Anti-Putin protesters: Coping with bitter cold and big questions
Kirill Kudryavtsev / AFP – Getty Images
Two of the organisers of the upcoming opposition rally “For Fair Elections,” anti-Kremlin blogger Alexei Navalny (R) and former chess champion Garry Kasparov (L), speak as they attend a meeting of the rally organisers in Moscow, on Jan. 31, 2012.
MOSCOW – By any standard, it was an impressive array of individuals. Seated under a large poster of a young Andrei Sakharov – the Soviet nuclear physicist, dissident, 1975 Nobel Peace Prize recipient and spiritual father of their movement – the brain trust of Moscow’s anti-Putin opposition sat at card tables debating their next move.
The group was putting the finishing touches on the plan for this Saturday’s protest – an hour march through central Moscow and a short rally across the Moskva River from the Kremlin. It will be the third mass opposition demonstration in Moscow since the December 4 parliamentary polls that were widely criticized for voter fraud in favor of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s party.
Six weeks ago, more than 100,000 protesters took to the streets to vent their anger with the corruption and stagnation of the Putin regime. But since then, the end-of-year Russian holidays, followed by a Siberian cold snap with record-breaking temperatures, has undeniably sapped the protest movement’s energy. The organizers collective fatigue was palpable.
Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion, led the meeting. Not because he’s so smart he almost beat a super computer at chess, but because his countless arrests and beatings at the hands of Russian riot police had earned him the mantle. Seated beside him were the two young stars of the new generation of Russian dissidents, the right-of-center blogger Alexei Navalny and socialist activist Sergei Udaltsov.
Str / AFP – Getty Images
Opposition activists hang their banner reading: “Putin, go!” atop a bulding’s roof, just over the Moskva River river from the Kremlin (foreground) in Moscow, on Feb. 1.
Both men, in their 30′s, had recently spent weeks in jail on charges of organizing illegal protests. Now they were subdued, speaking occasionally, but more often just listening, scrolling through their iPhone messages or tweeting.
Opposite Kasparov, sat Vladimir Ryzhkov. He too had paid his dues. Once the youngest MP elected to Boris Yeltsin’s parliament at age 27, Ryzhkov, broad-minded and articulate, was seen rather differently by Putin’s Kremlin. The “dangerous” reformer has effectively been ostracized from mainstream politics.
“No doubt the Russian Winter is not as inviting as the Arab Spring,” Kasparov quipped. “But I would say that 30, 40 or 50,000 in this weather will send a message across the river to the Kremlin.”
But what message will that be? Putin’s propaganda machine will likely jump on any smaller turn-out, proving, they will no doubt say, that the protest is petering out.
By the end of their two hour meeting the protest organizers were clearly divided over what to do next to regain some momentum.
Navalny argued that the mass protests of December needed to grow bigger and more frequent to pressure the Kremlin. But author Boris Akunin argued that the days of the big protests were over. They were too costly, too time-consuming, and had already peaked. It was time, he said, to focus on smaller, flash mob-generated actions.
Misha Japaridze / AP
Russian opposition leader Sergei Udaltsov shows a V sign after he was released from a detention center in Moscow, Russia, Wednesday, Jan. 4, 2012. Udaltsov, whose jailing became a rallying point for the Russian opposition, has been freed after a month in custody.
Indeed, across Moscow, such “attacks” are growing in number. On any given day, small groups of protesters walk out of the city’s many subway stations, their mouths covered with strips of masking tape, on which is written “We Have No Voice.” They’re arrested almost as soon as they walk into the street. They also have tried cyber-attacks on the Kremlin’s Internet. Within hours of the launch of Putin’s own website, it was jammed by thousands of emails calling on him to resign.
And in arguably the most startling “protest,” several activists managed to hang a giant banner on the top of a building directly opposite the Kremlin for all to see. Painted on the banner, both Putin’s likeness covered by a huge “X,” and beneath it, the words, “Go Away!” in Russian. Amazingly it took an hour for the police to spot it and tear it down. But, while often hilarious, none of these flash mob tactics are likely to keep Putin from winning a six-year term in the March 4 presidential elections.
Kremlin’s photo-doctoring backfires big time
Putin himself seems to have come to that conclusion. Creating massive traffic jams in central Moscow today as his convoy skidded over the icy snow from one campaign stop to another, he’s got his swagger back. His camp believes the protest movement is too divided to coalesce around one opposition candidate. And, besides, the other official candidates – Communist Gennady Zyuganov, Nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, Social Democrat Sergei Mironov and billionaire owner of the New Jersey Nets Mikhail Prokhorov – are all Kremlin-approved because they pose no real threat.
Andrey Smirnov / AFP – Getty Images
A police officer braves the cold as he detains a demonstrator wearing a carnival costume of death who tried to take part in an unauthorized stage protest just outside the Interior Ministry headquarters in Moscow on Friday. The sign on the protester’s chest says “Corruption.”
So what happens to the movement if Putin wins? Ryzhkov painted a dark picture: “There will be mass protests starting March 5th,” he said in his Moscow home and office following the meeting. “And then we stay in the streets until reforms start and Putin promises new legislative and presidential elections.”
“You mean Tent Cities,” I asked?
“Yes,” he replied. “Like the Orange Revolution in Ukraine.”
And what if Putin doesn’t reform, but instead cracks down?
“Unfortunately Putin is a dangerous man. He can start some violence like [Syria’s] Bashar al-Assad or [Libya’s] Moammar Ghadafi. But I hope that if he sees a half million people in the streets, he will start reforms instead of violence.”
Many middle-class, well-educated Russians are calling the protests a turning point. But is it the beginning of the end of Putin’s political career? Or rather the beginning of an unprecedented second 12-year run of power for the only real leader Russians have known this century?
The answer is blowing in a bone-chilling, Siberian wind.
Jim Maceda is an NBC News foreign correspondent based in London who has covered Russia and the former Soviet Union since the 1980′s.
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25 Things You Could Buy With a Super Bowl Ad Budget
A 30-second commercial advertisement for Super Bowl XLVI is going for $3.5 million. Can you imagine what you as a marketer could do for your company if you had that kind of budget? If you can’t even fathom what you’d do with a marketing budget that big (and just think, this is just one of many campaigns they’re running this year!), we’ve come up with some ideas for how you can better spend that chunk of change. And if you’re thinking you’d spend it on a commercial during the Super Bowl, well, maybe these ideas will give you some perspective on just how far $3.5 million can go in the marketing world.
25 Ways to Spend the $3.5 Million Budget of a Super Bowl XLVI Commercial
1.) Buy 1,458 years of HubSpot Basic Inbound Marketing Software. Tweet This!
2.) Direct mail the entire country of Sweden. Tweet This!
3.) Hire someone to blog for you for the next 70 years. Tweet This!
4.) Put up a billboard along the highway from Boston to D.C. every one mile. Tweet This!
5.) Purchase 2,333 years of Salesforce Enterprise CRM. Tweet This!
6.) Buy inbound links from enough web pages to fill the Oxford English Dictionary 16 times. Tweet This!
7.) Use PPC to buy a search presence for 2,333,333 keywords after Google dings you for purchasing links. Tweet This!
8.) Give 2,060 employees their own personal version of the entire Adobe Creative Suite. Tweet This!
9.) Send those 2,060 employees to classes so they know how to use the entire Adobe Creative Suite. Tweet This!
10.) Buy the email list of the entire population of Chile and SPAM them; try to do it before your IP is blacklisted. Tweet This!
11.) Repair your company’s spamtastic image by plastering your company logo and tagline across 35,000 park benches. Tweet This!
12.) Hire Al Gore to be your company’s celebrity spokesperson for a full 24-hour day. Tweet This!
13.) Let everyone know Al Gore is your spokesperson by, ironically, printing enough flyers to stick to every single household door in the United Kingdom. Take that, environment. Tweet This!
14.) Buy the stamps to send out your 2012 holiday cards. Let’s hope you have 7,777,777 customers. Tweet This!
15.) Purchase about 35,000 shares of Facebook after it IPOs. Tweet This!
16.) Keep a web designer on call 24 hours a day for 4 years to change your website whenever you want. Tweet This!
17.) Commission enough content from the Zerys Content Marketplace to post a new blog to your website every hour of every day for the next 26 years. Tweet This!
18.) Hire the entire graduating class of Emerson College’s Masters of Marketing program to work in your department. Tweet This!
19.) Or, if you’re happy with your current team, you could send 23 of them to get their MBAs. Tweet This!
20.) You should probably also buy them all brand new MacBook Airs for their studies; you’ll have enough money left over to hoard 3,477 for yourself. What? Marketers love Apple products! Tweet This!
21.) Hire Lady Gaga to follow your CMO around all day, singing “Happy Birthday” on repeat, every year for the next 145 years. Tweet This!
22.) Develop 542 mobile apps. Because the other 541 just weren’t good enough. Tweet This!
23.) Purchase enough color toner to print brochures that can span the Atlantic Ocean from Dublin to Boston. And then back again. Tweet This!
24.) Pay to rank for the rarely searched keyword phrase, “best company in the world” for 11,666 years. Tweet This!
25.) Air 17 regular commercials on network television any other time of the year. Tweet This!
Now just think of what you could do with the additional $1-2 million you’d spend actually producing the commercial…
If you had $3.5+ million to spend on marketing, how would you use the money?
Image credit: Images_of_Money
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How the Third Wave of Media Is Transforming Marketing Content
As a society, how we watch, read, and consume information is fundamentally changing. News, information, and entertainment will never go back to “the way it was,” and this change will have a powerful impact on all aspects of inbound and outbound marketing. In 2012, marketing is publishing, so let’s learn how to be a great publisher in an industry under constant disruption.
This week, some of the most intense shots yet were fired in the battle for the eyes and mind of the world. Stop. Listen for a second. Do you hear the cries and confusion? Those are the cries of the publishing and broadcast executives.
As a marketer, you should be cheering.
Amazon’s Unwavering Assault on the Publishing Industry
Brick and mortar bookseller Barnes and Noble announced this week that it would no longer stock books published by the digital book juggernaut, Amazon.com. “What’s that?” you ask? “Amazon publishes books? But I thought they only sold them.” That’s right — Amazon is a book distributor AND publisher.
In the fourth quarter of 2011, Amazon said it sold millions of Kindle electronic reading devices, but the business still came in a billion dollars in revenue below Wall Street expectations.
But Amazon doesn’t care.
As reported by the New York Times, Amazon published 122 books in the fall of 2011. This number is seemingly insignificant when compared to the total number of books published by all publishers during the same time period. But what doesn’t matter, because a secret about the publishing industry is that it makes most of its money from a small group of best-selling books and authors. Amazon understands this and seems willing to lose money in order to take the best and brightest writers away from traditional publishing houses. And with more than $6 billion in the bank, it can.
Barnes and Noble, citing the lack of ability to sell ebooks from Amazon’s published works, has decided to return the favor by not selling the print versions of those Amazon-published books in its stores. This marks a continued battle for control over distributing the words of the world.
The Third Wave of Media
Salar Kamangar, CEO of YouTube, believes that we are in a third wave of media. At an event in California this week Kamangar said, “The first wave was the broadcast networks. The second wave was cable networks. Now, it’s about giving people exactly what they want to watch today.”
Mashable reports that YouTube has invested more than $100 million into premium content channels around niche topics including food, fashion, pets, and fitness, making it clear that YouTube is willing to spend money to be a major player in this third wave of media. This week, YouTube hired Bruce Seidel, who oversaw shows on the Food Network and Cooking Channel, to lead programming for YouTube’s new food-focused channel. According to a New York Times article, Seidel hopes to “discover new stars and galvanize the niches that are driving the internet food conversation.”
User Experience and the Third Wave of Media
Since the early beginning of the internet, pundits have discussed the rise of internet-based entertainment, but the fact of the matter is that online video has never really made it into the living room. One core barrier that is too frequently ignored is the user experience of watching online video compared to watching television. People watch television to relax, and having to click a new video to watch on YouTube every three minutes is not relaxing. Plus, you have the added anxiety that, for many people, the computer equals a device, and devices subsequently mean stress.
It is the deficiency of user experience that third wave media companies have to overcome in order to infiltrate the living room. But Kamangar, who plans to launch 100 niche content channels on YouTube this year, says, “The idea is that you’ll subscribe to a channel, and you’ll go and just keep watching.”
Niche AND Quality
The knock against many ebooks and online video shows is quality. The fact of the matter is that because anyone with a computer or video camera can create an ebook or online show, the quality and production value in many cases is much lower than that of traditional publishing houses and cable networks. That’s why Amazon is signing top-quality authors and YouTube is hiring some of the best minds in cable programming. Both of these companies understand that, to take over the living room, the core content has to be remarkable.
The idea of remarkable content isn’t anything new. However, content has the potential to become even more remarkable when it is applied to a niche. And that niche factor is the leverage third wave media companies have over the first and second wave media companies. Imagine if 100 new cable networks launched this year to cover niche topics. It simply wouldn’t happen. Online video providers and ebook authors’ best shot at disruption comes from a laser focus on increasing content quality standards while still serving and representing niche communities currently underserved by cable networks.
Change Is Hard: AKA Why This Hasn’t Already Happened
The fact that the world is constantly changing isn’t news to any of us. We write it off as a fact of life. Despite this constant change, we are at a paradox. Change is easy to hate, especially major disruption to our daily routines and habits. And it’s not that we as people or as a society don’t want to change. It’s the simple fact that change is exhausting.
Chip and Dan Heath explain this idea perfectly in their book, Switch. The Heath brothers write: “Change is hard because people wear themselves out. And that’s the second surprise about change: What looks like laziness is often exhaustion.”
The way we read, watch, and consume information is changing at the pace of a rapid turtle. This means that you won’t blink and suddenly live in a world where no publishers exist, but every couple of months, a stack of small changes starts to become noticeable, and the media world becomes slightly different. Before you know it, a few years have passed, and the media world is completely different.
Marketing in a Transitional Media World
It’s time to find your niche. The way information is distributed is gradually yet radically changing around us, which means you can’t wake up years from now and decide that it’s time to change. It’d be too late. Instead, you need to take action now to be an active part of this transitional media world.
Start executing on these four action items today to not only survive, but also succeed in the next generation of media.
1. Find Your Niche – Your niche isn’t the product you sell. Rather, your niche is the subject matter that is of greatest interest to your prospective customers. If you sell supplies to auto body shop owners, then your niche is content about operating a successful auto body shop in every facet of the business, even those for which you don’t have products to sell.
2. Balance Quality and Velocity of Content – The challenge of content in the online media landscape is that content has to be high quality enough to stand out, but also be agile enough not to be out of date the moment it’s published. The only real way to know what a good quality/velocity balance is for your business is to test different options to understand what works the best for your niche. You can do this by changing the frequency in which you publish blog posts and other content. Do you get more leads and engagement when publish a blog post every day, or once a week? Do blog posts that you spend more time polishing and improving generate more traffic and leads than other posts? These are the elements to test as part of your marketing content.
3. Have a Personality – Don’t be bland. Look at the text or videos that capture your attention. They probably have a clear point of view and an interesting tone. Don’t be afraid to be fun, sarcastic, edgy, or any other tone that aligns with your brand and products.
4. Start Planning Beyond the Desktop Computer Screen – For most of us, we still think of a computer as the device that sits on our desk with a big screen that isn’t touch-sensitive. But from the Kindle, Nook, and iPads to iPhone and Andriod smartphones, the definition of a computer has changed. Yes, these changing devices will impact your marketing content. And it isn’t just about their size, but it’s also that they all have one key element in common: touch. Start thinking about what your content looks like in a world without mice (the computer kind). It will have a huge impact on how we design our content and collect information from our leads.
Success of digital-only magazines like the Daily demonstrate that consumers are willing to not only consume but also pay for touchable content that is personalized for their devices. Survey your target audience, and understand what devices they are using to consume information. Then make sure your content works well on the most popular devices.
Change is here.
Image Credit: Ariane Middel
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Two Americans kidnapped in Egypt
What we’re following:
- Two Americans kidnapped in Egypt
- Jobless rate drops to lowest level in almost three years
- Fears grow that Israel will attack Iran
And did you see…
- Top Komen official resigns in protest over grants cuts
- Major winter storm slamming Colorado
- Movie characters brawl in Hollywood
How to Tackle Your 5 Toughest Email Marketing Challenges
Email is a powerful marketing channel, but it’s also one that presents many questions and difficulties. In its 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, MarketingSherpa surveyed 2,735 companies and asked them to rank the significance of 12 common email marketing challenges. In this blog post, we will focus on the top five challenges and suggest some ideas through which you can address these issues.
The best inbound marketers like to amass valuable data across their different channels. For instance, they might like to see the possible relationships between landing pages and emails or track the sales process of an email conversion. In addition to the obvious reporting benefits such integrations provide, they also open the door to a much more enjoyable experience for email subscribers.
Just think about it: if you could bridge the gap between email marketing performance and social media activities, landing page conversions, or new customer acquisitions, you are that much closer to improving your sales funnel and delivering content that your community loves.
‘Other data,’ including form submissions and activities on site, can point you to the resources your recipients are truly interested in. In that way, you have a clear understanding of how to further engage them through careful targeting and segmentation.
Solution: Integrate Your Data Systems
In order to integrate your email marketing with your other data systems, you need to use marketing software that allows for that integration to take place. In fact, integration is the foundation on which HubSpot’s software was built as it connects SEO, blogging, social media, lead management, and reporting with email marketing and lead nurturing.
Combining your different marketing databases allows for clear segmentation and the ability to better target your customers and prospects with relevant email messages. Once you have access to an integrated marketing system, keep your buyer persona in mind and focus on the opportunity to target the right audience with the right message.
The more targeted your email campaigns, the more content you’ll need. The key to promoting relevant content in email is to provide an offer that is connected to the initial request. What action have your contacts taken on (or even off) your website? Offer them content that fits with their intent and their needs.
Deliverability rate is the percentage of email messages delivered to your recipients’ inboxes
versus the total number of messages sent. It tells you how many of the emails bounced back,
and it’s a sure sign of inactivity. The two factors that influence deliverability rate are soft bounces and hard bounces. The soft bounce is temporary and occurs when an email server rejects an incoming message (for instance, when your recipients’ inboxes are full). A hard bounce, on the other hand, is less benign and represents a permanent error to deliver an email. This generally occurs when the addresses you send to are bad or don’t exist.
A low deliverability rate might get you blocked by ISPs (internet service providers). If your list is full of inactive emails, you don’t really know what your complaint rate is. Sure, you probably look at the total complaints over total list size, but ISPs are actually registering the total number of complaints over the number of active email users.
In addition, ISPs can mark abandoned email addresses as spam traps. So even if you have acquired emails legitimately, the abandoned addresses may have turned into spam traps. Aside from all the ISP problems, low deliverability rate also means you are wasting money sending messages to nonexistent addresses.
Solution: Practice Good Email Hygiene
Start by cleaning up your email list by removing the unengaged addresses. (You can identify these addresses with metrics such as opens, clicks, or website activity.) If you have a really serious problem with deliverability, you might want to redefine your opt-in process to prevent invalid emails from getting on your list. Either ask people to enter their email twice or experiment with double opt-in. Lastly, make sure your recipients have an opportunity to update their email addresses. Invite them to your preference center from every email you send. That might also help you with segmentation and achieving higher engagement overall.
In MarketingSherpa’s survey, marketing professionals shared that their third most serious challenge in respect to email marketing is growing and retaining subscribers. No wonder! Increasing the size of your email list and keeping your contacts engaged in your messages is no easy task. In fact, according to MarketingSherpa, the average email list depreciates by 25% every year.
Unfortunately, companies often battle this problem by purchasing lists. This practice will surely get you into trouble: it might add invalid addresses to your list, and thus, pollute your entire database. Even if the addresses you acquired are valid, the new recipients will most likely not be interested in your content and either unsubscribe or not engage with your emails altogether.
To retain subscribers, a lot of companies also send fewer emails, thinking that the communication frequency might in some way define engagement. A few emails means they are more special, right? Wrong. Frequency of emailing, as we have established in our Science of Email Marketing research, doesn’t necessarily negatively impact subscriber retention.
Solution: Earn Your Email Subscribers
Don’t purchase email lists; instead, earn your subscribers. Be clear to your target audience about what they will get out of subscribing to your emails. Give them a clear description of what the value proposition is. For example, will your emails offer: (1) tips and tools on how to run their business more efficiently, (2) product updates from your company, or (3) special offers via email? Your audience will want to know “why” they should subscribe before they decide to clutter their inbox with even more emails.
Are you concerned that you are emailing your subscribers too often? Give this thought a break and instead ask yourself if you are emailing the right people with the right message. In order to retain your email subscribers, you’ll need to provide them with ongoing value that is targeted to their needs. Make sure you are segmenting based on knowledge you have about your recipients.
Don’t limit your email testing to subject lines. Embrace testing of various elements in your email marketing efforts to optimize email performance. For instance, you can do A/B testing of the landing pages you’re promoting in your emails.
Achieving measurable ROI (return on investment) is another challenge that marketing professionals face in the land of email marketing. It’s difficult for them to connect the dots between the messages they send out to prospective customers and the moment when these subscribers get further engaged and turn into customers.
Interestingly enough, this problem is tightly connected to challenge number one — integrating email marketing with other data systems. When your marketing channels are not speaking to one another, it’s hard to identify how they affect conversions. For instance, you might see that your email blast got a 3.4% click-through rate (CTR), but can you also see if that communication contributed to generating new leads? What is more, do you see if it resulted in any new customers?
Solution: Closed-Loop Marketing
The solution to achieving measurable ROI from your email marketing campaigns is to practice closed-loop marketing. Follow a contact from the point of visiting your website through further engagement (viewing other web pages, downloading resources, clicking on your emails), to her final conversion into a customer. Implementing closed-loop marketing empowers you to track leads from their initial channel through a first conversion all the way to becoming customers. Such intelligence, in turn, enables you to identify your most powerful marketing channels and assign clear value to each of them. In this way, you will be able to measure the ROI not only of your emails, but also of your other efforts, which might include social media marketing and blogging.
Your email campaigns should only be a part of your holistic marketing approach. The real power comes from achieving a strong marketing mix. Email cannot be truly as fruitful just by itself; rather, it should also strengthen your other initiatives, just like you shouldn’t use social media in a vacuum, only rely on blogging, or trust that search engine optimization is enough to meet your goals. This, however, seems to be a challenge for marketers. How do you optimize your sales and marketing funnel with emails?
Most marketing professionals are accustomed to sending one-time email blasts that are not necessarily related to the actions of their email subscribers, their interests, or needs. Such a practice doesn’t help push leads down the sales funnel, and it can actually alienate them.
Solution: Nurture Your Leads
Lead nurturing sometimes goes by other names: marketing automation, drip marketing, auto-responders, etc. Simply put, lead nurturing is a system that allows you to send an automated series of emails to an early stage lead in order to better qualify them before handing them over to your sales team.
If it typically takes your leads a month to make a purchasing decision, then make sure you’re spreading out your communications to keep them engaged throughout the month. By taking this approach, you save your sales organization time because you educate and qualify the lead overtime.
Among some of the key benefits of lead nurturing is that it enables marketers to establish contact with their fresh leads fast and stay top of mind for potential, and even current, customers. In comparison to email marketing, lead nurturing is also relatively easy to set up because it is automated and doesn’t need a ton of maintenance over time.
What are some of your top email marketing challenges? Do you have any to add to this list?
This blog post is an excerpt from the ebook Introduction to Email Marketing. To gain a better foundation on executing and measuring successful email marketing, download your free copy of the ebook.
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How to Tackle Your 5 Toughest Email Marketing Challenges
Email is a powerful marketing channel, but it’s also one that presents many questions and difficulties. In its 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, MarketingSherpa surveyed 2,735 companies and asked them to rank the significance of 12 common email marketing challenges. In this blog post, we will focus on the top five challenges and suggest some ideas through which you can address these issues.
The best inbound marketers like to amass valuable data across their different channels. For instance, they might like to see the possible relationships between landing pages and emails or track the sales process of an email conversion. In addition to the obvious reporting benefits such integrations provide, they also open the door to a much more enjoyable experience for email subscribers.
Just think about it: if you could bridge the gap between email marketing performance and social media activities, landing page conversions, or new customer acquisitions, you are that much closer to improving your sales funnel and delivering content that your community loves.
‘Other data,’ including form submissions and activities on site, can point you to the resources your recipients are truly interested in. In that way, you have a clear understanding of how to further engage them through careful targeting and segmentation.
Solution: Integrate Your Data Systems
In order to integrate your email marketing with your other data systems, you need to use marketing software that allows for that integration to take place. In fact, integration is the foundation on which HubSpot’s software was built as it connects SEO, blogging, social media, lead management, and reporting with email marketing and lead nurturing.
Combining your different marketing databases allows for clear segmentation and the ability to better target your customers and prospects with relevant email messages. Once you have access to an integrated marketing system, keep your buyer persona in mind and focus on the opportunity to target the right audience with the right message.
The more targeted your email campaigns, the more content you’ll need. The key to promoting relevant content in email is to provide an offer that is connected to the initial request. What action have your contacts taken on (or even off) your website? Offer them content that fits with their intent and their needs.
Deliverability rate is the percentage of email messages delivered to your recipients’ inboxes
versus the total number of messages sent. It tells you how many of the emails bounced back,
and it’s a sure sign of inactivity. The two factors that influence deliverability rate are soft bounces and hard bounces. The soft bounce is temporary and occurs when an email server rejects an incoming message (for instance, when your recipients’ inboxes are full). A hard bounce, on the other hand, is less benign and represents a permanent error to deliver an email. This generally occurs when the addresses you send to are bad or don’t exist.
A low deliverability rate might get you blocked by ISPs (internet service providers). If your list is full of inactive emails, you don’t really know what your complaint rate is. Sure, you probably look at the total complaints over total list size, but ISPs are actually registering the total number of complaints over the number of active email users.
In addition, ISPs can mark abandoned email addresses as spam traps. So even if you have acquired emails legitimately, the abandoned addresses may have turned into spam traps. Aside from all the ISP problems, low deliverability rate also means you are wasting money sending messages to nonexistent addresses.
Solution: Practice Good Email Hygiene
Start by cleaning up your email list by removing the unengaged addresses. (You can identify these addresses with metrics such as opens, clicks, or website activity.) If you have a really serious problem with deliverability, you might want to redefine your opt-in process to prevent invalid emails from getting on your list. Either ask people to enter their email twice or experiment with double opt-in. Lastly, make sure your recipients have an opportunity to update their email addresses. Invite them to your preference center from every email you send. That might also help you with segmentation and achieving higher engagement overall.
In MarketingSherpa’s survey, marketing professionals shared that their third most serious challenge in respect to email marketing is growing and retaining subscribers. No wonder! Increasing the size of your email list and keeping your contacts engaged in your messages is no easy task. In fact, according to MarketingSherpa, the average email list depreciates by 25% every year.
Unfortunately, companies often battle this problem by purchasing lists. This practice will surely get you into trouble: it might add invalid addresses to your list, and thus, pollute your entire database. Even if the addresses you acquired are valid, the new recipients will most likely not be interested in your content and either unsubscribe or not engage with your emails altogether.
To retain subscribers, a lot of companies also send fewer emails, thinking that the communication frequency might in some way define engagement. A few emails means they are more special, right? Wrong. Frequency of emailing, as we have established in our Science of Email Marketing research, doesn’t necessarily negatively impact subscriber retention.
Solution: Earn Your Email Subscribers
Don’t purchase email lists; instead, earn your subscribers. Be clear to your target audience about what they will get out of subscribing to your emails. Give them a clear description of what the value proposition is. For example, will your emails offer: (1) tips and tools on how to run their business more efficiently, (2) product updates from your company, or (3) special offers via email? Your audience will want to know “why” they should subscribe before they decide to clutter their inbox with even more emails.
Are you concerned that you are emailing your subscribers too often? Give this thought a break and instead ask yourself if you are emailing the right people with the right message. In order to retain your email subscribers, you’ll need to provide them with ongoing value that is targeted to their needs. Make sure you are segmenting based on knowledge you have about your recipients.
Don’t limit your email testing to subject lines. Embrace testing of various elements in your email marketing efforts to optimize email performance. For instance, you can do A/B testing of the landing pages you’re promoting in your emails.
Achieving measurable ROI (return on investment) is another challenge that marketing professionals face in the land of email marketing. It’s difficult for them to connect the dots between the messages they send out to prospective customers and the moment when these subscribers get further engaged and turn into customers.
Interestingly enough, this problem is tightly connected to challenge number one — integrating email marketing with other data systems. When your marketing channels are not speaking to one another, it’s hard to identify how they affect conversions. For instance, you might see that your email blast got a 3.4% click-through rate (CTR), but can you also see if that communication contributed to generating new leads? What is more, do you see if it resulted in any new customers?
Solution: Closed-Loop Marketing
The solution to achieving measurable ROI from your email marketing campaigns is to practice closed-loop marketing. Follow a contact from the point of visiting your website through further engagement (viewing other web pages, downloading resources, clicking on your emails), to her final conversion into a customer. Implementing closed-loop marketing empowers you to track leads from their initial channel through a first conversion all the way to becoming customers. Such intelligence, in turn, enables you to identify your most powerful marketing channels and assign clear value to each of them. In this way, you will be able to measure the ROI not only of your emails, but also of your other efforts, which might include social media marketing and blogging.
Your email campaigns should only be a part of your holistic marketing approach. The real power comes from achieving a strong marketing mix. Email cannot be truly as fruitful just by itself; rather, it should also strengthen your other initiatives, just like you shouldn’t use social media in a vacuum, only rely on blogging, or trust that search engine optimization is enough to meet your goals. This, however, seems to be a challenge for marketers. How do you optimize your sales and marketing funnel with emails?
Most marketing professionals are accustomed to sending one-time email blasts that are not necessarily related to the actions of their email subscribers, their interests, or needs. Such a practice doesn’t help push leads down the sales funnel, and it can actually alienate them.
Solution: Nurture Your Leads
Lead nurturing sometimes goes by other names: marketing automation, drip marketing, auto-responders, etc. Simply put, lead nurturing is a system that allows you to send an automated series of emails to an early stage lead in order to better qualify them before handing them over to your sales team.
If it typically takes your leads a month to make a purchasing decision, then make sure you’re spreading out your communications to keep them engaged throughout the month. By taking this approach, you save your sales organization time because you educate and qualify the lead overtime.
Among some of the key benefits of lead nurturing is that it enables marketers to establish contact with their fresh leads fast and stay top of mind for potential, and even current, customers. In comparison to email marketing, lead nurturing is also relatively easy to set up because it is automated and doesn’t need a ton of maintenance over time.
What are some of your top email marketing challenges? Do you have any to add to this list?
This blog post is an excerpt from the ebook Introduction to Email Marketing. To gain a better foundation on executing and measuring successful email marketing, download your free copy of the ebook.
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How to Tackle Your 5 Toughest Email Marketing Challenges
Email is a powerful marketing channel, but it’s also one that presents many questions and difficulties. In its 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, MarketingSherpa surveyed 2,735 companies and asked them to rank the significance of 12 common email marketing challenges. In this blog post, we will focus on the top five challenges and suggest some ideas through which you can address these issues.
The best inbound marketers like to amass valuable data across their different channels. For instance, they might like to see the possible relationships between landing pages and emails or track the sales process of an email conversion. In addition to the obvious reporting benefits such integrations provide, they also open the door to a much more enjoyable experience for email subscribers.
Just think about it: if you could bridge the gap between email marketing performance and social media activities, landing page conversions, or new customer acquisitions, you are that much closer to improving your sales funnel and delivering content that your community loves.
‘Other data,’ including form submissions and activities on site, can point you to the resources your recipients are truly interested in. In that way, you have a clear understanding of how to further engage them through careful targeting and segmentation.
Solution: Integrate Your Data Systems
In order to integrate your email marketing with your other data systems, you need to use marketing software that allows for that integration to take place. In fact, integration is the foundation on which HubSpot’s software was built as it connects SEO, blogging, social media, lead management, and reporting with email marketing and lead nurturing.
Combining your different marketing databases allows for clear segmentation and the ability to better target your customers and prospects with relevant email messages. Once you have access to an integrated marketing system, keep your buyer persona in mind and focus on the opportunity to target the right audience with the right message.
The more targeted your email campaigns, the more content you’ll need. The key to promoting relevant content in email is to provide an offer that is connected to the initial request. What action have your contacts taken on (or even off) your website? Offer them content that fits with their intent and their needs.
Deliverability rate is the percentage of email messages delivered to your recipients’ inboxes
versus the total number of messages sent. It tells you how many of the emails bounced back,
and it’s a sure sign of inactivity. The two factors that influence deliverability rate are soft bounces and hard bounces. The soft bounce is temporary and occurs when an email server rejects an incoming message (for instance, when your recipients’ inboxes are full). A hard bounce, on the other hand, is less benign and represents a permanent error to deliver an email. This generally occurs when the addresses you send to are bad or don’t exist.
A low deliverability rate might get you blocked by ISPs (internet service providers). If your list is full of inactive emails, you don’t really know what your complaint rate is. Sure, you probably look at the total complaints over total list size, but ISPs are actually registering the total number of complaints over the number of active email users.
In addition, ISPs can mark abandoned email addresses as spam traps. So even if you have acquired emails legitimately, the abandoned addresses may have turned into spam traps. Aside from all the ISP problems, low deliverability rate also means you are wasting money sending messages to nonexistent addresses.
Solution: Practice Good Email Hygiene
Start by cleaning up your email list by removing the unengaged addresses. (You can identify these addresses with metrics such as opens, clicks, or website activity.) If you have a really serious problem with deliverability, you might want to redefine your opt-in process to prevent invalid emails from getting on your list. Either ask people to enter their email twice or experiment with double opt-in. Lastly, make sure your recipients have an opportunity to update their email addresses. Invite them to your preference center from every email you send. That might also help you with segmentation and achieving higher engagement overall.
In MarketingSherpa’s survey, marketing professionals shared that their third most serious challenge in respect to email marketing is growing and retaining subscribers. No wonder! Increasing the size of your email list and keeping your contacts engaged in your messages is no easy task. In fact, according to MarketingSherpa, the average email list depreciates by 25% every year.
Unfortunately, companies often battle this problem by purchasing lists. This practice will surely get you into trouble: it might add invalid addresses to your list, and thus, pollute your entire database. Even if the addresses you acquired are valid, the new recipients will most likely not be interested in your content and either unsubscribe or not engage with your emails altogether.
To retain subscribers, a lot of companies also send fewer emails, thinking that the communication frequency might in some way define engagement. A few emails means they are more special, right? Wrong. Frequency of emailing, as we have established in our Science of Email Marketing research, doesn’t necessarily negatively impact subscriber retention.
Solution: Earn Your Email Subscribers
Don’t purchase email lists; instead, earn your subscribers. Be clear to your target audience about what they will get out of subscribing to your emails. Give them a clear description of what the value proposition is. For example, will your emails offer: (1) tips and tools on how to run their business more efficiently, (2) product updates from your company, or (3) special offers via email? Your audience will want to know “why” they should subscribe before they decide to clutter their inbox with even more emails.
Are you concerned that you are emailing your subscribers too often? Give this thought a break and instead ask yourself if you are emailing the right people with the right message. In order to retain your email subscribers, you’ll need to provide them with ongoing value that is targeted to their needs. Make sure you are segmenting based on knowledge you have about your recipients.
Don’t limit your email testing to subject lines. Embrace testing of various elements in your email marketing efforts to optimize email performance. For instance, you can do A/B testing of the landing pages you’re promoting in your emails.
Achieving measurable ROI (return on investment) is another challenge that marketing professionals face in the land of email marketing. It’s difficult for them to connect the dots between the messages they send out to prospective customers and the moment when these subscribers get further engaged and turn into customers.
Interestingly enough, this problem is tightly connected to challenge number one — integrating email marketing with other data systems. When your marketing channels are not speaking to one another, it’s hard to identify how they affect conversions. For instance, you might see that your email blast got a 3.4% click-through rate (CTR), but can you also see if that communication contributed to generating new leads? What is more, do you see if it resulted in any new customers?
Solution: Closed-Loop Marketing
The solution to achieving measurable ROI from your email marketing campaigns is to practice closed-loop marketing. Follow a contact from the point of visiting your website through further engagement (viewing other web pages, downloading resources, clicking on your emails), to her final conversion into a customer. Implementing closed-loop marketing empowers you to track leads from their initial channel through a first conversion all the way to becoming customers. Such intelligence, in turn, enables you to identify your most powerful marketing channels and assign clear value to each of them. In this way, you will be able to measure the ROI not only of your emails, but also of your other efforts, which might include social media marketing and blogging.
Your email campaigns should only be a part of your holistic marketing approach. The real power comes from achieving a strong marketing mix. Email cannot be truly as fruitful just by itself; rather, it should also strengthen your other initiatives, just like you shouldn’t use social media in a vacuum, only rely on blogging, or trust that search engine optimization is enough to meet your goals. This, however, seems to be a challenge for marketers. How do you optimize your sales and marketing funnel with emails?
Most marketing professionals are accustomed to sending one-time email blasts that are not necessarily related to the actions of their email subscribers, their interests, or needs. Such a practice doesn’t help push leads down the sales funnel, and it can actually alienate them.
Solution: Nurture Your Leads
Lead nurturing sometimes goes by other names: marketing automation, drip marketing, auto-responders, etc. Simply put, lead nurturing is a system that allows you to send an automated series of emails to an early stage lead in order to better qualify them before handing them over to your sales team.
If it typically takes your leads a month to make a purchasing decision, then make sure you’re spreading out your communications to keep them engaged throughout the month. By taking this approach, you save your sales organization time because you educate and qualify the lead overtime.
Among some of the key benefits of lead nurturing is that it enables marketers to establish contact with their fresh leads fast and stay top of mind for potential, and even current, customers. In comparison to email marketing, lead nurturing is also relatively easy to set up because it is automated and doesn’t need a ton of maintenance over time.
What are some of your top email marketing challenges? Do you have any to add to this list?
This blog post is an excerpt from the ebook Introduction to Email Marketing. To gain a better foundation on executing and measuring successful email marketing, download your free copy of the ebook.
Connect with HubSpot:
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Oldest Mona Lisa replica?
Reuters
A file photo of Leonardo da Vinci’s original “Mona Lisa” (L) which hangs in the Louvre in Paris, and a recently discovered and restored copy of the “Mona Lisa” painting as it was displayed at Madrid’s El Prado Museum is seen in this combination photo Feb. 1, 2012.
AP reports: A “Mona Lisa” copy owned by Spain’s Prado Museum was almost certainly painted by one of Leonardo da Vinci’s apprentices alongside the master himself as he did the original, museum officials said Wednesday.
The stunning find of what the Prado now says is probably the earliest known copy of La Gioconda will give art lovers and experts an idea of what the Mona Lisa looked like back in the 16th century, said Gabriele Finaldi, the museum’s deputy director collections.
The copy has been part of the Prado collection for years and displayed occasionally but no one paid much attention to it because around the woman in the Mona Lisa was a stark black background, not the pretty landscape seen in the original.
An analysis demonstrated this painting was done at the same time as the real masterpiece. NBC’s Brian Williams reports.
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Mystery teen illness grows in upstate NY, more cases reported
A 36-year-old is now experiencing the same odd verbal and motor tics first reported in teenage girls who live in LeRoy, N.Y. NBC’s Amy Robach reports.
By Amy Robach, Kevin Monahan and Christina Caron
NBC News
LeROY, N.Y. — The mystery illness now producing Tourette’s-like symptoms in a more than a dozen girls from upstate New York is also affecting a 36-year-old who is experiencing the same tics as the teens.
Nurse practitioner Marge Fitzsimmons, who has spent her whole life in LeRoy, N.Y., lives just a few miles from the school the teens attend.
“It started out with sudden head jerks in the middle of October,” Fitzsimmons told NBC News, the tics occasionally interfering with her ability to talk.
It got so bad she had to leave her job working with developmentally disabled patients until the tics subside.
“The motor tics wouldn’t stop, and the vocal tics started, and I went to one of the bosses and said I have to go.”
She hasn’t been back to work in two months. On a good day, Fitzsimmons said, the tics are sporadic. On a bad day, she cannot control them. Extensive testing – including a CAT scan and blood work – didn’t provide any answers, the same frustration experienced by the teens.
“When it first started I thought maybe I’m going crazy,” she said. “As an adult, I can’t imagine these teenagers going through this and for anyone to think that they’re faking it at all. Try living a day in their shoes.”
Some neurologists, including Fitzsimmons’ doctors, have suggested the illness could be “conversion disorder,” or mass hysteria – something Fitzsimmons has accepted “because that’s what gets me out of the bed every day. That is my answer.”
According to Dr. Laszlo Mechtler, vice president of the Dent Neurological Institute in Buffalo, N.Y., the disorder “occurs in small groups, especially girls in schools in small towns.”
“What happens is that one individual – the so-called index case – may have a neurological disorder,” Dr. Mechtler told NBC in January. “And then all of a sudden several other ladies have similar symptoms.”
High school student Thera Sanchez, 17, and 14 others started experiencing the odd symptoms last fall, around the same time as Fitzsimmons: stammering, verbal outbursts and limb spasms.
“I want an answer,” Sanchez told NBC in January, her words periodically punctuated with jerking motions and involuntary grunts. “I’ve had psychological treatment. They say this is stress induced. My psychological treatment …. That’s all they do is stress me out more.”
The teens’ plight captured the attention of environmental activist Erin Brockovich, who began speaking out about a 1970 train accident that spilled cyanide and industrial solvent four miles from the teens’ school, LeRoy Junior-Senior High School. According to a 1999 Environmental Protection Agency report, approximately 35,000 gallons of TCE (trichloroethene) contaminated the area near the derailment.
The EPA has been doing “routine maintenance” on the train derailment site in LeRoy, but said in a statement it “appears unrelated to the illness.” And after investigating the case for months, the New York State Health Department concluded the school grounds are not to blame for the girls’ symptoms.
“We have conclusively ruled out any form of infection or communicable disease and there’s no evidence of any environmental factor,’’ Dr. Gregory Young of the New York Department of Health told NBC News in January.
Click here to read the full report from the Le Roy Central School District.
Now Brockovich’s team is testing the area.
Fitzsimmons told NBC News that when she was a teenager, she used to hang out in the same area where the train had derailed. And now she wants to know if her own hometown – rather than “conversion disorder” – could be the root of her symptoms.
“This is really scary; it’s like somebody came in and took home away. LeRoy has always been home for me,” Fitzsimmons said. “At least somebody is trying to get answers.”
More content from msnbc.com and NBC News
- Teen girls’ medical mystery baffles doctors
- Doctor offers new details on teen girls’ mystery illness
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7 Examples of Brands That Pop on Pinterest
I’m sitting here next to an empty pan of mini red velvet donuts, and all I want to do is find another recipe to bake this weekend. No, my first stop won’t be the Food Network, Gourmet, or Cooking Light. What I am dying to do is head over to my new obsession — Pinterest – to discover the next pastry to tackle. Currently, I’m using Pinterest to save links to just about everything: recipes I love, clothes I want to buy, or furniture I want to furnish my house with someday. As a 25-year-old graduate student, someday is a little farther off than I’d like, but it’s best to be prepared.
Since you already know how to use Pinterest for marketing, now you’re probably craving some inspirational real-life examples of brands using it effectively. Many businesses have recently discovered that, not only is Pinterest another way to engage with fans and customers without spending advertising dollars, but it’s also a great way to impact purchases, especially when it comes to impulse buying. Data from Monetate shows that referral traffic from Pinterest to the websites of five specialty apparel retailers jumped 389% from July-December 2011.
Based on this data, it’s not surprising that many businesses-focused early adopters have been lifestyle brands like home goods retailer West Elm and Real Simple Magazine. However, tech brands like Mashable and The Next Web, as well as design network Behance have quickly seen the benefits, too. For these brands, Pinterest’s knack for allowing an interesting, visual way of categorizing information is likely the draw. So whether your brand is based on fashion or you’re just trying to show your followers what your brand is all about, Pinterest offers a great medium connect with your audience. And the brands that have been most successful aren’t just enabling users to “pin” their content; rather, they’re getting in on the pinning themselves.
While Pinterest is still very young and its true ROI remains to be seen, here are 7 examples of brands who are already using Pinterest the right way: to engage fans in a meaningful way that gets them to react, share, and even convert!
Chobani
You may wonder why anyone would want to follow a Greek yogurt brand, but like Facebook and Twitter, it’s all about the content you share, not necessarily what you sell.
What They’re Doing Right:
Chobani’s Pinterest account doesn’t just feature its different yogurt types, but it also shares recipes of how users can use its products differently. Chobani also has a featured board called “Nothing but Good,” the company’s tagline, which only showcases fun and funny pictures that go along with its brand image; there’s no yogurt to be seen. In this way, Chobani is embracing the main goal of Pinterest — to focus on the concept of a person’s lifestyle and encouraging users to share their tastes and interests with others and discover those of likeminded people. In other words, by promoting the lifestyle its products promote, Chobani is using its Pinterest account to enable people to learn more about its brand beyond just its signature products.
Oreck
Yes, the vacuum cleaner brand. Sure, Oreck may be a more boring, industrial-type product (not a brand you would typically think of following on a social media site), but then again, you haven’t see how clean its floors are.
What They’re Doing Right:
On its Pinterest page, Oreck has taken its industrial cleaning product and made you forget that a vacuum cleaner brand is behind the pinboards you’re looking at. For example, Oreck has a board just to feature pictures of beautiful flooring styles and layouts. The images are so beautiful, and it reminds viewers about the fact that they also have to clean them every once in a while. My favorite Oreck board, however, is its board devoted to ‘Furry Friends.’ It subtly points out one type of cleaning job its products help take care of without hitting you over the head with it. After all, we’re all well aware that the hairy aftermath of your favorite pets isn’t always the easiest thing to clean.
Mashable
Mashable is the largest independent news source dedicated to covering digital culture, social media, and technology. Pinterest currently has a pretty girly vibe, considering that 54-70% of it user base is female. But as this tech brand is proving, the overwhelmingly estrogen-charged demographic of this social network could change quickly.
What They’re Doing Right:
Mashable is preparing to be ahead of the curve for when the male population finally gets on board with Pinterest. Mashable’s Pinterest account showcases the gadgets and infographics the news source is well known for reporting on, taking its immense amount of data and information and making it more visual and shareable. Even if you’re a more data-driven company, that doesn’t mean you don’t have something interesting to share.
Etsy
This online shopping website, with 43,000+ followers, is one of the biggest I’ve seen. Beware: I’ve seen items I’ve pinned for a later purchase quickly disappear before my very eyes.
What They’re Doing Right:
As a retailer of homemade and vintage goods, Etsy’s pinboards really take to heart what its brand stands for. You can of course connect to the thousands of items for sale on its ecommerce site, but Etsy’s account also shows you how you can make your own products and how to put their products to work in your daily life, which again, emphasizes the lifestyle philosophy that Pinterest promotes. Not sure what to buy your love for Valentine’s Day? Don’t worry, Etsy has all its pins organized to give you tons of ideas. In other words, giving your customers new ideas for how they can use your products will give them more reasons and incentives to buy from you. When using Pinterest, think outside the box of how you’d typically use social networks to market your products and services.
Drake University
Drake is one of the few universities jumping on the Pinterest bandwagon, and at the same time, they’re doing an unbelievably awesome job. I sort of wish my beloved Wisconsin Badgers would jump on ‘board,’ too (hehe).
What They’re Doing Right:
Drake University showcases items its student population might actually be interested in (sorry, I don’t exactly mean different kinds of beer bongs). Drake has its boards organized by clothing that matches the school’s colors, room décor perfect for the dorm, what kinds of food to make when you run out of “Bulldog Bucks,” study inspirations, fan experiences, and even a board completely devoted to its bulldog mascot. Obviously, Drake is following Pinterest’ lifestyle credo, making its boards specifically about the school and student experience. If you are a potential student, you can learn everything you need to know about the school with just a few quick glances. The takeaway here is to make your Pinterest brand page personal for your fans. Remind them why they love you (or should love you)!
General Electric
General Electric seems to be all about social media lately. They’re rocking it on Instagram, and I shouldn’t have been surprised to find out they’re dominating Pinterest as well.
What They’re Doing Right:
Not only does GE have a board specifically devoted to the “Badass Machines” the company works with everyday, but it also has an “Archive” board that gives a visual history of the company’s products through the years. They also have an amazing board where they’ve posted all the fan photos taken during their #GEInspiredMe campaign, exemplifying a great use for Pinterest — leveraging and featuring user-generated content. All in all, as its description says, GE is clearly devoted to “#Pinning things that inspire us to build, power, move and cure the world.” On Pinterest, stay true to core of your brand, and if you get your fans involved too, that’s even better.
Peapod
Peapod is the largest grocery delivery service in the United States, and if you are having trouble figuring out why, look no further than its Pinterest page.
What They’re Doing Right:
Ever wonder how the food gets to your office or home? Want to know what sort of produce Peapod has in stock this season? The Peapod Pinterest page has all the answers. I particularly love the behind-the-scenes board devoted just to Peapod’s delivery trucks. It really highlights that, at the end of the day, Peapod is primarily a delivery service. Showing the cities it’s traveling through or watching its signature green bins getting loaded onto its trucks is a great way to give customers an inside look into a business that, on the outside, may not seem so glamorous. Even if your company isn’t exactly devoted to “pretty things,” it doesn’t mean you can’t be on Pinterest. It just means you have to get creative about showing off your brand in an interesting and unique way. You can do this by showcasing some behind-the-scenes content that shows the people behind your brand, injecting some personality into your business and make it easy to relate to.
As you can tell, the trick to succeeding on Pinterest isn’t necessarily about showing off your products or services directly. It’s about finding creative ways to show how those products and services fit into the lifestyles of your target audience. Find ways to do that, and you’ll have what you need to pop on Pinterest just like these brands do.
Are you experimenting with Pinterest for your brand? What are some pinboards you’ve created to highlight your business?
Image Credit: Christian Guthier
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