The PR 20/20 Blog

I’m surrounded by smart people. Some would call them strategists. Some would call them visionaries. Every day, I’m inspired to learn from my colleagues, clients, industry peers … I learn a lot about life from my two-year-old son, too.

As an agency, I believe this power to strategize, collaborate, and bring visionary ideas to life is our core strength. It’s part of our culture. And it’s part of each person we work with. It’s that power to look beyond that drives us—always forward.

And it’s no accident that Look Beyond is our company tagline.

It’s that time again… welcome to the kickoff of marketing conference season!

Every year, a handful of PR 20/20 team members head to Content Marketing World (#CMWorld) hosted in our very own Cleveland, Ohio. CMWorld is the largest content-focused event of its kind, bringing together 4,000+ marketers to learn the tools and materials needed to build the best content marketing strategies.

Attendees get access to some of the top industry influencers and keynote speakers (who agrees that seeing Tina Fey speak gives us serious bragging rights?!).

This post originally appeared on the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute's blog. The Marketing AI Institute was created and is powered by PR 20/20. 

Artificial intelligence has reached peak hype stage, but is it possible that its potential to transform marketing, and your career, is even greater than advertised?

Gartner forecasts global business value derived from AI is projected to reach $1.9 trillion in 2019, ramping up to $3.9 trillion in 2022 through three primary sources of customer experience, cost reduction and new revenue.

Meanwhile, McKinsey Global Institute projects up to a $6 trillion impact of AI and other analytics on marketing and sales, including the areas of pricing and promotion ($1.9T), customer service management ($1.0T), next product to buy/individualized offering ($1.0T), customer acquisition/lead generation ($0.7T), marketing budget allocation ($0.6T), churn reduction ($0.38T) and channel management ($0.32T).

Editor's note: This post was originally published in 2016 and has been updated to be more current and comprehensive.

Lights, camera, action. Video has taken the marketing world by storm, and it's here to stay.

Think video marketing is just another fad? Think again. Our customers are demanding it, and the proof is in the numbers: 

• 82% of consumers surveyed indicated that they favor live video over other types of social media posts.
• Video content receives 12 times more shares than text and images, combined.
• Video viewers retain 95% of a message when they see a video— compared to only 12% of written word.

Sometimes, social media can be an enigma.

You manage your brand’s social media presence, and you post stimulating photos with catchy captions day in and day out. Unfortunately, your fans don’t seem to see it that way, and you die inside at the measly 33 likes you received on your last Instagram photo.

Your competitors, on the other hand, are falling asleep each night to sweet dreams of likes, comments and DMs galore.

Editor's note: This article was originally written by Amanda Zantal-Wiener (@amanda_zw) published on HubSpot, and has been reprinted with permission. Zantal-Wiener covers tech news for the HubSpot Marketing Blog. 

Earlier this year, a handful of my extremely bright and capable colleagues compiled a report on topic clusters. Now first, what the heck is a topic cluster?

A topic cluster is a method that uses a single "pillar page" as the main hub of content for a given topic. All of your content assets related to that topic link back to the pillar page— and the pillar links out to each asset.

Here's why it's critical to your content strategy.

Marcus Sheridan kicked off this year’s IMPACT Live conference by asking one mission-critical question: How do we define inbound today?

Since its inception in 2005 (thanks, HubSpot), inbound has become a loaded term. It means a lot of different things to different people. But at its core, and in Sheridan’s words, “To be inbound is to be helpful.”

It’s no wonder then that Bob Ruffolo’s motivation to host IMPACT Live once again was to “make you and your organization successful.”

Editor's note: This post was originally published in 2016 and has been updated to be more current and comprehensive.

Brands have a major problem using the S-word. The term strategy is so overused by marketing departments and agencies that it is, in many cases, meaningless. They build marketing or content strategies. They think or act strategically.

Too often, marketers are irresponsibly using strategy and its variants as synonyms for planning.

How often do you question whether you're living up to your potential? Do you often feel you could be pushing yourself more to become a better professional, coworker or manager?

If you have ever felt like this, you are in the perfect position to challenge yourself to be a better professional. But, how can you effectively make this happen?

There’s a simple solution. It’s called Radical Candor™.

This post originally appeared on the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute's blog. The Marketing AI Institute was created and is powered by PR 20/20. 

“How do I get started with AI?” This is one of the top questions we get from marketers. A lot of professionals want to understand and apply AI to their work. But they don't know where or how to start.

It's understandable. There is a lot of content out there on AI. And there's a ton of hype.

So I want to walk marketers through how I would approach this process, using mock examples.

The goal? Show you how a brand could actually go from conception to reality with marketing AI.