Ryan Kane

There was a time when BlackBerry, the electronics manufacturer, was the undisputed smartphone champion in the business world. But in the late 2000s, Apple and Android entered the arena, armed with cutting-edge, user-friendly devices and operating systems. BlackBerry didn’t adapt. Its market share shrank from 20% in 2009 to a minuscule 0.1% in 2016.
Customer churn—the rate at which customers leave your business—can be a silent killer. When it goes unchecked, as in BlackBerry’s case, it eventua...

The average business loses 5.6% of its customers per month to churn. That means if you’re like most businesses, you’re replacing half of your customers annually just to break even.
But finding new customers isn’t your only option—which is a relief, because acquiring new customers costs five times more than retaining existing ones. By identifying why customers are leaving and nudging them to stay, you can speed up your company’s growth without busting your budget.
You probably already have a h...

There’s no more universally-repeated marketing principle than “make data-driven decisions.” But when it comes to account-based marketing (ABM), many companies are still figuring out how to gather intent data and use it constructively. According to a 2022 survey, 45% of new ABM programs and 34% of mature ABM programs fail to use intent data.
If you’re pursuing an ABM strategy, you already know the power of focusing your marketing and sales teams on the most valuable accounts. But properly inco...

Most digital marketing ads—Instagram ads for H&M clothing or display ads pushing a Disney+ subscription, for example—are for low-ticket items. For consumers, making the decision to spend $10-$20 only requires a short buying cycle. Many low-ticket items are impulse buys, particularly if they’re listed on Amazon, where conversion rates are considerably higher than other platforms.
But high ticket digital marketing requires a different approach.
For pricey items like enterprise software, jewelry...

There's an endless supply of apps promising to organize my life and work, but I still haven't conquered my digital clutter. Even being a loyal Notion user hasn't eliminated my organizational Achilles heel: the dozen or so .txt files cluttering my desktop at any given time.
But recently, I came across Mem. On the surface, it looks like other Notion alternatives: a clean, minimalist workspace environment that brings notes and project management together. But the vision for Mem is bigger than th...

We’ve all had some harrowing digital purchase experiences. My latest? A small Central American airline with the sketchiest checkout page I’ve seen since 1999. But hey—it was the only direct flight available, so I crossed my fingers, took out my least favorite credit card, and pressed “Buy now.” Luckily, it worked out. Still, I found myself firmly among the 90% of less-than-satisfied customers who feel most brands don’t deliver a good digital experience.
Fortunately, companies are slowly awake...

Over the last year, I've edited over 100 documents with Grammarly. So when I heard that Grammarly was adding generative AI functionality, I jumped at the chance to test it. Like most AI writing tools, GrammarlyGO is built on GPT-3, so it's not at any advantage in terms of the quality of its output. Instead, its edge is the fact that Grammarly is already a powerful editing tool.
How to create an AI writing coach
Could the convenience factor—the addition of AI tools directly into my editing wor...

If you think affiliate marketing means $0.50 commissions on Amazon books, I’ve got good news for you—some payouts are 10,000x that much. HubSpot affiliates, for example, can earn as much as $3,600 from a single sale of the company’s enterprise marketing software.
This is the beauty of high ticket affiliate marketing:
Rather than relying on selling thousands of books to make a living, you can cherry-pick affiliate programs with high payouts and design a marketing strategy around them.
More pro...

The year before DALL·E 2 came out, my wife gave me a digital drawing tablet as a birthday gift. I'd wanted to pick up digital art as a hobby, but I quickly lost steam. After watching a few YouTube videos on how to get started, the idea of learning the complex software and techniques involved felt overwhelming.

Then, in April 2022, DALL·E 2 was released. All of a sudden, instead of learning complicated programs, I could create digital art in seconds with an AI prompt. I was hooked. To see what...

Marketers are impatient. We want results fast, which means it’s easy to get distracted by new tactics and shiny objects. But sticking to a well-defined strategy is key—and digital marketers who follow a carefully-documented plan are 313% more likely to report success.
As a digital marketing specialist who’s worked with dozens of businesses, I’ve seen the impact of good and bad strategy on outcomes. In this article, I'll share my insights on how to build an effective digital marketing strategy...

Ever had a consumer experience that makes you question everything? Warby Parker is firmly in that category for me. It showed me how broken the old way of getting eyeglasses was—and how much I’d rather handle everything online instead of at a local optician.
Like the majority of customers today, I’m an “omnichannel customer”—I use a combination of apps, websites, and in-store shopping. 73% of customers use multiple channels on their path to purchase, according to Harvard Business Review. And o...

Use these AI design tools to create, edit, and enhance your designs.
When I first got my hands on Photoshop, I did the most logical thing any other 15-year-old kid would've done: I edited a family photo by swapping everyone's heads onto different bodies. It was the early days of Photoshopping, so my family was blown away. A copy of the photo even made its way onto my grandparents' fridge.
The only problem (other than the creepy head-swapping)? It was painstaking work. It took hours.
If you're...

Think Facebook’s one billion users are impressive? It still can’t top email, which had a staggering four billion users in 2020. Despite being invented in 1971, email is more relevant than ever, with over 300 billion emails sent and received daily.
Email’s popularity alone is a strong argument for building an email list. And as it turns out, most consumers prefer when brands contact them by email.
Add to that the fact that relying on platforms like Google, Facebook, or TikTok means that those ...

If you’ve ever used Google Translate or let Gmail autocomplete your sentences, you’ve seen natural language processing (NLP) in action. Smart assistants, like Alexa and Siri, also depend on NLP technology, as does sentiment analysis—the process brands use to analyze social media and other data sources to measure how customers feel about them.
Sentiment analysis and natural language processing models are improving fast. The latest models have been trained on over 175 billion parameters—ten tim...

Ah, social media. Depending on the day, it can feel like a vibrant town square or a toxic wasteland. But one thing’s for sure—with dozens of social media platforms and review sites, social media sentiment analysis is the only way to monitor what’s happening at scale. Fortunately, it’s worth the effort. Consumers spend 20-40% more with brands that engage with customers on social media.
At its most basic level, social media sentiment analysis works by flagging customer feedback as positive, neg...