What are /r/AskMarketing's favorite Products & Services?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

Might be helpful to read the "Requirements and Best Practices" from MailChimp.

Technically, yes he could email that list but it's at high risk because these people did not opt-in for this marketing, they opted-in for a different company's marketing.

If there are enough spam reports MailChimp could take action, per their terms of use.

>17. General Rules
You promise to follow these rules:
* You won’t send Spam! By “spam,” we mean the definition on the Spamhaus website.
* You won’t use purchased, rented, or third-party lists of email addresses.
* You won’t violate our Acceptable Use Policy, which is part of this Agreement.
* If you use our API, you’ll comply with our API Use Policy.
If you violate any of these rules, then we may suspend or terminate your account.

If you're referring to mobile articles, it has to do with Accelerated Mobile Pages which aim to load the article much faster initially and then if you want to read the rest of the article you can manually do so. Improves user experience.

My guess is small mom and pops places want you to tell them what they should do, independent of their success as a business.

As far as starting from the ground up, I'm a big fan of oli gardner's 6 month manifesto, "The Noob Guide to Online Marketing."

https://moz.com/blog/the-noob-guide-to-online-marketing-with-giant-infographic-11928

Yes, at the very least, they are going to take a dip for a few weeks. It depends a bit on if you are editing it live (which means you'll improve it page by page over time) or if you are editing the whole thing in a dev environment then switching it over all at once. And it also depends on if you are just updating the pages themselves, or adding/changing URLs.

And if you are a bit unsure about how to actually improve it from an SEO perspective, I'd recommend going through Moz's beginner's guide to SEO before you get started.

Have you tried Calendly? https://calendly.com/

In the core product, you can add or remove availability, only allow people to book in a certain date range, and updates your calendar in real time. It works with a few different calendar apps too. Works great for G-Cal for me.

The advanced settings do it for me and I've recommended custom event types for clients and they love it.

It might also be interesting to see what Academic marketing reserach has to say about this, while promotions and pricing is not my favorite field a quick google scholar found some interesting stuff:

On intention: "For the high-price product, our subjects evaluated a price reduction framed in dollar terms as more significant than the same price reduction framed in percentage terms, and the opposite was true for the low-price product." (Chen, Monroe & Lou, 1998) in Journal of Retailing - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022435999801006

On post-promotion price: (from the abstract) "This research examines how promotion frame (percentage off versus cents off) moderates the effect of promotion depth on postpromotion price expectations and choice. The findings indicate that compared with cents-off promotions, high-depth percentage-off promotions lead to higher postpromotion price expectations. Likewise, postpromotion choice is higher when high- depth promotions are framed in percentage-off than cents-off terms" (DelVecchio, Krishnan & Smith, 2007) - https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Daniel_Smith72/publication/247837180_Cents_or_Percent_The_Effects_of_Promotion_Framing_on_Price_Expectations_and_Choice/links/5612d08208aea9fb51c269c5.pdf

Reading over these might help you out!

Personally, I wouldn't worry about more schooling. Depending on the type of marketing you're most interested in, I would recommend taking all of Google's certifications. They're pretty helpful and (at least used to be) free. If you're interested in email marketing, learning basic HTML is a big plus. Moz has a really good beginner's guide to SEO: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo. That's a good resource, as well. Best of luck!

Depending on the industry duplicate and common content will hurt your ability to rank organically on SERP's.

https://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content#:~:text=Duplicate%20content%20can%20present%20three,it%20separated%20between%20multiple%20versions.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140924104418-15594701-complete-guide-to-creating-effective-web-pages

This is a combined post, one written by a designer and another written by me about how to make the page convert more leads and sales.

If you know the name of the person, see if they are on LinkedIn. Go to https://www.linkedin.com/directory/people-a and see if you can connect with them and ask how you pitch an idea to them in a message, don't pitch the idea, just ask how it's done.

Lynda courses. For AdWords specifically just a variety of blogs like wordstream and searches on the specific topic you need at that moment. You are right that Google is deliberately vague to make people who don't know better spend more money. For SEO, Moz resources. Here's a place to start: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo

As ickykarma have said, you need to start collection emails to possible leads. This does however require you to either get the a hold of the website responsible, so he can create a CTA with email or create a landing page solely for the purpose of collecting emails. They might already have a CRM with customer data in you can use to blast out a campaign, but if you could get a place to create some informative and good content, it would help a lot.

You're probably pretty familiar with social media, but in case some of the platforms are not your kind of soup: Moz Guide will help you get started.

Depending on what your partnerships/target audience are, you can do a lot of different stuff. Posters and flyers if College students are your target customer. If your courses are sold to government-owned unemployment centers as a part of a "get new skills, so you can get a job" you can develop some material to lay around their offices (We have this in Denmark, not sure about other countries). Referral systems with partners are also a way to speed up the word of mouth, but it might not be ideal for your product.

no, the best route is to enhance and maintain it. This is fascinating to me, what is driving your thinking that you want to cut off a free source of advertising/marketing?

See https://moz.com/local/overview and http://blumenthals.com/blog/ to start.

some great feedback, thank you! I'm also experimenting with followerwonk however I will look into this buzzsumo app. I appreciate your time and I agree it has to be done in a series of stages. I'm defining mine as 1. audience- growing, competitor/profile audits, assessing customer problem, and solution identification. 2.Engagement- testing which types of content receive highest engagement, 3. Convert- testing ad objectives to monetize my traffic

Generally most people don't bother with meta keywords tags anymore.

Opinion is divided on whether they do harm or have no effect but few people suggest adding them these days. Some argue that Yahoo still uses them, some argue that they help your competitors, some argue that Bing will use them as a spam indicator, pretty much everyone agrees Google ignores them.

https://moz.com/community/q/should-i-delete-meta-keywords-from-a-website

Google "should you use meta keywords tag" for more views. You will find a few people in favour but the majority are not.

At an average of $88,000 a year, this is a pretty good degree combo. You could decide on an avenue of marketing you like (branding, research, etc) and go for it. I've seen tons of jobs on Indeed with credentials like yours- I'd search there just to see what's available.

There is actually an ad network out there for local news. Avoid Adsense

http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/02/in-connnecticut-the-independent-media-network-tries-to-succeed-where-patch-couldnt/

Talk to these guys http://broadstreetads.com/ (primarily local news news ad network). Also, your friend should seriously think about finding a commission only based sales person to get actual local businesses to advertise.

(The street fighter guy if you write to him will probably have more ideas, that's all he writes about)

If I'm understanding you correctly then ActiveCampaign has person-centric tracking that can tell you which of your contacts visited what page. And it's £9 per month!

http://www.activecampaign.com/help/site-event-tracking/

I'm not sure how many customers you're going to have, but most CRMs are probably overkill when you're just starting out. I've found that they're more work than helpful until you're dealing with many customers.

Development skills: To truly take advantage of local seo tools, you're going to have to be able to get under the hood of your website. If you're going to work with a professional web developer to build your site, make sure they set up Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, follow structured data markup (ie schema.org) and facebook open graph.

If you want to tackle low hanging fruit without dealing with the code stuff, make sure you have a business page set up with all the major social media channels. Most importantly, a business Google+ page (https://www.google.com/business/). Also, when available, make sure you verify your listings. I've never used it, but you may want to look into Moz local (https://moz.com/local).

Yes, pay per click is like google ads. Before you go down that rabbit hole, be sure you have your site set up correctly (landing pages, analytics) so you know what's generating leads for you.

I am currently using Zoho CRM. Zoho CRM has a open source version & free version for 10 users. Online CRM system for managing your sales, marketing, customer support, and inventory in a single system. Selecting right software for business is very challenging task. I suggest you to go with SoftwareSuggest.com, they provide you free consultation for selecting right CRM software for your business. They have list of best CRM software for business with reviews, features, comparison and price quotes. You can refer those at http://www.softwaresuggest.com/crm-software

Here's a detailed step-by-step guide on how to create an AdWords ad (including how to conduct keyword research). Also, take a look at CrazyEgg's Beginner's Guide to Facebook Ads. Hope these will help you get started!

Have you tried Google Optimize instead of Experiments? I find it is easier to control and set up than Experiments is. Set up a redirect test on Optimize.

Hi Joe,

To be honest, the only reason I got the job was because the person who is hiring people went to the same university as me and is kind of giving me a chance. So I literally lucked into it. I found out about the job through my university's alumni office newsletter and I think I was the only (or one of a few) soon-to-be grads to inquire about the job.

I hope that helps. I am sorry I can't offer more concrete advice as I got pretty lucky. If you haven't already, try to leverage your alumni network as much as possible from your university :)

As for the job description, here is a link detailing what the job is about: https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=C47AC0B2B6639CEB!115&authkey=!AALv0dR3dtRk598&ithint=file%2c.docx

Thanks for taking the time to help me out man I really appreciate. I am looking forward to some of your thoughts!

I want to address a few things in your post:

1. You didn't "luck out" getting the job. You beat out other candidates in a competitive hiring environment. Finding 5 bucks on the street is lucky - you earned this job.

2. Nobody deserves a job simply because they have a degree. The world and marketplace doesn't owe you a damn thing. Yes, going to school for marketing should give those people an advantage, but its up to them to use that advantage to get hired. So ignore those people and be proud that you landed a job that you wanted - not one that someone thinks they "deserve". Props to /u/blackhood0 for sharing the same sentiments.

Now that I got that out of my system, I'll share with you some tips to get ahead.

• Read every day. Follow relevant blogs on marketing, copywriting, SEO, etc. An article or two a day will get you really far in this industry.

• Practice makes perfect. As /u/Wannabe2good noted, make it a priority to write for 20-30 minutes each day. And not just business related stuff - just write about anything and you'll keep seeing improvement over time. Use the Hemmingway app (http://www.hemingwayapp.com/) to learn how to tighten up your style and write concisely.

• Ask questions - often. Find a mentor at work or outside of work and pick their brain as often as you can. Learn from those who already have countless mistakes and successes so you can leapfrog the learning curve.

• Take calculated risks. Don't be afraid to experiment within reason. Sometimes your biggest marketing successes come from accidental or unintended actions.

The great thing about the your inexperience is that you don't have any bad habits to break. Treat this as an advantage and build up your fundamentals the right way.

Best of luck OP.

We use Hootsuite at my agency, it allows you to pre-schedule. It also has some powerful features that will help you accelerate your social marketing. Here's a link to their free version. https://hootsuite.com/plans/free

There are a bunch out there, just google "free social publishing tools".

Check out the LinkedIn Ads group on LinkedIn itself. Pretty active and a ton of great conversations on there that will quickly answer a ton of questions that you have. Then, test!

In Hygger you can find a good analog of Gantt's chart - it is Hygger's special roadmap. Thanks to its clear visualization of time frames and tasks, a clear design and a user-friendly operation, you can make a proper project work planning, global goals setting and other functions that make the workflow more convenient. Try it!

Man that is a harsh comment! :) But we appreciate the honest feedback. Is something like this page: https://www.mautic.org/tour more helpful? Maybe we should prioritize it some? What do you find to be vague or unhelpful that could be improved?

I'm an AdWords specialist, and especially if you're inexperienced with the platform, it's not a cheap way to do market research. For companies with existing resources or those in the later stages of an idea who already have some validation that they're onto something it can work, but it's not a great idea starting out.

Instead, I'd recommend getting out and talking to people who you think have the problem your product solves. Go to forums where you think they hang out or even approach people in person at events or on the street (it's scary but people will talk to you and some swear by this method). You could try creating a survey to distribute online but getting people to take it can be tricky. All this will start to give you a feel for who gets most excited about your idea and where to look for more people to talk to.

When talking to people, take note of how they talk about their problem and the solution they want. You'll want to use this in your advertising later on. Also take note of the online and offline communities your target audience is a part of.

If you want to learn more about doing market research in the most efficient way possible, read The Lean Startup, which will give you more info about the method I've outlined above.

Hey I've made an app - waiting for Apple approval, so ready some time in the next two weeks, literally released it two days ago on Android. It's called parksports and allows people to create casual games in the parks in your area. Totally free to use, and a few plugs could get the ball rolling for both of us https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.zapo.parksports

Happy to PM / take this offline if you want to chat further

Hey, I'm actually in a similar position. I'm trying to work out the best strategy of how to get my casual social sports app off the ground (shameless plug https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.zapo.parksports). Which in a sense is like a sports club - I need to hit a critical mass of people in my local area to get the ball rolling. So my response is more me thinking out loud than anything else.... What I have seen other successful sports clubs do is have a "sign on" day. I think this works well for parents because they need to have something to take their kids to, and it's a great way to grow the club. They advertise this locally by getting corflute signs made and put up around the area. Usually this is done some time in advance ~1 month. The weekend before it wouldn't hurt to setup a little desk advertising the sign up outside a the local grocery stores if they do that in your area. Do you have some other players? Don't do it alone, get them to chip in too. That's all I have for the moment

Edit: sometimes you may need to do it for a few weekends as well if it's a new club

No, that's not right. Check out the most-wanted list on Stack Overflow: https://stackoverflow.com/insights/survey/2017#most-loved-dreaded-and-wanted

Web development is where things are hot right now.

SQL is almost 40 years old. It will teach you nothing about modern techniques and methodologies. It's useful to know, sure, but not a starting place by any means.

I really like JavaScript as an intro language, but there are lots of equally valid choices. JavaScript actually has some downsides because the modern front-end technology stack has gotten pretty insane lately. I dunno, pick something other than SQL.

Creating content - depending on the niche you're in it could be backbreaking work, but short answer is "create content, and try and get it ranked in search". From there you can suppliment it with social posting. Facebook and the other big boys are basically 'pay-to-play' now which has significantly dimished the possible returns over previous years.

moz.com is a good place to get some thoughtstarters/steer on EXACTLY how to do it.

Who's going to see those Excel reports and when/how would you show it to them? There's no point in that, if those are going to sit on your desktop.

SEO/PPC is not my forte, admittedly. I did hear about this guy a few years ago, who made Google Ad campaigns for top Creative Directors and got a job that way, which might be relevant for you: http://mashable.com/2010/05/13/job-google-ad-words/

The interesting thing about job hunting in the marketing field is that we're self-proclaimed advertisers and many people forget that. Think of yourself as a product that needs to be marketed. Who is your target audience? How will you reach them, and convince them that you offer a valuable service? Why are you better than your competitors? Think creatively about how to reach them, and what will compel them to "buy".

In my first job out of college in '09, I reached out to a CCO of a major agency via Twitter and had some nonprofit and startup experience to make me seem semi-impressive in social media marketing, which was very much needed at that time. The landscape is a little different now, I'm mostly focused on content marketing.

Hope this was at least a little helpful. :)

The best way is to go straight to the source and see what they're looking for. All you need to know is right here. Work on these skills and requirements, build your LinkedIn profile and connect with those in the industry.

https://www.linkedin.com/jobs2/view/46394146?trk=vsrp_jobs_cluster_name&trkInfo=VSRPsearchId%3A231334791432141969887%2CVSRPtargetId%3A46394146%2CVSRPcmpt%3Ajobs_cluster

There is a ton of ways to measure awareness. But there's a difference between knowing a brand exists and knowing anything specific about the brand.

Then there is awareness of what the brand position is and then brand preference in choosing that brand over competing brands. You make no money until the brand preference stage. Measure all you want.

3 Metrics to Measure for Increased Brand Awareness

Measure Brand Awareness: Build Brand Power seems pretty useless

I typically run an initial report, scope out a plan to fix, and then monitor. Google/Bing make on-going changes that may require new work and new content/landing pages that may need further optimization.

It's not a set and forget for sure but will slow down once things are fixed and there are no new campaigns or things to rank for.

Moz.com also has a free course and lots of resources. If you want to get into SEO, I'd definitely start there.

• https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo
• https://moz.com/learn/seo

I don't know if they have a certification still, but you can include the courses on your resume.

This might be your best bet: http://php.net/manual/en/image.examples-png.php

>This example would be called from a page with a tag like: <img src="button.php?text=text">. The above button.php script then takes this "text" string and overlays it on top of a base image which in this case is "images/button1.png" and outputs the resulting image. This is a very convenient way to avoid having to draw new button images every time you want to change the text of a button. With this method they are dynamically generated.

Biggest frustration for many clients, too many terms for the things they need. SEO, SEM, SMM, SMO, Content Marketing, Social Media Marketing, CRO, PPC, Story Marketing, Video Marketing, etc. Where do I start? That's the question they ask. Then, if they read up on any of them, they find different explanations on how it should or should not be done. I write posts like this to try and help them understand. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140418064030-15594701-confused-by-all-the-types-of-marketers-vying-for-your-business

I haven't worked directly with them, but they are chasing my company heavily for a retargeting / behavioral marketing program. I do not like their aggressive sales approach, and they seem to change what they're entire program is about based on my responses to them. Each call just seemed really sleazy... when dealing with a possible new client, usually you're polite. I once let the guy know I had a conference call coming up and he didn't want to let me go.

I feel a retargeting campaign could be solid, but I need a more trustworthy company. I've looked around a bit... https://moz.com/blog/comparing-the-top-4-retargeting-companies

That article lists the four I probably will look into more. They don't call me twice a week...

How high the dealership shows up in local search results for 'acura dealership' depends on a number of factors, of which social media makes up 5.8%.

In the grand scheme of things, 5.8% is not a lot but unlike the other factors which are not 100% under your control, such as backlinks to the site, social media is totally in your court. It is not a frivolity to have a social media presence these days, it's a business necessity if you want your dealership to rank higher in search.

Moz posted a WhiteBoard Friday video a few weeks ago that you should watch: https://moz.com/blog/why-good-unique-content-needs-to-die-whiteboard-friday

I think it could give you some ideas on what to do and how to do it.

Make sure you also have a Google Plus Page and a Business page (https://www.google.com/business/befound.html), this often helps with the searches.

Also look at your website and ensure you have fine tuned the SEO. This will help you alot although it takes time to see the fruits of labour.

I also recommend that you create a blog and post articles on there, and post the article links on your social media and other places such as forums.

This will attract people to the website and raise your profile it will also drive down you alexa ranking.

There are many options available for you. You can check from the list of top live chat software for website. You will get free consultation about which live chat software is suitable for your website with price quotes, features, reviews and more.

That's really cool! After some digging around, I've discovered that the data can also be kept confidential by the user. Not sure how this is done but here is an example: https://bitly.com/2XSOKLN+

http://zipboard.co/ That's our website; we recently built it. I've heard of Jab Jab Jab Right Hook. I was doing some freelance work back then when I saw his book on Amazon, and the reviews said it was a pretty good book, but that it concentrated too much on the "why you need to do something" instead of "how you need to do it" (or maybe it was some other book and I am confused, sorry). XD

Oh haha I've just been reading so much lately. It's only been like a couple months since I started my professional journey and honestly, every few days it feels like I'm at a saturation point of my mental capacity.

Yeah, sorry about that. See, our product is an web-app in which you can upload your eLearning courses and review them with your team/clients so you know what you need to improve upon. Similarly, you can also add a URL and review your website/web-app in our app. It's pretty easy because you can take screenshots inside the app itself, and you can annotate/comment on those screenshots about what you want to change. Collaborators can discuss things right there and decide what needs to be done.

You might want to look into oktopost's startup offer. Oktopost is a great tool for social media management and lead generation. They give startups free access to the platform and resources.. http://www.oktopost.com/pages/startups

Who are you marketing to? We're a b2b company, for us the the best distribution channels are LinkedIn Groups, Twitter and Google+ communities. We use a tool called Oktopost, which is great for content distribution and lead generation from social media.

Yea, you're essentially creating two pages about the same thing which would compete against each other in search. You might think that it's better to be in two places than one, but it doesn't fit into any well-defined strategy, especially when talking about organic traffic.

You might release a video on Vimeo Pro (or Wistia) first, because you have access to a lot of features like lead gen and no advertising, and then after you generate the leads or links you are going for, syndicate it on YouTube. It really depends.

Here's some good info, especially the comments, that should point you in the right direction. Nearly everything I know of Video SEO has come from Phil Nottingham and the content he has produced across Distilled and Moz, he knows his stuff. As mentioned, if you're providing something educational and have a tiny platform, then YT might be the best path.

My girlfriend, whose a fancy graphic designer, also asked me to add that one of the best things you can do beforehand is get management to show you examples of logos, collateral, et, of other companies that they like. It'll help make the process a whole lot smoother once you've appointed a design company. She also suggested this link http://issuu.com/bellfrog/docs/jamie-oliver-frv-brand-guidelines as an example of what brand guidelines look like for a retail company or Google Siemens brand guidelines for a corporate example

I like to use either Hootsuite or Buffer.

To me, Buffer is more intuitive, but that might just be owed to the fact that it was the first tool I started using: https://buffer.com/

I'd recommend using Buffer (https://buffer.com/) to schedule Tweets so you don't have to remember all the time. Also, Content Gems (https://contentgems.com/) to find content that is relevant to your industry.

Be sure to use produce content that is relevant to your audience. Then direct them in a direction that is beneficial to your overall objectives.

Certifications will never out perform relationships.

Here is a good read:

https://medium.com/dont-be-good-be-great/4a64d158c342

"Too many students in my opinion waste their time getting a Marketing degree in this generation. I’m not belittling formal education, however marketing is more than what you may learn in a classroom."

It sounds like a good opportunity. The key is to maximize your efficiency so you don't get lost spending boatloads of hours working on things. Along those lines it's good to get automated processes setup. Marketing automation tools are great for this, as are things like Buffer for scheduling things. Basically you want to create a process flow once and then find an easy way for it to be executed automatically for you.

Shameless Plug: If you're looking at marketing automation software you can check out https://www.mautic.org which is completely and totally free (hence I feel it's ok to mention). :)

These kinds of tools will allow you to create landing pages, forms for lead submissions, and automated email marketing campaigns (as well as social media stuffs).

Best of luck if you decide to take the job!

well, Asana is a direct competitor to JIRA, it's built for Agile and https://asana.com/teams/marketing. in marketing, the steps like " discovery, exploration, complexity reduction, backlog" also very much exist.

my original point was not to question if you can manage marketing in an Agile ways (because you can), but to find out why companies typically use JIRA only for software development and not for marketing, when companies use Asana both in for software development AND marketing just fine.

We use amazon gift cards, and you can set the amount for the email version, not sure about the physical one.

Check it out (if link does not work search for "Amazon Gift Card - E-mail": https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004LLIKVU/gcrnsts?ie=UTF8&amp;keywords=Amazon%20Gift%20Card%20-%20E-mail&amp;qid=1388134805&amp;ref_=sr_1_1&amp;sr=8-1

Areas of Marketing

• Advertising
• Community
• Copywriting
• PR
• Customer Service
• Video Production
• Analytics
• Metrics
• Content Marketing
• Blogging
• SEO
• Marketing Automation
• Conversion Rate Optimisation
• Link Building
• Email Marketing
• PPC Analytics
• Branding
• Social Media Marketing
• E-Commerce
• Product Marketing
• Sales
• Retention
• Project Management
• Campaign Management
• Offline Marketing
• Events Marketing
• Local
• B2B
• Psychology
• Strategy
• CRMs
• Growth Hacking
• Data Science
• UX
• Mobile Marketing
• Productivity
• Public Speaking
• Web Development

Books

Principles

• The Professional Marketer by Tim Matthews
• Principles of Marketing by Philip Kotler
• Marketing Management by Philip Kotler
• Marketing 4.0 by Philip Kotler
• Linchpin by Seth Godin
• Purple Cow by Seth Godin
• All Marketers Are Liars by Seth Godin
• Permission Marketing by Seth Godin
• Good To Great by Jim Collins

Startup

• Zero to One by Blake Masters

Advertising

• My Life in Advertising and Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins
• How to Write a Good Advertisement by Victor Schwab

Community

• Tribes by Seth Godin

Content Marketing

• Epic Content Marketing by Joe Pulizzi
• Everybody Writes by Ann Handley
• Content Inc by Joe Pulizzi
• Inbound Marketing by Brian Halligan

Branding

• How to Style Your Brand by Fiona Humberstone
• Brand Brilliance by Fiona Humberstone
• Designing Brand Identity by Alina Wheeler

Social Media Marketing * The New Rules of Marketing & PR by David Scott

Psychology

• Hooked by Nir Eyal
• Pre-Suasion by Robert Cialdini
• Made to Stick by Heath Brothers
• Blue Ocean Strategy by W Chan Kim

Growth Hacking

• Growth Hacker Marketing by Ryan Holiday
• Hacking Growth by Sean Ellis
• Traction by Gabriel Weinberg

Good stuff. Blogs are generally better since they're more up to date. Try to read up on growth hacking as well - most companies will usually find those types of technical marketing skills more valuable than "fluffy" stuff like branding. That said, if you're interested in working in the tech/startup sector I'd recommend the book "The Lean Startup".

Don't get too down about your grades. Most companies won't care what your GPA was. Key skills or interesting side projects will make your CV stand out way more than a 4.0 GPA.

I quite like the books by Dan and Chip Heath. They're more advertising than marketing books, but they're still good. Made to Stick discusses how to get an audience to remember your message and Switch gives you advice on how to change behaviour. Both are based very much on academic research, which is good.

Passive voice means something was done to something else... But there is no somebody who did it. That person is invisible. Active voice emphasizes who is doing the actions.

So basically, to change a sentence from passive to active, you just add a subject.

Passive: The ball was kicked. The election was won. The problems were resolved.

Active: Johnny kicked the ball. Jessica won the election. We resolved the problems.

Always ask yourself: who did ____ (whatever is happening in the sentence)? If the answer isn't there, you're speaking in passive voice.

BTW, if you're just now learning that there's such a thing as active and passive voice, you should really, REALLY pick up a book on writing before you try to do any more writing professionally, or you're going to be destined for failure. Try The Elements of Style as a good beginning point. And maybe On Writing Well.

Sorry. I favor paid content.

Why? There is some inexplicable allure to self-funding marketing, whose sole metric is the cash register. Odd content marketing has little to say on the matter.

If you can't sell it, don't give it away ... or consider it doing much for marketing.

I'm trying to think of a book that really stands out on overall marketing and nothing is coming to mind at the moment, but of the textbooks I used in my marketing program one of the easiest to read and most helpful was "The Public Relations Writer's Handbook": https://www.amazon.com/Public-Relations-Writers-Handbook-Digital/dp/0787986313/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1486581186&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=public+relations+handbook

An interesting fun one that's a quick read is "Damn Good Advice (For People with Talent!)" by George Lois: https://www.amazon.com/Damn-Good-Advice-People-Talent/dp/0714863483/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1486581296&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=damn+good+advice

I'll add more if I think of anything.

These concepts are universal and apply to every size and type of business. If applied properly to your business, they will help you. However, as a small business owner, you may not have the time, resources or experience to apply these principals effectively.

I'm guessing that you're researching marketing because you have questions about how to build a strategy for your business. Frankly, the materials you referenced are not a good place for an inexperienced marketer to start. I highly recommend this book if you want to learn the basics of brand strategy.

Don't be fooled into thinking that marketing is limited to big companies. Sure, big companies use different tactics, but Coke started with nothing and built their brand up to be one of the most valuable in the world, and they did that by leveraging human psychology extremely well.

Couple of questions to ask yourself as you start your new journey..

1. Do I know what my users/customer's journeys through my website are? Do we have them mapped out properly, and as advised in other comments, are the pages in these journeys singing on mobile and easy to use?

2. Do I know how effective the last 12 months of paid and content marketing activities (including the traditional advertising, pr, event stuff too) have been in bringing people to and directing them through these digital journeys? If you're spending money, whats bringing in the customers, what isn't, and if so, can it be fixed or should it be dumped?

3. By now, you'll have much more data and insight to hand while you're flying the plane. When the flight smooths out, you can then take time to assemble your new marketing plan, which is absolutely going to be essential for you future success in the role. If you're inexperienced in writing digital marketing plans, grab a copy of this book (that isn't a self-plug btw)

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Understanding-Digital-Marketing-Strategies-Generation/dp/0749471026/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1470503758&amp;sr=8-5&amp;keywords=digital+marketing

Good luck and if you're interested I produce a monthly digital blog via Twitter @verypaulcherry.

>What is too time-consuming, expensive, boring or difficult?

One, working with designers. Two, working with these guys.

> Even though one of us works in marketing, we’ve realized that we don’t understand the space and marketers’ problems well enough.

... to develop software for marketers.

http://www.amazon.de/Creating-Value-Big-Data-Analytics/dp/1138837970/ref=sr_1_fkmr3_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1459498273&amp;sr=8-1-fkmr3&amp;keywords=creative+value+big+data

http://www.amazon.com/Everyone-Advanced-Analytics-Graphics-Addison-Wesley/dp/0321888030/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1459498311&amp;sr=8-8&amp;keywords=r

I'm doing a marketing grad school assignment on the UK beer industry and am about to head out to the library to see if I can borrow this book: Business for Punks: Break All the Rules - the BrewDog Way

Happy to let you know if it's any good.

I'd get him HubSpot's book about Inbound Marketing. It covers much more than social but everything, at a beginner level, that an entrepreneur should know about internet marketing. http://www.amazon.com/Inbound-Marketing-Found-Google-Social/dp/0470499311

Use your background, don't hide it. Craft a unique selling proposition. Develop some sort of overall approach or central concept like Getting Real, Purple Cow, also known as a philosophy. No mission statement required. No manifestos.

Personally, I find these to be trite and inane. You take some people out into, say, the woods. In paintball gear. Discuss no problem. Address no issue. Barely work on communications skills. Then you provide some distraction so many layers of abstraction removed from any business experience as to be worthless.

Presto. Success. That'll be five grand.

There are many criticisms. These are also called objections in marketing. You want to address them. My use for this category is a leading indicator of the peak of the current economic cycle. These things go south in a big way during a downturn.

My suggestion is don't go into to this unless you could write a book, with some central theme. Then get a literary agent. Write the book. And use it to open up your sales funnel.

Synchronized Breaking: Team-building &quot;production tool&quot; or cash-cow scam? LSD couldn't get me where I'd need to be to imagine this existed. In contrast there is Getting Real.

It sounds like your problem is selling to people. "Genera" ads are probably not the right direction for Facebook/in person. In your conversations and ad's, you should follow these steps: 1. Create attention 2. Establish an interest in your product/service 3. Create a desire for that person to need it 4. Finally, call to action (Email or call for a free quote)

Finding an audience, or even creating an audience is a good start, but you really have to ask why they need it. What is your product? What will it do for the consumer?

I can't recommend this book enough. Got me through college writing ad's and through my college Marketing internship.

have you ever read the book "Tipping point?" The whole book is about how to make things go viral, ideas, products... check it out http://www.amazon.com/The-Tipping-Point-Little-Difference/dp/0316346624

This is my favourite book on the matter http://www.amazon.com/Ogilvy-Advertising-David/dp/039472903X

It's timeless advice and gives you some of the core ideas behind creating a story, or associate branding.

It's impossible for someone to sit here and really flesh out the entire profession. There are so many small nuances to it and much of it is subjective.

A masterful resource I'd recommend is Alan Weiss' book, "Million Dollar Consulting".

Otherwise, dig right in like other said and if it makes financial sense, perhaps invest in a business coach who can help you along. Nothing too intense, but someone to keep you tracking and ease any anxieties.

For starters, thank you for taking the time to comment on this.

When I try my to google marketing topic say XYZ, I almost always end up on a blog post explaining the virtues of specific term like "Why XYZ is important for your marketing strategies".

Going back to my original post, I guess would break it out like this:

1) What marketing topics/strategies are relevant to an IT Consulting practice? For example, I know two from hanging around here: Branding and Thought Leadership through content generation. I am sure there are others. How do I find out what those topics and strategies are?

2) Learn the topics identified above. For example, for branding I am think of going after these 2 books

The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding

Positioning The-Battle-Your-Mind

What are the best resources for learning everything identified in 1 above?

3) How to tie everything identified in 1 into a cohesive strategy? How do I map these onto a sales process?

I think you nailed it with your IT statement. I used to read posts like "How do I learn to program web apps?" and I used to think "just buy a book and use google". I now have a much better appreciation of how one can feel totally lost when trying to step into a totally different domain.

Thanks

I think you need to shift how you're thinking about social here. You're not going to accomplish this through a campaign approach. Instead it's going to be a long game. Hitting instagram, twitter, Pinterest, snapchat, facebook every day - and not with promos.

Some really good case studies in here: http://www.amazon.com/Jab-Right-Hook-Story-Social/dp/006227306X

If you have these questions often, consider picking up The Graphic Artist's Guild Handbook of Pricing &amp; Ethical Guidelines, which is a great resource for pricing standards for all things graphic design and media production. It gives a range of prices for each service and sometimes time estimates as well.

Hey I recently launched a book on Traffic driving techniques on Amazon and currently its FREE (till 9th of Feb)...

You may want to check it out. I'm sure you'll greatly benefit from it...

Here's the link: U.S. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00S4HYR00 U.K. https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00S4HYR00

Good luck and cheers

Automation marketing tool also help you a lot. At least safe a lot of your time.

iMarketing Center is one of them (only for android) that supports text automation and email automation.

You can create email campaign or text campaign, with auto reply, auto followup, unsubscription, auto subscription.... that will help you a lot for your business.

This is it: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.emailmarketing247

Do you need email marketing tool or text marketing tool? Our app is iMarketing Center that support email & text marketing.

You can create text/email auto reply, auto subscription, auto followup ... from this app, but only for android :)

If you have android phone/tablet, please check it out here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.emailmarketing247

(and if you have question, please input in app's feedback)

sender must use an email marketing app that support auto unsubscribe. So recipient can subscribe them easily. It'll safe money and reputation also.

This Email Marketing 24/7 app is really help me do that: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.emailmarketing247

You should try Email Marketing 24/7 that has open rate/link click tracking (free). You can also use different email from/reply to and a lot... Please try here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.emailmarketing247