Ben Jacobson

What are your most successful content marketing campaigns, channels, and assets? How do you know? Tracking conversions from an internal blog post to online sales, for example, is quite simple. However, few customer journeys are that straightforward, especially in the convoluted, non-linear world of B2B marketing.

Amid the whirlwinds of the industry’s response, it’s become abundantly clear that the demise of the cookie is probably a good thing for everyone involved – audience members, publishers and even marketers.

In 2019, is inbound marketing becoming less effective, or is it possible that as marketers, we need to change our approaches? In the hours following his recent presentation at the Slush conference in Helsinki, I got the chance to sit down and talk with Brian Halligan, co-founder and CEO of HubSpot. Along with Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan is the figurehead of the inbound movement. Among other things, Halligan and I discussed inbound’s longevity and evolution. Here are some of his insights.

Brands need to keep communicating, but sensitively and thoughtfully. Audiences are glued to their devices and ready to engage. Here are a few practical tips.

Sure, you can (and should) spend time on content promotion and SEO to help new readers find you, but it can take months for those tactics to start showing real results. With content syndication, on the other hand, the content itself becomes a mechanism for promotion and can get you in front of new audience members a lot more quickly. Let’s look at the basics of content syndication, what it is and isn’t good for, and some tips f

Are you converting as many people as your product is capable of converting? From my perspective, it seems like most marketers are making the same mistakes – common funnel-draining mistakes that are fixable over just a few weeks or maybe months.

Committing to video marketing is no small undertaking. That’s why simplifying and streamlining your video marketing efforts is critical to achieving success. Fortunately, mining your content archives to repurpose different types of content as videos is relatively simple. Whether you’re turning other formats into engaging videos, or extending the reach of your production clips, you end up with a diverse content library that can empower your audience regardless of their format preference.

There’s a fine line between focus and tunnel vision, and a north star metric seems to fall right on the border. That level of focus has obviously helped startups in the past, but with certain situations and goals. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that ignoring most of your data will yield major business growth.

Many view neuromarketing as a type of “dark art,” designed to force consumers into doing a brand’s bidding. And there’s been a lot of tech blog “echo chamber” coverage of it being newfangled, unscientific, nefariously manipulative, and a host of other unflattering adjectives. The reality is that neuromarketing helps marketers get past some of the human barriers in traditional market research, penetrating surface emotions to the subconscious, and measuring emotional markers in real time instead of during recall.

Did you #DeleteFacebook in 2018? Caring about our online privacy might be popular right now, but on a wider level, it’s not as easy as we think to escape the hole we’ve dug ourselves into. And even if we were deleting our Facebook accounts en masse, would it be anything more than a symbolic gesture in terms of our own online privacy?

In news media jargon, an “echo chamber” is a situation where information, beliefs or ideas are reinforced or amplified through communication and repetition inside a defined system. When you’re in an echo chamber, whether you’re aware of it or not, you don’t question your sources, and perspectives that deviate from the status quo don’t have any way to get in. Brand publishing is no different, especially when marketers get so focused on ROI that we start over-relying on flawed performance data.

You’ve just batched an entirely new keyword list. There are tons of great potential terms and audiences to target. Until you look at the metrics: $50 for a click?
Instantly your momentum drains, and your campaign ideas are thrown out the window.
I see marketers give up at this point all the time. It’s simply not viable at such a high CPC, right? Wrong.
Here’s why over-reliance on CPC is causing massive downfalls in your marketing potential and why you should stop benchmarking it once and for ...

Since no one knows what your audience wants better than the consumers themselves, companies often go directly to their customers for shaping the future of their products. And this can work great when used right. Giving users a personal stake in the product’s future and getting them excited for what’s to come can increase the chance they’ll stick around for the release. But sometimes listening to customers can steer you in the wrong direction, especially when you become too eager to please.

“More content” won’t solve your problems on an ongoing basis if you continue to follow the same misguided processes as a default. Why rely on patchwork to fill in the gaps when you can plan to achieve goals like these from the get-go? A strategy and process refresh can be a great quarterly housekeeping item. If any part is misaligned with your business’s current priorities, now is the time to correct it before your content veers too far off track.

Retention marketing is often discussed as a whole with the same strategies suggested for every type of business. You rarely see it broken down further to different tactics and tools for different businesses, like B2B vs. B2C. And that’s where we start to go wrong.