How 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 moreAre you using this clever Facebook strategy to boost your B2B sales?
Most of us have developed at least fair skills at Google searches, but for many small business owners there may be a search platform that will pay far quicker dividends than Google. I’m talking about Facebook. Searching Facebook is, in many ways, the same as searching Google – at least for people, places, and keywords. The only thing you need to keep in mind is that you’re searching within the community of Facebook users and the content they create. If what you are searching for is buried somewhere within Facebook, there’s a good chance you’ll find it. If you’re in the B2B sector, you can get a lot of valuable information and connect with businesses easily using Facebook search. Here’s how it’s done: Search for the type of business that interests you, Select “Pages” and “See All,” Click to and examine the each business page to determine your level of interest, Note contact information and other details, such as the size of the business’ following, and Use Facebook Messenger to directly contact the business, if appropriate to your strategy. Let me show you For my illustration, I did a search for “restaurants in Florida.” That’s a pretty huge category. You can narrow it down significantly by using search terms like “restaurants in [city name}” or even “restaurants near me.” Note that Facebook, like Google, makes suggestions as you’re entering your search terms. I could have searched for “mom and pop restaurants in florida.” The first search results page that Facebook delivers includes a wide range of categories. For the most part, you’ll want to drill down to business Pages. However, there might be some cases when you’ll want to see “People” or see posts by your friends. Discovering your friends’ activity within your search criteria could be extremely valuable. For example, you might find that you have a friend who could make an important introduction for you. You might also uncover a Facebook Group related to your search that you should join. However, going to the full list of business pages will probably be the way you most often navigate from the initial search results page. Once you start examining each business page, you can glean a wealth of information. For example, if the page has a lot of followers, you can estimate how big it is and consequently what kind of budget it has for your product or services and perhaps even the likelihood that it needs what you sell. Basic information such as a phone number, business hours, and website URL are also listed. For many retail businesses, you’ll be able to see when they are the busiest, so you can avoid making contact during those hours. Also, take a few moments to scroll through posts. You might discover the name of the owner or manager and you’ll also start to get a feel for the “culture” of the business. You might find shared areas of interest, which you can use to build rapport. One of the biggest benefits of using Facebook business pages is your ability to send a quick note via Facebook Messenger to the business. Don’t jump into an immediate sales mode, but use it to introduce yourself or your business and compliment the business you’re making contact with. Use Messenger to build a...
read moreGet 100s of blog topics with one word and one click
For anyone tasked with the care and feeding of a blog, the single biggest problem in the long run is brainstorming worthy topics. Further, in the perfect world, the topics you cover in your blog would coincide with the topics people are investigating on the Internet. When those two areas overlap, you increase your ability to reach people through organic search engine inquiries. This can be especially powerful if you create content that Google uses in what we call search engine “position zero,” and giving you a chance to earn that position is the goal of this article. However, let me first take a moment to explain position zero. Often, an explanatory paragraph will appear at the top of Google search results, above “regular” listings of website pages. Below is an example when I searched Google for the best time to plant grass seeds. I’m sure you recognize this kind of information that often appears at the top of search result pages. It can take different formats, such as recipes and visual galleries. But the kind we’ll be discussing are generally short paragraphs or numbered lists. Now for the strategy: If you write blog articles that answer questions people ask on Google, you can get a chance to be listed in the coveted position zero. There are two basic strategies you have to follow to have a chance at this: Have your blog written in a way that tells Google you are answering a specific question, and Know the questions people ask. Writing and organizing your article Google publishes concise answers in these snippets. In other words, you can’t take five paragraphs to answer the question. You can take more space to expand on your answer, but you need to state the question and give the answer very succinctly. My grass seed example, comes from a page that answers several questions about planting grass. The question appears at the top of the page as a link to the answer below – where the question is asked again and answered in a short paragraph: If you want the chance to grab one of these spots, repeat a question word-for-word, and then answer it in a short paragraph. It must be clear to search engine crawlers that you are answering a specific question. Finding relevant topics For content, your goal is to write articles that answer questions that are often asked on Google. Perhaps the easiest way to do this is to do a keyword search at Answer the Public. Enter just one solid keyword or keyword phrase on this website and you’ll get a long list of questions you can use for blog topics. Below you’ll see the results when I entered the keyword “travel.” One thing I really like about this site is that you can download your results in a comma separated file so you can bring the questions into a spreadsheet. Once you do that, you can mix up questions on a variety of keywords related to your industry and then create a content calendar for your business. I have some final advice and a couple of warnings for you before we leave the topic. First, if you are primarily a local business, where appearing in local searches is your bread and butter, don’t put a tremendous...
read moreThis week in small business: Get ‘into the zone’ and take your productivity to the max!
This week’s collection of curated content reveals the connection between respect and productivity, how attention management will get you “into the zone,” and what keeps 22 successful entrepreneurs inspired to keep on keeping on! Leadership, management, and productivity Lynn Tesoro, Co-Founder and CEO of the HL Group is the focus on this installment of Laura Emily Dunn’s Women in Business Q&A. Need to hook up with a WordPress developer? Matteo Duo will show you the ropes. Victor Lipman makes some great points on the links between respect and productivity. Anyone who manages others needs to know these things. The same old productivity strategies don’t work anymore, says Maura Thomas, so it’s time to get “into the zone” via attention management. Marketing and sales Ivan Ivanov gives a good run down on the important differences between driving traffic to your site via search engine optimization and social media marketing. Ignite Visibility CEO John Lincoln goes point-by-point in this piece on how to start a social media marketing strategy. If you have a blog, you need to see Joe Goers’ eight simple ways to improve your SEO results. Christine Yodsukar gives us five practical social media marketing tips that will improve sales. In her Entrepreneur article, Emily Richett explains how having just a few loyal fans can make a big difference. Entrepreneurship, startups, and innovation Overnight success takes a while, and Paulina Guditch makes this point very well in her Forbes article, Why You Need To Dedicate At Least Four Years To Your Startup Idea. Need some gas in your tank? Nina Zipkin talked to 22 successful entrepreneurs to find out what inspires them to keep...
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