The Craft of Marketing: Content Marketing | Business Strategy | Entrepreneurship & Startups

Why Every Marketer Benefits From a Little Social Media Automation

If you’re a small business marketer, you might think social media automation tools are only for professionals. They’re not. Social media automation tools are super effective for any size business in any field.

You know you need to be active on social to connect with your audience. Not just to hawk what you sell, but to share some of your human-ness, how you think, what advice you have to offer. The challenge is keeping up with the pace of social so you are sharing consistently, the right content, on the right platforms, at the right time.

Social Media Automation Tools

That’s where social media automation tools can help, and the advantages are significant.

Pre-schedule your social media posts

Ensure that you are posting consistently, week over week, month over month

Leverage older posts so don’t have to be so reliant on always creating new content

More control over the type of content you share

Post content to multiple platforms

Automate repetitive social publishing tasks

Manage all of your social media accounts in one place

Track your results.

I don’t know a single marketer that isn’t strapped for time, Who doesn’t want to save time on repetitive tasks? Who doesn’t want to become more productive? Who doesn’t want to spend more time doing things that have a greater return on investment and maybe even have some time to do the things you love?

That’s what prompted me to reach out to Laura Roeder, she’s the founder of Edgar, one of my favorite social media automation tools. Laura’s road to recognition didn’t start out focused on being a tech entrepreneur, but she’s always been focused on how to scale. She began early on as blogger and social media consultant, she was even named one of the top 100 entrepreneurs under 35 in 2011, 2013 and 2014 working with the likes of Marie Forleo & Sir Richard Branson.

Somewhere along the way, she hatched an idea to build a software company that could fill the void she was experiencing first hand, that is, automating the parts of social that could benefit from a touch of technology. Don’t miss the interview with Laura, she’s a powerhouse that’s built an amazing tool you’ll want in your marketing tool belt, she also shares some deep insight into her journey.

How to Crack the Conversion Code

Increasing your conversion rates is absolutely critical to success. It's one of the most powerful levers you can have for driving bottom line results.

Ok, imagine your goal is to increase your sales volume by 100% this year. Where do you start? Making 100% more calls, Creating 100% more content? 100% more time, effort and money into sales marketing?

Hypothetically this could work, but it sure is cheaper to do it by increasing your conversion rate. Don't forget – if you have 1% conversion, going to 2% is actually a 100% uplift in results!

Sometimes the littlest change can lead to massive improvement in your conversion rates. Creating better content, cleaner landing pages, better copy writing for your calls-to-action. Add up a bunch of small tweaks and a couple of big ones can bring dramatic increase in your results.

27 Ways to Increase Your Conversion Rate Right Now-inst

If you want to grow your company, at some point or another you need to come to grips with creating a repeatable process for converting your leads into actual, honest to god, sales. That's what the conversion code is all about, mapping the process that connects your marketing activities to your sales activities and in turn, into the sweet sound of your register ringing like a bell.

Here are 27 ways to increase your conversion rate and crack the conversion code

Everyone is in marketing & sales

If you have any responsibility for the success of your company and you've ever had the thought that sales and marketing was someone else's job, I need to be honest with you, you're wrong. There is no fairy godmother in charge of sales or marketing that is going to save the day. You don’t get to be the idea guy or gal without some responsibility for making the cash register ring. The job of every human being at any company is to make people fall in love with your company, learn more about what you do, make the ultimate decision to use your company or recommend it to a friend, family member or innocent bystander.

Everyone is in marketing and everyone is in sales, It's just a matter of to what degree and to what extent. Think about it, whenever you want to convince your wife, boyfriend, boss, mother (insert relationship here) of something that you think is important, exciting to you (possibly not interesting to them) do you not think about ways to present it so that it seems attractive? And then provide useful information about the benefits of doing the thing that you want to suggest? Don't you cite examples of why it might be a good idea?, find good testimonials from trusted friends, colleagues, neighbors, the interwebs, and then at some point ask the question that leads to the answer that you hope will be a resounding yes? This process is a combination of sales and marketing at work. and it applies whether you're trying to get your 3 year old to eat a vegetable, turn your friend into a date, or convince your hubby to go to your favorite bar (restaurant, movie, club, or gourmet donut shop).

Read the entire 27 ways to increase your conversion rate today.

http://craftofmarketing.com/chris-smith/

Creating valuable content to inform, connect and motivate your audience is not only possible, it may be one of the few vehicles left that allows you to do that at scale. The trick is to use a measured approach, focus on understanding your audience and how you can be a part of their journey online and off.. This article explains how to weave content into your marketing strategy. I hope you find a few things here to add to your content marketing arsenal.

In today’s hyper-connected world, grabbing the attention of potential clients is no simple task. People are literally being bombarded with messages from all directions. The average American spends 70% of their waking hours consuming digital media, just thinking of the billions (182 Billion at last count) of emails that hit our inbox every day is enough to make anyone feel overloaded.

By now, you’ve probably read enough about why content and content marketing are important for your business. So, I want to answer the question of exactly “what” and “how.” A lot of blogs will say things like "think like a publisher” or "content is king” and while that’s a great general statement I wanted to go a bit deeper and clarify what content marketing is and more importantly what it isn’t.

Stop Writing about Everything. So many brands create content and try to cover everything, instead of focusing on the core niche that they can position themselves as an expert around.

"No one cares about your special recipe... Find your niche, and then go even more niche" - Joe Pulizzi

To start off my research I decided to go to the mother ship, Content Marketing Institute or more specifically Joe Pulizzi. If there was ever one person to call the ultimate evangelist for content marketing, it would have to be Joe. Some call him the Godfather of content. Back in 2007, he founded Content Marketing Institute to evangelize and educate on content marketing's ability to drive business results. Today CMI is one of the most well known resources on the subject.

I caught up with Joe to chat about everything marketing, from what it takes to build a media company to the launching of a successful conference, think Content Marketing World. We follow that up with the highlights of his latest book, "Content Inc," where he illustrates the consistent success of companies that focus on building a community first before trying to sell a product or service. Make sure you listen to the podcast to get your fill of Joe’s content marketing knowledge.

Read the entire post: http://craftofmarketing.com/joe-pulizzi/

Subscribe on iTunes: http://craftofmarketing.com/itunes/

If I told you you could hire an engineer to hack the sales process to create a predictable model for growth, would you do it? That’s exactly what one company did. They hired an MIT alum with an engineering background to rethink the sales and marketing process. Then they went on to build a $100 million company using data technology, processes for predictable hiring, sales and marketing SLAs, inbound marketing and selling. Mark Roberge is that guy. He’s the Chief Revenue Officer for a little software company called HubSpot, where in the first 6 years there he helped increase revenue over 6,000% and expanded the team from 1 to 450 employees.

Mark RobergeWhether you’re building the next $100 million company or just striving to hit the growth goals for your current endeavor, often, the biggest challenge comes down to the task of scaling sales.

I’ve always thought there was a blueprint for success, but everyone seems to talk about sales as an art form, rather than a science. You can’t major in sales in college and there’s lots of fantastic sales people didn’t even go to college. But the formula is real.

We get to explore this and more during the in-depth episode of the Craft of Marketing, during which I pick Mark’s brain to learn how he got where he is today, why creating a repeatable hiring process is the lynch-pin for rapid growth, and what it takes to build predictable, repeatable results.

Listen in for an honest account of what marketing is all about. The tips, hacks and strategies that professionals share with each other but rarely talk about in public.

Takeaways:

- How to hire the same successful salesperson every time

- Setup consistent training processes for every salesperson to insure repeatable results

- Hold salespeople accountable to the same sales process

- Focus on demand generation to provide salespeople with the same quality and quantity of leads every month

- Leverage technology to enable better buying for customers and faster selling for salespeople

Read the entire post: http://craftofmarketing.com/mark-roberge/

Subscribe on iTunes: http://craftofmarketing.com/itunes/

Why Your Marketing Strategy Stinks And What You Can Do About It.

The goal of any marketing strategy is to help you increase your brand awareness and grow your business. But in order for a marketing strategy to be successful, it has to be realistic and something you actually implement. Even with all the information on the web about marketing strategy, content marketing and social media, understanding how to make it work together is a challenge for everyone in business.

I’ve had the feeling that we’ve been thinking about marketing strategies all wrong, missing the opportunity to be agile and flexible in our our efforts. This led me to a conversation with Mark Schaefer about all things marketing, but especially marketing strategy. How to leverage content, social and build a strategy that’s dynamic and executable. If you don’t know Mark, he’s a marketing rock star. He’s written five seminal marketing books including, The Tao of Twitter, Return on Influence, Born to Blog and most recently, The Content Code. The insights here were inspired from our conversation recorded in this podcast.

10 Things you can do to create a better marketing strategy.

http://craftofmarketing.com/mark-schaefer/

SEO, that sh*t has changed!

We can all agree that SEO has morphed into a different beast over the past 2 years. From the non-stop changes of Google’s algorithms to the rise and possible overload of content, tech tools and social signals impacting consumer discovery.

SEO is now far more integrated with other aspects digital marketing than it used to be. What’s become crystal clear is that SEO is now a mix of technical, experiential, content and strategic efforts to get discovered on the screens that our customers are using.

I got a chance to interview Michael King and ask him a ton of questions on the subject. If you don’t know Michael, you should. He runs a team at the digital marketing agency, iPullRank. They go deeper than most to connect the dots on content strategy, audience research, SEO, predictive analytics and conversion rate optimization. Michael is one of the most impressive technical marketers around.

Here are some of the "Truths" that I took away from our interview. There’s so much more in the interview that you won’t want to miss, subscribe to it on iTunes or listen on SoundCloud.

Understanding your audience is paramount to success

Some call this audience research, persona development or consumer analysis. What matters most is the insight gleaned from deeply studying your audience, what’s important to them, the questions they ask and how they consume and share information.

We do a lot of one night stands in lead generation and not enough long term relationships - Michael King

This reminded me about a conversation I had with Michael Brenner, the VP of Brand Strategy at NewsCred, and he responded along a similar vein when describing how to implement a successful content strategy. Customer personas help you speak the right language and build a long term relationship, if you're not using them, start now!

See a trend here? Read more to find out.

Read the post: http://craftofmarketing.com/michael-king/

Listen on iTunes: http://craftofmarketing.com/itunes/

How do you implement a successful content marketing strategy?

One of the things I think we're all discovering is that content creation is no longer the biggest hurdle to overcome. In fact, content creation is easier than ever and more competitive too, now that everyone is armed with an iPhone, a laptop and a gazillion content creation tools.

The real content marketing challenge is turning out to be connection, distribution and promotion according to Joe Chernov, marketing VP from Eloqua, Hubspot and now Insight Squared. Once you come to that conclusion, you have to ask yourself "What kind of content marketing playbook do I need to insure success?"

If you're looking to answer that question or start planning for the evolution of your content marketing efforts, This post is for you.

Read more: http://craftofmarketing.com/michael-brenner/

Listen on iTunes: http://craftofmarketing.com/itunes/

Social media marketing can be a confusing beast when it comes to delivering measurable outcomes for marketing and sales professionals. There's a lot of mis-information around what is the most effective marketing activity on the web and what strategies will actually help a sales organization close deals.

Social selling is a secret weapon for crushing sales.

Read the post: http:craftofmarketing.com/jill-rowley/

Listen on iTunes: http://craftofmarketing.com/itunes/

Almost everything I've done in my career can be traced back to a strong personal brand. It's been the constant trump card that helped me get my first job, raise my first round of funding, make my first sale and land my first speaking gig. A outstanding reputation can help you overcome countless shortcomings to forge the path that you dream of for yourself.

Just as there are tactics and strategies for succeeding with practically every other facet of your life or business, there’s both an art and a science to branding yourself well. But what does “well” mean? For me it's simple.

Greater mindshare and credibility.

A steady stream of ideal clients.

Leadership opportunities.

And, overall higher perceived value...

This post is all about taking advantage of your personal brand superpowers that already exist.

My quest to understand personal branding started with the first interview on the Craft of Marketing podcast with Barry Feldman who's a master at content marketing for personal branding. It then led me to chat with marketing strategy consultant Dorie Clark, who early in her career, had an unexpected job change that forced her to confront what it means to reinvent ones-self and to think about standing out to create the life of her dreams, and not the life of circumstances.

Read the entire post: http://craftofmarketing.com/dorie-clark/

Subscribe on iTunes: http://craftofmarketing.com/itunes/

Here’s the thing: we can't deny that there is more content out there than ever before. But I don’t think the challenge this creates for marketers is any more unique than it was 3 years ago or 3 decades ago.

Some say that we are in the midst of the content shock era — but I'm convinced that after the shock wears off, we'll adapt. Because that's what we do to survive, as humans and as marketers.

My definition of “adapting,” revolves around observation, testing and non-stop iteration to find new ways to reach a desired audience and drive business results. And one way to do that involves something I learned from Lee Odden called "participation marketing".

We've all experienced marketing tactics and strategies that were once super effective but then lost their mojo for one reason or another — think banner ads in the mid 90's, or post Y2K, when SEO in the form of keyword-stuffing and black hat tactics was the strategy d'jour for getting your website and blog to dominate in the world of search. Now, though, that kind of one dimensional marketing effort just doesn't cut it. The market is demanding that we think out-of-the-box, and create well-mapped out, comprehensive — "marketing strategies" to make our marketing not only gain the attention of the search engines but more importantly, connect with our target audience through the entire consumer journey. Think marketing chess as opposed to promotional checkers.

And as TopRank Online Marketing CEO Lee Odden says, "if you can’t tell the difference between a simple tactic and a robust strategy, you need some help with your digital marketing". It's become very clear that there is no free lunch.

That's why Participation Marketing is so exciting. It's a little bit beyond the comfort zone of most marketers looking for quick hits. It's the next iteration of Content and Influencer marketing which has been written about in almost every marketing publication in the western hemisphere, and any marketer who hasn't been living under a rock or a management dictatorship has seen it's effectiveness first hand.

The formula is simple:

You + Brand Partner + Influencers + Co-Created Content = Participation to Reach Newly Expanded Audience

Read the entire post: http://craftofmarketing.com/lee-odden/

Subscribe on iTunes: http://craftofmarketing.com/iTunes/