content marketing Archives – Page 2 of 2 – Big love. Infinite magic.

It’s time for your new year’s marketing resolutions.

The new year is a great time to review your marketing strategies and plan ahead for the remainder of the year.

marketing 2014 Kylie Fennell small business marketing

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles/freedigitalimages.net

Take time to review what has worked for you, what hasn’t and what you should focus your efforts on when marketing in 2014.

So what are the hot trends in marketing for 2014? The two biggest marketing trends in 2014 are a carry-over from 2013. They are digital marketing, which includes social media and content marketing.

The great news for small businesses is both of the these trends can be leveraged for little cost.

Beyond that there are a few simple things small business can do to get the biggest bang for their marketing buck or in some cases no bucks.

Here are five tips to maximise your 2014 marketing efforts.

1. Digital marketing

Your onlineand social media presence should form one of your biggest marketing priorities in 2014.

Revisit your website and check whether it is still helping you achieve your marketing goals. What do you want users to do once they get to your site? Do you want them to make a purchase? Do you want to encourage customers to visit your shopfront? Do you want them to sign up to a newsletter? Is the website achieving this, and if not change it and keep it up-to-date.

Make sure the user can get what they need from your site in the easiest and quickest way possible.

Review your social media accounts in a similar way. Are you achieving your objectives through social media? Have you been keeping your social media account up-to-date? If not, perhaps consider paring back the number of accounts to the ones most relevant to your business and focus your efforts on them. Otherwise you will need to be disciplined and devote more time to social media.

Remember to be active and engage, deliver value to your connections and evaluate your success through free analytics and built-in tools such as Facebook Insights, Followerwonk for Twitter and Google Analytics.

2. Content marketing

Content marketing does not need to be terribly complex. In its simplest form it is about providing content that is relevant and valuable to your target audience.

Ensure your content is tailored to your target market and packaged and delivered in a format, style, frequency and timeframe most relevant to them. Focus on giving away lots of value in your comment.

3. Be a problem solver

It doesn’t matter what industry you are in, or what products or services you sell, we are all in the same business.

We are in the business of solving problems for our customers. There is also a difference between being a good problem solver and a great problem solver. The difference is brilliant customer service.

Go the extra mile for customers when you can. They will remember it, appreciate it and hopefully reward you with repeat business or word-of-mouth support.

Have a positive attitude to difficult customer requests. Instead of saying ‘No I can’t do that’, use the phrase ‘What I can do is…’. Anticipate customer needs and aim to exceed their expectations.

Know you customers inside out and speak directly to them. Consider creating a customer persona to better understand them.

4. Review your brand story

Once you are confident you fully understand your customers, you may want to review your brand story.

What is your business’s story? Have you got a one page story about your brand that clearly articulates who you are, what you offer and your point of difference?

If you don’t have a story, it’s time to write one with the writing tips found under tools on our website. If you do have one, it is time to review it to ensure it is still relevant to your target audience.

Once you have your brand story clear, make sure your key messages flow through all of your communication and marketing materials.

5. Don’t be afraid to try something new

There’s no harm in trying something new when it comes to marketing – provided you have the budget and resources you need and you stick to any relevant laws and regulations.

One of the best avenues for trying something different is via social media.

There are always new platforms and tools and most of them are low or no cost. You can immediately gauge the success of these activities via engagement and analytics. Venture out and try new features and platforms and have fun. Stick with what works for you and discard what doesn’t.

Just remember like any marketing activity, you need to have clear goals in mind and your marketing needs to support these objectives.

So now all you need to do is come up with your marketing resolutions – easy – the hard part is sticking to them. Just know you can always turn to an expert to help with your marketing in 2014.

Happy New Year and may all of your marketing dreams come true in 2014 – Kylie Fennell

www.kyliefennell.com Kylie Fennell

kylie@Kylie Fennell

Kylie Fennell + Kylie Fennell

So you have set up a business Facebook page that you diligently monitor and update once a day with snippets, pictures and videos, which may or may not feature a cat playing a piano.

You may have ventured out further and have been tweeting your thoughts on the latest reality TV show.

If so, you are probably congratulating yourself on taming the social media beast. And so you should.

What happens though if you start to notice that people are not engaging in your posts or updates? What happens when hardly anyone is liking/sharing/commenting/re-tweeting or clicking on your updates? More importantly how do you fix it?

By far the most important component of any marketing activity is content. Content marketing is more than a buzz word, it is the foundation of all marketing activities.

The same rule applies to social media marketing. Your social media content must be relevant and valuable to your target market.

Without this, your social media marketing efforts will be largely wasted.

Here are some tips on developing brilliant social media content.

80/20 rule

It is terribly tempting to blast your followers with promotional copy, promos, offers and sales.

While there is a place in social media for promotional opportunities, especially if they are well managed, by far the majority of your posts should be non-promotional.

Remember when most people are using social media, they are using it in a “social” sense. They are not in the headspace for hard-selling.

A 80/20 rule of thumb can be used as a guideline for posts. That is, for every self-serving promotional post, you should have at least four relevant and interesting content posts. These should be a mix of your own content and re-posts of relevant content written by others.

Posts can be purely entertaining (such as cats playing piano), or personal (such as personal images or anecdotes), but will be most effective if they connect with someone and elicit an emotion, whether that is laughter, empathy or gratitude. It should also have some connection to your business and its products or services. For example, a boutique may post a photo of the owner in their daggiest prom dress.

You should like or follow similarly minded pages that feature content that will be relevant to your target audience.

Content ideas

Here are some tips to help you identify content relevant to your target audience.

+ Think about your audience as people or “personas” rather than demographic profiles

+ Tailor your content and approach – ensure your content is tailored to your personas and packaged and delivered in a format, style, frequency and timeframe most relevant to them.

+ Focus on giving away lots of value – some call this giving away the secret sauce. Don’t always ask for something in return. Why give away the secret sauce? Remember you are in the business of solving problems. Your potential customer has a problem and your content may help solve it, at no cost to them. When they need more help hopefully they will come to you and share the information or experience with everyone they know.

+ Stockpile content – squirrel away content ideas and trends as you come across them. You never know when something may come in handy, especially if it is not time critical. You may come up with ideas anywhere from on the bus, in the shower or driving. It may be something as simple as a road sign, an anecdote a friend has told you or a news feature. Have a pen and paper on hand, or use voice memo on your phone (handy when in the car), or type notes into your phone. Tear out pages from newspapers or magazines as you see something that interests you. Compile your ideas in a hard copy or electronic folder. You may even like to input them into a spreadsheet with specific columns so you can search by particular fields

+ Ask your audience – ask your followers what kind of content they would like to see. This doesn’t make you sound stupid, it demonstrates you really want to engage with your customers.

Finally, be concise – as with any writing keep your content to the point, especially with Twitter where you have limited characters. If you are posting links, take advantage of free url shorteners that create a super-short link for you. Google’s and bitly’s url shorteners are probably the most common.

Call-to-action

Regardless of your overarching social media goal, one of your objectives is likely to be to get people to click it/view/like/share/re-post/comment in some way, shape or form. This would be in the hope it would lead to further awareness, increased traffic and hopefully sales. It also has the added benefit of increasing the likelihood of someone seeing your post (since the more people who comment or share it, the higher up it moves in a feed) and improve search engine optimisation (SEO).

Getting people click it/view/like/share/re-post/comment is a good basis for engaging your audience, and if it isn’t, it is time to review your objectives.

To achieve the above objective there needs to be a clear and persuasive call-to-action.

Keep in mind people share or comment on content based on how they want to perceived by others. So they want to look good/funny/intelligent/caring by liking or sharing something. Certainly high quality and valuable content will go a long way in achieving this. So you may simply go with adding a simple “like this post” or event a question at the end of your post with the hope people will engage with it.

This is a great starting point, but what else can you do to improve engagement? Momentus Media conducted a study of 20,000 Facebook profiles which found that asking a stand alone “question” will result in 23% less engagement that no question at all.

This does not mean questions should be avoided – it means you have to craft your questions more carefully. In fact you need to demand an answer. Sounds pushy right – well it works.

Here is an example:

Question only: “Coffee or Tea. Which is better?

Question with a demand: “Coffee or Tea. Which is better? Tell us in comments”

You may not believe this but research has shown that people are more likely to go to the effort of doing something, if they are told to do it.

Blogger Ryan ‘Haight’ Mail explains further:

“Look at any of the top 100 YouTube channels. They all end with:

“What do you think about turtle racing? Tell us in the comments! And remember to hit subscribe!”

They do this because it doesn’t matter how funny you are, the majority of people will finish your video and go, “Ha! That was funny– omg a cat playing piano. *click*”

And then they’re gone.”

By adding their call-to-action and couching it in a demand, they may have just got some more engagement, possibly even a lead for their email distribution list and SEO.

Let’s explore this concept a little further by using conditionals, such as ‘comment/like IF [condition]’. Eg. Comment if you think tea is better than coffee, or ‘Like’ if you think tea is better than coffee.

Have you noticed again how we are ‘telling’ rather than ‘asking’.

Now time for a little reality check, from Haight Mail who explains why aiming for a ‘Like’ is also a great option.

“People are Lazy. Comments are great on Facebook. They usually include words — sometimes they’re spelled correctly,” he says.

“But ultimately they’re a lot of work. So even with a call to action, people are less likely to interact the more work they have to do. So use this to your advantage and make it easy. You are 216% more likely to get people to click ‘Like’ than you are to have them actually write a sentence.” [Momentus Media]

So in summary, have a call-to-action, and let it demand or tell the audience what to do.

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Category: content marketing

Get the biggest bang for your marketing (or no) bucks in 2014

How to write brilliant social media content