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June Happenings in the TrackMaven Office

Sabel HarriszCorgi Friday\July 05, 2013

It’s July already?! Where does time go? Seriously. Regardless, we hope everyone had a wonderful 4th and the fun continues all month.

Of course we could leave you wondering what happened in the past month besides it being “loveably insane.” Here’s what’s been going on right above Kramer Books…

Well first, Maven is blushing because everyone just loves wearing t-shirts with his face on them! His tail won’t stop wagging, so we decided to extend that excitement into a TrackMaven swag Pinterest board. Have a TM shirt? Wear it, take a picture, and then tweet at us, so we can pin it up!

We all got together and had an awesome dinner at Fletcher’s to welcome our Bristol office to the US once again. The dinner was filled with great food, drinks, vines and rapping. Here’s a little vine action of it…

We also started seeing double…mainly with one of our interns, Trevor, having striking similarities with Allen. These similarities include hair color, glasses and accidentally wearing the same outfit one day. Can you tell who is who?

Well…we decided to keep up the twin effect…

And then we took it a step further…with our first annual Allen Gannett day! The blue shirts, glasses, and matching trousers, does it get better than that?

Yes, yes it does get better. Because Allen Gannett day in the TrackMaven office also involves Allen’s other favorite PINKBERRY!

On the next Allen Gannett Day, hopefully we’ll have a corgi. Until then, we’ll end with this one…

Key Performance Indicators (KPI) for Competitive Intelligence Marketing

Sabel HarriszCompetitive Intelligence, Marketing\July 03, 2013

KPIs or Key Performance Indicators are essential measurements in marketing in determining how successfully your actions are that you are taking with your marketing. Are you content marketing efforts increasing the amount of leads that you are driving into the funnel? Is your cost per lead becoming excessive in certain areas? Or most importantly which marketing campaigns are generating a high ROI?

KPIs help show the performance of your marketing campaigns; yet, theres an entirely new side to these key performance indicators — your competitors’ marketing.

The KPI’s of Competitive Intelligence Marketing follow some of the same suite as the overall general marketing KPIs, but looking at a competitive KPI will help you outline your overall business landscape, what is working and what isn’t working for you vs. your competitors.

Paid

1. Paid Ads

This KPI requires a little more work or luck happen stance; however, it provides a pretty useful KPI when looking at your competitors. Some platforms can help you with this, but I don’t want to start shamelessly plugging TrackMaven…on the TrackMaven blog. So digging a little more first, you can use some other tools to see where your competitors are posting ads and the number of ads that were spotted by the tool. Did your competitors just release 100 banner ads to all of the major media sources? What did the ad look like or why were the ads all posted in Forbes? Is there targeted audience there and are they more likely to click on that ad? Granted these are some broad questions and could result in false assumptions; however taking just the quantity of ads and where they are posting are indicators of how their ads are performing. If there 20 ads on x site, maybe it’s an indication that’s where their potential audience is and how they are attracting leads.

The other side of just happening to see an ad, could be in terms of the social advertising on Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin. Maybe you saw an ad on Facebook from one of your competitors. So what is your own title that you put on Facebook, what company do you work for, what are your own demographics? Breaking down the ad a little could indicate the audience they are targeting, if they are targeting people who work or “like” your brand. This could point to an audience shift, do you fit the customer they are now trying to target? You can find some of these metrics by trying an ad yourself. Go to the ads manager and put in the answers to the questions above. You can make a pretty good educated guess on how many people they are trying to target with the ad, a KPI that could help you see how your own audience stacks up.

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10 More Sites Marketers Should Check Daily

Sabel HarriszInsights, Marketing\July 01, 2013

With the death of Google Reader today, I thought it would be good to come up with another list of 10 sites every marketer should check daily (reasons still in a sentence or less). Hopefully you were able to transfer your daily reads in the least painful way as possible. Mostly though, without realizing it, I put together the 10 Sites That Marketers Should Check in a Sentence or less, became a little more evergreen than I thought it would be. I wrote the post quickly and figured it would be a good one to have for TrackMaven’s audience; however, it became a nice permanent piece that some people reference more frequently. I thought it would be even more helpful if I came out with another list of 10 more sites that marketers should check daily because sometimes just 10 sources isn’t enough…plus you need a little more content to add to your new rss reader.

1. Saastr - There are a ton posts brimming with some of the best pieces of information for startups, sales and marketing, but it’s better if you dive right into these posts without me getting into too much of a description.

2. QuickSprout - Neil Patel puts together some lengthy, but extremely useful posts on marketing that should be referenced at whatever stage of marketing you are in.

3. Social Media Today- I love this site mainly because they make it quite transparent on how you can contribute and because there are very useful tips on what is going on with social media reflecting with B2C and B2B companies.

4. Slideshare - Slideshare should not only be an outlet that you use because it boast over 60 million visits a month, but everyday there are a plethora of informative slides to quickly read.

5. Buffer Blog- Like I’ve said a number of times, I’m a huge Buffer fan and the blog posts that are released twice a week cover lifehacks and super insightful marketing techniques making this blog one that is hard to pass up.

6. Search Engine Journal- Search Engine Journal does focus on SEO, but it doesn’t neglect the other topics of marketing because everything does come full circle, anyway.

7. Marketing Land - Everything marketing (and by everything I really do mean everything) that is updated several times a day — strategy, SEO, SEM, analytics, email, mobile, etc.

8. Econsultancy - From the various graphs to the data driven studies, Econsultancy generates a ton of different marketing reports that help show what the current marketing landscape is like with SEO, mobile, social media, paid advertising etc.

9. BtoB- BtoB is the magazine for marketing strategists, where they have also have a wide online presence that boasts all-purpose advice for any of your marketing needs.

10. Marketo’s Blog- The Marketo blog is jam-packed with so many posts that sometimes I don’t know where to begin when I’m picking something to read; nevertheless, it doesn’t let me down with it’s high volume of some of the most useful posts I’ll continue to reference.

It’s already known that developing content is extremely essential in the growth of your marketing plan; however, curating content ranks high as well. Having a large library of resources helps with outreach programs, future guest posts, how you converse with your audience and what you are sharing as well. All of those things help strengthen your influence positively, so don’t just start producing a bunch of content without having resources or websites you should check daily as well. An up-to-date marketer is one that can be agile and produces the right results.

Are there more sites that I should include in on this list? Comment below, send me a tweet (@sabelharris) or maybe even give Maven a shout (@TrackMavenapp).

20 of the Best Feelings in Marketing

Sabel HarriszMarketing\June 28, 2013

Happy Friday! To start you weekend off right, here are the 20 best feelings in marketing:

  1. When you outrank a competitor in Google for your keywords
  2. CPC is low and your CTR is high.
  3. Traffic to a blog post or your home page soars above 1,000+ unique visitors in an hour.
  4. When a marketing influencer of yours responds to a tweet.
  5. When an influencer comments on a blog post, extra points if it’s basically giving you a comment high five!
  6. Super effective lead capturing forms, people notice it outright and then compliment you.
  7. An influential marketer responds to a ruff, oh, maybe that’s just with TrackMaven
  8. You have over 100+ people attending a webinar you are holding.
  9. When your outreach emails work and are answered by the person receiving the email.
  10. Above average conversion rates on the leads you helped push through the funnel.
  11. People are engaging with a recent post via comments, tweets, Facebook posts, etc. (positively of course!)
  12. Your ad targeting it really effective and reaching the audience you need.
  13. Everyone opened that email, which made your open rate crazily high!
  14. After you finishing writing an epic blog post, white paper or ebook.
  15. Being able to repurpose content you previously wrote whether it be through a white paper, webinar, ebook…the recycling is endless.
  16. Surpassing your monthly goal of qualified leads, visitors and traffic.
  17. When a larger publication wants to syndicate a blog post you spent months researching, gathering data etc.
  18. When your marketing is automated and you are optimizing as needed.
  19. Inbox zero. (Except I think that goes for anyone really)
  20. When you test something on your site, headline changes, color changes, switching at CTA and it goes the way you predicted it would.

I can’t just end the best feelings in marketing without a cute corgi photo, now you’re really all warm and fuzzy inside.