Arketi Principal Rory Carlton and former TAG COO Melanie Brandt were recently interviewed by BtoB magazine’s Charlotte Woolard for the article, “Association uses Twitter competition, redesigned website to drive Web traffic,” about the interactive website and social media competition.

Most notably, the number of unique visitors in the month after the March release of the report climbed 85 percent compared to the same time period last year, while page views rose 16 percent. Additionally, visitors stayed on the website longer and returned to the site more frequently than they had in the past.

To read the full BtoB magazine article, visit http://ow.ly/lVRmv.

This issue of Arketi Insights provides a comprehensive overview for developing an effective online marketing strategy. Key takeaways from this publication include how to:

• Start your online marketing efforts with paid search (PPC)
• Test for the most effective keywords, ad and landing page copy
• Use PPC campaigns to guide organic search initiatives
• Coordinate an integrated PPC and SEO strategy

To read more about paid and organic search optimization, download your free copy of  An Online Marketing Road Map.

Arketi Insights is a regular component of the agency’s ongoing Stop Selling. Start Listening. movement designed to help re-introduce BtoB marketers to a way of thinking that places buyers and their needs at the center of marketing priorities. The campaign also includes webinars and the seventh annual Technology CMO Roundtableto be held Sept. 26, 2013.

CMO Council study: Content has significant impact on buying process
from BtoB Magazine
A new study by the Chief Marketing Officer Council found that 87% of b-to-b buyers said online content has either a major or moderate impact on vendor preference and selection.

Where Do Marketers Get Leads?
from HubSpot’s Inbound Internet Marketing Blog
Not too long ago, I dove into some of our copious data from the 2013 State of Inbound Marketing Report to figure out where marketers get their customers. So I thought it’d be a good idea to back up a little bit and look at not just where customers come from — but where leads come from. After all, that’s where it all starts, right?

3 ways video helps with PR
from PR Daily
Overall, research estimates that video views among Internet users grew by 23 percent over the past year. So what has this to do with public relations? Here are three ways engaging video can help with any public relations efforts.

Social Media is Key to B2B Content Marketing
from Social Media Today
A recent study confirms that content marketing remains a top priority for B2B marketers, with the vast majority leveraging the practice as part of their marketing strategy. But many are uncertain about how to successfully employ the many tactics available to them.

Tips From a Reporter on Great PR Writing
from PR News
We’ve been doing a lot of writing in PR News lately on great PR writing and as I was reflecting on this very intricate craft—a form of writing that requires immense skill—I thought it might be useful to reflect on what a journalist looks for in PR writing—not just press releases, but also corporate letters, comments from executives, and more. So here goes, more or less in the order of importance.

Use Google+, Are You Serious?
from Social Media Today
You are a business and you think Facebook and Twitter are the best social networks to be on? You aren’t alone in thinking that, but have you considered using Google+ ? With well over 300 million active users, it’s time we showed Google+ some love.

How to Use the LinkedIn Contacts Feature
from Social Media Examiner
Are you looking for a smarter way to stay in touch with your most important business relationships? What if you could store all of your contacts in one place? Well now you can with LinkedIn Contacts. In this article, you’ll discover how LinkedIn Contacts looks and take a tour through its features.

8 Questions To Help You Define Your Content Strategy
from B2B Marketing Insider
The latest research from the Content Marketing Institute showed us that everyone is creating content and yet only about a third of us have a document content strategy. So, we have all have a content problem, whether we have accepted it or not. We need to create more of the kind of content our customers are looking for and less of the stuff no one reads, or acts upon.

Infographic: How to make messages stick with your audience
from Ragan.com
It may seem hard to create sticky messages, but it doesn’t have to be. One Leap created an infographic based on the principles from “Made to Stick,” a book that explains how you can ensure your messages break through the clutter. Here are a few pointers.

Merging email with social, mobile efforts
from BtoB Magazine
Integrating social, mobile and email marketing efforts can be complicated, but it’s increasingly important for marketers that want to connect with customers and prospects.

1. There is not a single winning recipe that works 100% of the time
2. The “media relations process” keeps changing and evolving as we continue to consume information in different mediums

So what’s a PR pro supposed to do when one of their longest-standing clients wants to extend their presence and generate interest in several new vertical markets by getting media coverage in key outlets? Not an unreasonable request except that the company has no customers in these markets and isn’t launching their product for several more months.  This is all hypothetical, of course because this never happens in the real world.

You have to do the typical publication research to find out what they cover and how your client may fit. Then, you’ve got to brainstorm several angles that map back to your client’s overall messaging and tailor them to the publication you’re targeting.

The critical step is to GET CREATIVE!

As mentioned previously in this blog, my colleagues and I participated in a very informative discussion by Michael Smart, which probably had some of the best advice I’ve heard regarding media relations in a long time. Here’s one of the several tips he provided that I think helps with the creativity factor:

Find unorthodox beats – Choose an angle that will appeal to a reporter other than your specific beat.

For example, if your client is a state university and the advanced physics class is holding an aircraft race with students’ handmade devices, your first instinct may be to pitch the education section of a publication. But by searching for unorthodox beats, you may have better success in pitching an aeronautical reporter rather than an education reporter.

The key take away here is that this and other creative approaches make you think differently and leads you down different paths than just the “I’d like you to talk to ABC Company because they are the leader in their space” pitch.

Several of us at Arketi have used this approach and have also had success. Try this tip out and see if it helps you come up with some new and creative ways to get your clients’ news out there.

16 Remarkable Web Analytics Guides, Tips and Techniques
from Business 2 Community
How can you measure all of the sources that contributed to a conversion–not just the last click? Which Google Analytics metrics are most important? How can you take action on analytics reports? Find the answers to those questions and many more here in 16 remarkable guides to web analytics from the past year.

Where Do Marketers Get Customers? [Data]
from HubSpot’s Inbound Internet Marketing Blog
Time and time again, we get asked for benchmark data, particularly about customer generation. Well, you may remember we recently launched our 2013 State of Inbound Marketing Research Report, and we used the mounds of research there to try to, you know, “give the people what they want.” And the people want benchmark data.

Email analytics: 3 best practices to live by
from BtoB Magazine
Marketers today can use more media channels than ever to reach their target audiences, but along with that opportunity comes a significant challenge: the need to track prospects who move from one device to the next and back again.

How to Write a Website Header Like a Copywriting Pro (and Why You Need an Awesome One)
from Business 2 Community
Your header/opening statement is the most important piece of content on your entire site. It creates an impression on your web designer who uses that impression to design your website. Basically, it’s very important to get it right.

Out with the sales funnel, in with the cocktail shaker
from BtoB Magazine
Sales and marketing frameworks can be useful, and there is no more commonly used framework than the traditional “sales funnel” that we all know and love.

19 things you need to know about the #NewGooglePlus
from Ragan.com
Recently, at the Google I/O 2013 conference, Google announced many exciting changes for various parts of its platform. The bulk of the upgrades this year centered on Google+.

Email Marketing: Your questions about personalization and length
from Marketingsherpa Blog
In this MarketingSherpa blog post, hear feedback on email marketing questions submitted by your peers and answered by Rich Fleck, Vice President of Strategy, Responsys. Learn about personalization in emails and how long email copy should be.

7 fastest growing industries in America right now…and they’re all related to tech
from Sarah’s Faves
Analysts at IBISWorld compiled a list of standout industries based on their annualized revenue growth over the past 10 years (and performance expected through 2018). Guess what? All of the top industries were in some way related to tech.

Content Curation for Lead Nurturing
from Modern B2B Marketing – Marketo Best Practices Blog
By now, many marketers are convinced of the value of lead nurturing – but they remain flummoxed by the task of creating content to fuel their programs. In this post, I’d like to propose that marketers can and should embrace content curation as an effective, easy way to nurture leads.

Facebook to launch verified pages
from PRWeek US
Facebook is following in Twitter’s footsteps by launching verified pages that allow people to identify authentic accounts of brands and celebrities on its network.

Color offers consumers an instantaneous method for conveying meaning and message without words. When building a brand, it’s important to take into account the way people interpret color. Color is the visual component people remember most about a brand, followed closely by shapes/symbols, then numbers and finally words.

Science has proven that color influences consumer’s emotions. That’s why you must remember to consider your business’ values and be clear on what emotions you want your brand to convey when designing the look and feel of your logo, web presence, or other design pieces. How can your brand show creativity, for example?

The psychoanalyst Carl Jung famously said that ‘colors are the mother tongue of the subconscious.’ Understanding the psychology of color and the associations that people in western cultures have relative to certain colors is one way that you can take a more objective approach when it comes to designing crucial elements of your visual brand identity. Consciously and consistently using color psychology can lead to increased sales, more memorable impressions and a stronger brand identity.

Think about brands like Facebook, Home Depot and Coca-Cola. Each has a unique color associated with its brand and more than likely, you would be able to identify each company based solely on its color.

Next, consider your brand as a whole. What do the colors you use say about the brand? Are your marketing materials consistent with their use of color?

The info graphic below from The Logo Company, helps illustrate the psychology of color theory with examples of famous brands from across the globe. Do you want clients and prospects to view your company as bold and youthful? Purple may be an appropriate color for you then.

Psychologists have proven color can increase brand recognition by up to 80%, further driving home the point that choosing the right color is crucial in determining how your brand is viewed. Take the time to look at how some of the worlds most famous brands utilize color within their logos that intrinsically tie-in with the overall brand strategy.

The Roundtable consisted of executives from leading technology companies in the Southeast and examined the rapidly evolving BtoB marketing landscape. With an optimistic outlook on the 2013 business environment, five consistent themes emerged from the Roundtable discussions.

Arketi Principal Mike Neumeier, APR was recently interviewed by BtoB magazine’s Christopher Hosford for the article, “For tech marketers, video is tops; advertising, a nonstarter,” in which he overviewed the five major trends.

Most notably, video is leading the content movement for tech marketers. Ninety percent of Arketi Roundtable participants said they will invest more into their video marketing efforts this year compared with last year.

To read the full BtoB magazine article, visit http://ow.ly/ljSgC.

The Ultimate Resource for 2013 Inbound Marketing Stats and Charts
from HubSpot’s Blog
We’ve compiled the ultimate resource of charts and statistics from the recently released 2013 State of Inbound Marketing Report. Feel free to use this data in your own content, tweet the stats you find most interesting, or just enlighten yourself about the current state of inbound marketing.

Marketing + technology = competitive advantage
from BtoB Magazine
Marketers and information technology departments are joined at the hip today, with IT leaving behind its singular focus on back-office operations and increasingly enabling customer information and service.

4 ways to reinvent your brand
from Ragan.com
How can people or companies reinvent their brands? What does it take to remake who we are and how people perceive us?

7 challenges that marketers face
from PR Daily
Marketing today remains a great challenge, in large part because of the consistently changing technology and media landscape. Information sources (conferences, blogs, etc.) consistently address these challenges, yet many issues persist. Here are the seven difficulties for today’s communicators, each followed by an idea or three about how to address them. Please add your own thoughts in the comments section.

15 Actionable Takeaways From Social Media Marketing World 2013
from Social Media Examiner
Did you miss Social Media Marketing World in April? Or perhaps you were there but weren’t able to attend all the sessions you would have liked to. In this article I’ve assembled for you 15 actionable social media marketing takeaways from some experts who presented at the event. Here’s what they had to say.

Value Proposition: 4 questions every marketer should ask about value prop
from Marketingsherpa Blog
In this MarketingSherpa live blog post from Optimization Summit 2013, learn four questions every marketer should ask about value propositions. View the details from their session, “Value Proposition: How to turn that shiny, new value prop into a high-performing page.”

Want to Increase Website Conversion? Fix These 5 Problems
from Social Media Today
Consumers, aided by social, mobile and internet technologies, are expecting more from the brands with whom they choose to do business. They are beginning to define a brand mostly, if not solely, by its online presence. To offer value and increase website conversion, make sure you fix these any or all of these five elements if they are broken.

BtoB study: Social media marketing reaches maturity
from BtoB Magazine
Social media marketing has reached a stage of maturity that places it firmly in the mainstream of marketing channel activity. A new study by BtoB found that 47% of b2b marketers are “very involved” or “fully integrated” with social marketing, up from 28% last year, and fully 96% of all marketers are engaging with social media in some fashion.

11 Checks to Ensure Your Facebook Page is Up-to-Date
from Social Media Examiner
How long has it been since you’ve reviewed your Facebook Page? Are you taking advantage of the latest Facebook features? It’s critical that Facebook Page managers take time to regularly audit their Page and ensure that they are not missing out on new features.

What are the two most USELESS slides in a sales pitch? The answer here:
from Sarah’s Faves
If the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company says it, then it must be true. Vice-President at Gartern, Rolf Jester shares the two most useless slides that can ruin your next sales pitch. Here they are: ANSWER: Common differentiators slide; and Partner logo slide.

The last three of our nine words relate to delivery. When it comes to giving the presentation, what matters most is knowing what you’re talking about. If you know your stuff – not just your speech but the subject – that will create the confidence to carry you through.

Even seasoned presenters can suffer from pre-presentation anxiety. The key to overcoming it is practice, practice, practice. Aim to know the presentation so well you can deliver it without referring more than occasionally to the script. If you’ve chosen good images for the slides, they will provide visual clues to each point you want to make.

Other than rehearsing, a good night’s sleep is absolutely the best preparation for any presentation. Don’t overdo the caffeine, and if you’re feeling nervous, take a quick five-minute walk and some deep breaths.

As we said at the start, the best presentation is not a lecture or a speech, but rather a conversation. So if you can – and it can take some time to get used to this – just talk normally, as if you were discussing the topic with a friend, rather than a room full of strangers. One trick is to talk more slowly than usual. This helps reduce the tendency to “speechify,” helps reduce the “umms” and “ahhs,” and sends a subtle signal to the audience that YOU are the expert.

Be upbeat about your topic – enthusiasm is contagious, and helps keep your audience engaged. Keep your voice elevated, smile, make eye contact, come out from behind the podium and move about the stage. All of these things help you connect with the audience. Remember, too, that the audience wants you to succeed. They’re not there to see you fail – they’re there because they want to hear what you have to say.

In conclusion
Giving a presentation is rewarding, but it isn’t necessarily something that comes easily to everyone. The fact is, even if you’ve been giving presentations for many years, it can still be hard. Some people find it easier than others, but for everyone, it gets a little easier every time. So hang in there and keep doing it.

Have a conversation. Keep it simple. Know your stuff. These nine words provide the foundation for building more effective presentations. A great talk is the most powerful way to persuade, encourage and even excite people. It’s the key to unlocking business success.

This is the third and final post in our blog series on how to give effective presentations. We hope you found these tips easy to practice and even simpler to remember.

Once you have your outline including your flow and arguments worked out, let three words, keep it simple, be your guide when fleshing them out into slides. The point is, the slides, and the words on them, are not the presentation – you are the presentation. The presentation is a conversation and that means it’s about you, not your slides. In fact, without you there to present them, the slides alone should be somewhat hard for someone to follow.

Think of it this way: if everything your audience needs to know is in the slides, why do they need you to present it? They can just read it. For this reason, one good way to start is to take everything you wrote in your outline, and copy it into the Notes section of each PowerPoint slide. This becomes your script.

Each slide should support a single key point from your outline; and for each slide, you need only a single powerful image, or perhaps a few key words taken from the script, to represent the point you are making. The pictures and keywords don’t try to tell the story; they support the script you will be speaking, and add visual interest.

Too many words on a slide actually hinders your audience’s ability to understand your presentation. If the language-parsing part of your brain is busy parsing words on the slides, it can’t take in the words you are speaking. But the visual-parsing part of the brain works independently from language, so the audience can take in a picture and your words at the same time.

When it comes to choosing images, we get the best results by sticking to a single image on each slide, and trying to use a similar style throughout. You don’t have to be a Photoshop guru – stock images are easily found online these days, and are certainly preferable to the clip-art that comes with PowerPoint. Don’t be afraid to inject a little humor either, for a change of pace.

This is the second post in a blog series on how to give effective presentations in nine words. Be sure to check out the third and final post next week.

Google+ Resources to Help You Create a Strategy for Success
from Social Media Today
A successful SEO campaign includes a Google+ strategy, yet many companies are still not thinking about Google+ as such a crucial aspect for SEO. Your typical social media benefits are obvious—on-site engagement, targeted messages, connections and referrals, etc.—but the benefits in terms of ranking on a SERP are still being ignored.

Why is Facebook Blue? The Science Behind Colors in Marketing
from Fast Company
There are some amazing examples of how colors actually affect our purchasing decisions. After all, sight is the strongest developed sense one in most human beings. It’s only natural that 90% of an assessment for trying out a product is made by color alone. So how do colors really affect us, and what is the science of colors in marketing, really?

6 ways PR pros are like salespeople
from PR Daily
I once told a young family member to learn to sell, because “you’re always selling something to someone”—as I’m doing now, trying to get you interested in whatever I’m going to type below. Here are six ways that PR pros are like salespeople:

50 Best Websites of 2013
from Techland
As a wise-but-forgotten person once pointed out, any book you haven’t read is a new book. With websites, it’s the same thing. So when we TIME editors publish our annual list of our favorite sites, as we’ve been doing for a decade now, our overarching goal is to tell you about a bunch that are new to you — whether they’re just-launched start-ups or underpublicized gems.

The Infinite Scrolling Website Trend…Are You In?
from Business 2 Community
Infinite scrolling is a cool technique that is starting to emerge more across the web and seen on social media sites like Pinterest. When implemented properly, infinite scrolling allows for greater content exposure and a simple way to navigate through a site – overall enhancing the user experience.

Tech companies to increase marketing budgets 3.7%
from BtoB Magazine
Technology companies expect to increase their marketing budgets 3.7% this year over last, according to IDC’s “2013 Tech Marketing Barometer,” released earlier this month.

SEO for PR: Gauging the success of content marketing
from PR Daily
Over the last several years, Google has evolved search to include several types of content in the results. This view has been deemed “Universal Search” and can include locations, websites, images, social media pages, blogs, reviews, and news stories within the top results.

Help your brand get the most out of LinkedIn
from Ragan.com
The Wall Street Journal surveyed 835 small-business owners and asked which social media network could help their business the most. According to the results, 41 percent of small businesses said LinkedIn could be beneficial to their companies, compared with 3 percent saying the same of Twitter and 14 percent of Facebook.

Agencies Anonymous: 6-Step Program to Overcoming Lead Nurturing Failures
from Marketo Best Practices Blog
Our goal is to provide you with steps to help you recover (and uncover) a strategy for lead nurturing that actually works and get over the reluctance of using an agency for lead nurturing. We’ve gleaned insight from the famous 12-Step program and have adopted the following 6-Step Program to coping with your lead nurturing failures.

Email open rates average 19.7% last year
from BtoB Magazine
Email marketers experienced an average open rate of 19.7% last year, although top-performing companies had an open rate almost twice as high, a report from email marketing services provider Silverpop found.

“Have a conversation”
Start by thinking of your presentation as a conversation. It’s not a lecture, and it’s certainly not a stump speech. To get into this frame of mind, imagine the topic of your presentation is something important that you want to explain to a friend.

One successful technique is to sit down with a friend and explain the topic to them. If that’s not practical, pretend you’re talking to a friend and record yourself. Ask the question, “If I was going to talk to someone about (fill-in-the-blank) topic, what do I think you would want to know?”

The point of this exercise is to identify the main ideas: the big “take-away” of your presentation. Keep in mind that, however compelling your delivery, the amount of information your audience can absorb is limited. If you can get them to remember one main point, you’ve done a great job. Write out your big idea on a single sheet, and use that as your focal point as you begin to develop your outline.

To write your outline, step away from the computer, silence your phone, and grab pen and paper. We find that ideas flow better without constant interruptions from emails and text messages – or the temptation to update Facebook!

Once you have the big idea and your outline, add in detail and supporting points. At this stage, it’s about the ideas: avoid the temptation to start thinking about graphics and layout just yet. A presentation isn’t about great-looking slides – it’s about great-sounding IDEAS that win people over. Refine your point, work out what’s important, and make it matter to the other person.

This is the first post in a blog series on how to give effective presentations in nine words. Be sure to check out the remaining six words next week.

Device overload has affected us, with one result being our manners having become worse. One place where this is prevalent is in our signature lines. I received a happy belated 50^th birthday the other day from “Sent from iPad.”

What does that communicate? It screams, “I don’t have the time to even sign your Happy Birthday note because I’m too busy.” Doesn’t that defeat the point of sending it in the first place – to make someone feel special?

As marketers, the signature line should be sacrosanct. Imagine if you have 100 employees a day and they each send out 30 emails a day… that is 3,000 messages associated with your brand or organization. What do they say? Is your name or branding treated correctly? Are you using that opportunity to market something, like an upcoming conference? Do you have a link to a landing page for feedback or other connection to your company?

For many companies, the email signature has become the wild-wild west of marketing. IT may setup each computer, but sadly employees tailor it and not for the better. Even worse, employees tailor their mobile devices’ email signatures with something silly, or don’t tailor them and “Sent from iPad” becomes the signature line. Most importantly, employees rarely update Outlook or mobile signatures to reflect the latest important item we need to market.

The signature says a lot about the person, which is important even for business emails, because people do business with people. For example, a friend of mine signs his emails (even business ones) with the word “Love,” relating to his Christian faith and his belief in the (agape) love we show for each other. I sign mine, “At your service,” to let clients and employees know I am at their service, and to remind me to act as a servant leader. Because the word, serve, comes from the Greek word, diakonia, (“deacon”), the signature line is meant to drive home a significant meaning to me (a Deacon at church) and my recipients.

The signature line also says a great deal about one’s company. Are your email signatures filled with two paragraphs of legal disclaimers for every email you send? Are you promoting your company? Is your email signature friendly and legible? All of it communicates something.

Luckily, there are organizations that provide a tool to manage email signatures centrally. One such company, aptly named eMailSignature (www.emailsignature.com), provides a solution to update hundreds or thousands of email signatures of employees by employee role, etc. And, they can be changed throughout the year, enabling marketing to update them centrally to improve brand and engage customers.

eMailSignature asks on their website, “What does your email signature say about your brand?”  They’re dead-on, but I would also add, “What does it say about you?” Nobody cares if it was sent from an iPad or Droid – but most likely, they definitely care about you!

There is always a tradeoff with that kind of freedom. With no one telling you how to structure your site, you have to decide how to do it yourself! It’s intimidating at first, but once you start getting into the power that MODX offers with template variables, input/output filters, snippets and chunks, it gets addictive. The hard part is learning what tools you have available and how to utilize them to do what you want.

We’re going to look at MIGX, a type of custom template variable that has quickly become one of my favorites. Using MIGX, which stands for MultiItemsGridtv for MODX, Arketi was able to create a scrolling homepage banner for our client, ARA.

Whoa, whoa, what’s a template variable? Well, let’s explain that first. In MODX, a template variable is a custom field for a MODX Resource. Resources in MODX can be many things, but the most common are representations of your website’s pages. Template variables allow you to store or use custom fields in your pages. They can be simple things such as text or a block of rich text with code. Or, they can be more complex such as date and time for recurring events, drop down lists built from other resources, or check boxes used to turn on or off page features. Basically, it’s one of the more powerful tools in MODX.

Setting up MIGX

I would highly recommend also reading the excellent tutorial for MIGX created by Mark Hamstra here and reading the MIGX documentation here. Both are excellent guides. 

The hardest part of the whole process is setting up the initial template variable. To begin, MIGX is installed through the MODX package management page. Once installed, you have access to a new type of template variable. Set your name, caption and description as you would for any other, and assign it to which template can use this variable under template access.

The input option is where it gets different. Set your input type to MIGX and you’ll see a whole host of new options. The most important are the form tabs and grid columns and both fields require JSON statements. The form tabs are how your data is stored and presented while the grid column is how that data is presented to a user in the MODX manager.

The ARA form tabs

The caption line defines what the header will say when you’ve opened a new item in your grid.
Using the title as an example, let’s look at each piece:

• “field”:”title” is the name used for the field
• “caption”:”Title” is the display name of this field
• “description”:”Intro Title” is a short bit of descriptive text shown to the user
• “inputTV”:”textTV-MIGX” (this one is key) this defines the TYPE of the field. This is a bit confusing at first but this entry looks for the textTV-MIGX template variable. It’s a special template variable, not assigned to a template that is set up with the textTV-MIGX name and the type is set to text.

As you can see above, there are 5 types of input TVs we use:

• placeholderTV-MIGX is a hidden field so it does not show up when editing a line
• textTV-MIGX is a simple text field
• textareaTV-MIGX is a simple text area
• imageTV-MIGX is an image template variable, allowing processing of a thumbnail.
• homeagepanelcolorTV-MIGX is a special template variable made for this panel. It is a series of radio buttons allowing a user to select a color

The ARA grid columns look like this

Let’s look at the title again:

• “header”: “Title” is the title for this column
• “width”: “100″ sets this column to 100 pixels wide
• “sortable”: “true” gives you the ability to sort it
• “dataIndex”: “title” links this column with the field name used in our Form Tabs.

There are a few special cases here such as the placeholder and image “renderer”: “this.renderPlaceholder” helps create a sequential id for each row. “renderer”: “this.renderImage” helps to create a thumbnail image in the row.

Once you are all done, go to any resource that uses this new template variable and you will see something like this:

You get a very nice, easy to update grid of items. Clicking add item opens up a pop up window with the ability to create a new row with all the necessary information.

Placing this template variable on a page gives us this:

Not very helpful, but that is where two other MODX tools come in—the snippet and the chunk.

Snippets are the way MODX can run pieces of dynamic PHP code on a page. Chunks are pieces of static text or other elements on a page. Chunks don’t process PHP, but they can be used to call snippets. The template variable, a snippet called “HomepageSlider”, and a pair of chunks is all we need to turn the output above into HTML code we can use.

On the homepage template is this line:

[[HomepageSlider? &input=`[[*HomepageFeatures]]` ]]

[[*HomepageFeatures]] is the name we gave our Template Variable

“HomepageSlider” is the name of the Snippet we are going to use. You can see that the Template Variable has been assigned to a paramater named input. This will be passed to the Snippet and used as a PHP variable.

So here’s the snippet’s code:
HomepageSlider

Let’s walk through this.

• First, turn that template variable into something usable. If you remember from before, we assigned a parameter to the snippet call named input. We are now using one of the MODX functions to turn that JSON string into a PHP array.
• Since the site editor might want to change the order of the slides in the manager, make a new variable that starts at the number 1 called slideorder.
• Create the output variable and make sure nothing is in it. Next, we can start to add some HTML code.
• We then start to step through this big array. First, set the MIGX_id to whatever number the slideorder variable is. In this case, it is the first one, so we number it one.
• Now, make a call with one of the MODX functions called getChunk. It does exactly as it sounds. It gets a chunk called ‘HomepageSliderTpl’ and uses the row array (more on this later).
• We then bump up the slide order by one.
• We run through this loop filling up a new array called section1.
• Once this loop is done, we implode the array into a nice new bit of HTML code.
• In most cases you would now be ready to return your output variable to the page. In the case of the ARA homepage area, the content is split from the images. Therefore, we have a bit more HTML code as well as another for each loop and implode.

This snippet has two getChunk statements. Here is what the getChunks look like

HompageSliderTpl

HompageSliderTpl2

When this chunk is called in or for each loop, it is given an array that has key pairs. The key value associated with ‘title’ will be placed in your chunk where you see the placeholder [[+title]]. You may notice that these placeholders share the same names as our field names way back in the Template Variable setup.

And there we have it! Once this snippet is executed on the page, it drops in a bit of HTML code that our Javascript based slider can then use.

Categories included video, lead generation/nurturing, content marketing, thought leadership and website enhancement, and the majority of respondents plan to do more of these activities. See the infographic below for all the responses, and for more information, download your free copy of The Outlook for Business-to-Business Technology in 2013.

Sounds simple, right? Well, it actually might be. If you can develop a piece of content that your audience finds useful enough to want to share with friends and colleagues, then you are on the right path.

The key thing to remember is that great content generates authority signals – by acquiring links and social shares – which make it easier for engaging content to rank. A link or a “like” and share on a social network are signals to search engines that people like your writing, that people are promoting your work, and that your content may be relevant to other search engine users.

So the question is: how to create content that the target audience will engage with? Here are a few pointers:

Investigate the community

Prior to creating your engaging content, ensure you know where it will be going. Research the industry and find platforms and users interested in this type of content. Is there an active community that would share your content? Are there sites, blogs or forums targeting your primary audience? Look at the content your competitors are distributing – and where they are distributing it. Determine which content users find most interesting by looking at their comments, and at the number of shares different posts garner.

Develop a keyword-targeted editorial calendar

Developing an editorial calendar is a great way to help you produce a steady stream of regular, timely content. Better still is a keyword-targeted editorial calendar in which you align your content pieces with the keywords for which you want to rank. Not only will you be writing content that aligns with your industry – you will be increasing your site’s chances of ranking for target terms.

Distribute educational content

This sounds obvious, but it’s often left by the wayside by those who are overly focused on generating leads and selling more products. Many Internet users don’t want to be sold on your product – more often than not, they are performing research or looking to learn something new. It’s important to be there for them at this early stage in their buying process, also – not just the end.

In fact, educational content – white papers, videos, infographics, data visualizations – often garners more links and social shares and is thus viewed as more authoritative by the search engines. Remember, interactions with your content indicate to search engines that your content is valuable.

Bottom line, it’s all about developing content that your target audience will find useful. If the audience thinks your content is valuable, the search engines will too. Google has said that its goal is to provide searchers with the most relevant results and a great user experience – so if users are touting your piece, it’s a signal that it is liked. Write engaging content, let it reach the masses, and the other search engines will come.

This post is the third in a series of posts on how to maximize the value of search and it first appeared on CommPRO.biz. Check out the previous posts including part two on “The Need to Know of B2B SEO” and part one on “SEO 101.” 

The findings show that 27 percent begin in October (the highest percentage), but 11 percent start as early as June. See the infographic below for more, and for all the results, download your free copy of The Outlook for Business-to-Business Technology in 2013.

3 Social Media Tools That Improve the Sales Cycle
from Social Media Examiner
Do you want more leads from your social efforts? Did you know there are great social media tools that make the sales process easier? In this article, I’ll review 3 tools to help you get the information you need to generate revenue from your social media activity.

Study Shows Producing Enough Content is Marketers Biggest Challenge
from Business 2 Community
According to a new CMI research report, the 2013 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends, the biggest challenge for marketers this year has been producing enough content, with 64 percent overall listing that as a challenge, and 29 percent saying it’s their biggest challenge of all.

Mobile, tablets drive U.S. paid search spending
from BtoB Magazine
Total paid search advertising spending across Google and Yahoo-Bing increased 21.6% in the first quarter compared with the year-earlier period, according to a report from search marketing agency the Search Agency.

How social media managers should react when tragedy strikes
from Ragan.com
Social media was and is, at its core, a vehicle for human connection. That’s exactly what social media managers need to remember when dealing with horrible tragedies such as the Boston Marathon bombings. We often talk about having a communications plan in place for a crisis, and although that’s always important, the most important thing to remember is to act like a human being.

7 tips for email marketing to mobile audiences
from PR Daily
While the format of email hasn’t changed much since it was introduced, how we’re consuming such content has—people check their emails on their computers and mobile devices. With that in mind, it’s important to adapt your content so that it’s accessible to both audiences.

How to Boost Engagement on Your LinkedIn Company Page
from Social Media Examiner
Are you leveraging your LinkedIn Company Page as best you can? In a recent LinkedIn study, 50% of current company followers stated they are more likely to purchase products and services from a business they engage with on LinkedIn.

Marketing Transformation: 3 Leadership Skills You Need To Succeed
from B2B Marketing Insider
As organizations seek to differentiate themselves, Marketing has taken on a more prominent role in many organizations. Simple advertising campaigns and tactical approaches to gain new customers are no longer enough. CMOs see the need to define the vision and path to real marketing transformation.

Value Proposition: 3 techniques for standing out in a highly competitive market
from Marketingsherpa Blog
Marketing in highly competitive environments can be difficult as pressure mounts to stand out amongst fierce competitors in a constantly shrinking market space. Read further for three ways you can use value propositions to differentiate your marketing in a crowded marketplace.

Is Google+ the place to be?
from BtoB Magazine
The traditional criticism of Google+ since its founding two years ago has been that few people use it. According to this narrative, the main reason to join Google+ is not so much for social marketing but to enhance a company’s organic search results, courtesy of its integration with the Google search engine.

Email Marketing: Segmentation, integration, automation and personal interaction
from Marketingsherpa Blog
In this MarketingSherpa blog post, we heard feedback from one of the previous Chart of the Week discussions on LinkedIn. Read on to hear from four of your peers on the subject of email marketing.

• Marketers today are battling indifference. Give your audience a reason to care about what you’re doing. Content should be:

a) entertaining,
b) informative or
c) provide utility.

• How can marketers enrich the lives of their audience and make them better?
• It’s not about you, the marketer, or your product. It’s about your audience and their circumstances. Determine where your buyers are in the cycle and direct specific content aimed at that level of the buy cycle.
• Marketers need to understand their audience and what motivates them. Leading with that level of insight yields greater results.
• Review Google Analytics to determine which keywords are driving the most conversions. Knowledge is power!
• Don’t insult your audience by not thinking mobile first. If your website is not optimized for mobile viewing, you are very likely annoying your audience.
• Think like a consumer. Keep your outreach short and simple, clean and informative – think of how you would like to receive information.
• In today’s mobile environment, consumers are always addressable, wherever they are. Determine peak information consumption times for your audience and time your outreach accordingly.

Leveraging these insights, marketers are better positioned to maximize audience interactions and cultivate long lasting relationships. With growing competition for your audience’s attention, what strategies are you using to remain relevant?

Building a Successful B2B Speakers Bureau
from B2Community
Ever wanted to see the words “Industry Expert” in front of your name? In the quest for thought leadership, the speaker circuit can, if executed strategically, drive both brand awareness and lead generation.

Rules of SEO Content Engagement
from CommPRO.biz
Create engaging content, and the users and search engines will come. Sounds simple, right? Well, it actually might be. If you can develop a piece of content that your audience finds useful enough to want to share with friends and colleagues, then you are on the right path.

Branding is key in filling the sales pipeline
from BtoB Magazine
Companies are increasingly tying marketing activities to leads and revenue. But marketers feel frustrated with their ability to drive enough leads to meet the demands of sales departments, according to a new study by BtoB.

How to Use Twitter for Business and Marketing
from Social Media Examiner by Charlene Kingston
Is Twitter a part of your social media marketing? Or have you let your Twitter marketing drop off lately? In any case, with the latest Twitter updates, trends in multi-screen usage and real-time marketing, you’ll likely want to take a fresh look at what Twitter has to offer.

Digital Is Changing Marketing And Changing Business
from B2B Marketing Insider by Michael Brenner
It’s clear that digital is changing marketing, but we also see that digital is changing business.  That’s a big opportunity for marketers who get this right.

Why Your Keyword Strategy Is Incomplete Without User Intent
from HubSpot’s Inbound Internet Marketing Blog
‘User intent’ is a concept that’s known to most SEO professionals, but unfortunately, used by too few. I say unfortunately, because it’s the key to improving the very foundation of SEO campaigns, while driving content strategies that yield better conversion rates, clicks, leads, and sales.

Online Marketing: 4 sources of customer insight on your website
from Marketingsherpa Blog
In this MarketingSherpa blog post, hear from Taylor Kennedy, Senior Research Manager, MECLABS, on how to gain customer insights using 4 sources on your website.

Tech marketers expect to increase budgets 3.7% this year
from BtoB Magazine
Technology companies expect to increase their marketing budgets 3.7% this year over last, according to IDC’s “2013 Tech Marketing Barometer.”

4 tips for building reporter relationships on Twitter
from PR Daily
For me, this joyful moment happens when three elements come together in unison: a great pitch, a solid relationship with a reporter, and the right timing. There are, in my opinion, four major ways PR professionals should be taking advantage of Twitter to help create media coverage opportunities:

12 great benefits of video marketing
from Ragan.com
If you’re having trouble convincing your marketing team, business partners, clients, boss or even yourself that online video marketing is worthwhile, then read on.

Many B2B marketers are struggling to reach optimal webinar registration numbers. With some best practices from BtoB’s “Annual Webinar Benchmarks Report,” you can make your webinar a must attend.

1. Use the right tools

According to the report, the four most effective tools (in order) for driving registration are informational emails, website promotion, emails from sales and third-party endorsement. Together, these four tools contribute to about 80 percent of leads.

Interestingly, the report found that social media was not as effective in driving registration. This is not to suggest that you should ignore social media when promoting your webinar, but if you have limited time or resources to invest, you shouldn’t focus all of your effort on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.

2. Choose the right timing

You want to start your webinar promotion more than one week in advance, but anything outside of two weeks is too far out. The report found that 36 percent register one week before the webinar and 64 percent register the week of the webinar – 21 percent of which register the day of.

If you start you webinar promotion 10 days in advance, you can hit your email list three times without overwhelming the inboxes of your clients and prospects. Which brings us to the third benchmark…

3. Send the right emails

The report found that some days are better for sending emails than others, with the optimal days for promotional emails being Tuesday and Wednesday. When sending multiple promotional emails for the same webinar, it is a recommended best practice to vary the content and try promoting from different angles.

For example, send one design email from the company with an overview of the webinar; one personalized, text-only email from the presenter; and one final reminder email the day of the webinar with only the need-to-know information. We’ve tried a similar approach at Arketi and have seen great results!

While nothing can save a webinar with poor content, these benchmarks and best practices for driving registration will get people signing up. Then all you have to do is keep them there with an engaging, informative presentation.

While the basics of media pitching remain true—researching the publication and reporter, customizing your pitch, and pitching the reporter through the channel he/she prefers best— it’s easy to develop a writing pattern that becomes a bit stale. From a recent PRSA webinar on how to “Transform Your Pitch from Snooze to News,” our team picked up a few tips to revamp our media pitches.

“While the basics of media pitching remain true, it’s easy to develop a writing pattern that becomes a bit stale.”

Here are four story enhancers to transform your pitches from zero to hero:

1. Focus on the process – For routine releases i.e. new products, routine events, etc., look beyond the results as the news piece (unless it’s breaking news or one of a kind) and focus on the process, measurements and obstacles that were overcome to achieve results. Similar to the typical underdog story, sometimes it’s not really about who wins or loses, but the steps or transformational process it took to get there.
2. Frame the pitch around people – Often, we are instinctively drawn to focus on the product or service of our pitch in an effort to get media coverage around a “thing.” As with many feature stories, focus on the people your organization may touch, affect, or even the people behind the scenes. In addition, while your executives may be the official spokespeople of the business, do not neglect the end users, third-party sources and brand advocates. They can often be your biggest assets.
3. Tie to a trend – Identify a growing or current trend and, when applicable, offer your organization/solution/service as a source. For growing trends, try to offer other examples as well. Because the nature of a trend requires timeliness, the earlier the better. No one strives for second place. Similarly, reporters do not want to be second in getting a trend story out, so be sure to stay ahead of or on top of the trend, and don’t be a laggard.
4. Exploit pop culture – Similar to “tying to a trend,” leverage the popularity of a reality TV show, movie or celebrity. While the benefit to you may be coverage, you could also help the reporter by making his/her job a bit easier by offering a source or examples for popular topics the publication may already plan on covering.

When was the last time you took a step back, put on your reporter hat, and examined your pitches? If your pitches aren’t newsworthy and enticing enough for you, don’t be surprised if a reporter feels the same way. So before you send out your next pitch, check to see if it needs a little makeover.

8 irresistible Twitter headlines
from PR Daily
Good headlines are the lifeblood of success on Twitter. Studies have shown you can increase your conversion rate on a link by 73 percent if you use a compelling headline. Here’s how to create headlines that will captivate readers:

Are Social Employees The Future of Marketing?
from B2B Marketing Insider by Michael Brenner
The biggest challenge many marketers face today is how to engage and empower their employees to ignite their brands and drive brand value. Today’s businesses need to understand that social technologies aren’t barriers to productivity, but portals to connectivity.

4 Ways to Maximize the Social Media Presence at Your Next Event
from Social Media Examiner by Rachel Sprung
Does your business run events, conferences or similar meetings? The ability for attendees to interact through social channels is a huge part of successful events. Here are 4 ways to maximize the social media presence of your next event.

How Much Does Marketing Automation Cost?
from Marketo Best Practices Blog
When building a business case for marketing automation, in addition to estimating the revenue growth and cost saving benefits, you’ll also need to understand the investment required to develop the other side of the business case. Guaranteed your stakeholders will want a complete cost analysis.

CMO Council finds challenges to CMO-CIO alignment
from BtoB Magazine
Eighty-five percent of CMOs and 85% of CIOs agree that their relationship is critical to the execution of customer-centric programs, but they are still challenged with alignment, according to new report from the Chief Marketing Officer Council and SAS Institute.

One year later, Google’s Penguin update is helping public relations
from PR Daily
As Google continues penalizing websites that use manipulative tactics to artificially boost their search rankings, PR pros should be jumping for joy. After all, the whole point of the year-old Penguin algorithm update is to reward websites that are producing valuable content on a regular basis by making them easier to find.

Use Video Marketing for Sales and ROI Boost
from Social Media Today
Videos have the ability to connect with prospects in a way you can’t through text, e-mail, or even a phone call. This is especially significant because in sales, you’re selling yourself: the product comes after you’ve established a connection. Here’s a look at some different types of video marketing.

Email Marketing: 77% of marketers use website registration pages to build email lists
from Marketingsherpa Blog
In the MarketingSherpa 2013 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, 77% of marketers surveyed indicated they use website registration pages to build email lists. Read on to hear your peers’ reactions to this data, and some insights into email list building.

Everything Marketers Should Know About Secondary CTAs
from HubSpot’s Inbound Internet Marketing Blog
While there are quite a few ways in which you can offer variety in your marketing, today we’re going to zone in on one in particular: secondary calls-to-action (CTAs). So let’s discuss exactly what secondary CTAs are, and why you should be using them in your various marketing initiatives.

Increasingly tech-driven PR still needs a human touch
from PRWeek US
Despite many advances in public relations technology in recent years, the use of technology in PR is nothing new.

A number of people have asked me why I would spend so much time trying to win a competition that awards no prize. My reason is simple, I am not trying to win for a prize or win for my ego although some might question that last part. My reason for participating is to share all the great things happening in the technology community in the only state I have ever lived, Georgia.

The URL: http://ow.ly/iWMlC is for the 2013 State of the Technology Industry Report created by the Technology Association of Georgia.  A lot of time, energy, and funding was involved in creating this report and it should be read by everyone interested in the Georgia Technology community. VC Funding, M&A Activity, Trends, New Company relocation and so much other important information can all be found in this report.

In a 140 character Twitter message you just can’t share the whole story. I hope in our excitement and hype to receive your Re-Tweets, you did not miss the focus for the tournament.

I am confident that a high percentage of you Re-Tweeted my post for no other reason than our friendship. For that I am grateful and very thankful. Heck, I am blessed!

I don’t know how many folks read the report or even knew there was a report: http://ow.ly/iWMlC. I created this blog post to put the focus on the report. Get excited about Georgia technology and discover #WhereGALeads.

I want to thank Tino Mantello at TAG and my friends at Arketi, especially Mike Neumeier and Ashley Biondich for including me in the competition.

To read Ricky’s full post as shared on his blog, click here. To view the online interactive bracket for the Technology Tweet Tournament, visit http://techtweettournament.com/.