Martech Zone
Martech Zone provides daily articles for business, sales, and marketing professionals to research technology, discover new sales and marketing tools, and learn how to leverage platforms to drive greater business results.
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Social Media & Influencer Marketing
Influencer Marketing: Beware of the Internet Famous
A few weeks ago, I received an email from a woman asking about my book. It was a bit of a sad email – reading that a woman who wanted to buy my e-book had spent a ton of money on the site where it was talked about and gotten no results in the past. Ironically, the article they read…
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Social Media & Influencer Marketing
Celebrity Endorsement Tweets are Here!
Do celebrity endorsements work? Yes, they do. Otherwise, we wouldn’t see advertisements with celebrities every day, would we? Catherine Zeta-Jones’ endorsement deal with T-Mobile was reportedly worth 20 Million. Subsequently, T-Mobile’s national sales jumped 25% during the campaign. Celebrity endorsements are now on Twitter, too! Why does celebrity advertising work? Celebrity advertising works on 3 different levels: Familiarity – we…
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Advertising Technology
RIP: Frank Batten Sr – The Billionaire You Never Heard Of
Most people have never heard of Frank Batten Sr outside of Hampton Roads, Virginia. When I first left the US Navy and went to work at The Virginian-Pilot, I heard nothing but great things from the Pressmen that worked for the newspaper when they spoke of Frank Sr. He was known to come out to the presses and chat it…
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Be Smart Enough to Find the Answers
Earlier this week, I posted a tweet promoting a product that was pretty cool. The application was graphically beatiful and incredibly useful… but I couldn’t actually figure out what it did or how to use it without a lot of work. The company immediately tweeted back that the interface was “simple”. I replied, “thanks!”. I wasn’t going to argue with…
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Mobile Marketing, Messaging, and Apps
Robocalls- We won’t miss them!
We all get them, and almost universally hate them, the annoying call promoting some product or event that plays a recording or, even worse, speaks to you in a mechanical voice. Well, the FTC has enacted new rules and regulations regarding the placing of these calls. Jon Leibowitz, Chairman of the FTC, had some pretty harsh words on the subject.…
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Content Marketing
We Know Customers are Talking About Us…
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of interviewing Clint Page, CEO of Dotster, on social media return on investment. I’ve been a fan of Dotster for 7 years now and my appreciation for the company was reaffirmed when I heard about the nightmare Terms of Service that other registrars were leveraging on their customers. 2009 is the year of social media…
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Marketing Books
Dummies: A Reference for the Rest of Us!
Last week there was an Indy Christian Geeks lunch at my favorite coffee shop. During lunch, I had a special gift delivered from the good folks at Wiley Publishing (also here in Indianapolis!). The guys had some fun… snapping some photos and uploading them to Twitter within minutes with great titles like, The Secret is Out! Kidding aside, Wiley has…
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Social Media & Influencer Marketing
Why I don’t like Facebook
Those of you who have seen me speak have often heard me speak out against Facebook. I’m on Facebook, I participate on Facebook… but I don’t like it. There are quite a few things I don’t enjoy on Facebook: The navigation makes no sense to me. There are menus, side menus, navigation that appears… I get lost and don’t believe…
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Content Marketing
Single-Tasking Tools
Douglas Karr must have been tapping into my brain when he wrote How to Single-Task. I’ve been thinking a lot about this whole multi-tasking thing, about how constant hopping from tidbit to tidbit and doing more than one task at once feels like it’s actually robbing me of time (and making me feel kind of stupid). When I’m writing reports,…
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E-commerce and Retail
Consumers Do Not Buy Perfection Anymore
One of the most wonderful transformations that I believe social media has brought about is the destruction of the perfect brand. No longer do consumers expect perfection… but we do expect honesty, customer service, and fulfillment of any promises a company set expectations for. In a client luncheon last week at Bitwise Solutions, President and CEO Ron Brumbarger told his…
