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Last year, Princeton researchers revealed a powerful new ad-blocking technique: perceptual ad-blocking uses a machine-learning model trained on images of pages with the ads identified to make predictions about which page elements are ads to block and which parts are not.

However, a new paper from a group of Stanford and CISPA Helmholtz Center researchers reveals a powerful machine learning countermeasure that, they say, will permanently tilt the advantage toward advertisers and away from ad-blockers.

The team revealed a set of eight techniques to generate adversarial examples of slightly modified ads that completely flummoxed the perceptual ad-blocker’s model: from overlaying a transparent image to modifying a few pixels in the logo used to demarcate an ad.

What’s more, the team showed that they could cause the perceptual blocker’s model to erroneously identify a page’s actual content as an ad and block it, while leaving the ads unblocked.

The team says that these techniques will always outrace the ability of perceptual blocking models to detect them, suggesting that perceptual blocking may be a dead letter.

We note that detection of adversarial examples [27, 47]—a simpler problem in principle but also one far from solved [14]— may not be applicable to ad-blockers. Indeed, ad-blockers face both adversarial false-positives and false-negatives, so merely detecting a perturbation does not help in decision-making. This challenging threat model also applies in part to ad-blockers based on non-visual cues, e.g., ML-based ad-blockers that use similar features as filter lists [11, 29, 36]. None of these have yet been evaluated against adaptive adversaries.

Moreover, by virtue of not relying on visual cues, these models are presumably easier to attack in ways that are fully transparent to users (e.g., switching ad domains)

Ad-versarial: Defeating Perceptual Ad-Blocking [Florian Tramèr, Pascal Dupré, Gili Rusak, Giancarlo Pellegrino and Dan Boneh/Arxiv]

Researchers Defeat Most Powerful Ad Blockers, Declare a ‘New Arms Race’ [Daniel Oberhaus/Motherboard]

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Customer reviews have become a major part of how consumers buy products — specifically high-dollar products that might have a manufacturer’s defect. Helpful reviews not only appear on the merchant’s website, but also on Yelp, YouTube and in a variety of forums.

For example, there is a forum about a defect in the Ford Explorer 2018. Sirius XM radio gets stuck on “acquiring signal,” sometimes for up to 20 minutes. Written conversations within the online forum point to a design change in Ford’s satellite antenna for the 2018 Explorer that now integrates the 4G modem for WiFi with the Sirius satellite antenna. Others point to an issue with the Ford Sync system.

But consumers really don’t really know the issue. Ford has not responded to any reviews in the forum, leaving some dealerships like Jackson Hole Ford to step up and play referee between the consumer and the manufacturer.

It’s not uncommon, said Josha Benner, cofounder of Uberall, which provides location marketing technology. Pointing to research about Chipotle and Burger King, where customers expressed concerns in reviews and forums about a variety of topics from restrooms to food ingredients, he said that “if the company looks at reviews in a timely manner the company can learn a lot about the product.”

While reviews are nothing new, it’s clear from Uberall’s study, released Thursday, that consumer want companies to personally address their issues and concerns.

The Customer Review Report analyzes how shoppers evaluate the responses of online reviews. This report specifically focuses on physical store reviews, but it makes sense their marketing department should also monitor and comment in forums.

In the Uberall-commissioned survey of more than 1,000 U.S. consumers conducted between October 1 and October 5, 2018, 74% of consumers cited personal reviews as either moderately important — 40% — or very important–34%. Just 20% said they were slightly important, and 6% said they were not important.

Some 65% of consumers said stores should respond to each customer service review, whether the review is positive or negative.

Some 18% believe they should respond only when the review is negative, while 10% feel they should never respond, and 6% think they should only respond when the review is positive.

In fact 86% said they would be more likely to shop at a store that responds to customer reviews. Of that group, 47% said they would be somewhat more likely, while 39% said they would be more likely. Only 8% said they would be somewhat less likely and 6% said they would be not likely.

About 29% of consumers responding to the survey think stores should personalize their response, while 49% think the response should be somewhat personal and 78% think it should include some personalization. Just 13% said the response should be “not very personalized” and 9% said not personalized.

When asked how often the survey’s respondents check customer reviews to help them figure out where to shop, 57% said they check occasionally, while 19% said all the time. Some 17% said they check rarely and 7% said very rarely.

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Sourced from MediaPost

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Every day, ads overrun us in our online journey. While this is necessary to keep many free services we constantly use in business, they are also heavily misaligned. We ignore most of the ads we see, find them intrusive, irrelevant and wasting our bandwidth. For the same reason, many companies are also spending ad dollars without seeing sufficient return.

But there are those who are benefiting from this model. After all, digital marketing has overtaken TV ads and it is a medium where marketers can measure the success of their campaigns and adjust accordingly. Google and Facebook are dominating the digital advertising industry. Amazon is currently in fifth place with nearly $2 billion in revenue for the first quarter of this year, but it is catching up fast as more advertisers turn to it.

Advertisers typically look for the company who can “get the word out” about them most efficiently, but they face a dilemma; most of them know by heart that many of the people they target really don’t need their products. However, they assume that if they just keep popping up all the time (and perhaps crack a joke or get undressed), eventually the consumer will surrender and buy. But here is the thing: if the consumer does not trust you, the impact will be minimal.

No one “hates” shopping –quite opposite, people love a good purchase. A good purchase requires knowledge of the products, but no one ever tells an advertiser that they are looking for a new car because they would instantly start spamming us. We prefer to keep that information private because we suspect it would be misused to sell us snake oil instead of really valuable products. In an era where consumers don’t trust advertisers, advertisers are forced to rely on middlemen like Google and Amazon to hint them at what could work best for them.

The reason is simple: Google knows the customers’ intent, Facebook knows the demographics and Amazon knows what many consider as the most important piece of the puzzle: what people buy. However, this puzzle still lacks one missing (and often overlooked) piece: the consumers. The current advertising business is primarily designed to serve the ad networks – not the companies or the clients. Here is where blockchain could help.

A new era

Blockchain is about decentralization and removing middle parties. There are four players in the digital advertising world: ad networks, companies, publishers and visitors. Companies are the ones who want to sell their products or services, and they do so via the “publishers.” The publishers, such as web admins, are the ones running a website and attract visitors, and the companies alike.

The ad networks sit between the companies and the publishers, match them up and take a huge cut in return. This is the player blockchain aims to remove and optimize the system to run only between companies, publishers and visitors.

By removing the ad networks, the cost for advertising will significantly drop for companies. Furthermore, there are no banks involved so transactions are much easier and faster, which is particularly important as advertisers target a global market. But this is not the only benefit.

Blockchain offers immutability, which essentially means a tamper-proof record of everything that has taken place on the network. This means everyone can track the customers’ journey: where and when they started interacting with an ad and what the results where. This also leads to transparency, as both the company and the publishers have correct metrics of the impressions and clicks.

Like always, specific blockchain projects add more features to these general concepts. For instance, BAT gives users full control of the ads they see and even pays them for the ads they watch. To track the watch time, the project collaborates with the Brave browser, which ironically comes with built-in ad blockers.

Adoption

No matter how promising, currently the digital advertising industry is dominated by centralized enterprises. This can eventually change, as more and more people turn to ad blockers and concerns around privacy and information tracking are beginning to rise. Eventually, the buyers are the people that are currently spammed so the ultimate winner would be the one that really takes the customers’ best interest into account. With blockchain, we are moving one step closer to giving power to the individuals.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

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I’m a developer and freelance tech blogger interested in cyber-security, AI and blockchain, and try to separate signal from noise in the industry.

Sourced from Forbes

By Chris Twogood

Ironically, while the Internet pervades our lives and sends a continual stream of information into an expanding digital, cloud-based, and data-driven world, the ability to make sense of this data is far from pervasive. In a previous post, I discussed how a recent global survey showed that 81% of senior business leaders want data analytics to be more widespread in their organizations, suggesting that it’s time for pervasive data intelligence to be the new enterprise standard.

Today, nearly every person’s role in a company involves drawing conclusions from data. Time and again, we’ve seen that when organizations make data scalable, frictionless, and available 24/7 to their employees, people across all functions and levels are better able to accomplish their daily work and generate positive business outcomes. And as businesses increasingly invest in augmented intelligence — which aims to tap the potential of humans and technology working together — ensuring a frictionless relationship between your people and your data is more important than ever.

Consider the impact of pervasive data intelligence on the data scientist, whose analysis is too often limited to data subsets due to time and technical constraints. Imagine the impact on the business if she could easily test her analytics in real time on 100 percent of the company’s data. And for the analyst streamlining business and IT processes, a flexible analytic environment supports the needs of various users and allows warehouse data to be combined with social media, IoT and SMS insights. This pervasive data intelligence system can grow with the business, reduce time to value and cost, and incorporate advanced technologies.

As businesses increasingly invest in augmented intelligence, ensuring a frictionless relationship between your people and your data is more important than ever.

The C-suite also benefits from the real-time, holistic view of the business that pervasive data intelligence provides. For example, the Chief Marketing Officer can leverage pervasive data intelligence to make planning decisions, test marketing strategies, measure deviance and ensure consistent customer experience across multiple channels. He can also better understand industry trends and competitors’ behavior to find ways to optimize campaigns, gain a competitive advantage, and provide effective and compelling value to customers.

As the manufacturer of over 600,000 installed medical equipment products, Siemens Healthcare has experienced the benefits of pervasive data intelligence firsthand. Siemens Healthineers use our cloud-based predictive platform Teradata Vantage to maintain and optimize 240,000 patient touchpoints an hour. Vantage translates these data points into intelligence through an automated process that Siemens Healthcare can scale throughout the global organization. Because this intelligence is delivered seamlessly and in real time, Siemens Healthcare can predict and prevent product maintenance and operational issues. This is vital when your products are responsible for over 70 percent of critical clinical decisions around the world.

“We want to have the right answer before our customers have even the question,” says Stefan Meiler, Head of Data Governance & Analytical Services at Siemens Healthcare.

Today organizations are making big bets that automation, artificial and augmented intelligence, and machine learning will give them a competitive edge. But without committing to “data science for all,” the enterprise will not reap the benefits from their human and technological investments. Ensuring pervasive data intelligence — where employees can seamlessly access relevant, real-time data at scale — will unleash innovation and allow technology to compound human expertise.

By Chris Twogood

Chris Twogood is Senior Vice President Global Marketing for Teradata Corporation. He is responsible for Teradata Brand, Influencer Relations, Content Marketing, Corporate Communications, Global Events, Demand Generation, Account Based Marketing and Digital for Teradata including Web and Social. Chris has thirty years of experience. Chris has extensive experience in the computer industry specializing in Data Warehousing, Decision Support, Customer Management and Analytics

View all posts by Senior Vice President, Marketing

Sourced from Teradata

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Twitter has substracted millions of suspicious followers again after first removing them in July this year.

As a result of the company’s crackdown on fake users, singer Katy Perry lost about 861,000 followers, according to social measurement firm Social Blade and Twitter’s own account lost 2.4 million followers.

According to Twitter, it discovered a bug where some of these accounts were briefly added back, which led to misleading follower counts for “very few accounts.”

In July, Twitter said: “As part of our ongoing and global effort to build trust and encourage healthy conversation on Twitter, every part of the service matters. Follower counts are a visible feature, and we want everyone to have confidence that the numbers are meaningful and accurate.

“Over the years, we’ve locked accounts when we detected sudden changes in account behavior. In these situations, we reach out to the owners of the accounts and unless they validate the account and reset their passwords, we keep them locked with no ability to log in. This week, we’ll be removing these locked accounts from follower counts across profiles globally. As a result, the number of followers displayed on many profiles may go down.”

The latest move was prophesied by Samuel Scott, a columnist for The Drum, who predicted a new wave of global social media regulation last month.

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Sourced from The Drum

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Want a faster, better way to optimize your ads? Did you know that focusing on customers’ emotions can help?

To explore how to use emotional messaging to move people to action, I interview Talia Wolf.

More About This Show

The Social Media Marketing podcast is designed to help busy marketers, business owners, and creators discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode, I interview Talia Wolf. She’s the founder of GetUplift, an agency that specializes in conversion rate optimization for websites, landing pages, and advertisements. Her course is called Emotion Sells: The Masterclass.

Talia explains how to research customers’ emotional connection to your product and why applying your findings improves conversions.

Click HERE to read the remainder of the article.

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Sourced from Social Media Examiner

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I have noticed lots of business owners are spending on Facebook ads to get new clients. I’m not saying that this is a bad strategy. I myself use Facebook ads as one method for acquiring customers. But the main problem with using ads is that business owners who haven’t truly validated their concept often think the ads will solve their problem of finding clients to book.

Throughout my career of starting and growing business-to-business (B2B) companies, I’ve realized there are a few steps that every single entrepreneur must go through to get initial traction and scale their business.

1. Focus on an isolated market segment.

One of the biggest problems I notice that entrepreneurs, freelancers and consultants make is that they believe everyone is their ideal customer. They say something like, “I help companies with Google Ads or search engine optimization (SEO).”

When I hear this, I almost immediately know that they are having a hard time landing new clients. The reason is that, when you try to appeal to everyone, your business is perceived as a commodity. You should focus on a specific market segment because it is much easier to become the best in the world at something specific than something broad.

As the chief marketing officer at TSD Global, I was in a highly competitive market, selling outsourcing services to medium and large businesses, and we needed to find a way to differentiate. So, the way I solved this problem was by focusing on a market segment — quick-service and fast-casual restaurants.

When you’re picking a market segment, it should be a niche that you are passionate about or have experience in.

2. Identify a painful problem this segment faces. 

After you’ve found your isolated market segment, it’s time to identify a specific problem it has. Now, the problem can be something obvious like Google Ads or SEO, but because you’re focused on that one market segment, you’re creating a huge differentiator from your competition.

Let me give you an example of how this works. If I owned a personal injury law firm and am wanting to win more cases for my firm, would I rather hire someone who is an expert in SEO or someone who is an expert in auto accident SEO? The person with specialized knowledge, of course.

3. Learn the ins and outs of your market segment.

Once you have found a market segment that has a problem, it’s time for you to become an industry expert.

Before I started getting traction with the restaurant industry, I researched the industry to learn about what the biggest pain points and risks were. I learned how to speak my prospects’ language and use the same buzzwords they did.

Every market segment has a certain lingo and it can be learned — not within decades, but in days. The shortcut that I use is to read annual reports of the players in my market segment and see how they speak about their industry. You can also use this strategy if you’re selling to private companies because they often share a lot of the same risks, concerns and pain points if they are in the same market segment.

4. Create a solution for your market segment.

Your solution should actually be the easiest part of your business. This is where we combine your scalable skill that solves a problem with your specialized knowledge of your market segment. The solution you should provide for your clients should take them from where they are now to achieving the goal they want.

5. Build your minimum viable credibility. 

Minimum viable credibility is something that I don’t hear people talk about in the marketplace. It absolutely blows me away. I hear people say that you don’t need to have any credibility to sell something and I couldn’t disagree more. It’s not impossible to sell someone a high-ticket item without any credibility, but there is a much more efficient way to handle this and build credibility fast.

When I first started selling to restaurants, I was negotiating with the CEO of one of the fastest growing restaurant chains in the country and he kept asking who I was working with and for references. At the time, the service I was providing was a brand new concept and had zero clients in that market segment. So, the way we solved this problem was with a free trial. It ended up working great.

So, my advice is to identify the players in your market segment that could get the ball rolling for your business and give them your service for free in exchange for a case study and testimonial.

6. Leverage personalized direct marketing. 

After you’ve established your credibility by getting case studies, you are ready to start generating high-ticket clients. When it comes to generating consulting clients, you can spend more time handpicking the dream clients who you can help in the beginning. Imagine what client logos you would like to put on your website and reach out to them instead of leaving it to chance with Facebook ads. I recommend writing personalized messages on Facebook, LinkedIn and in emails that explain the problem you can solve for their market segment.

7. Leverage automated personalized marketing. 

This is my secret sauce, and most people have a hard time executing this properly because they don’t really understand their market segment. After I have validated my market segment by acquiring a few clients with personalized messages, I scale up massively with automated marketing.

I have used a software that allows me to send personalized emails, at scale, that are highly relevant to my market segment and look like I spend 30 minutes researching their company. I have used this strategy and still use this method to book meetings with some of the most powerful executives in America on autopilot.

Follow these steps to create more targeted services and personalized marketing for your prospects. The customer acquisition cost with direct marketing can be a fraction of the price compared to Facebook ads.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

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Founder of Nick Tubis Enterprises, an e-learning platform that teaches people how to start and grow their own freelance or B2B company.

Sourced from Forbes

Sourced from Inc.

Email marketing is a delicate business. Email is an efficient way to stay in touch with potential and existing customers, but you don’t want to spam them. Here are some tips to strike the balance.

  1. Don’t take yourself too seriously. Boring, dry emails get old fast, and people will almost invariably unsubscribe (except your competitors). Be yourself, be conversational, and feel free to poke fun at yourself every now and then.
  2. Use email automation to cross-sell goods and services. If you’ve already converted a lead to a customer, then you will have the ability to potentially sell them other items in your portfolio.
  3. Don’t be too sales-y, but do have multiple campaigns–those for prospects at each stage of the sales funnel and those for organizations who are already customers at various maturity levels–so the content is fresh and pertinent to them.
  4. Be timely. If it’s tax season, for example, tell customers and leads how your product can help them file their return. If it’s April, talk about spring cleaning. If they’ve been a customer for three months, check in to see how they’re doing.
  5. Have a call to action. Let’s say you sent that email timed to tax season. Have a button with a call to action. A great way achieve this is to coordinate a blog post with a “Read more” button and then a call to action within that post. The longer you can keep a prospect’s or customer’s attention, the more likely they are to buy your product and stay with you.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

Sourced from Inc.

One thing’s for sure, 2018 has delivered designs that are anything but boring. It’s been a year dominated by imagery that’s funky, wild, fanciful and even absurd—perhaps reflecting the increasingly nutty world we live in. So sit up, take notice and see how you can incorporate some of these electrifying graphic design trends into your images.

Glitch effect

Mistakes, imperfections, blemishes. Rather than rushing to erase or correct what’s gone wrong, we’re embracing the accidental and finding the beauty in the flawed. In a world where technology touches every aspect of our lives, it makes sense that we’d incorporate the inevitable glitch into our imagery. Weird color surges happen, as do file corruptions and crooked lines, disorienting compositions and blurry photos. While our initial tendency is to make things neat and tidy for the viewer, it’s time to consider the joys of awkward discomfort.

 

80s and 90s Retro 

Who came of age in the 80s and 90s? Millennials. Who are businesses trying to woo? Millennials. And who are the creative leaders deciding what’s in and what’s out? Um, yeah, you guessed it: Millennials. So if you want to know why we’re being inundated by color palettes full of turquoises and teals and peaches and pinks, randomly placed geometric shapes and patterns, squiggly lines and retro illustrations, it’s because we’re resurrecting that golden age when hair was big, Pokemon could only be found on cards and videos, and everyone was watching “Friends.” (Oh, wait, they’re still watching “Friends.”)

Groovy Gradients

Another popular trend from the past (this time the early aughts) that’s making a major comeback is the gradient, sometimes known as “color transition.” You can’t look at your iPhone’s app display without seeing a gradient or seven, but this time around, the style is getting an update. Instead of sticking with linear transitions going horizontally or vertically, the new gradients can be radial (starting at a single point and emanating out) or even have different starting points, creating a more swirling, spirally effect.

 

Trippy typography

Designers are having the time of their lives playing with fonts, text and typography. They’re erasing key parts of letters while still maintaining their readability. They’re flouting conventional lines and placing letters haphazardly across the page or screen. They’re allowing text to interact directly with photographs and illustrations in imaginative ways. There are handmade fonts, layered letters, abstract forms, sliced and diced and dripping text that will make the viewer dizzy with delight. And most incredible? The return of the serif font, which is making a welcome comeback after a too-long absence from our digital screens.

 

Authentic Photography

Authenticity has been a buzzword not just in design, but in advertising, branding, business, social media, arts, entertainment, politics—pretty much every sector of society. One of the easiest and most effective ways to tap into an authentic vibe is through photography. Photos offer a realness that can’t be matched, especially pics that aren’t staged or arranged but rather have a documentary feel to them. While stock photography has been flooding the internet for a while, those canned images seem to be phasing out and are being replaced by messier imagery with imperfect lighting, lots of action, interesting compositions and deeper emotions.

Click HERE to read the remainder of the article.

 

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Content marketing is receiving tremendous acknowledgment among advertisers to reach clients. Indeed, 92% of B2B advertisers utilize content marketing to reach their intended interest group, and 86% B2C advertisers consider content marketing a key strategy to target clients, as indicated by the Content Marketing Institute.

In any case, not every single content marketers can accomplish their goals with regards to getting content marketing ROI. Some are effective, while many battles to attempt their content marketing endeavors productive.

In this post, the talk will be about six inquiries that will enable you to adjust your content marketing strategy and guarantee achievement.

1. What Problems Are You Solving?

The primary goal of your content marketing system is to solve your audience’s issues.

So the primary inquiry your content marketing strategy ought to have the capacity to answer what issues you are settling. What’s more, to take care of your clients’ issues, you ought to be very much aware of their pain points.

Here are some approaches to distinguish your clients’ pain points:

  • Conduct qualitative customer research
  • Interview your customers
  • Look at your reviews
  • Run online surveys
  • Scan forums/groups relevant to your niche

Content that goes head to head with the audience’s problems, get noticed, read and shared.

2. Have You set Objectives for Your Content Strategy?

Does your content marketing strategy have composed objectives? If not, you should set objectives now. Without defining objectives, it will resemble flying in obscurity and shooting randomly and hoping to hit the objective. Obviously, this isn’t something that you need to do. So set content marketing objectives. Following are some shared objectives that you might need to accomplish through content marketing:

  • Increase brand awareness
  • Increase traffic to your website
  • Generate Leads
  • Improve retention
  • Create customer loyalty

content marketing

3. Have You Fixed KPIs for Your Content Marketing Goals?

To know how much advancement you are making toward your content marketing objectives, you should track key performance indicators (KPIs).
Have you settled KPIs for your content marketing objectives?
Next, we should talk about regular KPIs you can append to your content marketing objectives:

Brand Awareness– Social share, comments, likes, views from partner sites
Traffic to Your Website– Google Analytics
Lead Generation– Leads generated by content, landing page conversion rate
Customer Loyalty– Repurchase, regular subscription
Leads Conversion– Leads to customer conversions through content pieces

4. Does Content Echo Your Audience’s Tone?

On the off chance that your audience didn’t feel right after reading your content, despite the fact that your content is super helpful, odds are your dialect is excessively straightforward or excessively complex that doesn’t match with the dialect of your audience.
So it is important that your substance should match with your gathering of people’s tone.
Furthermore, to figure out what tone is the best for you to embrace, you should know your audience and discover what they like and how they associate with one another.

5. Do You Have an Aggressive Content Promotion Plan?

Brian Clark, the founder of CopyBlogger, stated:

’’Creating great content and not getting it noticed is an online marketing sin.’’

There is no reason for making content if it doesn’t get noticed, read, and shared by your audience. Do you have a forceful content promotion strategy to make your content reach a vast audience? If not, act quick. You have the accompanying four content promotion channels:

1- Owned Channels– Homepage, email lists, owned communities, blog, app
2- Earned Channels– Influencer Outreach, media outreach, placed content
3- Shared Channels– social media organic, content sharing communities
4- Paid Channels– Native ads, paid social media, display ads, sponsored content

6. Are You Ready to Tweak Your Content Strategy?

A fruitful content marketing strategy requests a consistent cycle of investigation and changes. So you can’t settle your content procedure in a stone. You need to change it and adjust it depending on how your audience reacts to your content. The most ideal way is that you should make a rule of routinely assessing your content marketing strategy after a specific timeframe – track key performance indicators (KPIs) to know your advancement and discover the purposes behind not performing.

You should realize that content marketing sets aside some time to demonstrate results, however, the outcomes remain. It is smarter to set realistic content marketing strategy desires at first.

 

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Sourced from JOSIC