There are a lot of resources out there for marketers. We read books and blog posts and articles and magazines and podcasts and video blogs and … well, let’s just say the list goes on and on. Like a lot of people in our industry, I follow a lot of links and have a lot of opinions that I respect. One of these days, I plan to publish my must read list of blogs, but I have to confess that this list is not as static as you might think. There are many times when my reading pattern tends to be visiting a favourite blog of mine once a week due to client workload or my travel schedule, even though I wish I could read them more often.
Still, when it comes to the usefulness of the marketing content that I read, there is some that is mostly about new ideas or news in the industry. In fact, that’s the category that most of it fits into. There are three sites, however, that stand out because they are in a different league. The reason is because instead of ideas, they offer tangible real case studies of what brands are doing and how effective it is. Those sites are WOMMA, MarketingProfs and MarketingSherpa.
If these three sites are not on your reading list, you need to add them. For any practicing marketer, the lessons you will get from the cases here will likely offer you pieces of information that you will not only find useful, but just might give you the reasons for your peers to envy your level of knowledge and new insights. For example, a recent MarketingSherpa article (open access until tomorrow – 09/18/07) pointed out that the three most effective words for getting people to read more of an article were "click to continue." Not "continue to article" or "read more" but the option with the word "click" in it. I didn’t know that, but now that I do – you can bet we will be using this information in our email marketing work. That’s the power of reading case studies like this. They give you actionable insight and also great information to justify doing something or a benchmark to evaluate performance. I love ideas and innovation, but sometimes what you really need is a good case study.
I agree that Marketing Sherpa is a great source and we use it regularly. At one point we were publishing several enewsletters in the wireless industry. We use to use the “click here” frequently and discovered that the use of “click” significantly increased our spam rating – at least according to the software used by our email platform provider. Does anyone know anything about this?
People need to be told what to do, especially when they’re navigating unfamiliar waters where they might founder anytime. It’s comforting for them. That’s what I think. It relieves them of responsibility. If you simply offer a link, people will ignore it. Give them a link with a built-in instruction to use it, like “Click here for…” and they will.
One of the big problems that gives me as an SEO is knowing when to squander potential SEO benefits in a link in order to gain clickthrough – kind of the end-game really! Should I simply put, in a sentence on my site “yada yada yada SEO REPORT yada yada”, or should I put “yada yada yada click here for SEO REPORT yada yada,”?
Perhaps we’ll soon know!
BB
Actually I misread what Margi said. I bet others do too…
BB
Thanks for the shout, Rohit! Appreciate your kind words.
It’s really interesting to know about blog marketing. As we are familiar with how blogs have added a new dimension to communication and engaging ourselves in that conversation is really more important. I have been through the same topic’s speaking regarding Authority sites which are good.
Those are some great sites.
Thanks for the post