Developing strategies. Designing experiences.
Tidy up your social media footprint. Yes, we will be scouring the internet to learn as much about you as we can before we bring you in for an interview. Lock your profiles, or remove those college party pics. LinkedIn is your best friend. If you haven’t already, you need to start building your LinkedIn network and flushing out your profile. Find those “ultimate connectors” in your school and get connected. Follow companies you’re interested in. Started posting some original content. Share, like, comment, and get in on the conversation.
Get as much experience as you can under your belt. Do a couple of internships or offer to help a local nonprofit with their marketing efforts pro-bono. Run a small campaign for your Uncle’s pizza shop. It’s all experience and will go a long way. Learn as much about Google AdWords/Analytics and Facebook/Instagram ad manager as you can. Digital marketing and paid media are where you need to be.
Be the Purple Cow and stand out in the crowd. With a flurry of resumes flying across the desks of many employers, how will you stand out? What makes you unique? You’re a marketer, do your thing. Now is the time to start building YOUR brand. How will you present yourself to the market?
You will spend more time with the people you work with than your friends and family. Sorry, it's true! So, choose wisely. When applying for a job, try to get a feel for the company culture and who you may ultimately be reporting to and working with. Browse their website and social media accounts. Ask friends or professors if they know about the company. Check out their online reviews. This will be your first job and most likely not your last, but it’s a chance to get off on the right foot. Find a place you can settle in for a couple of years. Nobody likes to see a person who bounces around from company to company every year.
Unless you are applying through an online application, it all comes down to that first introduction email. Consider this your COVER LETTER. Don’t just mass email copy/paste your introduction email to 1,000 places just to see what sticks. TIP – This doesn’t work! Take the time to research a select few companies you really want to work for and craft an intro email that’s short-n-sweet but creative and interesting. Ask yourself this “Why should the employer even consider reading your email?”. What makes you unique, and memorable? It also helps to add something specific about the company to your intro. Let them know you’ve spent the time reviewing their website and that you want to work for them. Also, please don’t attach a resume that’s 25MBs. Nobody wants their email bogged down by a resume. And don’t send a WORD document. WORD docs seem unfinished and will certainly highlight any typos you may have. Export your WORD as a nice lightweight finished PDF. Include a link to your online website/portfolio. You’ll get bonus points!
Don’t let salary dictate your options. If money is your driving force, you’ll never be happy. Find a company and niche you love and be the expert. Work your tail off and earn your stripes. The money will come. What other benefits do companies offer? Flexible scheduling? Working from home days? Paid time off?
Be ready, once you enter the workforce, the days, weeks and years will pass you by. It’s sad but true. Don’t forget to get out and enjoy life. Just because college is over doesn’t mean the fun has to stop.
Always remember that wherever you go, the business world is much smaller than you think. Marketing managers, directors, and VPs all know each other. Never burn a bridge. Always stay professional.
Congrats you’ve graduated, and landed your first job, now what? Stay humble, find a non-profit with which you have some affinity, and help them out. They always need marketing help. Give back and pay it forward.
The world of social media is constantly changing. To keep up with your competitors, you need an exceptional PPC marketing campaign. In this blog post, we’ll explain recent shifts in the social media landscape and how to create a marketing strategy that will surpass your competitors’.
Over the past few years, there has been a dramatic shift in the social media landscape. You may have likes or followers, or well-crafted posts that are specific to your platform and your target audience. But unless you’re investing in quality video content, it’s unlikely that your content is going to get much reach or engagement. Here’s the kicker: social media marketing is no longer free.
This shift may have you wondering: what caused this change? Facebook has seen a major decline of organic search due to endless amounts of content and algorithm changes that now favor paid social. This push has forced brands to “pay to play.” In 2017 alone, social media marketing ad spend is projected to top $41 billion. While this news sounds defeating, there is a solution to keeping up with the ever-changing landscape: Pay up and create a marketing strategy that will succeed.
There are four key points to consider if you want to build a successful social media marketing campaign.
When finding the “right” people for your campaign, it’s essential to define your target audience. Your target audience can be found by defining your product or service’s demographics and personas. While some people think that demographic data is enough, persona profiles dig into the personality of the buyer, giving you valuable information about your target audience. Personas focus on what makes your buyers who they are and what drives them to seek out the services or products you offer.
Now that you’ve defined your target audience, it’s time to choose the right time and place for your message. To create a strategy for success, first you must choose the right platforms. It’s important to know which platforms your target audiences are most likely engaging with. This allows you to effectively target, resulting in wisely-used ad dollars. The next step in a strategy is creating a timing and sales funnel. Knowing where your customers are in the sales funnel gives you a better idea of what their current needs are, in order to move them to the next step of the buying process. The stages of the sales funnel include awareness, interest, decision and action. The third step to creating a strategy is based on your user flow and goals. How are visitors engaging with your content? Are they ready to take action or are they just looking for information to help form a decision? Determining where visitors are in the sales funnel can help you develop a strategy for PPC, traditional media, and remarketing, to deliver a message to visitors based on content they did or didn’t view to re-engage them and encourage a conversion.
When creating engaging content, it’s fundamental that your promoted content leads back to the content that converts. Here are a few questions you can ask yourself to help boost conversions:
Helpful tip: Make sure to provide your audience with a clear CTA so they know exactly what action you want them to take. When it comes to testing, don’t be afraid to fail, because failure is the best way to learn!
Make Data-Driven Decisions: After you have completed testing, the last step is to make data-driven decisions. Before we move on, it’s important to note that testing is never done. You must consistently measure the results of your advertising campaigns and track the changes, making data-driven decisions based on these results. Helpful resources for tracking data are Google Analytics, Tracking URLS, Crazy Egg and Mouseflow.
With the ever-changing world of marketing, your efforts need to be sophisticated and more creative than ever before. Now that you must “pay to play,” you can’t afford to create your ad based on trends and then forget about them. Tracking the performance of your paid advertising is never finite. You should always be testing, tracking and learning, not only in your front end and remarketing ad messaging, but also with your landing pages.
Landing Page Testing Examples that can be created in Optimizely or Google Content Experiments:
Need help creating and tracking a successful social media PPC marketing campaign from beginning to end? Contact Evolve Marketing to learn how our digital marketing team can help you.
Resources:
When kicking off a website redesign or marketing campaign, it’s crucial that you understand who you’re targeting. Many companies have no idea who their customers are! Creating persona profiles allows you to deliver the message to the right person at the right time.
Personas profiles, or buyer personas, are fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers. Having a deep understanding of these personas and what motivates them is key to your new website or campaign’s success.
When creating a persona profile, you’ll want to start with a solid creative brief. A creative brief is generated during initial meetings, interviews, discussions and research between a client and designer before the project is started. A creative brief is a mutual agreement between all parties involved and continues to inform and guide your work throughout the project. There are four key components to a creative brief:
It’s important to understand how personas differ from demographics. While demographics are basic information about the customer; such as age, gender and race; personas dig deeper into the personality of the buyer, focusing on what makes them who they are. Personas also help to determine what drives the customer to seek out your services or products.
Depending on your business, you could have as few as one or two personas, or as many as 10 or 20. If you are new to personas, it is best to start small, because you can always develop more later if needed.
Personas help marketing and sales teams identify the ideal customer for you to target. Having a thorough understanding of your buyer is critical to driving product development, content creation, sales follow-up and anything that relates to customer retention.
Understanding the user’s intent is essential. The key to a successful marketing campaign is to deliver the right message, to the right person at the right time!
Persona profiles can be created through research, surveys and interviews of your target audience. This could include a mix of prospects, customers and those who might align with your target audience.
Interviewing customers or prospects in person or over the phone is the best way to discover what they like about your product or service. It is important to know your customer insights! Here are some examples of interview questions to get you started:
The data collected from the interviews can be used to create your persona profiles, but keep in mind that it’s also important to review analytics data for any information that may have been missed during the interview process.
There are several available tools you can use to pull analytics data, which can answer additional questions and help you further develop your user personas.
Questions data can answer:
Data gathered can be used to construct your persona profiles. Keep in mind that you are not drafting a vague idea of who the audience is, but creating in-depth descriptions of hypothetical people with names, hobbies, jobs, likes and dislikes, and more.
The following is an example of a persona:
Ellen’s Profile
About Ellen:
Ellen loves her job and stands behind her marketing team. She’s always thinking about how she can drive more qualified leads to her sales team. She likes control and is very particular about her marketing choices. She’s willing to test new ideas as long as she can track properly and make data driven decisions. She is a busy person and doesn’t have time to be in the trenches, so she relies heavily on her team and web agency to execute her strategic plans. She’s loyal to no end and appreciates good quality work. She’s willing to pay for a better end product.
Ellen’s Needs:
At Evolve, one of our first steps when kicking off a website redesign or marketing campaign project is to create personas based on the business or company’s typical user. The details about a typical user help us to build a profile of a potential real user – someone we keep in mind throughout the project in order to create the ideal user experience.
Need help creating your persona profiles? Contact Evolve Creative Group to learn how our experienced web design and marketing teams can help you.
Resources:
Are you frustrated with advertising on Facebook? While it can seem difficult, it doesn’t have to be! Here are some tips to help you successfully navigate Facebook advertising:
Before you begin advertising on Facebook, it’s important to understand Business Manager. Business Manager lets you give employees specific access to the Pages, ad accounts, and apps your business manages, which lets several people work together on the same account. Since your business account isn’t tied to one employee under their personal profile, employees no longer have to friend coworkers or share login credentials for account access. From within the platform, you can assign employees the role of admin or employee. An admin has the ability to change settings in the account, while an employee can only view settings for the business. In addition, Business Manager gives you and anyone working on the account an overview of your Pages’ performance.
If you need to add new users to your Business Manager, it’s quite simple. First, go to the Business Manager settings. Find the people tab, and then click the “Add New People” button at the top of the page. Enter the work email addresses of the people you want to add, and then select the role you would like to assign to them: Business Manager Admin or Business Manager Employee. Lastly, choose which Pages or ad accounts you would like each person to have access to. Choosing the lowest role for each ad account will allow you to maintain permission roles while giving others enough access to do their job. Once you have added users to the account or Page, they will receive an email notification from Facebook. Once they accept the request, the setup is complete. If they don’t receive an email notification, you can send them a link to verify their account.
At Evolve, we’ve found that Facebook doesn’t always send an email, so we’ve had to log in and send the link.
Billing methods: Business Manager makes it easy to pay for ads with different billing methods. Keep in mind that only those assigned the Business Admin roles can add a payment method in Business Manager. Adding one or more payment methods to your Business Manager allows you to quickly create ad accounts. Just make sure you connect your payment method to ads manager, because Business Manager will not automatically add it to your account.
Easily update campaigns: Once you begin using Business Manager, you can simply access the pages you manage and the ad accounts associated with them. This convenient tool puts everything in one place so you don’t have to log in to multiple accounts. This makes it easy for you to update your campaigns and ads through Pages and ad accounts.
When creating an ad on Facebook, it’s important to determine which ad types best match your business objectives. The Facebook Ads Guide is a helpful tool that provides detailed information on the different ads that are available to you. This resource also gives you the image size requirements, pixel limit, and character limit for different ad types, and shows you what the ads will look like when they run on Facebook.
Below is a brief overview of Facebook ad types you can create:
To edit a Facebook ad:
Use the Delivery Insights tool in Ads Manager to see how your ads are competing at auction. The tool also provides recommendations on how to improve the ads and make them more competitive, which you can then communicate to your team. Delivery Insights identifies ad sets that are under-delivering and provides explanations for why. For example, if Delivery Insights identifies ad sets that are under-delivering, you can use the tool’s data and recommendations to continue to monitor and update your strategy to improve your ads’ performance.
You can target your Facebook ads to reach the demographic most likely to convert. When creating your custom audience, you can choose from the following options:
Like most online advertising services, Facebook’s ad options are constantly changing and expanding to address the needs of its users in the digital space. As the world’s largest social network with 500 million active users and counting, Facebook advertising is a worthy investment in order to increase brand awareness, leads, and conversions — but only 6% of Facebook Pages are taking advantage.
Staying up-to-date with these changes can be difficult for many companies, but you can stand out from your competitors and reach new customers with assistance from Evolve Creative Group. Our digital marketing team will help you with your Facebook account management by helping your team navigate your Business Manager account and create a compelling strategy, ad copy, and ad creative that align with your objectives.
Contact Evolve Creative Group to learn how our professional digital marketing team can help you.
Resources:
For those celebrating Chinese New Year, 2015 will be the year of the goat. For marketers, business owners, and anyone involved in the online channel, 2015 will be the year of mobile. After years of carefully watching statistics chronicling increased mobile adoption by consumers, devouring several reports published this past year, and poring over local and national data Evolve Creative Group collected, it's more than evident we need to adapt and change the way we think about our ongoing marketing initiatives. While you'll find plenty of data to support the claim, you don't need to look much further than out a window to see mobile has not only changed our lives but those of consumers worldwide. The question is no longer, "When is mobile Web browsing really going to separate itself from the pack?" It's more, "That day has come. Now, what am I doing about it?"
Check out the infographic below for a visual synopsis.
60% of Time Spent on Media Is Spent on Mobile
Of all the hours spent on media and technology, the average consumer is spending 60% of them on mobile devices. This means your customers are most likely using mobile devices as their go-to when interacting with your brand. Think about how many could be doing so at this very second. Is your site optimized to deal with this level of traffic? Are you able to sell your product or service on a mobile device? If you don't have a responsive website, the answer to those questions is most likely, "No."
Increase Your Ranking
Google already penalizes websites that aren't mobile-friendly in its mobile search. It appears to be taking this a step further by using the "mobile-friendly" designation as a ranking factor to promote sites optimized for mobile, while demoting those that aren't. Think of all the effort that's gone into earning the ranking you have now. Don't let that go to waste. In fact, build on it.
40% of Users Leave A Site if It's Not Mobile-Friendly
Mobile consumers aren't just leaving non-optimized sites, they're heading to a competitor's after a bad mobile Web experience. It's a significant and scary figure, but you can use it to your advantage. Think of the new prospects you'll gain as they leave a competitor's site because your mobile version is that much easier to use.
Mobile Users Are Buyers
Mobile users that search and find your business online have a conversion percentage nearly three times higher versus the same search done on a desktop computer or laptop. Why? Mobile users are on the go, and they're armed with an agenda. When they search, they have a specific intent in mind. Mobile searchers are buyers. In short, they have the potential to put a lot of food on your table.
It's safe to say 2015 is the year of mobile. The research is starting to tell the story Web professionals have known about for years now, the one beginning to become fact for marketers and business owners. Mobile users are a part of the marketing mix that can't be ignored anymore. That's why you need a responsive website.
Check out some of our responsive website designs:
Time and time again while using social media I run into the same dilemma: unusable, branded social media accounts. It happens for a variety of reasons such as an employee taking a proactive measure in claiming the account for the good of all brand-kind, only later to forget or delete the email account, username and password associated with it. Or, the company was late to adopt the online channel, leaving the prime, branded URL for others to claim and cling to.
It’s unfortunate and all too common. This leads to one strong message for those companies that currently own only their website domain: claim your social media accounts now.
So you don’t want to be on social media? You may say that now, but with the growing desire of consumers to connect with a company on a more personal level, you’ll see yourself on social media in the next year or so. (Hello, public relations.) Vanity URLs and handles don’t expire, so you’ve got nothing to lose by taking these preemptive measures.
I’m sure you have some questions, which I’m happy to answer.
Well, someone else could claim your company name and upload untrue content or share distasteful pieces of information that don’t align with your company, potentially offending those who view it.
Although that won’t happen to in every scenario, there are still other issues you could face if someone else claims your name. Your branding consistency will be forced to shift, which will create an additional need to craft handles, URLs and names that are available, but still in-line with branding.
Additionally, in some industries, (such as online marketing), it makes a reliable authority look as though they aren’t on top of things. Take Search Engine Watch for example.
Compile a list of your current social media accounts. If you’re not sure where they are, or if they exist, search google with, “company name social network name”. If the results do not turn up an account, double check by going into the social network and manually searching for your company name.
If the account does not exist, then this is your time to claim the account and the vanity URL right away. Be sure that you know what your URL needs to be. This could be your exact company name, or a user-friendly version. Lowes Home Improvement, for example, has created an online branding strategy for “Lowes”. Pick one and roll with it. Try not to change them from account to account.
Begin claiming your branded vanity URL on the main networks:
Remember the other, less noted social media platforms too, because once upon a time, Twitter was discounted as one of those “other ones”.
*An additional note for all companies: those with long official company names will need to have a strategy in place that adheres to the character limit of social URLs and handles.
Mason’s Creamery, a local hand-crafted ice cream maker in Cleveland, has done an excellent job of claiming their social accounts and vanity URLs. These guys, (actually, guy and gal), made it easy for me to give you an example to follow:
Why are they a good example you may wonder? Easy. They are currently in the process of opening a store in Ohio City, which means if their growth continues, they may open shops in Akron, Canton, or even LA. With each new location, the chance increases that someone will take Mason’s Creamery’s social into their own hands to create the accounts. By taking a proactive approach to claiming these now, they can promote their happenings and flavors online to followers and fans, plus they also have control of these profiles as they expand.
“What if it’s too late?”
Don’t feel bad if it’s happened to you; it also happened to Grey Goose Vodka.
This is when you rethink the strategy, and create a vanity URL that you can carry throughout your campaign.
“But I have a trademark!”
If you do own the trademark name that has been unrightfully claimed by another party (as in, it does not belong to that person or the company in any way) and that account is acting under the pretense that they are in fact your company, there are legal routes that you can take to prove that you are the rightful owner, but nothing is guaranteed … or timely.
Some of the social networks will work with you to cease the account from another individual with the right trademark information. However, in cases, such as YouTube, once that domain has been used and assigned to a specific username and password, it can no longer be transferred.
Therefore, you will still need a new vanity URL for your channel, and YouTube can redirect the old subscribers to the new channel. So even the legal route won’t get the vanity URL back, (but it can help in stopping brand-stealing trolls.)
Facebook’s current policy is that once you claim a vanity URL it’s yours forever and there is no changing, selling or trading that URL.
So All in All…
Be proactive in your online efforts. Claiming your vanity URL sooner than later will save time and hassle, and will help make online marketing a lot easier. If this seems overwhelming and too much for you to handle, contact Evolve Marketing—we’d love to help you out!
While you’re at it, work with your web developer to make sure you’re using the correct social media icons on your website when linking to the networks of your choice. Make sure that these are the social media networks that you are updating, controlling and for which you have a marketing plan.
I was recently asked to create some unique social icons for a client – rounded-corner buttons with a 3D look and subtle gradients. Knowing Twitter had updated its branding several times in the last year or so, I checked the website’s branding section to be sure I had the right logo. I quickly realized that everything I was about to design was technically not allowed.
I’m well aware that all major brands have usage guidelines (and if they don’t, they should), but I was surprised to find in Twitter’s guidelines of what not to do, plenty of examples of things I see on the Web on a daily basis: Adding graphics (like speech bubbles) to the bird, using a different bird to represent Twitter and most commonly, changing the color of the Twitter icon (or any other social media icon for that matter) to match a custom color scheme. These are all definite “don’ts,” according to Twitter.
After some more digging, I found that most of the major social media platforms—Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and Google+—have similarly strict brand guidelines. Take Facebook’s General Do’s and Don’ts for example.
They have one simple “don’t” when it comes to their minimal “f” logo: “Don't modify the ‘f’ logo in any way, such as by changing the design or color.”
As a Web designer, I read that and thought, “Not fair! I wanted to use the ‘f’ in an orange circle to match the look of my client’s website”. But after a moment, I asked myself this: Why do we feel we should be allowed to alter the branding of social media icons to suit our design needs? Most designers wouldn’t dream of doing that to any other logo, aside from maybe making it grayscale.
Facebook has a helpful FAQs section that spells it out for anyone questioning the reasoning behind its rules.
For example: Why does Facebook need rules about how to use its brand assets?
These rules are intended to promote consistent use of the Facebook brand. This makes it easier for people to instantly recognize references to Facebook and prevents consumer confusion. These guidelines also help protect company trademarks.
What does Facebook do if people misuse its brand assets?
Facebook dedicates substantial resources to the development and protection of its intellectual property. In addition to seeking registration of its trademarks and logos around the world, Facebook enforces its rights against people who misuse its trademarks.
If the above statements were made about any other big brand, like Coke for example, no one would blink an eye. It’s only because we’re talking about logos and icons displayed over and over on the Web that we start to feel we can manipulate them to meet our aesthetic needs.
Why do we think of social media platforms so differently when it comes to their branding? I believe it’s because we think of them as our own. MY Twitter, MY Facebook, MY LinkedIn … and the list goes on. These sites and apps have become so commonplace for so many of us that we feel they’re our own personal pages, when really, we’re just using the technology of these platforms for personal use. At the end of the day, social media platforms are owned by companies that own established brands. They simply allow us to use their technology.
Now with all of that said, I seriously doubt Twitter, Facebook or Google+ are going to slam you with a lawsuit if you make their logos pink on your modest portfolio site. A quick glance at big brand websites, as well as design and technology blogs, showed that many of these high profile sites are technically breaking the rules. In my opinion, it’s a matter of respect. Whenever possible, adhere to the guidelines. Users see these icons constantly—it’s highly unlikely they’ll be offended if the colors “clash” with your site design. Now, if the colors of these icons just won’t cut it for your design, most of the aforementioned brands have black or white options that are perfectly acceptable. Basically, if you’re going to change the icons, change them only when necessary and as little as possible.
The Super Bowl has always been a powerhouse of insight into the world of marketing and advertising – setting new trends with innovative advertisements that cost tens of millions of dollars to produce and syndicate. This past Super Bowl was a spectacle due to a number of incidents, most notably a power outage in the third quarter that left half the Mercedes-Benz Superdome without lights for over half an hour.
Recent Super Bowls have been noted for the social media activity surrounding them. Twitter users seem to thrive on the event in particular, constantly posting short clips of text throughout it, with national activity peaking during critical moments. This Super Bowl’s Twitter statistics during the blackout incident are of particular note, demonstrating the opportunism necessary to find the greatest success on the social media platform, as well as the increasing popularity and utility of the brand.
The 34-minute power outage was a brief but unpredictable window of opportunity for marketers all over the country to jump on. During the power outage alone, over 231,500 tweets were sent out every minute, a statistic now referred to as TPM (tweets per minute). Companies instantly reacted to the situation, sending out tweets immediately to capitalize on the opportunity.
Oreo sent out a tweet that received a massive following, stating, "You can still dunk in the dark," while Tide posted, "We can’t get your blackout. But we can get your stains out." These tweets were just two of the most popular ones in the massive stream flooding the platform during the blackout. Users applauded the response, re-posting and sensationalizing the brief messages to a point where analysts considered Tide and Oreo to be the most successful advertisers of the evening.
These posts were simply knee-jerk reactions to a critical event that nearly everyone in America witnessed, but they illustrated a simple, social media world principle: Twitter rewards opportunism.
With a tight character limit and constantly-changing atmosphere, Twitter is the perfect platform for instant commentary and sharp spikes of popularity. Boring or uneventful posts get buried in a few minutes, but the most successful posts start an explosive chain reaction of reposting and references.
The most successful posts tend to immediately react to something, though this success can be either very positive or very negative. Popular positive posts tend to be punch lines or offers capitalizing on an immediate recent event, as Oreo and Tide demonstrated. Popular negative posts tend to be emotionally-charged insults or outbursts that could damage a company’s reputation or eventually cost millions of dollars in punitive damages.
Either way, the most popular posts on Twitter are those reacting immediately to something significant, meaning the most successful Twitter account managers are instinctively opportunistic. The takeaway: Jump on the moment immediately or the moment will die, along with any possible benefits. Yes, reactionary posts are risky, but they also have the highest possible payoff.
Super Bowl advertisements have always caught the attention of marketers and consumers alike - the thought of millions of dollars being spent for just 30 seconds of airtime is incentive enough to want to watch them.
This year, an informal analysis revealed a somewhat surprising ratio of social media mentions during ad breaks. The 59 national commercials aired after kickoff and before the end of the game were analyzed for social media-related content, with 50 percent mentioned Twitter or hashtags, compared to 8 percent mentioning Facebook, and none mentioning Google+. Instagram and YouTube each received a single mention. This doesn’t necessarily mean Twitter is beating out every other social media platform in popularity and utility, but it does make an interesting case for Twitter’s popularity among advertisers.
The sheer cost associated with Super Bowl advertisements means every second is examined with scrutiny to ensure it maximizes some element of reach to consumers. Mentioning Twitter for a single second could equate to hundreds of thousands of dollars, meaning marketers with the biggest budgets favor Twitter over any other social media platform, at least for a quick mention. This, too, is a type of opportunism: Taking the least amount of time to generate the maximum possible value.
Twitter is a social media platform of opportunism, both in terms of what’s posted and how it’s promoted. The most successful and scandalous posts seem to be the ones that serve as core reactions to sudden events, so even though some posts might be risky, the potential payoff is enormous. Furthermore, Twitter seems to be the best social media platform to push when time or space is limited. It’s a concise, reactionary platform that thrives on short moments and instant decisions.
And so far, it hasn't lost power.
by Dave Crader
Welcome to the second part of my Content Marketing Strategy Development blog series. I recommend reading the previous post, How To Develop a Customer Persona, before diving into this one.
In this post, I’ll show you how to create a Sales Funnel, align your personas to your Sales Funnel and identify gaps in your current content marketing strategy using a Content Opportunity Chart. This process helps you deliver the right content to the right people at the right time.
If you don’t have a Sales Funnel mapped out already, you’ll need to make one to get started. The B2B Sales Funnel is usually more structured than the B2C Sales Funnel, but in general, your funnel will most likely look something like this:
Let’s revisit the Big Taste doughnut example from How To Develop a Customer Persona. In case you missed part-1 of this series, Big Taste is our fictional flavor development company that develops recipes marketed towards large fast-food franchises, and your job was to effectively market a delicious bacon doughnut recipe. Keep in mind that we’re marketing to two different personas – the head chef in charge of new product development and the CEO. Now, let’s take a look at what the Big Taste Sales Funnel for that delicious bacon doughnut probably looks like:
Now that you have your Sales Funnel, it’s time to align your personas and content to it. This will help you figure out where there are gaps in your current content marketing strategy and where you need to improve.
Use the chart below as a guide:
| Prospects | Contacts | Leads | Finalists | Clients |
 |
• Company Overview White Paper • White Paper about Big Taste’s organic ingredients |
• Product Sample • Bacon Doughnut Brochure |
• Case Study of a previous success | |
 |
• Product Sample • Bacon Doughnut Brochure |
Just fill in the boxes where you already have content. Now ask yourself, “Where do I need to create content to push my personas to the next stage of my Sales Funnel?” To clarify, let’s look at our Big Taste example again.
The Content Opportunity Chart shows us Big Taste is lacking content made specifically for its CEO persona. It also shows us the company is lacking content in the final stage of its Sales Funnel. Both observations give us direction for our content marketing strategy.
I’ll be going over how to create engaging content for our personas in part three of this series, but as a quick tease, I’ll say Big Taste might want to consider creating some sort of ROI projection tool for its CEO persona and some sort of follow-up, cross-sell white paper for the final stage of its Sales Funnel.
If you’re struggling with this process, consider setting up Google Analytic goals and looking at the “Goal Flow” (Conversions -> Goals -> Goal Flow) section within your Google Analytics account. You may also want to look at the “Visitor Flow” section (Audience -> Visitor Flow) as well. This will give insight into how visitors are finding your website, whether or not those visitors completed your goal and what interested them before they converted.
By looking at Evolve’s Visitor Flow in Google Analytics, we can see returning visitors (visitors who came to our site, left and came back later) like to view our Why Choose Us, About Evolve and Website Design pages before contacting us.
This gives us great insight into the minds of the “Interested Prospects” within our Sales Funnel (our Sales Funnel differs slightly from Big Taste’s Sales Funnel, as will yours). From this report, I was able to gather that Evolve, like most businesses, has a good amount of content in the beginning stages of its Sales Funnel, but lacks in the final stage - similar to Big Taste. If I was putting this information into a Content Opportunity Chart, I’d put the Why Choose Us, About Evolve and Website Design pages in the “Interested Prospect” column for a mid-level Marketing Manager persona.
Shout out to Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose over at the Content Marketing Institute for some of these insights and ideas.
Next Up: Developing a Content Marketing Strategy: Choosing a Content Format – Part Three
This guest post was written by Steve Mehr. The author's opinions are entirely his own and may not reflect the views of Evolve Creative Group.
For nearly a decade, businesses have raced onto social media platforms with dollar signs in their eyes. They didn’t know how to use it, didn’t exactly know what all those followers and fans were, but they sure felt cool every time someone clicked on their link. And for many, after a few months of playing with their page, the appeal wore off. Now where are they? I regularly come across business pages that look like ghost towns. I could yell hello into their virtual space and imagine the echoes bouncing off of that empty profile.
So you tried it out, and right away you didn’t get your desired effect. Should you abandon social media? Certainly not! Social media is not a destination, it’s a journey. It’s an experience in community building and long term customer conversions, not one for one dollar per status update. Now what?
For many businesses, gaining a following on social media is difficult. It’s not only difficult, it’s damn near impossible. And to many business owners, they wonder how to quantify the value of an active social media page. To those business owners, I pose the question: what are you doing to engage followers and to interest people in using your business?
Think of your social media pages as communities. And it’s your job to build those communities and engage people. You’re the mayor of your own little town and it’s your job to start kissing the babies and shaking hands. So how exactly does a business do that? Let’s start getting you back into community building mode with these tips:
Invite people to participate. Think of your social media as an extension of the community already surrounding your business. Tell your clients that they can find you online. Invite prospective clients to log on and find new specials, to chat about products or services, and to interact. Put the social media link in your marketing materials. One of the best examples of this is a local burger joint I frequent. When you walk in, their blackboard above the register tells you how to find them online and features customers who checked in and left comments. That magic blackboard has really encouraged people to go online and join the community.
Interact! It sounds silly, but there are so many businesses that don’t take the time to write people back. Are people asking you questions on your wall? Are you answering them? Or are you putting up a post and fleeing the scene like a criminal? Take the time to talk to your community and see what develops. You may be able to solve a fan’s dilemma and gain new business.
Write clear calls to action. Congratulations you’re online. And you’ve just posted a link to a blog you wrote on your website. Now what? Tell people to go check it out! Insert a clear call to action for people who see your posts. Examples include Click here to see our new award; log on to win this new gift card; Go leave us a review here. It’s not enough to put up the post without telling people what to do with it.
Lead brand discussions. Don’t confine your posts to links to your blogs or links to your shopping cart. Pepper in items of interest to the community that are on brand. You can do this by linking to funny videos about your industry, putting up interesting pictures that communicate your brand, you name it! The sky’s the limit. You don’t need every post to be a mini advertisement of call us to do x service but you should be communicating the story of your brand through your social media.
Social media isn’t very intuitive, and if it were easy, we’d all have thousands of organic followers who write us every day and then convert to paying clients. But it’s not that easy. It takes a little hard work to get noticed. But luckily, even the busiest new business owner can take a few minutes a day to post, respond to questions, and then get back to the business of running a business.
Steve Mehr is the CEO of WebShark360, a full service attorney marketing agency. Based out of Irvine, Ca, Steve and his talented team offers attorneys critical marketing tools to gain new business now. As an attorney and an attorney marketer, Steve understands how attorneys market like no other.
