The 15 Best Marketing Articles of 2015 (Part One)

The year may be half over but we have already seen a few prominent themes in the digital marketing world. Chances are you’ve read an article or two on how to create a compelling story for your brand or something similar to the top 5, 10 or 20 growth strategies for your company.

It’s no secret that the recent success of today's top B2B and B2C companies follow many of the strategies that are found in a variety of blogs, articles and ebooks. So why not start to tackle this impressive list with the top 15 marketing articles of 2015 to date based on views, likes, tweets and shares.

The storytellers

SEO 2015: Will this be the year of the Story Brand?KISSmetrics kicked off the year with a great article on creating a story around your brand in the year 2015. The Author; Asher Elran, summarizes predictions from some of the digital marketing industries top experts, including Kevin Spacey (yes Frank Underwood himself!) on how companies need to step up their game in storytelling and content marketing from last year. This is a great snapshot on how to adjust your content marketing strategy so that it speaks to a broader audience this year.

Understanding The Power of Story To Build a Product that Sticks

A much more detailed account on storytelling, Dan Martell discusses the power of story i.e., How the “product story” can increase the likelihood of people inviting their friends to try the product.

Creating the product story, the author describes as “after a new visitor goes to your site, signs up and uses your product for the first time, they create a mental movie for the value it can bring to their – or a friend’s life.”  Martell emphasis the importance of this extraction as the key reason for growth.

The author also talks about a sequential method to attracting users (product promise), user sign ups (user onboarding)  & how to keep users and encourage them to bring in more users (core product value: how you get a user to stick).

Storytelling Could Bring Your Brand to Life and Strengthen Your Marketing Impact This write-up from Adam Toren explains how anyone (creative or not) can create a story for his or her brand and the importance of storytelling to drive business. The author provides useful references of specific companies that have created businesses out of helping other businesses find their “product story”. They are great tools if you’re having a little trouble with the creative process.

What is Brand Storytelling?

An article published by smallbiz.com describes the art of storytelling for your brand as a much more meaningful experience. The author suggests evoking feelings from your audience to capture their attention, make the story relatable and keeping your story simple and easy to understand.

A Visual Guide to Telling Compelling Stories for Your Brand

HubSpot is a great online resource for marketers. The author of this piece created an entertaining visual step-by-step guide on how to create a compelling story for your brand that will attract and engage customers. True to the theme of the article itself the characters and format in which the author suggest how to find “your story” has an authentic and easy tone, which in turn has contributed to the number of shares it has received.

Growth Strategies

Build a Growth Machine Like Andy Johns

Lauren Bass simplified in 8 steps how to build a growth process for your company emulating Andy John’s processes from his past positions at Facebook, Twitter, Quora and now Wealthfront. In a nut-shell, Johns suggests measuring your growth similar to the way you would measure your cash flow, using scientific methodology to test your product's marketability. Get to product market fit – clearly define your user, clearly describe the product to that user and find/remove any friction that prevents engagement.

Find the Aha moment (the user “gets” it and therefore sticks around) – using the data from the process it takes to get users to this point and build it into your growth process. Make sure growth is built into the DNA of your company – long term growth must be a core value.

13 Growth Tactics to use in 2015

A Simplistic and easy to execute guide on how to increase user adoption and engagement for your company.  The team at SaaSquatch are actively exploring different methods of growth and have a great educational blog to assist other startups in this area. In this article Brandon Gains suggests creating ways to draw in new users such as onboarding incentives, keep users interested with targeted content as well as conversion tactics for your mobile app.

8 people you should hire to grow your start up fast Growth is not just about the process you put in place but the people you hire to execute this process. This entrepreneur.com article from Sujan Patel provides us with eight different hires you can make to impact the growth of your company.

How to grow your start up 3000% in the first year

The author, Ross Paul, discusses LemonStand’s recent growth starting from the early challenges that shaped the company to what it is today. The piece reflects on the importance of pivoting when your current model just isn’t working, delivering a minimum viable product to test product market fit, the importance of customer relations, transparency and pricing strategies.

Five ways to grow your Business Fast in 2015

LinkedIn has a plethora of great articles for entrepreneurship. This specific post from Jerome Knyszewski gives solid advice to small businesses on how to plan for initial growing pains (increase in costs & resources) when executing your growth plan, focusing on old and existing customers not just attracting the new. Also creative ways to save on costs when you business IS growing but joining purchasing groups and recycling old equipment.

Content Marketing

Ways Content Marketing is going to Change in 2015Mentioned as many businesses top digital marketing tool this year, content marketing continues to grow in popularity, and for good reason as listed in this article surpassing social media marketing, SEO & paid advertising as a top revenue contributor. John Rampton predicts the 7 ways content marketing is changing (for the better) and how you can jump into this growing trend. He covers everything from increasing your spend on content creation to using collaborative marketing tools.

10 Tips for Getting Long-Term Traffic to your Content

HubSpot does it again! Unlike any other I’ve read to date this article really empowers and educates the reader with 10 very useful ways of having your content stay relevant on the web long after it's been posted, thus increasing the inbound traffic to your website. The author Sujan Patel, referencing many useful tools for collecting valuable analytics around lasting themes, catchy titles as well as the ability to pull in quotes from key influencers in your space.

7 Biggest Content Marketing Mistakes And How to Avoid Them

Content marketing can be a great creative outlet and invoke excitement when posting and preaching about your brand however if it’s not done well and with no process it can have little impact for your company. In this write-up, Liz Bedor outlines 7 common mistakes many marketers fall victim to when creating and posting content. She goes over areas like not paying close enough attention to your customers’ questions as well as not reusing and repurposing what you’ve already written.

The author, Neil Patel of Quicksprout has compiled a list of his top articles on how to improve your content marketing strategy.  Patel curates topics such as the importance of infographics to drive visitors to your site and the psychology of the consumer just to name a couple. The extensive and detailed list covers many of the main themes you’ll likely find around content marketing. Definitely a must-read!

Content Marketing Tips: Image Rules for the Top 7 Social Networks

The importance of imagery associated with your content is something all marketers should be very familiar with, after all as the author Jeff Bullas points out, on Twitter you get 150% more retweets, 89% more favorites and 18% more clicks if your post includes an image. This article includes a handy infographic on the optimal sizes for imagery on the 7 most widely used social networks.