rather than advertising frequency and

placement as has been the case since the television boom of the 1950s. With

neuromarketing, psychologists have begun the process, already unearthing some

counterintuitive truths about the advertising industry.

For instance, a recent study from the American Psychological Association found that the

use of sex and violence in advertising actually distracts viewers from the product that is

being advertised. This means that hundreds of ads over the years by brands like

Carl’s Jr. have been mostly ineffective on a very basic psychological level.

To maintain success and capitalize on prime advertising real estate, both on TV and online, marketers

should stop relying on the psychology that has lead to subliminal message—which we’ve seen is

ineffective in some cases—and start to look towards the psychology of engagement and

relationship building.

Budget dollars will soon prove to be better spent in studying person to person interactions and

extrapolating them into strategic marketing campaigns, than in studying consumer responses to

products. This is because on a neurological level, the experience of an interaction with a person

and a product are fundamentally different and therefore will not foster the same relationship brands

are looking to build today through social channels and online communities.

Until brands understand how their consumer base will react to their advertisements on this type

of neurological level, they will be unable to create the viral content that is so coveted in today’s

advertising landscape.

Those in charge of email marketing campaigns often find themselves being forced to walk a fine

line. Sending out email blasts can pass along valuable information to customers and attract more

traffic and commerce to a website. At the same time, however, marketers must be wary of flooding

customers’ inboxes with an annoying amount of mail, especially now in light of Google’s new email

patent that has the potential to reduce the search rankings of organizations that churn out a lot of

spam mail. With this is mind, email marketers should look to follow these best practices when it

comes to interacting with customers through email.

• Personalization: Every customer wants to feel as though they are personally being cared for

by the organizations they patronize. There is perhaps no quicker way to turn off a customer

(and have your message sent directly to the spam folder) than making them read a cookie-cutter

marketing email that clearly was just churned out to thousands of people. Instead, email

marketers should attempt to tailor their messages to individual customers. For example, emails

could use a readers’ previous viewing habits on your site to provide other links they might enjoy.

• Keep it Short: A third of all emails are opened on mobile devices, according to Freshmail.

With so many people reading emails on such a small screen, email marketers must work to

keep their messages short and to the point. Customers forced to scroll and scroll and scroll on

their mobile devices will quickly become disinterested and move on, and will be less likely to

open future emails. Thus, for email marketers, less is more.

• Call for action: All marketing emails should have some sort of objective behind them, be it

to get customers to read a post or make a purchase, or something else. In order to make it

more convenient for the customers, these emails should then also contain a clear call for the

reader to do whatever it is the email is trying to get them to do, as well as clearly labeled links

to point them in the right direction.

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Three Keys in Unlocking Email Marketing SuccessBy Andrew Bindelglass - Contributing Writer

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Following these three keys will

allow marketers to get the most

out of their email marketing campaigns

while maintaining the search engine

rankings they have worked so hard to

achieve. When used correctly, email is just

one more valuable tool for marketers.

Become a Mad Marketer!

What makes a Mad Marketer? Mad Marketers are the

innovators, the first to step out of the box and those who are

always pushing boundaries to get their brand to the next level. You

don’t become a Mad Marketer over night. It takes experience, instinct

and an ear to the ground for tips, tricks and expert insights. And that’s just

what we want to provide to our readers: an online resource for all things marketing.

So take a chance, be an innovator, and click here to start being a Mad Marketer today.

Marketers today have more on their plates than ever before. On top of the innumerous projects

they currently oversee such as advertisement, event planning and customer retention and

acquisition, marketing departments today are required to constantly churn out high-quality

content in order to solidify their brand’s digital presence and to stay competitive with industry leaders.

Just consider that nearly 70 percent of businesses are creating more content today than they were

just one year ago, and those companies likely have dedicated content teams in order to oversee

their content creation strategy.

With this rise in workload obviously comes the risk of

burnout, which you may have already noticed

in your marketing department. Symptoms of marketer

burnout include diminished attention to detail, finger

pointing and, worst of all, entire projects falling through

the cracks. However, there is a way to pull your team

back from the brink of seeming disaster.

If you need help getting your marketing team back in the game, consider these three tips:

• Reassign projects: Marketing teams are collaborative by nature, but chances are you have

projects that are unique to each employee. If your marketing team is running on fumes,

reassigning projects might be a way to breathe some new life into your department. This will

give marketers a chance to finally get their hands on a project they’ve been eying since day one

but haven’t had the opportunity to work on.

• Implement a “mandatory” break time: Many organizations have built in breaks throughout

the week, where employees can congregate and relax for 10 or 20 minutes. However,

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How to Get Your Marketing Team Back in the GameBy Sal Trifilio - Managing Editor, Mad Marketer

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oftentimes employees who are feeling stressed or overworked won’t partake

because they are afraid of losing the time. By making these social gatherings

mandatory—or at least suggesting they are—you can put your employees at ease

and break up the monotony of the hectic work day.

• Find ways to reward hard work: When you notice your employees are feeling

overworked and run down, it can help to create small rewards or friendly competition

to motivate your team. Rewards could be a free lunch, an extra work-at-home

day, or even the chance to lead the next team meeting. Whatever it is, big or

small; giving the team something to work towards at the end of each week

can help reinvigorate their efforts.

The overworked marketer is not a new phenomenon; however

combating burnout is something that requires constant attention

and creative solutions. What are you doing to keep your

marketers in the game?

Become a Mad Marketer!

What makes a Mad Marketer? Mad Marketers are the

innovators, the first to step out of the box and those who are

always pushing boundaries to get their brand to the next level. You

don’t become a Mad Marketer over night. It takes experience, instinct

and an ear to the ground for tips, tricks and expert insights. And that’s just

what we want to provide to our readers: an online resource for all things marketing.

So take a chance, be an innovator, and click here to start being a Mad Marketer today.

Resources

The Working Dead Have Arrived

The League of Agency Villains

Becoming an Agile Marketing Team

Need a Mad Marketer quick fix?

Remember to check back to the Mad Marketer frequently for our Multimedia Showcase, where we let some of the biggest brands in the business promote their marketing thought leadership creatively. This month the Mad Marketer is showcasing the results from Workfront’s 2015 Content Marketing World Survey.

Click here to view.

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