The Wax Blog

20 Feb

Posted at 08:15h in Digital Marketing, The New Entrepreneur by
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B2B digital transformation demands a lot of businesses. Rapidly evolving technology has forced companies to adapt quickly without always knowing the outcomes. For B2B marketers and new entrepreneurs, it's important to understand not only the definition of terms like IoT and blockchain. We need to understand how they may impact businesses in the near future.  G2 Crowd, the world’s largest B2B software and services review site, has identified digital trends that look beyond buzzwords and industry jargon. AI, blockchain, and IoT are actual tools driving change in today’s technological landscape. In this post we turned to Aaron Walker, Senior Research Specialist for G2 Crowd focusing on software development and cyber security technologies, to help walk us through how these technologies work.    

What is B2B Digital Transformation? 

The term “digital transformation” can mean a lot of things. The trends outlined here are classified across AI, digital platforms, and IoT-related concepts. Integrating new technology related to these trends is not a simple process. Companies and managers must identify the proper fit in order to complement their business’s operations, strategies, and objectives. It’s easy to get distracted by AI-powered tools or blockchain-based applications, but the tools' actual benefits depend entirely on successful adoption. Powerhouse corporations like GE are already demonstrating ideal digital transformation practices. While their stock value took a hit, earning the title of worst performing stock of 2017 and losing about 40 percent of its value, the company appears to be successfully evolving to focus on the future by investing in AI and IoT.  Despite being well over a century old, GE exemplifies the prototypical example of enterprise-scale digital transformation. The company has embraced SaaS-based subscription models to help bridge a gap between industrial markets and emerging technologies. Predix, their new digital platform, is linking commercial appliances and manufacturing endpoints to IoT automating the supply chain and driving greater efficiency for the organization. 

Where does Artificial Intelligence fit in?

15 Feb

Posted at 12:16h in Digital Marketing, News by
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Artificial intelligence has been changing the landscape of our world since its introduction in the 1950's. It has already made a significant impact in tech industries. Now it's now permeating across verticals ranging from medicine to education.  One sector that has made significant advancements with the aid of artificial intelligence is the online translation industry. In fact, AI is impacting translation in a multitude of ways. This is of importance to marketers who are facing increasingly demands for multi-lingual campaigns.  You may already have an idea of this. If you’ve ever translated a phrase or a sentence using a program like Google Translate, you’ve encountered a form of artificial intelligence. As AI transitions from the more rigid, rule-oriented Narrow AI to the human-like AI of Deep Learning more complex processes like eLearning translation and intuitive machine translation are happening faster and more accurately than ever. Here are the ways in which AI is impacting translation and why it will be a fixture well into the future: 

06 Feb

Posted at 16:48h in Digital Marketing by
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[caption id="attachment_13886" align="alignright" width="200"]mobile-first indexing Chad Crowe of Techwood Consulting provides tips on mobile-first indexing.[/caption] One way Google matches people’s search queries with the content they are seeking is by indexing the pages on a website. Indexing happens when Google sends its robots to crawl your site. What the robots find is one factor that affects the placement of your website in search engine results pages. Mobile-first indexing could impact your business and you need to know how to prepare for this change. The majority of web searches are done on mobile phones," says Chad Crowe with Atlanta-based Techwood Consulting, a digital consultancy with core competencies in organic and paid search. "Because of this Google has announced that they are going to move to mobile-first indexing. By taking a mobile-first approach, Google’s robots crawl the mobile version of your site first before crawling the desktop version." This change is expected to be rolled out this year. Google has already begun testing mobile-first indexing with a limited number of websites. If you use the internet to reach new customers, mobile-first indexing matters to you.

How Mobile-First Indexing Will Affect Your Business

28 Jan

Posted at 21:03h in Integrated Marketing, Social Media by
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When it comes to events, a little can go a long, long way. Here are some tips to help you maximize your event promotion budget, no matter how small.  The numbers don’t lie. Events are without a doubt still an extremely lucrative marketing avenue for any business. 80% of marketers believe live events are critical to their company’s success  and they’re proven to directly impact product and service sales. However, only 28% of companies allocate more than 20% of their total marketing budget to organizing events. 37% of businesses don’t intend to increase that budget in the next year. The largest portion usually gets eaten up by the venue and catering, leaving very little money left over for things like critical promotion efforts. If you're a marketer you may be dealing with a small event promotion budget.  Here are 5 ways to get the most out of your event promotion budget so you can have your event, and promote it too.

Integrate With Facebook Business Manager

The great thing about Facebook Business Manager is its ample organization and targeting features. You can have your entire event marketing team working within the account, helping you manage multiple assets such as Facebook Pages, Ad Accounts, and Apps. From the Facebook Business Manager, you can set up and select the ad account you want to use to create an ad for your event. Your ads will automatically be tailored to mobile. To ensure your ad spend is going as far as it can, target custom audiences. For example,

25 Jan

Posted at 11:10h in Content Marketing, News by
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There are a lot of ways to stay on the cutting edge for marketing strategies in 2018 (like reading this blog for example). Reading is one of the top characteristics of successful people so we've developed this list of the 6 best marketing books to consider reading. From virtual reality, to content marketing to  evolving brand management these are the books to consider reading this year. 
  1. Brand Intimacy: A New Paradigm in Marketing by Mario Natarelli and Rina Plapler
Brand Intimacy was an immediate "yes" to our list of the best marketing books to read. This book does a really nice job of explaining the underpinnings of brand loyalty on a number of levels including psychology, marketing and the consumer journey. Authors Natarelli and Plaper draw some intriguing conclusions, for example, the ways consumer intimacy with brands closely mimics human intimacy with family and friends. Brand Intimacy offers a helpful guide for assessing the intimacy of your brand and delivers a comprehensive look at how businesses of all kinds can build the intimacy so many covet. Replete with helpful infographics and divided into exceptionally well-organized sections, the lessons of Brand Intimacy: A New Paradigm in Marketing are digestible and easily transferable to your own business.   2. Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords: How to Access 100 Million People in 10 Minutes (Ultimate Series) 5th Edition by Perry Marshall, Mike Rhodes, and Brian Todd

05 Jan

Posted at 17:33h in Digital Marketing by
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[caption id="attachment_13803" align="alignright" width="272"] Visit KarlJesper.com for info about SEO and other marketing strategies.[/caption] We don't normally post this kind of thing, but Karl Jesper is a pretty stand up guy and these look like a great set of tools. Crush it in 2018 with the Ultimate Marketers Toolkit! Click...

05 Jan

Posted at 17:21h in The New Entrepreneur by
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  We've all seen news stories about bloated compensation for America’s top CEOs. The stunning (and growing) salaries beg the question - can one person be worth such an enormous amount of money?   The Return on Leadership, a new book by business expert D.L. Brouwer describes a new way to measure whether CEO salaries are economically sensible. Think about the best leaders you know. What traits do they embody? It’s clear that certain skill sets like organization and creativity often lead to better outcomes for a business. But leadership assessments can only provide so much information. Until now there's been no concrete way to equate a person’s leadership skills to the actual value they’ve contributed to the organization. Brouwer makes the refreshing case that ‘leadership’ is not as abstract and unquantifiable a concept as it may appear.  t.  In The Return on Leadership: A Three Step Plan to Navigate Change and Unlock Hidden Growth,  Brouwer uses a straightforward metric to gauge the impact of CEOs on their companies. It's also valuable as a comparison on how a CEO may be doing performing relative to  their peers. And it's incredibly easy to calculate.  Dividing the change in a company’s market capitalization (information that's easily available for public companies)  by its CEO's salary results in a Return on Leadership (RoL) Ratio. To us, since a company’s market cap is a strong reflection on the foresight of its CEO it makes sense to use it as a barometer for rating CEO performance. 

03 Jan

Posted at 09:15h in Content Marketing, SEO by
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How to gain success with SEO in 2018 by engaging your target audience and he right kind of content. Technology improves at an amazing rate every year and it's important to consider SEO for 2018. To keep a marketing website relevant and on top of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) it is vital to stay current in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). 2017 brought in a lot of new things. SEO for 2018 heralds the arrival of even more. Some are expansions of last year’s trends while others are new ways of doing things that are emerging in the marketing world. Here are some ways to ensure success with your SEO in 2018:

Understand Mobile Marketing

More people are relying on cell phones, tablets, and other mobile devices to do their browsing, shopping and communicating. This trend is showing no signs of slowing down - the experts predict that the mobile market will continue its rapid expansion in 2018. What this means for websites is that not only do they have to be compatible with this format, or responsive in other words. They need content that is mobile-friendly as well.