Category: Social Media

Digital Marketing Goals: Projects for Improvement or Business as Usual

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As the year closes out, digital marketing goals should be set for the following year. This can be especially true in digital marketing because campaigns can be repetitive and trainers, consultants, and professional coaches might allow that to lull them into complacency. This can cause swift declines in results due to the digital marketing environment changing so rapidly. As you set your goals they should fall into two categories: Business as Usual (BAU) or Projects for Improvement (PFI).

The reason to break goals into these categories is to ensure that at least a couple fall into PGI. Often times, digital marketing goals look more like a checklist of current activities rather than a list of strategic initiatives. We don’t want the status quo to be the standard moving forward. Each year should have targeted improvement.

So yes, your goals should include your website updates, email marketing outlines, social media schedules, SEO tasks, report/download call to action creation, etc. But these are BAU goals and should make up no more than 75% of your total goals. These goals, while important, should be a given for completion as it’s the action items required to run an effective online marketing campaign.

Put some real thought into PFI goals. What changes can be made to get better results? Does the website need an updated layout or additional sections to drive calls to action? Does the email marketing campaign need updated segments or additional content? Do social media channels need integrated with a particular app to refocus on a particular audience? Whichever PFI goal(s) you choose, it should serve to get marketing tasks done more quickly/efficiently or seek to improve conversions.

PFI goals are often the most difficult to set for digital marketing because they usually involve an element of the unknown. Resist the fear of the unknown and commit to the goal. In doing so you’ll find your campaign improving rather than just happening.

Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Site Conversion, Social Media

Content that Says Nothing.

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Most trainers, consultants, and professional coaches agree that their content is the real value that drives their marketing campaigns. After all, their knowledge is what they are selling, so content is really just a product teaser for the whole business. Unfortunately due to writer’s block, complacency, or self-delusion, the content created for marketing can be poorly constructed resulting in communications with little value.

Earlier this year we wrote about some guidelines for constructing good content but the last section of engaging content that can be a challenging judgment call. After all no one intends to write, shoot, post bad content . . . but it happens all the same.

Here is a recent example of an email tactic sent by a business consultant:

“Don’t fall in love with the product or service you sell because people won’t pay what you think its worth. They’ll only pay for the value they see.”

I think the intended message was:

“Gut check your product or service to stay objective about the value. In that way you’ll come to a level playing field with those interested in what you are offering which will make for more productive conversations. “

But that’s my interpretation and giving the benefit of the doubt to a newsletter that has had valuable information in the past.

Boiled down it says, “People only pay for the value they perceive.” While the content is true, it’s obvious to the point of cliché. It’s the equivalent of a digital marketer saying “Content is king” as a tactic. It should have been the intro to a real insight, not the climax of the email.

In the spirit of the tactic I received, don’t fall in love with the content you create. Always make sure that what you are delivering is something worth your audience’s time. Sure, you’ll get a few free passes on content that’s not as hard hitting as some of your best insights but it’s best not to rely on your audience forgiving you because they’ve gotten value in the past.

After creating content spend some time away from it and then see how you feel about it later. Better yet have a trusted colleague review your content to provide criticism or enhancements. Getting some separation or outside feedback helps keep an objective viewpoint on whether your content is really worth your audience’s time.

Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, Social Media

Make Social Sharing Easy

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Most people engage in social media to interact with a target market and gain a following. Often times, generating that interest is easier said than done. Valuable commentary and content is a prerequisite to gaining a valuable following but beyond that, sharing should be made easy on your audience to broaden your reach.

The unique power of social media is the ability to share. That one feature makes social media a vastly scalable channel. So if the goal is for others to share your content, then why do many trainers, consultants, and professional coaches make it so hard to share?

When asking that question many people will say, “They can just like it, or retweet it, or share it, or pin it, etc.” The problem with that thinking is that it presupposes your audience interacts with content in the exact same manner you do. That’s a dangerous assumption and one that can limit your overall reach.

Look for ways of making sharing easy across social media platforms. A simple way is to include your content on multiple platforms. Trainers, consultants, and professional coaches often target LinkedIn due to its business focus and neglect other platforms. While LinkedIn does tend to perform the best for trainers, consultants, and professional coaches that doesn’t mean that other platforms can’t contribute value.

Make sure to include social shareability off of your social channels. Share buttons for websites and email have become prevalent and easier than ever to implement. This allows people to share your content with a single click. We suggest using Addthis as it includes tons of social media platforms, customization, and makes integration simple. Widgets, I frames, and plugins are all available for different integration applications. If Addthis does not offer a necessary component, find a social sharing utility that suits your needs, there are many quality ones available.

As a general rule, check each channel for a two-click share process. If it takes more than two clicks for users to share your content then the process is likely a barrier that prevents some sharing.

Internet Marketing, Site Conversion, Social Media

Making Your Digital Marketing Relatable

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ID-100293556It’s not uncommon for us to run into a trainer, consultant, or professional coach that says, “I’m putting a lot of effort into marketing and I’m just not seeing results.” Sometimes the effort is questionable but many times there is a legitimate marketing campaign being rolled out with little to show for it. If you have a well-constructed campaign but no results from it, the problem is likely that your messages are not relatable to your target audience.

A digital marketing campaign will only be relatable to your target market if you understand your target market. It’s impossible to make compelling communications if you don’t understand your prospects and clients and the concerns they face on a day-to-day basis.

If you are certain that your communications are pertinent to your audience then the problem might be in the authenticity of your messages. Are they honest and transparent? Many marketing communications are watered down clichés or confusing corporate speak rather than a truly interesting or insightful message. If marketing messages aren’t saying something that resonates with the individual, then it will be ignored.

Marketing provides a stage for you to communicate why you are relevant to your target audience. Companies, even small firms, often have a brand but no voice for that stage. The voice of a company is the people that make up an organization. When it comes to trainers, consultants, or coaches, people don’t relate to companies. Rather they relate to the person they are interacting with.

Use that connection in your communications by communicating and reinforcing the same enthusiastic, compelling, and insightful messages that the trainers, consultants, or coaches provide when dealing with prospects or clients directly. If the digital marketing campaign can’t provide that same level of engagement, then it will be a shadow of what the company can truly provide and will remain largely irrelevant and ignored.

Image courtesy of  sheelamohan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, Site Conversion, Social Media

Marketing Shouldn’t Take Vacations Even When People Do

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Everyone needs a chance to get away from work for a while. However, when it comes to trainers, consultants, and professional coaches, one person’s vacation can become a vacation from the firm’s marketing. With some planning and effective use of available digital marketing tools, there is no reason that vacation schedules should result in a lull in marketing.

Typically the suggestion that marketing not take a vacation is met with one of two excuses.

  1. It’s only (insert amount of time).
    The fact of the matter is that in digital marketing the expectation is real time responses. There’s not a lot of patience for delays. Even a day’s gap can lead to disinterest about something that in the moment was a priority. If the gap affects the assigned schedule of communications, it can disrupt consistency and have a lasting negative impact if it’s a communication your audience has come to expect.
  2. I’ve got (whichever digital marketing element the marketer finds important) covered, the rest can wait.
    Good digital marketing campaigns are built so that one channel reinforces the other. Removing one channel weakens the others. The entire process should be set up to function in someone’s absence either through automation or temporary responsibility reassignment.

The concept sounds simple but can be complex when analyzed. As an example, we have a client who owns a sales training firm that was taking a two-week vacation. The client was proactive in reviewing their digital marketing campaigns and asked us to fill in a few gaps that would exist in their absence.

We reviewed the plan for the two-week period and found that it looked solid. Emails and social media posts were pre-set and authorized by the client so that there was no delay in the approval and send process. All supporting promotions for the time period were set up on the website so that materials could be requested and delivered and events could be registered and confirmed, both in an automated way.

It looked pretty solid until the end of our review when we realized that while the requested material would be automatically delivered to the requester, the notification went to the owner who would be on vacation. So a follow up on the lead would be delayed until the owner returned from vacation or checked in to their email account. As a workaround we rerouted the notifications for the two week period to distribute to a few consultants in the firm that could follow up with a lead in the owners absense and set text message notifications so the owner had a record of leads for the time period.

This illustrates how a simple step in the process can undo a marketing campaigns goal of generating leads or sales. It also shows that overconfidence in the process or automation can result in critical errors. Even the best and most efficient marketing systems require human input. Make sure that the systems will continue to function if one of those people is absent.

Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, Social Media

Take Account of Cross-Audience Exposure in Marketing Campaigns

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ID-100175980It’s great to understand your audience and the personas of your target market. It’s equally important to know how these audiences interact and make sure that an agenda to engage one group does not alienate another target group. As marketing campaigns are planned, it’s important to identify which channels might cross audiences and ensure that the messaging to one audience is not counterproductive to another.

Marketing is often looked at as a means of generating leads or sales, and for the most part that covers it. Every so often, however, marketing is consulted on other business facets like recruiting. Recently a CEO of a client launched a presence on LinkedIn via the marketing department to support an HR agenda to attract millennials to the company. This agenda was initiated because there was a number of technology openings within the company that HR felt millennials would be better suited to perform.

So the CEO launched several LinkedIn posts about how valuable millennials could be to a company and why he thought it was critical to current companies’ future to bring them on board. The LinkedIn posts garnered some interest and HR was pleased to see an increase in application for their open technology positions.

To further promote the CEO’s presence on LinkedIn, an internal communication was sent asking employees to follow the CEO’s posts. Many of the employees did so and were greeted with the CEOs recent posts. The problem was that many of the employees were not millennials and felt the articles were dismissive of the contributions other generations could and had made to the company.

Marketing had to deal with comments on LinkedIn from current employees that felt marginalized .HR had to do damage control for current employees that took exception to the content. To further diminish the productivity of the campaign, the CEO had no plans of continually doing posts so the original three articles became an obvious self-serving attempt at boosting recruiting rather than a valuable commentary on business development. The lack of ongoing quality content for the targeted audience meant that followers dwindled or disappeared.

While this example has as much to do with HR as it does with marketing, it’s a great example of how marketing agendas can backfire when channels cause them to cross audiences. This is especially true for web content or social media posts which make the content available to anyone who finds it. Even channels like email that make it possible to restrict access to a target group still have cross audience capabilities via forwards and replies.

It’s best to review any marketing campaigns from the perspective of your unique audiences. If you find that particular communications are dismissive or alienating to a different target audience, it’s worth restructuring the campaign to be more inclusive.

 

Image courtesy of  tiverylucky / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, Social Media

When Digital Marketing Dogs Technology

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ID-100296232Technology that doesn’t work can be very frustrating. However, some digital marketers have let their frustration boil over into a prejudice. If technology does not work in exactly the way they envision, they bemoan inconveniences or small inefficiencies as if it’s a critical error. Setting up marketing systems for a website, social media, list management, and email marketing can get complicated. If it’s so complicated that tasks can’t be done or are laborious, then it’s worth investigating a new setup. If however, the system runs fairly well but does not meet a few small desires from marketing, it’s best to find a way to accomplish the task within the technology’s confines.

The fact of the matter is that for most trainers, consultants, and professional coaches, changing platforms or underlying technology for digital marketing is time consuming and can be expensive. A deficiency needs to be severe enough to justify the investment of time and resources to correct it.

As an example, a consulting firm we work with was launching an eBook. The campaign had been mapped out with an ideal process flow. A specific layout was set up for the landing page that included a form to download the eBook. In testing the process flow we discovered that the consultant’s web platform would not accommodate the layout and a form on the same page. So we outlined two workarounds, a simpler layout that included the form or the more complex layout with a button that linked to the form.

The marketing director for the firm adamantly refused either workaround stating that, “It’s a best practice to have our landing page mirror our communications and to have a form on that landing page. We have to figure it out.” While we agreed that was the ideal solution, the technology involved was not accommodating. Still the marketing coordinator was not swayed.

So we launched a project to build a separate landing page that was not built on their website’s pre-existing platform. Since the new page was off platform, it required a custom setup to report to their lead database to integrate with the rest of the process flow.

We were able to bend the technology to our will, but was it worth it? The workaround options were so close to the desired outcome that conversion rates were unlikely to suffer much, if at all. In the end, we can’t know for sure as testing an on-platform version didn’t make much sense after spending the time and effort to build the custom off-platform solution.

Don’t let technical irritations derail or delay your marketing campaigns. Part of digital marketing is working with technology to drive sales or leads. Technology rarely functions exactly how we want but with some patience and creative solutions it will often get close enough to deliver the desired result.

Image courtesy of  hywards / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, Site Conversion, Social Media, Web Maintenance

Is Your Style Conducive to Digital Marketing?

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ID-10044044Putting personality into blog articles, email campaigns, or social media posts can be a unique and engaging way to approach your target markets. But if not done tactfully, it can also be alienating to the group you hope to interact with.

Trainers, consultants, and professional coaches often have magnetic personalities that serve them well in training sessions or consulting meetings. Since their personality is an asset in front of people there is often an assumption that it is equally advantageous in digital marketing. That assumption is not always the case.

A client we have worked with for years is a straight talking, to the point, type of person. However, when speaking with him, he will soften his statements through tonality or with a smile. So his directness is often appreciated because verbal or visual cues clue people in that while he is bluntly pointing out an area that needs improvement, his intention is to help.

Those subtle cues don’t translate to digital marketing.

After some encouragement to be more active with his social network this client made his initial post to Twitter, “Sales people: If you can’t stop talking in a sales call you should be punched in the face.”

His intended point was that sales people should listen a considerable amount of the time. I have no doubt he’s said this same thing to a group of sales people he has trained and it went over well. However, on social media, with none of the subtle cues to emphasize the humor in his statement, he just wished that his target audience suffer a random act of violence.

This came in the midst of a campaign to generate invitations for key note speaking. A punch in the face is a difficult introduction to convert into a speaking engagement.

Inserting your style into digital marketing is a great way to add some personality to your campaigns. It can help distinguish your communications from other drab marketing messages. But be careful that the intent in your message accurately translates to digital marketing and that it’s not portraying a personality that is counterproductive to your marketing goals.

Image courtesy of  Ambro / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, Site Conversion, Social Media

Trainers, Consultants, and Professional Coaches – Be an Exceptional Content Marketer

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Most trainers, consultants, and professional coaches have an unfair advantage with their internet and email marketing. The advantage is that their core product, knowledge, lends itself perfectly for powerful content marketing.

However this advantage is often squandered with poorly constructed messages, uncompelling overview information, or a lack of actionable information for fear of “giving away the farm.” Below are some guidelines for making your valuable knowledge into compelling content marketing.

Make Text Scannable

Huge blocks of text turn readers off. This can be paragraphs that go on for twenty lines or more, or pages of text without section headers. In other words, text that looks like a wall. These sorts of things subtly tell readers the text is going to be hard to read.

Simply breaking text up and making it scannable would help a lot of business content. People are far more likely to read something online if it appears to be a quick read.

Three simple changes can make a huge difference:

  • Break paragraphs into five lines or less
  • Use section headers
  • Use bullet points wherever possible

Write Clearly

If you can get past the long dense type in many content pieces, the next obstacle you’ll run into is the copy. A lot of content marketing is, in fact, hard to read. There are long, overly-elaborate sentences peppered with acronyms and jargon that prevents anyone except seasoned experts from understanding it.

Target content so that a fourth or fifth grader can comprehend it. That’s the level of copy that people respond to best. This is not because people are stupid but rather because there is limited time to focus. This doesn’t mean the content should be dumbed down but rather simplified so that it’s easy for readers to digest.

Use Images

Use images to break up the text and to magnify the points made by the words. Try to use one image on every other page/email/social media post.

Focus on the Audience

The question that should be top of mind for any content marketing is “What’s in it for them?” Your brand and product or service might be part of what’s in it for them, but even if they do decide to buy, they will still be 99% focused on what’s in it for them.

Use Data

Odds are good you’ve got quite a lot of information about what your audience is interested in. You probably know which pages people like and which reports they download the most. Use that data. Make more content similar to what has worked in the past.

Ask Questions

We are no longer involved in a simple one way broadcast. Internet marketing is interactive. Engage in a conversation. Ask your readers what they think.

Make the Content Engaging

A lot of content marketing is regurgitated information, copy and pasting from training materials, or unrefined reports. These things can all be used as inspiration but are unlikely to engage your audience without some re-thought and re-work.

Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, Social Media

Some of Your Social Media Content Needs to be Original

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ID-10098730Social media profiles can and should be an extension of a business, firm, or individuals personality. This is especially true for trainers, consultants, and professional coaches who are the product and the face of their organization. While using social media to highlight valuable material or support a complimentary viewpoint serves as a valuable single source for information, it’s imperative that some of your content be original.

It’s rare that people are excited to get a second-rate knock off product. But that’s what many lazy social media marketing tactics illustrate. A trainer, consultant, or professional coach with no unique insights serves a similar function as a parrot, listening to something and repeating it right back. At first people will be captivated by the material but as they run into it elsewhere the novelty will wear off and credibility will erode.

I recently experienced this very thing from a sales training firm that I follow. One of their posts in particular grabbed me as both funny and poignant. I was about to share it when I noticed a contact on LinkedIn had posted the same exact graphic. At first, I thought they had shared it from the sales training company, but no, it was a carbon copy. It turned out the graphic was from another sales consultant’s page. I was shocked to find that several of their posts had been lifted directly from this consultant’s profiles.

I’ve paid little attention to this sales training group’s social accounts since. After all, why do I need them when I could follow the consultant they are copying from?

It’s great to share, retweet, like etc. content that your users will get value from but do it selectively. Have a schedule for producing original content that people get first from your accounts. If you are sharing someone else’s content make sure to customize or comment on it so that you’re adding something to the interaction. Regurgitation should not be your social media strategy.

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Social Media
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