My Blog My Blog

6 Steps to Build a Single Customer View & Improve Customer Experience

Marketing Operations
June 19, 2021/by
6 Steps to Build a Single Customer View & Improve Customer Experience Ever see those cool 360-degree cameras on red carpets at award shows? Someone famous will stand in the middle and several cameras positioned all around will simultaneously capture pictures of the star, creating a spectacular image that gives you a 360 view of the person. Now, imagine if you could do that with your target audience? Capture them from all angles as they interact with your brand. With a single customer view, you can. The issue is, many businesses struggle to know where to start. At the end of this article, you’ll understand what a single customer view is and how to create one for your brand. A single customer view combines data from a consumer’s behavior on web and email, social media activity, demographics, interactions with customer service, and purchase history. Let’s go through an example of an interaction between a consumer and a brand. A consumer, let’s call her Jazmyn, discovers a brand on Instagram. Jazmyn visits the brand’s website through Instagram and downloads a free offer. Said brand adds Jazmyn to an email list and she starts receiving nurturing emails. After months of no interactions, Jazmyn rediscovers the brand and makes a purchase. A month after that, she calls customer service regarding an issue with her product. In just a few months, Jazmyn has interacted with at least three departments within the company: marketing, sales, and customer service. In many businesses, every department tracks...
Read Full Story

9 Breadcrumb Tips to Make Your Site Easier to Navigate [+ Examples]

User Experience
June 18, 2021/by
9 Breadcrumb Tips to Make Your Site Easier to Navigate In the fairy tale Hansel and Gretel, two children drop breadcrumbs in the woods to find their way home. Nowadays, you probably don't experience too many lost-in-the-wood experiences, but I'm willing to bet you've felt disoriented on a poorly designed website. In web design, breadcrumb navigation is a way to show your users their location and how they got there. Like Hansel’s breadcrumbs, it helps users retrace their path and see where they are in the greater scheme of your site. While you can style breadcrumbs however you'd like, they tend to look the same across websites that use them. Here's a simple example of breadcrumbs from the HubSpot Knowledge Base: Jakob Nielsen, co-founder of the acclaimed Nielsen Norman Group, has been recommending breadcrumb navigation since 1995, and makes a strong point for their usefulness and efficiency: "All that breadcrumbs do is make it easier for users to move around the site, assuming its content and overall structure make sense. That's sufficient contribution for something that takes up only one line in the design." If your business's website is multi-layered, you might consider implementing breadcrumb navigation to make your site easier to navigate. However, like any design element, there's a right and wrong way of doing it. Here, we'll explore nine tips and examples to ensure you're creating the most effective breadcrumb navigation for your users. Breadcrumb Navigation Tips and Examples 1. Only use breadcrumb navigation...
Read Full Story

The Beginner’s Guide to Brand Pillars

Branding
June 17, 2021/by
The Beginner's Guide to Brand Pillars Although the practices of marketing and branding have been around for centuries, the industries started to shift in the 1990s. The digital age came about and companies began to market their brands more than their products with the goal of giving their company a personality. As a millennial born in the early 90s, I grew up at the same time as the digital revolution. In fact, millennials have a reputation for spending all day on their phones and being lazy. However, I'd argue that as the digital age and technology began to evolve, so did society's work expectations. Businesses, and even employees, are expected to be a brand in and of themselves that has value and positively impacts society (instead of just selling products). As a marketer or business owner, you might be wondering, "How can I create a brand that my audience connects with?" In this post, we'll discuss how to create brand pillars that clearly communicate your brand identity to your audience. For example, brand pillars can be core values, important strengths, or aspects of a brand that support or add dimension to the core idea of "Who are you?" Essentially, these brand pillars can be anything that your customers find important -- perhaps it's innovation, reliability, on-time delivery, etc. Brand pillars are meant to differentiate your brand and should be valued and endorsed by your customers. When someone asks why your customers like your brand, they'll probably be able to...
Read Full Story

The Ultimate Guide to Writing a Cover Letter

Cover Letter
June 17, 2021/by
The Ultimate Guide to Writing a Cover Letter Nowadays, companies have a computerized system that puts resumes through an online scanner which will automatically reject some applicants and push other applicants through depending on their qualifications. So, What does this mean for you as a job seeker? Well, the cover letter attached to your application is more important than ever. Have you been asked to attach a cover letter to your job application? Perhaps you're struggling to write one that lands an interview or have no clue what one is at all. Whichever situation you're in, we've crafted this ultimate guide to cover letters. You'll find out how to write one that gets read, what to include, and browse tons of templates to gain inspiration. Are you ready to land the job of your dreams through a perfectly crafted cover letter? Awesome! You can dive straight in, or jump to the section you'd like to read. How Long Should a Cover Letter Be? Okay, so you're all fired up and ready to craft the cover letter of the hiring manager's dream. That's great! But how do you manage the fine balance between in-depth and overwhelming? A good cover letter is long enough to communicate why the recruiter should pick you … but not long enough to bore them to the point where they'll need a strong coffee. One page is usually enough to cover everything you'll need to include, without losing the recruiter's attention and...
Read Full Story

How to Build a Marketing Technology (Martech) Stack That’ll Grow With You

Marketing Automation
June 17, 2021/by
How to Build a Marketing Technology (Martech) Stack That'll Grow With You What will your marketing team look like six months from now? Or a year from now? How many people will you add? What new tools, systems, and data will you need? There are a lot of potential questions you can ask about the future of your business, but there is one certainty: you'll deal with more data, more people, more processes, and more complex problems as you grow. But how do you deal with that in your marketing team? That’s where marketing technology, or martech, comes in. By automating tasks and removing obstacles from your team’s workflows, marketing tech empowers your team to waste less time on menial tasks, allowing your business to grow more efficiently. When you put it all together, you get a marketing technology stack: a collection of tools that your team uses to do their best work every day. As your team and business scales, it’s important to create a martech stack that streamlines your day-to-day processes. In this post, we’ll go over everything you need to know about martech and how to build a marketing tech stack that will stay with you as you grow your business. Marketing technology can be used by any type of marketer — even non-digital marketers. One martech tool is typically used for a different marketing discipline. Here are a few examples of disciplines and a martech tool that can be used for them. ...
Read Full Story

What Netflix Bingeing Taught Me About Digital Experience

Marketing Strategy
June 16, 2021/by
What Netflix Bingeing Taught Me About Digital Experience Next time you open Netflix, I want you to try something. When you see your tailored suggestions, as the platform starts the video right where you left off on your iPad, stop and take note of that experience. How do these experiences actually make you feel? Does the device handoff give you a rush of excitement and gratitude? Probably not. Start over. Imagine opening Netflix again. Your recommendations are gone, replaced with an unfiltered list of content. The list feels random, but then you'd expect at least a couple of shows to be of random interest. They're not. That episode you're halfway through on your iPad? You'll have to scroll back and forth to find your place. Ultimately, you'll probably just rewatch parts of the episode “just to be safe”.   If you're like me (my apologies if you are), you'll react more to this moment of friction than the moment of seamless performance. The seamless experience is largely invisible — it's unfelt — while the bad experience is impossible to ignore. Based on how bad it is, it'll haunt you and sometimes make you question your life choices. It may even push you toward Hulu or Disney +, or another platform that you trust more. The same dynamic is at play for the digital experiences you deliver to customers. 2020 and 2021 accelerated digital transformation across industries, creating a new set of expectations in your customers' personal and...
Read Full Story

Why People Visit YouTube & How to Engage Them [New Data]

Youtube Marketing
June 15, 2021/by
Why People Visit YouTube & How to Engage Them YouTube is the second largest website globally with over 2 billion global users. Still, despite its huge audience, it can be challenging to gain engagement on your videos. Ultimately, to gain views, likes, shares, and even subscribers, your content will have to engage at least part of YouTube's huge audience while fulfilling their needs. But, if you're just starting on YouTube, or struggling to grow your strategy, you might not know what the platform's audience wants just yet. To help marketers learn more about YouTube's huge user pool, and their interests, I asked nearly 300 consumers: "Why do you most commonly visit YouTube?" Here's what they said. Why Do People Visit YouTube? Before we dive into what people picked as the most common reason they visit YouTube, it's worth mention one thing you won't see on the list below: product discovery. Just a measly 3% of respondents visit YouTube primarily to "learn about products." Data Source However, you shouldn't panic just yet. Keep in mind that we just polled a small group of general consumers about their most common reason for visiting YouTube. Had we asked them for their top three reasons, polled a larger group, or polled a specific demographic, the results could have been different. It's also worth noting that many demographics search out product videos when they're researching a prospective purchase. In fact, in a 2020 recent survey, 94% of people said they watch explainer...
Read Full Story

The Ultimate Guide to Starting a Minority-Owned Business [+ Expert Tips]

Breaking the Blueprint
June 15, 2021/by
The Ultimate Guide to Starting a Minority-Owned Business COVID-19 presented more challenges than one for businesses, and the pandemic took an even more tremendous toll on minority business owners. With minority business owners experiencing a cash crunch, not many could secure loans to keep their doors open. In 2020, 400,000 small businesses decided to permanently close due to the effects of the pandemic — many of which were in underserved communities. Whether you're in the idea phase or already established, this guide will help you get your minority-owned business off the ground. Before you dive into this guide, check out this blog on how to start a business if you're still in the idea phase. When you finish reading this piece, you'll have everything you need (and more) to thrive as a minority business owner — from how to get certified as a minority-owned business, to funding options and growth resources. Get Certified as a Minority-Owned Business After you've nailed down your business idea, plan, and registered your company, it's time to get certified as a minority-owned business. This certification isn't required, but it will help inform consumers and potential partners about your company's leadership. You may also need this certification may also if you want to apply for government-funded minority business grants and loans, or other programs. Illinois, Ohio, California, and New York have local agencies to get certified as a minority-owned business on a state level. There are various ways to get certified from local state and business agencies,...
Read Full Story

Your Brief Guide to Using Goal Seek in Excel

Excel
June 12, 2021/by
Your Brief Guide to Using Goal Seek in Excel Successful marketers make informed decisions quickly using a combination of gut instincts and data analysis. They know the end goal, and figure out what it takes to get there. One way to fill in those gaps is by using Goal Seek in Excel. The function is helpful when you know your desired result, but you're not sure how to reach it. Maybe you want to improve your conversion rate to get more qualified leads but don't know how many people you need to attract. Or let's say your marketing team is aiming for an audacious revenue goal and you want to know how many customers you have to bring in with an upcoming campaign. If you're running a promotion, you likely need to figure out what discount to apply so you don't wind up with a loss. Goal Seek is the answer. Understanding how to apply it to your marketing or sales efforts can inform your strategy by letting you calculate the numbers required to achieve your goals. This post will explain how to use Goal Seek so you can start planning for your next campaign or making projections for the upcoming quarter. What is Goal Seek in Excel? Goal Seek is a powerful Excel function for conducting a what-if analysis. Also known as a sensitivity analysis, it helps you understand what can happen when you change one or more variables. Essentially, it's a way to conduct a reverse...
Read Full Story

The 4 Go-To Social Media Video Platforms & How to Engage Their Audiences [New Data]

Video Marketing
June 12, 2021/by
The 4 Go-To Social Media Video Platforms & How to Engage Their Audiences Last week, HubSpot's 2021 State of Marketing Report reveals that video is the top content marketing strategy used by brands while social media is ranked as the top marketing channel. With data like that above -- and all the growing social media video platforms out there -- it's become obvious that social media marketing and video content go hand in hand. While creating great social media videos for your company can be an incredibly effective marketing tactic, each social media content strategy shouldn't be a one-size-fits-all approach. To ensure that your videos are seen and spread quality brand awareness, you'll need to ensure you're making the right videos for the right audiences on the right platforms. With new video publishing options appearing on social platforms regularly, determining where your content will live is part of the content marketing battle. To help you figure out where to publish your video content -- and which types of videos to post -- we surveyed 300+ consumers to find out where they most commonly watch videos on social media. Below, we'll reveal the results and a few expert tips for building the best social media video-sharing strategy for 2021 -- including one from an expert at Wistia. Where are Consumers Watching Social Media Videos? In recent years, Gen-Z-targeting platforms like TikTok and Instagram have been on the rise. But if you think that everyone's primarily watching video on...
Read Full Story