Best-Of-The-Best Marketing Ebooks of 2015
Marketing is changing rapidly. Some say it has changed more in the last 5 years than it did in the last 500 years.
Responsibilities of CMO’s are also increasing due to the shift in buyer behavior and the fast changing world of marketing technology.
We may very well be entering a golden age of marketing, but this is not coming without some cost.
That cost is visible as a whole new learning curve for marketers, who are starting to have to be more and more technical. And on the other side you have technical people, who are having to learn more marketing.
Modern marketing leaders, or aspiring modern marketers must learn to master the discipline of lifelong-learning by continuously reading, studying and experimenting in an ever expanding field of marketing expertise.
Today, like I did in 2014, I want to provide you with a selection of the best marketing ebooks that have been created in 2015. These marketing ebooks are part of my way of lifelong learning, and I want to share some of the best that I found in 2015 with you.
(if you are not interested in the little personal story that follow, just scroll down to find the list of best marketing ebooks of 2015 !) Read more 
2015 and the Year of the Rise of the GAFTAA Mafia
Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and Alibaba.
Together they are the GAFTAA mafia. They battle for the internet, the consumer, and access to these consumer through marketers.
We marketers have little choice to pay ever more pizzo, or protection money.
This protection money serves to marketers as a means to be found or to get access to our consumer. Or do we have a choice instead of paying them money? Read more
The Rise of Online Advertising, and why I don’t get it
On the one hand online advertising is growing, and on the other hand stats show they are not effective. Can someone explain?
For a couple of years I have been blogging to help others. Now has the moment come where I need your help!
My question is very simple:
Why do marketers keep advertising online, while clearly it doesn’t seem to be working?
And before your click away, no, this is not yet another blog post “yelling” to stop advertising, and to start doing content marketing.
This is something else, and I am merely trying to get my head around something.
And for this I need your help… Read more
The Future of Advertising is Google’s “Don’t be Evil”
Google’s über cookie
Marketers are trying to collect a lot of data, in a move towards big data. But Google and users are fighting against it : keyword not provided, cookie not accepted, location turned off, notification turned off.
On the other hand, we are leaving more data trails than we have ever done before. Even garbage cans are scanning our mobile phones to get the MAC address from your phone to understand how many times you came by (they’ve stopped that now due to protest).
Next thing is you’ll get an iBeacon alert trying to sell you something because they know you’ll pass by on monday at 8u30.
Think about this for a second how addicted we are to our mobile devices and how addicted we are to using cool technology like Google. In many ways you could say Google knows us better than our wives or our husbands because all the stuff we put in there lasts seven years.
Google’s über cookie is coming
Google is in a way walking a very thin line. On the one hand they claim to protect our privacy (keyword not provided), but on the other hand Google is reinventing the bowser cookie into an über cookie: AdID.
The stuff you browse on your laptop and the stuff you browse on your smartphone could all be lumped into one big profile on you. Advertisers will be able to tap into this information, because that’s where the money comes from for Google. Some even speculate that Google will connect your online behavior with your real profile.
Should you invest in Native Advertising as Marketer ?
I’m looking at it and I just don’t quite get it. Banner ads don’t work, and yet marketers still keep investing in it. According to a recent article in Smart Insight click-through rates remain impressively low with “banner blindness” as a key reason for ignoring ads.
One day, someone needs to explain me why a marketer doesn’t get fired by the CEO for spending thousands of ad euros and reporting a conversion of 0.2%. But let’s keep that discussion for another time.
Native advertising. They are the latest addition to digital advertising land. Named as the “disruptive” technology that will change the advertising business model. It is considered the fresh air that the beleaguered publishers need.
They seem to be more efficient, according to recent research from IPG Media and Sharethrough:
- Consumers looked at native ads 52% more frequently than banner ads.
- Native advertisements registered 9% higher lift for brand affinity and 18% higher lift for purchase intent responses.
- Consumers looked at native ads more than the original editorial content.
Some feel as native advertising is the same as advertorials or article marketing.
It’s not.
OK. So what is native advertising? And do you need to use it your marketing mix? Read more
5 Real Reasons Why CEOs Cut Your Marketing Budget
Digital disruptions are causing marketers to rethink their position within the company. The increasing expectations from customers, social media, mobile and globalization are giving organizations great opportunities, to those who are willing to change.
Many struggle with this change. Few have been able to position themselves to capture the real business benefits.
I think this change starts with strong leadership and a change of mindset. If you do not have that leadership and mindset, your CEO will keep cutting your budget. Here are 5 Misconceptions about Marketing, understood by those that will make the change, neglected by those of the past.
Budget cuts are yours by those who neglect. Read more
CEO’s Agree: Marketers don’t show Marketing ROI. How to regain trust?
Are we blind for our own Marketing ROI?
(image source: lifehacker.com)
Showing Marketing ROI and the ability to contribute to the growth of the business is in many ways the biggest challenge of every marketer.
Every so often reports show that B2B marketers have problems showing Marketing ROI. And then marketers have to do ‘more with less’.
Why is this?
Why do we have problems in showing our Marketing ROI? What can we do to regain trust from our CEO?
Putting a stop to Advertisement Blindness
Experiments have shown that online advertising and print advertising are increasingly less effective. We have become blind for advertisements.
The Benway and Lane experiment
The term “banner blindness” or advertisement blindness was coined by Benway and Lane as a result of website usability tests where a majority of the test subjects either consciously or unconsciously ignored information that was presented in banners.
They used eye tracking camera’s too monitor where people look on a screen. The experiment showed that we do see the ads, but we do not take them into account. Jacob Nielsen did a comparable experiment back in 2007.
We have become extremely well trained in filtering out everything we don’t want on a web page. And that even includes Google text ads.
Eye tracking camera’s monitor where people look on a screen. Banners and even Google text ads are not looked at.
Image source : http://www.useit.com/alertbox/banner-blindness-examples.jpg
Read more
How to maximize the effect of your marketing materials?
B2B marketing organizations create many marketing materials, or execute different types of outbound marketing activities.
As explained in some of my previous posts on the increasing ineffectiveness of marketing materials, for example press releases or advertisements, today’s marketers need to adapt their marketing strategy to fit the needs of today’s buyers who are on-line and make use of search engines and social media networks.
What can you do to make your marketing materials effective?
- Make them relevant: without a listening process, you have no clue what your customers want. Of course your marketing materials need to look good, but the materials and the content of the materials need to be what your customers want.
- Make them authentic: today’s buyers can smell unauthentic materials from miles away. The golden rule is: don’t write anything down unless you immediately can proof it. Don’t inflate numbers, not even when your competition is doing this, because your customers will trust you more because you promise realistic gains.
- Set your content free: too often we are afraid that the competition might steal our ideas of get access to our marketing materials. But at the same time your customers AND Google have no access to it. Set it free, on several platforms, and promote it on all social networks your customers are using.
