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4 Fairly Fast Factoids for B2B Tech Marketers
Time is always at a premium, so this post is all about providing short and useful findings that you can use in your tech marketing role.
Here, we cover these 4 topics:
- How to do a quick scan of digital ads
- Recommended podcasts
- Optimal eDM Subject line length & a handy excel function
- Good distraction while waiting for you next conference call to start
Digital ad review
A quick and free way to get a sense of a firm’s digital ads is from marketing analytics firm Moat. Go to the Moat home page, type in name of a firm (like your employer, competitor, partner, or prospect) and then the Moat software quickly provides a snapshot of that firm’s web ads. The images below are from my search on Cisco, Imperva, and Rackspace. The output is actually much longer with dozens more ads than I’m showing in this picture. I used it recently to do some comparisons for how a client and their main competitor were positioning similar products.
Do you podcast?
One in four Americans listened to a podcast in the last month (including me) according to Edison Research, so thought I’d share a few podcast resources:
• Top security podcasts. I love this one because it’s put together by a security company, Heimdal Security, so they are generating traffic to their home page from people searching for “top security podcasts.” I’m surprised more firms don’t curate a list like this for their industry.
• Here’s a list of some great marketing podcasts for marketers. I listened to a few and I’d say there are good bits, but IMO most podcasts need to get to the meat of their story much faster. Thankfully, it’s easy to skip ahead 15 seconds or play at 1.5x speed on most podcast players.
• And when on that family road trip, I recommend Brains On and Surprisingly Awesome (now known as Every Little Thing). They are both interesting and entertaining for all ages. I listened to an entire show about Broccoli and it in fact was “surprisingly awesome.”
Optimal eDM subject line length
Do you know the ideal length of an email SUBJECT line? Email deliverability firm Return Path has good data on length of email subject line relative to read rate (for email marketing but maybe it could transfer over with emails to your boss or spouse). Somewhat surprising, slightly longer headlines (51 – 70) characters, have the highest read rate, yet a small portion of emails are that length.
Handy Excel Function: The best way I’ve found to count characters, like when writing multiple headlines, tweets, CTAs, etc. is “=LEN” (as in LENGTH) function in Excel. This was a new one to me and pasting =LEN across Excel cells made counting characters in a spreadsheet super easy for me while I was on a working on a digital surround campaign recently.
When the meeting organizer is late
Just about everyone has a few minutes to kill while waiting for a conference call to begin. Here’s a G-rated, smile-generating impossible odds compilation video. Most are sports related, but by sports I’m talking ones like Jenga, gum juggling, and pencil flipping. It’s ok to skip the first minute as the videos get better. Enjoy!
Have a good tip share?
We greatly value input and suggestions from clients, experts, prospects, and all on this topic. We welcome you to submit your notes to eric@aventigroup.com.
