“Company A Acquires Company B.” "Great, I read the same thing in Google," Jim Sinkinson of Fired Up! Marketing once told us about a headline he received. “Your content should not be about the industry per se, it should be about the reader. There are important developments afoot in that acquisition that are going to affect me.”

“The landing page, it’s one of those things, it can become its own science,” Matt Bailey, founder of SiteLogic, told me a couple months ago. “The landing page is the critical part that a lot of people forget about in this type of lead marketing or content marketing or even dealing with the funnel.”

They also say that “only about half of [organizations] consider their value proposition to be very compelling or compelling (48%). On the other hand, 42% find their organization’s value proposition to be only somewhat compelling.

Something—maybe a reminiscence about his narrowing down your main marketing message to six words (try it)—led me to Matt Bailey’s excellent blog last week, Endless Coffee Cup. The subject was the sales funnel. Apparently there has been some doubts raised about it.   “I can’t imagine why someone would say the sales funnel is dying,” he told his equally lively co-host Ashley Schweigert. “Maybe we’ve seen a flattening—the places people are coming into the funnel—[but if anything] it’s getting greater.   “The reason we’ve had the funnel to begin with is that we need a visual representation of what’s happening. Just looking at numbers alone is not an understandable way about where are people in our sales process. How are we acquiring? Where are they? What stage do they go to next?”   That made me want to call Bailey—an accomplished speaker, trainer, author ...

The New Yorker Magazine Migrates to Pugpig Publish

Answering a question posed recently on the SIPA Forum about video vs. podcasts, Stephanie Williford, CEO, EB Medicine, wrote, "We haven't done a formal test, but I think the old 'know your audience' adage applies well here. For ours (emergency physicians, who are notoriously ADHD), they can't stand to sit still and watch an educational video for more than a few minutes, but they love podcasts because they can listen and learn while doing something else too."

According to a report last year by Edison Research and Triton Digital, the portion of the public listening to online radio (podcasts) continues to grow. In 2017, 61% of Americans have listened to online radio in the past month, while about half (53%) have listened in the past week. This is up from 57% and 50%, respectively, in 2016.

Welcome New Members

Last week I mentioned Access Intelligence VP Dan Hanover's preference that the fear of paying more works better than the benefit of saving money. So instead of "Last chance to save $200," he strongly prefers "Prices will go up $200 tomorrow."

SIPA member Northern Miner Group's podcast starts with some lively music and then a sponsor announcement for the Yukon Mining Alliance. The host, Matthew Keevil, has fun with the topic—in Geology Corner they dig into "the mama jama of all copper deposits"—and then runs down the various segments on the show. It's over an hour.