New Online Marketer? Grow some B.E.A.R.D!

 

It’s really funny how some marketers think that this playing field is all about making money, meeting customers’ demands and putting up with the daily dose of troubles in gathering more customers for their sake. In fact, we are in a new generation of marketers that falls shortly into these 3 categories.

• FULL of ideas, definitely NOT money minded, SLOW in planning and relationships

• LACKS ideas, DEFINITELY money minded, SLOW in planning and relationships

• LACKS ideas, definitely NOT money minded, GOOD at planning and relationships

You’re lucky if you’re a combination of 2 of these categories, but never did I find someone who is initially perfect. It will be always something that’s lacking and this gap made marketing a ground of equal competition (unless you are really that experienced, that is).

For a new marketer to dominate the playing field against something that is very well equipped with experience and foundations, you must grow something that I like to grow BEARD. Yes, I do have a beard, but this beard is not what I am talking about.

To be able to fill in that gap between those new marketers (and for those who have not yet perfected marketing), you must grow your Business Idea, E-mail List, Archives, Ranking Plans and Distraction

Yes, you might be confused right now, but I’ll assure you you’ll be educated in the process.

1. Business Idea

One of the first things that you need to build is your business idea. You must know the blueprint of your market in the future. Not having a single idea on what you want in this business is a big NO. If you really want to dominate (or at least be equal to) your experience competitors, you must first know your mission and objectives when it comes to marketing.

2. E-mail List

Another thing to grow is your E-mail list. You must have connections in order to execute your press releases and newsletters smoothly. Not having any fixed connections could be a ball and chain to your business, slowing it down until others could outshine you.

3. Archives

Not just because you already posted it and it goes straight online doesn’t mean you don’t need to have a soft copy of it. Make it a habit of keeping documents on a certain folder. Instead of searching through pages after pages of documents when updating contents, you could simply zip through those archives.

4. Ranking Plans

As new online marketers, you must also have your SEO plans for your website. You must spread out needed tasks (such as content creation, graphics, social boosters, etc.) and distribute them nicely. Foolishly tackling SEO will only lead to unexposed websites or worse, super low rankings.

5. Distractions

Now, you’d be wondering “Why should I have distractions in this business if I really want to dominate the field?” It is a fact that every marketers needs to focus on his or her business, but overstressing on things could make your brain fizzle and could burn your brain’s spark plug. Every marketer should have a little bit of distraction in order to ease up tensions when it comes to marketing. This will help you make clearer decisions that could help you improve.

Whether you’re new or experienced marketers in this business, you must have a BEARD. And don’t worry, you won’t need those monthly shavers to maintain your marketing beard. Just let it grow until you achieve your goals in marketing!

 

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/article/20141028023321-328054593-new-online-marketer-grow-some-b-e-a-r-d?trk=hb_ntf_MEGAPHONE_ARTICLE_POST

5 Tips on How to Be Effective at Content Marketing

 

Content marketing is fun but it often feels overwhelming.

It’s about inspiration, perspiration (doing the work) and good luck. Making that content move on a social web is sometimes more about having your content in the right place at the right time!

But despite the frustrations the only way to succeed in content marketing is to continuously improve the strategies and approaches used in every content marketing campaign.

That’s the persistence part!

Bringing every phase of the campaign to the highest level allows content marketers to become more flexible, creative and effective in their daily work.

However, becoming an effective content marketer would require time and energy to devote into each specific task and to produce content assets that would appeal to a targeted audience. The more you practice content marketing, the better off you will be excellent in what you are doing.

In this post, I’d like to share with you tips on how you can become more effective in your field, produce better results, earn more traffic and leads through your content pieces and retain your happy customers.

Let’s get started.

1. Identify and understand your targeted audience

Answer the “who” question in content marketing. “Who is your audience?”.

By looking at your brand’s selling points, mission/vision, core values and business-related goals, you will have an idea of which group(s) of people your business is primarily targeting. Unless you identify your audience, you’ll be having a hard time seeing good results from your campaigns.

You should also brainstorm about the different persona groups that you know would benefit from your brand’s offerings (product, service, information, etc..).For instance, if you’re selling a cloud POS (point of sale) system, you could list down these persona groups: retailers, ecommerce webmasters and small business owners. They would normally comprise the whole audience that your content marketing campaigns should be able to target and engage with.

To understand the behavior of your targeted audience, you can place surveys or chat rooms on your website to get some feedback from your customers. This could help you improve the way you create your content assets as you will be able to identify the needs of your users and help them solve their problems.

2. Be eager to experiment and produce actual data

A regular audit of your content marketing campaigns allows you to evaluate which strategies/methods/approaches had managed to positively affect your current results. This would help you develop new strategies that will eventually be the core foundation of your campaign.

An audit normally comprises of the following tasks:

• Identifying which content format (image, article, video, etc..) gets the most number of shares, comments and traffic.
• Determine which piece brings the most number of leads (potential customers) to your company by looking at the site’s Google Analytics account (conversion goals).
• Listing down content assets with the highest return on investment.

At the start of the campaign, you can already estimate the return of investment of each of your content asset. This presentation by Ross Hudgens is an awesome resource to help you calculate the ROI of your content.

3. Replicate content strategies from other niches

If you’re working for multiple clients but they are in the same industry, the tendency is to be less creative with crafting your content assets for all of those clients. The main reason is that you may be creating the same content format, use the same topic, and promote it with the same method which diminishes your ability to be creative with the process.

The key solution for this is to replicate content strategies from webmasters from other niches. To get started with it, you can look for types of content that are most commonly seen on many blogs in that other niche that you choose. Use Buzzsumo, Topsy and Cognitive SEO to find the content asset with the most number of shares and links. When you already have a list of the most shared pieces, you can select five or ten of them and adapt the techniques used by the content publisher in creating and promoting the piece. Observe and gather the results of that experiment for future references.

4. Understand other aspects of online marketing

Content marketing should also be tied with other aspects of online marketing including social media and conversion rate optimization (CRO).

Your knowledge about CRO could help you craft an asset that can generate sales and leads to your business. A good background on how to write call to actions alongside your content could entice customers to contact you for products/services. It could also give you an understanding on which color, font and design is the most attractive to your users.

Social media skills could help you promote your content to targeted group of audience even if your brand is still new in the industry. Those people who’ve shared your competitor’s assets are good targets for outreach and content promotion. Reach out to those people and just ask them if they could see your content (never tell them to share your piece, they know what to do).

Listening to your customers on social networks is a good way to get some topic ideas for your blog posts. By doing this, you get assured that your blog posts are the ones that your audience would love to see and read.

There are a lot of other online marketing aspects that you must be able to understand and at least know the basics so you can maximize all your efforts in planning and executing your content marketing campaign.

5. Learn from the best content marketing experts

Reading case studies, stories and actionable tips from the top content marketing experts could help you test new strategies for your campaigns whether it deals with content creation or content promotion.

Here is a list of the top influencers in content marketing:

• Ross Hudgens
• Jason Acidre
• Rand Fishkin
• Brian Clark
• Joe Pulizzi

Follow them and get updated with their shares. Learn from them and become good marketers.

 

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Read more at http://www.jeffbullas.com/2014/10/10/5-tips-on-how-to-be-effective-at-content-marketing/#BtQT2kADpsWSFeQX.99