Digital Marketing Archives - Page 12 of 17

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Why All Business Owners Should Consider Podcasting

February 20, 2019 No Comments

In my over a decade of experience in digital marketing, I’ve seen few services skyrocket into prominence as much as podcasting. This growth is just one reason our agency started offering a podcast development service. In this article, we’ll cover why this platform should be considered by all business owners and some tips for starting your own.

Power Of The Podcast

It seems like everyone has a favourite podcast these days. The popularity and influence of podcasting are expanding exponentially in the U.S. and around the world. Nearly 25% of Americans currently listen to podcasts regularly, and there is no reason to believe that number will not continue to grow well into the future. With such a dramatic rise, it’s no wonder digital marketers and brands are also listening and working to utilize the power of the podcast to better connect businesses to a wider audience than ever before.

These roughly 70 million listeners are drawn in by the promise of interesting and relevant content that’s both easily consumable and entertaining. Perhaps the best aspect of the medium is that it allows people the ability to instantaneously seek out and choose for themselves the specific topics that matter most to them at any given time. This means people who listen to podcasts are not only a captive audience, but they’re an audience that wants to be captivated.

I remember back in the early 2000s when blogs first created significant excitement across all sectors. It was no secret that the top blogs — those that produced the most views and web traffic — delivered the most relevant and accessible content. They gave readers information that they could easily use to purchase the products and services that best fit their needs, wants and budgets. Today, podcasts have risen to the level of blogs for their extraordinary ability to also effectively deliver the quality content that consumers desire. What’s even more astounding is that podcasts can be transcribed and turned into blogs, which adds even more content to boost rankings on search engines.

The nature of the podcast means the host(s) and their guests can deep-dive into any subject area for as long as is necessary. This allows listeners to become fully immersed and versed on the benefits of any given product or service provided by a company or industry. Therefore, the podcast can take the old concept of the “sales pitch” and turn it on its head, where it instead gets transformed into a conversation. A podcast host can explore real-world examples of a product in action, or interview someone who has genuinely had their life changed by your company’s service. The authenticity of such an interaction is, in my opinion, the backbone of quality podcasting content.

Feature Image Credit: Pexels

By Dennis Kirwan

Dennis Kirwan is currently the CEO of Dymic Digital, a Marketing Agency based in Los Angeles, CA. www.Dymic.com

Sourced from Forbes

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Alexis Hall How to Choose a B2B Marketing Agency that Can Evolve with Your Needs

February 6, 2019 No Comments

By Alexis Hall

B2B brands’ marketing departments are constantly evolving. Over the past 10 years, marketing teams have undergone a seismic shift to accommodate changing technology, millennial consumers and employees, and to breakdown silos between marketing and the rest of the business.

To keep pace with the changing marketplace, many B2B brands are working to find the perfect balance between growing out their in-house digital marketing team and partnering with an external digital marketing agency. Most brands are seeking agency partners to provide a spectrum of services, from tactical support to creative strategy and content innovation. And they need a partner that can adapt and evolve along with their marketing needs and opportunities.

So, the question is: To find that partner that can grow and adapt to your needs, what should you be looking for?

In our humble opinion, the best brand/agency partnerships help brands stay ahead of their competitors with integrated strategies, an eye on the latest and greatest, and the ability to measure and iterate on the success of campaigns. Here are some key characteristics that you should be on the lookout for.

What to Look for in a B2B Marketing Agency Partner

#1 – They have an eye (and hand) on emerging trends.

Interactive content. Influencer marketing. Podcasting. Virtual Reality. As the B2B landscape and B2B buyers evolve, brands and marketers need to adapt their digital and content marketing strategies to not only stand out from their competition and reach their target audience audience, but connect and resonate with buyers. And that means carefully investing in new types of content and strategies.

Of course, dipping your toe into new waters can be scary, and you’ll need to set aside time, resources, and budget for testing new mediums and following trends. And at the end of the day, you need the expertise to get it done. That’s where an experienced agency partner can help you gain traction.

For example, if you’re interested in going bold with interactive content; look for an external agency with experience here to help you:

Planning: An experienced marketing agency likely already has a planning checklist developed and has worked through the kinks you haven’t even considered yet; like where to host, how to optimize multi-media files, and how to create a UX experience in an non-static asset.
Tools and Equipment: New trends often require new technology. Tap into a marketing agency’s existing tool set and expertise using the tools.
Optimization: Another benefit of agency specialization is that they’ve already optimized the process, the promotion mix and experience, so your brand gets the benefit of all that experience; instead of having to start from scratch.
Measurement: A great agency partner will be able to help you set up tracking and provide reporting to tell you if and how emerging trends are really working for you.

#2 – They possess undeniable strategic acumen.

External agencies are great at providing support and creative ideas as needed for projects. However, the development of agency talent, expertise and context, provides agencies with strategic expertise to help you develop the marketing approach that informs their tactical support.

Tapping into an outside perspective to deep dive into owned, competitive, or prospect data to develop a comprehensive strategy and recommendation can be a really impactful set up in planning. External agencies can offer brand support in:

Owned and competitive audits.
Strategic roadmaps.
Customer or prospect research and profiles.
Overcoming marketing pain points like a lack of qualified leads or a sudden drop in traffic.

#3 – They challenge the status quo.

In-house marketing teams offer the benefit of people that are deeply immersed within the brand and the team. Frequently they sit in the same building, same floor as the rest of the team, making them easily accessible for questions, brainstorming, and strategy development.

This can be a great benefit when it comes to the free flow of information and integration across team. However, familiarity can be stifle innovation. But the good news is that it can empower an outsider to think differently.

By offering a third-party, neutral perspective, an agency can drive tough conversations that push you out of your comfort zone to create next-level strategies, and help:

Persuade: Agencies’ specialization and work across many clients can drive knowledge and credibility which may be able to convince a marketing team to take the next step.
Bring new ideas: Agency marketers, who live and breathe new marketing, and often focus on creative hires, can supply brands with new tactical or creative approaches which can push the envelope and grab attention within the marketplace.

#4 – They prioritize client relationships.

The relationship an external agency creates with your brand and in-house team is so critical. The best agency/brand relationships are based on trust and genuine alignment of goals.

Strong relationships are a key factor in creating innovative and successful marketing tactics. As you are considering agency partners, look for:

Alignment of values, purpose and mission: Agencies and brands that fit and work best together tend to have alignment around key culture items. Teams which exemplify the brand/agency core values are able to connect and enjoy working collaboratively toward the same goals.
Engaged Listening: Agency partners need to advise, but they should also be adept listeners. During the prospecting phase, a potentially great agency partner should be able to really listen to your business’ needs and present a solution that syncs with your brands’ objectives.
Thoughtfulness: Yes, great agency partners are responsive to your needs and queries. Perhaps more important than a quick response; is thoughtfulness and quality of response. A really great partner will offer you well thought out and creative solutions to challenges and questions, to really drive results.
A referral from someone you trust: When it doubt, ask your colleagues and associates for a referral to an agency they love. If they love them, that agency is already more likely to align with your values, be familiar with your brand voice and requirements, and think of you as a highly valuable partner.

#5 – They’re committed to transparency of contracts, tactics, and data.

Along with prioritizing the relationship, the right agency partner will build trust with your brand by offering transparency, which comes to everything from contract deliverables to the results of your core KPIs.

If you are partnering with an agency to help you test emerging trends; it’s especially critical that a great partner share what is and is not working, so your teams can together optimize and iterate.

Whether it’s a change in timeline, a tweak to a tactical mix or an honest assessment of how you’re tracking against benchmarks, a good partner will drive straight forward conversations that help you move forward in the best way.

#6 – They know your niche.

In B2B it can be especially tough to get up to speed on a new vertical or product. Tapping into an agency that has a similar client base to you; speeds the learning curve as much as possible.

Industry trends (like IOT for example) often span verticals; so look for a partner that understands the lingo, but also has an existing network of influencer and contacts.

Better Together: Find a Partner You Can Grow With

The agency place within your marketing department will continue to evolve as your team does. And partnering with right agency can provide you with a partner who will help you innovate tactically and strategically, while providing your in house team with the support they need to reach their goals in 2019 and beyond.

By Alexis Hall

Sourced from TopRank Marketing

In News

How Digital Marketing Will Change in 2019

January 24, 2019 No Comments

By Neil Patel

Digital marketing is going to change drastically in 2019. And sadly, you aren’t going to like a lot of the changes.

And no, I don’t mean change from a competition standpoint. You already know that each year marketing gets more expensive and more competitive. That’s just a given.

Just look at the graph above: that’s Google’s annual revenue. As you can see, during the last recession, Google made more and more money. They didn’t even have a down year.

One of the big reasons we are seeing digital marketing change so much is because of the adoption of new technologies. But also because the web is getting saturated… there are 1,805,260,010 websites on the web.

That means there is 1 website for every 4 people in this world. That’s crazy!

So, let’s dive into it… here’s how digital marketing is going to change this year.

Drastic Change #1: SEO won’t look the same

I’m starting with this one because I know you are going to hate this. SEO is moving to voice search.

In 2018, 2 out of every 5 adults used voice search once per day. But in 2020, 50% of all searches will be done through voice search according to ComScore.

And it won’t just be people speaking into their microphone on their cell phone or laptop, 30% of web browsing won’t even take place on a device with a screen. That means more people will be searching through devices like Google Home or Alexa.

I know you don’t like this because every time I blog about voice search, no one really reads the article. It’s one of those topics that SEOs just wish didn’t exist.

Why?

Well, being on page 1 doesn’t matter when it comes to voice search. Either Google pulls from your website or they don’t.

And secondly, conversions from voice search will be lower because people won’t be going to your website. Google will just be giving them the answer. At least, until we can figure out how to solve this as marketers.

But instead of looking at voice search as a bad thing, just think of it this way, no one cares to read articles about it, which means most SEOs won’t be prepared for it.

This is your chance to get ahead of your competition and gobble up that traffic before the market shifts into using voice.

Here are some articles that will teach you how to maximize your voice search traffic:

Drastic Change #2: Expect algorithm updates to be more complex

According to the Moz algorithm changelog, there were 12 updates in 2018.

Although it sounds like a lot, it isn’t. In 2017 there were 13 updates and in 2016 there were 11. In other words, Google has been averaging 12 updates per year if you combined the confirmed updates with the “unconfirmed” ones.

But let’s look at the older updates…

On July 17, 2015, Google released Panda 4.2. I know you may have hated the Panda update, but it wasn’t too bad. All Google did doing was get rid of spammy sites with low-quality content.

They didn’t want to rank sites that had thousands of 300-word blog posts with duplicate content.

Could you blame them for that?

And what about the change Google made on September 27, 2016, the Penguin 4.0 update?

If you built spammy links, they no longer would just penalize you, in most cases, they would devalue those links instead.

That means if you did something shady like buy a ton of backlinks and get caught, those links would just be de-valued instead of causing your whole site to get banned.

Now if you look at the latest algorithm updates, they are getting more complex and harder to beat. And it’s because technology is evolving so fast.

Google no longer has to just look at metrics like content and backlink count to figure out if a site ranks well. They can look at user metrics, such as:

Are users spending more time on your site than the other ranked sites on Google?
Are people bouncing off your site and heading back to the Google listing page?
Are your brand queries increasing over time? Or do people not see you as a brand?
Do people find your site more appealing… in other words, is your click-through-rate higher?

If you want to beat Google, you have to shift your mindset. It’s not about understanding Google, it’s about understanding users.

Google has one goal: to rank sites that users love the most at the top. That causes people to come back, keep using Google, and increase their overall revenue.

If you can put yourself in your users’ shoes, you’ll be better suited to do that.

The first step in doing this is to realize that when someone performs a search for any keyword, they aren’t just “performing a search,” they are looking for a solution to their problem.

By understanding the intent of their search, you’ll be more likely and able to solve their problems. You can use tools like Ubersuggest to help you with it as it will show you long tail phrases (problems people are trying to solve for).

Once you do that, you’ll be able to create the best experience, the best product, or even service that people deserve.

This is how you make your site continually rank well in the long run even as they make their algorithm more complex.

Drastic Change #3: You can’t build a company off of 1 channel

You familiar with Dropbox?

Of course, you are, it’s a multi-billion-dollar company… and you probably have it installed on your computer.

When they first came out, they tried to acquire users through Google AdWords. Can you guess how much it cost them to acquire a customer?

It ranged between $200 and $300.

Do you know how much Dropbox costs?

$60 a year.

The math doesn’t work out. Why would you spend $200 to acquire a user who only pays $60?

Even when someone pays you $60, it’s not all profit. Because of that, Dropbox had to grow using growth hacking.

Dropbox gives you more free space the more users you invite. That’s a great example of growth hacking. And it’s how they grew into a multi-billion-dollar company.

Nowadays, if you created a similar invite flow within your company, it won’t work that well. You can no longer build a company using one channel like how Dropbox grew.

And do you remember how Facebook grew?

When you signed up, they would tap into your email address book and send out an email to every single one of your contacts inviting them to use Facebook, even if you didn’t want them to.

That one channel helped Facebook grow into the multi-hundred-billion-dollar company that we know today.

Nowadays, if you get an email saying your friend is inviting you to join a new site or social network, you’ll probably just ignore it.

Again, you no longer can build a big business leveraging only one marketing channel.

So, what does that mean for you?

First of all, popular marketing channels that are profitable get saturated fast and you are going to have a lot of competitors.

Due to that, you have to leverage all channels. From content marketing and paid ads to social media marketing and SEO to email marketing… you have to leverage all channels out there.

It’s your only option to doing well in the long run.

One channel won’t make your business anymore. But if you combine them all, you can still grow your business.

And hey, if something happens to one channel like an algorithm change, at least your business won’t go down too much because you are diversified.

No matter how much you love one form of marketing, never rely on it. Adopt an omnichannel approach.

Drastic Change #4: Blogging won’t work too well

I got into this a little bit at the top… the web is saturated. There are just way too many sites.

Sure, most of those 1.8 billion sites aren’t being updated and a lot are dormant.

Now out of those 1.8 billion sites, roughly 1 billion of them are blogs. That’s roughly 1 blog for every 7 people out there.

When I started my first blog in 2005, there weren’t as many people online creating sites or producing content. There also weren’t as many people using Google.

Nevertheless, Google loved content. Everyone was saying how content is king because if you produce high-quality articles Google would rank them due to one simple fact… they lacked content in their index.

But as time went by, Google no longer had a shortage of content. I would even go as far to say that there is too much content for them to choose from.

For that reason, they can be pickier if they want to rank your website or not. It’s not just about backlinks or optimizing your on-page code, it’s about providing what’s best for the end user.

That means Google is going to rank fresh content that isn’t regurgitated.

If you want to take the route of just writing dozens of articles each way and trying to rank for everything under the sun, you can. It’s still possible, but it will take more time and it will be harder as there is more competition.

More so, the way content marketing is changing in 2019, and we saw a little of this in 2018, is that you need to update your content.

No longer can your strategy be to write a lot of content. You are going to have to plan on updating your content on a regular basis.

For example, I have one person who works for me full time going through my old blog posts to update them. Also, I now only have time to write once piece of content each week. There is no way I can go through my blog and update over a thousand blog posts.

You’re going to have to do the same if you want to maintain your search traffic. If you are established and have an old blog, spend half your time updating your old content. If you are a new blog, you don’t really need to spend more than 5% of your time updating your old content.

Drastic Change #5: You’ll need to focus on new search engines and new content types

We can all agree that text-based content is saturated.

If you don’t agree with me, just scroll back up to Drastic Change #4 😉

We all know it takes forever to rank on Google. If you aren’t willing to give it a year, you shouldn’t spend much time doing traditional SEO.

What if I told you there was another form of SEO in which you can see results very, very fast?

So fast, that within 30 days (or even a few days!) you can rank at the top. And, better yet, those rankings mean you will get traffic.

Just look at my search traffic from this different kind of search engine:

Can you guess that what search engine this is?

YouTube!

I generate 198,380 views every month from YouTube search. And those people watch my content for an average of 559,237 minutes a month.

I’m generating over 388 days of watch time each month just from YouTube search. That’s crazy!

YouTube isn’t nearly as competitive as Google. Nor is optimizing for the iTunes store if you have a podcast.

Don’t just focus your efforts on Google.

Focus your efforts on less-saturated forms of content like video and audio while optimizing for less common search engines like YouTube and iTunes.

Plus, these new channels have a very lucrative audience as they are engaged. Did you know that 45% of podcast listeners have a household income of $75,000 or more?

Here are some articles that’ll help you out:

If you don’t have a big marketing budget no worries. These channels aren’t as expensive or competitive yet. You also don’t need a studio to film or record. You can just bust out your iPhone and start recording yourself.

Believe it or not, a lot of people prefer that over studio quality content as it is more authentic.

Drastic Change #6: Budgets will start shifting into conversion rate optimization

At the beginning of this post, I broke down Google’s yearly revenue.

As you can see it has continually increased even during recessionary periods.

Sure, some of it has to do with more people coming online. But also, the cost per click is rising.

Same with Facebook Ads. I literally know hundreds of affiliates who used to make over a million dollars a year in income because Facebook Ads were so affordable.

But in June/July 2017, Facebook crossed a point where they had more advertisers than inventory… at least in the United States.

Over time, that trend continued into other countries, which mean Facebook Ad costs drastically increased.

Just look at the graph below. As you can see, companies spend the majority of their budget on Google AdWords and Facebook Ads.

Now let’s look at what channel produces the highest ROI. Can you guess what it is?

SEO, right?

Although the chart shows SEO produces the biggest ROI, in reality, it is the second runner up.

What’s hard to see because it is classified as “other” in the chart and it is grouped with other marketing channels, is conversion rate optimization. And that channel produced the biggest ROI by far. It beat SEO by leaps and bounds.

It was just hard to see that because not enough companies spend money on conversion rate optimization. And when they do, it is a very small portion of their budget.

In 2019, start running A/B tests. Whether you use Crazy Egg or any other solution out there, don’t forget to include it in your marketing arsenal.

Drastic Change #7: Marketers will learn what funnels are

You may have heard of marketing funnels or sales funnels, but I bet you aren’t using them.

And no, a funnel isn’t something as simple an email sequence.

Because ads are getting more expensive, you’ll find yourself doing things like running more A/B tests (as I mentioned above), but it will only help so much.

As your competition also starts running A/B tests, you’ll find that ad prices will go up again.

So, what should you do?

You are going to have to upsell and downsell your visitors. I learned this tactic from Ryan Deiss years ago and he was spot on.

The best way to generate revenue isn’t to get more customers, it’s to get more money out of your existing customers.

Sure, your customer base is only going to spend so much. But if you offer upsells and downsells you can see increases in revenue from 10% to 30%. And some cases you’ll even double your revenue.

The key points with upselling and downselling are as follows:

Offer at least 2 or 3 upsells (or downsells).
If people don’t take the offer, considering offering the same offer again with monthly installments.
The best offers are speed and automation. In other words, if you can help people get results faster or in an automated way, they are much more likely to take it. People are lazy and impatient, hence speed and automation always win when it comes to upsells.

At this point you are probably wondering how to do all of this upselling or downselling, right?

You have to build a marketing funnel. The good news is, you don’t have to hire a developer, you can use solutions like Click Funnels and Samcart.

They are easy to use, and you can get started in minutes.

Conclusion

Expect 2019 to be a crazy year. What worked once, won’t work in 2019.

Technology is more sophisticated and with things like machine learning and artificial intelligence knocking at the door, we are going to be on a crazy rollercoaster.

Don’t be afraid, though!

If you take the concepts above and start working on them now, you are going to be in for a much smoother ride with fewer downs and more ups.

By Neil Patel

He is the co-founder of Neil Patel Digital. The Wall Street Journal calls him a top influencer on the web, Forbes says he is one of the top 10 marketers, and Entrepreneur Magazine says he created one of the 100 most brilliant companies. Neil is a New York Times bestselling author and was recognized as a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 30 by President Obama and a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 35 by the United Nations.

In News

23 Social Media And Digital Marketing Best Practices That Are Actually Myths

October 8, 2018 No Comments

By Susanna Gebauer

When you are new to the game and have not your path to success (yet), you probably hop from one piece of information to the next, sucking up all the tips, social media best practices and success stories.

The problem is that there is some horrible, outdated and often simply wrong advice still floating around. And for a newbie without any experience and knowledge it is extremely difficult to figure out which tips are legit – and which tips will at best get you nowhere – at worst the tips will hurt your blog, business, and marketing.

We have been there; we got some bad tips for our marketing – we tried some, ditched more. And to help you even more, here are some common myths about online and social media marketing that you should better ignore:

1. Post once a day – or week

Many people are sooo afraid to post too often that they kill all chances of social media success long before they got going. They post so seldom that their fans and followers have a hard time remembering who they were and how they met before they get the next update.

The truth is: Most people don’t post enough on social media. For Facebook once a day is rather the minimum than the maximum, for Twitter once a day is as good as not posting at all. Pinterest best practice tips range from 30 to 40 pins per day, and Instagram is more like: Post as often as you like as long as you have great images.

2. If you only post your own content, you are a spammer

Do you believe that? Be honest: If you follow a page on Facebook, do you follow the page because you love what they do and like to know more about it – or are you following them because you want them to give you a daily news update on everything they can find?

Posting on social media is about providing value. If you have enough valuable content and information you can share, feel free to share it, even if it is your own content!

3. Never automate

While you should not blindly automate all you can, once you understand what you are doing on social media, automation will be a game changer and the key to unlocking social media marketing success.

Or how do you think all the successful gurus post multiple times per day on Facebook, 30 to 100 pins on Pinterest, 20 – 50 tweets and several images in Instagram? They use tools and automate at least part of their social media activities.

4. Following other people is wrong

Honestly, how can you expect other people to follow you if you are too afraid to make the first step and follow some people? It is a two-way street. You need to be willing to connect if you want others to connect to you.

Simply keep in mind, who you want to connect to? Make sure that at least a large part of the people you follow is from your target audience.

5. Following back is a must

I have been attacked on Twitter for not following someone. Really? How can that be in my interest to follow back everyone who is following me?

Only follow back people that you are interested in – and if you follow people, never get angry at them if they don’t follow you back either. Don’t take it personally.

6. Posting too often is spam

Nope. It just might not be the optimal frequency. You have to watch your numbers and figure out what works best for you. Also, if you post you need to provide value. Don’t just post often because you think you should. If you don’t have something valuable to share, don’t post.

But if you have a ton of value to share, feel free to post more often – it can well be a game changer and give you a boost in traffic.

7. Re-posting content is bad

Do you always tweet your content once – and then never again? Bad. Only a fraction of your followers will have seen this one tweet. There is nothing wrong to tweet the content again – and again. Make sure you share a large variety of content – but you can and should tweet your content again at a different time of the day.

For Facebook, it is slightly different because their algorithm will know that you repeat a post you already posted. But even on Facebook, you can re-share content that you already posted. And your audience will love it – because most of them will either not remember that you already posted it, or they did not even see it the first time around.

8. You shouldn’t talk about your business

Many people are afraid to talk about themselves or their business on social media. They fear to be overly promotional. But there is a huge difference between sharing a story and promoting. And while you should not be too promotional, there is nothing wrong to talk about your business – or yourself. Sharing your own story should be an important part of your marketing!

9. Posting great content is enough to gather an audience (fast)

This is one major myth that is killing opportunities for many young businesses and bloggers. The hard truth is: if nobody knows you exist your content will not spread – no matter how great it is.

Even great keyword research will not do the trick in most cases. There is already so much content floating around that there is (almost) no niche where there isn’t already a ton of content floating around – with more backlinks and a larger audience than you have if you are just starting out.

Don’t sit back and wait for a miracle – take your success into your own hands and start distributing your content!

10. Rules are set in stone

So you found a set of rules that you think make sense and now you follow them, but unfortunately, you cannot see any success? Change your strategy. In online marketing, rules are not fixed. Things (and the networks) change on a daily basis. If something was best practice and worked for someone yesterday, it can still be different today – or not work for your niche.

Watch your numbers, question and test everything – and create your own best practices.

11. What works for others will always work for you

Do you have this one awesome blogger who made it to huge success? And now you try to recreate every step of their success journey?

Could work – but does not have to work.

You are a different person, you are in a different situation – and things change. How many years ago did that blogger start out? How many competition did he have – and much competition do you have?

Take Pinterest for instance: There are still success stories and best practices floating around from bloggers who started a couple of years ago BEFORE Pinterest introduced the smart feed – never ever will you get to success, if you follow one of these stories.

12. As a business, you can’t show personality (or humor)

Many first-time social media marketers try to stay very serious – but truth be told, the best and often most efficient social media campaigns or strategies play with emotions. Staying too serious and focusing only on the business side often fails to trigger the emotions that turn visitors into fans or subscribers and fans into customers.

13. Once you have a strategy that works, you should only repeat and not change it

Good marketing evolves. The big advantage of online marketing is that you can test, interpret and adjust in quick succession. The best marketers are the ones that are open to change, are creative and come up with new ideas and changes all the time.

Even if you found a great marketing strategy that gets you a ton of traffic and sales, you need to be open to change. Because the online marketing landscape evolves all the time.

14. Social media results aren’t measurable

There is a ton of data available. Knowing how to use that data is key to digital marketing success!

If the social networks or Google Analytics does not provide you the data you need – check some social media marketing tools. Most of them provide you with awesome analytics and statistics to help you to figure out exactly what is going on.

15. You need to be everywhere

When we started out we had no clue about marketing on any of the major social networks. We ended up trying everything at once and getting nothing.

That changed when we figured out Twitter. Marketing with Twitter was the game changer for us. All it took to get our marketing on the track to success was to find ONE social network that really worked. If you find your one traffic channel that you can tame and scale, some of the other traffic channels will either fall into place or be much easier to tackle with a little cross promotion.

16. The number of followers is what counts

A while ago there was a startup story floating around Berlin: They were really proud of growing their Facebook Page to an impressive number of fans mostly via advertising. The problem was that most of these fans were not interested in what they were doing, the Fan page was really unresponsive, the startup was German, but the fans were mostly from India and other Asian countries.

(Sorry, I cannot link to the page, the startup went out of business)

The problem is that the number of fans or followers will not pay your bills if they are not targeted and engaging. There are many examples of blogs, business or even people winning big with social media but they don’t have so many fans.

When we were still running our startup, we started seeing measurable results from Twitter when we only had a couple of thousand followers. And on networks like Pinterest, the number of followers is even less important because many people find content via the search function.

17. You always have to be on the cutting edge and follow the hype

A while ago in a workshop, one of the participants asked us why we are not doing more with video on Facebook. After all, video is the BIG thing right now.

The reason is simple, creating video content is a lot of work, We already have big-time marketing success without going for video. And maybe video is not so much our thing – we are more like writers.

Our blog, our subscriber list and the list of customers are still growing. Because we have a ton of traffic from other channels like Twitter and Google – for us it is a simple equation: We don’t want and need to invest the effort into creating a ton of videos for Facebook. For someone else who loves videos that might be a totally different story.

18. Twitter is dead

Do I really need to answer that? Twitter has millions of active users; Twitter is growing. Twitter just is not as good as Facebook and Instagram at making their users pay for success…

Did you know that there are some straight-forward processes that can help you and almost any other blog or business help to grow an audience from Twitter – no advertising involved. There are many blogs – including our The Social Ms blog and Jeff Bullas – who built their traffic with Twitter. A large part of our traffic still comes from Twitter, and it is not going dying down.

19. Pinterest is for women and DIY only

That is so totally wrong. Over 175 millions of people are active on Pinterest, and a lot of men are starting to discover the power of Pinterest, too. While there may be some niches where it is easier to unlock the full power of Pinterest it is not that other niches are not present on Pinterest.

20. Pinterest is purely social (Search)

The truth is that if you are looking to drive traffic to a website from Pinterest, you should consider the search function of Pinterest and do some sort of SEO for your pins. This way not only your followers will be able to see your pins, but you can also unlock the tremendous power of the Pinterest smart feed and search.

21. Pinterest is a search engine

While SEO for Pinterest should be a must, not considering the social aspect of Pinterest is also wrong. The smart feed is strongly based on multiple factors. And one of these factors is who is following who and who is sharing your content.

Pinterest recently took a major step towards some of the social media functionality by (re-)introducing hashtags. If you want to unlock the full power of Pinterest, you should now also look into hashtags (That is new as of October 2017).

22. Niche forums are dead

Most people today look for big-time traffic from the major social networks or Google search. But for many niches, it would be much easier to see first results quickly by going through niche forums. These can be on-topic Facebook groups or LinkedIn Groups but also special interest niche forums on very targeted topics.

Since targeting on them is often much better than you can do on the BIG outlets, you can often see better results, build valuable connections and have a lot more fun by talking to people that share your interests.

23. Email marketing isn’t social

Many people see email marketing as something impersonal or rather a shout –out medium. That is not how it should be.

Good email marketing is your chance to connect and build a relationship with your audience. You have the chance to start a conversation, have more than one point of contact and build trust.

You can often connect via email much better than with loose contact in social media. That is a chance that many bloggers, marketers and business owners are missing.

Final words on social media myths

These are just a few of the misconceptions and mistakes we have encountered throughout our marketing activity. I am fairly sure there a lot more myths floating around and misleading some of the more inexperienced bloggers and marketers.

Which social media myths have you encountered? Which mistakes have you made due to misleading advice?

This article originally appeared on the Social Ms blog.

By Susanna Gebauer

Susanna Gebauer is a marketing blogger at The Social Ms. She bloggers, entrepreneurs and small businesses how to grow their business on a small budget using online marketing. If you want to improve your blog content, you can get their free workbook… View full profile ›

Sourced from Business 2 Community

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Attribution: The Secret Sauce of Digital Marketing

September 18, 2018 No Comments

By James Mathewson

One thread that binds my career is top-of-funnel content. I’ve co-written two books on the importance of early-stage content and how to identify and capitalize on those opportunities. I’ve also had a lot of success launching content for the early phases in the customer journey: What some people call the “awareness” or “learning” phases. And I’ve written extensively about what success looks like for top-of-funnel content. But I have rarely led sustainable upper-funnel content efforts for a simple reason: It’s difficult to track the first touches in a multi-touch customer journey to revenue.

As I said in the referenced blog post:

When I have been successful in educating executives on recognizing their successes, I have convinced them to focus on optimizing the experience to get a higher share of users to take the next steps in their customer journeys. That kind of growth is much more valuable, as you can attribute it to revenue.

I should have added, “in theory.” In practice, few digital marketers I talk to have attribution working well enough to give each touch point in a customer journey the credit it is due. Upper-funnel content is expensive. It’s an easy line item on a budget to cut if there is no way to track it to revenue. Most of my upper-funnel content efforts were ultimately redesigned out of existence because there was no way to prove they generated revenue.

This is the paradox of upper-funnel content. Without attribution, you can’t prove it was instrumental in generating leads. But redesign it out of existence and suddenly, your lead volume goes way down. Why? Because no one becomes a lead until they’re ready. And they only get ready by first learning the what, why, and how of their topics of interest. These are the basic building blocks of upper-funnel content. Attribution modeling is the solution to the paradox. When you develop an attribution model, you figure out how important the content is to the leads you generate and give it the credit it is due.

We have developed some methods at IBM to give all the content in a journey the credit it is due, including upper-funnel content. I can share the basic methods with you now. Before I do that, however, I want to highlight a common dead end, so we can move on from it.

Last-touch attribution

Most people I talk to at conferences say they have attribution. But after I grill them for information on how they do it, they ultimately acknowledge that they mostly use “last-touch” attribution. That means giving all the credit for the last thing a prospect did before becoming a lead.

For several reasons, last-touch attribution doesn’t work. The main reason is the last thing a prospect sees before becoming a lead might not be the most important. If it is treated as such, a disproportionate amount of resources go to developing it, and you end up with a very bottom-heavy experience.

Last-touch is also bad because you never fill up the pipeline for bottom-of-the-funnel interactions without having top-of-funnel experiences. For example, the last thing many of our high quality leads did was to take a free trial. In last-touch attribution, you would give all the credit to the trial. But nobody takes a free trial without first learning about what they want to try. And nobody sets out to learn about what they want to try without first understanding what problem the tech solves. The more complex the product, the more touch points are necessary just to get to the point of wanting a free trial. In this example, top-of-funnel experiences contributed to the quality and quantity of the lead, but get no credit.

Last-touch attribution is really no attribution. So the question becomes, how do you move towards a true attribution model?

Start with response scoring

The first step is to score all your content in terms of how it contributed to leads and wins. If a white paper is downloaded often, and a high percentage of the respondents who register to take the download become sales, that white paper should be scored relatively highly. Let’s say you have 100 white papers, you can rank sort them on the number of high quality leads they generate, and give them scores on that scale from 0 to 100. Now you have a way to measure the relative value of those white papers.

But assets like white papers don’t generate leads by themselves. They have to be part of campaigns, which puts them in front of the audience using paid, owned, or earned means. If you use the same white paper in multiple channels, it is bound to generate more responses in some channels than others.Let’s say a particular white paper about migrating to the cloud gets a lot of quality responses through organic search. For example, a lot of people query “how do I migrate to the cloud?” and visit the page where the paper can be downloaded. When they visit, they download the white paper and give quality information about themselves in exchange for the asset. This indicates that the paper does its job in early-stage education.

Now let’s say you try to use the same white paper in a paid search campaign that focuses on a product name like IBM Cloud Migration Services. When prospects click the ad, they get a single-offer landing page with the same white paper on it. Here, most of the users abandon the experience before filling out the form, and the paper does not generate a lot of quality responses.

How can the same paper do well in one context and poorly in another? In this case, the paper is useful for early-stage prospects but not for late-stage prospects. By the time someone searches for a brand name, chances are they have already learned all the basics and are ready for a deeper conversation. So a paper that tells them what they already know is no longer relevant.

This example illustrates why simple response scoring is not enough. You need an attribution model that helps you understand the value of assets when they are most useful. Once you have this more nuanced response scoring method, you can begin to pay attention to other variables in the mix.

Every time I have done studies like this as part of campaign optimization, I have also found that the same paper performs differently in two early-stage experiences. Perhaps in one, users have to scroll to get the link to the download whereas the other experience is easier. You never learn how changing UX can change performance until you try to score your assets in the mix. If you have attribution, they become markers to help improve the whole experience, including the asset itself.

From response scoring to attribution modeling

The first step in moving to attribution modeling is to look for patterns in the responses you are getting for your assets. In the example above, the white paper performed well in the early stages of the customer journey and poorly in the late stages. The hypothesis is white papers tend to do better in the top-of-funnel. Test that by looking at all your white papers to see if that pattern is consistent. If so, you can tune your experience by moving your white papers to top-of-funnel and move other things, like product demo videos, later.

This tuning is important prior to implementing attribution because the data can be very noisy if you don’t havewell-tunedned experience design first. If you implement attribution prior to tuning, it’s not the end of the world, but you will need to cut through the noise to tune the attribution. And this can be difficult because there are so many variables to control, it’s difficult to draw valid conclusions from the data.

When we started doing this at IBM, we found that five out of the 1000 or so white papers we had in market generated any kind of quality responses. The temptation was to say, “white papers don’t work.” But when did a further analysis of the five that worked, we found that they were highly technical in nature, not just delivering strategic points of view, but giving tactical guidance of how to implement a solution. Also, all our testing was done on late-stage offers, when tactical information is relevant but strategy is not.

Instead of jumping to conclusions, we started looking at how strategic white papers performed in early-stage experiences, and found that they performed better. All we needed to do was wire up the tracking system to show that people who downloaded those white papers also did late-stage activities leading to quality responses. When those leads closed, we could attribute the early-stage white papers to both leads and wins.

This example illuminates how attribution modeling works best. It doesn’t work to try to make all kinds of assumptions and wire something up based on the assumptions. That leads to conclusions like, “white papers don’t work.” But if you want to know how well a particular white paper is working, you have to take all these variables into account. Assuming the context in which the white paper is delivered to the audience conforms to best practices (landing page UX, right asset type, etc.), you can compare their response scores on an apples-to-apples basis.

A note on gating

Another variable you will need to control is whether or not your assets are gated. In early stages, prospects are less likely to fill out a form with their correct information to download an asset. Also, gating can prevent them from finding the assets in the first place, because the gate prevents search engines from indexing the assets independently of the experiences where they live. So the best practice is not to gate assets in early-stage experiences.

But if you don’t gate, how do you know the asset contributed to a lead? The answer is tracking. You can cookie the user anonymously and track their activities through the point where they fill out a form. When they do fill out the form, you can add all those other touches to the client reference, with the name and email you capture. All those touch points contribute in some way to the lead. Your attribution model can then take those touch points into account.

I have intentionally avoided the question of how much weight to give individual touches in a multi-touch client journey. Weighting can add bias to the algorithm, which obviously affects the results. But it is up to you to weight things the way you think measures your touch points accurately. I would start with giving equal weight to all the touch points, and then look for patterns in the data to determine that you want to weight certain items higher than others.

Conclusion

Attribution modeling is as much art as science. I hope after reading this, you are not so intimidated on getting started. It’s not that hard. You make hypotheses (based on best practices) about what you think is working, and you test it. You learn a lot in this process, and eventually you are able to attribute any page or asset (or combinations) you publish to the business results that matter. If you have a working attribution model, you can learn how to focus on the things that matter more. Most importantly, you can get the funding you need to do more of the things that work. In particular, you can build sustainable top-of-funnel content marketing programs.

By James Mathewson

Sourced from Business 2 Community

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Why is Content Marketing Essential for Digital Marketing Success?

September 14, 2018 No Comments

Sourced from TECHsling

The digital boom has changed the way companies interact with customers, making content marketing a crucial strategy for attracting customers and boosting loyalty. Recent research has revealed that two-thirds of people consider content marketing useful, significantly outweighing the 33% who consider it biased. Even when customers know they are reading marketing material, they continue to express interest, with over 50% of those surveyed being more likely to research a company’s products or services after consuming its content. In this post, we highlight the reasons why content is key to any business wishing to remain competitive.

Establishing Brand Authority

Many leading companies are hiring savvy content writers to produce content that will establish them as authorities in their field. By providing white papers, blog posts, insider tips and other content that is actually useful, companies can build trust, which is key when it comes to acquiring and retaining clients. As noted by Forbes, “Having brand authority means consumers will feel confident that you know what you’re doing, and thus that their money is well spent with your company.” Content not only needs to be informative but also curated to clients. Analytics can help companies determine a strategy that includes personalizing content to different target or client groups.

Encouraging Consumers to Engage

As noted in a thesis by J Denham-Smith and P Harvidsson (Content Marketing’s Effect on Customer Engagement), “The goal of content marketing is to provide consumers with content that they are willing to engage with. Ways of engaging in content mean sharing, liking, commenting and adapting the message, then spreading it, thereby creating user-generated content.” In essence, valuable content marketing leads to sharing and recommendations. Create excitement around content enables a company to reach the sites of social influencers, who can significantly boost its brand awareness.

Content Marketing Drives Sales

Over 82% of people make purchases from a company after consuming its content. This statistic highlights the value of investment in content. Your blog may have thousands of visitors and your social media hundreds of likes, but these figures need to be converted into sales if content marketing is to meet its aim. According to Moran (2016), content marketing should possess four key qualities: it should be credible, targeted, differentiated, and measurable.

We have mentioned the key reasons why content marketing is currently a big priority for most businesses that invest in digital marketing strategies. To stay at the top of your game, it is important to produce quality content, but also to curate it to your clients. Ensure your content is shared, commented on, and liked, and measure whether or not it is making a difference to your conversion rate.

Sourced from TECHsling

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Let’s Keep Influencer Marketing Accountable

September 11, 2018 No Comments

By Katie Paulsen

One of the top challenges facing influencer marketing is one common across the entire arena of digital marketing: brand safety.

At this year’s Cannes Lions, Unilever’s Chief Marketing Officer Keith Weed warned that influencer marketing has an integrity issue. The proliferation of fake followers, aided and abetted by a lack of transparency and proper measurement reporting, threatens to destabilize the entire industry.

Weed warned that the industry must take “urgent action now to rebuild trust before it’s gone forever,” and he pledged that Unilever’s brands will never buy followers nor work with influencers who buy followers.

Any brand conducting influencer marketing programs should heed the call to ensure greater transparency and integrity.

The relationship between social media and influencer marketing is at a crossroads. To be clear, the challenge is not one of growth: According to a recent study by the Association of National Advertisers, 75% of brands use influencer marketing, and almost half are planning to increase budgets in the next year. However, in order for influencer marketing to continue to thrive, brands will need to improve their campaign strategies.

Brand safety is of paramount importance in the development of influencer marketing tools and in ongoing campaign monitoring and management. Campaigns – and the technologies that support them – should be designed to track telltale signs of suspicious activity such as sudden bursts in followers or suspicious letter replacements in profile names, such as the use of “1” to replace the letter “I.” More sophisticated algorithms can flag dramatic shifts in performance and unanticipated engagement patterns.

In addition to ensuring transparency and integrity, influencer marketing campaigns should focus on authentic engagement. Influencer marketing is inherently social; when implemented well it can be an open (but directed) conversation that is amplified to the masses. This is why it is vital to focus on follower engagement.

While metrics like volume are of course important (e.g., follower count, posts per day/week, etc.), engagement may have the biggest impact on meeting or even exceeding KPIs. One of the highlights of influencer marketing is the opportunity for a brand to leverage an influencer’s unique voice. That unique voice has a big impact on the type of content an influencer can produce for brands — and it is that unique, authentic voice that ultimately drives consumer engagement with the branded content.

For brands, a trusted environment is one of the most effective places to engage consumers. Passionate influencers who authentically weave branded stories into social platforms that consumers trust are the ones who deliver powerful results.

Whether it is a story told through a blog post, video, a picture, or any combination of these, working with influencers can bring brands and products to life with engaging, custom content delivered to the right audience — amplified through the channels that has the potential to make the greatest impact.

But to help ensure that this marriage between influencer marketing and social not only survives, but thrives, it is up to everyone in the industry to work to ensure that engagements remain authentic, honest, transparent, and measurable.

By Katie Paulsen

By Katie Paulsen, Vice President of Influencer Marketing, RhythmOne

Sourced from MediaPost

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7 Important Digital Marketing KPIs for Small Business Owners

July 6, 2018 No Comments

By Derek Miller

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are measurable data that companies use to track and evaluate strategic activities and business objectives. KPIs are important to businesses because they provide context to organizational goals and place accountability on those tasked with achieving those goals.

While small business owners usually have no problem creating KPIs for sales and production, deciding how to track and measure digital marketing initiatives can be more cumbersome.

As technology becomes more integrated into our lives, so too is the importance of having KPIs for your small business’ digital marketing.

Here are seven of the most important digital marketing KPIs:

1. Email Open Rate

Measures: The number of email recipients who opened an email.

Calculating Open Rate: Most email marketing platforms provide open rate statistics on each email campaign. If you want to track open rates on individual email correspondents, try using a tool like Yesware.

Why it’s important: Understanding and using email open rates can help you improve your email marketing activities and discover trends that lead to more email engagement.

2. Cost Per Click (CPC)

Measures: The cost you pay for each unique visitor from an online paid media ad.

Calculating CPC: Most paid media platforms (Google AdWords, Facebook Ads Manager, Outbrain, etc.) have an analytics report that shows your CPC. You can also use Google Tag Manager and your digital marketing budget report to assess CPC from other paid strategies.

Why it’s important: Knowing your CPC and creating goals using this marketing metric can help you optimize your paid media activities.

3. Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)

Measures: The cost you pay for each conversion or acquisition. A conversion or acquisition could include activities like: calling your business, completing a lead form, downloading an eBook, purchasing a product, or any other number of user actions.

Calculating CPA: Where CPC calculates traffic, CPA measures activity. To calculate CPA, you need to track conversions either through the paid media platform, web analytics software, or manually. You will then take the total amount spent on advertising that campaign and divide it by the total users converted.

Why it’s important: Understanding your cost per acquisition and creating a targeted average CPA will help you assess the return on investment from your advertising activities.

4. Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Measures: The percentage of people who see your advertisement, inbound link, post, or search result snippet and then clicks it to navigate to your website.

Calculating CTR: Most communication channels will provide a CTR for each marketing activity you execute. If a platform doesn’t, you can look for the total impressions received, and use Google Tag Manager to calculate the traffic from that link.

Why it’s important: A low CTR indicates that people see your post or ad, but are not compelled to act. By measuring your CTR, you can adjust ad copy and marketing messages to entice more people to click on your links.

5. Inbound Links

Measures: The number of internal links pointing to your website from another site.

Calculating Inbound Links: Use an SEO tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush to crawl the web for links pointing to your domain.

Why it’s important: Inbound links are one of the most powerful ways to grow your online presence. You should be working to grow the number of links pointing to your site by creating link-worthy content and conducting link earning/building outreach. By tracking and creating goals for total inbound links, you can help improve your organic rankings and drive more traffic to your website.

6. Monthly Website Traffic (Channels)

Measures: The number of users who visit your website through organic search, referral links, direct URLs, or paid channels.

Calculating Monthly Website Traffic: Use Google Analytics to calculate your website’s total monthly visitors. You can also drill down to specific acquisition methods to determine what channels drive the most traffic.

Why it’s important: Knowing the total amount of traffic you receive every month and the channels they used to find your website provide you the insight needed to measure the effectiveness of your different marketing campaigns. It also helps you find opportunities to increase the amount and quality of your visitors.

7. Bounce Rate

Measures: The percentage of users who leave your website after only visiting the page on which they landed.

Calculating Bounce Rate: Use Google Analytics to track the bounce rate across your entire site and on the specific pages for which you are running targeted marketing campaigns.

Why it’s important: Bounce rate indicates the user-experience on your various pages. If visitors are leaving your site after only visiting one page, you need to assess whether that page is under-optimized, if you’re bringing the wrong audience to your site, or why visitors are not engaging with your other pages.

Working With Digital Marketing KPIs

Every small business should use digital marketing KPIs. While every company will have their own digital marketing KPIs, understanding some of the most popular ones can help you get started with tracking and measuring your digital marketing initiatives against your business goals.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

By Derek Miller

Sourced from the balance small business

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How to Use Facebook Advertising to Beat the Algorithm and Ensure Your Posts Are Seen

July 5, 2018 No Comments

By Kate Peers

Facebook has been experiencing a lot of bad press. Some even say that users are gravitating away from Facebook and towards other platforms.

The current statistics disagree with this assessment, however. There are still one billion active users on Facebook, which means that Facebook is still a strong place to find potential customers for your business. If you use Facebook ads efficiently, you can precisely target your audience and effectively spend for a strong return.

In this article, we examine how and when to use Facebook ads for your business.

Can I reach people without ads?

Facebook are using an algorithm which makes it more and more difficult to reach people organically through posting direct to your page. On average your posts will reach 1–3% of your audience without any ad spend. So, while can you interact with customers without ads, spending money on ads will help you reach more people, as well as more relevant people.

Should I boost a post?

Facebook is very clever. If you have ever posted anything on a business page, you’ll be familiar with the constant suggestions to “boost” your post. You may see a message that says something along the lines of, “This post is performing well, boost it now for more people to view it.”

While boosting a post can increase your customer reach, the most efficient way to interact with customers is by creating an ad from scratch.

How do I create an ad?

Before you make a start with Facebook ads, think hard about your objective. What would you like to achieve with your ad? Do you want to drive traffic to your blog? Would you like people to purchase an e-book? Are you hoping to get more page likes on Facebook and increase your followers?

All of these objectives can be achieved with Facebook ads, but make sure you have them clear before you begin, otherwise your spend will be directed towards the wrong outcome.

Target your audience

Take time to consider your dream client. Who is he or she? Do you want to target women in New York, aged between 30–45 with a high disposable income? You can do this.

Facebook has different targeting options divided into general demographics, interests, behaviors and connections. The real power of Facebook ads lies in interest and behavioral targeting. As we now know all too well, Facebook has tons of data on everyone’s interests, page likes and groups joined. If you know your audience, then you can reach them by creating an audience on Facebook.

Create a strong visual

A strong visual image is key to grab your customer’s attention. You only have one shot to make a first impression — you want to be sure that your images are clear, bright, and convey your message appropriately.

You should also be mindful about the fact that Facebook has very strict guidelines for ad creation, which tend to change a lot. You can only have text covering 20% of your image for instance, or your ad won’t deliver. Ensure your image meets these guidelines before you spend unnecessary time and money on an ad that doesn’t work.

Test, trial and respond to each ad

Facebook insights allow you to track how well an ad has performed. Price per click, number of times the ad was seen and adding URL tags to your ads mean that with a combination of Google analytics and Facebook insights you can play around with a small budget.

It is important to test to see what your audience responds to and ensure you are spending your money to achieve good results. If you notice that no one’s clicking on an ad, you may want to pause it. But, if you notice that hundreds of people are responding, you may want to add more spend and reach more people.

Once you get it right, the results will be mind blowing.

Final thoughts

There are few ways to reach your audience that are as direct and effective as Facebook advertising. If you’ve been hesitant to try out Facebook ads, now’s the time to give it a go.

Have you tried ProWritingAid’s editing tool yet? It will help you edit faster, strengthen your writing, and get your ideas across.

Try it for free now!

Originally published at prowritingaid.com.

Feature Image Source: Shutterstock

By Kate Peers

Kate Peers is the writer of the Mad About The Boys blog. A social media and marketing manager, she secretly wants to write a book one day. She is the a contributing author of Walking In The Rain and Washing Up Is Good For You, curated books by Department Store For The Mind. Her work can also be found on Metro online.

Sourced from The Writing Cooperative

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Attracting Millennials And Gen Zs To Sales In A Digital Marketing World

June 19, 2018 No Comments

By Nicole Lee

Over the last five to six years, I have sat in numerous interviews in which candidates very candidly announced that their real passion was in marketing, digital marketing or social media marketing. I am constantly asking myself, “How can I attract quality account executives when there is so much buzz around digital marketing?”

There is no denying it — the term “sales” is not always looked on in the best light. No young person wants to think of themselves as being sold something, especially now when you walk into empty malls and see hungry associates trying to make their daily goals. The big shift in our culture from having a personal sales experience with a trusted, thoughtful salesperson to being able to order anything from your phone and have it there in two days has affected the way we think of salespeople.

This thought process extends into people’s careers. A large part of their interactions are in a voyeuristic/exhibitionist manner; this makes it difficult to ask people to fully engage in a career where you have to create and maintain your own relationships. Picking up the phone and calling someone does not come naturally. Having to reach out to strangers and tell them something they may not want to hear seems to a majority of candidates to be the lowest of the low.

While marketing is still a means of promoting and selling products, it is viewed as a creative industry and thus satiates the human desire to be creative. We know that 76.8 million millennials participate in some kind of social media. On a daily basis, they are marketing themselves to their friends and colleagues in their own creative voice. Thus, a career in marketing is just an extension of a personal habit that they already participate in and thoroughly enjoy.

So, how can we, as senior sales professionals, attract the best candidates to be passionate and engaged in sales and business development?

At Glow Concept, I have taken several steps that do not include doubling their pay or benefits. These tactics may not work for every industry, but we’ve been able to build an amazing team by changing our internal goals and outlook on what the sales team actually does. The following is our four-pronged approach.

Rebranding Our Sales Force

Our team members are now B2B relationship managers. Their main focus is on creating strategic marketing plans to optimize sales with our partners. This works particularly well for our team, as we are not in a heavy outreach phase and are focused on building deeper relationships with our current accounts.

Marketing Is Sales; Sales Is Marketing

We put a heavy emphasis on digital marketing being a part of our overall sales and marketing strategy. Our executives and managers must be involved in planning, implementing and monitoring digital advertising campaigns, social campaign effectiveness and affiliate marketing success.

Digital Marketing Is Really Just B2C Sales

This is something I talk about on a daily basis because at some point (in our industry) someone is going to have to sell to the customer. We must think in terms of how we best deliver to the customer. From content to product shots to copy, I have enabled the team to have an eye out for how the message is best delivered and study the performance of each delivery.

Be Creative

I implore the team to always remember they are at the front end and therefore have a big voice when it comes to products and the communication around those products. They are encouraged to analyze how and why things are performing and what we can do to optimize our marketing and digital marketing efforts.

Putting an emphasis on relationship management as a means of marketing our products to other business and, eventually, consumers has invigorated our team. They are creative, digital-marketing-savvy salespeople who understand the importance of relationship management, but are also able to keep up with the digital marketing world. I realize this article may or may not be helpful depending on your industry, but I implore you to think of your sales team as more than a collection of salespeople and explore how you can get creative to pull in top talent in a digital market world.

Feature Image Credit: Shutterstock

By Nicole Lee

Experienced Brand Builder with over 13 years experience in sales and marketing.

Sourced from Forbes