People who've completed marketing degree programs often go on to careers in advertising, marketing and public relations. Read on to discover the job opportunities available to you if you hold a marketing degree.
What Jobs Can I Get with a BBA in Marketing?
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Marketing Analyst: Career and Salary Facts
Explore the career requirements for marketing analysts. Get the facts about salary, job duties and education requirements to determine if this is the right career for you.
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Marketing Representative: Career and Salary Facts
Explore the career requirements for a marketing representative. Get the facts about education requirements, job responsibilities and salary to determine if this is the right career for you.
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What is a Website Promotion Specialist?
Website promotion specialists develop marketing plans based on consumer trends and employer philosophies. Continue reading to learn what skills can lead to a successful career with a company wanting to maintain an online presence.
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How Can I Get a Job as a Director of Product Marketing?
If you have significant experience in marketing and would like to use your knowledge to help a company excel in their marketing efforts, you could be ready to take on the role of director of product marketing. Read on for information about the preparation that is necessary to qualify for such a position.
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What's the Job Description of a Global Marketing Professional?
Global marketing professionals work with businesses to develop strategies for commerce in countries all over the world. Read on to learn about this career choice to see if it might be a good choice for you.
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What is the Job Description of an Internet Marketing Manager?
Internet marketing managers have training in marketing and e-business strategies. Find out more about this position, and explore the job duties, educational requirements, career outlook and salary potential for Internet marketing managers.
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What Are the Top Universities for Marketing and Advertising?
Find out tips for selecting a good marketing or advertising degree program. Learn about top schools offering degree programs in this field and compare these schools.
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Customer Marketing Manager: Career and Salary Facts
Explore the career requirements for customer marketing managers. Get the facts about job duties, education requirements, salary and job outlook to determine if this is the right career for you.
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Internet Marketing Courses and Certification Programs
Internet marketing courses are available at the undergraduate and graduate levels and can teach you how to integrate traditional marketing strategies into websites. Continue reading to learn more about internet marketing courses and certification.
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Advertising, Promotions, and Marketing Managers : Occupational Outlook Handbook: : U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
Advertising, promotions, and marketing managers plan programs to generate interest in products or services. They work with art directors, sales agents, and financial staff members.
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Marketing Management | The University of Chicago Booth School of Business
In the 21 month program, challenge conventional wisdom and participate in vigorous dialogue with other like-minded thinkers. Welcome to our culture of inquiry and innovation at Chicago Booth.
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My Online Collection
Just the Stuff I find interesting . Social , news and politics are of interest to me . Marketing...
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Why Change Management is Apparel’s Best Response to Trade Uncertainty –
Sourcing Journal’s Optimizing Productivity Report advises on the best ways for apparel and footwear companies to weed out inefficiencies.
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Digital Wallets Take On B2C Payment Pain Points
PayPal discusses its partnership with Citi to tackle the friction in the cross-border business-to-consumer (B2C) payments space by embracing digital wallets.
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Artificial Intelligence Is Making Increasing Headway In The Enterprise Back Office
Read Ronald Schmelzer’s article in Forbes about the ways in which AI is making an impact on the back office: Artificial intelligence is making some of the most remarkable progress in back offices of enterprises of all types.
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Implementing Cloud: The need to enforce Change Management Process
The business benefits of Cloud have already been felt by forward-thinking organizations that have long been in the game.Especially in the financial sector,…
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Leading Process Improvement – Project Initiation – Change Management World
One key challenge in Process Improvement Leadership can be the initiation of projects. As a CPI Leader you may or may not be privy to the challenges occurring in other departments (or, on a larger scale, other facilities). In a large (multi-site) organization it makes sense to coordinate…
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Robotic process automation in data centres
Organizations are setting up DevOps teams and micro services for real-time processing, big data storage capacity and reliability.
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5 Thing You Must Know About Managed Services
Simply put, managed services are the practice of outsourcing critical processes or functions of a workforce in hopes to streamline business operations or cut costs while allowing internal teams to focus on core competencies and more strategically aligned activities.
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Why Change Management
There is a common denominator for achieving the intended outcomes of your initiative: people. Your initiatives impact how individual people do their work: their processes, job roles, workflows, reporting structures, behaviors and even their identity within the organization.
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The Value of Configuration Management
For the purpose of understanding the value of Configuration Management, we have to trace how value is added to transactions. The value transaction is important to the supplier because that is where value the customer is measured.
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How the Enterprise is Shifting Towards Corporate Social Responsibility and What It Means for Comms
Due in part to a major transition signaled by the Business Roundtable in August, many businesses have begun reevaluating their marketing strategies with an increased focus on corporate social responsibility.
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How Your Marketing Calendar Helps You Be Flexible When Project Dates Change
Table of Contents
Connect Social Messages and Tasks to Projects
Everything that has a date should be on your CoSchedule Marketing Calendar – including tasks, social messages, events, and even notes. Make your life easier by connecting tasks and social messages directly to your marketing projects. Tasks are added before the project’s due date so that all the work is done prior to the project publishing. Social messages come after the project publishes, so you are promoting something that is live. You’ll notice tasks and social messages live on your Calendar next to your Project Cards.
Reschedule Everything With Drag & Drop
It can feel intimidating to have projects, tasks, and social media messages on your calendar – especially if project due dates change or priorities shift. One of the best time-saving features of connecting tasks and social messages to a marketing project is the ability to drag and drop to reschedule everything. If a project’s due date changes, simply drag and drop the project to a new date on the calendar. All the connected tasks and social messages will automatically reschedule along with it.
Get started by adding some tasks and social messages to your CoSchedule Marketing Calendar.
The post How Your Marketing Calendar Helps You Be Flexible When Project Dates Change appeared first on CoSchedule Blog.
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Customer Lifecycle Marketing: How to Attract and Retain More Customers
When you’re purchasing a new product, you’ll go through five main stages.
Successful companies deliver the right content at the right stage—which likely has an impact on if (and when) you seal the deal.
Fancy learning how you can do that for your customers?
It starts with a customer lifecycle marketing strategy.
[Tweet "Customer Lifecycle Marketing: How to Attract and Retain More Customers by @elisedopson via @CoSchedule"]
What is Customer Lifecycle Marketing?
Before we dive in, let’s cover the basics and touch on what customer lifecycle marketing actually means. Every customer goes through these five key stages before they buy something:- Awareness
- Consideration
- Purchase
- Support
- Retention
The duration depends on various things—such as the product, service, industry, or price—but all five stages are present in any sales journey. It’s the same cycle no matter whether they’re buying a diary or a $5,000 SaaS product.
Customer lifecycle marketing is the content strategy you use to meet and communicate with potential customers at each touchpoint.(Hence why you might also see this called a “sales funnel” or “buyer’s journey.”)
Download Your Customer Lifecycle Marketing Strategy + Marketing Calendar Templates
Organizing and executing your strategy will require two tools: a documented plan and a marketing calendar to visualize each piece of content you'll publish to address each stage of the customer lifecycle. Download these two templates now, then read on to learn what customers need from your content at every stage in the purchasing cycle. [Cookie "Get Your Customer Lifecycle Marketing Strategy Templates || https://media.coschedule.com/uploads/blog_customer_lifecycle_marketing-11-1.png || Download Now || https://media.coschedule.com/uploads/customer_lifecycle_marketing_strategy_template.zip"]Why Bother With Understanding the Customer Lifecycle?
Now we know what customer lifecycle marketing is, it’s time to move onto the juicy part: why you should be thinking of this in your business. After all, it’s easy (and sometimes, standard practice) to find a keyword with lots of monthly searches, write it up, and hope for the best. The only problem? You optimize it for SEO and start to drive traffic from organic search… But those visits don’t translate into conversions—be that signing up to an email list or completing a purchase. That’s because if you don’t pinpoint exactly who should be reading it, the person landing there won’t complete the goal of that piece of content. You need to give the right person the right thing, at the right time. (An obvious example is a sales page. Shoving a sales page in front of a stranger likely won’t make them want to buy because they don’t know you, or your product/service, yet. Why would they trust you enough with their cash? They don’t know whether you’ll deliver.) A customer lifecycle marketing strategy takes this into consideration. We can see this on a very basic level with the two main categories: new customers and existing customers.
Recommended Listening: How Customers Can Identify Their Best Customers to 3X Business Growth With Katelyn Bourgoin
Attract New Customers
You won’t have a profitable or sustainable business if you don’t attract customers. This is why most marketing campaigns target people known to be at the top of the funnel, or starting point of the customer lifecycle. The intention is to show new people what you have to offer, and nurture them towards a sale. So, the first few stages of a customer lifecycle marketing strategy are geared towards brand awareness. You want to attract a bunch of people with a vague interest in your industry, then convince them to engage with your campaigns. This engagement builds trust—something crucial for any purchasing decision. [caption id="attachment_80134" align="aligncenter" width="1360"]
Source: Harvard Business Review[/caption]
Retain Existing Customers
You’ve attracted customers and they trust you enough to purchase. How do you continue to get value from them without relying on them to purchase on their own accord? The answer: With marketing campaigns specifically crafted for those people. This can be beneficial in more ways than one. Sure, you’ll get a bunch of sales trickling in—but it’s also 5-25 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to retain an existing one. So much so, that improving your customer retention rates by 5% can increase your profitability by up to 95%. [caption id="attachment_80137" align="aligncenter" width="1360"]
Source: Harvard Business School[/caption]
How to Create a Customer Lifecycle Marketing Strategy
Are you ready to create a customer lifecycle marketing strategy that ticks all five boxes from stranger to raving customer? Here’s what you’ll need to do at each stage of the funnel:
1. Awareness
The first stage of any customer journey starts before the person knows your brand. The people you’ll target at this stage don’t know you, your product, or your services. They’re complete strangers—hence why your goal is to get in front of them. (You shouldn’t aim to get in front of everybody, though. Refer back to your buyer personas and target people who fit that mould, but likely don’t know you exist yet.) Because these people are strangers, they don’t have much time to invest into your content. They want something light-hearted about a topic they’re already interested in. Think about it: You wouldn’t download and read a 50-page eBook from a brand you’ve never heard of, right? People in this stage have the same opinion. You need to win them over with a short burst of content that doesn’t need too much commitment on their side. The channel you’re using to communicate with them is crucial. Because they don’t have much time to give you, ideal channels might be:- Blog posts
- Website content
- Landing pages
- Social media content
- Videos
- Podcasts
2. Consideration
Once somebody knows your brand name, they’ll remember you when they’ve got a problem. (You can find yours inside your buyer persona. Have a look at the pain points you’ve listed—these are the things your target customer struggles with, and uses your product/service to solve.) People in the Consideration stage of a customer lifecycle already know they’re struggling with a problem. They’re turning to sites like Google for help to solve it—or, they’ll head to a brand they know through content they saw in the Awareness stage. Content for these people is more in-depth and specific, usually answering a problem they have. It has more search intent than others. For example: someone searching “how to buy Apple stock” is further along in the sales funnel than someone searching “beginner’s guide to investing.” Their search is more specific and they know exactly what they need help with. Again, you might package this content in a different way to Awareness-based content because people have more time and attention to devote. (Remember: They want to solve a problem.) You could do this through:- Blog posts
- Website content
- Email journeys
- Lead magnets or content upgrades
3. Purchase
The person who’s just read your Consideration-focused content knows they want to solve the problem you’ve just discussed with them. However, they’ve got a few more questions before they cross the purchase line. They’re looking for the best company, product, or service to solve their problem, and need some more guidance to help them make their decision. So, think about what people would want to see if they’re debating whether to purchase your product or a competitor. Do they want to see:- Price comparisons?
- Feature comparisons?
- Testimonials of customers similar to them who are happy after purchasing from you?
The goal of Purchase content is to encourage that person to buy from you. This email shows it doesn’t always need to be a comprehensive blog post, or a 20-minute-long video.
It can be as simple as an incentive for them to do so—like a discount code.
Recommended Reading: All About BOFU: What You Need to Know About Bottom-Funnel Content
4. Support
You’ve convinced your reader to hit the purchase button as a result of your top- and middle-of-funnel content. Great job! But your work isn’t complete just yet. Chances are, the people who’ve just hit purchase and might have some questions. They might be wondering:- How to use a feature inside your app
- How to contact customer support
- How to change their billing details
- An onboarding sequence: This series of messages can slowly drip common support queries to your new customer either via email or in-app messages. The downside? They might be struggling with the issue before your relevant tutorial is delivered.
- A support/help center: Create a huge library of FAQs, and direct people there in their purchase confirmation emails. Zendesk is a great example of this. Their help center is the go-to place for any post-purchase questions:
The best part? Both of these distribution tactics help your customer find answers by themselves. They don’t need to wait the 7+ hours it usually takes to receive a response from a customer support agent; the answers are ready and waiting for them.
5. Retention
What happens if you’ve carried a customer through to the support phase, and they don’t seemingly need help anymore? The answer isn’t “leave them to do their own thing.” Your goal is to either make them continue with their subscription, or buy more products. So, let’s start by thinking about what customers would like to see—even if they’re happy with the item they’ve purchased. You could:- Give them a tutorial that shows how to make the most of their subscription—like how to use certain features
- Offer discount codes to be redeemed off future purchases to thank them for already being a customer
- Share upcoming plans for your company which can’t be seen by non-customers
They know I’m a happy customer with no history of complaints. But rather than assuming I’ll repurchase off my own back, they always try and re-engage me with their app—with the goal of going back to their store.
This impacts your bottom line; the ROI you’re getting from content marketing.
Why? Because 36.5% of shoppers said they will spend more on products if they’re loyal to a brand. Sending regular, relevant and engaging content to those people is bound to build that loyalty.
[caption id="attachment_80139" align="aligncenter" width="1360"]
Source: Yotpo[/caption]
Find Your Customer Lifecycle
Every customer goes through these five stages when they’re buying products. Now you know the content you’ll create at each stage, the only thing left to do is create it—and figure out how you can deliver it to the right person, at the right time.The post Customer Lifecycle Marketing: How to Attract and Retain More Customers appeared first on CoSchedule Blog.
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Which Influencer Marketing Tactics Should We Retire (and What You Should Do Instead) With Jamie Lieberman From Hashtag Legal [AMP 177]
Influencer marketing is a multi-billion-dollar industry that continues to grow and shows no signs of slowing down. It’s a direct line to your customer base to grow your brand and gain insight about your products.
Today’s guest is Jamie Lieberman, owner and founder of Hashtag Legal. Jamie describes specific do’s and don’ts of influencer marketing to avoid conflict with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Stay ethical and legal!
[podcast_motor_player]
Some of the highlights of the show include:
- Big Business: Influencer marketing shifted from blogs and brands to billions
- All Parties Involved: Transactions include influencers, agencies, and brands
- Misconceptions: Influencers take any sponsored content and focus only on ROI
- Best Practices: Quality over quantity, metrics, and analytics of sponsored content
- Worst Tactics: FTC disclosures defeat trust between influencers and brands
- Getting Started: Conduct research, learn from others, and find influencers
- Do’s: Build authentic relationships and form true partnerships
Links:
If you liked today’s show, please subscribe on iTunes to The Actionable Content Marketing Podcast! The podcast is also available on SoundCloud, Stitcher, and Google Play.
Quotes by Jamie Lieberman:
[Tweet "Which Influencer Marketing Tactics Should We Retire (and What You Should Do Instead) With Jamie Lieberman From @hashtaglegalllc"]
- “Brands are now really approaching [influencer marketing] in a much more business sort of way and in a much more thoughtful way.”
- “Most influencers are really curating those offers that they are receiving to make sure they are really a good fit.”
- “More transparency is really the way to go.”
- “If you find influencers who are already engaging with your content... go talk to them and see what kind of arrangement can be struck.”
Transcript:
Ben: Influencer marketing is a rapidly growing industry worth billions of dollars. That growth is showing absolutely no signs of slowing down in the near future. If you’ve been considering jumping on the trend or even if you’ve been in the game for a while, there are some do’s and don’ts that you might not be aware of. Including some that could get you into trouble with the FTC if you're aren’t careful, and that’s not something anyone wants for their company. What you do want, though, is a direct line to your customer base that helps you grow your brand while offering you direct insight into what people really think about your products. To find out how to achieve those kinds of benefits from influencer marketing while staying within sound ethical practice and the law, I spoke with Jamie Lieberman from Hashtag Legal who does a fantastic job explaining key do’s and don’ts about the practice, shared some really good tips on how to get started, and even how to take your influencer marketing to the next level once you’ve gotten yourself comfortable and your feet wet with it. As a founder/partner in the Influencer Marketing Association and the business owner at Hashtag Legal, she brings a ton of really unique insight into this topic, both from a strategic perspective, as well as a legal one. Stick around to hear what she has to say. Welcome to the show, Jamie, how's it going? Jamie: Great, how are you? Ben: I'm fantastic. I hear it's a little bit dreary out there in the greater New York City area today. Jamie: It is. It’s really overcast but we're trying to keep it happy anyway. Ben: Good, keeping it happy is good advice for all of us. Jamie: Yeah, sometimes you just got to smile through it. Ben: Absolutely. Well, I'm smiling because I'm really excited to talk about influencer marketing, do’s and don’ts, things that need to be put to rest, and things we should be doing instead. I'm particularly excited about this, just because it's such a hot topic right now and it's also something I don't really know a ton about. I'm thinking this is going to be educational for myself as much for our audience, so I really appreciate your time. The first thing that I would like to ask, maybe is a good starting point, what have been some of the biggest shifts in influencer marketing you've seen in the past few years? Jamie: I've actually been in the space for longer than the term influencer existed. It's been really interesting to watch it change. I was a blogger many, many years ago and then I started working for a company that did conferences for bloggers. I was working for more than six or seven years ago. At that time, sponsored content looked very different. There wasn't much budget behind it. It was a lot of we’d send 100 press releases out to a bunch of bloggers and hope some of them would post. Sometimes a gift card would be involved; that would be a bonus, and there’d be a lot of offers of gift certificates or free products. But there just wasn't a lot of the real true business plan behind it because people didn't know. Then, you fast-forward to now and it's a massive industry. I just read it's going to grow to 22 billion by 2022, Business Insider said, so it's just changed. It's crazy and it's just changed so much. Now, I feel like all parties to these transactions, which can be anything from an influencer of all varying sizes (and people call them macro, micro, nano, all of the above), but in all the different types of influencers, agencies that either focus on influencer marketing or have a group of people who focus on it within larger agencies. Brands are now really approaching it in a much more business way and in a much more thoughtful way. There's a lot more vetting. There's way more relationship building than there ever had been before between the brands and influencers.
Ben: Got you. What are some of the biggest misconceptions about the practice that you hear?
Jamie: One is that an influencer will take any sponsored content that comes their way, that's just not true. Most influencers are really curating those offers that they're receiving to make sure they're a really good fit and that the other is that there's a misperception of what the return on investment is going to be.
Traditionally, a lot of people want to see returns on campaigns of sales and I don't think that that's necessarily a realistic approach to influencer marketing. It's about some larger goals than just sales per se. Now, people in the space, particularly the brands, are approaching influencers and influencers who are working with the brands, are really looking at it as the end result, like what are our keep performance indicators, and making sure that we're hitting accurate metrics and that the brand is getting what the brand needs or wants from that relationship. Sales is often not a good indicator of that. Moving away from really looking for a certain number of products to move.
Ben: And that leads into the next question I have for you. Are there any specific tactics that were once effective that marketers should now stop using? To add to that as well, are there any goals that maybe were considered best practice at one time to follow that are maybe not the best things to try to achieve of influencer marketing?
Jamie: There used to be quantity over quality and now it's very much quality. There's a lot more vetting involved. There are a lot more conversations to make sure that the audience that the influencer has is the best fit for the brand. There's a lot more conversation about metrics and knowing your analytics. It's really important that the blogger or the influencer has a really good understanding of their metrics of who their audiences are, what their audiences are interested in, and understanding what content their audience engages with the most. That really is how you can back out and find the best relationships between the brands and the influencer because then you are set up for that success.
Sponsored content is typically engaged with less. It’s just the fact and you have to know that and that's okay. It's not a bad thing, but when it's something that makes sense and coming through it, it doesn't feel like it's out of the left field, then it's really effective. It really is. It can absolutely drive engagement and it can also drive just eyeballs and knowing about a product that maybe the audience didn’t know about before.
Ben: Absolutely. Something you've touched on a couple of times here is metrics. For influencer marketing, what would be some strong metrics that marketers should consider following or using to actually track the success of their influencer campaigns?
Jamie: The engagement is the number one place people look most to, but it's not just the numbers, but the quality of engagement. That really requires looking deep at how people are engaging with that content, what they're saying, who's saying it, where it's coming from. That often can be on the influencer to create that report, so I'm seeing a lot more requirements for brands are saying, “We want you to gather a lot of this data,” because the influencer is the one who has the best access to that.
I think it's a really great way for influencers to continue relationships, is to create reports at the end just to show what they're content did, what the comments were, what that most liked comment, most engaged with comment, what people are saying. It's a true pulse in how people are interested in what the brand is putting out there. They're pretty honest about their needs.
Ben: Yes, they are.
Jamie: They're going to tell you if they like it or they don’t. I think that there's so much valuable data there and that can be collected, but you have to take the time to look at it, and you have to take time to collect it. I think that it allows many of the influencers to negotiate for more when they're able to provide those metrics. It's like market data that you can't always get. It’s all good and it’s all quality that I'm now seeing it in the contracts where their brands are saying, “We really want these case studies. We want to see the analytics. We want to see what's working best.”
Ben: I always love to hear that marketers are thinking about measurements; that's encouraging. Are there any tactics also that you would say have been overused, even though they never actually worked to begin with? Things that are floating around out there that people think they need to be doing, but they should stop, and probably never should have been doing in the first place?
Jamie: Actually, I think a lot of it revolves around disclosures like the FTC disclosures. I think a lot of people were just trying to hide the ball for so long that content was sponsored. You buried the hashtag, like a string of hashtags and all of this. People saw through it and when they saw that that just defeated the whole purpose of trying to create that trust relationship.
I think more transparency is really the way to go. The fact is, influencers are creating so much content for free, and it's okay that they get paid. There shouldn't be an apology for them getting paid for content because they put so much out there and work so hard to do that.
A lot of brands, for some time, were actively encouraging the hiding and a lot of times, influencers were doing it as well, but the FTC is not liking that lately, and has definitely made some waves. I think that finding ways to disclose and make it very clear that this is sponsored content shouldn't be like a bad word. It's okay. Advertisements have been around as long as us. It's marketing and there's nothing wrong with it. Taking that tactic away would be pretty beneficial.
Ben: Yeah, I can agree with that. If I'm a marketer, I'm listening to this show, and I've never really done any influencer marketing before, but I'm sold on the idea that it could be a good opportunity for my brand, what would be the three things I should start doing first?
Jamie: I research. Research is key. Talking to other professionals who have worked in the space, what's worked for them, what hasn't worked for them. An opening dialogue with influencers; looking at the influencers that maybe are already using the products that you create.
Influencers talk about products all the time in a non-sponsored way. If you find those influencers who are already engaging with your content—they’ll tag you, they’ll engage in your social channels—go talk to those influencers and see what kind of arrangement can be struck if it makes sense because they're already talking about you. It will feel very natural.
I think that it's not just research, but it's also that level of, don't just try to throw a bunch of stuff and hope it sticks. Now it's really about forming relationships with the right people. Also, the third thing I'd say is knowing what you want to get from it. Why are you doing it and what are you looking to drive? When you know those goals and what those KPIs are, that will help you back up into how you approach it because there's going to be different things you may do depending on what your goals are.
Ben: To take on that first point of doing research and finding influencers, maybe just getting your finger on the pulse of who those people are in their space, and what kinds of things they're saying, what kinds of products they seem to like. Do you have any advice on tools, or tactics, or methods for getting started with that research?
Jamie: There are certainly a million databases out there. I won't say or have a favorite that it shifts so frequently. If you do choose to use one of those databases, have a really good understanding of how they're gathering that information, what influencers, how they're signing up for it, things like that.
Another way that people will often do it is there are really great agencies out there that do this for a living, and are really smart, and have been doing it for a long time. If the budget is there for you to do that, it may be worth an engagement with an agency that can at least help you start that program. Maybe you'll take it in-house eventually. Some brands do, some brands decide that's not the best fit.
I see it in both ways, but there's a lot of really great resources. There's also just a lot of resources out there, but looking at what those resources are, so making sure that those resources are good, the quality of who's talking about it is knowledgeable and has been doing it. There are a lot of people who call themselves influencers or call themselves influencer marketers, and when you just scratch the surface, you're like, “Yeah, this is not actually what this is,” so having maybe a discerning eye for where you're getting information from.
I'm actually on the board of directors of an organization called the Influencer Marketing Association, it’s a nonprofit. They are actually dedicated to putting forth more ethics in influencer marketing. They have some amazing resources on their website. They're a really great resource to look at, so places like that or organizations like that. If you honestly have no information at all, there are also some really great digital marketing resources out there that talk about it, and they'd be a great place to start, too. Those would be some great resources.
Ben: Awesome. Once a marketer gets beyond those, maybe we can call them entry-level tactics, for lack of a better term, as they get past the starting points, what would be the next steps you would recommend they take to really bring their influencer marketing to the next level?
Jamie: The first thing I would say is to make sure you have a set program that you've put together in place. You know what you're willing and able to offer to the influencers that you want to work with, you're contracting with them properly, that you have agreements in place, you have an understanding of what you want to do with that content. Whether it's going to live on the influencer’s website or social channels, or you want the ability to repurpose it, and how you want to repurpose it. I'm now seeing a lot of companies want to repurpose it to run branded ads.
Influencers will create an Instagram post and then the brand will want to have a year's worth of being able to utilize that beautiful photo as an ad. Knowing what you also want to do with it down the road is an important thing to do. I really truly believe it's all about relationship building. It's getting on calls which I know sounds crazy, but if you're negotiating deals, there's a lot of money. It's important to get to know the person that you want to be working with to really understand their brand and who they are, what their values are, and make sure they align with the values of your brand. It's really hard to do that by just a cursory glance of someone’s (say) Instagram channel.
I think you need to spend a little bit more time talking to the person. Instead of saying, “We want 30 influencers,” maybe you choose one or two that are a really great fit, and you invest in working with them over the course of (say) a year because that's when I think you start to see a lot more traction.
Ben: That does it for all the other questions I had prepared, but before I let you go, is there anything else about influencer marketing, the tactics, strategy, and measurement around it that you feel really strongly about, that you didn't get an opportunity to speak to yet. Just in terms of what should marketers be doing or not doing?
Jamie: I think when it's approached as a true partnership and people are really spending time, I just really believe it's all about the relationship building and the time to do that. I think those are the most effective. So making sure you have that time because we’re busy.
It's very hard to do that, but carving out that time to form those relationships and investing a little bit more to get the content you want created, because it takes a lot of time on the part of the influencers to shoot those videos, to take those photos. They invest a lot in their equipment as well. It's just when you form that relationship and you have that trust, you can really take it to the next level. Really, the most effective relationships I've witnessed are like that.
Ben: Fantastic stuff. This is a great conversation. Thanks for your time in this dreary afternoon to chat with us about influencer marketing. I think our listeners are really going to get some value out of this.
Jamie: Great. Thank you.
The post Which Influencer Marketing Tactics Should We Retire (and What You Should Do Instead) With Jamie Lieberman From Hashtag Legal [AMP 177] appeared first on CoSchedule Blog.
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Actionable Content: How to Actually Help Your Audience and Earn Their Trust
How beneficial is the content you’re creating? Not only for your business, but for your reader?
If you’re not creating actionable content, you’re likely using your time and effort to create blogs and articles that simply aren’t going to produce results. Not for your business, and also not for your reader.
Actionable content provides real people with real value and solutions, which is what leads a reader to take action. This, in turn, leads to increased engagement and more positive brand experiences.
Keep reading to learn how to begin creating actionable content that is more beneficial to your audience and your bottom line.
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What is Actionable Content?
Actionable content is content that can be easily implemented and acted upon by readers. Whether it’s blog posts, articles, or other content marketing materials, this type of content is typically informative, relevant, entertaining, and unique. So, what makes content “actionable”? Here are six common elements of actionable content:- It shows readers how to complete a process step-by-step.
- It targets your specific reader/intended audience.
- It provides value.
- It establishes trust.
- It addresses the reader’s needs or problems.
- Rather than simply telling a reader what to do, it shows the reader how to achieve something.
How It Will Benefit Your Business
How does creating actionable content benefit both the reader and your business? When readers find your posts helpful and have a positive experience interacting with your content, they will be more likely to engage with your brand as a whole. Because actionable content helps the target audience smoothly execute the steps to solve a relevant problem of theirs, this type of content can generate a great deal of traffic and leads. [Tweet "Actionable Content: How to Actually Help Your Audience and Earn Their Trust"]The 4 Layers of Actionable Content
For content to be actionable, it needs to do more than explain what a reader wants to or should strive to achieve. Instead, actionable content places a focus on educating the reader on how to take the necessary steps to achieve that goal. There are four layers involved when creating effective content that drives readers to take action. Before readers are convinced to act, you’ll likely need to work your way through the following steps:- Address reader pain.
- Create value.
- Build a relationship.
- Earn trust.
The first step is to focus on your reader’s or prospect’s pain. By recognizing their pain points and what it is they’re struggling with, your reader will begin to care about what you’re saying and engagement is sparked.
After addressing reader pain, provide a solution for your prospect. Offer realistic options that provide real value—something your reader can take away from reading your blog post or article and put to use.
Next, develop and strengthen a relationship with readers. The goal of this stage is to earn readers’ trust.
Finally, once trust has been established, the reader will feel comfortable enough to act on your CTA.
Recommended Reading: Content Governance: How to Establish Processes That Drive Great Content
5 Ways to Create More Actionable Content for Your Readers
So, how do you actually create this kind of content? Start by following these steps.1. Incorporate Interactive Elements
Rather than reading online content word for word, skimming has become accepted as the new normal. In fact, an average of 55 percent of visitors will read your articles for 15 seconds or less, according to Buffer. [caption id="attachment_80234" align="aligncenter" width="1360"]
Source: Buffer[/caption]
To effectively present your CTAs within your content, you’ll need to first engage your reader. Then, you’ll need to successfully keep their attention throughout the piece far enough to reach those CTAs and take action to solve their problem.
This means, simply crafting an attention-grabbing headline won’t cut it.
To keep your reader engaged with your post from the introduction to the conclusion, focus on making the content interactive. Because interactive content keeps readers clicking and consuming information, it’s an effective way to keep a reader's attention until your final CTA.
The following are a few ways to increase reader interaction with your content:
- Feature an interactive video or slideshow
- Include a survey or poll
- Embed a social media post
- Include a quiz or an assessment
- Add a calculator or tool
- Present an infographic
Quizzes/Assessments
Quizzes and assessments ask a user to provide answers to a few questions. At the end, the user receives insight or quality feedback based on their answers. When creating a quiz or assessment for your actionable content, consider the following best practices:- Direct your quiz questions at your ideal audience rather than trying to cater to everyone.
- Try including image answers rather than all text answers.
- Keep user results positive. Avoid focusing on any negative aspects of a user's results in their feedback.
- Keep user results short and simple. Write only 3 or 4 sentences for quiz or assessment results. (If you want to share more info, include a button or option to learn more.)
Polls/Surveys
Use polls and surveys in your content to gain feedback and new user data. When creating a survey or poll to embed in a post, follow these steps:- Determine your goal for the survey: Do you want to get feedback? Find out more about the demographics of your reader? Learn more about levels of interest?
- Keep it brief: A poll consists of only one multiple choice question, but surveys will have multiple. Try to keep your survey as short as you can to keep readers engaged
- Use simple language: Avoid industry-related jargon and keep wording simple and straightforward.
- Consider offering an incentive: Offering an incentive for those readers who complete your survey or poll will help further entice readers to participate
Calculators
Calculators are excellent tools to help make your content more interactive and valuable. A calculator provides precise results and can be used in a variety of situations. The key to creating calculators to imbed in your content is to keep them simple. No fluff is required. Stick to data. Check out any of the tools below to make your next calculator: Bonus: Interactive content can also provide you with data you can use to learn more about your readers! Take Nerdwallet for example. Nerdwallet offers a variety of calculator tools such as a down payment calculator, mortgage calculator, etc., which they regularly feature in their blogs. Other interactive content like polls and surveys are featured throughout their posts as well.
Check out any of the tools below to create elements that will make your content more interactive.
Recommended Reading: 13 Interactive Content Examples That Will Engage Your Audience
2. Include Multiple Clear Calls to Action
Including calls to action throughout your blogs, articles, etc. will direct readers along a logical path, showing them what comes next. Before adding any calls to action in your content, you need to determine your specific goal for that piece of content. Not only for your reader, but for your brand. What is it you want this piece of content to accomplish? Your content should always have a purpose, and that purpose should play a role in a wider strategy. For instance, you may create a blog post with the goal of driving social engagement, earning links, ranking in SERPs, or educating your audience. Once you’ve identified a clear goal for your content, decide what action(s) you want readers to take that will support that overarching goal. Once you’ve determined that action(s), strategically place a few clear calls to action within or around the text.
Whether it’s halfway through the piece, at the conclusion (like BuzzSumo did above), somewhere in between, or even in a sidebar or a branded graphic, your CTA location will depend on your intent.
Consider what action you want to encourage the reader to take and how you want the reader to consume the information you’re providing.
For instance, if your goal is to drive social engagement with your content, you’ll want readers to be sharing your content. So, place share buttons throughout the piece.
You may choose to include a display of social media sharing buttons at the bottom of a blog, in a stationary sidebar, or both. Additionally, you may include shareable graphics or quotes throughout the body of the blog, like the call to action in a Coschedule blog below prompting readers to tweet the link to the post.
On the other hand, if your goal is to educate an audience for the purpose of moving potential customers through a sales funnel, you’ll want to include specific direction leading your readers to the next step in the funnel.
For example, your call to action may be instructing readers to download a freebie or join your email list like the Coschedule example below offering a downloadable resource.
For info on how to write a killer CTA, check out this Coschedule CTA Template with examples or this Coschedule CTA worksheet.
3. Prove It: Insert Facts, Stats & Quotes
Before you can drive a reader to take action, you need to address reader pain, create value, build a relationship, and earn their trust. One way to earn a reader’s trust is to include hard evidence in your content. “Proving” your points and supporting your arguments with facts, stats, data, and expert quotes will give your content the credibility it needs to gain reader trust and begin building that relationship.
There are a few ways to earn a reader’s trust when it comes to supporting your arguments:
- Cite facts
- Provide statistics
- Include quotes from well-known industry experts and niche personalities.
If a reader is coming across your platform for the first time, they will have no way of knowing how trustworthy your brand or your content is. Mentioning specific numbers and statistics from reputable sources or featuring expert advice are effective ways to immediately establish credibility.
For instance, Cosmopolitan magazine writers are likely not experts in the medical field. But, by getting facts from a slew of doctors, studies, and expert quotes like those from the associate director of the Brown University Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies, this article about ways to beat a hangover becomes incredibly reliable.
When adding facts and statistics into content, be sure to only use authoritative sources, and fact check any details.
Here are a few more ways to make your facts more credible in your content:
- Define nomenclature or jargon that may be subject to interpretation.
- Relate facts to questions (make sure the statistics you use actually apply to your argument).
- Show the entire picture/don’t misrepresent evidence.
- Give bases of percentages.
- Cite your sources properly.
Recommended Reading: 13 of the Best Research Strategies to Create Amazing Content
4. Everyone Loves Examples
To create more actionable content and inspire readers to take action to solve their problem, incorporate real world examples into your blogs and content marketing materials. Including real-life examples of related success stories will not help build trust with your audience, but it will also add value by providing a realistic solution.
Well-explained examples will provide readers with a clear path toward success by demonstrating what has been proven to work for others. This will make it easier to persuade readers to act on instructions within your content and/or your final CTA.
Including examples within sections of your posts are beneficial for all of the reasons listed above. But, don’t limit yourself. You can also create entire pieces of content around the idea of demonstrating results or showing examples of how to do something.
Take the Coschedule blog post below, for instance. The entire post is dedicated to showing readers examples of social media posts that have been successful in the past.
Because of these real-life examples, this post not only tells readers how to create effective social media posts, but it shows them exactly how it has been done in the past, making it easy for readers to replicate on their own.
Get in the habit of following up advice, “tricks,” or how-to’s with an example showing the reader how to do it.
Aside from integrating examples directly into texts, here are a two other ways you can include examples in your work:
Parenthetical phrases
Here’s an instance of Coschedule using examples in parenthetical phrases at the end of a statement.
Visuals
Check out this instance of a Coschedule blog post teaching readers how to use the Coschedule Calendar to execute work quickly with images.
5. Let Some Visuals Do the Talking (Images, Videos, Graphs, Etc.)
You’ve heard it before. A picture is worth a thousand words. And with the average consumer attention span being 8 seconds, according to Cision, you need to be conveying your message as quickly as possible to convince your reader to take action. Because photos, graphs, videos, etc, appeal to our brains and are processed differently than text, visuals are an easy way to communicate key points to readers quickly. Additionally, including visuals in your content will make it more actionable because visual cues prompt our brains to make decisions for us. There are various ways you can incorporate visuals into your content such as infographics, video clips, screenshots, graphics, etc. You can even use visuals in your content to demonstrate how to do something step by step like Coschedule did in a blog below.
So while the text in your content can be written in a way to inspire action, incorporating images, graphics, or videos will also help nudge readers along in the right direction.
In fact, a study led by a Michigan State University neurologist found that “the visual cortex can essentially make decisions just like the brain’s traditional ‘higher level’ areas,” MSU Today reported. “The part of the brain that is responsible for seeing, for the apparently ‘simple’ act of generating the picture in our mind’s eye, turns out to have the ability to do something akin to choosing.”
When using visuals in blog posts or articles to create more actionable content, follow these best practices:
- Use visuals to break up the text and make it easier for readers to digest.
- Ensure images are legal to use. There are a few different ways to use images legally online including the following: royalty-free images, rights managed images, public domain images, creative commons images.
- Create your own images. If you want to give it a shot to make your own images for blogs, check out resources like Canva, Adobe, or Easil.
- Annotate screenshots to help improve engagement and make instructions or examples easier for readers to follow (as seen in a blog post from Neil Patel below).
Takeaways: Creating Actionable Content
- Actionable content should not only address reader pain, but also educate a reader on how to achieve something.
- To keep readers engaged from start to finish, include interactive content (polls, questions, video).
- Determine your content goals before creating calls to action. Once you’ve decided on the purpose behind the piece, only include CTAs that drive the reader in that direction.
- Improve trustworthiness and overall credibility by including well-placed facts and statistics or quotes.
- Include examples as a way to demonstrate what has been proven to work before and to provide readers with a clear path toward success.
- Visual cues prompt our brains to make decisions, so include images, graphics, or videos in your content to help push readers to act on your CTA.
The post Actionable Content: How to Actually Help Your Audience and Earn Their Trust appeared first on CoSchedule Blog.
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How to Rock Blog Management In 5 Easy Steps (Includes Checklist)
So – you’ve got a blog! Congratulations.
You’re one of 547,200 new sites on the internet today. And that “Hello World” introduction post? Yeah, it’s one of the daily 4.4 million blog posts sent off into the ether with the click of the Publish button.
If those numbers seem pretty discouraging, don’t worry. Only 2% of all blogs stay active.
That’s only about 2,700 of those new blogs that cropped up today – if we believe the statistic that a quarter of all sites on the internet are blogs.
In this sea of new content swelling the pages of Google, how on earth will you ever climb to the top?
The answer is actually pretty simple: good blog management.
While there are plenty of services out there that you can hire to take over your blog management, solopreneurs tend to be a pretty DIY bunch. So, we’ve created this guide on rocking blog management like a pro.
Ready to get started? Here’s how to join the ranks of that glorious 2% and climb to the top of Google with proper planning, consistent publishing, and a rock-solid workflow that doesn’t miss a beat.
Manage Your Blog With This Workflow Checklist + Calendar Template
Managing your blog effectively is easier when you have the right tools. Download this workflow checklist + calendar template kit to plan your process and organize your posts: [Cookie "Get Your Blog Management Checklist || https://media.coschedule.com/uploads/blog_blog_management-06.png || Download Now || https://media.coschedule.com/uploads/blog_management_checklist-1.zip"] [Tweet "How to Rock Blog Management In 5 Easy Steps (Includes Checklist)"]1. Take 30 Minutes to Generate Ideas
Before you can get started writing, you first need to have ideas. However, ideas aren’t always easy to find. In fact, coming up with ideas for your blog may be one of the hardest things that you do as a solopreneur – but you’re going to have to get used to doing it constantly if you want to be successful at blogging and blog management. If you’re struggling, don’t worry. Getting stumped in the idea generation phase has afflicted people for so long that scientists have conducted research to determine just why we seem to constantly suffer from creative blocks (hint: brain chemistry). Fortunately, based on this science, we also now know that there a few things you can do to “trick” your brain into bumping up the creativity. That’s the purpose of brainstorming, and there’s also quite a bit of scientific evidence out there that it works when done correctly. Creative blocks are essentially an argument between two parts of your brain resulting in a cognitive deadlock (read about it below). To break down this deadlock, follow this simple recipe that takes 30 minutes to perform:1. Spend 10 Minutes Writing Down Every Idea You Have
Set a timer for 10 minutes, grab your pencil, and start making a list. Write down everything that comes to mind without a thought as to whether or not the idea is a good one. It might help to start with one concept then write down all the associations you have with that concept rather than thinking of “blog topic ideas” per se. You can also do this with blog categories or themes.2. Spend 10 Minutes Rating Each Idea
When your first 10 minutes are up, reset your timer. Now, go down your list and rate each as a 1, 2, or 3 – with 3 being your favorite ideas.3. Spend 10 Minutes Deciding Which Ideas to Write
Once you’ve sorted your list, spend a final 10 minutes going through it determining which ones you’ll write. That could be all of your number 1 ideas, or it could be a combination of them depending on how well the topics flow together. Still having trouble? That’s alright. You can also use this process while curating content to identify suitable topics for your blog.
Creativity is one of the defining features of humans but, like with cats, it can occasionally get us killed. As a result, the brain developed a defense mechanism to reduce the ability of early humans to conceive (and thus act upon) very bad ideas. The activation of that defense mechanism is what you’re experiencing whenever you feel a creative block.]
2. Schedule Your Blog Posts
Once you’ve got your collection of blog posts title it might be tempting to start writing them all at once. After all, you’ve got so many amazing ideas now and your creativity is on full blast! Resist the urge. It’s time to rein in those creative juices and stop suppressing your frontal lobe with dopamine. Do that by creating a blogging schedule. It will make your frontal lobe very happy. To schedule your blogs:First, Figure Out Your Time Commitment
Blogging is much more than simply typing up a post and throwing it online. Crafting a thoughtful, well-written blog post takes time, energy, and a whole lot of research to do it well. How much time that takes you will vary according to your topics. You’ll also need to balance your publishing frequency with your other time constraints. Running a brick and mortar retail location? Got kids? You might not have enough hours in the day to publish an in-depth, authoritative post daily. A realistic grasp of how much time it will take you to post, and how much time you actually have, is the first step to creating an effective blogging schedule. (PS – don’t be afraid to start slow. Consistency is more important than volume.)Then, Identify Your Blogging Goals
What are you trying to get out of your blog? Depending on your business, that may vary. Some common goals include:- Improving your page rank for local SEO or specific keywords.
- Growing your audience and developing authority in an industry over time.
- Gaining [x] amount of new email subscriptions or sales in a certain amount of time.
- Increase content related to a certain topic overall.
Finally, Use a Calendar for Topics and Categories
Using an Editorial Calendar, like CoSchedule is a best practice that has several major advantages – not the least of which is preventing the burnout you’ll invariably feel from trying to do everything at once. A calendar is also a useful visual tool to help you spot holes, inconsistencies, or patterns in your scheduling. It will help you stay focused and efficient. For blog management purposes, you can even take it a step further. Use a calendar to track categories, hashtag usage, or themes that you’re posting about. Check out what one of our templates looks like all filled out…
A calendar template like this one can help you plan out not just topics, but category usage, blog tags, and your social media around each blog post. Find a bunch of useful templates right here.
3. Create a Checklist-Based Workflow for Writing Posts
Once you’ve created your calendar, streamline it with a checklist. This will ensure that you don’t miss any critical details when you draft your blog articles. Some things that you’ll want your blog management workflow checklist to include are…- Tags, categories, and SEO keywords. Know them before you start – they will help focus your writing.
-
Outline. An outline keeps each section balanced and shows you how the blog fits together.
- A strong, focused introduction. You’ll want to nail it for success.
- First draft. It’s easier to edit than write, so focus on completing the post first.
- Call to action at the end. Strong blogs have a CTA to drive engagement.
- Headline analyzer score. You’ll know right away if you’ve got a good one.
- Yoast content analysis. Check your keyword usage and adopt SEO best practices.
- Grammarly check. It will spot the mistakes you (or Word) missed.
- Images. Does your blog need any? Add them.
- Approval. If you work with clients or have multiple people who look over each post before publication, you’ll need their input.
- Final editing. Always double check your work to make sure it’s perfect.
While this checklist is designed for blog management, here’s a more detailed checklist you can follow when writing each actual blog.
4. Use Yoast to Edit the Title, Tags, and Meta Descriptions
So, you’re ranking on Google. Your blogs are insightful, funny, and well-written – a goldmine of knowledge just waiting to be found. Good blog articles take more than just creative genius and the right SEO keywords. A strong title, the right tags, and eye-catching meta descriptions are exactly the hook you need to pique a person’s curiosity. There are a lot of different tools out there to help you hone your meta information. One of our favorites is Yoast. Yoast is a freemium WordPress plugin that analyzes your SEO game right there in the blog post. It walks you through SEO best practices and offers tips to improve the searchability and readability of your post. In the event you’re not using WordPress, they’ve also created a Real-Time Content Analysis page into which you can paste your blog text and check your title, keywords, and meta description.
Yoast will let you know how you’re doing with SEO and provide helpful tips to improve your blog articles.
5. Create Templates for Social Media Promotion
Social media promotion is a powerful way to drive readership and engagement with your blog. (Actually, it’s imperative for your brand’s success. If you aren’t on social media, you need to be.) However, it’s also one of the biggest time sucks out there. The latest reports estimate that we spend about two and a half hours on social media every day. (At least 72% of Americans use social media.) As a solopreneur, you’re already doing all the heavy lifting involved in running your business – you don’t have time to spend two hours every day on your company’s social media. So, don’t. CoSchedule puts into your hands the tools you need to schedule perfect social media promotions without you actually being there. That tool is called Social Templates, and it’s about to be your best friend. When you create a social media template, you use “helpers” to pull specific pieces of information from that blog post you just created. Our algorithms will drop that information into a template and push it to your social media platform on a predetermined schedule. There! Social media promotions now get done while you catch up on sleep.
Plan and Execute Your Blog Management Like a Pro With CoSchedule
As you can see, blog management requires a fair bit more than simply coming up with a few ideas, throwing together a blog and throwing it onto your site. In addition to crafting your latest piece of insight, you’ve got to worry about SEO, social media promotion and, of course, keeping all of it consistent.The post How to Rock Blog Management In 5 Easy Steps (Includes Checklist) appeared first on CoSchedule Blog.
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What is Planogramming? 6 Types of Planograms
Retailers continuously look for ideas to make their store look presentable to attract more customers. The presentation of products in the store is as important...
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The post What is Planogramming? 6 Types of Planograms appeared first on Marketing91
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Build Your Own Ideal Marketing Calendar With CoSchedule
Step 1: Add a Project to Your Calendar on the Publish Date
The first thing you need to do is add every project to your marketing calendar from now on. Think of an upcoming blog post, newsletter, event, etc. that you are currently working on. Add it to your calendar on that day you want it to go live or publish.
Here’s a quick cheat sheet for when to choose each project type.
Project: Use if you want to create...
- Blog posts.
- Videos.
- Events.
- Website Content.
- Newsletters.
- etc.
- Single social media messages.
- Multiple social media messages in a campaign.
- A blog post that also appears in WordPress.
- An email that also appears in MailChimp.
Step 2: Give Your Project A Name
After you’ve clicked the plus sign on the publish date, give your project a name and choose from the dropdown list to add the project type.
You’ll see the project you just created on your calendar. The project card tells you all the details you just filled out like the project name, owner, and project type.
Continue adding planned marketing projects to your calendar to build visibility into everything going on with your marketing team.
Step 3: Add Your Integrations
The three most used integrations include WordPress, Email Marketing platforms (like MailChimp), and Social Media channels. It’s recommended that you set up all three, if applicable. To add an integration:- Click the hamburger menu in the top left-hand corner.
- Toggle down your name.
- Choose calendar settings.
Then choose the integrations option from the left-hand menu.
Once your integrations are set up, everything you do outside of CoSchedule will be synced to your calendar – which means you don’t have to waste your time duplicating work.
The post Build Your Own Ideal Marketing Calendar With CoSchedule appeared first on CoSchedule Blog.
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Personal Development – Definition, Importance and 9 Steps
Definition Personal Development is the process of improving oneself. A person develops when he measures his skills and qualities and make conscious efforts to improve...
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Direct Selling – Definition, Types, Advantages, Disadvantages
What is direct selling? Direct selling is one of the primary forms of doing business. This method of sale is adopted by both small businessmen...
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Corporate Strategy – Meaning, Components, Advantages
Corporate Strategy can be understood as an all-embracing scope and direction along with the means, mediums, methods, and mechanisms through which different business operations of...
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The post Corporate Strategy – Meaning, Components, Advantages appeared first on Marketing91
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Equal Employment Opportunity – Definition, Meaning and Advantages
Definition of equal employment opportunity Equal employment opportunity is a concept that emphasis that opportunities in employment should be freely available to all citizens irrespective...
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The post Equal Employment Opportunity – Definition, Meaning and Advantages appeared first on Marketing91
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Deferred Compensation – Definition, Examples, Types, Advantages
Definition Deferred compensation is defined as an arrangement at your place of employment where a part of the compensation due to the employee is set...
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The post Deferred Compensation – Definition, Examples, Types, Advantages appeared first on Marketing91
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Change Agent – Definition, Types, Skills And Examples
A change agent is an individual who aids in transforming a company by putting the onus on organizational development, improvement, and effectiveness. He can be...
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Category Management – Definition, Role, Benefits, Challenges
The retailers around different corners of the world employ various policies to manage the organization and to step forward in the direction of high profit...
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Channel Management – Definition, Steps and Problems
Definition of channel management Channel management can be defined as a process used by companies to direct and manage various marketing techniques and the parties...
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9 Brilliant Steps to Become an Influencer
These days, the word ‘influencer’ is being tossed around very frequently. It has become a common buzzword in the online as well as offline channels...
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How to Create Compelling B2B Blog Posts That Build Audiences and Convert Customers
The idea that B2B blog posts have to be serious and highly technical is a misconception. Yes, B2B audiences want expert advice and lots of it. But, blog posts don't need to be convoluted.
Nowadays, it’s more important for B2B audiences to see quality and value in your content.
You’re no doubt aware of the vast amount of content you have to compete with. If your content isn’t of the highest quality, we’re talking Beyoncé levels of greatness, then it will disappear into obscurity like the five other former members of Destiny’s Child.
So, the conundrum here is...
How do you meet the needs of an intelligent and demanding audience? But, at the same time, keep them interested with the kind of stuff they actually want to see and read?
Schedule Your B2B Content With This Calendar Template
Great content often starts with a plan, and content plans are best organized on a calendar. Visualize your B2B content publishing schedule and never miss a deadline again with this calendar template: [Cookie "Get Your Marketing Calendar Template Kit || https://media.coschedule.com/uploads/blog-b2b-blog-posts-04.png || Download Now || https://media.coschedule.com/uploads/marketing_calendar_template_kit-2.zip"]The Value Of Blogging For B2B Companies
Blog content should be a crucial part of any company’s marketing strategy. There are a number of reasons why: traffic and SEO, increasing brand awareness, growing your email subscriber list and so on. But what is the value of blogging for B2B companies specifically? Well, it all comes down to the way in which B2B audiences work. When B2B buyers make a purchase there’s a lot more research and more people involved, thus making the time it takes to make a purchase longer. Research from Adobe revealed that 90% of B2B customers take twists and turns throughout the buying journey, even repeating steps. The point is that the B2B customer journey is complex. Any way that you can make the journey easier will ultimately benefit your business. So, to some extent, the value of B2B blog content lies in sharing useful information with customers to make their overall journey easier. What’s more, 96% of the most successful B2B content marketers say that content builds trust and credibility with their audience. B2B audiences are super smart. It’s much better to build trust with your audience over time through educational blog posts than to make some bold sales pitch, which they will see right through. In fact, an Isoline study showed that over half of B2B buyers consume 3-5 pieces of content before contacting a supplier:
This proves that content isn’t just valuable, it’s a necessary part of the buyer’s journey. And you can use it to share helpful information and earn the customer’s favor and trust throughout.
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B2B Vs. B2C Blog Posts: What Are The Differences?
B2B and B2C blog posts are sisters, not twins. If you want to create content for a B2B audience specifically, then it helps to understand the key differences between B2B and B2C blog posts. Here are the main characteristics worth noting when writing for B2B vs. B2C audiences:B2C Content
- Example types of content: a listicle, influencer interview, editorial piece or simple how-to.
- The tone is casual, fun. B2C posts use straightforward and relatable language.
- Posts are shorter in length. B2C audiences want an efficient experience. The goal is to drive the consumer to a quick, or even an impulse, purchase decision. While the goal for B2B content is to build long-term relationships.
- Content is emotionally-driven. B2C buyers make purchases based on their emotions, as opposed to the more careful, logical approach of B2B buyers. So, B2C content needs to be striking and memorable.
- It’s also product-driven. You see lots of flashy images of products. The intention is to grab the consumer’s attention in the moment. That’s also why the subject matter is often what’s on-trend, rather than an evergreen topic.
Note the cool, casual language, the fact that it’s all about the product, and the evocative content. Which 90s baby doesn’t want to look like the star of a 90s music video, after all?
Recommended Reading: B2B Content: How to Create High-Performing Content in Complex Niches (With Examples)
B2B Content
- Example types of content: a case study, white paper, thought leadership post, or an in-depth guide.
- The tone is more serious. Complex topics call for more complex descriptions. Your audience should understand the terminology you use, though you don’t need to use jargon for jargon’s sake. Nor does the tone have to be dry and boring just because it’s B2B.
- Posts are highly-detailed. They’re likely to be longer and more detailed as B2B audiences are sponges for information.
- Content is data-driven. Intelligent B2B audiences want to see hard proof of what you’re telling them. This aids in the decision-making process.
- Posts are more likely to be educational/informational. B2B content is more subtle in the way it convinces prospects of the benefits of a product or service. There’s a greater emphasis on sharing useful, expert knowledge.
You can clearly see the high level of detail, abundant use of data and educational slant.
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What Do B2B Audiences Expect From Content?
There has been a shift in B2B content marketing towards customer-centric content. You need to produce the content that they desire. This means throwing out content based on traditional keyword research or your sales pitch. Instead, you should be creating content based on real questions your audience ask and their intent. Here’s how to create more customer-centric content based on what audiences expect from your brand:1. Speak to Them Personally
B2B audiences expect to see content catered specifically to them. This shouldn’t be too difficult to achieve. While B2C audiences might be made up of varying personas, as a B2B brand, you have more of a niche segment to speak to. If you can understand their interests and desires, it’s easier to make content more personal and really speak to them.2. Show Off Your Value
One thing B2B audiences really care about is ROI. So, you need to emphasize the importance of your product or service, even if you don’t explicitly state it. Obviously, this is important for those in the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey. But you also need to go beyond this stage and create content for existing customers to show them how to get the most value from your product.3. Educate Them
Educational content helps in the decision-making process. B2B audiences want solutions to their problems. You get to make their lives or their jobs easier through the content you create. Consider how and why somebody came to your content (their intent), and give them something they can apply successfully in real-life. This is why B2B content must have a strong level of depth and expertise.
Recommended Reading: How to Create User Intent Optimized Content That Delights Your Customers
4. Engage Them
B2B audiences want compelling content as much as B2C audiences. That’s something that will never change across the board. The difference is what they find interesting or compelling. Essentially, you need to give your audience something that they want to read and that they can easily digest. Again, it helps to know what the user expects to see, in terms of information and format, i.e. what they’re familiar with. Here’s a handy checklist to make sure you tick all of the boxes. And it never hurts to provide some entertainment value, which we’ll get onto later…
How To Find B2B Blog Post Ideas
Now that you understand the importance of customer-centric content, just how do you come up with blog post ideas that your audience will love?1. Answer Audience Questions
Provide solutions to customer pain points by finding questions that your target audience is asking. There are a few great sources where you can find such questions:- Google’s People Also Ask Box - Here you can find endless queries related to a topic. For example, when you type in “what is cloud computing”, you get a list of queries like this:
- AnswerThePublic - This site collects queries that are auto-suggested by search engines.
- Forums/Quora/Reddit - Find forums related to your niche or search your topics on sites such as Quora or Reddit to find a goldmine of user questions.
2. Consider Intent
Think about what kind of solution somebody is looking for when they ask a question and what stage they’re at in the buyer’s journey. Different kinds of content will be more effective in different cases. Here’s a useful table from Brainrider to assist you: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="768"]
Source: https://www.brainrider.com/resources/b2b-content-marketing-strategy-template/[/caption]
3. Choose High-Performing Topics
Head to Google Analytics to discover your top-performing posts. You’ll find them under Behavior > Site Content > All Pages:
This shows which topics your audience is most interested in. You can then cover them from a different angle or dig deeper into a certain sub-topic.
Alternatively, there are numerous tools you can use to find topics that are popular across the web. BuzzSumo, for instance, displays popular blog posts according to social media engagement:
Essentially, it’s all about putting your audience’s interests and informational needs first.
Recommended Reading: 189 Creative Blog Post Ideas and Topics That Will Delight Your Audience
How To Write Compelling B2B Headlines
Compelling headlines encourage more people to click through and read your posts, whether that’s on social media or search engines. Generic headlines get lost in the sea of content that’s out there. You may wish to use proven headline formulas based on research. A BuzzSumo study showed that top-performing B2B blog posts contained the following phrases:- “The Future of”
- “How to Use”
- “Need to”
- “How to Create”
- “Here’s How”
- “You Need to Know”
Let’s break this headline down into its key parts:
- “How to Create” - This is the familiar element.
- “a Powerful Chatbot” - The word “powerful” evokes emotion.
- “in 15 minutes” - This is a power phrase that incites action in the reader.
How To Make Your Posts Data-Driven
When something is ‘compelling’, it’s interesting, irrefutable, convincing. Data can represent all of these things, which is why it’s so useful in B2B content. A data-driven blog post can be directly related to your product or service, as in a case study, for example. You can and should also publish data that reveals something interesting about your industry, as in original research or an original study. You can collect and collate data from other credible sources to create unique posts. And use this data to back up arguments within all of your content. Visual representations of data are particularly compelling as they can demonstrate aspects such as comparisons and change over time. Plus, they stick in the mind of the reader. Graphics are an essential element of quality content.How To Create Expert, Authoritative Content
B2B audiences require expert content because of the types of subject matter involved. They’re looking for a solution to a problem. So, if they’re going to take advice from a piece of content and invest time or money when they apply it in real life, they need to know it’s solid advice that they can trust. This notion has been reflected in Google’s algorithm updates of recent years, in particular, the 2018 Medic update and June 2019 broad core algorithm update. Rankings were affected where sites required expertise, including a decent chunk of sites related to business or finance:
The point is, it’s more important than ever to create content that displays expertise and authoritativeness.
To do this, again, you need to focus on creating in-depth, quality content that’s backed by evidence and catered to your audience’s needs. But also, you should build the credibility of your authors and site as a whole.
Check your authority for free using MozBar. You’ll see a domain authority rating and spam score like so:
Naturally, you’ll want to work on increasing your authority and reducing your spam score.
How To Keep Scanners On The Page
A blog post made up of just a wall of text is going to turn people off. Some people will read every word of your blog post, but many will simply scan the post for the information they require. So, if your text isn’t easy-to-digest then they will bounce. An easy-to-read format includes:- A clear structure with text broken up by headers, images, bulleted/numbered lists etc.
- A table of contents.
- A logical structure that flows and makes sense.
- Short paragraphs and sentences that keep users engaged and moving through your text.
Elements like these that make your content more readable are good for user experience.
Ways to Make B2B Content More Engaging
Many B2B blog posts are drier than a mouth full of crackers. Depending on your branding, you may not want a tone that’s quite as casual as the average B2C post. However, you still need your audience to actually want to read and enjoy your posts, while they’re learning something. This will keep them on the page and help build a long-term relationship with customers. Along with many of the above points, you’ll also want to do the following to make your b2b blog posts more engaging:1. Inject Personality
Your brand voice helps you portray your brand identity and characteristics. You don’t even necessarily need a conversational tone of voice, simply one that’s uniquely yours. For instance, is your brand super transparent and honest? Then you’ll want to make sure your content contains genuine opinions. Or perhaps you want your brand to seem friendly? Then you’ll have to rid your content of any negative slants2. Use Humor
No one is expecting you to have the comedic talent of Wanda Sykes. But, humor is an easy way to make your content less boring. So, throw in the odd joke or cultural reference. And if you can use humor intelligently or make it about your industry, this will appeal to a B2B audience even more.3. Utilize Storytelling
Nowadays, B2B audiences are especially aware of how the marketing machine works. Therefore, they want to see an authentic, human touch in your content. Storytelling also gives you the opportunity to demonstrate the value of your product or service in the real world.
Recommended Reading: 20 Examples of Successful Blogs That Will Get You Inspired Now
7 Examples Of Compelling B2B Blog Posts
Here are some examples of compelling B2B content that you can use for inspo:1. “How to Get Rid of a Virus & Other Malware on Your Computer” - AVG
What Makes It Compelling?
This is a great example of in-depth educational content. It’s an actionable guide that takes readers through a step-by-step process, using screenshots to illustrate. It also anticipates user needs by directing Mac users to a guide specifically for them.
2. “Cloud Computing Trends: 2019 State of the Cloud Survey” - Flexera
What Makes It Compelling?
For this original study, Flexera surveyed over 786 IT professionals, over half of which represented enterprises with more than 1,000 employees. So, this is an example of unique and thorough data-driven content.
The report has a highlights section suitable for scanners, plus visual representations of their results - what more could you expect?
3. “A Huge List of Places to Find Freelance Photography Jobs (Updated!)” - FreshBooks
What Makes It Compelling?
This post represents audience-centric content, as it provides useful information as well as valuable resources for the reader.
It solves a key pain point for this audience segment, i.e. “where can I find freelance photography jobs?” What’s more, they clearly update their content regularly to retain its value.
4. The Content Strategist - Contently
What Makes It Compelling?
To ensure that their content really speaks to their audience personally, Contently has two separate blogs - the above example for content marketers and another for freelancers. This is an intelligent means of personalizing a content marketing strategy.
5. “Patient-centered care and technology: a powerful partnership” - Philips
What Makes It Compelling?
Here we have a thought leadership piece that oozes expertise and authority. For starters, the author is named as a “Nuclear Medicine Physician and Neuroradiologist”. *Ahem*
Not only does she incorporate storytelling by sharing her own experiences as an expert, but she also makes use of data and discusses the future of the industry.
6. “Open-ended questions vs. close-ended questions: examples and how to survey users” - Hotjar
What Makes It Compelling?
This post epitomizes great blog design. There’s a clear and logical structure, which is necessary for a complex topic such as this.
Also worth noting, is that Hotjar uses original graphics in this post, as well as many of their other posts. This makes their posts memorable, useful and enjoyable.
7. “6 Customer Experience Trends That Will Determine Your CX Success (Or Failure) In 2020” - Drift
What Makes It Compelling?
This post contains so many elements of a great B2B blog post. It’s in-depth, it’s actionable, it’s data-driven. But what makes it even better is the use of personality. The tone is intelligent but conversational and the author has a good sense of humor.
Now you’ve seen some examples of what B2B blog content should look like. The trick is to take away aspects that make sense for your brand and emulate them.
Final Word
There’s a lot of information and advice here. But if you remember one thing from this guide it’s that it’s all about the audience, their needs and desires. You need to know what they hope to gain from your blog posts, what they expect to see and how to keep them interested once you get them there.The post How to Create Compelling B2B Blog Posts That Build Audiences and Convert Customers appeared first on CoSchedule Blog.
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How to Apply Audience Insights to Content Marketing With Rand Fishkin From SparkToro [AMP 178]
How can marketers make their content go beyond Google and Facebook for audience research to be a competitive advantage? The duopoly may monopolize your attention and saturate SEO and social media channels, but it doesn’t own Web and search marketing.
Today’s guest is Rand Fishkin from SparkToro. He describes problems and solutions related to audience research. Rand’s insight continues to be inspirational and instrumental in many marketers’ careers.
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Some of the highlights of the show include:
- SparkToro’s Solutions: Pay-to-play frustration? Alternative channels are available
- Broaden, Don’t Abandon Scope: Turbocharge marketing without spending much
- Find the Right People: Scrape and scroll through shares on social platforms
- Speak the Language: In-jokes and memes won’t work, don’t make assumptions
- Avoid Potential Pitfalls: Know, understand, measure, audit competitive landscape
- Event Attendance for Audience Research: Don’t limit learning and consumption
- Formalized Practice: Turn intelligence into product features, data, and positioning
- What it takes to win? Position product’s story, language, and solutions
- Product Content: Influencers earn amplification, engagement, and awareness
- Narrow Niche: From reachable audience to ideal customers
- Purchasing Decisions: What makes qualified customers buy or not buy products?
Links:
If you liked today’s show, please subscribe on iTunes to The Actionable Content Marketing Podcast! The podcast is also available on SoundCloud, Stitcher, and Google Play.
Quotes by Rand Fishkin:
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- “This duopoly just really monopolizes our attention as marketers and our budgets. It is really hard to get a competitive advantage.”
- “If Facebook advertising is producing positive ROI for you, keep investing. But is it giving you a competitive advantage?”
- “You have a superpower without spending an exorbitant amount of work or dollars.”
- “Point to your competition.”
Transcript:
You are listening to the Actionable Marketing Podcast powered by CoSchedule, the only way to organize your marketing in one place, helping marketers stay focused, deliver projects on time, and keep their entire marketing team happy. Ben: Hi there and welcome to another episode of the Actionable Marketing Podcast. Before we get too far into the show, I want to note that between the time that this interview was originally recorded and now when I’m recording this introduction, our world changed considerably with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic. I also have no idea how much things might further change between now when I’m recording this introduction and when this episode goes live in a couple of weeks. One thing I will say is that, given our current circumstances, as much as talking about marketing feels a little bit weird at least to me personally, just considering the gravity of the situation that we are all in and just generally being in the early days of getting used to working from home, and just figuring out how we are going to make this all work while we are going through this together, I also feel very fortunate to be able to continue to do this show. I hope that in some small way, if you have made our show a part of your routine week to week, I hope that we can help you maintain maybe some sense of normalcy. Above all, I hope that you and those you care for are staying safe and that you are doing your best to take care of yourself and others around you. With that said, our guest on this episode is someone that I was extremely excited to get to speak with. I feel like Rand Fishkin really almost needs no introduction. As I’m sure is the case for a lot of your listeners out there, Rand has been a big inspiration for me for years, his Whiteboard Fridays from back in the Moz days, the SEO software company Moz that he founded. Those videos were instrumental in my own education, in my own career development when I was starting out in this field, and just following his work and his insight over the years has really benefited me a great deal. I am really excited to be able to bring him back to the show for the second time. He was on the show a couple of years ago in early 2018 to talk about audience research and some of the problems in that area that he is hoping to solve with his new company SparkToro. In a time where it feels like Google and Facebook dominate so much of our attention and our marketing budgets, it's becoming increasingly important to be able to understand where your audiences are hanging out and who they are following, not only on those platforms but well beyond it. If you are looking for insight into how to actually do that, why it matters and how it can give you a massive competitive advantage, then I highly recommend listening to what he has to say. Here’s Rand. For listeners of the show, can you explain what you’re working on with SparkToro and the sorts of audience research problems that the product solves? Rand: The inspiration behind this, Ben, was basically Casey, my co-founder and I, kind of looked across the landscape of web marketing and obviously search marketing because of my personal views at Moz and felt this frustration. I don’t know if you felt it, but this frustration that Google and Facebook sort of own the entire landscape. This duopoly just really monopolizes our attention as marketers and our budgets and that it is really hard to get a competitive advantage by bidding against your competitors, doing SEO, and doing Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube marketing. These channels are just so saturated and so challenging. Google and Facebook have made it such that they are really want you to pay to play in these places.
We thought there is a competitive advantage in being able to choose alternative channels. To be able to find (for example) a streaming podcast, the podcast your audience listens to, the YouTube channels that they subscribe to and watch, the websites that they go and visit, the social accounts that they listen to, the groups that they’re a part of, the events and conferences they go to, and organically or through sponsorship, advertising, going direct to those places rather than going through the duopoly of Facebook and Google.
That’s the problem we wanted to solve. We were like, “Can we help marketers do that work? Can we help them figure out what those channels and sources of influence are so that they can go do or execute all their marketing tactics, in a way that gives them a competitive advantage, and that broadens the marketing and advertising landscape?” I think more diversity is healthy for our ecosystem at the macro level, and at the micro-level, for you and me, it’s a great competitive advantage because our competitors are almost certainly just throwing dollars at Google and Facebook and letting them sort out the targeting. That’s why we want to help people with SparkToro.
Ben: Absolutely love it. I agree 100% with everything you have to say about the downsides to essentially two companies monopolizing all of our attention, and by extension of that, our marketing budgets. But I would assume what you’re advocating is that it allows you to just broaden your scope (maybe) rather than to abandon.
Rand: Yeah. I’m [...] not saying if Facebook advertising is producing positive ROI for you, keep investing, but is it going to give you a competitive advantage? Is it going to let you out-market your competitors? Would you be better than them? The answer is probably no. You are going to build strengths in other places on the product, on customer service, on brand writing, and in these other ways.
To be frank, Facebook makes the ecosystem of being against your competition really easy. The same with Google. Whether that’s across display, retargeting, or search advertising. Even RCO is a tough place to play because it is so much work, which means it is so expensive to get to the top rankings. There are so many people vying for those top-rankings, so it's hard to stand out. The best among the SEO players absolutely can and will do that. That’s true on Facebook ads or [...] as well, but for most of us, it is not a competitive advantage.
A great competitive advantage is saying I found a channel. I found podcast advertising, website sponsorships, guest hostings on a couple of communities, and relationship-holding with a few influential sources on social to really turbocharge my marketing in the way that my competitors aren’t even thinking about it.
You have a superpower without spending enormous amounts of work or dollars having to do that. I think that’s what marketers are looking for. Marketers (at least the really savvy ones or the ones who are forward-thinking) are looking for those competitive advantages.
You and I [...] right? Let’s say we go spin up a new yoga studio and it’s a chain of yoga studios across North Dakota. We are doing a particular kind of yoga that’s really helpful for people with back problems. So, how do we go reach a community of interested people? We want health-conscious, we want them to be in these geographical areas. Where are we going to reach them other than Facebook ads and Google searches?
Let's imagine SparkToro doesn’t exist. I guess we go survey them and interview them. We are like, “Hey, tell me some podcast you listen to. Tell me some YouTube channels you watch and who do follow on social.” We do a little bit of cyberstalking where we go find a few of our early customers, get all their social and web accounts, go visit those, try and learn more about them.
That’s an insane amount of work. Surveys are notoriously not great and inaccurate at getting what people actually pay attention to. For example, I have degenerative disc disease which makes some forms of exercise really really helpful for me according to my doctors and it seems to be working. Maybe we could go find everyone who has talked about degenerative disc disease online on wherever, Twitter, Instagram or Facebook or whatever. We could find all those accounts in North Dakota. Maybe it's only 1% of the actual population but it is representative.
Maybe we could find people who had talked about Vinyasa yoga. Maybe we could find people who already follow a few health-related accounts like physical health-related accounts. Go find all those people, download whatever, scrape, crawl the last 500 shares that they have made across their social platforms and whatever their websites and about pages are and then go analyze those in a big database. That is the right thing to do and that’s what SparkToro does.
SparkToro just doesn’t [...] everyone, calls tens of millions of accounts, puts them all into a database and just makes it searchable so that we don’t have to custom do this. Essentially, what I found when I was talking to a lot of marketers are really, really savvy cutting-edge ones who have access to big data resources.
We are doing this already. They were essentially taking their customers or who they thought would be their customers, plugging them into the systems like this, extracting all this data and we are like, “Oh man, you should not do that.” That is manual work that is ludicrous. You should just pay a small monthly fee to have access to the database that already does this for you and focuses on just that. That’s where we came up with that.
Ben: Very cool. In addition to just finding ways to get a competitive leg-up over your competition, what would you say are maybe some other reasons that marketers should spend time understanding what their audience reads, who they follow, and where they spend their time online?
Rand: Very frankly, we’ve had a lot of conversations with folks who were not like you and I types of marketers. Sophisticated marketers who are in the weeds all the time. They are often like product managers, part designers and developers, entrepreneurs and founders who are building companies, and researchers. I think those folks and marketers get a lot of value from just being part of the conversation, the same conversation cycles, and the same outlets that their customers and audience are.
One of the great ways to have empathy for other human beings is to consume the same things they consume. It lets you speak the language. I go to a lot of conferences and events. Sometimes, I’ll sit in the audience. This happens very often at events that I do in the UK, Canada, Australia, other places.
As the presenter who gets up on stage and they make a pop culture-related joke that is known to me because I am an American (I watch the same whatever television series they are familiar with) but the rest of the audience shrug their shoulders like, “I don’t get it. I don’t know what’s going on, this person has sort of lost me,” I had that over a couple of years where it felt like everybody in digital marketing was watching Game of Thrones which I’ve never seen. There were a lot of memes, in-jokes, and “Oh this is just like the name of a person…” I’ve never heard of and it went totally over my head.
That is a great example of not paying attention to your audience. You make assumptions about what they are familiar with, what they consume, read, watch, listen to. and your in-jokes don’t work for them. It’s the same thing if I go to the UK and I make a joke about Michael Bloomberg’s democratic campaign. They’re like, “Who? What? I don’t get it.”
So, this attention that you can give to your audience, so you understand the language they use around the topics that you talk about. The news, stories, things that are top of mind that they are probably consuming and the ones that they are not. The memes that they are aware of. The individual people and the channels that they are aware of. The ways that they talk about a product or a problem, the language, the internal lingo that they use. All of that is going to make you way more successful in having empathy for them and being able to build products for them. That’s true whether we’re talking about a physical product, a B2C product, a software product that’s B2B, across the board. You just want to be in your customer’s ecosystem rather than coming from the outside.
Ben: That totally makes sense and this is a point that you touched on there a little bit that I’d like to dig deeper into. What are some of the potential pitfalls marketers might face if they overlook doing this kind of audience research? You touched on a little bit there, like maybe you will make a cultural reference that people don’t understand and things like that, but going even deeper, what are some other opportunities that people might miss and things they might end up tripping over on?
Rand: I think one of the biggest ones is not understanding your competitive landscape. I don’t just mean direct competitors, like people who offer the same products and services that you do. Very often, we as marketers get trapped into this idea of looking at our current customers and seeing what else today considered to purchase that would have solved their problem, when in fact, the way these human beings tend to think about problems is, what are the ways I can solve this problem? Those could be paid or unpaid, those could be just not dealing with the problem at all, finding an alternative.
Very often, I think about my old company, Moz. For a long time, I looked at a few competitive alternatives like SEMrush, Ahrefs, but did not think about, “Oh there’s just a ton of people who used Google Search Console plus their own spreadsheets.” Or, there's a bunch of people who solve SEO by publishing content and never looking at or tracking them. They just don’t pay attention to it. They are not actively doing and measuring SEO and based on those things improving it. How do they do keyword research? They start typing something into Google and if it autocompletes near the top, they think it must have a good [...]. Okay. I decided on a great way to go, I don’t recommend it. I know as previously professional SEO, I know that’s a bad way to think about things, but that’s not necessarily true for customers.
I think if you are not in that ecosystem and understanding those folks, you can miss alternatives, essentially competitive alternatives. Things that your potential customers or existing customers might do rather than buy your products, and because you don’t understand that. Because you are not swimming in that water, you won't have a great grasp on how to sell to them. How to speak to them with your marketing, your sales pages, or if you have people doing sales like that, if you have a narrative that you are projecting in your content.
If you miss out on that, I think you miss out on a lot of customer opportunities as well and your positioning is just going to suffer. And someone else is going to do it right. Someone else in your space is listening to that, they are picking up that slack that you potentially dropped.
Ben: Yeah. I think that’s an interesting corollary. Do you want audience intelligence to be your own competitive advantage or potentially the competitive stick that you get beaten with?
Rand: Yeah well said. It's one or the other.
Ben: Yeah, if you have to choose one. I know which I would prefer.
Rand: I don’t want to pretend that SparkToro is the only way to do this or that doing it with SparkToro is going to solve all these problems. We want to solve a very particular kind of search challenge. I think the bigger world of just discovering who your customers and potential customers are, learning who their sources of influence are, and swimming in that water for a while so that you speak the language the way they speak it, so you make the references that they understand, so that you understand the problems they are facing down to their core, and what the alternatives to facing those problems are, how are they solving those today, that is massively valuable for building any type of company, for releasing a product that’s going to work, for doing marketing that will speak to your audience and resonate with them.
Ben: Absolutely. That sparked an interesting thought. If you’re doing this type of research regardless of what kinds of methods or tools you might be using to gather insight into your audience or into a potential customer base, obviously, any sort of tool arising is going to be limited to the fact that you’re just looking at digital platforms and channels. Would you say that there is any value, or do you have any opinions on or insight into the value of consuming things that maybe aren’t digital? Things that are completely outside of the digital sphere and gaining more understanding of your audience, more empathy for your audience by immersing yourself in what they are consuming, when they are not on the computer or whether they are not on their phone?
Rand: I think the biggest one that I’ve seen in B2B specifically is Absolutely Events. There’s this surprising world where, “Oh, I’m a chemical engineer who works in the plastics field. Essentially, I go to these two conferences every year. That’s where I learn all the new things that are happening in my industry and figure out who I want to pay attention to. If you want to reach me, I don’t consume a lot of chemistry-related content on the web or follow a ton of people on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram that is related to my field of work. Maybe I get this journal four times a year and I go to this conference.”
This is often true in fields like medicine, dentistry, and engineering of all kinds. A lot of these legal practices, like lawyers, pay a little more attention to all my sources, but those fields make a ton of sense to find out what those are. What are those events? What are those journals? How do I participate in those ecosystems? Maybe that’s sponsoring a booth at the event. Maybe it's just attending. Maybe it's pitching to speak. Maybe it is doing some type of unique sponsorship with that event. Maybe it's paid to get to listen to people who go, then going and learning more about them that way. Maybe it's just going with a bunch of Starbucks gift cards and interviewing people, “Hey, maybe just sit down with me for 10 minutes and answer some questions, and we will give you this gift card,” that kind of thing, doing that manual research.
I find that all of these things are super valuable. One of the things that I do that is very offline for SparkToro and did in the18 months prior to our launch. I say launch. We haven’t technically launched yet, but we are about to. We’re pretty close.
One of the things I've been doing for the last six months is I fly to a lot of cities for conferences and events, and speak there, and I’ll try and find one, two, or three agencies, consultants, or marketers who are in those cities, who have some connection to, just reach out and say, “Hey, I’m going to be in town. It will be cool to come by and like to talk to your team about how they’re solving this problem.” We just sit in one of their conference rooms and chat about how they do audience intelligence, how they do market research today, and those learnings have been huge. They really, really help.
Casey and I craft the right product and position it correctly to hopefully resource folks. A lot of the time I walk out of those meetings, I got to call Casey, “They are really excited about this thing which we aren’t building yet. Maybe we should put it higher up on the list,” or, “They are not really excited about this feature that I thought they’re going to be excited about.” Sometimes those meetings are the greatest things. I walk out just feeling amazing like, “Oh, my God. What we are building is going to be so great for them. They are so excited,” and sometimes I will walk out, “Oh, man. That’s giving me a rough ride. They don’t seem excited at all.” I think that offline research, in-person interviews are invaluable.
Ben: What Rand has to say about finding your audience outside of Facebook and Google, and how that can actually be a competitive advantage is both extremely real and it might also be one of the strongest arguments that you have in favor of diving really deep into the audience research when trying to make a case to your boss or to other stakeholders, as to why this is worth your time. If you know or you suspect that this is something that your competitors aren’t really doing, then you’ll be digging into a vast wealth of data and information that’s not even crossing their radar. That means unique insights for your business, which equals powerful thought for the content that you are creating, and creating content that your competition can’t easily copy. Something to think about.
Let’s say I’m a marketer and listening to the show, I’m sold on the idea that gathering audience intelligence is something that I should be doing more of if I’m not doing it already. Let’s say that there’s a roadblock or there’s something that is really preventing me from diving deep into this area of marketing. In your experience what are some of the biggest challenges and the biggest source of things that tend to maybe prevent marketers from being successful in doing audience research or maybe even from getting started in the first place?
Rand: I think to be totally frank, one of the biggest ones is just time. A lot of marketers are overwhelmed with channels and opportunities. They are overwhelmed with work. They are not given a chance to step back and see the bigger picture. “Hey, let's spend the next quarter (or not) optimizing our paid spend, our organic investments, and our content marketing, but rather take a step back and look at positioning overall.” Whether we are speaking to our customers in the way that’s going to resonate most with them and having those conversations set. To be frank there’s not a lot of companies or agencies where that’s a formalized practice.
Formalized practice is like email marketing. “Hey, I want you to optimize what we’re writing there, the website content, SEO, SEM, or display retargeting. All of those are pretty well-understood channels and practices but frankly positioning, market research, audience intelligence, no. I think there’s a vague uphill battle that we face on the education front and the prioritization front.
But I am such a believer in this because I have done it wrong, where I did not speak to my audience in a way that they understood, where I've seen products win the market not by doing better content SEO, paid search, marketing. Not by executing better in the channels, but by positioning themselves better. By understanding their audience, how to reach them, how to speak to them better. They essentially avoided having to get good at all these things that I thought you had to be good at to compete with us and beat us out anyway. Some of that is obviously turning that intelligence into product features and product data, but a lot of it is also just positioning.
I have really come around to this idea that the best product in the market does not win. Someone who is best at executing on these channels does not necessarily win. It is very often the case that matching your product's story, your product’s language, how people think about your product and the problem that it solves, how people think about that problem and potential solutions are often jumping the rest of it.
Ben: I think that’s very true. If you want to get really old school, the clichéd example of that is like VHS versus Betamax.
Rand: Oh right. Like Beta had the better features and VHS won anyway.
Ben: Yeah. You see that I feel like across so many different product categories, so many different industries. I would be willing to bet that a lot of people listening to this probably are strong advocates for some product or another that’s not the market leader, but they are all strongly to tell you it's better because of X, Y, and Z. If that’s the case what’s stopping that company from making sure that everybody knows that and feels that way?
Rand: I think this is true in the marketplace of ideas as well. There are certain things that for some reason or another become part of our cultural, political, social landscape and they get talked about. Let's be real. Star Wars is a crappy product that we all spend hundreds of millions of dollars on. It was great when we were kids but it's been bad for a long time and we still, “Well, yeah. All right. New Star Wars movie, new Star Wars ride, new Star Wars cartoon, Star Wars on some new Disney plus channel. I guess I’ll pay for that, too.” We all know there are better shells out there but, well, it’s Star Wars, go see it.
Ben: It’s such a cultural… I don’t even know what you would call it, but—
Rand: It’s like this [...]. It has some association. You have a mental model around it, you got familiarity with it, so even if it's crappy, you know you can go talk to your friends, co-workers, and family about how crappy it was, and everybody can commiserate, right?
Ben: For better or worse, it connects you to other people.
Rand: Yeah, for better or worse. Especially with a lot of pop culture stuff, there’s a ton of the best product rarely wins but the best-positioned product often wins.
Ben: Yeah, I think there’s a lot of truth to that. This has all been great so far just around the value of gathering audience intelligence and insights. Let's say I’m a listener and I have done a bunch of work in this area. I feel like I’ve got a pretty good understanding of all kinds of different things about my audience that maybe I didn’t know before. Where would you recommend I begin applying those insights to my content? How do I turn that from intelligence to an actual output or informing what I am already doing in some way that’s going to resonate with people better?
Rand: There are a few ways to think about this if you are paying attention to what your audience is talking about or what’s resonating with them. I think the core of solving this problem is positioning your company and your product in such a way that it speaks to the primary reason or reasons that people experience a problem and how they choose to solve it versus alternatives. That is step one.
I really like April Dunford. Her website’s aprildunford.com. She has an outstanding book and a bunch of great talks as well. The book is called “Obviously Awesome.” I highly, highly recommend it and she [...] a framework for using your understanding of your audience, your understanding of your competition and of your market in order to craft a great narrative and due positioning for your business. When you take it down another level from a company to content [...], the way that I think about that is rueful.
One is there’s content that speaks to your customers or the people that you want to buy from you and that content tends to be useful on your own site for people who are trying to understand your product but not very useful for earning amplification, awareness, engagement. If you want to earn those things, like get more people knowing about your company, your product and all that kind of stuff, you need to instead speak to a different group that’s one level removed. The one level removed people are influencers of your customers. They are different from your customers.
Where I see a ton of businesses go wrong, content creators especially go wrong is they think they are making content for their customers and potential customers when in fact what they should be doing is thinking about the media, the publications people social influencers, podcasters, YouTube channel creators, writers, bloggers, and journalists. All that group who are going to be listened to by our audience and now you have to make something. You have to make a product for them.
Your content is that product and that product has to serve their needs like essentially give me new data, new narratives, new conflict. Hopefully, something that’s contentious that has multiple sides to it that speaks to the dialogue of what people find intriguing or even potentially are really surprising, angering, upsetting. You have those types of things in your content, people will pay a lot of attention.
For example, using SparkToro. I have not created a bunch of content on our blog which is, “Hey here’s how to do market research and audience intelligence.” What I have created a lot of content that is, “Hey here’s a problem in the web marketing role.” One of the biggest problems that I've been writing about is zero-click searches from Google and Facebook. Essentially Facebook is letting out a smaller and smaller percentage of traffic. So is Twitter, so is LinkedIn, so is YouTube, so is Google. All these big platforms that are controlling a huge amount of attention online are reducing the amount of traffic they send out. They are trying to keep it on their platform and that’s making marketers’ jobs way harder.
By talking about that issue, I am creating a product content for journalists, people who write in the news, people who cover the space, conference organizers, podcasters, video creators. All these people who influence the rest of the field. It’s really nice because it makes a lot more people aware of SparkToro and now they’ll go check it out like, “Hey, what does this SparkToro people do? What are Rand and Casey up to? What are they building? Are they trying to help solve this problem in some way or are they just whining about it?” [...]. I think that is how you should think about content.
Ben: Absolutely. Something else that I think about when it comes to really doing any research or spending any amount of time with analytics is sometimes, like marketers today, have access to so much data. That it can be really difficult (in some cases) to separate the signal from the noise. When it comes to doing audience research, what would be, maybe some simple tactics or ideas or recommendations that you would have for our listeners just on how to make sure that the insights that they are extracting that they think are important are actually important?
Rand: One of the biggest challenges I see (and I’ve done this myself) is paying attention to too broad a field, essentially I go out and I talk to a ton of marketers. A lot of those people are probably not ideal customers. They don’t experience the problem or they don’t experience the problem regularly enough or painfully enough to be customers of whatever I’m building.
That can throw a lot of folks off because very often, your field is bigger than your customer set. I think it pays to do two things. To separate out our reachable audience and this other group are people who are potential customers. They look like our best customers. They are similar to them.
I love this framework from a company in the UK called Conversion Rate Experts. It's Ben Jesson and Karl Blanks. They have a great book as well, Making Websites Win. “Most websites lose,” is what it says and they have this, “Making websites win.” It’s a terrific book. I really like it. They have this framework around it where they basically are trying to tell folks that if you want to improve your conversion rates, want to improve your understanding of your audience, the thing you wanted to do is talk to customers who purchase from you and ask them what made them buy. Ask any objections that they had with purchasing and how they overcame those objections.
Then, talk to the people who looked like your best customers but didn’t buy from you and ask them about their objections why they chose not to buy. What makes some qualified customers not purchase? Answering the objections that those qualified customers who didn’t purchase have, with the answers that came from the qualified customers who did purchase and are happy with their product. Their answers will match the challenge inside the minds of the other people who didn’t buy. I love that process.
By the way, this is very tactical, but I think it is a super pro tip for folks. One of the best things that you can do, one of the things that we are doing right now is for folks who make it to the page in SparkToro where you essentially choose a plan. There are about four or five plans. You click on one of them. If they start going through that cart creation process but don’t finish, they get a personal email. A personalized email just for me it’s like one line or something it's like, “Hey, I noticed you started the SparkToro, started choosing a plan but didn’t end up purchasing. Is there anything I can help with or questions I can answer? Let me know. Best, Rand.”
I get a lot of replies there. “Well, we are thinking about this. I didn’t know about this. Can I run these types of queries, blah-blah-blah.” I’ll have a back-and-forth with them and then we can go to include that later in our product landing pages, plans page, to help get people to overcome those objections. That is a great way to learn from that group as well.
Going back to your broad question, when you’re inundated with a ton of data, you need to separate them into these two groups. You need to look at your best customers and who they are, find that group among your potential customers, make sure you are paying the most attention to them, and solving their objections before going out to the broader field.
Ben: I think that’s great advice. The last question I’ll throw your way. Again, this is something that I think you touched on a little bit, just in terms of trying to find the people who influence the people you want to sell to. What’s the best way to get started with that? I think if you’re going to take that holistically, that’s a huge topic that you really can’t condense down into a sound bite by any means. What would you recommend someone do just to get started? You want to go out and find influencers that your audience cares about, fantastic. What’s the first thing, like the first step down that path?
Rand: The first step absolutely is having a list of people who are willing to have conversations with you who have the problem that you are solving. If you don’t have that you cannot get started down this path. You won’t even understand that. If you are in the super early stages before you have a product, that is more difficult. You tend to need to tap your professional network, personal network, and coffee, phone call, email, and LinkedIn your way from one person to the next.
If, however, you already have paying customers, it gets way easier. Look at the email addresses of those paying customers. Email a few of them. Not bulk. Personally. One-on-one. Often, it's best if it comes from a founder or a higher–up person at the organization, or someone with a name and face or voice that they recognize, just reach out and say, “Hey, so thankful to have you as a customer. Would you be willing to talk on the phone for five minutes sometime in the next couple of weeks just to chat about what you’re doing with it?” Five minutes turn into 15; most folks are okay with that. Then, you can start to get answers to these questions in a qualitative way.
From there, you can start to do things like build a survey for quantitative data based on the shared attributes that you’ve identified, even as a few as 10 or 20 customers. If you know the job title, type of company, size, or on the consumer side, general behavior, general demographics, general geography, general whatever, cultural elements, hobbies, interests or whatever that make them periodics awesome. You can then go do all these other things.
SparkToro makes some of that. If your audience is describable in a certain way as opposed to just demographically, SparkToro makes some of that research way, way faster and easier. I would still recommend having those in-person, phone, or email conversations that are exciting. That is invaluable.
Ben: Absolutely. Well that does it for all the questions I had for you, but this has been great. I really appreciate your taking the time to share your insight with our audience. Before I let you go, is there anything else about this topic that you would like to share, that you feel is particularly important, that you maybe did not get a chance to mention?
Rand: The one thing I’ll say is, for a lot of marketers, they are going to have a hard time selling their boss, their team, their client on it, and I feel your pain. You might be listening to a chat. It all sounds great, guess who is never going to spring for it? Let me give you one tip that might help you get those groups over that hurdle, which is to point to your competition.
It tends to be the case. Let’s say you’re a consultant, a client won’t pay for service X until you point out that one of their competitors is beating them because of it. The same thing if you are on an internal team. You point out to your manager, your executive team, “Hey, we are getting our lunch eaten by these people who are doing this.” That competitive spirit can often be the thing that pushes people over the line, makes them willing to invest. That doesn’t have to be a direct competitor, it can be someone who is in your space who is doing well in your field serving a similar customer, but that spirit of competition is my [...].
Ben: Very cool. I can definitely see that being a strong motivator because if you can point to somebody else. I feel like a lot of us have that competitive spirit and where I would be like, “They are going to do that, I am going to do that better.”
Rand: “They can’t. I am not going to let them win.”
Ben: Right, yeah.
Rand: Exactly.
The post How to Apply Audience Insights to Content Marketing With Rand Fishkin From SparkToro [AMP 178] appeared first on CoSchedule Blog.
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Messaging Matrix: How to Keep Brand Messaging Aligned (Template)
Have you ever listened to two very different people describe the same story, like a book or movie? They probably gave you wildly different answers based on their own preferences and experiences, right?
That’s why honing your brand’s messaging strategy is important.
Because if your whole team isn’t aligned around your messaging, the same thing happens as when two different people describe the same movie. Everyone asked about the product gives a different answer.
This is especially important for businesses that have already started growing their marketing team and scaling their marketing and content strategies.
As you grow the marketing team, the sales team, and the other teams communicating with your business’s audiences, you’re adding more people that are sharing your brand’s core message on a daily basis.
And if you don’t have an overall messaging strategy aligning all those people, the message ends up being subject to their own translation.
Plus, think of all the other things you document as you grow your marketing team.
You’ve probably documented your overall marketing strategy, your content strategy, your social media strategy, your customer journey, your brand voice, and more.
But all of those things require messages. So it's time to document a messaging strategy to align it all.
A messaging matrix is how you do that.
[Tweet "Messaging Matrix: How to Keep Brand Messaging Aligned (Template) by @thatbberg via @CoSchedule"]
Download Your Easy-to-Use Messaging Matrix Template
Keeping messaging aligned with your key personas is super easy with this template. Follow the advice in this post, then use this downloadable resource to put it into action: [Cookie "Get Your Messaging Matrix Templates || https://media.coschedule.com/uploads/blog-messaging-matrix-07.png || Download Now || https://media.coschedule.com/uploads/message_matrix_templates.zip"]What is a Messaging Matrix?
A messaging matrix is a simple chart that summarizes and systemizes your brand’s positioning and messaging so your content can better align with your core value proposition, no matter what.
It’s involved in methodologies like Six Sigma, but isn’t as commonly found in the agile and more modern companies you might work at (although you’re about to change that).
[caption id="attachment_80649" align="aligncenter" width="1360"]
Source: GoLeanSixSigma.com[/caption]
Think of it like a bridge between your buyer personas and your content strategy.
In one chart or document, it summarizes your brand’s unique value proposition, what makes you unique from competitors, and how that value should be communicated to different segments of your audience in different situations.
It clearly communicates things like:
- The brand’s overall positioning or core values
- The main customer profiles you’re targeting
- Which parts of your positioning those personas care most about
- How you can cater your message accordingly
Image Source: Pardot[/caption]
With all the information and context mapped out in advance for your brand’s most important messages, your whole company has an easy map to turn to when they need to create content or copy.
Obviously, this is a great time and difficulty saver for marketers who previously figured this out individually for every landing page, blog post, or email. But it’s even more helpful when you think about how it can work outside of the marketing team.
Ever have someone in sales or product ask for your feedback on some writing “real quick,” to make sure it resonated alright? By making your messaging matrix and sample messages available company-wide, you can make your team’s expertise available in quick reference form.
Why a Messaging Matrix is Crucial for Marketing Teams
So why is a messaging matrix so important for marketing teams in fast-growing businesses? Can’t you just trust that everyone else you work with will “know the brand” and figure out the right messages to include for the content they’re working on? In theory. But once you’ve been a marketer for long enough, you know that marketing theory and marketing practice are two very different things. So putting together your messaging matrix will:Ensure Strategic Messaging
Don’t assume everyone on your team already knows the brand’s core messaging and positioning perfectly. Especially if you’re working with an agency, consultants, or freelancers, you need to ensure everyone has the same, and the most up-to-date, information about how to communicate with customers most effectively. This goes beyond the ability to write good copy, to the core of understanding what customers need to hear in a given moment.Create Consistency Across Teams
As more functions of our businesses come online, more teams outside of marketing need marketing’s help with content and copy. The sales team needs help with copy for their sales decks. The support team could use your advice for the knowledge base. Product, HR, the list goes on… To paraphrase Nora Ephron, “everything is content.” And having a messaging matrix available to your whole company makes it easy for everyone to create their own content. This trains other teams how to do so and can help make them better collaborators when you do work with them.Make Copywriting Easier
Writing words is easy. Writing informational words is more difficult. Writing informational words that persuade someone, taps into their emotion, and moves them to take an action that moves them further into the customer journey is hard. So why make your team do it more than once? Creating really compelling, persuasive content requires that you figure this messaging out. And if you don’t document it and save it for later, you have to figure it out every time you start a new project. But with a messaging matrix with specific pain points, features, and results laid out with messaging to accompany them, you’re not starting from scratch as often. When it’s time to write a new landing page targeted at a certain customer, you have pieces of messaging ready that you already know will resonate.Aligns the Whole Customer Journey
Finally, a messaging matrix can create alignment throughout the different stages of the customer journey. With content supporting more and more of that journey, it’s important that you can provide that consistent messaging and experience, whether someone’s reading a social media post targeted at the top of the marketing funnel or talking to a sales rep on a demo. And when everyone’s working from the same guidelines and starting point when writing copy, that happens way more often and easily.
How to Create Your Brand's Messaging Matrix
So, you’re ready to create a messaging matrix and get your content better aligned with your brand’s most persuasive positioning. How can you actually get started? Here’s a brief overview:Step 1: Gather Customer Experience Stakeholders
First, you need to get the right people in the same room. A messaging matrix needs to be data- and experience- informed based on real prospects and customers. This means people from departments like marketing, sales, and support all need to come together. And I don’t just mean the department heads either. While you managers might take the lead on strategy, your team members are the ones that talk to and communicate with your audience most. They’re going to have crucial insights for you.Step 2: Identify Your Brand’s Core Value Proposition
Once you’ve brought together the team members with the most insight into and data about your customers, it’s time to identify the core value proposition, or what CoSchedule likes to call your content core:“Your content core connects the dots between what your customers care about and what you have to offer them.”
Your value proposition isn’t just a description of your company’s product, or service, or mission. It brings your offering and mission together in a way that succinctly gets across which problem of your customers’ it solves and why they need it solved now.
It’s your brand’s ultimate answer to “why should the world care?”
[Tweet "Your core value proposition is your brand's ultimate answer to why should the world care?"]
Step 3: Break Down Your Key Customer Personas
You’re almost ready to start filling out your messaging matrix, but there’s one more thing to do before you start: refine and refresh your buyer personas. Think about how you talk at a family reunion: your tone and topics change depending on whether you’re hanging out with the kids of the family, the younger adults, or the elder generation. Even the same story, you’d tell a slightly different way. That’s why this step is so important. You may have perfected your general value proposition, but how you convey and communicate that will depend on who you’re talking to. That means figuring out who you’re talking to, and understanding them on a deep level. And once everyone in the room is reminded of this, you can start filling out the matrix with your personas as the vertical axis, and components of your positioning across the horizontal one.Step 4: Fill Out Your Messaging Matrix
Finally, it’s time to start filling in the matrix. You have all the information you need, you just need to frame it. This means taking the important parts of your value proposition and messaging and “translating” it to how each of your core customer personas would want to hear it. If your general value proposition answers, “why would the world care?” the language you come up with in this step answers, “why would this specific person care?” Inside the matrix, you’ll write information like:- A version of your value proposition targeted to that specific persona, thinking about what first impressions you’d want them to have, what would hook them in, and more.
- Which product or service, or features of your product or service, they would be most interested in and why, including which benefits and results those features bring.
- What kind of facts and social proof will be most persuasive and appealing to them.
Step 5: Use and Review It Regularly
Finally, the last step is to make sure you, and everyone else who needs to, actually uses the information in the messaging matrix. Documentation is only helpful when people actually reference it, which might take some behavior and habit change.
Make sure the matrix is easily available to anyone who needs it, and that it’s always up to date. This likely means uploading it to your shared file drive or company wiki, along with making a quarterly recurring meeting with your stakeholders to review and update it.
Recommended Reading: Brand Asset Management: How to Get Started the Right Way
Get Your Messaging In Order
Now that you’ve learned how a messaging matrix works (and why it works), you’re ready to build your own. Time to send a calendar request to customer stakeholders and get started on step one. And for even more help getting started, download a messaging matrix template below:The post Messaging Matrix: How to Keep Brand Messaging Aligned (Template) appeared first on CoSchedule Blog.
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Take Control of Your Process With Your Marketing Calendar
When your marketing team suffers from a lack of process, it can feel like things are out-of-control.
You have no idea what’s going on, who’s doing what, and when things are going live.
In this blog, you’re going to learn how to use your CoSchedule Marketing Calendar to get a solid marketing process in place.
Step 1: Change The Status of a Project
Project cards can help you track what phase each project is currently in. This helps you better prioritize your work and lets you see what’s currently being worked on.
To change the status of a project:
- Click a project card on your calendar.
- Click the status button in the top right-hand corner to move a project forward.
Step 2: Choose Your Color Labels
Color labels are the most powerful way to add visual organization to your calendar. Here are some of the most popular ways to organize your color labels.
Step 3: Apply Color Labels to Your Marketing Calendar
To set up color labels:- Click the hamburger menu in the top left-hand corner
- Toggle down your name.
- Choose calendar settings.
After you’ve set up color labels, you can apply them to your projects to visually distinguish between different projects on your calendar.
Bonus Step: Apply Additional Metadata to Your Projects
Aside from color labels, there are additional descriptors you can add to your projects for even better visibility.Tags
Tags build an added layer of information on top of your color labels. This helps you quickly see from the project card which projects contribute to various goals, target audiences, or initiatives.
Here are some popular tags to add to your projects.
To add tags to your projects, navigate to your calendar settings. Tags are located under your color labels.
Descriptions
Project descriptions clarify more details about a project. This helps team members quickly understand how to create successful content that meets expectations.
Descriptions can be added by clicking “More Options” when creating a new project.
The post Take Control of Your Process With Your Marketing Calendar appeared first on CoSchedule Blog.
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