Inbound Marketing Blog

Voice recognition and virtual assistants are definitely becoming a staple in everyday life and a trend companies and marketers can’t ignore. While virtual assistants can answer your questions, they also have the ability to do much more. That’s where Alexa Skills come into play.

With 2018 just around the corner, do you know what marketing technology you're going to implement next year? In this week's episode of The IMPACT Show, Bob and Nick asked what you wanted to hear, and the topic everyone wanted to know more about was what marketing technology you should consider in 2018. As always, in digital marketing news,  we discussed Google machine and the differences between rule based and AI bots. Just in case you missed us live (or if you want to relive the magic), you’ll find the episode’s show notes below as well as the recording.

When you have it at your fingertips and can make informed decisions, data is a powerful thing. Without it, you’re not really being agile. We’ve been wrestling with how to be more data-driven in our agile marketing approach for about a year now, as have been many agile marketers we’ve spoken to. Fortunately, we finally found the missing link - Databox.

With so many digital marketing tools out on the market, sometimes it can be most effective to combine their powers to get the best results. Luckily HubSpot has been stepping up their integration game, making more and more native integrations available in the past few months. In 2017, HubSpot has added about 18 integrations so far including Databox, Olark, and Enthusem (both IMPACT clients). This means your marketing tools and HubSpot are even more powerful as they can share information and speak to each other. The latest addition, email marketing tool, Sigstr is no different.

There's a reason why Best Film Editing is its own category at the Oscars. It's the under-appreciated "invisible art form" that goes far beyond simply piecing together bits and pieces of dialogue and visuals. Often, it's in the editing room where raw footage is transformed into a visually-compelling, immersive story.  Of course, us marketers are not typically found rubbing elbows with Hollywood's video editing elite (nor do we have access to their budgets). But, with the rise of video marketing -- both in popularity and accessibility -- we are being asked to don our own video editing caps with greater frequency. Like the modern-day editors of Tinseltown, you should always leverage video editing software in post-production to make your story come to life.

Amazon Spark was released earlier this month putting the online giant into yet another digital space -- social networking. Only available on Amazon’s mobile app, Spark is a place for users to share photos of different products they’ve tried or are selling via the Amazon Marketplace, and explore suggestions.

Every marketer today knows that video content is a must, but unfortunately, for many, it gets throw to the wayside when they stop to think about the time commitment to filming and editing. Good news: Those days are long gone. Earlier this month, Wistia released Soapbox - a free Chrome extension that allows you to record yourself and screen right from your browser. (and can I just be real for a second… it’s awesome!!)

When you love your job, everything becomes an opportunity to learn and hone your craft.  As digital marketers, we don’t often get the chance to interact with real-life examples of what we do, but I recently had a bit of “aha” about user experience and virtual reality (VR) in marketing and I have to share it with you.