Think about a great news story you’ve read. Got it? Now, think about this — as you remember the details of the story, what are you feeling right now? That news story in your mind — was it a list of facts? Some bullet points answering the “five W’s”? Probably not. Whatever journalism piece you’re thinking of, I bet you don’t remember the news story as much as how the story made you feel.  Good marketing is also about making people feel something. We believe all marketers should hone their storytelling skills by learning to think like a journalist. Here’s…

I’ve got companies sending me daily emails that I haven’t opened for weeks. When I finally do, it’ll probably be to unsubscribe. Everyone’s inbox seems more cluttered than ever. So how do you cut through and make your message heard? You need to be an email sharpshooter. And that’s exactly what we’ll cover in our email marketing webinar next week.

Your customers don’t care about your business. I’m sorry, but it’s true. Even your biggest brand evangelists don’t really care about your brand. They care about how it benefits them. The second your business stops giving them value, they’re gone. Ruthless, huh? Don’t take it personally. This is just natural human behavior. We’re hardwired to look out for ourselves in all aspects of life — especially in our finances. We aren’t going to pay for something unless we really, really want it . . . which is why we frankly don’t give a damn about your product’s “features.”

An entire blog post about email out-of-office replies? Is that really necessary? We think so! Let me explain. Not only are out-of-office emails really important, they also give you the opportunity to add a little personality to your emails! For your inspiration, we came up with three creative out-of-office email replies to send the next time you’re ready to head out for a client meeting, conference, or exotic vacation.

Facebook is the town square of the Internet. That is to say, it’s the town square of the world. Still, we get a lot of questions about whether Facebook is the best place to spend your marketing dollars — and, even more frequently, questions about whether Facebook ads really help sell cars. Enter Facebook Offline Events: an offline conversion tool that allows advertisers to see how many customers made a purchase after seeing a Facebook ad.

Being a creative content strategist means that we show up to work every day, ready to creatively solve problems. Sometimes that means we have the tendency to solve very similar problems over and over again, and that also means we run the risk of falling into a rut by using very similar tactics to solve these same problems. That’s not a bad thing! There are certainly some methods we swear by — we’ve tested them, pushed them, and made sure that we’re always doing what we’re doing because it’s backed up by data. But still, having a fresh perspective is incredibly valuable…

Savvy managers crave the benefits of professional development for their teams. Performance, retention, satisfaction, and motivation are high on the wishlist at any organization.

Welcome to Data Drop! We’ve always been a group of A/B testers here at 9 Clouds. After all, we want to know — based on data — what works best for our clients across all content platforms. But, with all of us A/B testing different things all the time, it’s often hard to come to cohesive conclusions that would allow us to define “best practices.” So recently, we’ve honed in on one or two aspects to test — as a group, across several clients — each month. Along with that, we’ll be droppin’ the data on these findings in this new, quarterly…

If you’re one of our clients, you probably received word a few weeks ago that we were hitting the road for our annual company retreat. If you aren’t one of our clients, you probably saw evidence of our annual company retreat on social. If you don’t follow us on social (um, why not?), then let me be the first to tell you: we went on our annual company retreat to Minneapolis a few weeks ago.  We toured a brewery, bowled a little (some better than others), and, of course, bonded as a team, talking through challenges and opportunities for 9…

Email isn’t dead. In fact, it’s so alive that the challenge for auto marketers today isn’t how to get someone to open an email — it’s how to get them to open yours amid the 269 billion emails sent every day. Yes, there really are that many. And while people prefer email over any other marketing channel, you can’t expect them to care about your email unless you give them a good reason to — like, a really, really, reeeally good reason. So how do you do that? In the latest season of our free educational video series, 9 Clouds Live, we walk you…

Several months ago, I made my first Big Mess-Up with a client. I cried at my desk. I thought the client might fire us. Would I get fired? Would life go on? I take pride in my work at 9 Clouds, and that day I was feeling cold, hard shame. Then along came Jenny, our project management director AKA Godsend of the Moment: “Jaden, you did the best you could with the information you had.” – Jenny Elizabeth Lockhart | August 24, 2018 I didn’t get fired, and we didn’t lose the client. In fact, my mistake became an opportunity to clean…

When shoppers embark on their journey to purchasing a vehicle, they regularly turn to a search engine to start their research. Out of the average 24 touchpoints on the road to a car purchase, 19 are digital — and more than half of those 19 touchpoints could go through a search engine.