Sure Oak

How to reach out to Simon Thompson:

Introducing a new company podcast may sound like a daunting challenge, but according to Simon Thompson, CEO of podcasting service provider, Content Kite, it may be key in gaining meaningful business connections.

How To Start A Podcast

At its core, setting up your new podcast really only requires some type of podcasting microphone. However, much like a website, a variety of separate elements go into making a podcast, and more advanced designs may require more time and skill to create.

As Simon explains, the difficulty level of setting up a podcast depends “on how much effort you want to put into it, how big you want to make it, how professional you want it to sound.” NPR may invest more time and money to produce their narrative podcasts, but you don’t need to adopt an intricate or costly podcast structure to enjoy the benefits of podcasting.

In fact, according to Simon’s statistics, your business is likely better off with a basic podcast than with a souped-up blog. For one thing, podcast listenership is on the rise, and trends do not show any signs of slowing.

With more people regularly subscribing to podcasts, marketers have begun to recognize podcasting as an effectiveness method for introducing their brands and services to large pools of potential customers.

Podcasts have also been demonstrated to be more engaging than other forms of content sharing. This may be due in part to the personability of hearing a speaker’s voice over reading content mentally.

Also, Simon pointed out, today there a hundreds of billions of websites, and even more blog posts than that competing for readership. In contrast, there are currently only hundreds of millions of podcasts competing for listenership. With few barriers to entry and less competition, why wouldn’t your brand launch its own podcast?

The Main Benefits Of Podcast Production

Podcasting may appear to be a form of content marketing, but the benefits of starting your own podcast production go far beyond that. According to Simon, podcasts do help with content marketing, but brands should focus more on the other hidden benefit: finding business connections.

You probably aren’t going to make many business friends emailing a blog post link around. However, it turns out you probably will make some connections by inviting guest speakers onto your podcast production. Reach out to potential partners and industry influencers with the opportunity to interview on and gain exposure from your podcast.

By offering collaborators something valuable, such as brand exposure, it is not only likely that they will join you to create a podcast episode, you will also have established a business relationship with potential to boost your own brand. It’s a classic win-win situation.

Simon further breaks down how you may find new customers in your listeners, but you can build partnerships with podcast guests, or team up with industry influencers to give your company more credibility and authority. Bottom line, do not hesitate to reach out to others with sound reputations in the industry. Even if you miss, you may end up with a referral.

Podcasting Tips: Put Your Listeners First

While your new podcast is sure to benefit your business, please don’t forget to provide value to the listeners too! “Always, always, always the listener has to be first”, Simon reminds, “for someone to make it onto your ideal guest list,

How to reach out to Mikael Yang:

Chatbots are nothing new. So, why are digital marketers suddenly so hyped?

According to ManyChat's co-founder, Mikael Yang, “...it’s not about the chatbots.”

Actually, chatbots have been in existence for decades, having debuted some time in the 70s or 80s. More than that, chatbot technology has not drastically improved since those days. Instead, this new wave of excitement for chatbots seems to be driven by the sweeping popularity of online messenger platforms. The growing volume of messenger-users means chatbots now have larger and more targeted audiences to “chat” with.

What Is A Chatbot?

Chatbots have existed longer than many people might think. While they made their first appearances on forums and often served entertainment purposes, today chatbots help businesses market their products and services directly to potential customers, handle customer services with loyal patrons, and, in some cases, even process customer transactions.

While the technology behind chatbots hasn’t transformed entirely since then, it has certainly grown more effective in delivering value and has become more simple to use than ever before. Chatbots communicate with consumers in an intuitive way, offering consumers menus of options and calls to action.

Though developers continue expanding the breadth of their functionality and making them more human-like, chatbots have also became simpler for businesses to use for marketing efforts. Today, business owners can set up chatbots to represent their brand through Facebook Messenger without a deep, technical understanding of their workings.

With their interactive features, chatbots are statistically shown to be more effective in marketing efforts than traditional email marketing techniques; however, many email marketers remain hesitant to make the switch.

According to Mikael, one common misconception holding these traditional digital marketers back is that chatbots are bulky and difficult to build up. In reality, chatbots are not much more than structured conversations, and designing one can be easy and fun.

Mikael explains that ultimately, the focus should not be placed on chatbot technology itself. Instead, marketers should celebrate chatbots for allowing them to “...connect with customers through a channel that they actually are engaged in and in a place where they actually read your messages.” After all, Mikael’s data suggests that chatbots have higher open rates, CTRs, and levels of engagement.

Is Email Marketing In Decline?

Just how much more engagement can a business experience by switching from traditional email marketing tactics to messenger-based chatbots? According to Mikael, “it’s about how do you map [chatbots] to the actual conversation, to the actual channel where you’re getting 80% open rates and 20% CTRs.”

In other words, some chatbot marketers have reached amazing benchmarks in terms of engagement, but such success depends on how you build up a chatbot. Just as email marketing involves an element of strategy, so too do chatbots. You cannot create a chatbot without careful planning.

As online messaging platforms take off, email marketers are experiencing ongoing trends of lower open rates and insignificant CTRs. Companies all over the world are familiar with email marketing, and by now, consumers are too. In fact, the practice is so common that many email inboxes provide a separate folder to keep these marketing attempts out of your main inbox. In short, consumers have become desensitized to email marketing.

How to reach out to Hailey Friedman:

There is no room for guesswork in marketing strategy. Just ask Hailey Friedman, an 8th grade English teacher turned growth marketer with a passion for helping small businesses succeed.

According to Hailey, consulting data eliminates much of the guesswork by providing clear insights into the status and performance of marketing campaigns. By targeting and analyzing the right data, marketers can demonstrate the effectiveness of their campaigns in terms of creating new leads, opportunities, and closed deals. More than that, given the proper data,  marketers can also loosely predict the future performance of marketing campaigns. So, why aren’t more companies developing data-driven marketing strategies?

What is Data-Driven Marketing?

Each day, the internet continues to expand as new sites and social platforms develop. While this situation of endless opportunities to reach consumers may be a marketer’s dream, Hailey also points out the key challenges data-driven marketers experience in the face of this growth.  “The challenge there is that all this data lives in all these different platforms”, Hailey explained, “...how do you wrangle all that data together?”

If each site and platform stores marketing data separately, it can be both time-consuming and frustrating to locate the relevant data in multiple sources, import the data into a common marketing dashboard, and then conduct an analysis. Hailey is all too familiar with this tedious challenge and recounts the career journey that led her to become infatuated with improving data-driven marketing with useful tools.

Originally an 8th grade English teacher, Hailey pivoted toward marketing after her experience creating and launching a mobile app. It didn’t take long for Hailey to value the importance of marketing: “You can have a really cool product, and you can have an awesome team. But if you don’t know how to get customers ... then you don’t have anything that’s worth very much.”

Fascinated by the idea of converting consumers to customers, Hailey began pursuing more consumers. While she learned valuable lessons there, Hailey decided to pursue a more specialized opportunity in San Francisco, home of the start-up. There Hailey joined the RealtyShares team where her mentor, Mark, helped her learn the basics behind data-driven marketing.

Hailey soon came to accept marketing as a “numbers-heavy” occupation. “I was lucky that Mark kind of took me under his wing and pushed me to wrap my head around it,” Hailey admitted, “you cannot be an awesome growth marketer if you shy away from that numbers piece.” With a natural drive to learn, Hailey worked hard to teach herself data analysis.

Hailey’s data gathering and analysis alone would take up to 20 hours each week, and she soon recognized the need for a tool that could track data over multiple platforms and provide relevant analyses.

No More Data Headaches

One day, Hailey heard about Improvato.io, a marketing dashboard that grabs marketing data from a variety of platforms and consolidates these numbers into meaningful metrics. Hoping to help free other data-driven marketers from the headache of gathering data manually as she once had, Hailey decided to join Improvato.io,

How to reach out to Aiden Carroll:

What is a customer journey?

Digital marketing trainer and speaker from the Coloring In Department, Aiden Carroll, can hardly hold back a smile at the opportunity to elaborate on his favorite topic. After all, Aiden explains, conversations about the customer journey do not come up nearly as often as they should. Every company should be talking about customer journey mapping as a means of improving customer experience by providing deeper insight into consumer needs and wants. So, why aren’t they?

Does A Customer Journey Definition Even Truly Exist?

From entrepreneurs claiming the customer journey model does not apply to their brand to companies claiming they already know everything they could possibly ever need to know about their customers, Aiden has already heard every excuse in the book when it comes to avoiding customer journey analysis.

Some entrepreneurs may resist investing time and resources in their customer journey because the concept itself seems ambiguous and difficult to fully grasp. It’s true, the customer journey is a broad and multifaceted concept that can be difficult to capture within a single definition, and it varies for each industry, brand, and service. Without a precise and replicable formula to follow, some entrepreneurs may shy away from giving their customer journey the consideration it deserves.

In reality, this fear of failure does more damage than good. When it comes to developing your customer journey, the only wrong approach is a strategy of ignorance. Aiden suggests that, at a basic level, customer journey mapping is successful as long as two key components are at play:

* Your data allows you to gain a clear understanding of your current status

* Your data helps you identify areas where you can add greater value for consumers

In other words, be creative with your customer journey framework as long as it remains useful to you. You may find inspiration from the customer journey map examples other brands have shared online, but ultimately your framework should be unique, tailored specifically to fit your brand and customers.

Whatever framework you come up with, “The world doesn’t need to agree on it,” Aiden reminds Tom, “but the organization certainly does.”

Customer Journey Map Examples as Guides

You may not find a ready-wear customer journey template for your brand by searching through Google, but there is certainly plenty to learn from case studies of other brands. Like the natural speaker he is, Aiden tells the story of a hypothetical customer journey involving travel industry services.

Beginning with a close look at the aspects of brand awareness that influenced the customer to choose a particular flight-booking service over another, to the moment that customer commits to using that service by checking in for departure, a customer journey analysis considers the true drivers behind consumer behavior. Aiden advises the eager entrepreneur to avoid jumping directly into “Solution Mode”. Customer journey mapping may occur in a cyclical structure, he explains, and you may not get it right on your very first try.

Customer journey mapping is about asking the right questions. While marketing strategies may also consider customer behavior, data is often used to maximize a brand’s visibility.

How to reach out to Brian Dean:

Brian Dean used to be a digital nomad.

Now, he’s a digital “slowmad.”

He used to travel the world, spending one night in Berlin and then jetting off for a two or three-day stay in Canada. It might sound glamorous, but according to Brian, it’s a great way to not get any work done. After growing tired of living off a miniscule budget, Brian decided to turn to the “slowmad” lifestyle. He still travels the world while working on his digital marketing, but now he spends weeks at a time in different places, being sure to get work done and still enjoy his travels.

HOW MUCH SHOULD YOU WORK?

Brian’s typical work day begins around ten and ends around 3.

“I’m not a long hours guy.”

In the early days of your career, Brian says it’s great to work a lot.

When he first started out, he would give himself from 7am-7pm to get his work done.

“You don’t know a lot, so you have a learn and work a lot.”

It gives you time to figure out what works and what doesn’t work for you, so when you’re older, you can simply do what works best for you.

WHAT IS MOST IMPORTANT?

To Brian, “There is nothing more important than creating.”

Brian always starts his day off by writing.

With a blog, there is nothing more important than creating content for the blog. So before he turns on his phone or checks his email, he is sure to write a new blog post for his website.

CREATING DOESN’T ALWAYS MEAN STARTING FROM SCRATCH

Sometimes content on a blog need updating, so writing something new doesn’t always mean writing a whole new post.

When things change with Google or with SEO, it’s just as important to go in and alter old content for relevance as it is to make new posts.

FIND OUT WHAT WORKS FOR YOU

Brian has done it all.

From running an agency, to working for an affiliate, to consulting, he has given it all a try.

In the end, he says you should never stop trying to figure out what works for you and for your career.

KEY INSIGHTS

* Work more when you’re starting out and discover what works best for you.

* Never stop trying new things.

* Being a “slowmad” is most likely more lucrative than being a digital nomad.

BRIAN’S TAKEAWAYS

* As a blogger, there is nothing more important than creating content.

* Sometimes writing means rewriting, not just creating something new

* When pieces need updating, that is just as important as creating new content.

MORE FROM BRIAN DEAN

Backlinko

Backlinko’s YouTube Channel

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How to reach out to Mike King:

With SEO companies looking more and more like ad agencies, some of the technical aspects of SEO have been slipping through the cracks. On this week’s podcast, host Tom Casano speaks with iPullRank’s Mike King about what Technical SEO is and how you can use it to improve your rankings and overall business.

WHAT IS TECHNICAL SEO?

Technical SEO is pretty self-explanatory. It is simply the technical side of SEO, meaning every part of SEO not involving direct content marketing.

Technical SEO involves making sure the website is secure, the loading speeds are up to par, and all necessary tweaks have been made so you can increase your reach and add value to your website.

WHY IS TECHNICAL SEO IMPORTANT?

According to Mike, in the few years since SEO has gone into the content marketing realm, we have lost sight of how to make websites visible.

Everyone suddenly wanted to be a cool, fake ad agency that generated fun content.

But it is sometimes forgotten that the technical side of SEO is just as important, especially when you are working for big websites where a small tweak can be the difference in millions of dollars. We've seen the massive impact it can have, which is why Sure Oak offers technical SEO services.

Mike states that the content side is still important, but we can’t forget about technical SEO.

HOW MUCH DOES IT MATTER?

Website sizes range from millions of pages to WordPress sites with a much smaller number.

The bigger the site, the more technical SEO matters.

A site with a 2 billion page index will see a profound effect with just a small tweak in internal linking.

Although a site with only a few pages will not have as big of an effect, it’s all about the impact of scale from technical means.

WHAT IS IMPORTANT IN TECHNICAL SEO?

According to Mike, technical SEO is all about accessibility.

You need to make sure your site is running well, with quick load time and no dead links.

It also involves making sure your site is built in a way that is accessible to both Google and the people visiting your site.

When the content of a page changes, be sure to update your metadata and URL to ensure what your data is saying reflects what is on the page.

If you want to understand your site's technical SEO, test it using our free SEO tools. You can generate your own robots.txt file, test redirects, check your http headers, and more.

KEY INSIGHTS

* A small tweak in your technical SEO can mean a huge difference for your business.

* The bigger the site, the more technical SEO matters.

* First and foremost, make sure your website is accessible.

MIKE’S TAKEAWAYS

How to reach out to Deepak Shukla:

LinkedIn is a tool we all use to build our networks, but are you using it to its fullest potential? In this episode of the Sure Oak Podcast, Tom Casano talks with Deepak Shukla of Pearl Lemon on how you can use your LinkedIn profile to generate leads and turn them into business.

WHAT IS LINKEDIN GENERATION?

LinkedIn Generation is the process of finding people through the platform who are interested in spending money on your business. It can be done for both B2B and B2C businesses.

TAKE FULL ADVANTAGE OF LINKEDIN

There is an opportunity on LinkedIn to fill out your profile to the fullest, so you can utilize the platform to the fullest.

“If I’m going to spend three or 4,000 dollars with you every month, I’m going to read your entire LinkedIn profile.”

That means you should not just copy something from your LinkedIn resume into your summary and cut corners. Take the time to fill out every part of your profile, from your interests to your summary, so potential leads will know who you are.

LINKEDIN AND SEO

The LinkedIn search algorithm is just a simpler version of Google’s algorithm.

Use this to your advantage to optimize keywords you want to be found for.

In Deepak’s case, that’s SEO and Lead Generation.  (Learn about solar lead generation here.)

This is even a great way to develop inbound business from LinkedIn.

BE STRATEGIC WITH YOUR PICTURES

Have a nice picture.

Be sure you’re smiling and looking straight ahead.

A lot of people don’t smile in their LinkedIn photos, but according to Deepak, it’s important to show your personality in your profile photo.

For your cover photo, Deepak encourages you to use it as a way to show what your profile is all about. It’s the perfect place to put a call to action.

His says, “We do SEO really, really well.”

THE BASICS OF OUTREACH

Have content that goes out on your page on a daily basis.

It sounds easy enough, but people often lack the time, inspiration, and by extension, the content.

Here are Deepak’s solutions:

* Time: Save time by front loading content (write 70 status updates at once.)

* Inspiration: Google examples of LinkedIn status updates

* Content: Now you have the content you need.

There are dozens of great Linkedin automation tools to use to dock your statuses if you want them to go out automatically.

This way, you will stay on the top of people’s news feeds, you will drive traffic to your pages, and you will even gain more connections.

Also remember, it takes time. Don’t become disappointed after 15 days if things haven’t yet come together. Keep working at it, and you’ll be guaranteed to see results before you know it.

KEY INSIGHTS

* Utilize your profile to the fullest.

* Be sure you post a friendly, high-quality photo of you as your LinkedIn profile picture.

* Your cover photo is the perfect space for a call to action.

DEEPAK’S TAKEAWAYS

* LinkedIn’s algorithm is a simpler version of Google’s.

* Optimize your profile with the keywords that define your business.

* Never stop your outreach!

How to reach out to Ed Zaloga:

In the world of Digital Marketing, it can be easy to forget that the primary reason businesses sell products is to help solve problems for their consumers. On today’s episode of the Sure Oak Podcast, Tom Casano chats with Ed Zaloga from Responsify about why marketing should be seen less as a business to business activity and more human to human.

WHAT IS HUMAN TO HUMAN MARKETING?

H2H marketing is human-centered marketing and sales.

It gets away from marketing that is disruptive and unhelpful to people and focuses on establishing usefulness.

Ed wanted to find a way to engage with people more in a way they enjoy instead of disrupting and annoying them.

He now helps businesses empathize with and relate to their customers.

IT’S ALL ABOUT EMPATHY

Ed says that he and his team work to identify who the ideal customer is that they are targeting. They then focus on trying to understand and tap into what their primary challenges, goals and responsibilities are, and how those relate to the solution the business can provide.

With that understanding, they are better equipped to help those customers find the solutions they need in an organic way.

HOW TO DEVELOP EMPATHY

Go out and speak with people.

For a long time, marketers did everything from behind closed doors. But if you can meet people and have real conversations, you’ll be more able to interact with customers and see how they react to things.

It’s always better to ask open ended questions instead of trying to get data from surveys where the possible answers have already been laid out.

Find out what their challenges are and what solutions you can create to solve them.

Once you know this, you can align your campaign, including your SEO, around these real scenarios.

Try to speak with at least 3-5 people per persona you are trying to create.

By engaging in this process, Ed realized how much he loves interacting with and helping people.

“It makes marketing fun.”

KEY INSIGHTS

Build lasting relationships with your customers.

Interviews are always better than surveys.

Find out what their challenges are that you can create solutions for.

ED’S TAKEAWAYS

Human to human connection makes marketing fun!

Market to customers in a way that isn’t disruptive.

Be sure to interview a variety of people before creating a profile.

MORE FROM ED

Responsify

Responsify’s Twitter

Ed’s LinkedIn

Ed’s Twitter

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How to reach out to Ray Wang:

Faster than we realize, reality and virtual reality are merging. But other than virtual reality games like Pokemon Go and SnapChat apps, what exactly does that look like? This week Tom chats with Ray Wang from Software Insider about the future of marketing technology and how it affects experiences with prospects and customers.

THE FUTURE OF MARKETING TECHNOLOGY

We may never get to real AI, but we have reached the level of machine learning.

Think about all the promises made about predictive analytics. Suggestions will soon be automated, as will all that learning we’ve had.

It’s called Mass Personalization at scale. With it, AI will be the new UX.

Reality and virtuality will merge. There’s a whole new set of user experiences that we haven’t seen yet.

According to Ray, it’s a very exciting time to be working in marketing and AI.

PERSONALIZED EXPERIENCES

Machine learning is a subset of AI. We are starting to apply machine learning techniques.

Businesses like Amazon and Google are trying to track your preferences.

Mass Personalization needs to get to know your patterns.

Ray uses this example:

Maybe at 7am every day you get your coffee.

And at 75 degrees you get a normal coffee.

But what about at 85 degrees? What about 95 degrees?

When do you start getting iced coffee? What factors are causing you to make these decisions?

From your coffee and breakfast preferences to your heart rate, mass personalization at scale wants to get to know you as well as it can. However, since it can’t be a perfect science, it has to make a lot of guesses.

DANGER OF OVER AUTOMATION

With the trend and ease of automation, it can be tempting as a business to want to automate a consumer’s entire experience.

However, there is a danger of becoming too automated and creating a frictionless experience.

If you are going to a cheap motel and just want to open your hotel door with your phone, that’s one thing. But what if you are going to a five star hotel and want the experience of having someone show you to your door? Sometimes having that friction, or experience, is important to the consumer.

Now, it is up to mass personalization at scale, to learn and decide how much friction a consumer wants. And businesses are looking to do this on a personalized level.

THE EVERYDAY BUSINESS OWNER

We are trying to create an easy experience for business owners to use this technology. As things get easier to use, people are going to be able to do the things large companies are able to do with AI.

We are also working to create chatbots and technology that can show business owners where things are going right and what needs a little more work.

KEY INSIGHTS

* We will never get to real AI, but mass personalization is happening now

* It is possible to over-automate your business.

* It is sometimes important to have friction in your consumer experiences

RAY’S TAKEAWAYS

* Be sure to find the balance between automation and friction.

* Mass personalization is all about getting to know your consumer on a personal level

* Mass personalization will soon be available for all bus...

How to reach out to Steve Farnsworth:

The world of digital marketing is changing at a rapid pace. So what can you do to keep you and your business relevant?  This week Tom speaks with Steve Farnsworth from Demand Marketing. Steve is a specialist in demand marketing, a keynote speaker, and a Forbes Top 50 Influencer. (learn how to be a Forbes contributor here) Steve and Tom discuss demand marketing, collaboration, and why you should never stop learning.

WHAT IS DEMAND GENERATION?

Demand generation marketing incorporates all aspects of marketing, from generating leads to making sales.

“You have to think, what leads am I getting and where are they coming from? And based on that, what dials should I turn up more efficiently, and what dials aren’t on at all?”

According to Steve, it is a process of reverse engineering to analyze the origin of your sales to see where your strengths and weaknesses are.

If all of your leads are coming from social, how can you get those leads to go further into your sales funnel?

IT HAS TO BE COLLABORATIVE

In digital marketing, the days of being “just a little tech savvy” are over. The worlds of technology and marketing and now closer than ever, and it’s important to understand all aspects of the field, from the creative, content-driven side to the marketing tech side if you want to be a successful marketer.

That is why it is important to have a great marketing team with a dynamic marketing team structure.

Steve also says this means you should never stop learning about marketing technology, as it’s a way to always have the latest digital marketing tools under your belt.

KEEP LEARNING

There is so much going on in marketing. Things keep changing, and if you are not taking your continuous education seriously, you will quickly become irrelevant.

Steve recommends doing so by making education an integral part of your weekly routine.

“Make podcasts and certifications a part of your weekly routine.”

Staying on top of certifications through Hubspot and other online marketing courses, and keeping up with the latest marketing podcasts and articles, are great ways to stay current.

There are tons of digital marketing courses online that are always being updated, which makes it easy to stay current in the field.

Steve recommends that you “Commit to about six hours of active learning each week.”

AI AND MARKETING

There are huge changes happening in the way content is being produced, and one large way is AI marketing and technology.

As a part of your continuous education, Steve also recommends visiting trade shows and talking to people at booths. Doing so is a great way to understand the rise of AI and machine learning marketing.

KEY INSIGHTS

* Demand generation encompasses every part of the marketing process, from leads to sales.

* Digital marketing today has to be collaborative.