Three Simple Words And Three Sites Every Marketer Should Read

There are a lot of resources out there for marketers.  We read books and blog posts and articles and magazines and podcasts and video blogs and … well, let’s just say the list goes on and on.  Like a lot of people in our industry, I follow a lot of links and have a lot of opinions that I respect.  One of these days, I plan to publish my must read list of blogs, but I have to confess that this list is not as static as you might think.  There are many times when my reading pattern tends to be visiting a favourite blog of mine once a week due to client workload or my travel schedule, even though I wish I could read them more often. 

Still, when it comes to the usefulness of the marketing content that I read, there is some that is mostly about new ideas or news in the industry.  In fact, that’s the category that most of it fits into.  There are three sites, however, that stand out because they are in a different league.  The reason is because instead of ideas, they offer tangible real case studies of what brands are doing and how effective it is.  Those sites are WOMMA, MarketingProfs and MarketingSherpa.

If these three sites are not on your reading list, you need to add them.  For any practicing marketer, the lessons you will get from the cases here will likely offer you pieces of information that you will not only find useful, but just might give you the reasons for your peers to envy your level of knowledge and new insights.  For example, a recent MarketingSherpa article (open access until tomorrow – 09/18/07) pointed out that the three most effective words for getting people to read more of an article were "click to continue."  Not "continue to article" or "read more" but the option with the word "click" in it.  I didn’t know that, but now that I do – you can bet we will be using this information in our email marketing work.  That’s the power of reading case studies like this.  They give you actionable insight and also great information to justify doing something or a benchmark to evaluate performance.  I love ideas and innovation, but sometimes what you really need is a good case study.