Get Ahead of the Competition with The New Rules of Marketing and PR (Book Review)
Make marketing language uniquely you. Every brand should have its own identity, which means your marketing strategy should not be the same as your competitor's. This applies to concepts both large and small, from major marketing campaigns to the language used in promotional material. Whatever angle you choose, make sure the rest of the company is on the same page.
Best Marketing Books You Need to Read
Every month it seems like there are new marketing tools being introduced and new trends to stay on top of. But in the constant mad hunt for what's cool and trending (the legacy of all social media), marketers sometimes forget to revisit relevant lessons from classic marketing books. Below, we've put together a roundup of the last few marketing book reviews on the Wrike blog:
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4 Ways to Arm Your Team for Content Marketing Success
The Content Marketing Institute recently held its annual conference, Content Marketing World, and also published their B2B Content Marketing Study. Some trends that became very clear from both the survey and the event. We’re going to be increasingly flooded with content from brands Content marketers will continue to hone their skills, so content will get better and better To stand out, your content needs to be both unique and consistently delivered You’ll need a management approach, tools, processes and people in place to have an effective Content Engine To focus on the last point, and to arm your marketing plan for content marketing success, the effective management and operations of the content marketing team requires four things: 1. An Agile management approach to adjust to constantly changing demands from both internal stakeholders and customers. (See 7 Steps to Developing an Agile Marketing Team.) 2. A tool to manage communication, workflows and project management. (Learn more about Wrike for marketing team collaboration.) 3. Appropriate resources and access given to the content creators, designers and web developers to support rapid and regular content creation. 4. A collaborative relationship with the marketers who handle social media, advertising, email marketing/marketing automation. Learn more about the approaching content wave and the key takeaways from Content Marketing World 2014 in our Slideshare. Standing Out: Content Marketing World 2014 Takeaways #CMWorld Is your marketing team ready? How is your marketing team approaching the increasing need for high quality content? Let us know in the comments!
Ready, Set, Go Pro: 7 Steps to Becoming a Network Marketing Professional (Book Review)
Eric Worre reveals the secret to succeeding in this industry in his book, Go Pro: 7 Steps to Becoming a Network Marketing Professional. Are you ready to maximize your network marketing investment? Read this book review.
Nail the Basics with Marketing for Dummies: 4th Edition (Book Review)
This updated work covers an extensive set of topics, from social media best practices to building brand loyalty. It lays out everything you need to know to avoid wasting time on potentially costly, ineffective initiatives and focus on what matters. Most important, Marketing for Dummies offers more than just marketing research. It gives readers the necessary tools to take actionable steps forward to achieve results and meet their goals.
How to Use Wrike for Content Planning
It is crucial to plan ahead so you always have ideas at the ready. It's even better if you have finished and recyclable content pieces that can be published at a moment's notice. That's the purpose of this blog post: to walk you through a three-part process for planning out your content in advance of deadlines and sudden needs.
The Art of Writing: How to Create Content Like a Pro
Even if writing isn’t exactly your forte, the ability to communicate clearly and persuasively is essential—both for your leadership skills, and your ability to develop a strong online presence for your brand. Imagine this: you’ve spent a good deal of time and money developing a beautifully designed, user-friendly website for your company, and you have high expectations for it to lead to greater brand awareness and more sales. But that website needs fuel in the form of great content. Moreover, you’ll have to promote it via social media, with… you guessed it, more great content. Many of you don’t need to envision that scenario: you’ve faced it already, and you know that you simply can’t afford to neglect your writing skills. How to Master the Art of Writing Of course, there's aren't any instant shortcuts that will make you a brilliant writer overnight. It's a skill that takes a lot of practice, commitment, and diligence. However, there are certain methods that will help you improve your creativity and writing technique with less effort, including these key strategies and tools: 1. Understand the 'Why' Behind Each Piece of Content Think the purpose of content is simply to promote your brand? Think again! Your primary goal is to help the reader. Your reader should not come away believing that promotion was your main objective, but that your content is helping them in some way. Here are the main goals your content should have: Delivering value for the target audience, in the form of problem solutions, tips that improve their lives, answers to their questions, or entertainment Growing relationships with your audience that keep them coming back over the long term Defining your brand (or yourself) to target readers Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania analyzed the most emailed articles from The New York Times. The results were surprising: people liked sharing elaborate articles on intellectually-challenging topics, and they preferred recommending articles that awakened positive emotions. What about your brand? Analyze your own audience's preferences and then craft content that will meet their expectations. 2. Create How-To and List Articles Although some audiences prefer long form content based on in-depth research, they still want it organized in a clean, easy-to-skim format. Even if listicles and how-to articles seem like an outdated form of content, they are still effective. The trick is, you need a very specific topic that will separate you from the competition. So, instead of writing an article named Top 10 Movies from the 80s, try something like Top 10 Movies from the 80s to Watch in October. 3. Use the Right Keywords It's not enough to write great content—you have to make it easy for your audience to find. You know how Google works: you enter a set of keywords and the engine lists relevant results. Obviously, you want your content ranked as high as possible in results pages for the search phrases your audience uses most often. This is where SEO optimization comes in. You’ll need to use the right keywords in the right places, without letting those keywords take over your content. You should always put the human reader first by making sure keywords make sense within the context of your writing. 4. Ask Questions Questions are great because they make your content interactive. When you ask a question, the reader will answer it in their own head (and hopefully in the comments section of your article as well). In addition, questions awaken curiosity. It's a perfect opportunity for you to guide them to another of your articles or content pieces that discusses their question in greater detail and offers answers. 5. Express Your Personality Uniqueness is the factor that makes your content recognizable. It doesn’t matter whether you’re learning how to start a blog, a social media page, or you’re writing email campaigns. You have to find your unique voice! Your content should convey your company's distinct organizational culture, and it should make your brand recognizable. You’ll connect better with your audience if you write in first or second person, as if you're speaking directly to them. Adding some humor, storytelling, and real-life experience to your posts will help make your content even more engaging. Tools to Make You a More Efficient Writer Now that you’re aware of some tips to help you reach your the target audience, let’s go through some tools that will support the process. Google AdWords – Keyword Planner This is where you’ll get SEO keywords from. In addition to keyword ideas, the tool gives you a chance to organize your overall content writing campaign. You will see how a list of keywords may perform, and you can create your own keywords by combining different suggestions. EduGeeksClub Professional Writing Service If you need outside help generating content for your blog, email campaigns, and social media updates, you can outsource with a service like EduGeeksClub. This writing service connects you with professional writers from different niches, so you’ll always rely on experts who will work under your specific instructions. Hubspot’s Blog Topic Generator A great title is a critical part of attracting attention, especially when it comes to standing out in a sea of online content. If you have no idea where to start, this tool will give you a solid starting point. Enter three nouns relevant to the theme you want to work on, and the app will give you suggestions for a captivating title. CoSchedule Blog Post Headline Analyzer If you've brainstormed a few options for a headline but don't know which to use, this tool will predict how each of them will perform before you even publish the content. It gives you a grade based on word choice, emotional appeal, and the power of the topic. Are you ready to start working on your writing skills? Try the tips and tools suggested above and inform us about the progress you make! Author Bio Karen Dikson is a marketing expert and creative writer. She finds her inspiration in books and traveling. Connect with Karen on Twitter.
Top 10 Add-ons for Adobe Premiere
For video professionals, Adobe Premiere Pro is one of those powerful tools that allow you to bring a vision to life onscreen. And Premiere Pro gives users a large assortment of add-ons that can help expand your options for editing and compositing your videos. Here are the top 10 most useful and most popular Adobe Premiere Pro add-ons, both paid and free.
5 Marketing Operations Myths Debunked
Marketing operations is a hot topic, especially for businesses looking to stretch their marketing dollars farther. And yet misunderstandings abound concerning what marketing ops teams do and how they do it. So, we're tackling 5 common misconceptions surrounding marketing operations to set the record straight. First things first: what exactly do marketing operations teams do? They work to increase the efficiency and agility of the marketing department, aligning marketing efforts with both overarching business strategy and other departments (like sales and IT). Marketing ops manages strategic planning, budgeting, MRM marketing, process development, professional development, and marketing technology/data in order to measure and improve marketing performance and identify best practices. Myth 1: Marketing Ops' main goal is to justify marketing efforts. Fact: Marketing ops teams are objective. They don’t have quotas, so they can look at campaign results objectively to measure performance and attribute credit impartially. Their main goal isn’t to prove the ROI of marketing efforts, but rather to boost ROI through improved processes, analytics, etc. Myth 2: Marketing Operations is part of demand generation, and Marketing Operations managers come from traditional marketing roles. Fact: Marketing Operations teams are completely independent from other marketing departments, and marketers aren’t necessarily the ones filling marketing ops roles; they’re coming from finance, IT, sales ops, and other analytical, process-oriented positions. Myth 3: Marketing Ops is all about technology and data — automating processes, analyzing results, and crunching numbers. Fact: Gathering data isn’t enough, good marketing ops means interpreting it, understanding the business' objectives and how the marketing organization fits into the larger organization, and driving change within the organization. Marketing operations teams need to consider first and foremost the customer experience; only then can they determine how to tailor the marketing approach to improve that experience and boost engagement. Myth 4: Revenue generation is the realm of Sales Ops. Fact: Good Marketing Ops teams consider their marketing organization's process and strategy by considering this question: how does it contribute to revenue generation? At the Marketing Operations Executive Summit, they shared that "Marketing is now the strategy arm that is leading, and sales is following.” Marketing ops and Sales ops teams need to be closely aligned when it comes to revenue generation, not participate in hand-offs or operate independently. Myth 5: Your company needs a full-fledged Marketing Operations department in order to have effective marketing operations. Fact: You can improve your company's marketing operations right now, with the resources you already have. This article gives tips on identifying someone within your current marketing team who would be a good fit for taking on some marketing operations/marketing technologist responsibilities. And this article covers 6 ways your current marketing leaders can improve your marketing operations processes without hiring a marketing ops role (or spending any money at all). Learn About Marketing Operations Facts and Figures Find out which skills are most desired among marketing operations managers, the top challenge facing today's marketing departments, and how high-performing companies are boosting marketing revenue contribution by 69% in this overview of current marketing operations statistics. Sources: Marketo blog, Venturebeat, Wikipedia, Allocadia.com
Wrike Turns a Marketing Firm into a Project Management Rock Star
Today, for numerous companies, distributed teams have become a way of hiring the best people, regardless of their location. However, geographically distributed teams face additional challenges when establishing effective collaboration and overcoming some of the frictions of time and geography. Read the whole story of how 3rd Wave Research turned into project management rock stars with Wrike.
11 Top Add-Ons for Adobe Illustrator
As a creative professional, you're always looking for new ways to bring your designs to life. Add-ons offer more tools, effects, and workflows to help you do more with your Adobe Creative Cloud apps. While there are countless plugins and add-ons available for Adobe applications, we asked our own design team to share some of their favorites. These 11 add-ons will save you time and effort on your designs — and add some cool new visual styles to your arsenal. 1. Dragstrip Illustrator Brush Kit - RetroSupply Co. Price: $15 Give your vectors the look of hand-painted brush strokes with this add-on. Includes 26 illustrator brushes, including TIFF versions, painterly and splatter texture overlays, and two examples of professional quality reference art so you can see exactly how to use the brushes for best results. 2. Handmade Linocut Brushes - Guerillacraft Price: $8 35 lino cut brushes and 12 vector textures to give your work a handmade, hand-printed look, along with a set of brushes to create a unique woodcut effect. 3. Vintage Comic Press - AI Actions Price: $19 Inspired by comics from the 1950s, this add-on uses yellow, magenta, and cyan overlays to produce an authentic vintage look in vector format. Also includes halftone variations, 3D shadows, text outlines, coloring tips and cheat sheets. 4. PosterPress for Illustrator - Ian Barnard Price: $16 Give your designs the look of beautiful vintage travel posters with this add-on. You’ll also get 18 vector textures, a visual font list plus links to download them, and 13 beautiful photographs to use in your work. 5. Gold Rush for Illustrator - Studio Denmark Price: $18 All the metallic, glitter, and foil effects you could possibly want, in every shade of gold, rose gold, black, silver and copper. Over 200 swatches that include crumpled foil, gold leaf, metallic paint, textures, glitter, confetti, and geometric patterns. 6. Watercolor Fantasies Quick Styles - Creators Couture Price: $18 140 raster pattern swatches, each with a light and intense style variation. Apply it with a click and it pulls your current vector color as the base color, then adjust the style via the appearance panel. 7. 300+ Real Markers for Illustrator - Hejbrush.com Price: $9 Realistic marker brushes—over 300 actual markers scanned in 2400 dpi, cleaned and sharpened, then taken back to original size at 300 dpi. 8. VectorScribe - Astute Graphics Price: $78 Edit vector paths with precision, create dynamic shapes and corners, convert and delete points, extend and trim paths, and more. Included is a smart remove brush tool to remove excess points, a path extend tool, dynamic corners and shapes tools, a PathScribe tool to edit vector paths, the dynamic measure tool for quick and accurate measurements, and a protractor tool. 9. Magic Exporter - Kodlian.com Price: $25 Export objects from your AI docs to PNGs for all devices and screens. The add-on exports objects separately, so you can export artwork with a graphic layout behind it, and you can export designs scaled precisely for various devices and screen sizes. 10. CADtools 10 for Illustrator - Hot Door Price: $349 Easily draw, edit, and dimension vector your artwork with these 87 tools and 12 panels. Hundreds of editable symbols for architecture, people, and landscapes that automatically scale to the target layer, plus a built-in dashboard to control CAD features in Illustrator. 11. Wrike Adobe Creative Cloud Add-In - Wrike Price: Free Trial Attach previews of your work to Wrike, update and track file versions, update task status, and quickly find instructions, creative briefs, and feedback comments without leaving Illustrator. More Tools and Resources for Creative Professionals Whether you’re a novice designer or have years of experience under your belt, there are always new shortcuts and techniques to learn. Check out our list of free online training resources for Adobe Creative Cloud to sharpen your existing skills or learn the ins and outs of a new tool. Then see how Wrike's solution for marketing and creative teams can streamline administrative tasks and free your time to focus on creative work.
