In the many years I’ve worked in technology marketing, I’ve come to learn that the only color that’s safe from attacks is blue. Blue, blue and more blue. Maybe add some gray, but make sure there’s plenty of blue. And be liberal in your use of dark royal blue, but be careful not to take it too dark or too bright. Then we can all feel comfortable with our choices, and ourselves, while our brand disappears within the depths of the calm, blue sea of technology marketing.
Here are 3 reasons IT pros will (or won’t) attend your next big event
As my team considers the redesign of our event recruitment landing pages, and how to arrange the content to achieve the best marketing ROI, we sought out the knowledge of our audience of IT pros by way of very targeted focus groups. What compels them to attend a live event in 2014? Is it the location? The big production? The party?
Brand management in the era of DIY: Get tactical
Don’t keep it simple, smarty: Complexity in content strategy promises high engagement
While the cliché of “keeping things simple, stupid” is thrown around as if no other option could be smart, logical complexity in content strategy is an advantage. It promises high engagement with your content, regardless if it’s editorial content or marketing content. If you need to convince constituents you’re being smart, not stupid, visualization of complex content strategy can quickly convey its beneficial logic.
5 steps to strategic visualization during content creation: reversing a process to be more compelling
The stampede of the infographic gold rush has left a lot of humble bar and pie charts littering the shoulders of the visualization trail. Are any of us sympathetic? I’m not. I want more visualization in content creation, and not just limited to the fashionable, standalone infographic. And we need to change to the way create content to succeed with visualization
On marketing ROI: Your right brain called, and it misses you terribly
The wealth and abundance of valuable audience intelligence available to marketers through their own digital properties as well as from media partners like TechTarget has triggered a seismic shift in how marketers and the business determine how to move forward. Districted by this shiny new object, we marketers can easily lose sight of the value of bringing a message to life for our audience. So this newfound love of intelligence can easily overshadow the right brain. The net result is that you probably have a marketing team of smart people duking it out, left versus right, in the match of the century.
Tired. Boring. Words. In italic. Has the tagline outlived its usefulness?
Recently I read of the purported demise of the tagline in BtoC marketing. Is the same true in B2B? Tagline? No tagline? I’ve noticed few taglines in B2B business website headers, and some oddly appear only in the “about us” section. So the debate going on inside my head: is it because it’s irrelevant now, or because the web design committee deemed the real estate more valuable for functionality that can be measured using analytics?