Now approaching its fourth year, our C&EN Marketing Elements blog has expanded quite a bit, and one could argue the most during this past year. Case in point: we held our first live, in-person marketing event here in DC this past summer, with plans to make it an annual meeting due to its success. But the blog and our newsletter will remain the cornerstone of this science marketing community, and so here we thought we’d take a look back at the most-read posts of the year.
Some content emerged from the archives, indicating the appetite for the tried-and-true tactics in the marketing world – albeit perhaps with a little spin. Find these posts and more in our review of our 2017 science marketing topics below.
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10 Steps to a Successful Website Overhaul
Like everything digital, websites need to evolve fairly often. Whether it’s Google’s mobile-friendly requirements, or that the style you loved five years ago is now super out of date, every marketer has undergone a website redesign. But are we stopping to check if we’re doing each step correctly? In a guest blog post from our friends at The Market Element (no relation to our blog name!) they tell us the importance of defining – or redefining – your goals, audits, wireframes, and more.
Read ’10 Steps to a Successful Website Overhaul’
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How to Use Print Ads to Build Awareness 
There are a lot of digital marketing tactics that make our most-read list, but as this next post suggests, print is still very much a marketer’s friend. Especially useful for building brand awareness, this blog post outlines why print is an essential tool, and how you can build it in to your campaigns.
Read ‘How to Use Print Ads to Build Awareness’
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Magazine Industry Trends Every Science Marketer Should Know
Coming from a magazine environment ourselves, our team reads up on trends specific to the publishing world all the time. And increasingly we’re talking to our advertisers about them, too: what can they expect to change, and ultimately, what should a reader’s experience really be like. Be it a regular display ad or a full native advertising campaign, innovations in publishing does indeed matter to science marketers. In this blog post, we pulled the key stats from overall magazine trends that would be of particular interest to our advertisers.
Read ‘Magazine Industry Trends Every Science Marketer Should Know’
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The Mad Men & Women of Science Marketing
The C&EN Media Group team started this blog as a how-to resource for the science marketing community, using a monthly newsletter, white papers, and Q&A’s with industry leaders to engage with this audience. This year, we wanted to expand these resources even further. Along with our DC marketing event, we created a free e-book to peak inside the minds of other leaders in our space. In one of our most popular features this year, you can hear directly from experts who have built their careers around science marketing, – some even coming from the bench before launching their own firms.
Download The Mad Men & Women of Science Marketing Book
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5 Key Factors to Consider When Creating Your Display Ads
A lot of our content returned to basics this year. Because marketing changes so quickly, it’s very easy to forget just how effective traditional tactics can be. The stand-by’s are also the easiest to rush through. (Who hasn’t basically repeated a campaign that ran the year before?) In this blog post, readers paused and took a minute to review the best tactics for display ads: goals, simplicity, CTA, the value proposition, and optimization.
Read ‘5 Key Factors to Consider When Creating Your Display Ads’
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15 Wacky Trade Show Gimmicks
A blast from the past. This post was published in 2015! But event marketing is a key tenant for a lot of science companies, who use trade shows to demo new products, recruit top scientists, and expose their brand to a high concentration of scientists. (Plus, this post is a little fun.) See some great examples on how other marketers are taking their exhibits up a notch.
Read ‘ 15 Wacky Trade Show Booth Gimmicks’
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8 Creative Banner Ad Tips to Energize Your Next Digital Campaign
Another post from the archives, which shows just have much banner ads are…. having a moment. They can interrupt readers, Google is cracking down on pop-ups, and advertisers are getting lower click through rates year over year. However, there’s a key piece of information missing from this picture: the issue is not simply that the medium is ineffective overall, but how marketers are using them. We advertise our own content on cen.acs.org and pubs.acs.org, and when using display ads to promote quizzes or hook the viewer for a webinar, they perform so much better. Read more on how to effectively harness the display ad below.
Read ‘8 Creative Banner Ad Tips to Energize Your Next Digital Campaign
As always, thanks for reading! Please don’t hesitate to reach out to cenmediagroup@acs.org with any questions, comments, interview requests or other inquiries.
What topics do you want to see in 2018? Let us know in the comments below.
