If you're looking for greater success with your content marketing strategies, include visuals.  It has been found that people respond better to text with images than to text only content.  The infographic below lists eight statistics that show the benefits of incorporating visuals into your content strategy.

Video is the in thing now.  YouTube has exploded in both the number of videos available to view and the number of viewers watching them.  FaceBook is peppered with them.  Video has higher conversion rates than many other marketing channels because users want to view content in this format.  So it has become one of the hottest trends in marketing today.  Video as a marketing tool can be quite effective for most organizations.  But video can be an especially effective tool for associations and non-profits.  An article by Paul Gannon, posted at Brightfind, explains why this is.  He lists three reasons why video may be especially well-suited for the needs of associations and their marketing efforts.

Digital advertising is expected to surpass television advertising this year to become the leader in media ad spend.  In addition, the expectation is that digital ad spending will only continue to rise through out the foreseeable future.  The infographic below highlights four advertising trends to be aware of in 2016.

Marketing is becoming more technology driven and marketers are becoming more sophisticated and tech savvy than ever before.  The use of programmatic advertising among marketers has dramatically increased in the last few years.  The rise in usage of marketing automation software has now made it possible to tailor your message to the right people, at the right time and place for optimal results.  In-depth insights into this tech explosion in marketing are presented in AdRoll's State Of The Industry 2016 report.  1050 marketers, across numerous industries, were surveyed on their perspective of the changing advertising and marketing landscape.  Take a look at the report and see where marketers are in the adoption of these new marketing technologies.

Welcome emails can be used for more than just a friendly greeting.  Organizations can use this type of email as an opportunity to guide subscribers into their world.  They can be used to set expectations, provide education, highlight services and product features, or point out discounts and offers.  Welcome emails set the stage for what a customer can expect from an organization.  They also outperform promotional mailings. Welcome emails have 4 times higher open rates and 5 times higher click-through rates than promotional emails.  Yet close to 70% of marketers are still not incorporating them into their customer aquistition program.  Our partner Bluehornet, has created a guide of best practices for building a welcome email campaign.  Download "A Digital Marketers Guide-Welcome Email Campaign" and learn about the benefits of using welcome emails to help increase your digital marketing success and grow your organization.

If your organization is accumulating a growing list of leads with email addresses, it's probably time to take a look at marketing tools that will ensure effective digital interactions with those leads.  There are many options available for marketing software tools.  Before you start looking at vendors and software platforms, you might want to begin with a basic question.  What is the difference between email marketing and marketing automation?  Yes, they are two different things.  Both email marketing and marketing automation use email as the primary channel to communicate and engage with your audience.  However, email software only tracks the actions taken by recipients of your email.  Marketing automation software moniters every digital interaction a lead has with your organization.  Aleksandr Peterson at Act-On has written an article in which he breaks down the differences between these two types of software systems in much greater detail.  This article is a good resource to help you decide which system will best meet your needs.