In the web marketing world, creativity is an essential quality for a compelling, unique and effective marketing initiative. A great example is the recent Old Spice social media campaign  where the creators took an already effective strategy (their original TV ad) which had received great feedback, and used it in a new and exciting way by having the actor respond with personalized videos to tweets he received from fans.

This campaign is a definite example of creativity and we’re pretty sure it couldn’t have been developed in a company that doesn’t foster a culture of innovation.

A recent study performed by IBM on 1500 CEOs in 60 different countries found that that most CEOs rated creativity as the number one leadership quality necessary for business success.

While this may not seem like a surprising statement to many of you, it is a very optimistic one for innovative thinkers and thought-leaders. The study found that over 80% of CEOs believe that the business environment is becoming so complex that it is literally impossible to succeed without new ways of thinking and yet less than 50% of the respondents believed that their company’s were prepared to deal effectively with this rising complexity (they didn’t feel that they had the creative competency necessary).

Harvard Business Review wrote a blog post on the study and identified 6 fundamental “moves” that they believe CEOs and business leaders must make to foster cultures of innovation in their organization. These transitional moves are:

1. Meeting people’s needs. Fulfilling employees’ core needs (physical, emotional, mental spiritual) means that they are less preoccupied with unmet needs, and more able to bring engagement to their work.
2. Teaching creativity systematically. The post cites several, “well-defined, widely accepted stages of creative thinking,” that can be trained and taught to your employees. 
3. Nurturing passion. Allowing people to take on roles that excite their imagination is a key element in fostering creativity. 
4. Making the work matter. According to the post, “human beings are meaning-making animals.” Essentially, by making your employees’ work stand for something, or “mean” something to them, they are more likely to engage with the work in a motivated, creative way. 
5. Providing the time. Creative thinking often requires un-interrupted time where employees are free to think without the pressure of deadlines and instant answers. 
6. Valuing renewal. Allowing a recovery period for your employees is essential for the mental renewal required for creativity. In other words, ensure that your employees are taking breaks (around every 90 minutes or so) to renew their energy.

We think that these moves are an excellent starting point for creating an innovative culture in companies. In our experience we also think that all these points are often overlooked. We like to think that we foster creativity here at Marqui, but it still surprised us to see that we should be taking a break every 90 minutes to renew our energy and we certainly weren't up to date with the stages of creative thinking either, which were an interesting eye-opener!

Does your organization have an effective culture in place currently or does it still need to implement these transitions to allow for a more creative ecosystem?

Especially in the marketing space where so much that we do on a daily basis is based in creativity,  a company that doesn’t innovate won’t be able to grow.


Image by Cayusa on Flickr

This week's post has two blog posts, a presentation on the ROI of social media and a video on the evolution of marketing.

This post from the aimClear Blog contains a list of 57 takes on the new Facebook Places service and is a great resource for everything you'd like to know about Facebook's newest initiative.

This presentation from Olivier Alain Blanchard gives great insight into how businesses can leverage social media to improve ROI and the business justification for getting involved in the social networking space.

This video from the CakeGoup on the evolution of marketing from "basically selling" to the media being in the hands of the people is an engaging visual representation of how marketing has changed over time.

Are you having trouble getting inspired to write your blog content? This post from the Communications Conversations blog has some good tips for getting back on track with writing compelling blog content.


Image by Bryan Wright on Flickr

Today's presentation has an interesting animated video on what really motivates us, an infographic on search engine optimization (SEO) and presentation on marketing measurement targeted towards higher education.

This presentation from Karine Joly discusses marketing measurement in the higher education space and is a great resource for all your higher ed marketers out there!

Have you ever wondered what the most frequently asked SEO questions are? Well this infographic gives a visual representation of them.

Here at Marqui, we often wonder what really motivates us and other people in our industry. Well, this fabulous animation featured on the Content Wrangler blog walks through some of the things that really motivate us and is definitely worth a look.



Image by redstamp.com on Flickr

B2B companies need to work hard to gain visibility in a crowded market and one of the main ways they can do this is to help their company and it's employees to be seen as thought leaders in your industry.  As a B2B marketer, thought leadership is one of the most important aspects of your marketing strategy  that you can cultivate and provide for your brand.

Due to the enormous range of information that is widely available on the internet today,  marketers in the B2B industry now need to establish their brand as a trusted resource early in the buying cycle, to help leads come to them, rather than going out and finding leads themselves. How do you do this? Become a thought leader in your industry.

What are some of the benefits of becoming a thought leader?

1. It can help you increase your website's conversion rates
2. It increases brand trust and credibility 
3. From a search engine optimization standpoint, it helps you increase your number of inbound links and your quality traffic

What are some characteristics of a thought leader?

• They develop and maintain relationships with industry professionals in their niche
• They are a willing go-to resource for insight, opinion and interpretation of industry trends and best practices
• They are a recognized authority or expert in their field
• They have earned a respected place in consumers' opinions 

How can you work towards becoming a thought leader in your industry?

1. Create content that offers value. When you develop content that offers value to your consumers it is more likely to get read, and, can help you get your name out in your industry as a provider of quality, valuable content and resources.
2. Write a blog to provide your opinions. Blogs tend to be a less formal content setting than a piece of collateral like a whitepaper. A platform where you are more able to offer your opinions on certain topics is a great place for you to establish yourself as a forward thinker in your industry.
3. Become a speaker. Speaking at different industry events is essential for getting both your name and face recognized in your industry and is also a good way to meet other industry professionals.
4. Spread your content and make it easily accessible. Posting your content on free sites like slideshare and offering free pieces of content on other social media sites is a good way to spread your content and opinions around the web.
5. Know what's going on in your industry. If you want to establish yourself as a relevant resource it's essential that you know what is going on in your industry. Keeping up with news, emerging trends and best practices is an important way to make sure you are a trusted, reliable resource.
6. Practice and repeat. Being a thought leader is an ongoing process of creating, developing and updating content, as well as keeping up on industry news and participating in conversations.

This week's post has an infographic on improving your landing pages, a video on tweeting and a presentation on "Micro Marketing."

This infographic from Unbounce shows the 12 steps they suggest for putting your landing pages through "conversion rehab." If you want to learn first-hand how to improve your own landing pages, attend our upcoming webinar, "Live Landing Page Assessment" on Thursday August 19th at 10:30 am Pacific.

This video from Good.is, a collaborative magazine put together by, "individuals, businesses and non-profits that are pushing the world forward," discusses the most popular types of tweets and the sources of different tweets.

Micro Marketing is a theory that's growing in popularity in the marketing world and this presentation by Greg Verdino for Marketing Profs called, "Get Big Results by Thinking and Acting Small," discusses how marketing has changed from being about one big initiative to being about many small interactions.

Have a great weekend!

Image by Matt Hamm on Flickr.

This week’s post has a strategy plan for success with Facebook marketing, a video on reinventing social media, a report on how women use the web and a video discussing why even if you think social media isn’t right for you, maybe you should give it a second chance.

This social media strategy guide called, "The 8 Success Criteria for Facebook Page Marketing," from Altimeter, a research-based advisory firm, gives some great advice on using Facebook Pages as part of your organization's marketing strategy.

This video presentation by David Armano, the Senior Vice President of Edelman Digital, is called "Reinventing Social Media," has some great insight into social media today and how organizations can optimize their use of social media technologies.





Comscore, a digital marketing intelligence agency, has released a report on how women use the web today called, "Women on the Web: How Women are Shaping the Internet," and it is full of great statistics and metrics on woman and the internet.

Have you ever wondered if social media is right for your business? This video from Sage Lewis of Search Engine Guide gives you his opinion (and some great reasons) why social media can be used effectively by just about every industry.



We hope you found these links and resources useful. Have a great weekend!

Today's post has an infographic on SEO, a new study on Twitter, a video on the ROI of social media and a presentation on website design.

This infographic on SEO from Bloggingpro.com breaks down  the main aspects of an SEO campaign in a clear, easy to understand visual.

A recent study shows that zero percent of Twitter users would pay for the service should it become a pay site. You can view that statistics and the rest of the study results on Mashable.

Determining the ROI of social media is a hot topic for most businesses who are using social media as part of their marketing strategy. The video below from  Socialnomics gives a great overview on this topic.


This presentation on website design or "designing identities" from Helge Tenno, gives an interesting view point on website design and the process of designing a copmany's identity on the web.

We just finished out bi-weekly webinar on Web Analytics. Hopefully everyone who attended found the information useful and feel confident that they can get their web analytics set up and running successfully!

As usual we'll go over the questions we didn't have time to answer during the webinar here, and remember, we're always available to answer your questions directly as well.

Can Google Analytics monitor completion rates for web pages which require visitor content creation (ex. "Request for Quote" pages)?

Yes. There are two ways to do this. You can track the click as a JavaScript event, you can read about that here, or  you can manually track clicks for outbound links, you can learn more about that here.

Is Google Analytics Free?

Yes, Google Analytics is a completely free tool it just requires you to set up a Google account.

What is Direct Traffic?

Direct Traffic is the traffic which arrives at your site without first a search engine, another website or marketing campaign.

The majority of our traffic is from government agencies that aren't allowed to use cookies, can I still use Google Analytics successfully?

There are other ways to track visitors that don't use cookies. Every analytics software is different, but if you're concerned, we suggest taking a look at this interview with some popular web analytics vendors, which discusses the different ways that analytics software can track visitors including using IP User Strings and Unique User Identifiers.

Will the JavaScript code produced by Google Analytics slow down my website?

No, the tracking code will not slow down the speed of your website.

We hope you all found this webinar useful! Our next webinar will be on August 19th and is a Live Landing Page Assessment and you can register for it here.

If you want to view a full recording of the "Web Analytics 101" webinar you can view it here.

If you want to read a related blog post, we suggest our "Getting Stated with Web Analytics" post, which you can read here.

Today's web marketing digest post will be a little different from usual. Instead of having several links that we find interesting we wanted to focus on a recent survey that has some relevant statistics and facts that might surprise you. AskMen.com has released, “The Great Male Survey 2010 Edition” an annual survey they release filled with opinion-data on everything from dating to lifestyle, and the survey includes quite a few social media, mobile and internet statistics that might surprise readers. The data we’re posting below is for Canadian Men, but the survey includes data from the US, Australia and Britain as well (and the numbers only vary by about 1-2%).
 
When it comes to Social Media…

• 30% of men say that Facebook is their primary method for staying in touch with friends. They chose this over phone, email and Twitter.
• 70% of men said that they use Facebook regularly
• 59% of men don’t use Twitter because they see it as “useless”
• 55% of men said that they don’t use location-based social media like Foursquare because they don’t understand it or don’t know what it is

When it comes to the Internet in general…

• 42% of men think that it isn’t possible to gain social status online
• 74% of men say they spend more time in front of the computer than the TV
• 37% of people chose, “no, not at all” as their response to the question, “Do you still read the newspaper in its print format?”
• 33% of men stated that they watch their favorite TV shows online rather than on TV during regular broadcasting

When it comes to Social Media privacy…

• In response to the question, “Does privacy exist anymore?” 53% of men replied, “Yes, but not online.”
• Only 34% of men use the privacy settings on Facebook  so that only their friends can view their profiles, 25% of men feel that that self-censoring is sufficient for Facebook privacy and 11% don’t use any privacy settings whatsoever

Some of the statistics in the survey surprised us (the fact that 53% of men think that privacy online doesn't matter anymore being one of them) and some of them were right on track with what we believed was the way the public felt about social media. Surveys like this are a great way to get a better understanding of your organization's demographics, and if you're an organization that caters to the male market, the survey is definitely worth taking a look at!

This week’s post has some great marketing statistics, a presentation on location-based social media services, a presentation for inspiration when creating slide decks for your next presentation and an infographic on the state of the internet.

This presentation by Tara Hunt is filled with statistics on social media and web marketing in general and is definitely worth taking a look at.

We're all about presentations today and this one by Grand Union, a digital agency located in the UK, gives an excellent overview on location-based services.

The last presentation on our list today is solely for inspiration. Many of you know that the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival just finished and this presentation is filled with the best slides presented there to help you get some ideas for your next presentation.

Finally, last but not least on our list for today is an infographic on the state of the internet today.

The World Cup 2010 is over, and there is no doubt that it was a marketing (especially a social media) success. We mentioned in a previous post, how FIFA used the web, and social media to promote the World Cup and looking back on the entire course of the event, we can all learn a little bit about marketing from the beautiful game.

1. There is no replay. At the end of the day, the marketing decisions you make stand. If a bad call is made, if a strategy fails, you live with your mistakes and keep on playing the game. 
2. Take your team to your fans. Creating personality for your brand is key to having a successful online presence,  like football teams did during the World Cup by having individual Twitter accounts for each team.  Help people get to know your team and your brand to help build a fan base.
3. If everyone isn’t on the same page, you lose. Making sure that your entire team is familiar with your marketing strategy  can help ensure that your team is successful. A fragmented internal marketing strategy can have a somewhat stunning failure rate, much like the way that internal strife brought down the French team during the World Cup.   
4. Understand how to accept a loss and rethink your game plan. No one likes to lose. Having said that, there will inevitably be losses for every team and accepting the losses, learning from your mistakes and improving your game plan are essential to moving on to win in the future. 
5. Celebrate your wins and your key players.  Celebrating your wins for your team and fans is important. Just as in soccer when players dance, run, jump around and land in dog piles celebrating a win, and the team players that made that win possible, congratulating your team is an excellent way to solidify relationships and build trust, within your organization and with your fans. 

We hope you all enjoyed the World Cup (no matter who you were cheering for) and that these these lessons help you build a more effective marketing presence.

Image by CLF on Flickr

With the buying process changing to one where customers take more control, sales and marketing alignment gets even more crucial for a successful business strategy. However, despite the fact that marketing and sales teams are working towards similar goals, it often seems like they just can’t get along.

How can you encourage sales and marketing alignment in your organization?

1. Identify your ideal customer. Ensuring that both departments have a clear idea of who your organization’s ideal customers are can help you simplify the lead hand-off process and help your demand generation initiatives. If you know who your target customers are, then you can be sure you’re marketing along the correct channels, and that leads from these sources are viable for sales.

2. Define a common language. Often sales and marketing departments have different definitions of different terms and this can be extremely detrimental especially when it comes to things like leads.  A lead could be:

• A name on a purchased list
• An analytics goal conversion
• Somebody who fills in a web form
• Somebody who downloads a resource or attends a webinar
• Somebody who passes BANT questions (budget, authority, need, timeline)
• Somebody who wants to talk to a sales rep

Having a clear definition of what your organization considers a lead to be can facilitate the lead generation and hand-off process (often one of the largest pain points for sales and marketing teams).

3. Identify and agree on rules of engagement at key interface points. Knowing who is going to do what is crucial for any successful business strategy. When everyone has a clear idea of when they are going to take action it minimizes confusion and can help your organizations run smoothly in tandem. Some key interface points could be:

• Responding to demo or “contact us” requests
• Following up with webinar registrants
• Returning leads to marketing for further nurturing 
• Dealing with closed / lost opportunities
• Determining who will nurture live opportunities

4. Operate as a single team. By committing to different team building strategies (weekly sales and marketing meetings, opening communication channels etc.) you can help to diminish the view that many sales and marketing departments have of “them” versus “us.”

5.  Measure what you want to improve. What areas are you looking to improve between your sales and marketing teams? Determining these, can help you measure your alignment and determine where your integration is falling short. Some common metrics you might want to improve are:

• Sales ready leads count
• Opportunity conversions: absolute count, percentage of sales-ready leads converted
• All lead sources: referral, inside sales, sales prospecting 
• Closed business by lead source

Image by ePublicist on Flickr

This week's post has a presentation on building brand relationships, two great infographics and some ways that social media is helping the Gulf Coast Benefit get some added support.

This presentation by David Rollo discusses why it's important to connect brands with customers through social media and how this can help companies to develop stronger relationships.

Have you ever wondered what the economy of Facebook looks like? This infographic from visualeconomics.com is what you're looking for!

The Gulf Coast oil spill is a terrible tragedy, and to help mitigate the lasting effects, the Gulf Coast Benefit was created. The benefit was a a series of 60 concerts which were presented across the USA and the proceeds went towards the community's Gulf Future Campaign. This post from Mashable highlights some of the ways that the benefit used social media to supplement it's promotion efforts and gives some good ideas for how other benefits can do the same.

We've mentioned the World Cup 2010 a couple times over the last few weeks, and wrote a blog post about FIFA's use of social media to promote the event. This infographic from Inside View, a company which provides sales intelligence to help improve productivity, shows how economic productivity has gone down during the event.

Have a great weekend!

Undoubtedly most bloggers and other web content developers have at some point in their careers come across Creative Commons Licenses. While different people use these for different reasons, most content creators agree that there are definite benefits to this type of license. Unfortunately, while many people have heard of Creative Commons, few have a really clear understanding of what they are or where they come from.

What are Creative Commons Licenses?

In response to a need for an alternative to classic copyright licenses, Creative Commons was created by a group of copyright and intellectual property experts in the United States in 2001. The project created several user-friendly licenses which enable content creators to share their work while retaining their copyright(s) under certain conditions.

Why should you use a Creative Commons (CC) License?

There are several benefits associated with placing this type of license on your content:

• It allows you to share your content within a community while retaining your creative rights
• It allows the spread and promotion of your content across the web without the loss of copyright
• It allows you to place a visible license with regulations on your content rather than just an assumed, “all rights reserved” license

Which license is right for you?

It is important to understand that by placing your work under a Creative Commons License you are by no means giving up your copyright(s). The CC Licenses allow creators to mix and match certain “allowable conditions” according to their specific personal and professional preferences. There are six different types of licenses and each one reserves different subset of copyright(s). The license is generated by the Creative Commons website and then attached to the creator’s work. You can view a full list of the creative commons licenses on the Creative Commons website here.

The licenses fall under four different license categories based on the following conditions:

1. Attribution – You let others make free use (distribute, copy, perform etc.) your work, and its derivative works, as long as you are given credit.
2. Noncommercial – Follows the same rules as attribution, except the works aren’t to be used for any commercial purposes. 
3. No Derivative Works – You work can be copied, distributed or performed verbatim only. In other words, no derivative works can be created based on your original creation. 
4. Share Alike – In this case you’re allowing others to distribute derivatives of your work but only as long as they use an identical license to the one that was put on your original work.

Creative Common Licenses are an excellent way for content creators to share their content while protecting their copyright(s). Thus far, Creative Commons has been a successful, user-friendly alternative to traditional copyright licenses on the web. While it is by no means a perfect solution, it addresses some of the issues that web content creators have faced with traditional copyright licenses in the past and continues to grow in popularity.

For More information on this topic you can visit the Creative Commons Organization website, or the Creative Commons Canada website at:

http://www.creativecommons.org
http://www.creativecommons.ca

Image by AJC1 on Flickr

This week's post has a presentation on social customers, a report on social networking and some Canadian social media news (it was Canada day yesterday after all!)

This presentation from Ryan Turner, highlights the ways that technology has changed businesses interactions with their customers by creating distance. The presentation goes on to discuss why we need to take the time to understand our new "social" customers and to bridge the gap. The presentation is insightful as well as entertaining and includes some statistic gems on social media and internet usage by the general populace today not the least of which is:

We just finished our webinar, "9 Tips to Convert Website Visitors to Leads" and we think it went well.

As usual, we got a few more questions than we could answer during the Q & A period at the end of the webinar, and as promised, we'll address them here.

Does conversion rate have a direct impact on sales?

Yes. Increased conversion rate, leads to more leads handed-off to sales, which leads to more opportunities created. This is especially true if you're optimizing your website not just for increased conversion rates, but for targeted traffic since this leads to more qualified leads. Using some of the tips we suggested in the webinar, like publishing your pricing on your website, is a great way to increase the quality of your leads.

Which is more effective, a text link or a button for a call-to-action?

Both are effective in different ways. We usually recommend using both for variety as buttons usually draw a visitors attention more quickly, but a text link can be included in the body copy of you site to follow a logical flow.

Why is benchmark data for conversion rates important?

Benchmark data can help you establish how effective your website's optimization tactics are. If you are far below benchmark conversion rates, then you know you have lots of room for improvement. A good resource for benchmark conversion rate data is the Fireclick index.

We hope you found the information in today's webinar useful. For those of you who were unable to attend you can view the full recording here. Don't forget to sign up for our next webinar, "Growing Your Business with Social Media."

This week's post has a great infographic filled with information on Facebook, a post from Search Engine Guide on the goals of social media and some marketing tips from one of the world's most renowned super villains!

This infographic from Mashable shows information on Facebook's growth, and there might be some facts that surprise you about one of the world's most popular social networks.

This post on the goals of social media gives a great overview of the ways that social media can help you: build your brand, drive conversions and increase your organization's web presence. Often businesses lose sight of the primary goals of social media for small business and this post is a great way to help bring social media targets back into perspective.

We all know that establishing yourself as an evil mastermind has to involve at least a little bit of marketing skill. Well here are a few marketing tips from Dr. Evil, on how you can achieve worldwide marketing domination (courtesy of Copyblogger).

We hope you've found this post informative and as usual, we hope you have a great weekend!

Image found on Flickr from ConradKilroy

Today's post has a recent study showing the most popular online brands and a presentation with some great statistics about social media budgets, spending and usage.

This study from NeilsenWire gives some great statistical data on the most popular online brands including: Facebook, Google, YouTube and Wikipedia. The data shows the popularity of these brands by percentage of the world's population and time spend on their sites as well as the popularity of various social media sites by geographic region and specifically Facebook's popularity by country.

This presentation on the  2010 SEMPO Survey on the state of search engine marketing gives an overview of the survey and highlights the data findings and is definitely worth taking a look at.

The statistics include:

• 59% of companies will invest more on social for 2010 than they did in 2009
• 62% of companies run their social media efforts in-house with internal resources
• 51% of companies aim to increase brand awareness and enhance reputation through social media in 2010
• 62% of companies evaluated social media marketing success in terms of brand awareness

We hope you find these links helpful and as always, have a great weekend!

Today's bi-weekly web marketing webinar was on sales and marketing alignment and was presented by our VP of Marketing, Richard Sharp and our VP of Sales, Mike Cowan.

For those of you who couldn't attend, here's a recap of some of the main takeaways:

• The web has changed the way prospects navigate the buying process
• Marketing and sales collectively own a single customer funnel
• Collaborating at key interface points and measuring processes can help encourage alignment
• Having an effective sales and marketing infrastructure (relationships) is integral to alignment
• Continuously reviewing and refining (having a 360 degree view of customer acquisition) help alignment and improves sales and marketing processes

 If you'd like to view the recording of this webinar, you can watch it here.

This week's post has two great presentations, one on internet trends in 2010 and one on web design, a video on how to use LinkedIn answers to your advantage and an infographic with some Twitter Facts & Figures.

This presentation, on internet trends for 2010, from the CM Summit,  has some excellent statistics and points on mobile marketing and cloud computer among others.

Last week we published a blog post on using LinkedIn to market your business. This video gives a good explanation of how you can implement one of the tips we mentioned in the post, using LinkedIn answers to generate leads and establish yourself as a thought leader.

This infographic, gives some good insight into the basic facts about Twitter usage today.

This presentation discusses the question of whether specialist or generalists are better for your business when it comes to web designers.

As always, we hope you found these links helpful, and have a great weekend!