Q: What do you get if you cross Santa with a duck?
A: A Christmas quacker!

The only thing better than a good old Christmas cracker joke is a good old Christmas ad.

Festive, heartwarming, and thought-provoking, TV Christmas ads signify the start of Christmas.

And they’re a marketers dream. According to research, for every $1.30 that’s spent making a Christmas ad, retailers can expect to get $31 back.

How do Christmas ads generate so much revenue? When did Christmas ads become such a huge deal? What are the best Christmas ads EVER made? And what makes a Christmas ad the best EVER?

Time to find out as we get ‘Santa-mental’ and ‘sleigh’ our way through the following topics in this Process Street post:

• ”It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas ads”: When did it all start (and who started it)?
• ”On the fifth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me…”: How do Christmas ads affect the bottom line?
• ”Last Christmas ad I gave you my heart”: Why are they so effective?
• ”All I want for Christmas ads is you”: What are the best EVER Christmas ads & why?

Ready? Hold on for ‘deer’ life and let’s ‘snow’…

(The ‘presents’ of these terrible Christmas puns do ‘snow’ down – I promise.) Continue Reading

“An hour of planning can save you ten hours of doing.” – Dale Carnegie

The formula for success on social media can seem like trying to pick the lottery’s winning numbers – impossible, with a dash of blind luck. What if you could predict some of the outcomes? The game becomes a lot easier, right?

One of the keys to success on social media is creating a well-thought-out social media content calendar process – another is executing it!

Having worked for a creative marketing agency, I understand the difficulty of creating a well-structured social media content calendar process. Waiting for approvals from your clients feels like rallying against Roger Federer at Wimbledon (his social media game is ace too). While cornering your colleague who still owes you that spellcheck is awkward at best.

So how do you become the Roger Federer of social media?

All it takes is a 3-step process to get the ultimate social media content calendar. But first, let’s see what you’ll learn about in this blog post.

• What is a social media content calendar? 
• Why do I need a social media content calendar? 
• What social media content calendar tools are out there?
• The 3-step social media content calendar process

Click the headings to jump ahead, or stick with me as we rally for serve.
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Travis Taborek is an SEO and content marketing specialist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s a graduate of General Assembly’s digital marketing course, and has since written content and optimized websites for Wescover and TiVo. He also has a side-business doing PR and social media work for indie games and reviews indie games in his spare time. His most recent accomplishment was finishing Homestuck and thereby winning shelter-in-place.

Back in 2011, you might have been able to get away with uploading your indie game to Steam’s marketplace and expect a revenue of $30-50K in the first year, without any effort or marketing knowledge.

Hell, you might have even been able to get away with that as late as 2014. But these golden days for indie game developers are long gone.

Steam has made many changes to the way it promotes indie games and the current market is far more saturated. There are more game developers than ever and tools like Unity and Unreal have made game development more accessible than ever.

Just getting that final build finished and uploaded to your storefront of choice is no longer enough. To have a successful launch, whether you’re a solo dev or a small team, you have to understand how to market your game.

In principle, marketing your game is relatively straightforward; you just need to know where to start. If you understand who you’re making the game for (your audience) and how to talk about your game as a product (meaning: you’re able to communicate what your game offers and how that aligns to the expectations of your target audience), then you’ve already done most of the hard work. The rest is as simple as following a process.

Once you have this base knowledge, it’s just about taking your product to market and doing the legwork that’s involved with getting the word out and making sure you get eyes on the finished product.

This Process Street article takes a look at one strategy for marketing your indie game: social media marketing.

What is social media marketing?

It’s basically exactly what it sounds like: using social media to get your game in front of your target audience. The term ‘social media marketing’ is a bit vague and encompasses a bunch of different approaches; we’ll be looking at some of the different ways you can use social media to market your game in this article.

Social media marketing is great for connecting on an intimate level with your fans and building lasting communities around your game, from early development until launch, and beyond. When done properly, it can allow you to develop trusting relationships with your audience that will drive them to not just purchase one of your games, but every game you put out.

Here’s a high-level overview of what we’ll be looking at:

• The theory of social media marketing, and how it relates to indie games
• Social media best practices for indie games
• What platforms do I use, and how do I use them?
• A/B Testing and Analytics: How do you know whether what you’re doing is working?
• Social media management tools to use
• Additional marketing resources

Let’s get started beginning with the theory of social media marketing.
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This is a guest post by Tom Siani, an online marketing expert with up to 4 years of experience in the digital industry. He is also collaborating with some well-known brands to generate traffic, create a sales funnel, and increase online sales. He has written a considerable number of articles about marketing via social media, brand marketing, blogging, and search visibility.

With over 50% of the world’s population using social media, a number that is only increasing, you can see how social media marketing is critical for reaching potential customers and driving sales.

With this in mind, in this Process Street article we look at how you can improve your social media marketing strategy to get ahead of the game. Specifically, we turn our attention to social media marketing automation.

We’ll explain the advantages of using social media marketing automation as part of your social media marketing strategy, in addition to presenting you with our top 5 social media marketing automation tools you can sign up and use today. Sound good?

But wait there is more!

To kick-off this article, I present Process Street as your critical social media marketing accomplice.

At Process Street, we have been working hard to provide you with practical template tools to assist you in delivering an optimal social media marketing strategy.

These template resources are listed below. Click on the links provided to jump straight in. Alternatively, scroll down to find out more.

• Buffers Social Media Etiquette Checklist
• Social Listening Strategy Process Checklist
• Social Media Image Design
• Social Media Influencer Outreach Checklist
• Social Media Manager Daily Checklist
• Social Media SLA Management Checklist Template
• Social Media SLA Metric Tracking Process Template

If you want to jump to a specific section in this article, click on the relevant subheader below. If not, continue scrolling!

• Use a social media marketing checklist
• Social media marketing automation: What is it, and the benefits of automation
• 5 Top social media marketing tools

Let’s get started!
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This is a guest post from Hugh Beaulac, a content strategist at MC2 who also works as a social media manager. With over 6 years of digital marketing experience, Hugh helps small and medium businesses grow online and likes to share his tips and tricks with top-notch marketing blogs like Wordstream, CrazyEgg, and Semrush. Follow him on Twitter to read his latest articles on Instagram marketing.

In the era of social media, when over 2.82 billion people have at least one social media account, email marketing isn’t the most obvious marketing tool.

It’s no wonder that more and more brands use social media platforms to promote their products and services as their target audience is active on these channels.

But here’s the thing: Although email is one of the oldest messaging channels, it still matters.

Why? Because nearly all social media users have active email accounts.

Recent Hubspot report claims that email marketing is still effective: 99% of customers check their email every day, 73% of people claim that email is the preferred communication channel to receive branded news and offers, and 59% of customers say marketing emails influence their purchase decisions.

For marketers, this means that combining social media and email marketing is a must. And with the growing popularity of Instagram marketing, there’s a perfect way to connect with engaged users and get more email list subscribers.

In this Process Street article, we’re covering:

• Why use Instagram to get email list subscribers
• Make the most out of your Instagram bio
• Give your customers a reason to share an email
• Use Instagram Stories to promote sign-ups
• Reach potential subscribers who don’t follow
• Benefits of Instagram marketing
• The Ultimate Guide to Instagram Marketing

Let’s take a look at four effective ways to grow your email list with Instagram.
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Natasha Ponomaroff is the Senior Marketing Director of Instasize – a content creating tool-kit for anyone editing photos and online content on mobile. A weekly contributor on the site’s blog, Natasha tracks social media trends and updates the millions of “creatives” who are currently using Instasize to curate awesome online content.

Seeking to establish a well-rounded online presence?

There are many different digital marketing channels to choose from, and all of them contribute to a holistic online strategy.

However, to succeed you need to know how to pair the right kind of content with the most suitable platform.

For marketers, there’s a constant pressure to create new content while maintaining a high level of quality.

To alleviate that burden, look to social media content.

Social media content, especially the kind of content you’ll find on a visual-focusedchannel like Instagram, is perfect for repurposing. Consider the fact that not all audiences favor social media as their communication medium of choice.

While effective in its own way, studies have shown that email marketing is 40 times more effective at reaching target customers than some social media channels.

With that in mind, and to cover multiple audience bases at once, here’s how you can bring Instagram content into your email marketing campaigns and save time in the process.

In this Process Street article, we’ll cover:

• Embedding user-generated content into your email marketing
• Making the most of original content in emails
• How to save and share Instagram Stories through email newsletters
• Getting started with repurposing your Instagram for email marketing content
• Use Process Street for your email marketing processes and more!

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This is a guest post by Adlin Sherley, an enthusiastic writer specializing in social media marketing techniques. She has a healthy obsession with writing, reading and catching up with her friends. Her passion is to help people in all aspects of marketing through the content she provides.

If you have a product, service or even just an idea that is worth selling, how would you do it? How would you let people know?

In the world of business, certain principles have been relevant for centuries. The concepts of promotion and marketing have existed for as long as humans have been trading.

Humans have always used their voices to communicate, tell stories, and spread messages, which is why word of mouth is still one of the simplest yet most effective ways of marketing something.

Before the internet or advent of the printing press, marketing moved slower. Person A used or came across something that caught their attention, and then they went around spreading the word to B, C, D, and whoever else was along the way. Arguably, it was a lot easier to convince people back then.

One thing that has changed with the advent of digital technology, is the speed and reach of marketing and advertising tools.

Enter the digital era

As we enter into the age of information, technology has made reaching large numbers of people as easy as a single click.

On the other hand, this means that competition in the attention-economy is fiercer than ever, with the coveted-yet-fickle attention span of individuals the shining prize.

“Going viral is not an outcome; it’s a happening. Sometimes it happens; sometimes it doesn’t. Just remember, fans are vanity and sales are sanity.” – Lori Taylor (@lorirtaylor)

Analogies aside, marketing today is a matter of strategy; well-planned, well-implemented, and continuously improved upon. If your marketing strategy is bang-on, then there’s nothing stopping you.

Conversely, a single wrong move could set you back tremendously, and that’s why it’s important to establish a process.

Breaking down digital marketing

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The following is a guest post by Deepti Jain, an engineering student who has a knack for writing and is currently working at AeroLeads as a content writer.

Social Selling is a buzzword these days.

I doubt it surprises people anymore given how huge social media is.

I don’t think people realize just how big it is.

According to Statista, 3.02 Billion of the world population will be using social media by 2021.

I know it gets a bad reputation sometimes and folks involved in B2B businesses are often a bit skeptical of leveraging social selling.

What they don’t realize is that they are missing out on a lot of leads, ROI, revenue, yadda yadda yadda.

In fact, Neil Patel, the marketing guru, recently discussed in his blog how he generated $332,640 in 3 months from Instagram alone.

Did this change your stance on social selling?

Hah! I knew it would.

However, if you are still not sold on the idea of social selling, then also don’t fret.

Today, I have rounded up some solid reasons why social selling is important for every salesperson.

Let’s begin!

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Fake news is a hot button issue right now and one we’ve covered a couple of times at Process Street.

Normally, the discussion of fake news is a roundly negative affair.

How do we come back from consistently lowering journalistic standards? What does this mean for society?

In this article, I’m going to put a more positive face on and explain why there’s good reason to believe quality journalism is going to make a comeback – it may have already begun!

• We’ll look at broadly what fake news is, and why it isn’t a wholly new phenomena.
• We’ll look at the financial performance of different media outlets and try to understand what economic motivations there are in the industry, plus how that impacts on content.
• We’ll look at the new wave of journalistic opportunities and what you can do to help!

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There’s a lot of advice on the internet. Some of it is good, some of it is terrible, and some sits in the gray area between.

Within the fields of tech and startups, a lot of what people do day to day is influenced by what they’ve learned online; I doubt many people reading this article learned in school how to effectively market a product over Instagram!

Sorting the good from the bad is a challenge we all face, and one we have to become better at as individuals and as a society.

Improving our ability to analyze information doesn’t just mean identifying fake news, though we will look briefly at it. It also means being able to take a second look at informative journalism and the reporting of research; the kind of information which you might use to inform big business decisions. We’ll look at:

• The importance of recognizing the gray area in complex issues and reviewing the source text.
• How media reporting of studies can often obscure the real points
• Why certain models of investigation can have inherent flaws, and why you should be wary of that.

At the end I’ll follow up with the 10 step process you can use to improve your analysis. This process is pulled from the recommendations of Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, and Michael Shermer, and repurposed for your professional needs.

But first, let me tell you a little story…

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