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Fixed mindsets irritate me.
You know what I mean. Heard the conversations.
We have always done it this way.
It is just a fad.
As we reinvent business and try to change, the foibles of the habitual human become evident. Calcified thinking.
“The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones“ – John Maynard Keynes
The pace of change today has accelerated from the era of train and coal to the generation of rocket ships and robots. Being trapped in old habits that aren’t working well anymore stops us innovating in a digital age.
We need to let go of the past.
The thinking and practices that no longer serves us. A flexibility mindset is essential.
So….here are some of the hard questions you need to be asking to grow your business in a digital world and invest in the future.
As visual creatures and hard reality infused homo sapiens, the world is often viewed from the perspective of what we can see and touch.
The ephemeral is often not valued. Maybe we can blame the accountants for that.
The digital world has assets that are hard to see and value. These are the hard digital assets we can measure.
Then there are “soft” digital assets. These are hard to quantify. The digital skill sets, attitudes and mindsets of your people.
Time to put a value on this new age equity.
Command and control corporate thinking doesn’t like the notion of allowing its silent experts to become visible. To give them permission to be thought leaders.
The recent Edelman Trust Barometer – 2017 shows that the CEO’s trust level is plummeting and its employees credibility are rising. Employees are trusted 16% more than their CEO
It is time to make our in house corporate stars shine. Let them reveal their story and expertise. There is an added benefit amongst others. Make the corporation more human.
Do you let them shine to build credibility and trust?
Do you own your marketing?
Just handing over all your advertising to an agency is dangerous.
The web tech of apps and platforms on the social web has put the power in your hands. To publish. To advertise.
Invest internally.
But you will also need marketing tech to do that.
Most knowledge professionals attend annual training to keep their credentials updated. There are all sorts of acronyms for this. CPD (Continuing Professional Development) and even MAT (Mandatory Annual Training).
Nothing wrong with that but that is not even close to what is needed in today’s business environment.
What is required today is “continuous learning”
Accenture is evaluating ts leaders based on innovation and spending $900 million in education (some are spending 80 hours in training a year) to deliver the technologies
Google gives its staff 1 day a week to work on their passionate ideas. Researching passionate ideas is a powerful way to learn, grow and innovate.
What is your approach to learning in your business?
PR is becoming content marketing. Is your PR company still sending out old school press releases.
Are you building out your digital communications networks that allow you to get your message out without begging gatekeepers?
Are you using the new emerging channels. Webinars, Podcasts and “Live” streaming?
Skype, Google Docs and a social web have removed borders. But most of us still think local. Their is now a “world” of opportunities.
Time to re-think the current attitudes? Where your customer is and how you can reach them and work with them.
Paul McCartney was seen recently using an old Nokia phone. You know the ones I mean. The ones you can send a text with.
Maybe he can afford to be a bit old school.
But can your company?
The average age of independent directors in the USA is 63. There lies much valuable experience.
But is that enough?
Many need “unlearning” to take their companies into the future So the challenge to reinvent a business for a digital world is not to be underestimated.
What directors are using smart phones, tablets and apps and how are they using them?
Do they get it?
Are they open to the new opportunities? Digital thinking.
Attending networking events with a stack of business cards leaves me cold. Cold calling disturbs me.
Digital networking and online lead generation needs to be part of the mix.
Digital disruption is real.
Millennials dreaming of making it big with an app start-up are sometimes scoffed at. But we are in a generational shift of what business is and how we grow.
The start up scene rolls on and big brands have three options.
Ignore them, start your own or invest in them. Ignoring this shift could be dangerous.
What are your plans?
Finding the right talent for this brave new world can be hard.
The culture of sitting everyone in the same room and making sure they are productive (and not on Facebook) is still hard to shake.
New thinking on where your best talent needs to be is summed up well in a book by 37Signals. The company behind the software “Base Camp”.
Many companies now have staff working in home offices and coffee shops.
The book “Remote: Office Not Required” is maybe worth a read.
So here is a simple process worth contemplating to become digital to the core.
Over to you.
The post Want To Grow Your Business? 10 Hard Questions You Need To Ask appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.
The social media hashtag for Affiliate Summit East 2017 is #ASE17. Social media signs. Here are the Affiliate Summit … Affiliate Marketing Resources …
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According to the complaint, Shah was an affiliate marketer for the web site citrades.com, orchestrating advertising campaigns that lured investors to the …
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It’s common knowledge that people don’t trust brands – they trust other people. All too often, digital marketing can come across as cold and lifeless. But it’s not hard to warm up your digital marketing, and win the trust of prospects and customers.
Why? Because your company consists of people: people who probably have a healthy appetite for sharing their thoughts via social media.
At the risk of lowering the temperature, I shall now introduce one of those frigid-sounding marketing terms: employee advocacy.
But really, it’s a term with a lot more warmth and appeal than you might imagine.
In a nutshell, employee advocacy is the promotion of a company by its people. It involves them talking your business or brand up on social networks because they want to… and it helps boost your company’s visibility and credibility by showing you have a strong relationship with your employees.
Many brands don’t encourage employee advocacy, but they should. If you’re not empowering employees to advocate for your company, you’re missing out on a huge PR opportunity. The conversion, retention and engagement potential is huge.
Check out just some of the benefits companies claim they’ve experienced from employee advocacy, courtesy of a study conducted by Hinge Marketing and Social Media Today.
Data from Smarp, an employee advocacy software company, indicates the average employee advocate has approximately 420 Facebook friends, 400 LinkedIn contacts, and 360 Twitter followers. It’s easy to see how getting them to give you a shout-out on social media has the potential to dramatically amplify the reach of your company’s messaging.
Here is Smarp’s formula for estimating potential reach boost via employee advocacy. It makes a compelling argument.
“Employees who share company content on social media… and spread the good word around can do wonders for your employer brand,” notes Smarp’s Content Manager, Annika Rautakoura. “Employees who feel empowered and in charge of their work will gladly advocate their work and the employer to their social networks.”
Smarp’s platform helps marketers promote internal communication and employee-driven content sharing with features such as a gamified leaderboard and data-rich analytics that can help calculate advocacy-based ROI.
Employee advocacy also overlaps a great deal with employee engagement. “When employees become brand ambassadors, they feel a vested interest in the company’s success and are therefore engaged in exceeding the stated requirements of their job,” writes Sapir Segal on the Oktopost blog. “And the more employees feel engaged, the more they want to continue talking and promoting the company’s brand.”
Providing an end-to-end solution for enterprising B2B social media marketing, Oktopost’s employee advocacy tools enable marketers to post content to themed sharing boards which aggregate to dedicated mobile apps as well as the employee’s web browser. Marketers can easily browse through the platform’s content curation and social listening modules to find the most relevant and fresh content to push to these boards.
Oktopost’s “Social Advocacy” mobile apps make it easy for employees to find relevant suggested content to share, which marketers can organize by topic.
But team members aren’t necessarily going to share content about their employers without a dedicated employment advocacy program to encourage them to do so. “[Employment advocacy] requires proper training, a significant time investment, and the appropriate software tools,” the authors of Understanding Employee Advocacy on Social Media point out.
“The most effective way to motivate employees to advocate the brand on social media is to explain why they are being asked to do so. Both managers and advocates agree that this communication is the biggest motivator, more so than gifts, monetary incentives, or public recognition of performance.”
So what’s a marketing organization to do to foster participation in its employee advocacy program? The following 12 steps are bound to give it wings.
You want to begin by securing organizational buy-in from C-level executives. LinkedIn’s Sean Callahan recommends that you:
You need to create a program with some degree of structure. That is, you want to document your goals and a framework for measuring them. One of the best things about employee advocacy is that it’s scaleable. Goals might include:
However, you don’t want to dictate exactly what, when, where and how your employees share content on social media. Just give them encouragement and a healthy dose of latitude.
Obviously, there are risks involved with employee advocacy. As such, you’ll want to document a policy outlining acceptable protocol. The idea is to provide direction regarding social etiquette and tone, not iron-clad rules.
Designate an employee advocacy leader who you believe can help generate favorable results. The leader might be given specific responsibilities such as:
The ideal person will encourage and guide employees, not boss them around. Employee advocacy relies on goodwill and trust.
Rather than roll out the program to every employee at once, start with specific employees who have demonstrated that they are interested in participating and in providing feedback.
“Our research found that 77% of those employees who do advocate is a manager or above, so clearly brands have not yet figured out how to tap their broader base of individual contributors.”
~ Ed Terpening and Aubrey Littleton, Altimeter
Don’t assume your employees know how to use social media effectively for business purposes. Deliver training and learning resources. Make them engaging and fun.
Potential topics to address in training may include:
Your employees may enjoy positioning themselves as subject matter experts. Support this idea. Serve employees by helping them raise the status of their personal brands and/or development.
Reward participants in your employee advocacy program with the recognition they crave. Create programs to showcase and reward the accomplishments of your leading advocates. Consider running contests. Top participants can be rewarded with money, gift cards or a day off.
Obviously, sharing useful content is central to your employee advocacy program. You want your employees to spread the word about your company’s blog posts, eBooks, infographics, videos, podcasts and more.
Marketers can work toward encouraging the sharing of relevant content in a variety of ways:
The list of content types you can use in your employee engagement program is long. Need ideas? Here you go:
These are the most common types of posts shared by employees, as reported by Altimeter in Social Media Employee Advocacy: Tapping into the power of an engaged social workforce.
There are several social sharing tools you may want to consider equipping your employees with. Consider free and/or subscription-based platforms such as AgoraPulse. Highly effective tools that are dedicated to employee advocacy include the aforementioned Oktopost and Smarp, as well as GaggleAMP, LinkedIn Elevate and Social Chorus.
Smarp’s analytics reporting can demonstrate impact per content item or per team member.
Give employees something fun to share with their followers and they will, so take them out to the ballgame! Host theme parties! Bring in speakers or entertainers! Do whatever you can to make sure they are quite literally a part of the party.
Give employees some cool branded swag such as shirts, water bottles, backpacks, etc. You might want to throw a custom hashtag for sharing it on social media as well. Just sit back and watch what happens.
Your employees are the human face of your brand and they have valuable connections across LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Plus, because they’re real people rather than a faceless brand, they’re more trusted than anyone in your C-suite or marketing department.
Marketing leaders should no longer think of social at the department level only, and recognize the company’s workforce as a tremendous asset for social media marketing.
Reaching new levels of achievement in employee advocacy comes with numerous challenges, including: winning buy-in from leaders and the workforce; managing risk; building skills; making content available; and using metrics to prove value.
Overcoming these challenges takes a systematic approach to employee advocacy. And now is the time to take action, build a strong employee advocacy program, and inspire employees to share content regularly.
Guest Author: Barry is the author of The Road to Recognition and SEO Simplified for Short Attention Spans. Barry operates Feldman Creative and provides content marketing consulting, copywriting, and creative direction services. He contributes to top marketing sites and was named one of the 25 Social Media Marketing Experts You Need to Know by LinkedIn. To get a piece of his mind, visit his blog, The Point.
The post 12 Steps To Build A Successful Employee Advocacy Program appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.
THERE are lots to be discovered and learn in affiliate marketing, especially on the Internet. In today’s rapidly evolving technology, online marketing is …
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iGB Affiliate parent company Clarion Events has announced they have now acquired one of the largest affiliate marketing conferences in the world.
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iPROMOTEu (asi/232119) has hired Gary Goodhart and Guy Dupuis as directors of affiliate sales development. In their new roles, they will be …
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Celltrion Healthcare, a marketing affiliate of biopharmaceutical company Celltrion, made an impressive debut on the secondary Kosdaq on Friday, …
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Clarion Events has furthered its presence within the affiliate marketing sector, by acquiring B2B event organiser Affiliate Summit Corporation.
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So in June 2010, I started a blog, and 9 months later, credit card companies came knocking at my door for affiliate marketing. Today we’re one of top …
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Additionally, she led Harland Clarkes Marketing Services division and was also Harland Clarkes Vice President of … leading financial institutions, large retailers, affiliate marketing companies and accounting software providers.
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NEWS ANALYSIS: An analyst, a strategist, and an affiliate marketer comfortably walk into a bar. Then they notice Amazon in the corner. All your base …
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Mindset 24 Global is a new hybrid Direct Sales/Affiliate/MLM company … to provide life changing information from world class marketing partners.
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The parent company of iGB Affiliate has purchased one of the largest affiliate marketing conferences in the world. Affiliate Summit is a three-day …
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Affiliate marketing has its pros and cons — advocates and detractors. The industry is booming but there are many merchants that have negative …
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With the acquisition, Affiliate Summit will continue to deliver the premier affiliate marketing tradeshow and conference in the United States, and will …
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One man who believes this is John Crestani, an internationally-renowned expert in affiliate marketing. Since(involuntarily) leaving his cushy job in the …
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Posted by randfish
Typical link outreach is a tired sport, and we’ve all but alienated most content creators with our constant link requests. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand outlines five smart ways to earn links to your site without having to beg.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week, I’m going to help you avoid having to directly ask for links.
Some people in the SEO world, some link builders are extremely effective. If you go to the Russ Jones School of Link Outreach, you need to make a big list of people to contact, get in front of those folks, outreach them, and have these little success rates. But for some of us, myself included, I just absolutely hate begging people for links. So even though I often produce content that I want people to link to, it’s the outreach process that stops me from having success. But there are ways around this. There are ways to earn links, even from very specific sources, without needing to directly say, “Hey, will you please link to this?” I’ll try and illustrate that.
So the problem is I think that most of the web at this point is sort of burned out on this conversation of, “Hey, I have this great resource.” Or, “Hey, you linked to this thing which is currently broken and so maybe you’d like to,” or “Hey, I noticed that you frequently mention or link to blah, blah, blah. Well I have a blah, blah, blah like blah, blah, blah.”
Folks I think are just like, “Oh, my God, I hate these SEOs, like I’m so done with this.” Most of these folks, the journalists, the bloggers, the content creators of all kinds start to detest the link requests even when they’re useful, even when they help your success rates. I mean, great success rates.
The world’s best link builders, link outreach specialists, when I talked to agencies, they say, “Our absolute best folks ever hover in the 5% to 10% success range.” So that means you’re basically like, “No. Nope. Nuh-uh. Uh-uh. No way. Sorry. Uh-uh. Yeah, no. Uh, no.” Then, maybe you’ll get one, “Okay, fine. I’ll actually link to you.”
This can be a really demoralizing practice, and it also hurts your brand every time you outreach to someone and have no success. They’re basically associating you with … and in fact, there are many people in the SEO world who my only association with them is, gosh, they have asked me for a lot of links over the years. It kind of sucks the souls from people who hate doing it. Now granted, there are some people who like doing it, but you have two options.
Number one, you can optimize the outreach to try and get a higher success rate, to do less damage to your brand when you do this, to make this less of a soul-sucking process, and we have some Whiteboard Fridays on exactly that topic and some great blog posts on that too. But there are ways to build links without it, and today I’m going to cover four and a half of them, because the fifth one is barely a tactic.
The first one is the tactic — I’m going to use very conversational naming conventions for these — the “I made this thing you will probably use.” So this is, in effect, saying not, “Hey, I made this thing. Will you link to it?” but rather, “I made this thing and I can have some confidence that you and people like you, others like you, will probably want to link to it because it fulfills a specific need.”
So there’s some existing content that you find on the web, you locate the author of that content or the publisher of that content, and you form a connection, usually through social, through email, or through a direct comment on that content. You have an additional resource of some kind that is likely to be included, either in that particular element or in a future element.
This works very well with bloggers. It works well with journalists. It works well with folks who cover data and studies. It works well with folks who are including visuals or tools in their content. As a result, it tends to work well if you can optimize for one of those types of things, like data or visuals or ego-bait. Or supporting evidence works really well. If you have someone who’s trying to make an argument with their content and you have evidence that can help support that argument, it will very often be the case that even just a comment can get you included into the primary post, because that person wants to show off what you’ve got.
It tends not to work very well with commercial content. So that is a drawback to the tactic.
So this is rather than saying, “I would like a link,” it’s a very indirect or a relatively indirect ploy for the same thing. You find resources that list Xs, and there’s usually either an author or some process for submission, but you don’t have to beg for links. You can instead just say, “I fit your criteria.”
So this could be, “Hey, are there websites in the educational world that are ADA-compliant and accessible for folks?” You might say, “Well, guess what? I’m that. Therefore, all of these places that list resources like that, that are ADA-compliant, will fit in here.”
Or for example, we’re doing design awards for pure CSS design, and it turns out you have a beautifully-designed site or page that is pure CSS, and so maybe you can fit in to that particular criteria. Or websites that load under a second, even on a super slow connection, and they list those, and you have one of those. So there’s a process, and you can get inclusion.
This can be very broad, but, basically, if you can identify sources and start to follow those sources wherever they publish and however they publish, whether that’s social or via content or broadcast or other ways, if you find those publications, those authors expressing a need or an interest or that they are in the process of completing something, by offering to assist you will almost always get a link for your credit. So this is a way where you’re simply monitoring these folks that you would like to get links from, waiting for them to express some sort of need, fulfilling that need, and then reaping the benefit through that link.
This is sort of a modified version of “I made this thing you’ll probably like.” But instead of saying, “Here’s the thing that you will probably like and maybe include,” you’re saying, “I noticed that you have a product, a piece of content, a tool, a new piece of hardware, some physical product, whatever it is, and I like it and I use it and I happen to fit into the correct demographic that you are trying to reach. Therefore, I am happy to contribute an endorsement or a testimonial.” Oftentimes, almost always, whenever there’s a testimonial, you will get a link back to your source, because they’ll want to say, “Well, Rand Fishkin from Moz says X and Y and Z,” and there’s the link to either my page or to Moz’s page.
The one you’re probably most familiar with, and it was probably the first one that came to mind when you thought about the “How do I get links without asking for them?” and that is through guest contributions, so guest blogging and guest editorials and authorship of all kinds. There are a few Whiteboard Fridays on that, so I won’t dive deep in here.
But I hope you can leverage some or all of these tactics, because if you hate link building the outreach way, these all have more work that goes into them, but far, far better results than this 5% to 10% as the top. Five to ten percent is probably the bottom range for each of these, and you can get 50%, 75% on some of these tactics. Get a lot of great links from great sources. It just requires some elbow grease.
All right, everyone. Thanks for watching. We’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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Once upon a time, when Yahoo! was one of the most dominant search engines and Google was nowhere to be seen on the ‘most popular search engines’ map, search rankings depended solely on web page content.
But then Google rolled out its PageRank Algorithm and completely changed the way in which search results were displayed. Rather than simply focusing on the content of a web page, Google would, through the algorithm, also seek to understand the number of other websites which linked to the page. The logic being that if a significant number of people linked to a page, it must be useful.
This quickly became a building block of modern search values. Link building is not dead – far from it – and it’s likely to stick around for a long time. It’s vital to any solid SEO strategy (link building is one of Google’s top 3 ranking factors) and it can also be leveraged to help you with your overall business growth strategy.
So what are the key ingredients of an effective link building campaign? I’ve laid out what I consider to be my top seven requirements below.
Before you kick off your link building campaign, create a plan of where you are, what you want to achieve, and how you intend to do it. Identify your objectives and record your definition of success. What would you have to achieve first before calling your campaign a success? Write it down.
It may sound obvious, but a plan helps you identify the type of links you want.
Start by considering the type of links that your site already has, then review the type of links your competitors have. Run your website through tools like Majestic, Moz’s Open Site Explorer, SEMrush, and Ahrefs. This will help you conduct link analysis to better understand about the sites linking to your site, as well as page performance, branded and non-branded anchor text, fresh links, etc.
A plan also helps you retain a firm idea of the niche and general industry you’re operating in. Sites that are popular in certain industries may not be as influential in other industries. Similarly, sites that are unheard of in certain industries might be very popular in your industry. You will want to have this information on hand.
Link building doesn’t just happen. The product or service you’re working so hard to promote must actually be useful to your primary target: the customer.
Google values links highly because they signify credibility and authority. In other words, links are the internet’s referral system. In order to gain online endorsements, you need to have a product worthy of endorsing in the first place.
First, create a website that highlights your product’s benefits, not just its features. If you don’t have a product that people would find useful, then SEO and link building probably shouldn’t be your main focus. Improving it should be.
Having a noteworthy product or service will make, not only your link building campaigns more successful, but your overall brand and business too.
Links help direct people to content. Therefore link building can’t work if there isn’t some form of content to refer those visitors to. For a successful and sustainable campaign, the content also needs to be high-quality.
But what does high-quality content look like?
High-quality content is unique and/or in-depth. Content such as research data, cases studies, and industry news coverage is bound to get lots of links. Other content such as ‘How To’ posts, visual content, videos, listicles and reviews – even when based on existing content – can generate incoming links too.
How do you develop high-quality content?
It might seem obvious, but most businesses are solely relying on their product pages to gain incoming links. Most site owners aren’t looking for product pages to link to. They want to link to actual content. So, starting a blog for your business goes a long way.
You also need to know your target audience: not other bloggers, but the reader and potential customer. Ask yourself what type of content they would find most relevant. That’s the type of content you need to create.
Of course, high-quality content alone won’t make the magic. You still need to promote it actively, but the link building process hinges on great content.
A link building campaign is a piece of a wider marketing campaign. Thus, for it to be a success, you need to treat it like it’s part of a bigger picture and not just an isolated initiative.
It’ll work best if you integrate it with other strategies such as content marketing, email marketing, public relations, social media and search engine marketing.
For instance, picture starting your link building campaign immediately after running a successful publicity campaign. You’d not only get a surge in links but also brand mentions, which you can turn into links too. A successful link building campaign could also boost the number of shares and mentions on your content. This would get more people interested; you’d get more followers on social media, and ultimately a rise in the number of email subscribers.
In 2017, you can’t isolate any strategy.
Seeing that you’re building links primarily for a higher ranking, it helps if you know how SEO works. And not just how the links help boost your SEO, but also how a boost in SEO can impact your bottom line.
Not all links are created equal. Two of the main factors to consider are relevance and the authority of your links. This is why you need to be familiar with the most authoritative sites in your industry.
If a pet food blogger links to your real estate site, it probably won’t help your link building campaign in any tangible way. The links aren’t very relevant or useful to the audience demographic. In fact, this could impact your site negatively through an increase in bounce rate, where a user gets to your site only to realize that the content on the site isn’t what they were expecting, so they leave immediately.
In essence, link building is relationship building. Once you link to a website, you link it to your own and vice versa.
Also, as discussed, a link is an endorsement of sorts. Linking, referencing, citing, or outright endorsing a site tells your readers that you trust the information from that page and that the website is reputable.
Therefore, that sense of relationship should be with you all the way.
Your relationships with other people in your industry can also help you increase your chance of gaining quality links. For instance, if you’ve already established rapport with a certain blogger or influencer, it will be much easier to ask them to link to you than if you didn’t know each other at all.
Similarly, engaging with your audience online leads to people talking about your business – and we’ve already seen how you can turn these mentions into links.
We’ve been talking about how you can turn mentions into links. But how do you know when people are mentioning your brand?
Using a tool like Google Alerts, you can easily conduct an analysis on where you’re getting brand mentions either by name or by URL. Simply paste your site URL into the tool then click on any of the results. From there you can get their contact information or just contact them directly on the site.
Since they have already mentioned you, it will be easy to pitch an idea such as a guest post or content collaboration, if it’s a blogger or brand. If it’s a potential customer, it’s your chance to engage with them and solve their needs.
Great content will help increase your website traffic, and your link building efforts will be more successful if you create valuable content that readers find useful.
When linking to other sites, make sure that your intention is always to provide value to the reader. Similarly, when developing your content, make it high-quality so that other people may find the desire to link to you.
SEO is an important piece of the larger marketing puzzle. It’s a consistent practice that, when done effectively, can have an incredible impact on your business. Don’t give up early. It’s a constant struggle to become a well-rounded marketer, but integrating these seven techniques will pay off in the long run.
Guest Author: Alex Jasin is the founder and CEO of X3 Digital, a Google Certified digital marketing, and design agency. He helps businesses grow through paid search, search engine optimization, web development, mobile apps, content marketing, and branding. Alex is also the founder and the CEO of Metapress, a rapidly-growing publication where visitors can learn new skills, gain inspiration and discover more about what interests them. Jasin’s writing can be found in Business Insider, Entrepreneur, The Huffington Post, CMI, Internet Retailer, The Next Web and other leading publications. Connect with Alex on Twitter, Medium, and LinkedIn.
The post 7 Must-Have Ingredients In Any Effective Link Building Campaign appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.
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It is our belief that marketers have a right to have transparency into their marketing campaigns, particularly their affiliate marketing and display and …
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Gannavarapu worked on software that powered Amazon’s affiliate marketing programme. Paranjpe worked with Persistent Systems among other …
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… a Delhi-based digital marketing company that offers ROI-driven solutions, … verticals like ad-network, performance marketing and affiliate marketing.
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Affiliate and influencer marketing each have a time and place. Your responsibility is to figure out where your company is today and how to get where …
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Wirex has revealed a new ‘Associates community’ for affiliate marketing. The program will get a new tracking center, new banners, new content, new …
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The affiliate marketing space has matured into a significant channel for driving sales for advertisers of all sizes. In fact, eMarketer has predicted affiliate …
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On October 4 and 5th, ECC Sokolniki in Moscow, will host RACE 2017 Congress, a conference dedicated to affiliate programs and marketing.
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“I’m looking forward to meeting with affiliate marketers and others at the Affiliate Summit and helping them to navigate cross-device attribution.”.
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Affiliate marketing business Acceleration Partners, has opened in the UK with Helen Southgate, former managing director of affilinet. Southgate will …
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Both Pat and Rob had corporate careers, i.e. “Real Jobs,” before they learned about affiliate marketing. But both Pat and Rob make far more now as …
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Schroeder-Gardner, now 28, says she and Wesley, who works on the blog with her, make money through advertising, affiliate marketing arrangements …
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Cerber managed to successfully pull off an affiliate marketing scheme, in which people are paid a commission for every infected victim that pays the …
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ADLARGE MEDIA VP Affiliate Marketing JESSICA SHERMAN said, “SERENE & PEARL deliver to radio a multimedia juggernaut that is homespun …
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Tunji Meshioye, marketing manager at Bet9ja, said: “Bet9ja is among the … “Partnering with Income Access allows for a much smoother affiliate …
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LONDON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Acceleration Partners, the largest independent affiliate marketing agency in the U.S., has officially launched in the UK …
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… for digital marketing managers, SEO managers, SEM/PPC experts, social media managers, affiliate marketing leaders, content marketers, and much …
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Posted by BritneyMuller
You, a content marketing ninja, are able to wield immense SEO reach with your content in ways most SEOs (*cough* like myself) can only dream of.
BUT, you’re not leveraging keyword research to your advantage!
The fact that you can discover how many people per month are searching for something, what words they’re using, and what questions they’re asking still blows my mind!
Keyword research doesn’t have to be a marathon bender. A brisk 30-minute walk can provide incredible insights — insights that connect you with a wider audience on a deeper level.
My previous company, Pryde Marketing, was not founded on out-of-this-world high-quality content. It was founded on leveraging online data strategically for private medical practices.
When we were hired to do keyword research for an MRI company, we discovered that hundreds of people a month were searching “open vs closed mri” but no one was providing any good answers, content, or photos for these searchers.
We decided to create an “Open Vs. Closed MRI” page for our client that, to our surprise, continues to see over double the traffic of the homepage. Plus, it’s brought in over 50k+ unique visitors.
We were not successful because we thought of this content idea.
We were successful because we listened to the keyword data.
Example client: Hunter & Company (Wedding & Event Planning)
Objective: Write better content for their website and assist with digital marketing efforts.
Having five to ten data-driven blog categories can help you rank for popular topics, allow readers to find more relevant content, and help to organize your blog.
Identify the most common navigation items and blog categories on leading industry sites.
While exploring top websites, you can use advanced Google operators to dig deeper.
Example: Bride.com has topic pages like /topic/wedding-beauty. To view all of Bride.com’s topics search this: site:brides.com/topic
Google “wedding” and don’t hit enter!
Instead, make note of the drop-down search suggestions. You can also search “wedding a” [don’t hit enter], “wedding b” [don’t hit enter], all the way through to z to get the most popular and/or trending wedding-related searches.
Now that we have aggregated keywords from the above tactics, we have a solid list:
wedding venues, wedding photographers, wedding dj, wedding beauty, wedding videographers, wedding bands, wedding budget, wedding invitations, wedding registry, wedding colors, wedding decorations, wedding party, wedding ideas, wedding cakes, wedding centerpieces, wedding hairstyles, wedding bouquets, engagement rings, wedding dresses, bridesmaid dresses, mother of the bride dresses, wedding rings, flower girl dresses, wedding accessories, wedding jewelry, wedding tuxedos, wedding registry, wedding ceremony, wedding reception, wedding cake, wedding food, wedding favors, wedding flowers
Keep up the pace — we can’t stop here!
Next, let’s determine which categories are most popular by average monthly Google searches.
There are two primary tools to view average monthly search volume (AKA to know how many times a query like “wedding flowers” are searched per month): Google Keyword Planner and Moz Keyword Explorer. (Check out GKP vs. MKE to learn more.)
Step 1: Paste your saved keyword list into the box under “Enter one or more of the following” and click “Get Ideas”:
Step 2: Evaluate and save search volume data while being mindful of the large search data ranges and limited data:
Note: Google will occasionally change your keywords to something different; “wedding videographers” was changed to “wedding videos” in this case. It’s important to be mindful of this as you’re deciding on the exact category names.
You should also explore the keywords below your immediate keyword search section. Sort by average monthly searches (highest to lowest) to make sure you aren’t missing any other big category items.
Step 1: Create a new list.
Step 2: Paste your keyword list into the “Enter Keywords” box:
Step 3: Take a quick water break, because KWE will take a minute to gather data. Once the data is in view, sort by and evaluate average monthly search volume:
Woohoo! We reached the finish line with two minutes to spare.
To finalize our blog categories, we need to ask ourselves two things: Which topics are the most popular and the most relevant to a wedding planner site?
With that in mind, you’ve chosen six of the most popular wedding topics and have nested several sub-categories within “Wedding Decorations” — brilliant!
Answering the most commonly searched-for questions about your product/service will provide value to your readers and solidify you as an industry expert.
Here’s how to gather the most commonly asked questions on a topic:
Search for your product/service.
How cool is this snazzy question wheel?! While the visuals are fun, it’s easier to gather the questions by clicking the top-right yellow “export to csv” button and deleting non-relevant questions in a .csv or Google Sheet.
Step 1: Search and filter “display keyword suggestions” by “are questions”:
Step 2: Add relevant questions to a new keyword list:
Step 3: Add relevant AnswerThePublic questions to list:
Research done!
I wouldn’t worry about evaluating search volume too closely for FAQs because questions are typically more long-tail (meaning they have lower search volume and are usually easier to rank for). In multitudes, these can be very valuable to your site.
Now you can start adding your newly discovered FAQs to an FAQ page (while trying to avoid duplicate types of questions):
This uncovers the specific type of content your audience is interested in. Here are the 10 most popular pages for One Fine Day Events:
Pro tip: Use Google Trends to evaluate seasonal searches and prepare competitive content months before it spikes:
Expanding your page’s topical content will expand your digital SEO reach. This is why you’ll see definitive guides like Moz’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO ranking so well, and for such a wide range of keywords (~1,665!).
Step 1: Activate MozBar. Enter in your primary keyword and click “optimize.”
Step 2: Click “On-Page Content Suggestions”:
Step 3: View the 23+ content integration ideas for your webpage:
You never want to force non-relevant content onto a page for SEO reasons. Instead, look through the topics and think about which would provide value to your readers.
Then, devise a plan to naturally integrate those topics into the page’s content.
Topic integrations for the Hunter & Co. homepage:
We are seeing a big rise in “no-click” Google searches.
No-click searches occur when individuals search for something and find their answer, without ever having to click on a search result.
Example: If you search “Denver weather,” Google will show you an 8-day weather forecast for Denver. Most searchers are satisfied with that and leave, resulting in a no-click Google search.
Image from State of Searcher Behavior Revealed
No-click searches are rising because Google continues to provide searchers answers within search features such as featured snippets (answer boxes), People Also Ask boxes, knowledge graphs, weather forecasts, etc.
Knowing which search features occur most frequently for your product/service-related searches can help you to steal search features by optimizing for them. Keep in mind that if you’re ranking on page one or two of a desired featured snippet search, you’re better positioned to steal that featured snippet than if you were on page 3+.
Remember our FAQs about “wedding planning” above? Twenty-four of 28 questions found in Moz Keyword Explorer have featured snippets (answer boxes) in their search results:
RealSimple currently has a large featured snippet for “wedding checklist”:
Looking more closely into that page, you’ll notice RealSimple’s <html> check-box markup and definitive style content.
Now, my content marketing ninjas, go forth and tap gloves with a wider audience! Your content deserves it!
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!
Let’s get it straight from the start: entrepreneurship is not easy.
Don’t run head first into something that you’re not prepared to handle. Being an entrepreneur takes more time and effort than any other job.
You’re directly responsible for your actions and every mistake can become a costly setback for you and your idea. With that being said, you should know that it’s still the right time to start your own business. Not tomorrow, not next week. Right now.
Entrepreneurship won’t get easier as time passes. You won’t face less competition or fewer hardships if you keep postponing your dream.
If you’re here, you probably already have an idea that’s worth sharing with the world. So stop wasting time and start making progress towards your dream.
This is probably the biggest and most important reason why you should start your company right away. However hard it may be, at the end of the day, you’re going to be spending the best days of your life while working towards your goal.
Just because something is hard doesn’t mean it’s not worth spending time and effort to do. Especially when it comes to doing something that you love: working for a dream.
Entrepreneurs are the rockstars of the business world. I don’t know about you, but me and most of my friends always dreamt of becoming rockstars, even if only for a day.
Starting your own company will transform you into the rockstar that you deserve to be. If you’re not living your life to the fullest already, the moment you start believing and working towards achieving your goal is the moment you’ll realize that all the failures, victories, uncertainties, and events will be the ones that drive you forward.
Creativity can be lost along the way in many professions. Rarely do I hear people saying that they’ve had the liberty to create a new product or service from scratch.
You don’t need to run your ideas by various staff members and project managers. You might have a great idea written on a torn piece of paper on your desk. Make that happen by starting your own business and building upon it.
There’s a great chance that your idea will have an impact on the lives of the people around you. Whether it’s a new product, a new service, or it’s just the way you’re going to do it that differs from what’s being done right now, the effort is worth it.
Thanks to social media, you’re closer to the world than ever before. The farthest point in the world is only a few clicks away. To put it in perspective, this infographic from Search Engine Journal will show you just how many people you can reach online. Reaching even 0.1% of these people is more than enough to have one of the most successful businesses in the world.
Although the list is in no particular order, the connections you will make as an entrepreneur are stronger than the usual relationships that you have with your friends. That’s because even though you’re not working in the same field, you’re facing the same obstacles.
Plus, the friends that you make will be there for you in times of need, just as you’ll be there for them. Not once has an entrepreneur been able to keep moving forward with their idea without the help of their fellow entrepreneurs.
Regardless of how much you prepare for the future, starting a new company will always bring unexpected events into play. The expertise of other entrepreneurs can easily prove to be life-saving, even though they may not work in the same field. Sometimes, you have to think outside the box, and surrounding yourself with entrepreneurs working in other domains can be just as lucrative for you as it is for them. 5 years from now, you’ll be able to look back at all the obstacles you’ve overcome together.
A decade ago, starting your own company would have cost you an arm and a leg. Today, not only is it cheaper to find hardware solutions to cover your initial needs, but software might even be free. If you can’t find a free solution for your needs, chances are there’s someone you can talk to about it.
Setting up your company has never been easier. Specialized company formation agents are available in just a few clicks. The biggest advantage is that such an agent can take away most of the legal and bureaucratic work, allowing you to focus on more important issues.
When it comes to software, there are hundreds of frameworks and databases that can suit your needs. If you come to think about it, the most expensive point on your list is going to be your time. You’ll have to invest a lot of time into your new company but you reap what you sow, so get going!
Getting new customers is a challenge for any company, big or small. What used to be one of the biggest challenges for a new company is now easily achievable with little effort.
Getting an initial customer base is made easier by the wide variety of available customer acquisition channels. Since almost everyone in the world is online, developing several online marketing strategies will help you get started. Blogs, search engine marketing, targeted ads, and email marketing are just a handful of channels that you should focus on right from the start.
Once your company starts growing, you can invest in other conventional strategies, such as PR, affiliate programs, viral marketing, and so on. What’s important is to always continue to improve and develop your customer acquisition strategies. This will ensure a constant stream of new customers looking to buy from you.
Being your own boss sounds fantastic, as long as your company is making a profit and you don’t have to worry about not being able to put food on the table tomorrow.
Ten years ago, it would have been almost impossible to start a new company without having saved up enough money first. Today, you can be your own boss even if you have limited funds.
Depending on the type of business that you’re starting, there are multiple ways through which you can gain a decent profit and work your way up. The most important thing to remember is that although being your own boss allows certain freedoms, you can’t put the company on hold. You have to keep working hard at all times.
Guest Author: Stefan Paulo is a young entrepreneur. He is passionate about digital technologies and trying to implement them in the sphere of education. He observes all the news connected with online tools and is always ready to discuss them.
Disclaimer: This is a sponsored post. As always, all thoughts and opinions are the author’s and have been edited in accordance with our strict editorial guidelines.
The post 6 Reasons You Should Start Your Own Business Right Now appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.
If you have been studying business planning, you’ll know that the word ‘niche’ has been used quite a lot in the marketing realm and the same is true …
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The Bet9ja Affiliate Programme makes it is simple for affiliates to leverage these promotions with marketing materials that are easily accessible …
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Affiliate marketing: You can also make money blogging by promoting products you don’t own. You can earn a commission when your visitors purchase …
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… oversees NBCUniversal’s 30 owned TV stations, affiliate relations and affiliate marketing as well as network operations and broadcast standards.
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Posted by Angela_Petteys
To say marketing automation is a complex subject is putting it mildly. On the surface it seems simple enough, but once you get just a little bit deeper into it, it’s overwhelming. Even if you work with marketing automation on a daily basis, it can be hard to describe.
When used correctly, marketing automation can be useful in helping sales and marketing teams do their jobs more effectively so they can reach their goals. But there are also a lot of misunderstandings about what marketing automation is and isn’t. Let’s try to get a better understanding of what marketing automation is and how it can potentially help a business.
Marketing automation is the use of software to deliver personalized messages to customers and leads. The software allows you to create a dynamic series of messages to send to your contacts. The message a person receives is decided by factors you specify, like what their spending habits are, where they are in the buying process, and past interactions they’ve had with your site.
Delivering content that’s tailored to a person’s needs and interests helps build stronger relationships which, in turn, can help increase conversions and revenue. Marketing automation can help you accomplish all these things while streamlining your operations at the same time.
In the broad scope of things, marketing automation incorporates several different aspects of marketing and business development, including email marketing, content development, conversion rate optimization, and lead generation.
By far, one of the biggest benefits of marketing automation is that it helps sales and marketing teams work more efficiently. People love personalized content; sending out personalized emails generates six times more revenue than sending non-personalized emails. But manually sending out customized messages to contacts simply isn’t practical. Marketing automation platforms handle the mundane and repetitive work that goes into delivering personalized content, giving sales and marketing professionals more time to focus on things that are more interesting and challenging.
Not only does marketing automation make it easier to deliver messages, it makes it easier to figure out where people are in the conversion process. Marketing automation programs typically have a lead scoring feature which helps users quickly identify which leads are the most sales-ready.
One of the most common reasons why businesses consider using marketing automation in the first place is because they want to improve their conversion rates and revenues. Marketing automation is a way to encourage customers to stay engaged longer, making it more likely they’ll stick around long enough to convert. On average, companies that use marketing automation have 53% higher conversion rates and an annual revenue growth rate 3.1% higher compared to companies that don’t.
For products and services with longer conversion cycles, marketing automation can also help speed up the process. In one example cited by VentureHarbour, Thomson Reuters was able to reduce their conversion time by 72% by using marketing automation software.
While marketing automation has several different applications, email messaging and lead generation/nurturing are among the most common.
Yes, email is still relevant as a marketing tool. While it’s easy to say things like “Everybody’s on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram,” it’s simply not true. However, most Internet users do have at least one email address. Email inboxes also tend to move at a slower pace than social media feeds, giving you the best chance at making a direct connection with your contacts. There’s a multitude of ways marketing automation can be used with email:
And that’s just to name a few.
Many companies use marketing automation to solicit feedback from their contacts, regardless if they’ve converted or not. Whether it’s by sending out surveys or asking people to send comments directly to them, the information they garner can be extremely valuable in guiding changes that will help improve their revenues in the long run.
Given that personalized emails generate so much more revenue than non-personalized emails, marketing automation can be an effective way to nurture your leads. According to Marketo, about 50% of leads in any system are not ready to buy and nearly 80% of all new leads will never become sales. With marketing automation, the goal is to give people something of value when they need it most so that they’re more likely to convert. Effective lead nurturing generates 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost. Nurtured leads also tend to make larger purchases than non-nurtured leads.
Marketing automation platforms are also often commonly used to manage social media campaigns, create landing pages, and conduct ongoing A/B testing.
Businesses of all sizes can potentially benefit from marketing automation, but whether a business has a B2B or B2C model is going to have an impact on the type of messaging used in their campaigns. While both types of businesses would have the main goals of improving conversions and revenue, there are differences in how they’ll reach that goal.
B2B sales tend to have longer conversion cycles than B2C sales and often involve products or services that require a more long-term commitment. (Of course, there are some exceptions.) Because of this, B2B messaging has a greater emphasis on long-form content like whitepapers, case studies, and e-books. When major purchases are being considered for a business, multiple people are often involved in the decision-making process, so it’s not always a matter of winning over one person like it is with B2C sales. It’s important for the business with something to sell to establish themselves as an authority in their industry — offering in-depth informational content is a great way to do that.
Since B2C sales move at a faster pace, the content used in their messaging is typically much simpler. For example, Sephora customers aren’t going to be interested in long case studies about a product, but they might appreciate a 30-second video demonstrating how to use a product instead. For B2C companies, the focus tends to be more on brand building and giving customers reasons to come back, so their messaging typically includes things like abandoned shopping cart reminders, personalized product recommendations, and offers tailored to specific types of customers.
Although many different aspects of marketing and business development come together in marketing automation, the whole process is ultimately driven by a few core concepts.
A conversion funnel is the process a person takes toward becoming a customer. Now that it’s so easy to find product reviews and shop around, a lot of people don’t just buy things from the first place they see it for sale. Marketing automation is a way to keep people engaged so they’re more likely to convert.
The conversion funnel can be broken down into a few basic stages:
Ideally, after a person converts once, they’ll be so happy with their decision that they become a repeat customer. But as people move through the conversion funnel, whether they do it once or several times, some of them will always drop out at each level. On average, only 1–5 % of people who enter a conversion funnel actually convert. When people drop out, it’s known as churn, and while some churn is inevitable, marketing automation can help reduce it. By understanding the needs and interests of people at each stage of the conversion funnel, you’re better able to keep them engaged by providing them with the type of content they’re most interested in.
For example, let’s say a company installs vinyl windows and they advertise heavily in the local media. At any given time, a large percentage of the thousands of people who see their ads won’t take any action after seeing one because they either don’t need new windows or because they live in a rental property. No amount of additional messaging will win those people over. But since replacing windows can be very expensive, the people who actually do need them typically spend time doing research to make sure they choose the right type of window and get the best price. If this company were to send additional information about vinyl windows to the people who contact them to get an estimate, they may be able to convince more people to convert.
One of the basic laws of physics is that for every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. A very similar concept also applies in the world of marketing automation, and it’s known as a feedback loop. When you send a message to a person, the recipient will have some kind of reaction to it, even if that reaction is to do nothing at all. That reaction is part of your feedback loop and you’ll need to pay attention to your metrics to get an idea of what those reactions are.
Feedback loops and metrics are a reflection of how effective your marketing automation strategy is. Whether a person converts, clicks through to your site, ignores the message, flags it as spam, or unsubscribes from your list, that tells you something about how the recipient felt about your message.
When you look at your metrics, you’ll ideally want to see high open rates, clickthrough rates, and maybe even some forwards, since those are signs your content is engaging, valuable, and not annoying to your contacts. Some unsubscribes and abuse reports are inevitable, especially since a lot of people get confused about the difference between the two. But don’t ignore those metrics just because they’re not what you want to see. An increasing number of either could be a sign your strategy is too aggressive and needs to be reworked.
While conversion funnels refer to the process taken toward converting, user flow refers to the series of pages a person visits before taking an action.
When you have traffic coming to your site from different sources like PPC ads, social media, and email messages, you want to direct users to pages that will make it easy for them to take the action you want them to take, whether it’s buying something, signing up for a free trial, or joining an email list.
You also have to keep in mind that people often have different needs depending on how they arrive at a page, so you’ll want to do your best to make sure people are being taken to a page that would appeal to them. For example, if a person is directly taken to a product page after doing a search for a long-tail keyword, that’s fine since they’re clearly looking for something specific and are more likely to be ready to convert. But someone who clicks on a PPC ad and fills out a form on a landing page is probably going to want more information before they make any decisions, so it’s not time to give them a hard sell.
Workflows are where the automation part of marketing automation comes into play. Your workflow is the series of triggers you create to deliver messages. Creating a workflow involves taking yourself through the entire process and asking yourself, “If this happens, what should happen next?”
Workflows can consist of many different triggers, such as how long it’s been since a person has taken an action, interactions you’ve had with a person, or actions they’ve previously taken on your site. Some types of workflows commonly used by retailers include sending discount codes to customers who haven’t made any purchases in a while, reminding people to review products after they’ve had some time to enjoy their purchase, and sending reminders to people who have recently added items to their cart without actually making a purchase.
This might seem like an obvious point to make, but before you do anything else, you need to decide exactly what you want marketing automation to help you achieve so you can plan your strategy accordingly. Are you trying to generate more leads? Working to build up business from return customers? Trying to boost sales during an off season? Each of those goals is going to require a different strategy, so it’s important to understand exactly what your main objectives are.
Of course it’s important to understand the needs of your customers at all points of the conversion process. But depending on what your main goals are, your time and energy may be best spent focusing on people who are at a specific point of the process. For instance, if you’re not really having a problem with lead generation but you want more people to convert, your time and energy would be better spent focusing on the middle and lower parts of the conversion funnel.
By using marketing automation, you’re trying to get people to take some kind of action. Mapping user flow is a way to visualize the steps people need to go through to be able to take that action.
Depending on the way a person arrives at your site, some people might need more information than others before they’re willing to take that action. You don’t want to make people go through more steps than are necessary to do something, but you don’t want to hit people with a hard sell too soon, either. By using state diagrams to map user flows, as recommended by Peep Laja of ConversionXL, you’ll see exactly how people are arriving at a page and how many steps it takes for them to take the desired action.
It’s important to remember that not all leads are necessarily equal in terms of quality. Your database of contacts is inevitably going to be a mix of people who are on the verge of buying, people who are still researching their options, and people who probably won’t convert, so it’s not possible to create broad messages that will somehow appeal to all of those types of people. Rating your leads helps you figure out exactly who needs further nurturing and who is ready to be handed over to a sales team.
The interactions a person has had with your content and the actions they’ve taken on your site can be a reflection of how ready they are to convert. A person who has viewed a pricing page is most likely going to be closer to buying than someone who has simply read a blog post on a site. A person who has visited a site multiple times over the course of a few weeks is clearly more interested than someone who has only visited once or twice in the past year. Marketing automation software lets you assign values to certain actions and interactions so that it can calculate a score for that lead.
Marketing automation also lets you segment your database of contacts to a very high degree so you can deliver messages to very specific types of people. For example, when working with a B2B business, a marketer might want to target messages to people with certain job titles who work at businesses of a certain size. With B2C sales, a retailer might want to segment their lists to give special offers to people who have spent a certain amount of money with the company or send product recommendations to people who live in certain locations.
There’s no easy way around it: Building a high-quality database of contacts takes time. Marketing automation should come into play once you already have a fairly sizeable database of contacts to work with, but you will need to keep adding new names to that database on a regular basis.
One of the most effective ways to build a database of highly qualified contacts is by creating informative content. Blog content is great for providing high-level information, and it helps businesses build trust and establish themselves as an authority in their field. On the other hand, things like whitepapers and e-books are best for attracting people who want more in-depth information on a subject and are more inclined to be interested in what a business is offering, which is why those types of content are usually gated. With gated content, a person’s contact information is essentially the price of accessing the content.
For businesses that offer a service, free trials are an excellent way to get contact information since the people who sign up for them are obviously interested in what’s being offered.
Whatever you do, don’t be tempted to buy a list of contacts. Purchased lists may give you a quick boost up front, but they’ll work against you in the long run.
First of all, high-quality lists of contacts aren’t for sale. The kinds of lists you can buy or rent are typically full of invalid and abandoned email addresses. Even if a person actually does see your message, they likely either won’t be interested or will be skeptical about doing business with a company they’re not familiar with.
If you were to start sending messages to a list full of contacts of questionable quality, you’ll most likely end up with high bounce rates, lots of unsubscriptions, low open rates, and a whole lot of abuse reports. Email service providers pay attention to those sorts of metrics and if they start seeing them on a regular basis, they’ll view you as a spammer, which will only make it harder for you to get your message to more qualified leads once you have them.
Make your point quickly and make it clear. We all have a limited amount of time each day and one thing people have little patience for is long messages. People just want to know what’s in it for them. How would your product or service solve their problem? What’s unique about what you’re offering?
By implementing marketing automation strategies, you’re trying to keep people engaged. Therefore, your messages should be written in an active tone and encourage recipients to take some kind of action, whether it’s downloading a whitepaper, reading a blog post, watching a video, or making a purchase.
Don’t forget that some types of content will be more appealing than others depending on where a person is in the conversion funnel. People who are just starting to learn more about a company or product are not going to be happy if they get hit with a hard sell, but highly promotional content could potentially be effective on someone further down in the conversion funnel.
When used correctly, marketing automation is not spam — we’ll talk more about why that is in just a little bit. But don’t give your contacts the wrong impression. Certain things will always look spammy, such as typing in all capital letters, overusing the color red, and using too many links in the body of the message. If you’re going to use symbols in your subject lines or messages, don’t use too many of them. Avoid using words known to trigger spam filters.
If you’re unfamiliar with the CAN-SPAM Act, take some time to learn about what it means for your campaign. Subject lines need to be accurate and not misleading. Companies that send marketing messages through email need to provide a physical mailing address. (PO box addresses are allowed.) You also need to provide an unsubscribe option in all messages and make sure all opt-out requests are honored as soon as possible.
Bigger isn’t always better when it comes to contact lists. One of the key goals for marketing automation is to get your message to precisely the right people. Pay close attention to your metrics so you know who your most qualified leads are and get rid of the ones who aren’t responding anymore. You’re better off with a smaller list of highly qualified leads than with a large list of contacts who don’t care. If it’s been months since a person last opened a message from you, just remove them from your list and focus more on the leads who are more interested.
When done correctly, marketing automation can and should feel personal. In all fairness, it’s easy to understand how people get the wrong impression here — after all, the word “automation” is usually associated with things like computerization and robots. But for a marketing automation strategy to be successful, there needs to be a human touch behind it. Marketing automation simply makes it easier for you to get your message out there. It’s up to you to come up with content that will appeal to people and to create the strategy for getting it out there.
We all know how obnoxious spam is — marketers included. Marketers also understand how ineffective it is. While spam is an unsolicited message promoting something irrelevant to the vast majority of its recipients, the goal of marketing automation is to deliver highly relevant messages to users who clearly express an interest in it.
Unlike spam, marketing automation also frequently involves non-promotional content. Marketing automation messages absolutely can be promotional in nature, but ultimately, the goal is to foster positive relationships by offering something of value — and that doesn’t always involve a hard sell.
This is another case where the word “automation” can give the wrong impression. When you think of something being automated, it’s easy to think you can just set it up, sit back, and let it run on its own. In reality, marketing automation is anything but a hands-off process. Marketing automation needs constant attention and refinement to make sure it’s as successful as possible. Many people use the A/B testing functionality of marketing automation software to run ongoing tests to see which sorts of content, subject lines, design variations, and CTAs people best respond to.
Email is a significant part of marketing automation, but marketing automation isn’t just a new name for email marketing.
First of all, the types of messages involved in basic email marketing and marketing automation are distinctly different. When most people think of email marketing, they’re thinking of broad email blasts that go out to an entire list of contacts, but that’s just what you’re trying to avoid doing with marketing automation. Marketing automation messages are much more fine-tuned to a user’s interests and needs. Although basic email marketing programs do allow for some list segmentation, marketing automation programs allow you to get much more hyper-segmented.
Basic email marketing and marketing automation programs also offer different functionality and insights. While regular email marketing platforms give some basic information about how people interact with your message, marketing automation programs offer more measurable, in-depth insights.
While marketing automation offers a lot of benefits, it’s not going to be an ideal solution for all businesses. For some types of businesses, basic email marketing is all they really need. Studies have shown that marketers often feel like marketing automation software isn’t worth the investment, but many marketers also fail to use it to its full potential or businesses try using it before they have a large enough database of contacts to truly make it worthwhile. Before using marketing automation, the key things to consider are whether or not you have the time and resources to dedicate to training on the software so they can use it to its full potential.
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