ImageWorks Creative Blog

Salesforce has released a new report on the “State of Marketing”. Backed by data pulled from over 4,100 marketing leaders around the world, Salesforce breaks down the problems that marketers and advertisers face in a new age of high user expectations and how to structure a strategy to keep up with the world’s best marketers.

The report covers these main subjects:

Marketing Becoming the Cross Functional Glue of Customer Experiences

Creating a website is only half of the battle when trying to scale your online presence. Getting users to your website can turn out to be the harder and much longer battle to wage. There is always one constant factor that will force you to maintain and optimize your SEO strategies…Competition. Depending on the services or content you are promoting, you could be entering the arena with hundreds or thousands of other sites. To overcome this obstacle, you’ll need to think about how to optimize your website for search engines.

For large and small businesses alike, creating engaging content is one challenge, but consistently keeping content engaging can be an even harder battle to wage. 

Companies can find it difficult to create and share content that is relevant to their business without boring their audience, especially when working in an “all-the-same” industry. From this common issue, many companies will conclude that there is no point in creating content if no one will engage with it. This is the easy way out. 

Facebook along with its neighboring social platforms are entering an unprecedented age of undervalued user data collection that is sitting there for marketers to act on. The problem for most people is understanding how to collect, measure, and structure a plan to maximize the potential of their social campaigns.

As most would expect, SEO will be changing this year. As Google continues to downplay traditional SEO with the increase in no-click searches (searches answered without the need to click for more answers) and voice searches with Amazon Echo and Google Home, industry professionals must change their game plan to focus on their website’s strengths and prepare for the new additions in user search technology.

In today's online world, social media reviews have replaced the traditional word-of-mouth form of marketing. At ImageWorks, we strongly recommend that our clients engage in a reputation, review, and reward program so that reviews of their products or services are captured quickly and effectively. We recently received this article in our inbox from one of our favorite online marketing resources, Street Fight Magazine.

As marketers, we know better than anyone just how noisy our marketplace truly is. We are fighting for the attention of our customers through thought-provoking content, never before seen advertising, and brilliant campaigns that makes the competition look bleak.

Marketers are given less time and opportunity to work their magic and must not only be cleaver but nimble in doing so.

Looking to gain leads through content? We've found a great article to help you do just that. The 4 Basic Truths of Good Sales Enablement Content offers some bold tips on how to develop the kind of content that will drive action and gain new customers.

The one takeaway you should not miss - make sure you are aware of who your audience is. Know them inside and out. Use what you know to create a roadmap for your content.

With all the content inundating the world wide web, how do you ensure that yours breaks through the noise? Your content needs a purpose, direction, and a target. You want to understand why you are writing what you are writing and to who.