Best Free Online Marketing Guide For Online Entrepreneur

Did you know that social media has a significant impact on your lead generation? Untapped potential buyers are hanging out on social where you can reach, engage, and, eventually, convert them. But this channel inherently lacks reliable tools to measure the business value it can provide. Audience and engagement data is siloed between networks and disconnected from your marketing stack. That’s exactly why we built Oktopost – to help marketers determine what social content drives pipeline growth and turn their social audience into leads. Oktopost is already allowing B2B marketers to seamlessly integrate social engagement data with marketing automation, CRM and BI platforms, so they can leverage it for more effective lead nurturing, scoring and attribution. But we never intended to stop there. Today, we are giving you the People Database, our newest feature that takes social demand generation to the next level. We make it measurable. What is the People Database? As part of the Okto...

Bots on the internet get a bad rap. Often, you hear about them being involved in hacking incidents or trying to influence people on social media. But chatbot technology has been quietly growing and improving over the years.  We’re long past the days when conversations with chatbots were full of stilted non sequiturs. Today’s chatbots are still quite obviously bots, but they’ve gotten much better at both maintaining natural conversational flow and understanding the discussion their human interlocutors are trying to have. By and large, customers prefer talking to real, live human customer service representatives over dealing with automated systems.  But here’s a fun fact: customers also really like talking to chatbots. According to a 2017 survey , 57% of consumers like getting information from a chatbot when browsing a company’s website. 47% are open to the idea of using a chatbot to make a purchase . Marketers have realized that chatbots can do much more than field frequentl...

If you don’t eat, sleep, and breathe marketing, the idea of building a personal brand online can seem trivial. How is becoming a minor internet celebrity going to help you close big B2B contracts with serious, technically-minded buyers?  In reality, social media is the best possible place to establish a reputation for trustworthiness and expertise with both current and future customers. If you want to engage with people online to talk about your company, your products, and the state of your industry, it makes more impact to back your words up with a credible personal brand. We do not recommend the approach of just putting yourself out there and hoping for the best. There are habits and practices that help to create the best possible conditions for building a solid personal brand. We’ve boiled them down to twelve key tips . 1. Study What Successful Influencers Do If you want to build a strong personal brand and gain an online following, you’re going to want to study from the ...

There is just over a week left in October, and the kickoff month to Q4 has been a good one so far. Here at Oktopost, we’ve seen some interesting marketing updates in the digital and social spaces. Here’s what you should know. Facebook hints at removing “Like” counts. Following Instagram’s lead , Facebook is testing hiding the “Like” count. The platform confirmed to Tech Crunch that it was being tested in Australia. I think this could get extremely complicated for the platform, and for those of us managing both organic and paid efforts on the platform. This change could be really good if it pulls people back to the OG platform or really bad if it continues to drive users to other networks. Also, how will this effect the mysterious algorithm? We’re already writhing with network algorithms daily, so this will further complicate that relationship. The platform is a big piece of marketing plans for brand awareness, community building and lead generation, with ads providing much of the f...

There’s big news for followers of shocking weight loss tips, down-and-out child stars, and pictures of weird things that may or may not be body parts. You know what I’m talking about — all the strange links and photos that show up at the bottom of web-published articles, just daring you to click on them. Yes, the ubiquitous native advertising companies Outbrain and Taboola are joining forces in order to better compete with Google and Facebook . Obviously, this will have big implications for native advertising, and it raises the question — just what is that one vegetable gut doctors are begging people not to eat? More importantly, could this merger create new opportunities for B2B native advertising ? Why the Outbrain Taboola Merger is Significant for B2B Backing up for a moment, let’s consider what is actually taking place in the Outbrain/Taboola merger. The new company will be retaining Taboola’s name and CEO, and will be serving an audience of 2.6 billion across more than twent...

We’re very excited to share the new Oktopost podcast, B2B Marketing Now! In our first episode, Brett McNay, the Director of Enterprise Client Engagement at Bluewolf, an IBM Company, joins Jessica Stephens, Inbound Marketing Director at Oktopost to discuss sales and marketing. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, as this is the first topic of a twice monthly program. Next time we will be reviewing the power of video in B2B marketing.   A Few Takeaways from Episode 1 “SDRs can be a key connection between sales and marketing.” Many successful organizations have a blurred line between the two groups, having a few SDRs that actually roll up to marketing. Having that crossover is powerful. It creates greater revenue accountability for marketing and greater brand accountability for sales, overall helping the bottom line. Additionally, the feedback loop created by sales delivering insights gleaned from prospects to the marketing team facilitates stronger content. They encou...

When you’re in sales, you hear a lot of advice from people about how to be better at sales. It often comes from other salespeople talking about what has and hasn’t worked for them. Your friends who’ve been on the receiving end of a sales pitch — or that have seen “Glengarry Glen Ross” a few too many times — may share their ideas with you. No matter who they are or what their level of experience is, everyone wants to tell you how to close your next deal. Of course, when you’re trying to close a huge and critical business-to-business sale, it’s not really helpful to reflect on anecdotes and movie quotes. At the same time, falling back on the safest, most timeworn sales techniques isn’t always the best way to convince the stakeholders at the other end of the table to commit to a major purchase. Sometimes, you have to put conventional wisdom aside and try an approach that’s less obvious. This is especially true in B2B sales, where the cycle is longer, and there are more people you need t...

Social advocacy is a powerful thing. Your employees’ networks are valuable marketing assets that can generate far more engagement than corporate channels. That’s why smart organizations use employee advocacy to elevate their social media marketing. Oktopost is here to help on this journey: our latest updates to the Advocacy Board will allow you to improve advocates’ experience, boost engagement and streamline content management at scale. For Advocates New Publishing Tools As you might already know,  we added quite a few cool features to our social publishing platform. Some of them are now also available to advocates, such as an emoji picker and hashtag autocomplete. Emojis are a huge part of how people express themselves on social media –  our latest improvement will enable your advocates to add their own voice to brand messages. The new autocomplete feature offers trending hashtags, which is a great way to amplify your content reach and help your advocates grow their ...

What is the defining challenge of marketing in the current era of digital commerce? Cutting through the noise and confusion of an oversaturated media landscape to deliver your message to the people who truly need to see it.  One approach that has been gaining ground recently is account based marketing (ABM), which flips the traditional flow and perspective of marketing models. Instead of trying to narrow down a wide prospective market into a smaller subset of leads, you identify and target the specific customers you want to convert. Then you market directly to them in an individualized way. What is ABM? In account based marketing, the customer is the market. You choose approaches that are designed to be effective for that individual customer. If the customer is an organization and not a single person, then you choose approaches design for the decision makers within the organization. The idea, essentially, is to create bespoke marketing campaigns built around each client’s uniq...