It’s more than a little hard to believe, but MarketerGizmo isn’t even a year old yet. We’ve had an amazing 2015 and can’t wait to get started on our first full year of publishing!
Here are some highlights from the site for 2015:
- Total pageviews: 72,971
- Average session duration: 1:25
- Articles published: 169
- Total comments: 227
We’ve covered a lot of ground in nine short months, from hashtags on Facebook to getting started with agile marketing to Vince Vaughn and stock photos. Some articles resonated with you, our beloved audience, while others are in our queue for serious revisions.
As a reminder of how far we’ve come (and what great things are in store for our community in the future), here’s a recap of our 15 most successful posts from 2015.
#15: A Fun Guide to Market Segmentation
This lighthearted post came out of a heated content marketing meeting in which we debated how best to make topics like market segmentation engaging and accessible.
Our solution: have fun with it.
We changed up the dry as toast research terms to things like “Moose-age,” hopefully allowing you to make use of this tactic without getting bogged down in terminology.
See also:
Why Translating Your Market Segmentation to Personas Makes Both More Useful
What Are Brand Awareness Studies and How to Do Them
#14: 7 Marketing Skills That Will Make Your Life Easier
Whether it’s just enough HTML to get by or data analysis skills, this article is an excellent map to professional education for modern marketers.
No need to wait for developers or graphic designers if you systematically improve your chops in these seven areas:
- Coding (HTML and CSS)
- Graphic Manipulation
- Video Production
- Data Collection, Analysis, and Visualization
- Writing
- Interpersonal Skills and Big Picture Awareness
- Time Management
See also:
Marketers Review 3 Time Management Systems
3 Essential Image Creation Tools for Busy Beginners
#13: Viral Video Marketing: Whats, Whys, and Hows of Going Viral
“Let’s make some viral videos,” may be one of the worst marketing strategies ever, but it’s a painfully common “idea.”
This article explores the ins and outs of viral videos, including why cat videos aren’t automatically a marketing home run.
See also:
Getting Started With Video Marketing for Under $200
Video Marketing: How to Have Charisma on Camera
#12: Best (and Worst) Practices for Infographics
Like “viral” videos, infographics aren’t a magic marketing bullet. When they work they can spread like wild fire, generating hundreds of powerful backlinks and spreading your brand far and wide. When they don’t work, they make you look like an amateur and hurt your credibility.
This article covers what good infographics get right and what bad infographics do wrong so you can make sure your next project is setup for success.
See also:
Make Your Infographics Infotastic With These 4 Key Elements
#11: An Agile Approach to Problem Solving: Fishbone Diagram & 5 Why’s
Agile marketing doesn’t have an answer for everything, but it does offer some excellent ways to get at the root of your problems.
This article explores the use of a Fishbone Diagram (complete with a downloadable template) and the practice of asking “Why?” five times to be a more effective problem solver.
See also:
Marketing Problems and Their Agile Solutions
3 Crucial Agile Marketing Skills You May Already Have
#10: The Definitive Guide to Doing a Brand Awareness Study
In conjunction with our sibling company SurveyGizmo, we run quarterly brand awareness studies in our marketing department.
We’ve learned a lot from designing and implementing these surveys, and we collected it all in this definitive guide to brand awareness.
See also:
Turning Executive Tweets Into Brand Awareness and Brand Loyalty
What Are Brand Awareness Studies and How to Do Them
#9: A Beginner’s Guide to Kanban for Agile Marketing
Scrum gets most of the attention in discussions of agile methodologies, but Kanban offers a lot of flexibility for agile marketing teams looking to try something else.
Born out of frustration at the lack of coverage on this topic, this article offers an overview of Kanban and how marketers can adapt it to fit their unique needs.
See also:
An Introduction to Scrumban for Agile Marketing
How to Lay the Foundation for an Agile Culture in Your Marketing Department
#8: How to Run an Agile Marketing Campaign
This was one of our earliest articles on agile marketing, and one of our first steps in attempting to offer insight into the real steps needed to adapt agile principles to marketing teams.
As we always do here on MarketerGizmo, we did our best in this article to get beyond theory and into the realities of agile marketing.
See also:
Glossary of Agile Marketing Terms
Changing the Daily Standup for Agile Marketing
#7: 12 Social Media Marketing Job Skills You Need to Advance Your Career
Remember when social media marketers were making up their own crazy job titles? We’ve come a long way from the days of made up jobs, but social media marketing is still an uncertain field.
This article covers 12 skills that will help marketers advance their social media ambitions, regardless of what the promotion path looks like in their organization.
See also:
Can Social Media Fit on an Agile Marketing Team?
What the Moz SEO Ranking Report Means for Content and Social Media
#6: What is Agile Marketing (and Why You Should Care)
Definitions of agile marketing can range from flowery and unhelpful to downright inaccurate. This article was written to try and counteract some of these worrying content trends.
We give you a definition grounded in our real life experience of agile marketing, along with some of the more compelling reasons why you should be getting serious about this marketing approach.
See also:
The Power of Combining Intelligent Content and Agile Marketing
Our First Six Weeks as an Agile Marketing Team
#5: The Definitive Guide to a LinkedIn Content Marketing Strategy
LinkedIn and content marketing are a match made in heaven, or at least they can be when combined the right way.
One of our most popular articles from this year gives you all the information you need to start rocking your content on one of the most powerful social networks on the planet.
See also:
LinkedIn Marketing Strategy: Meet Your Audience Where They Are
#4: The Last Marketing Plan Template You’ll Ever Need
Ever tried to find a good marketing plan template online? It’s very, very frustrating. Most of them are convoluted and confusing.
In the spirit of MarketerGizmo’s efforts to help marketers do their jobs better, we made our own marketing plan template (which you can download on the article page). We hope it’s the last one you’ll ever need.
See also:
The Agile Marketing Plan: Are You Riding an Elephant or a Hummingbird?
#3: 4 Key Elements of Successful Infographic Design
Infographics are clearly a popular topic with our readers, as this is the second article on this topic in our top 15 list. This early article breaks down the four key elements that most truly awesome infographics have in common:
- Intriguing Topic
- Interesting Story
- Ingestible Design
- Irresistible Shareability
See also:
A SlideShare version of this article for those who don’t have time to digest the 2500 word guide
#2: A Guide to Using the Scrum Methodology for Agile Marketing
Good old Scrum, the method that most people use during the transition to agile marketing, is near and dear to our heart here at MarketerGizmo.
In this highly shared article our own certified Scrum Master provides a detailed guide to adopting Scrum for your marketing team.
See also:
A SlideShare overview on How to Run an Agile Marketing Sprint
#1: A Beginner’s Guide to Hashtag Use on Facebook
I love that this article is consistently a top performer, because we wrote it after discussing this topic and not finding a good answer anywhere online. This is the reason that MarketerGizmo was started: to provide real, helpful answers to real marketing problems, and it gives me warm fuzzies when our articles do this so successfully.
So if you’re wondering about using hashtags on Facebook, here’s the short answer: it’s probably not a good idea. For more, check out the number one article on our site.
See also:
B2B Marketing on Facebook: Examples, Ideas, and Inspirations
Facebook SEO: Ranking Signal or New Search Engine?
What Do you Want to See on MarketerGizmo in 2016?
We’re here for you, so if you have ideas or questions that you want us to cover on MarketerGizmo let us know! There’s a handy article suggestion form at the top right of this page. Just shoot us your idea and we’ll do our best to tackle it.