If digital marketing increasingly depends on visuals and videos, does good writing still matter? Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer at MarketingProfs and Wall Street Journal best-selling author of Everybody Writes, makes a compelling case that it does. In fact, she says, “Writing is still very relevant to what marketers need to do today.There’s even more pressure on it now because we’re in a world of exploding content.”

Ann is this week's guest on the Marketing Cloudcast , the marketing podcast from Salesforce . Her book Everybody Writes is one of the first resources I recommend to aspiring marketers because it focuses on writing best practices that anyone can actually implement.

According to Ann, even those who aren't born with Shakespearian (or Hemingwayian, or even Vonnegutian) abilities can indeed learn to become better writers, and she's developed valuable tips and checklists to help everybody become a more capable writer. Almost every job in digital marketing — from email to social, and content marketing to display advertising — includes writing and communication as core responsibilities, so why not improve your effectiveness?

Listen to the full podcast episode to hear Ann's useful writing tips first-hand, or hear a preview below:

Artificial intelligence will be at the core of most enterprise products that deal with large amounts of text, structured data and image data. Salesforce Einstein strives to bring AI to use cases in service, sales, marketing and others by embedding it directly into Salesforce products and enabling developers through our platform. AI will empower every company to deliver smarter, more personalized customer experiences.

Democratizing AI to everyone is challenging but something that Salesforce is uniquely positioned to take on. Our mission is to bring the power of AI to CRM, and Salesforce Research is focused on bringing cutting edge algorithms into the Salesforce CRM ecosystem, ensuring that our customers benefit from the latest breakthroughs in AI.

A health-conscious work environment is becoming the norm for many companies, and for good reason. Organizations that successfully implement comprehensive wellness programs see positive business outcomes and create thriving work environments for their employees.

In fact, a study done by Harvard Business Review found that health care costs increased by just 1 to 2 percent for organizations with workplace wellness systems in place, as opposed to 7 percent, which is the national average.

If you already have a wellness program in place, then fitness trackers will fit right into the culture you’re working to build. Otherwise, this can be a first step in that direction and then some, because bringing this popular piece of technology into your office isn’t just good for creating health awareness among employees. It can also be used to improve sales, promoting friendly competition among employees.

Get your sales team moving and selling more with these tips and ideas for using fitness trackers to improve productivity.

In the course of my nearly 20-year career I've collaborated with 1000s of customers making a CRM vendor selection, many involving Salesforce. Customers would often boil it down to two questions:

“Salesforce is a higher price. Is it worth it?”

“Why do customers pay a premium?”

These are fair and reasonable questions. Salesforce is a premium offering. It will always be incumbent upon Salesforce to continually justify that premium. Because many of you are considering Salesforce, I thought I would share my top 5 thoughts on what clients told me were reasons why they believed the premium was worth their Salesforce investments.

When working on sales efforts, the focus is usually on getting new leads, which will hopefully convert and build your business. There are plenty of ways to generate new leads: performance marketing, cold emails, introductions to new people and more.

While these are all valid ways of generating leads, some of them might work wonders for one company, but might not necessarily work for others. It’s definitely worthwhile to try every single method and then decide which to focus on.

I’d like to discuss what I think should be done before cold calling and spending money on performance marketing. I’m sharing these insights because these proved to be useful for me at Veed.me on a regular basis.