10 Marketing Blogs Every Successful Marketer Should Follow (2 of 2)

Apart from books, marketing blogs are the next best thing for every successful marketer eager to learn: marketing experts and trendsetters write down their ideas and insights in easy to read articles.

Read recommendations 1 through 5 in the first part of this article: 10 Marketing Experts Every Successful Marketer Should Follow (1 of 2).

Let’s continue with our blogs recommendations 6 through 10!

6. Mari Smith – Mari’s Blog

Mari Smith / linkedin.com

Mari Smith has been working in internet marketing since 1999. She is one of the world’s leading social media thought leaders, often referred to as the Queen of Facebook for her Facebook marketing expertise.

She ranked at #4 in Forbes “Top Social Media Power Influencer” and was designated by Facebook Small Business and Facebook Marketing Expert. She is a founding contributor to Social Media Examiner, one of the world’s largest business blogs.

She is a keynote speaker and the author of The New Relationship Marketing and coauthor of Facebook Marketing: An Hour A Day. The book outlines a step-by-step plan for building a sizable, loyal network comprised of quality relationships that garner leads, publicity, sales, and more.

Mari’s blog is called ….Mari’s Blog (easy to remember :)).

On her blog, Mari writes about everything social: how to optimize your social media conversion strategy, Facebook video marketing, why newsletters are the future of online media, how to write Instagram posts to boost your business etc.

Service is the new social. Exemplary customer service will never go out of style.

Mari Smith

7. Mark Schaefer – {Grow}

Mark Schaefer / linkedin.com

Mark Schaefer is a speaker, consultant, educator and marketer with extensive experience. He is also an inspired writer on topics related to marketing. His latest book Marketing Rebellion: The Most Human Company Wins has just been published earlier this year (learn more about Mark and his book).

Mark’s blog is called {Grow} and, as the name has it, it features articles on marketing, technology and humanity to help businesses grow. On his blog, Mark writes about marketing strategy, influence marketing, big data and analytics, branding, corporate communications etc.

The most important characteristic of content marketing today is not quality or quantity. It’s insight. And that is the differentiator lacking almost everywhere.

Mark Schaefer

8. Tara Hunt – Truly Inc

Tara Hunt / linkedin.com

Tara Hunt is an executive-level digital marketing professional with over 20 years of progressive experience. She specializes in relationship and inbound marketing with a passion for data-driven strategy.

Tara and her team are on a mission to change the relationship between brands and their customers. They believe there is a better way to market your brand than through yelling and hand-waving.

Before Truly Inc, there was (and still is) Truly Social, Tara’s YouTube channel where she delivers insightful (and fun to watch) videos on everything marketing.

On her company’s blog, Tara writes articles on hot topics like influencers, engagement, content etc. What makes her articles stand out from the rest of the content available on the world wide web is her ability to provide a unique and insightful perspective. Here are a few titles: Content is worthless, Why branded content doesn’t work, Buying Facebook Ads is not a strategy etc.

Content, engagement and influencers are worthless but only when they are seen as promotional tools used to fast-track results.

Tara Hunt

9. Jon Loomer – jonloomer.com

Jon Loomer / linkedin.com

Jon Loomer is widely known for his Facebook advertising expertise. He is a Facebook Marketing Strategist and Metrics Master.

Social Media Examiner recognized his website, jonloomer.com as one of Top 10 Social Media Blogs of 2013, 2014 and 2015. His website is the most complete online resource of advanced Facebook marketing tips and tutorials, updated on nearly a daily basis.

Although he sees himself as an “accidental marketer”, there are no accidents when it comes to his career in Facebook marketing and advertising. His strength lies in his love of numbers, statistics and strategy which are all required traits for a marketer looking to manage successful Facebook advertising campaigns.

Jon started his website in 2011 and the number of articles he has written insofar will soon reach 1000 by the end of March 2019. That’s a lot of knowledge!

If you are looking for valuable insights and expert tutorials on Facebook advertising, Jon Loomer is the best marketer to turn to.

10. Aaron Orendorff – iConiContent

Aaron Orendorff / linkedin.com

As a marketer, you need to be able to write content, ideally – great content. Fortunately, writing effective and results-focused content is a skill you can learn.

Aaron Orendorff is a copywriter, Editor in Chief of Shopify Plus, one of the fastest growing e-commerce companies in the world and founder of iConiContent.

His mission is to save the world from bad content. Aaron’s articles on iConiContent are packed full of recommendations, insights and examples on how to write great content which adds value to your customers’ lives.

Here are a few examples: Failed Copywriting Pitch – 5 Lessons, 3 Audience-Enticing Headline Hacks: Power, Novelty & Pull, How to engage and captivate your audience…when they don’t want to listen.

Every piece of content you create has to do two things: (1) rescue its audience from their own personal hell and (2) deliver them unto their own personal heaven. Great copywriting is about salvation … not sales. If you’re not in the business of actually helping people, stop here.

Aaron Orendorff

Join the Conversation

We’d love to hear what you have to say.

Get in touch with us on Facebook Group and Twitter.

What makes a video viral?

Creating a successful viral campaign is every marketer’s dream nowadays and many agencies aspire to the idea of creating a video that will have a huge impact on the target and will get shared fast and, therefore, create a big buzz around it. But what is a viral video and how hard is to reach that goal? According to the definition on techopedia, a viral video is any clip of animation or film that is spread rapidly through online sharing. Viral videos can receive millions of views as they are shared on social media sites, reposted to blogs, sent in emails and so on. Most viral videos contain humor and fall into three broad categories:

• Unintentional Viral Videos: Videos that the creators never intended to go viral. These videos may have been posted by the creator or shared with friends, who then spread the content.
• Humorous Viral Videos: Videos that have been created specifically to entertain people. If a video is funny enough, it will spread.
• Promotional Viral videos: Videos that are designed to go viral with a marketing message to raise brand awareness. Promotional viral videos fall under viral marketing practices.

When it comes to the formula of creating a viral, it hasn’t been determined or shared yet, leaving us thinking that some of the success it has to do with luck and that most things actually go viral by accident. Very few people have mastered the art of creating viral content on purpose. What is for sure known is that it has to appeal to the target’s emotions, no matter their type (happiness, sadness, anger, joy, love, etc).

“Viral videos are the talk of the town—garnering coverage on popular blogs, rising to the top of sites like Reddit, being Tweeted and posted to Facebook, and even covered on the evening news,” wrote Megan O’Neill for AdWeek.

“There’s no specific number of shares, likes, retweets, reblogs, or whatever another measure of interaction needed to be reached in order for it to claim “viral” status.  On YouTube, lots of videos get tens of thousands of views now shortly after being uploaded, but many people wouldn’t say that’s enough to consider it viral. Back in the day, however, when YouTube was much smaller and there weren’t as many users uploading videos, tens of thousands of views may have counted as <<going viral>>,” said Elise Moreau for Lifewire.

Moreover, advanced technology and platform design have made it way too easy to share things with our friends and followers, making the perfect environment for a ripple effect to occur on all levels of social media with the perfect piece of shareable content. All it takes is a few shares and the right audience to trigger an avalanche of sharing across the internet. It’s not easy to start a viral movement, but when it does happen, it can take the most regular people and turn them into  internet celebrities practically overnight if it’s powerful enough.

According to Jonah Berger, marketing professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “Contagious: Why Things Catch On”, quoted by entrepreneur.com, visceral response is what separates viral breakouts from busts. Berger has spent years investigating the mechanics behind virality, identifying six key drivers under the acronym STEPPS. They are Social Currency (e.g., sharing things that make people look good), Triggers (acknowledging that we talk about things that are top-of-mind), Emotion, Public (imitating what we see others do), Practical Value (news people can use) and Stories (information passed along under the guise of idle chitchat). “Each [driver] is a research-tested principle that increases the likelihood that people will talk about and share things, that brands get word-of-mouth, that services get shared and that videos get passed along the internet,” Berger explains. “We can reliably say that including certain characteristics and messages will increase the number of people who share [content] and the likelihood it will be shared.”