Category Archives: direction

… and miss the poison

The star developer who writes great code… but who also resists taking any direction and refuses to help others… won’t instantly turn over a new interpersonal leaf just because you hire him.

The skilled salesperson who in the short-term always seems to outperform her peers… but who also maneuvers and manipulates and builds kerosene-soaked bridges just waiting to go up in flames… won’t turn into a relationship building, long-term focused ambassador for your …

… on the competition. So kick back, enjoy the last of your weekend, and learn a bit more about the direction the marketing industry is headed with these top marketing stories and resources of the week.

Facebook Posts Get Half Their Reach Within 30 Minutes of Being Published, From MarketingCharts

You might remember our weekly round-up post from a couple weeks ago where we reported that only 6% of fans engage with a brand’s Facebook Page. Now we’re finding that Facebook posts obtain …

… from, I’d send that along, too. This all simply helps set the writer up for success, providing direction and context. Then when the blog post returned, I’d have one of the people at my company who knows the most about how email spam traps work review the content for accuracy, making any final tweaks or additions before publishing.

This kind of collaborative blogging approach typically yields the best content, anyway, and it’s an approach that’s appropriate for both small and …

… they need to pump up the value and optimize for engagement. This seems like a logical, natural direction for YouTube to move toward. Of course, YouTube isn’t just changing its algorithm to benefit users — its changing it to benefit advertisers, too. In the past, when you saw an interesting thumbnail on YouTube and clicked on it, you could have exited out before an ad even began to play, yet that ‘click’ would still have counted for the video, contributing to higher rankings. With …

… fence about your company, emailing them helpful, educational materials can sway them in the right direction. It may even tell them the things they didn’t know they didn’t know – in other words, introduce new problems (and their solutions … that you offer) to your customers that present upsell opportunities. So when, ohhh I don’t know, a tax accountant gets his check in the mail after tax season, it certainly behooves him to send an ebook about creative tax deductions to his …

… way, the right person is responding with the right answer! And this stands true for the opposite direction. Sometimes your support reps are asked marketing questions on the phone and need a fast answer. Have someone in Marketing who they can contact for quick, accurate assistance.

5) Allow Employees to Experience Both Departments

So what makes all the aforementioned alignment between Marketing and Support actually happen? What is the overarching theme? In essence, there is not …

… the agency that established this tagline, could possibly have guessed that that is the direction Nike was headed when the company first debuted. This tagline’s proof positive that a brand needs to give itself time for a tagline to marinate before anyone can truly understand what it means to its audience.

2) Think Different

Ah, the infamous Apple tagline. Unlike Nike, it only took Apple one year before the “Think Different” tagline debuted. But that’s because this …

… of the most viewed pages on your website? Your historical performance should dictate your future direction for all new marketing content — particularly your lead generation content. If you don’t have access to marketing analytics that give you this type of intelligence, look in the public domain (places like Google News, Google Trends, and Twitter Trending Topics) for popular and newsworthy industry stories. You can then piggyback on these popular topics by adding a personal spin that …

… A/B testing is typically used for redesigns to test out the effectiveness of a single design direction or theory against a goal (like driving conversions). Multivariate testing tends to be used for smaller changes over a longer period of time. It will take a number of elements of your site and test out all possible combinations of these elements together for ongoing optimization. In a post in January, my colleague Corey Eridon explained the differences between when you’d use one test …