You may have noticed some changes in Instagram over the past year or so. For instance, the fancy new API for iMessage that autoplays Bachelor in Paradise commercials you send to your friends. Or the option to “Tag a Business Partner” when you open a story feature. To know more about why some of your third-party apps aren’t working, or what a “Graph API” is, we have the latest changes to Instagram’s API, explained. If you’re wondering what the heck an API is, don’t fret. API stands for Application Programming Interface. … [Read more...]

I don’t own a car in Chicago, but I do take the train (referred to as the “L” here). On the L, most of my commuting companions pass the time by looking at their phones. But, my motion sickness prevents that, so I typically find myself watching the world — and many, many billboards — go by. And I must say: Some billboards can be very, very entertaining. Now, billboard advertising isn’t your typical inbound marketing methodology. So why are we writing about it? Billboard advertising can still be a powerful way to build brand … [Read more...]

Think back to the last thing you Googled. Did the content you discover actually answer the question you were asking? Did you feel engaged in reading the article or watching the video that you found? Were you able to find a helpful next step to learn more? If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, then the person who created the content probably paid close attention to its structure. And they're reaping the benefits -- you, along with many others, are now aware of their business and potentially interested in engaging with future content related to their brand. … [Read more...]

Eric will present "Influence in the Machine Learning Age" at CRC, October 22-24 in Orlando. In the classic sequel, Back to the Future 2 (1989), Marty McFly travels into the wild world of 2015 where he discovers that skateboards have evolved into hoverboards. In 1989, that’s what Hollywood thought our future might hold. But flash forward to 2019, and many things look more or less the same. Despite the prediction of airborne kids, we’re all still watching TV (lots of it), driving cars, paying to go to the movies, stressing out over our daily lives, waiting in … [Read more...]

To learn about this and other topics from nonprofit organization insights leaders, attend What You Didn’t Know About MR in Associations and Nonprofits at CRC, October 22-24 in Orlando. As Millennial and Gen Z buyers continue to demand additional transparency and social responsibility, brands feel the pressure to act out and communicate social and political stances on behalf of their customers/constituents. This type of responsibility is old hat for organizations like the IIA and the NRA who represent the Internal Audit profession and gun owners, respectively. … [Read more...]

Escalent (formerly Market Strategies International-Morpace) has announced that Sharna Morelli, the firm’s CIO, will retire, and John Sivak has been promoted to senior vice president and will lead the firm’s IT division from the Livonia, MI headquarters. Morelli originally joined Morpace as a tab programmer in 1979. Over the four decades that followed, she advanced to the highest levels of the organization, becoming its COO and executive vice president in 2015. After the merger of Market Strategies and Morpace in 2018, she assumed the role of CIO to … [Read more...]

In 2018, there were over 3.7 billion email users around the world. By 2022, this number is expected to increase to 4.3 billion. A group within that large number of users includes your business’s target audience, the people you want to market your brand, products, and services to via email. To ensure your emails stand out and grab the attention of these target audience members, you must consider email design. What is email design? Email design is the process of strategically designing and creating an email that resonates with your business’s target … [Read more...]

Cliché: A picture is worth a thousand words. Fact: HubSpot's pictures are worth 120 thousand clicks. Last year, my colleague Karla Cook gave our readers a 3,000-word peek behind the curtain into a new SEO strategy we implemented at the beginning of 2018. That strategy, which was designed to fix a traffic plateau across the blog, increased our organic traffic by 25% year over year -- to eight million organic pageviews per month. This is about three million new organic views we didn't have at the beginning of 2018. Where that traffic is coming from is equally … [Read more...]

Nowadays, Facebook is one of the top platforms for digital advertising -- in fact, 93% of social media advertisers use Facebook ads on a regular basis. Additionally, since Facebook offers a wide range of options for effective and measurable advertising, it's a good opportunity to reach an audience regardless of your budget. If you haven't explored Facebook advertising yet, now's a good time -- at the end of 2018, ad costs on Facebook dropped by 2%, while ad impressions skyrocketed by 34%, making it more appealing for marketers than ever before. Among the various … [Read more...]

There's almost nothing more gratifying than the feeling you get when you accomplish a goal. Whether you're pressing "Publish" on a blog post or collecting initial analytics on a campaign months in the making, it's undeniably satisfying to know you've successfully finished a task. When you're not chasing a clear goal, though, work can feel like a never-ending grind. Without goals, you're setting yourself up to feel like the work you're doing isn't enough -- or, worse, you position yourself to do work that doesn't actually impact your company's bottom line. Making … [Read more...]