While using stock images can appear easy and cost-effective, it can come off as unauthentic and cause damage to your brand and marketing programs.

Does your marketing plan include a strategy for word of mouth marketing (WOMM)? If not, and your traditional marketing is the least bit effective, then you are probably benefiting in some way from WOMM without any focused effort. Your customers, prospects, and influencer advocates are talking about your products and services and those of your competitors. Are you listening and providing relevant stories worth talking about?

It works more now more than ever because there are now more online and offline conversations among your customers.

If you’re a B2B marketer and want to improve your website traffic, inbound marketing should be a required component of your marketing plan and budget in the upcoming year. As the costs of paid search continue to rise, now is the time to strategically improve your organic search results with search engine optimization (SEO). Avoid these common mistakes that could cripple your SEO initiative from the start.

In developing b2b buyer personas you have to remember their connection to the buying cycle, as different stages in the buying cycle lead to different content. Demographic information is helpful in better tailoring your message (e.g. a millennial will want information delivered to him/her differently than a baby boomer), but a buyer persona doesn’t do its job if it isn’t related to buying.

For anyone who was unable to attend MLT Creative’s Revolutionary and Remarkable event recently, Ideas on Influence, I wanted to write a quick blog post to let you know what you missed. The event mixed business with pleasure to educate B2B marketers in a relaxed environment filled with food (from Atlanta’s Good Food Truck!), spirits, and presentations by Mark Schaefer and Ted Wright. As the event title suggested, both presentations discussed the idea of influence and looked at it from both the virtual and the face-to-face perspective. And both presentations were phenomenal.

Even though gamification is much more than badges, many people continue to think of it as just that. So in order to challenge you to think outside the box about gamification, I am going to look at it through a scientific lens to show how the concept is rooted in a distinct human trait: the desire for recognition of our achievements.

In order to motivate buyer behavior, you have to understand your buyer. And in addition to studying buyer behavior offline, you can examine your prospect’s online behavior in order to create a more complete persona of whom you are targeting.

As Director of Buyer Behavior Studies here at MLT Creative, I am always researching how we can better understand our buyers and thus motivate their buying behavior. Based upon my research, I argue that buyer personas are a fundamental part of understanding your buyer (and thus his/her buyer behavior) due to many psychological and sociological reasons; however, sometimes that may not be enough to sell my readers on them. So when I saw BrightTALK, DemandGen and Forrester’s webinar this morning titled The ROI of Buyer Personas, I noted its great statistics and wanted to share them with you all.

Whenever you tweet a story or update your status, chances are you are ‘picturing’ a person on the other end that will care what you have to say. Sometimes it may be an actual person, other times it may just be a type of person or a mixture of several people; but either way, you have some sort of recipient that you think will care.