Home » Posts » Page 5

Category: Posts

Post Round-Up | Q3 & Q4 2016

Contributing Posts

LeadGenius

Bridging The Gap: Account Based Marketing & Sales Strategy [eBook]

bridging-the-gap-1400x900-notext

I recently teamed up with Brandon Redlinger, Head of Growth at PersistIQ, and Jeremy Boudinet, Director of Marketing at Ambition, to write an eBook about account based marketing and sales strategy.

This eBook is a primer on how B2B companies can bridge disconnects between marketing and sales departments when implementing an account based strategy.

  • “This eBook takes a massive topic, account based marketing and selling, and distills it into an actionable, digestible volume tailor-made for the modern B2B business leader.” -Max Altschuler Founder & CEO, SalesHacker
  • “This ebook does a fantastic job of covering the specific tactics most organization struggle with.” – Lars Nilsson, VP of Global Sales, Cloudera
  • “This e-book outlines numerous focus areas, tactics and best practices to accelerate the impact of your ABM efforts and demonstrate significantly greater marketing impact on sales and revenue in the months ahead.” – Matt Heinz, President, Heinz Marketing
  • “This ebook gives a framework on how to be strategic and drive collaboration between Sales, Marketing and Account Management, which is crucial for success.” – John Barrows Sales Trainer, JBarrows

Download Bridging The Gap at accountbasedebook.com

Growth Hacking A Best Seller

The end goal of every growth hacker is to build a self-perpetuating marketing machine that reaches millions by itself. – Aaron Ginn, Head of Growth, Stumbleupon

There’s been a lot of talk about “growth hacking” lately.

The term is en vogue but no matter what you call it – growth hacking, lean marketing, marketing 2.0, marketing 3.0 – it’s shorthand for the methods used by a new generation of multi-billion companies such as Facebook, Dropbox, and Airbnb to build their brands without spending a dime on “traditional marketing.”

Growth Hacking at its core means putting aside the notion that marketing is a self-contained act that begins toward the end of a company’s or a product’s development life cycle. It is, instead, a way of thinking and looking at your business. A “growth hacker” is someone who has thrown out the playbook of traditional marketing and replaced it with only what is testable, trackable, and scalable.

 

I recommend that people don’t get caught up on the term “growth hacker” or even a specific definition for it. Focus instead on the concepts behind it. – Sean Ellis, CEO, Qualaroo

 

Let’s keep it simple:

Growth hacking is marketing in today’s media landscape. It’s about maximizing ROI – about expending resources and energy where they will be most effective. At it’s core, marketing is lead generation. Anything that gets customers is marketing. It’s a shift from focusing on customer acquisition and creative profitability over ‘awareness’ and ‘publicity.’ Now more than ever, doing more with less is not a luxury, it’s a necessity.

Enter Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising by Ryan Holiday.

Ryan Holiday is a media strategist and prominent writer on strategy and business. He dropped out of college at nineteen to apprentice under Robert Greene, author of The 48 Laws of Power. He then went on to advise many bestselling authors and multiplatinum musicians. He served as director of marketing at American Apparel for many years, where his campaigns have been used as case studies by Twitter, YouTube, and Google and written about in AdAge, the New York Times, and Fast Company.

Ryan has been on my radar for many years. Back in 2007 I was googling “Marcus Aurelius” and an interview Ryan did with UVA literature professor Gregory Hays was a first page result. There was very little in the way of commentary about Meditations out there at the time and here was this guy, my age, in marketing, blogging about stoicism. I thought that was really cool.

Since then, Ryan has had an impressive career. His first book Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator was a best seller. Ryan’s book The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph from earlier this year is an excellent introduction to practical Stoicism. The applicability of both these reads is not by any means limited to those interested in marketing or philosophy. I recommend you pick them up.

A couple of months back, Ryan put out a blog post announcing that he was looking for someone to help with the release of his upcoming paperbackGrowth Hacker Marketing. I pitched him an idea about how we might go about building a powerful pre-launch team of early adopters by offering a free advance copy of the book to college students actively enrolled in Fall 2014 courses covering advertising, PR, new media, entrepreneurship, and computer science.

With Ryan’s help, we massaged that idea into a successful lauch campaign.  The campaign was executed in 5 week-long stages: building and testing the site, organic promotion, targeted free promotion, and paid promotion.

 

Virality isn’t luck. It’s not magic. And it’s not random. These a science behind why people talk and share. A recipe. A formula, even. – Johan Berger, Contagious

 

Our objective: generate a wave of Amazon reviews, pre-orders and word-of-mouth PR from our pre-launch audience. Our goal: get 500 qualified sign ups with a potential cap of 1000.

Our strategy was a success and Growth Hacker Marketing launched with a wave of pre-orders and positive Amazon reviews.

So here’s how we executed from start to finish:

The techniques Ryan used to create and promote Growth Hacker Marketing – including our launch strategy – are detailed in-depth by The New York Observer: “Disrupting How Bestsellers Are Made: Apply Startup-style Growth Hacking To Publishing”. Be prepared to settle in. This article tips the scales at over 4750 words. If you’re looking for details and actionable advice, here you go. You can also read more about the project on Ryan’s website.

For a shorter recap of the project, here’s a SlideShare on how Ryan took Growth Hacker Marketing from a minimum viable product to a bestseller.

It was a pleasure working with Ryan.  It’s easy to see how his work ethic and ingenuity have made him so successful.

I also highly recommend you check out Ryan’s reading list newsletter. I typically pick up at least one book he recommends a month.

 

Growth hackers have a common attitude, internal investigation process, and mentality unique among technologists and marketers. The mindset of data, creativity, and curiosity allows a growth hacker to accomplish the feat of growing a user base into the millions. – Andrew Chen

 

“Disrupting How Bestsellers Are Made: Apply Startup-style Growth Hacking To Publishing by Ryan Holiday via The New York Observer

Train Paint

THE ARCHIVE

For years I’ve tried to tell folks about the trove of interesting sights on the tracks behind my house, but most people just want to know how I get any sleep with diesel locomotives screeching by 20 feet from my bedroom.

The train comes by a dozen or so times a day, every day. You can hear the whistle 7 miles away: two long, one short, one long.

I guess they just have to see what I’m talking about.

After watching thousands of interesting railcars hurtle past my back porch, I decided I needed a way to capture a few. Every train has something that warrants more than a blink: everything from full car art pieces, to scribbled tags, weathered logos, and miles of military surplus coming back home from The Port of Savannah, to the interesting people and animals that frequent the rails in between.

Train Paint is here for anyone who’s interested.

THE TECHNOLOGY

I’ve set a motion activated 8mp Bushnell Trophy Cam HD to take a burst of 3 pictures every 1 second with a 0.6-second trigger speed. The infrared sensor will pick up activity about sixty feet away.

Each week I comb through the pictures and post the most interesting ones for your enjoyment, with a crop and color correction here and there.

You can also follow @TrainPaint on Twitter. The account is automated to post 3 pictures every day.

Suggestions for improving @TrainPaint are welcome.

If you like what you see, you can donate $1 with Bitcoin to keep the Archive alive:

Enjoy.

 

Fostering Trust in an Interactive Space – #DHCX

Written and designed by William Wickey [@wwickey]. Presented by Dr. Scott Shamp [@sshamp] at the Digital Health Communication Extravaganza [#DHCX] in Orlando, FL. February 21, 2013.

This video is the visual component of a 20-minute presentation titled "Fostering Trust in an Interactive Space." The talk first distinguishes different types of "big data" sources. As a "permeable data source," Facebook provides a time and money saving method of data collection especially beneficial to the health and wellness industries. Three specific approaches to designing positive user experiences are then detailed.

In other words, this presentation addresses the question, "how do you get users to accept the permissions for your Facebook Application?"

The Lay of the Land – Media Programs in Higher Education

The media are changing rapidly. Seismic shifts in audience, economics, and technology are shaking its very foundations. From this upheaval, a new media landscape is emerging.

Beyond just unraveling the mechanisms of this powerful cultural influence, the study of media provides practical economic benefits for universities, including jobs for graduates, revenue generation through commercialization, and economic development. Media industries need universities for the leadership and ideas that will drive growth and profitability.

What should universities do with, for, and about media? This report is the first step in an exploration to discover the future of media education.

"The Lay of the Land: Media Programs in Higher Education," is a survey of how univerisities teach and research media. The report details the university, where the media program is located, the dean, department head, or chair of that reporting unit, the departments and degree programs offered, as well as any additional institutes or special programs.

In addition to charting its structure, organization, and resources, each program was asked about the biggest challenge it faced.

Studying the lay of the land offers useful guideposts for navigating the tricky terrain of change.

Data from this report was collected between October 2010 and December 2011 by the New Media Institute at the University of Georgia.

Big Data (Really Gets Me)

Ever since Al Gore invented the internet, gun-slinging entrepreneurs, dusty media giants and wagon trains of marketers have been panning the web for nuggets of consumer data. It’s still the Wild West out there but the California gold rush is over and the Texas oil boom is on. Waiting just below the trickling stream of keywords, likes, and basic demographics is a pressurized cavern of consumer data that Facebook’s Open Graph is threatening to blow sky-high…

 

 

Graduate students at The University of Georgia's New Media Institute explore the significance of Big Data in today's digital media landcape. Pioneers, major players and application proposals for Facebook's Open Graph are topics covered in this publication.