Another month, October, is coming to an end. You know what that means…Halloween! Just kidding. Although Halloween is undoubtedly my favorite holiday each year, the end of October means another thing: it’s time for a wrap-up.
If you missed our first monthly update last month, here’s the rundown:
- It’s important to read and stay up-to-date on industry news.
- Sometimes, that means a lot of reading and searching that not everyone has time for.
- We like you.
- We want to make it easier for you to find the most important. marketing news from the previous month.
- This is how we’re trying to accomplish that.
- The first section of these monthly posts are a bit biased. We think they’re really great posts, but we also wrote them.
Get the gist? Great! Now on to all the news that’s fit to type (not really).
Resources from the eZanga Blog:
- 4 Social Media Lessons for Small Businesses from Breaking Bad - In what is probably the coolest guest blog post we’ve ever featured on the blog so far, Vocus’ Gabe Arce proves that TV doesn’t rot your brain. In fact, you can learn a lot from it; even from shows like Breaking Bad. If you work for a small business or in social media and are going through withdrawal from your favorite show, this post is for you.
- Get Crafty for More Effective Calls-to-Action – Next time creating a landing page, marketing email, etc. and need to create a call-to-action, read this post first. It turns out the secret to strong calls-to-action is getting crafty, minus the scissors and glue. In a recent webinar, Unbounce taught attendees a handy little acronym that all great marketers should memorize.
- 25 Marketing Quotes to Inspire [Slide Deck] – An oldie but goodie, this ones a pick-me-up for when you’re feeling down. We’ve all been in that place where we’re feeling uninspired, discouraged, or bad at our jobs. In these moments, it’s best to step back and breathe for a minute. During that minute, take a look at these quotes to remember what your purpose is and why you’re striving to achieve it.
- Create Landing Pages That Convert With These 5 Tools – If going back and forth between designers and developers for days, weeks, or even months is keeping you from kicking off your next great marketing campaign, it’s time to look at alternative options. There are plenty of great landing page builders that require no coding or design skills and will give you a DIY landing page ready to go live in just a few hours. This post has 5 that we recommend.
- 3 Post-Hummingbird Content Marketing Techniques – Content marketing is even more important than ever before in the aftermath of Google’s release of its latest algorithm. If your small business isn’t already dabbling in creating content, it’s high time to start. If it all seems overwhelming, start by focusing on blogging and being active on social media. Boostsuite’s Ryan Kettler gives you advice in this post.
Important marketing news from around the web:
- Twitter adds photo and video previews to timelines - Were you ever annoyed by how much clicking around was required to view multimedia on Twitter? If you view a lot of it, that’s a lot of expanding tweets. Well, Twitter has updated its timeline on the web and mobile applications so that previews of photos and videos are viewable right in the timeline, without having to click to expand the tweet or open a lightbox. The New York Times calls this the biggest update to the interface since the 2011 update.
- Pinterest’s Promoted Pins go live – We’ve seen it coming for years. It was officially announced last month. And it finally happened this month. There’s now official advertising on Pinterest. While still exclusive to select brands, you may have already started seeing Promoted Pins while browsing on Pinterest. If you haven’t yet, this blog post from Mashable shows you what they look like and how they work.
- Content strategy in a (not provided) world – As we mentioned last month, Google is now encrypting all organic search keywords. A lot of marketers are unsure about how to handle SEO from here on out. In addition to content marketing, focus on storytelling. This Vocus post goes over how SEO is a lot more about the searcher now. Search is becoming more human, so think about the person searching instead of what they’re searching.
- Google’s Matt Cutts on search vs. social – It’s been a big argument over the past few years in the marketing world. What’s more important? Search or social media? But is there a clear cut answer? Matt Cutts of Google says there isn’t, except that you shouldn’t just choose one and completely ignore the other. Good marketers don’t just use one channel and ignore the rest anymore. You just can’t get away with it.
- Improve your email marketing click-through rate by 16% - Inbound marketing software Hubspot recently released a study that found that targeting your email marketing campaigns based on buyer persona can improve your click-through rates by 16%. Personalized marketing is more than inserting someone’s first name into an email; most people can do that by now. Instead, make the content of the email something that the subscriber actually wants and needs.
Did we miss anything? What do you consider the biggest marketing news of the month? Share the news in the comments.
