Let’s talk about SEO. More than a month after a source gave thousands of pages of internal Google documentation to SparkToro co-founder Rand Fishkin, the importance of this leak is Research from the continuous-scroll era showed that 88% of clicks go to the top three positions — and only 4% of clicks come after result…
Marketers should stop using attribution models and return to a 1985-like measurement model if they want their brands to succeed in 2024 and beyond. “Attribution is fully broken these days, but we’re still using it like we used to,” says Can We Really ‘Measure’ Marketing Anymore? Read on (or watch the video) to learn what…
Ask a question; get an answer. Ask the next question; get the next answer. Repeat until done. That’s the basic formula of any interview. But making an interview great requires more than you posing questions and the interviewee answering them. A great interview incorporates a thoughtful approach that makes the subject comfortable enough to share…
I had two interesting discussions with marketing leaders recently. Both revolved around the same question: “Where do we start?” One told me she’d road-mapped an entirely new content operation for her marketing department. She’d gotten the go-ahead from leadership, but everybody was so busy with other work that they weren’t sure how to move forward….
How are things for marketing agencies? Not as great as last year, according to Ad Age’s Agency Report 2024 (subscription required). In 2023, total revenue for the 30 biggest agency companies in the world rose 5.6%. The forecast for this year? It’s between 2% and 3%. The Too Big Five (as CMI’s Robert Rose calls…
Social media offers a volatile space for marketing. The rules of engagement vary across platforms, as do the audiences and opportunities for brands. The platforms’ popularity ebbs and flows while new challengers emerge, hoping to disrupt the scene and steal the spotlight. Once seemingly stable and reliable, shared media outlets shift their business priorities and…
Stuart Butler is a trained rocket scientist turned content marketing rock star. Though the career as a rocket scientist didn’t stick, he applied what he learned to a 20-plus-year career in marketing. Now, as chief marketing officer of Traveling the Spectrum, a heartwarming, unscripted six-part video series following three families living with autism as they…
A long time ago (so long ago that Nickelback still had hits), my marketing leader would ask me what value my brand-building programs added to the business. My answer to him was always the same: “Good things.” Halfway through 2024, brands are desperate to make every piece of content catch their audiences’ attention. That’s no…
We didn’t get to the south of France this week, but we’ve been talking about Cannes Lions. At the most recent book and in his keynote presentation at Content Marketing World 2023, Robert Rose asked if marketing was simply becoming content marketing. Well, this year’s Dumb Ways To Die campaign. This year’s early winners struck…
Brands’ words and actions — including yours — matter. As politics, health care, and other cultural topics become more polarized, being authentic about your values and causes can build audience loyalty. Over half of young U.S. adults (ages 18 to 29) want businesses to take a public stand on current events, while 35% of those…