A Marketing Podcast with Matt Coco

In session 25 of A Marketing Podcast, Part 6 of How to advertise your business online, I’m talking about Twitter Ads. I walk you through your options within the platform and setting up your first campaign. Session 25: Twitter Ads – Advertising on Twitter Welcome to Session 25, and Part 6 of the How to advertise your business online mini series. Reviewing part 1 – 5 of the mini series: * Session 20 – Overview on how to advertise your business online * Session 21 – Search Engine Marketing * Session 22 – Display Advertising * Session 23 – Facebook Advertising * Session 24 – LinkedIn Advertising In today’s session, session 25, we’re focusing on Twitter advertising in particular: * What’s LinkedIn all about? * Why choose LinkedIn advertising as part of your advertising mix? * Setting up a Company within LinkedIn * Different advertising options within LinkedIn * Your first campaign * Reporting and Monitoring Why Twitter advertising might be right for your business? Virtually any business/product/service can make use of twitter as a potential advertising platform or channel. 320 million active monthly users. Twitter is the easiest way to see what’s going on in the world in real time, which is one of the platform’s major differentiators from the other networks A great look at Social Channels Active Monthly Users The user mindset within Twitter Users are consuming large amounts of content at high speeds, so understanding that we need to get as many impressions as possible our advertising may require larger budgets or more refined targeting to get the impressions we need. Different advertising options within Twitter * Tweet engagements(e.g., retweets, favorites, replies) – Reach more people and drive conversation * Website clicks or conversions – Send people to your site (to purchase, sign up, etc.) * App installs or app re-engagements – Get people to install or re-engage with your mobile app * Video views BETA – Get people to watch your videos using Twitter’s native video player. * Followers – Grow your community on Twitter * Leads on Twitter – Collect emails from people who express interest in your offer Twitters Campaign Setup FAQs Your First Campaign Setup Once you’ve selected your desired objective it’s onto configuring your campaign. Step 1: Campaign name and duration Step 2: Selecting Your Audience * Location – Select Country, City, Town, or even post code * Gender – Pretty self explanatory * Languages – again, self  explanatory * Devices, platforms, and carriers – Select specific devices and carriers to target specifically by device * Keywords/Phrases – target users by keyword matching their previous searches, recently viewed tweets, engaged tweets matching keyword terms. * Followers – target specific followers, or your followers or even “look a like” followers. * Interests – Category matching by interest * Tailored Audiences – This is Twitter’s Re-marketing section. Upload your email list to match twitter users, or implement Twitters re-marketing list building of users to your website. * TV Targeting – Target by TV market, or even by specific show. There are also options to target by Networks or genres of shows. * Behaviors – Not available everywhere,

In session 24 of A Marketing Podcast, Part 5 of How to advertise your business online, I’m talking about LinkedIn Advertising. Some of the options you have within the platform, as well as the unique targeting features that are available within the B2B social network. Session 24: Getting Started with Facebook Advertising Welcome to Session 24, and Part 5 of the How to advertise your business online mini series. Reviewing part 1 – 4 of the mini series: * Session 20 – Overview on how to advertise your business online * Session 21 – Search Engine Marketing * Session 22 – Display Advertising * Session 23 – Facebook Advertising In today’s session, session 24, we’re focusing on LinkedIn advertising in particular: * What’s LinkedIn all about? * Why choose LinkedIn advertising as part of your advertising mix? * Setting up a Company within LinkedIn * Different advertising options within LinkedIn * Your first campaign * Reporting and Monitoring What’s LinkedIn all about? Business to Business primary social channel Also, career based, human resources related business hap[pens primarily within LinkedIn Ability to try things out for cheap LinkedIn like Facebook allows you to work with reasonably small budgets to essentially perform trial and error on your campaigns. So working with less than $500 you can create and modify several campaigns to see what targeting or messaging works best before scaling up your budget. Finding your advertising sweet spot within LinkedIn Start by targeting as specifically as possible. LinkedIn provide some really granular targeting to help with this. An example would be, targeting a specific company and those related to it. Or even further target the C-Suite within that company to advertise to. So playing around with your targeting allows you to identify the sweet spot for your businesses product/service offering and the ad in particular. LinkedIn’s social element and how it aligns with advertising LinkedIn, although a business  to business social channel, there are some neat social elements that generate regular traffic within the platform. Such as connections anniversary’s or new positions. All of which generate more traffic within the platform, and more traffic to see your advertising. Advertising can be shown within the users news feed as well as above the feed in the text formats. Company Pages must be setup In order to perform advertising within LinkedIn you must setup a company page. In addition, even if you’re not advertising it’s a good idea to get that page setup and begin posting content to it. This content will provide users with the ability to find out more about your business and later these posts are actually used in your advertising. Through your advertising you will also drive traffic to your company page, therefore it’s important to make sure your page is setup and has some recent content. Options on types of advertising within LinkedIn In LinkedIn you hvae two types of ads to use: * Textual links allow you to write a line of text and link that text. * Whereas, sponsored posts make use of existent, or brand new, posts from your company page. Accounts in LinkedIn LinkedIn provide a sorting, or categorization, for your advertising much like Facebook. These are called accounts. Creating an account allows you to assign a particular business and company page to that account. As well as specific payment information for each account. It also allows you to add other people to your account the manage your advertising with/for you. Creating a LinkedIn Advertising Campaign First step is creating the name for your campaign.

In session 23 of A Marketing Podcast, Part 4 of How to advertise your business online, I’m talking about getting started with Facebook Advertising. I walk through the options available to you and the setup of a campaign. Session 23: Getting Started with Facebook Advertising Why use Facebook advertising? First off here’s some stats (thanks to Zephoria.com): * Worldwide, there are over 1.71 billion monthly active Facebook users (Facebook MAUs) which is a 15 percent increase year over year. * Age 25 to 34, at 29.7% of users, is the most common age demographic. * Facebook users are 76% female * Every 60 seconds on Facebook: 510 comments are posted, 293,000 statuses are updated, and 136,000 photos are uploaded * At 1.49 billion, Facebook has more monthly active users than WhatsApp (500 million), Twitter (284 million) and Instagram (200 million)—combined. As you can see the pure volume and usage of Facebook make it a viable place to spend your advertising dollars. However, the real advantage, in my opinion, is the amazing level of targeting that can be achieved through Facebooks advertising platform. Everything from location based targeting, to those who like a certain page and those who match the profiles of those who like a certain page. Meaning you can actually target people who like a competitor, and those who match the profiles of those who like your competitor. Another reason to give Facebook a try for is that it’s fairly inexpensive to run some trail campaigns to see what sort of results you can expect. There are many more reasons to give Facebook a try, but the biggest one is the different options they provide for your advertising. From building your Facebook community, to driving traffic to your promotions on your website, to purchases right in the app. Personal Accounts & Business Manager In order to perform advertising within Facebook you need to make use of a personal account, or link an account to a business through Facebooks Business Manager. Business Manager allows you to work with others in Facebook and manage many other elements of your business in one place without having to give access to your personal account like you had to back in the day. Your options and strategies behind each Awareness * Boost your Facebook Posts * Promote your page * Reach people near your business * Increase brand awareness Consideration * Send people to your website * Get installs of your app * Raise attendance at an event * Get Video Views * Collect leads for your business Conversion * Increase conversions on your website * increase engagement in your app * Get people to claim your offer * Promote a product catalog Creating your first campaign It’s super easy so lets walk through it. Once logged in navigate to the “Create Ad” option in your Facebook menu items (top right little down arrow). You’ll be presented with the options I mentioned a minute ago, and all you have to do is select the one that aligns best with your campaign/desired outcome. Facebook will pre-populate some of the settings you need to configure to achieve that options objectives. Simple work through those options and enter the configurations your ‘re after. They are: * Audience * Placements – where your ad shows within the Facebook site and mobile apps. * Budget & Schedule * The Ad or Post to use in your advertising It’s that simple. Your first campaign is good to go. Of course you’ll need to add your credit card before ads will be approved. Facebooks 20% rule Facebook reviews and approves your ads before they start showing in other peopl...

In session 22 of A Marketing Podcast, Part 3 of How to advertise your business online, we’re going to focus on Display advertising 101. From the things to consider before you setup your display advertising campaigns, to the actual setup of a campaign, and some of the things to consider along the way. Session 22: Display Advertising 101 Recap the first two parts of How to Advertise your business online – Setup considerations and Search Engine Marketing. Session 20: Things to consider before advertising: * Develop strong targeting profiles (your audiences) * Messaging and content creation for your campaigns * The technical setup of your website & Reporting tools * The time required to manage your campaigns and the process I like to use Listen to Session 20 Session 21: Search Engine Marketing * setting up a google adwords account * developing AdGroups & keyword research * Understanding and managing bid’s and campaigns * reporting and monitoring * calculating outcomes/ ROI Listen to Session 21 In today’s session: * what is display advertising? * Why use display advertising? * Googles display network * Web Banners – creating, dimensions, animations * Setting up a campaign and how to target through Google’s Display Network * Touch on Video advertising through YouTube What is display advertising? Display advertising is the act of using web banners, images, videos, and any other type of visual content as an advertisement online. Display network as a term is synonymous with Google, as it’s channel for advertising on publisher’s website that are part of the Google network. SEM User Intent vs Display Advertising Intent Search engine users are searching for a solution. Display advertising users are search for solutions to, but are not looking for it in our ads. Instead they are looking for content within the website they are visiting. Therefore, we have to work to draw their attention to our ads. Why use display advertising? Display advertising provides visual elements to entice potential customers into your promotions. Be it a discount offer, a product release, or even awareness campaigns, display advertising allows us to connect with potential customers on a visual level to spark emotional responses. Compared to Search engine marketing, where we can only use textual ads, display network provides a much richer experience. So it’s important to develop good quality visuals that are related on the websites and networks that they are displayed on. Googles Display network As with Search engine marketing, as a small business, google provides the best and easiest way to setup your first campaign. The google network provides access to the largest display network of publishers online, through a tool that makes it fairly easy to submit your ads for display. Google AdWords. Other options for display advertising Affiliate marketing through services such as Commission Junction which make use of web banners and placements on publisher websites. Private or privately managed services – either website owners who provide advertising options through their site, or company such as http://www.adpulsemedia.com/ Also, big company networks , made up of many publishers such as AOL and Yellow pages. Web Banners – creating, dimensions, animations Let’s talk about creating web banners. There is essentially two types of web banners that you can use in display advertising. Static and animated.

In session 21 of A Marketing Podcast we’re on to Part 2 of How to advertise your business online. We’re going to focus on Search Engine Marketing (SEM) in today’s session. From setup to configuration and management. I had the pleasure of having a friend of mine, Troy Meier, on the show to help explain everything about SEM. Enjoy! Session 20: How to advertise your business online This session is the first of a 6 part series on how to advertise your business online. I’m going to walk you through a few things to make sure you’re getting the most out of your advertising spend. Search Engines to Use For entry level search engine marketers, and those working with tight budgets, it simply makes no sense to spend time and money on advertising on any other search engine the Google. As such in today’s session we’re going to focus on setting up Search Engine Marketing (SEM) through Google AdWords platform. Setting up an Adwords Account * Head on over to google.com/adwords * Click the “Get started button and follow the prompts. If you hvae a google account already using that account will make the process shorter and link your new AdWords account to you google account. Creating your campaign Find the + Campaign button and you will be forwarded to the setup screen. Which asks some basic configuration questions, and forwards you into the keyword research tool. Keyword Research Google provide a handy keyword research tool that draws information from your website and you campaign targeting to develop a set of AdGroups that contain keywords. To get started the auto selected keywords will be just fine. However, as you perform more search engine marketing, you’ll want to spend time developing your keyword research to optimize your spend and targeting. You may want to choose only a couple AdGroups suggested by google to being with as well. Verse creating all the suggested AdGroups. AdGroup setup & theories on dividing keywords into AdGroups As mentioned Google does a good job of creating AdGroups for you from the keywords found. The next step in setting up your AdGroups is writing the copy, or ad, for each group. Ads a restricted to 3 fields, each of which has a specific character count(size). * Title (25 Characters) * Description 1 (35 Characters) * Description 2 (35 Characters) * Display URL (can be different than the actual URL the user will arrive at. But must be of the same base domain) Things to consider in writing your ads Start with a strong headline, try to use a search term in your AdGroups keywords in the heading. And your heading must fit within 25 Characters. Then you hvae two lines of 35 characters each. Remember these lines may be shown as one in certain ads, so keep that in mind. You may want to add some punctuation. Bidding In the initial setup Google asks for a bid. This bid is applied to all your AdGroups and Keywords. However you can adjust your bids on all three levels, those being: * Campaign * AdGroup * Keyword More often than not you will be adjusting your bids upwards to catch placement on more competitive keywords. Due to Google reverse dutch auction, you won’t spend more than the bidder in second place. Our example was if you’re bidding $5 on a term and the second place bidder is bidding $1.25, you will win the bid and be charged $1.26. More on Google Auction Billing and how Google charges Google essentially forward a credit for your advertising. Of which starts at $150. This means that once you hit the $150 threshold you will receive an invoice and the payment will be charged ...

In session 20 of A Marketing Podcast we’re starting a 6 part series about How to advertise your business online. In this session I’ll provide an overview of advertising online and what you need to consider and setup before you spend a cent. As well as how to maximize your advertising budgets and generate quality traffic to your website. Session 20: How to advertise your business online This session is the first of a 6 part series on how to advertise your business online. I’m going to walk you through a few things to make sure you’re getting the most out of your advertising spend. They are: * What is Advertising online? * Develop strong targeting profiles (your audiences) * Messaging and content creation for your campaigns * The technical setup of your website & Reporting tools * The time required to manage your campaigns and the process I like to use Then, for the remainder of the 6 part series, we’ll get into the ins and outs of particular advertising channels, and those are: * Search Engine Marketing or SEM * Display Network Advertising * Facebook Advertising * Twitter Advertising * LinkedIn Advertising What is Advertising online? Spending money to get your advertising in front of a new audience online. Much like traditional advertising it requires that you spend money to place your ads in a certain medium or space. In this case it’s online. Developing strong targeting profiles Targeting determines who sees your advertising. Maybe the main thing to learn about how to advertise your business online, is developing strong targeting will optimize the delivery of your ads to the right audience. Understand that in online advertising, same with traditional advertising, you will inevitably advertise to people that are not in your target audience. This isn’t a failed outcome as much as it’s part of advertising. That being said targeting as finely as possible will limit the wasted impressions. You should have established a solid understanding of your business’ audiences by now, and this will help with your targeting. I like to develop my targeting profiles as the first step of any campaign as it helps you develop the right content for each target – yes you should have content for each target group or profile. Check out Session 4: Understanding and developing your target audiences,  if you haven’t developed your businesses target audiences yet. Messaging and content creation for your campaigns Now that we know who our target audiences are it’s time to create content for them. If you’re coming at your advertising campaigns with a pre-developed offer, promotion, or product you will have already established your content. But it needs to be crosschecked against your target audiences. It’s a little chicken egg to be honest, but ones thing’s for sure – your content needs to resonate with your audience. Part of content resonating with your new traffic is that the messaging in the advertisement, be it copy or visuals, needs to relate to the page they land on, on your website. For example, if you’re going to have a promotion for a new product, make sure the user lands on a page that references the promotion and provides a call to action. It’s for this reason that digital inbound marketing works great with advertising. You can find out more by listening to Session 14: All about digital inbound marketing . Technical Setup of your website and reporting tools Your website is the main place to drive traffic from your online advertising.

In session 19 of A Marketing Podcast I chat with Jonathan Lacoste of Jebbit.com. In the interview we discuss micro-moments, interactive content, developing customer insights, marketing automation, as well as how Jebbit puts this all together in one place for you to produce a cohesive, finely tuned marketing machine. Jonathan provides a ton of value to help you develop better content and think about your customers and what they want, and even expect, from you as a marketer. Session 19: Show Notes Jonathan Lacoste – Introduction Jonathan Lacoste is an award-winning entrepreneur and writer. He’s the Co-Founder and President of Jebbit, a digital marketing platform that he and Thomas Coburn founded as undergraduates in 2011. Since launching the company, Jonathan has been named to Forbes’ “30 Under 30,”, he was able to raise venture capital at age 19 and get Jebbit off the ground. Jonathan is clearly passionate about improving marketers ability to communicate to their audience through the development of insights and dynamic content. The Jebbit Story Jonathan tell’s us how Jebbit came to be and that it was the result of a business plan competition with Thomas Coburn, his co-founder. Initially, it was to become a business to help marketers deliver branded content but has changed over the last 5 years to become a digital marketing platform. Digital Marketing Platform At a high level, what the folks at Jebbit are seeing is that marketers a strapped for time due to a number of reasons, and that any tool needs to integrate with several marketing systems/platforms to be a viable product in the industry. Micro-Content and Engaging customers The average time you get to attract and convert a consumer to look into your product or service is only 8 seconds, and is typically on a mobile device whilst multi-taking or on their way to somewhere else. This is the idea behind understanding and developing micro-content that can be delivered within those 8 seconds. Mobile First The funny things is that we’re now hearing not just mobile first, but thinking about “Mobile Only”. So instead f just developing and designing for mobile, create and deliver solely on mobile, understanding that over the next 10 years the use of mobile will only increase. As will consumers desire to transact through mobile. Jonathan, believes that we’re only just getting to the year of mobile, as the consumer starts to use their mobile devices more than their desktop devices on a larger average statistic. It’s going to be important for marketers to understand where their consumers interact on mobile and developing a monetization strategy for purely mobile interactions. Interactive Content Jebbits bread and butter is helping marketers create and deliver interactive content. Conceptually, Jebbt’s view point is that marketers are creating great content, but it’s difficult to slow down consumers and do two things: * Educate them on the value props or benefits of what your selling * Having a conversation so that you can go away with insights into that consumers wants and desires The best interaction is not asking for emails right away, but having a conversation and understanding the consumer to avoid pushing marketing on to consumers as we’ve done in the past. The biggest challenge that marketers are having in this day and age is making use of data. Figuring out how to use and format in a way to make more successful, and personal, marketing campaigns. Marketing Automation in Content Marketing Gathering insights from interactive content is one thing, but find a way to use that information to deliver dynamic content is the gold at the end of the rainbow. Jonathan see’s us as being in the second or even third iteration of market...

In session 18 of A Marketing Podcast I discuss how to get started in Social Media Listening. I identify several tools you can use to perform your listening as well as an approach as to how you can listen to develop actionable insights through what people are saying in social media. Session 18: Show Notes What is social media listening? Monitoring social media channels to identify mentions about brand, topics, specific keywords, and social accounts. Social Media Listening Tools Social Channels Make use of social channels directly. Log in and use the search functionality of those channels. Hootsuite Make use of social channels directly Nuvi Makes use of automated tasks and analysis of bulk data. Nuvi crawls the internet for more than just public facing social media, it includes blogs, comments, social communities like Reddit, and general web content. Sysmos The power house in the social listening world. Makes use of “big data” by using powerful crawlers of more than just social media channels, just like Nuvi. How to use social listening There’s two ways to approach social media listening. * Work to answer a specific question – devise a specific thing you’re trying to prove or disprove * Observe in a way that you can derive actionable insights How to observe in a way that identifies the unknown Divide how you listen into 3 main groups: * Industry * Competition * Brand (your company) Industry Listen for keywords and phrases that reflect common terms in your industry. For example: If you own a mountain bike store you’ll want to listen for terms related to mountain biking. Such as: mountain biking, down hill biking, mountain bike competitors, buying a mountain bike, etc. In doing so you will gather sentiment on the particular topics within your industry. Industry is great for developing products or services to fulfill certain shortfalls in the industry, identified by regular negative sentiment. Competition Listen to what people are saying about your competitors. Listening to your competition can achieve two things: * Understanding what people think about your competition * How they use social media Listening to what people are saying about your competition can help you to deliver a better service or product based on the feedback people have about your competitors. Brand (Yourself) Finally, listen for what people are saying about your business. When listening to your own brand, it makes sense to reply and interact with those who mention your brand. This can take on a customer service style approach depending on the mentions. Or simply saying thanks for mention how great your product or service is. Links & Resources * Hootsuite * Nuvi * Sysomos.com * Small Business Digital Marketing Setup Checklist * Join the AMP Community Thanks for listening in! If you have any questions about this session, leave them in the comments section below. If you enjoyed the show, let your friends know by using the social sharing buttons below. Your help sharing the podcast will allow me to help more business owners and marketers just like you be more strategic! Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast through iTunes,

In session 17 of A Marketing Podcast I discuss how to get started in Search Engine Optimization. This is your SEO 101 course as I walk you through the three basic progressions to optimizing your website in relation to your search engine rankings. Session 17: Show Notes Search Engine Optimization is not part of your marketing strategy SEO is the act of providing search engines the information they need to rank your website as high as possible for the keywords that you deem to be important to you. First off, SEO is as much an art as it is a science. Many will claim they understand the science of search engines and how to optimize and rank your website at the top of Google, but it’s a fact, that the number of factors that determine your website’s ranking for a specific term are not 100% known. Therefore, it’s impossible for someone to know all the ways in which to achieve perfect rankings. That’s where art comes into play. The art is marketing, making assumptions and understanding your audience to deliver content that they will read and share and get value out of. If you want to improve your rankings and stay there, develop great content, ensure your website is setup correctly, and generate links from credible websites back to yours. SEO is essentially that easy. Ensure your website is setup correctly, develop great content, and generate links from credible websites back to yours But why is SEO not part of your marketing strategy? That’s because SEO is the act of optimizing content and your sites appearance to search engines. It’s not a strategic approach to marketing, or even a marketing tactic. SEO is applied to the various tactics that you use to market. For example, you should have a content marketing strategy, or even campaigns, and you should apply SEO to the content you develop in that campaign. Much like you should have a Social Media strategy that includes driving traffic to your website. Which will have an effect on your SEO rankings if other begin to share your content or visits your website. The exception to this rule is potentially having a back linking campaign or strategy. But even then, the way in which you build back links should be through partnerships and content development. White Hats and Black Hats In SEO the terms white hat and black hat are used to refer to the idea of there being some SEO tactics that are professional and sound, whilst others are little more fishy and potentially “scammy”. I’m not going to push you in either direction, but I am going to explain the difference in relation to some tactics. And depending on your way of operating you can apply the approach you wish. White Hat tactics • Developing great content • Working with others in your industry to share that content and link back to your website (guest blogging) • Providing genuine data in your META output • The long game of SEO, and built on honesty and a genuine approach to providing value through content. Black Hat tactics • Spamming forums and directories for back links • Creating your own network of websites to deliver back links with ease • Delivering metadata that is not related to your content and typically jammed with keyword heavy content • Can get as bad as hacking other websites to paste links and place content referring to your website • Hidden text or links • And more but you get the point Google being the leader in search is always working to prevent the black hat tactics from actually working, but as you can see, from the tactics I just mentioned, some of these still work today. For what it’s worth the tactics I use on A Marketing Podcast are white hat tactics, not only because I want to appear genuine and stay out of trouble with Google,

In session 16 of A Marketing Podcast I discuss starting social media for small business. How to get started, some of the basic strategy behind your social media, hint it’s about community. I also talk abut what you need to have in place before you get started with a social media strategy and what your daily social media routine should include. Session 16: Show Notes Initial Strategy Understand your audience – and know where they are. By now you should be on top of this one, but as it pertains to social media understand which social media channels your audiences uses, as well as how they use those channels. Focus on a single social media channel to being with – it’s ok to setup the main ones, but focus your efforts on one channel initially. Your main focus should be to build a community – not gain followers. You might be thinking how can you have one without the other, well you can’t, but what I’m meaning here is work to develop a community by being engaged and posting great content, and helping your followers solve problem. As opposed to spamming click bait content and paying for followers. Why? In the long run you’ll have a community that not only buys your product/service, but helps you develop your business in a way that delivers maximum value to your customers. Because your community will provide you with honest feedback. Where as a community full of purchased followers may not engage with you at all. Resist the buy your followers urge. Quality over quantity. Every. Single. Time. Is your small business ready for social media? This is an important question because wanting to do social media and being ready to do social media are two different things. You need to have the following under control to be ready: * Time and budget * Understanding of your target audiences (where they are and how they use social media) * A solid brand voice * The ability to implement a process to manage your social media * Commitment – it’s not going to work without it. Daily Routine Build social media engagement into your daily routine. Give yourself a block of time to look through your specific channels that you manage, reply to comments keep your community engaged. Also, have a look at your competitors. See how they are using social media dn what they are doing that you can riff off, or even do better! Post new content – post at least one new piece of content a day. Is this a do or die rule – no – but it will keep your feeds fresh and active. And that just may be the biggest element of being successful on social media – fresh and active! A handy tool I like to use to manage my social media – and do so for AMP is Hootsuite. It’s totally free to get started and manage up to 4 social media channels. It literally is your one stop shot for managing your social media – Get started with a FREE for life Hootsuite account now! Setting up social channels Before you can start posting content and building communities you need to setup your social channels. I’d suggest setting up accounts in the big ones: * Facebook Page * LinkedIn Page * Twitter Account * Google+ Business Page Then determine if you need to create other accounts such as: * Instagram * Snapchat * Reddit * Etc etc etc You should only use these if they align directly with your business. Refer to the small business digital marketing setup checklist for the elements you need to be able to setup ...

In session 15 of A Marketing Podcast I discuss what customer journey mapping and Omni channel marketing is all about. First I dig into two methods to understanding the shopper journey, and then how to develop the journey for your specific audience. Thew I quickly explain what Omni Channel Marketing is and how I believe it differs from multi channel marketing. As well I provide two examples of great Omni channel marketing executions by a couple of well known companies. Session 15: Show Notes Customer journey mapping Customer journey mapping works to identify the way in which your potential customers (as well as your current customers) move towards making a purchase from you. The customer journey can be envisioned in two main ways: * Marketing funnel * Consumer decision journey Both theories work to help you understand your potential customers journey towards making a purchase, however one is linear in nature and one is cyclical in nature. Let me explain the difference and which theory you should focus on, depending on your marketing mix. Marketing Funnels Marketing funnels are made up of steps that indicate a shopper’s journey to making a purchase. The process is linear in fashion and assumes the shoppers progress through the funnel step by step. A typical Marketing funnel would include the following steps in this particular order: * Awareness * Interest * Consideration * Intent * Evaluation * Purchase * Loyalty However, as our marketing becomes more complex and the shopper is more in charge of their purchase decisions, the marketing funnels has become less accurate in predicting the process towards a purchase. It’s still valuable in identifying the steps that may be taken by shoppers, but it’s not much more common for shoppers to move in different ways through the funnel. Sometimes skipping steps altogether, or even backtracking to perform steps that have already been performed. Such as re-considering the alternative products that could be purchased (which is typically one of the first steps in a customer journey) Some additional reading on the changes in shopper journeys and how marketers can no longer reply on the marketing funnel. The consumer decision journey Involves more of a cyclical approach to shopper progression towards purchases. The consumer decision journey involves 5 phases. Those are: * Initial consideration * Active evaluation * Moment of Purchase * Post Purchase Experience * Loyalty Loop Initial Consideration Involves the shopper learning about your product or service and performing a preliminary review. The type of marketing that helps at this phase is typically advertising or marketing tactics that target a new customer base (those who’ve never heard or you business). Active Evaluation The shopper has decided that your product/service is a possible solution and begins performing in depth research and information gathering. Content marketing is great for this phase of the journey as it provides the information to make evaluation of your business and product/service as easy as possible. Those who communicate the best appear the most viable. Quality aside. Moment of Purchase Pretty self explanatory – our shopper has made the leap – yay our marketing worked! Post Purchase Experience This is, what I believe, to be the easiest and most important part of the journey. Of course getting a sale is a great thing to achieve, but now you have a potential advocate for your business who can tell your story with more power and conviction than you ever can.

In session 14 of A Marketing Podcast I discuss what digital inbound marketing is from a comprehensive, full life-cycle, point of view. I dig into each section of an inbound marketing campaign, from advertising to ROI calculations. Session 14: Show Notes What is digital inbound marketing? The use of content/value proposition to provoke a user’s interest and conversions through a conversion mechanism. Can you do inbound marketing offline? You can do it, however the idea behind inbound and allowing users to self serve on your content is much easy in the digital world. For example, things like catalogs for potential customers to take home and do their own research would be a form on inbound marketing. Typically this kind of offline tactic promotes an online action anyway. The elements of a digital inbound marketing campaign * Driving traffic to your campaign – advertising * Your landing page – designed specifically for an inbound campaign * A conversion mechanism – typically a form * A value proposition – used to provoke conversion * A thank you page – more important than you might think * An email followup / sequence – capitalize on your conversion * Tracking and reporting your campaign’s progress Developing your campaign Devise a very specific message or subject matter. I recommend starting with just one message and one landing page. Once you get the first inbound campaign under control, you can develop additional messages and landing page. Driving traffic to your campaign Essentially two ways to drive traffic. Advertising * All sorts of online advertising can be used to generate traffic to your landing page * Type of advertising depends on your marketing strategy * Consider display advertising, and when you do, ensure that your creative on banners matches the messaging and offers that are on your landing page Free and Organic * Using methods that require no financial requirements * Email list – send a link to your list * Social media – post in your streams * Webinars/podcasts * Etc Your landing page This is where all the magic happens! The landing page is the hub of your inbound marketing campaigns. Keep it simple, so simple you should do the following: * Remove your website’s main navigation from the page * Remove any elements that are not  related to the core messaging of the page * Remove any links that are not conversion links (trackable) * A footer should have nothing but your copyright and company name A Conversion Mechanism The idea of an inbound campaign is to get conversions, or leads. The best way to do this is through a web form that provides as fewer fields as possible. The best combination is simply: * First name * Email address You could just do email, but I like to personalize my emails and having a first name allows me to do just that. Depending on your campaign’s objectives and your business, you may add additional fields that are important to your customer profile information, and that your customer won’t see as a huge barrier to giving you their email. Such as: * Company name * Title * Maybe it’s truck type (if you’re a truck accessory business running a campaign) A Valuable Proposition You’re only going to get conversions through your inbound campaign is what you’re offering is worth giving your email for. It doesn’t have to be a downloadable document, although they work well, it could simply be an offer that’s only available to those who signup through your landing page. At a marketing podcast I have a several value propositions to ...

In session 13 of A Marketing Podcast I discuss what content marketing is and how you can get started. I also review 8 different types of content marketing and what they are used to achieve. I go into depth on the 8 different types of content marketing that I decided to focus on. Including some insight into webinars and podcasts, and reasoning behind inbound campaigns. Session 13: Show Notes What is content marketing? A very broad term used to explain marketing strategy and tactics that involve the curation of content and delivery of that content. The exchange of content from a business to another business or consumer is to achieve one of the following: * Increased brand awareness * Obtain a lead * Build customer satisfaction/retention The difference between promotion/advertising and content marketing * content marketing provides value that is useful or actionable * promotion/advertising makes use of content but it’s typically a call to action and doesn’t provide any standalone value Types of content that can shape your content marketing There are four types of content that can be created and used as part of any content marketing campaign , they are: * Textual (blog posts, articles, even PR) * Visual (images, such as info-graphics, product shots, and so on) * Audio (this podcast is an example of audio) * Video (YouTube, online courses, how to guides, etc – usually combined with audio) Types of content marketing Traditional content marketing example: Shiny catalogs at car dealerships – These work to develop your desire for the car by showing beautiful imagery and maybe even stats and comparisons to get you back into the dealership Digital content marketing examples: * Blog posts & guest posts * Lead Magnets * Case studies & whitepapers * Email marketing (newsletters, drip campaign content) check out session 12 for more on this * Ebooks * Podcasts * Webinars * Inbound marketing campaigns Blog Posts & Guest posting * Subject matter expertise is the main reason for writing * Used to develop SEO value of your website * Guest posts, work to spread your subject matter expertise, and also to develop backlinks to your website (which isn’t as valuable as they used to be for SEO value but still have value) Lead Magnets / Content Upgrades * On blog posts and articles, also on regular pages * Example is the marketing strategy template I’ve developed * Used to get email addresses in exchange for a valuable piece of content you’ve developed Email Marketing There’s so much content required by email marketing campaigns Check out session #12 – What is email marketing – I outlined 6 email marketing strategies that require a lot of content be developed for Ebooks * Ebooks are great not only for obtaining emails (essentially as lead magnets) but also as stand alone products of their own * Many people have been successful writing ebooks and selling them * Could be a gateway product to a higher level, more expensive product you sell * Such as an ebook about building a deck from the ground up, and if you’re a deck building company that may drive more sales as people understand the complexity and time it would take to build their own deck Podcasts * A great way to deliver knowledge, entertainment, even sales to an audience that is interested in hearing from you * It’s no secret that my podcast is based on the topic that I will build products around

In session 12 of A Marketing Podcast I talk all about email marketing strategy. I go over the objectives that any email marketing strategy should work to achieve, and review 6 email marketing strategies that you can implement for your small business. I talk about the ins and outs of each strategy and some things to keep in mind when developing those strategies. Session 12: Show Notes The objectives of an email marketing strategy A comprehensive email marketing strategy works to achieve all of the following: * Email list building * Subscriber conversion * Customer development Building your email list * Email marketing is nothing without email addresses * so building your list is your first priority * The only way to build your list is to provide potential subscribers with a level of value that they feel is worth sharing their email with you. * That level depends on many factors. I’ll talk about some strategies for list building later in the article. I’m not going to get into specific tactics to build your list – we’ll save that for another session. Subscribers into paying customers * Once you have subscribers you want to build trust and convert them into paying customers * Again the trick is to provide value that is worth paying for * This is a process – not a single email * Depending on business product/service the time will vary (your sales cycle) * The conversion is achieved by delivering a solution to a problem and having the required amount of trust and value in your product or service to make the purchase a non-issue Developing your customers * Once you have paying customers you should use email to support them * Not only that, you want to keep them engaged for the potential of another purchase * Treating your customers right will also entice sharing and social proof which in turn equates to sales Drip email marketing explained Before we get into the different types of email marketing strategies that are available, let’s discuss drip email marketing. Drip email marketing is the act of sending multiple emails, usually in an automated fashion, to develop your subscriber into performing a desired action. The main reason for performing a drip campaign is to build trust and this is done by providing value before attempting to sell a product/service. Developing trust with your subscribers The benefit to executing a drip email marketing strategy is to develop your subscribers’ trust in you and your product. Here’s a quick rundown on a theory I use to developing that trust. * Email 1 – Welcome and thanks * Email 2 – Some value (educational in nature) * Email 3 – More value (more education) * Email 4 – More value + soft sell on product * Email 5 – More value (more education) * Email 6 – Hard Sell (it’s time to buy) * Email 7 – Why not (question as to why they didn’t buy – politely of course) Let’s look at several email marketing strategy types to sum everything up. Strategies to discuss * Community building/generic list * contests/giveaways * Email based challenges * Email courses * Lead magnets * Emails’ involvement in your inbound campaigns Community building email marketing strategy * Community building, or a general list, is the idea of building up your email list to distribute general update style emails * An example is your monthly newsletter * This is the type that most small businesses begin with (and maybe end with) * This is the “sign up to receive our newsletter” call to action * It can be effective but has become slightly less effective due to the development of the following strategies

In session 11 of A Marketing Podcast I discuss the role that your website plays in your marketing, as well as walking you through the set-up of your business’s online presence. I focus on setting up your visual brand elements, your website, social media, email marketing, and monitoring and reporting. Session 11: Show Notes Your website’s role in marketing Your website is your marketing hub, and it should be able to handle online and offline traffic. Even tactics that direct someone to your store, or to make a phone call, will likely result in a website visit before they take these actions. Make sure you provide this basic information on your website: * About your company * Your products (if many make sure easy to find) * Your services (again easy to find) * Contact information Any information in a addition to the above is extra. So make sure it has a purpose and provides value to your visitors. Content like blog posts, would be in this category. Blog posts are important for SEO purposes, but it should still provide value to organic visits. Website role by tactic Inbound Marketing Your website provides the landing pages for your inbound marketing campaigns.  These pages are designed specifically to support a campaign, or provide value to generate leads/conversions. Landing pages are typically orphaned pages (not in your navigation), and because of this the SEO value of the page is decreased. Social Media The role of social media is essentially to build a community and drive them to your website. If you’re not working to get your social audience to your website, you’re essentially digital sharecropping. Which means to operate on someone else’s real estate. By doing this you are at the mercy of the social channel’s platform; whereas your website is yours to do as you please. Therefore, I recommend to my clients that they direct their social traffic to their website to perform specific actions. Content Marketing Your website is where the content goes. you may distribute content through your social channels, or other people’s websites, but that content should predominantly live on your website. Mainly for SEO purposes. Your website is everything in regards to what search engines think of your business. Small business online presence setup checklist You want to make sure your online presence is setup and ready to make the most of your marketing efforts. I’ve created a checklist for you to walk through step by step to setup your online presence. Visual Brand Elements The visual side of your brand should be established first so that we have the elements we need for many of the items in the online presence checklist. Those items are: * Company logo * Colour palette – primary, secondary, and tertiary colors * Font stack – a heading font and a paragraph font * Brand image(s) – a single high resolution image will work just fine Website We discussed how important your website is, so we want to make sure it’s setup professionally and ready for our marketing as part of your online presence. * Domain Name * Web Hosting * Your website * Basic SEO setup Google Setup Google is all powerful and their services are now different. So setting up these google services is a must for many reasons. * Create a Google Account * Claim your Google business * Setup Google Analytics * Setup Google Search Console Social Media All businesses should have a social online presence. In the setup I focus on setting up the big 4 at a minimum. * Facebook Company Page * Twitter Account * LinkedIn company page * Google+ Page Email Marketing