What does your business stand for? If you don’t have a quick answer, don’t worry. Most companies are too busy with day-to-day concerns like growth and profitability to ponder the “bigger” questions. But it’s worth thinking about.

Often falsely attributed to Benjamin Franklin, this quote actually traces its roots back to the 3rd century and Confucian philosopher, Xun Kuang. So even as far back as 250 BC, wise men knew the value of an effective user experience! Yet some brands in 2019 still don’t place enough emphasis on UX-based writing as part of their content strategy.

Lead generation is the lifeblood of a business, for new projects and new revenues. Where would we be without it? Yet it remains a difficult process and task for many businesses. Successful lead generation requires a deep understanding of the needs of the customer, and your ability to relate to their concerns and issues.

Video is a critical part of any branded content strategy. Check out these tips on adding value and driving customer engagement with your video content.

When it comes to analytics, the world of social and digital marketing can be wide and expansive, and it can be difficult to figure out what to focus on—which can mean valuable time, wasted.

In any successful relationship, trust is earned and kept through giving recognition to a partner on a regular basis. By staying connected to other people’s goals and motivation, deeper connections can be maintained. The same holds true in a business-customer relationship.

“So, how did we do?” It’s a question marketers often ask each other at the end of a campaign. And, although it’s a good a question, we don’t always get the answer we had hoped for. A list of metrics, important Key Performance Indicators, or even something as promising as the number of new leads generated can leave our stakeholders surprised, confused, or worse--unsure if we did our job. What does it all mean?

Email is a relatively inexpensive tool yielding a high return that companies can use to gain insights into what their audience finds meaningful. This tool can also help companies segment their lists and target more effectively, resulting in higher engagements not just in email, but across all channels.

This article, Part 2, focuses on how to communicate within and treat [business] relationships after these contacts have become our clients and customers.

Where do you start? Everyone usually wants to jump in the water and start building right away. But, build what? And why? These are critical questions that will help you compile a roadmap for your project.

AI is a powerful, emergent force that big tech companies, for example, are fawning over—and for good reason.

To drive additional awareness and build trust in your mission and products, you should be focusing on influencer marketing. It’s a buzzword that’s bandied about often – and for good reason.

At Trellist, we operate in a sociable, personal, and professional environment—what we call a workhome—where we strive to meet each other on common ground and that serves our clients and employees.

Excellent technical abilities, much like a strong grasp of modern marketing strategies, can take you a long way in your career. However, little can impede your upward career trajectory faster than a lack of people skills.

“What platform should we use to manage our digital assets?” Before answering that question, you need to stop and take a look around your organization to determine the best place to start.

You’re not alone in embracing marketing automation and other marketing technology, and you’re also not alone if you’re running into a relatively steep learning curve when it comes to using it most effectively. However, when it comes to using it well, only 5% consider themselves experts.

We’re on the cusp of a radical shift in the way that marketers create, measure, and optimize the experiences we’re providing for our customers. Artificial intelligence and its applications in marketing are going beyond the proof-of-concept stage and emerging as a tool to drive real change within organizations.

Anything worth doing is worth doing well. It’s great advice…but how does one measure “well”?

Have you ever rolled your eyes at the implausibility of a bombastic radio commercial? Or thought, “Wow! That’s just awful,” while watching a TV spot or reading a piece of mail? You’re not alone.

It can seem like change is the only constant in today’s business environment. The pressures of globalization, technological innovation, and competition continually drive the need for transformation across the organization.

Careers don’t consist of a single position at a single company with incremental raises and promotions. Rather, they tend to focus on pursuing a skillset or particular expertise, bouncing from organization to organization to develop depth and – naturally – better pay and benefits.

Virtual reality. The very phrase probably conjures up images of a futuristic, computer-driven landscape you might see in your favorite sci-fi movie. It’s less likely that you’d associate the next-gen tech with a disconcertingly up close, flea’s-eye view of carpet piles in your virtual living room.

Successful recruiting is one of the most important components of your organization’s health and wellbeing. Like proper nutrition for your body or premium fuel for your car, your people and your teams are what keep your organization moving in the right direction.

For many organizations, the ticking of the countdown clock for General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance is growing louder as the May 25th deadline approaches. While many of the world’s largest brands have made huge strides toward compliance, most businesses still have significant progress to make.

Accessibility is a philosophy that ensures a wide range of people are able to comprehend the content we create for businesses — even if they do not all access and experience the information in same way. But creating accessible websites is not always easy.

Think about how you, as a consumer, make an online purchase. You probably know what you want and may have a product category in mind that fits your need. However, there are likely many different products available.

GDPR, or General Data Protection Regulation, requires businesses to protect the personal data and privacy of EU citizens for transactions that occur within the EU. It is a result of 4 years of work by the EU parliament due to the inadequacy of older rules, such as the Safe Harbor Privacy Principles 2000 and Privacy Shield agreements of July 2016. Unlike its predecessors, GDPR recognizes the importance of privacy in the current era as well as the likelihood of a future cashless society. It was created with the idea that “identity is the new currency in our world.”

Is your business taking full advantage of one of the simplest ways to get your customers’ attention? After all, every email has a subject line. But how you put it to work is up to you.

One-to-one marketing, personalization, segmentation, hypertargeting, consumer-first marketing—whatever it’s called, the goals of nearly every marketing strategy are virtually the same: to understand customers as individuals, reach them on their terms, and communicate in a way that makes them feel like they are interacting one-to-one with your brand and its products and services.

We’re about 10 years past marketing automation’s advent, so most business leaders are familiar with the ROI to be gained in automating top- and mid-funnel marketing touchpoints. But while 40-50% of companies have invested in an automation platform, a staggering 85% percent of B2B organizations report not using their platform to its full potential.

While social media has forever changed how businesses and customers interact, social media marketing as a whole is constantly evolving. To ensure your brand’s content garners likes, comments, and shares, your strategy must shift with the industry’s latest trends.

How does a manufacturing organization deploy a corporate digital strategy without turning its business upside down? For large, enterprise organizations, it makes sense to start with your biggest pain point. In other words, what part of the organization has the most opportunity to improve and impact your go-to-market efficiency? Let's evaluate an enterprise B2B through four distinct lenses: (1) Operations, (2) Customer Interface, (3) Business Processes, and (4) Data Access.

Trade shows are the perfect opportunity to mingle with customers and prospects, soak in thought leadership, and bring home an avalanche of new leads and potentially win new business. If you’re planning to exhibit at an industry event, all of these benefits are possible. Unfortunately, it’s easy to miss out on most of these opportunities and watch helplessly as your ROI plummets if you don’t prepare properly.

How does a manufacturing organization deploy a corporate digital strategy without turning its business upside down? For large, enterprise organizations it makes sense to start with your most significant pain point. In other words, what part of the organization has the most opportunity to improve and impact your go-to-market efficiency? Let’s evaluate an enterprise B2B through four distinct lenses: (1) Operations, (2) Customer Interface, (3) Business Processes, and (4) Data Access.

The beauty and promise of the cloud is its scalability, always-on availability, better security, and streamlined workflows for your team. However, the real value will never be realized without the right migration strategy, implementation, and ongoing optimization.

How does a manufacturing organization deploy a corporate digital strategy without turning its business upside down? For large, enterprise organizations it makes sense to start with your biggest pain point. In other words, what part of the organization has the most opportunity to improve and impact your go-to-market efficiency? Let’s evaluate an enterprise B2B through four distinct lenses: (1) Operations, (2) Customer Interface, (3) Business Processes, and (4) Data Access.

How does a manufacturing organization deploy a corporate digital strategy without turning its business upside down? Where is the best place to start? How long will this take and what’s the price tag? How much revenue lift can I expect? At Trellist, we get asked these questions on a frequent basis from our clients. The answer, as you probably expect, is “it depends.”

The case for a robust discovery process before beginning design/development projects: Imagine a house that’s beautiful from the outside but, once you cross the threshold, you find the floorplan is all wrong, the rooms are too small, and the windows are too high to reach. It takes time and thought to develop the layout and “experience” of those interiors so that they meet the expectations and needs of the people who enter. No matter how spectacular the exterior is, if the internal experience doesn’t deliver, the whole thing is a failure.

Millennials are a growing segment of consumers—making up more than a quarter of the US population—thus forcing marketers to change their game in order to stay ahead. They’ve completely reshaped the marketplace. Check out some of our best tips for keeping up with these 83.1 million consumers:

A big mistake that people make when creating websites is that they separate the visual design efforts from the UX (User Experience) and content development. They see visual design as putting paint on a finished piece of pottery—something you do at the end to make it look pretty. This approach is missing the power that visual design has to engage users with a website’s narrative.

LinkedIn recently got a fresh new look. The social networking site says it’s the largest redesign since its inception. The company hopes users will find the new design more intuitive and easier to use. LinkedIn claims users were apparently “overwhelmed” by the old design.

For marketers, understanding the influence that technology and media has on the generation and how that influence impacts the future of marketing is crucial, because Millennials account for an estimated $200 billion annually in direct spending and a projected $1.4 trillion by the year 2020. Read more to find out 3 ways that Millennials are redefining marketing.

Visual content shared on social media is a powerful asset, especially at conferences and events. Images help boost a brand’s visibility in general, but did you know that social media posts with images receive 94% more views than those without them? Every picture tells a story. So share yours and watch it improve engagement on your social channels.

In this short video, Founding Partner, CEO and United States Veteran David Atadan provides inspiration and advice to other Veterans considering starting their own business. Click Read Post to watch the video.

Email marketing isn't dead, but the Inbox sure is flooded. So much so that Gmail now pushes promotional content out of the primary Inbox. All the more reason to experiment with targeted social media marketing with reach and ROI that rivals email campaigns.

Stories is Instagram’s newest feature – and it does a lot of the same things Snapchat does. Learn about the pros and cons of using Stories for your brand.

SharePoint’s look and feel out of the box and can often leave much to be desired, leading to low adoption rates across an enterprise. What differentiates a SharePoint site that is hard to navigate and underutilized from one that truly impacts collaboration and productivity is great design and user interface/user experience (UI/UX) work.

Identifying customer personas, and cataloguing the insights associated with them, is essential for targeting marketing and sales efforts in the most efficient and productive way possible. It prepares the business to most appropriately appeal to its prospective customers. Here are the six essentials to successfully developing buyer personas for any business.

Brands are obsessed with plugging into the Millennial generation. Despite this, it seems that many established companies still struggle with how to create a meaningful connection with this key audience–financial institutions included. As a result, we performed research around the relationship between Millennials and credit cards to develop insight that would help financial institutions build campaigns that resonate.

Is there any confusion in your organization about whitepapers, eBooks, sell sheets and case studies, what they are and how to use them? In case there is, let’s review.

When a business strategy is actionable, employees will be able to see the connectivity of their own work with the strategy, have the right tools and resources to meet objectives, and be trained on any new systems or platforms. We've got the five key questions you should answer to develop a strategy that is actually actionable.

For businesses accustomed to traditional marketing approaches, a shift to content marketing is not always easy. Great content marketing efforts require a somewhat different mindset — that of a journalist. A journalist’s approach to audience and storytelling provides a useful model for content marketers. Three aspects of journalism are particularly useful for organizations to adopt if they want to make their content marketing initiatives successful.

In a move that scuttles retail dogma, all 143 REI locations were closed on Black Friday 2015 with a message to get outside and enjoy nature. This move speaks to an emerging corporate ethos that places the values of customers ahead of short-term dollars, focusing instead on brand integrity and lifetime value of the customer. We've used social technologies to analyze if this major business decision was a smart one.

It was only a matter of time until the trendy wearable tech we use to monitor our daily activities started to impact our shopping carts. Just as Philosopher Alain de Lille is quoted as saying that, “one thousand roads lead men forever to Rome,” so do one thousand Fitbits and Jawbones lead companies in the healthcare industry to better consumer insight data.

New social media platforms are appearing everywhere, making it difficult for businesses to identify where they should spend their time and resources. One important consideration in making the assessment is understanding which forms of social media have, and are likely to maintain, a broad reach. Two newer mobile social media platforms have emerged that appear to have sizeable user bases and some staying power: Snapchat and Periscope.

Organizations can benefit from using Microsoft SharePoint and Office 365 as an environment for learning curriculum.

If you dig deep enough, you’ll find some interesting clues from the past that mirror what an effective public relations strategy should look like today. Want proof? We've got five essentials to successful public relations efforts that began in ancient times.

Looking for a competitive edge or ways to improve your customer service? You might be surprised to learn what social listening can do for your business.

Too often, marketing departments put their noses down into spreadsheets, and lose the emotional aspect of what they're trying to do. And that is automatically limiting; because emotion, not numbers, is the gasoline that fuels marketing awesomeness.

Sprinklr – the world’s most complete enterprise social technology – just announced a whopping $46 million in new funding. We're sharing this significant news because it corroborates the increasingly important role of omnichannel as an integrated marketing and technology strategy.

Microsoft has killed off Internet Explorer. Where will they turn for branding their new browser? Here's our predictions.

If your organization is forward-thinking, it’s very likely considering deploying a mobile app to better reach customers. However, it’s important to stop for a moment and think strategically.

Mobile device use is increasing at a staggering rate. People are more connected than ever, and by 2018, Internet traffic from wireless and mobile devices will surpass traffic from wired devices. Because of this, IT architects must consider all of these mobile devices and their users when planning environments that will deliver and exchange critical business data.

In today's digital buying and selling enviornment, content fuels The New Buyer's Journey.

Without question, social technologies rank among the most disruptive trends in business and culture in the 21st Century. So disruptive, in fact, it could prove to be an “extinction event” for businesses too inflexible or slow to evolve.

Low-energy, low-cost Bluetooth devices are bridging the physical and digital worlds.

Has your organization made the move from practicing Social Media to practicing Social Business?

Content may be king, but it’s dynamic content that starts an empire.

Welcome to the segmented reality of Enterprise and Marketing-Based eLearning.

Email is more mobile than ever. Understanding what motivates customers when they check email on their devices is critical to engagement and performance.

Imagine attending a corporate meeting or conference, and all you need for managing check-in and registration is your mobile phone or tablet. Consider the power of never having to squint again to view an overstuffed presentation slide from your seat in the back of the room, because you can follow along to more compelling, real-time presentation content on your own device. Or imagine yourself as the presenter – with the ability to get instant feedback from an audience half a world away.

How one evening of rapid, creative thinking at Philly Tech Week revealed ideation tactics worth considering for business and beyond.

Making electronic information accessible to those with disabilities involves fine-tuning interactive information with specific best-practice design and coding methodologies.

Social media challenges long held traditions about ROI from online media. Many traditional measurements miss out on the true value of social media. Here are 5 ways to measure social media ROI that you may be missing.

Advertising and marketing success is gauged on the impression you leave with your audience. Kinetic type is a simple creative solution that is often overlooked in B2B applications.

Upping your social media game in 2013 is easier than you might think. Here's a take on social media optimization for the new 365.

Mobile First means that the mobile use case is taken into account first and foremost when developing any digital customer touch point. Adherence to this discipline translates to more streamlined messaging and, ultimately, more effective communications.

Know what to ask for and you’ll get the most out of your crowdsourcing initiative.

The secret ingredients for capitalizing on content marketing.

It's a crowdsourced world. Be sure to enlist the people at the right time for optimal success.

Often, CEOs delegate branding decisions solely to the marketing department without taking an active role, instead tending to financial or operational affairs. In doing so, they risk committing one of the most underreported business blunders of our time.

The case for including video in your marketing strategy is no longer a right brain vs. left brain conundrum. The numbers are too compelling now.

Although smartphones usage is growing and dynamically changing how we integrate mobile into the marketing plan, it does not suggest that retail is dead.

In part one of this series, we discussed the phenomenon of intelligent digital agents, and their significance in the future of our computing experience. In this second installment we’ll discuss ways to start incorporating mobile thinking into your SEO strategy.

With a very different approach to email development, print and direct mail creative methodology, marketing executives have much greater freedom to personalize offers, creative treatments, and marketing messages, all while reinventing their marketing program strategy with greater personalization.

Siri (Apple's new, intelligent personal assistant), and her inevitable descendants, have the potential to change how information is indexed and consumed, and we need to understand how to prepare for it.

Over the last few years many businesses have moved aspects of their business operations to cloud computing. It offers many advantages, including potential cost savings. However, there are also significant risks associated with cloud computing. So what are some of the factors that companies should be aware when evaluating cloud computing, and how do you mitigate the risks associated with it?

During a time when each monetary decision, especially in business, is more heavily scrutinized than the last, the creation of a strategic vision is of the utmost importance. Business strategy provides a methodology that should be used to effectively complete any project.

We think today’s Black Friday Shopper is very different from what we saw on ABC and NBC News. She is a smart, mobile-savvy, well-researched consumer who seeks value based on real information and the opinions of the people and brands that she trusts. Let's take a look at the Real Black Friday Shopper.

It’s a time tested solution to an age old problem: Make it fun and people are more likely to participate. Whether your goal is to get customers to use their loyalty cards more often, to visit your bricks and mortar locations, or simply to participate in your survey, applying the principles of gamification to your marketing programs may be a great way to generate lift.

Merchant funded loyalty programs are a growing loyalty strategy, enabling financial institutions to share the burden of loyalty program costs with merchants.

With the latest economic news, CTOs and CIOs are once again seeking opportunities for short term cost savings. Outsourcing critical services to specialized vendors has been a favorite strategy of the CIO under pressure to reduce costs and improve service. Now CMOs are looking to steal a page from their business team rivals. Progressive [...]

Brands that engage in a dialogue by listening, learning and participating are more likely to create a positive impact. Therefore, it is important that brands actively participate in dialogs throughout their social graph, leveraging the strength in their core message, feedback mechanisms, curating and distributing content, and visual expression as it applies across channels.

They say that we only use about 10% of our brain. That’s just a myth, but regardless of the percentage, mine is at capacity today. It feels like that pink pie chart on your hard drive that shows “space available”—I can’t fit anymore in. And it’s not just me. People are on information overload, [...]

Continuing from my last post on what true loyalty means, I would like to touch upon the topic of customer experience (CX) as a foundation for truly serving the customer.

My father was one of the best story tellers I ever knew, legendary in some circles. When I was a child, he asked me, “Who has the most important job in the castle?” I answered “the king”. “No,” he said. “The king dies and his son becomes king. The most important job is the kingmaker.

Recently we submitted a webpage mockup to a client who responded, “will all my content fit above the fold?” No, we said, and that's okay. Here's why it's okay to flout that rule, and 4 other user experience mis-guidelines.

One of the main obstacles we encounter when beginning a new eLearning project at leading organizations is outdated infrastructure and equipment. We find ourselves (out of necessity) developing alternative approaches to what should be an intriguing, dynamic learning experience.

Web advertising has been evolving ever since companies started trying to generate sales online. As web users gain experience and their surfing habits evolve, advertisers must also change their habits to get attention and clicks with their ads.

If I had more time, I would have written you a shorter blog post. That’s my twist on a famous quote credited to everyone from Mark Twain to Voltaire (replace “blog post” with “letter” for the original version). Regardless of who actually said it, the idea is sublimely important. It does require more effort to [...]

While there are many different approaches to managing application development projects…. Agile development is an approach that emphasizes teamwork, collaboration and adaptability. This method can be a good choice for projects where flexibility and time-to-market are the primary considerations.

The latest in Google’s ongoing series of innovations was announced last week with the launch of Google Ad Instant Preview. This extension of their innovation strategy enables searchers to preview the destination landing page to see if it has the information they’re looking for, and to do this before clicking on the ad.

In a 2010 study, Jupiter Research cited that 75 percent of American consumers belong to at least one loyalty program. These programs can promote brand consideration since consumers are always looking for ways to be rewarded for loyalty.

You’ve probably seen a QR Code before but never took notice of those innocuous square barcodes that appear on everything from product packaging to movie cutouts. While QR Codes are close cousins to traditional barcodes, they are far more versatile to marketers. While you may already know what QR codes are, you may not have realized some of the fascinating ways they can be used.

Let’s face it – we’re all participating in some sort of loyalty program in our daily lives. Some of us use our grocery store club card to get discounts or our Starbucks card, or our credit card for points for cash or free airline tickets.

In dynamic business environments, a new type of planning methodology is being deployed, and is being branded “Emergent Planning.”

Each platform has distinct advantages but the decision may rest on content type.

Analytics tools help web developers better understand site visitors and their needs leading to better web site designs.

Gap, Inc., the apparel retailer, had established its logo through consistent usage over the past 20 years. Recently, Gap decided to try its luck with an updated logo and revealed the new creation on the Gap website without warning.  This move ignited spirited conversation within the online community, which responded with mostly harsh criticism of [...]

Late last week, Google introduced a new search technology that immediately changed organic search marketing. Google Instant is a major leap forward in predictive search functionality, going beyond suggesting search terms to streaming results as users enter each letter of their keywords. Google Instant allows users to search as they type; Marissa [...]

Software development involves many different stages of development before the application is deployed. This process, however, does not end after deployment. Regardless of how well the application is designed, coded, and tested there are situations that can and do cause errors to occur in the application. For example, if the database server [...]

Forrester recently identified “five mistakes to avoid when asking for Web customer experience funding,” certainly a good reminder. 1) Letting people think the current site is “good enough” 2) Being too vague about how they want to spend the money 3) Assuming positive ROI will be enough to get a request approved 4) Giving in to pressures to cut [...]

We could spend hours discussing how this assumption has constrained market insight for products where attributes are neither readily changed by the manufacturer nor independent (health care is an excellent example). “Which is more efficacious, drug A or drug B?” is a red herring in any setting. What qualitative can tell us is:

Google has announced a major shift in its policy on the use of trademarked names in paid search ad copy.  Beginning June 15th, advertisers will be allowed to use trademarked names in their ad text, with some restrictions. This change is causing concern among brand marketers. In the past, Google has barred advertisers from using trademarked [...]

A slightly different version of this article originally appeared in Quirk’s Research Review, May 2005, page 40. Part 2 in a 6-part series. The second sin, or ‘Presto!  Let there be quant.’ Under the illusion of “representativeness” noted in my previous post, researchers may bring quantitative instruments into the qualitative setting and report the aggregate (or [...]

Google announced today that they will begin a test of behavioral targeting through their AdSense network.  This will be a significant change in how advertisers can use Google to target a specific profile on sites other than its search page. To give you some background, AdSense is Google’s content network, where it places text and display [...]