3 reasons to diversify your online marketing
Too many small businesses are one algorithm tweak or shift in the social media popularity winds away from a wiped out digital marketing program. These businesses essentially put all of their digital marketing effort into one strategy or social media platform. The online marketing world is littered with their corpses: The businesses that depended on organic SEO based on backlinks from low value sites. (Their Google rankings disappeared when the search engine giant started penalizing sites with those bogus links.) Companies that relied on their posts appearing in the Facebook newsfeeds of their fans and followers. (Facebook is constantly erecting new roadblocks between your posts and news feeds.) Influencers who launched careers using Snapchat stories. (Many lost their audiences when Instagram got into the “story” business and caused an exodus of users away from Snapchat over to Instagram.) 200 million Vine users were lopped off when Twitter decided to shut down the mini-video platform. These examples capsulize the first reason you need to work hard to diversify your online marketing: 1. When you depend on one platform or strategy, it’s not a question of “if” conditions will change, but “when” they will change. We’ve encouraged you to be exploring multiple social media platforms to find where your top prospects hang out. That is always a sound strategy, and it should be an ongoing one. Not only do the demographics of your core customers evolve (they tend to get older!), but the next generation of your top prospects is out there…somewhere. Your job is to find out where they are and start laying the groundwork for bringing them into the fold. For these reasons: 2. You should develop multiple marketing channels to convert current prospects and nurture your next generation of customers. The third reason is as much about you as it is about your prospects or customers: 3. Exploiting multiple marketing channels develops and improves your creativity and broadens its appeal. Maybe you are an incredible article writer or have one on your team. But how good are you with images or videos? Teachers are well aware of the fact that people learn best with differing modes of delivering educational content. Some are visual learners, other are auditory, others need a tactile experience. I think that for most businesses a parallel situation exists with prospects. Don’t think that your 2,000-word blogs will press everyone’s button, in fact they might turn off some prospect. Some may need to see that information in an infographic or video to become truly engaged. Make your marketing multi-dimensional. Don’t sing a one-note song, your audience will soon become bored....
read moreMarketing tips: How to find out what’s hot (and not) locally
The way I see things, it’s usually a good idea to jump on the bandwagon, because even if you’re the last person on, you still get the benefit of the ride. The “bandwagon” I’m talking about here is trending Internet topics. We’ve posted here before about sites to check out in your search for trending topics to use in content marketing. Among those are Twitter and Google. I want to quickly touch on that topic again, but focus on local trends. For many small businesses, global trends may not be as important as the trends in their states and cities. Fortunately, you can drill down on some sites to get more localized trend intelligence to use in your digital marketing. Twitter is the place to begin. By default, you get what Twitter calls “Tailored Trends.” These combine your interests and your location. I believe it also includes the larger “global” trends. In any case, sometimes you can squeeze more information out of Twitter Trends, by changing your settings so that it only includes trends based on your location. On your Twitter home page there’s a box labeled “Trends for you.” Click “change,” then click “change” again in the pop-up that follows. Next, you’ll see some recent locations. The location you want to check – your hometown, for instance – will probably be listed there. If so, click on it and you’re done. If you don’t see the location for which you would like to see local trends, click on “Select your location” in the middle of the pop-up box. From there you’ll get two pull down menus that will let you select your country and your city. Go through these steps and you’ll be able to see exactly what Twitter trends are sweeping your local area. You can also evaluate local trends on Google. By evaluate, I mean that you can measure the relative interest of trending search terms. You can’t go to Google and find out the search trends for your area; you can only get as “granular” as your country. However, if you want to find out the relative popularity of a specific search term in your area, you can drill down to your state and the bigger cities within your state. Here’s what you do: From the Google Trends page, enter your search term at the top of the page and hit return. In the Interest by region box, click on the United States (or your country). In the Interest by subregion box, click on your state. Find your community or nearby larger city to see the relative popularity of your search term. Armed with these local insights, you have the power to create content that engages local prospects by jumping on the bandwagons that they are already riding....
read moreHow strong are your skills in these 6 critical online marketing areas?
“Girls only like guys who have great skills.” – Napoleon Dynamite. “Skills” were the key to success with high school girls, as Napoleon Dynamite viewed his world. And, I’d have to say that skills are the key to success in digital marketing today. The problem for a small business owner is that as digital marketing has matured, the array and depth of skills required for success has increased greatly. For example, if you think you’re killing two birds with one stone – content marketing and social media marketing – by using a plugin on your site that announces a new blog post to your social media accounts, you’re badly mistaken. There are six skills I want you to consider and for each one you need to soberly assess your strengths and weaknesses, or the skills and weaknesses of those to whom you have delegated responsibility. 1. Content Marketing For our purposes here, we’ll define this as the blogs and infographics that are generally published on your website. (I’ve made video a separate category.) The major challenges here are maintaining a consistent publication schedule and keeping your content fresh and engaging. To assess your skills, consider: Your technical writing skills (Do you make grammar and usage errors?), Your creative writing skills (Can you keep your content interesting and engaging?), Your subject area expertise (Do you know enough to keep people coming back?), and Your time and energy commitment (Are you running out of gas?). When creating content seems too burdensome, it’s time to hand it off to someone in-house or available on a contract basis to can keep the ball rolling. The worst mistake is to give up creating content…because your competitors might not be quitters! 2. Social Media Marketing The song says that “Love is a many splendored thing” and today so is social media. As a consumer of social media, no matter what interests you have, you can find it well represented on one or more social media platforms. Words, memes, videos, jokes, inspiration, fantasy, practical, and any other genre and medium you can think of will be well represented in social media. Your challenge is to be able to create social media posts that hit the sweet spots of your prospects and customers. They would probably appreciate a mix of informative and entertaining posts using words, pictures, and even video. Do you have the skills to create that wide range of social media posts? 3. Video Marketing Video marketing today crosses and connects content marketing and social media marketing. For example, many businesses need to post videos on their company website, but at the same time they would benefit greatly from doing a Facebook Live video. From a technical standpoint, video today might be created via your smartphone or it might be created using high-quality, high-def cameras. In the same way, it might be a simple unedited five-minute video stream or it might need to be a professionally edited half-hour instructional video. Few – if any – small business owners will have the kind of skills and equipment to handle all of these video creation assignments. 4. Paid and organic traffic growth strategies The major goal of any digital marketing campaign is to drive more qualified prospects to a website. Marketers grow traffic organically via search engine...
read moreHow to use Facebook’s ‘Pages to Watch’ tool to see what’s working for your competitors
Does your business page have at least 100 likes on Facebook? If so, you should be using Facebooks free “Pages to Watch” tool. With this tool, you can instantly see what is working for your competitors on Facebook and also measure your performance against theirs. It’s super easy to use, so let me show you how it’s done. First navigate to your page and click on “Insights” at the top. By default, that will take you to the “Overview.” If you end up on a different Insights page, click on Overview at the top of the list on the left. Once you’re on the Overview page, scroll down to the bottom. This is where you’ll find the analytical tool that you’ll be working with. Have about five of your competitors ready– or others Facebook pages you’d like to understand better – click “Add Pages” and then enter their names, one at a time. Make sure you have their spelling right so Facebook is able to properly search for the pages you’re interested in. In my example below, I’ve done this for some of the big car makers. When you’re finished, you’ll have a nice chart that gives you an overview of how your competitors are doing on Facebook. But the real magic comes when you click on their names. When you do that, Facebook reveals that company’s top performing post from the previous seven days. Discovering what works well for your competitors should help you fine tune you own Facebook...
read moreA lesson from Pringles: How to promote your brand more creatively
It’s always a smart idea when you can get a practical (and free) marketing lesson from a multi-million-dollar ad agency. Today we thank Pringles for picking up the tab and giving us a great example of brand-based versus product-based messaging. Recently Twitter published the findings of a study that looked at the marketing mix of branding and product advertising with an emphasis on video. They found – and this won’t shock anyone – that product advertising had a much higher short-term ROI than brand-only marketing: $2 versus 30 cents on their platform. However, it was a couple of video messaging examples that I felt were interesting. One message was product based, the other brand based. Neither was intended to immediately sell a can of Pringles. Each was designed to get the viewer involved in a contest. Here’s the brand-based Tweet with video: Support your team & share your chants with #PringlesSuperFans for a chance to win the ULTIMATE football prize!https://t.co/jJQnqoZyoF — Pringles (@Pringles_UK) June 15, 2016 I think this is the kind of presentation most of us would use if we were to promote a contest or something else of general interest – as opposed to promoting a direct sale of a product. However, the second example below shows how Pringles (or their ad agency) featured products in a video designed to get people involved in a contest. Join @ollyofficial at a private LDN show to help celebrate our 25th Birthday! Here’s how: https://t.co/TdV8sEPBaQ https://t.co/e2EvGfvxy3 — Pringles (@Pringles_UK) March 8, 2016 I think the second video is very creative and demonstrates an approach that most of us wouldn’t come up with on our own. Because the video is embedded in a Tweet, there’s no question about the brand; the familiar Pringles graphic is an integral part of every Pringles Tweet. And by using the Pringles cans with their flavors well displayed, there’s no question that Pringles products are also being “advertised.” Finally, because the video segues into a promotional pitch, the video does a good job encouraging viewers to participate in the contest or program. As you design your graphics or produce videos to promote your products, services, and brand, don’t allow your thinking to be pigeonholed. Marketing assets that look like product ads can actually be used to increase overall brand awareness....
read more