|
Dear <<First Name>>:
This email contains your monthly dose of links to the best articles in marketing and PR for the last 30 days. However, we also have a special request for you.
As we’ve done for the last few years, we’ve published a roundup of predictions and you are invited to participate this year!
Participating is easy just click here to enter your prediction (and see examples from prior years): https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/Scripts2020
And now, onward with the regular edition of the Monthly Scripts.
Yours in marketing and communications,
Frank Strong
The Must-Read Articles
Every month I peruse hundreds of articles about marketing and public relations. At the end of the month, I analyze those metrics with technology and human judgment to find the most important stories.
Leadership and the CMO
1) The importance of becoming a ‘unifier’ CMO – and building relationships in the C-suite (Marketing Tech) “We have found that CMOs are divided into three archetypes, each with distinctive habits and traits: the Unifier, the Friend, and the Loner. However, only one—the Unifier—is the key to future victory.”
2) CMO Q&A: McAfee's Cybersecurity Marketing Challenges (Chief Marketer) "...3,000 vendors on any given day that will offer some form of cybersecurity and the [market] is noisy and overwhelmingly complicated."
Marketing
3) Three in 10 Consumers Say That A Brand Has Become “Too Personal” (Marketing Charts) “...respondents who have had a brand tip the balance towards being too personal, nearly 7 in 10 (69%) say they would stop doing business with a brand or reconsider their relationship”
4) Gartner report: Brands are ‘living organisms’ that must ‘continuously adapt’ (ClickZ) “Marketers are now considering brand value not just in the sense of acquiring new customers, but as a way of keeping customers around – and therefore increasing their lifetime value to the company.”
Public Relations
5) 7 Common PR Mistakes Startups Make (Crenshaw Communications) Timing, expectations and “me, me, me.”
6) Questions Everyone Asks About Op-Eds (O’Dwyer’s PR) “What are the biggest obstacles you encounter collaborating on an op-ed with clients? An it’s-all-about-me attitude that spells overbearing attempts at branding. The too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen syndrome. Cold feet about speaking out forcefully in public.”
7) How to Leverage Sales Teams for PR and Content Marketing (Marketing Profs) Salespeople can be the true voice of the customer. Through daily conversations, they intimately understand what problems prospects are experiencing right now.
Content Marketing
8) [New Research] How has Blogging Changed? 5 Years of Blogging Statistics, Data and Trends (Orbit Media) “The average blog post takes 3 hours and 57 minutes to write …up 65% from 2014 The average blog post is 1236 words long …56% longer than in 2014 52% of bloggers report that it’s getting harder to get readers to engage with their content.”
9) Parse.ly looks to solve content marketing attribution challenges (Martech Today) “A conversions report details which content converts the most users, which content contributes to the most conversions and the types of conversions.”
10) The 5 Common Mistakes Every Content Marketer Should Know (Content Marketing Institute) “Did you know that writing too many pieces on the same topic and focus keyword could damage your organic results in Google? It’s called keyword cannibalization. Your competing pages literally eat each other in the rankings.”
Email Marketing
11) Email Click Rates Continue to Decline. Which Emails Perform Better? (Marketing Charts) “average email click-through rates dropped below the 3% mark (2.9%) for the first time in North America, reversing a minor uptick in the same period last year.”
12) 7 spam words to avoid in email marketing (and why) (Emma Email Marketing) What’s not so great is that your marketing email can end up stuck in the spam folder with the scammers just because of the words used in the email.
Measurement
13) Why marketers’ channel neglect leads to fewer insights (Bulldog Reporter) It's not the lack of results that kills marketing, but the lack of attribution for those results.
14) KPI overload (Marketoonist) “We are working in a golden age of metrics. But the explosion in available data and metrics can give us KPI tunnel vision. It can blind businesses to what’s really most important.”
Creativity
15) 4 Ways Marketing and Creative Teams Can Streamline the Review and Approval Process (MarTech Series) “Those teams that find themselves with projects routinely stuck in review know the true meaning of the word bottleneck: they are facing upwards of 10 rounds of review over two weeks or more – and even after that they aren’t clear on what should change.” [disclosure: cleint]
16) Branding Is Dead, CX Design Is King (Designers) “UX is now associated with the quality of interactions between a user and a digital product, and CX design has come to encompass all the other encounters that a person has with a business.”
17) Citi has quietly been building an in-house creative agency (The Drum) “Citi has spent the last year shaping an in-house creative agency designed to speed up communication between its agencies and internal stakeholders.”
18) Survey: Growing content demands add pressure on marketing to improve cross-functional collaboration (MarTech Today) “An Adobe survey found better communication with other teams improves content marketing outcomes.”
Search and SEO
19) Rand Fishkin on optimizing for and against Google (Search Engine Land) “Google’s relationship with brands has shifted from referrer to competitor.”
Social Media
20) How social media marketing trends affect our martech decisions (ClickZ) “We look back at the top six social media trends from 2019, how they've shaped our martech buying decisions, and what they imply for the future.”
>>>Do you enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to a friend or colleague. New subscribers can sign up here.<<<
Recent Posts from Sword and the Script
The Sword and the Script blog and this newsletter are two separate subscriptions: Subscribe to the blog here to received thoughtful weekly posts. Here are the most recent you might have missed:
a) Storytelling is the Essence of Brand Development; Off Script No. 44: Jeffrey Crow, 2x CMO
b) 3 Studies with Benchmarks for Content Marketing, Blogging and Webinars [UML]
c) An Overview of Business Software Review Sites for Marketing Leaders in B2B Tech and Tips for Managing Profiles and Activity
d) PR Tech Briefing: How Cision Impact is Bringing Earned Media Attribution and Retargeting to Public Relations
e) PR Tech Briefing: Prezly is CRM for PR that’s Built on an Online Newsroom
f) Would you Run Your Internal Data Through this Media Monitoring AI? PR Tech Sum: Talkwalker, TVEyes, Meltwater, SocialChorus, Cision, Signal AI and Burrelles
Contributions and Mentions from Around the Web
Here are some of the third-party sites we’ve been fortunate to contribute to over the last month or so.
Local to the Atlanta area?
Sword and the Script Media organizes The Alpharetta Business Networking Club a monthly meetup that’s part business and part social. There are 3,300 members of this group in the high-technology corridor just north of Atlanta.
About Us
Sword and the Script Media, LLC is a certified veteran-owned public relations agency immersed in the business-to-business (B2B) marketplace. We focus on building consistent, sustainable and process-driven programs for PR, content marketing and social media. A defining difference comes down to our approach – that marketing ought to have utility. This is because marketing that helps, sells better than marketing that hypes.
About Us | Leadership | Services
* * *
Questions, comments or suggestions? Send ‘em. I’d like to hear from you.
---------------------------------------------
Frank Strong, MA, MBA
Founder & President
Sword and the Script Media, LLC
www.swordandthescript.com
PR | Content Marketing | Social Media
LinkedIn | Twitter | Facebook
* Sword and the Script Media, LLC is a verified veteran-owned business.
** Subscribe to the monthly newsletter or the weekly blog by email.
*** Local in Atlanta? Join the 3,000+ member Alpharetta Business Networking Club.
|
