Canadian Small Business Women

Connection, Synergy, Community

What to do if the Media Aren’t Interested In Your Story

CHuntly

You have developed your campaign, put the work in to build your launch story (and your perfect pitch!), and you have actively been pitching and following up with the media with your beautifully written media release. Unfortunately, you are sitting and waiting in silence. You can’t seem to get any media interested in the story you have to offer.

There are a few reasons why the media might not be interested in what you have to say:

  1. You targeted the wrong media. Do your research to make sure they cover stories like yours.
  2. There is no relevant connection to an overarching newsworthy storyline (ie. Current events, pop culture, etc.)
  3. You didn’t give the media enough time before your launch or event. They need to have time to put together the story before it’s past.
  4. Bigger news came up. Do your research to make sure there isn’t a major event happening. However, it’s impossible to predict when the latest scandal or huge news story will break!
  5. Your pitch was too long.
  6. Your subject line wasn’t attention-grabbing.

Maybe you have done everything right. From a media perspective, sometimes they get hundreds of pitches every day, so despite how hard you try, your email or Twitter pitch may just get lost in the shuffle.

Here are three ways you can get creative with your outreach strategy to build buzz if you need can’t seem to get through to the media:

  1. Build a strong content strategy. If you have built a great brand story for yourself or your business, you should also be putting out great content on all of your marketing channels – your website, social media, blog, e-newsletter, etc. You have to make sure you are putting out great content on a regular basis. That means setting up a schedule for posting and keeping up with it so your audience expects it from you and they can engage with you. Sometimes a strong content strategy will actually put you on the radar with media who often look for story ideas online.
  2. Become a guest contributor. Try connecting with publications, industry-related blogs, and blogs of associations you are part of. They are often looking for great content, and this is a fantastic way for you to get your name out there and showcase your expertise.
  3. Be active on social media to grow your community and brand awareness. Social media is all about relationship building and empowering others to talk about your brand. Keep it social and go on at least once per day.

The key is that you shouldn’t give up on generating buzz about your brand just because you can’t get media coverage. Media coverage is a great goal, but there are so many other ways for you to get your brand out there that shouldn’t be ignored.

Candace Huntly is the Founder and Principal at SongBird Marketing Communications, an agency working to take organizational and individual brands to the next level. With a passion for all things related to creativity and strategy, she specializes in business intelligence, marketing & branding, content strategy & development, media & influencer relations, and social media. Basically, if you need to put your brand, product, or cause in the public eye, she will find a way to do it, while making it unique to you.

Connect with Candace

Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn/email/Website

How to Build a PR Campaign

CHuntly

Now you know all about PR and what it can do for your business, it’s time to put together a fabulous campaign so you can start seeing great results. But where do you start?

Here are nine steps to building a great PR campaign:

  1. Set goals: What do you want to achieve?

What does success look like to you? Once you decide what the end game is, then you can decide how to get there. There is no point in putting together a strategy if you don’t know what you want to accomplish. In fact, you will find that your strategy will lack direction, which means you could end up doing things that aren’t right for your brand.

  1. Decide on your budget

This always seems to be the toughest thing for any business to do, especially small businesses or start-ups. There are a couple of things you should do before setting your budget. First, conduct a bit of research to determine industry best practices. If you plan to hire a third party to help you put your strategy together and execute, that also has to factor in. The two most important things to realize are that you won’t get anything for free and you need to be honest with yourself. Even if it’s time spent knocking on doors and you want to do it yourself, that is time spent away from your regular business operation – time is money. When you factor in a third party (like an agency), they usually base their fees on an hourly estimate. The cheapest is not always the best option, but neither is the most expensive. Find an agency that will work with your budget. You have to make sure that you are honest with how much you can spend and work within those parameters. If you are working with an agency, it’s frustrating for both parties if you say there is no budget and then you complain when you see the proposed quote that it is too high.

  1. Decide on your timeframe

Depending on what your campaign’s objectives are you can determine when you would like to start/finish your campaign. Make sure you are giving yourself enough time to get all the prep work done at the beginning!

  1. Identify your target audience

Is this campaign meant to target a niche audience? Perhaps there is an audience that you think your brand would be perfect for, but you haven’t really had the opportunity to tap into it yet. Decide who you want to reach and then make sure you learn everything you can about them – where do they go online? Who influences their decision-making? How do they like to learn about new brands? Etc.

  1. What is your story?

Determine what story you are telling. That means finding the unique sweet spot that will make your brand stand out from the rest of your competitors. You need to be able to identify why this is important for your target audience.

  1. What channels do you want to utilize?

With so many options available to you, you need to reign yourself in a bit. Don’t spread your budget and time too thin by trying to target too many channels at once. Once you have identified your target audience, then it should become clear as to what channels you can and should use. Keep in mind that your channels may be determined partially by your budget!

  1. Research

At this point in your planning, you need to research different aspects of your strategic choices. If you are having an event, what other events are on the same day in your city/industry that would conflict? Have any of your competitors done similar things? Did it work for them? How can you make your idea unique? What are the costs associated with what you would like to do? Educate yourself on what you need to know before putting your strategy into action.

  1. Create a critical path

A critical path is just a fancy name for a timeline. Work backwards from your end goal and note major milestones you would like to hit in your campaign. Then flesh it out by putting in tasks and who is responsible to get each task done. The best way to track this is to set up a chart. I like to work in weekly increments. I identify the date, the task, and who is responsible in the first three columns. Always add one last column for “status” so you can get the satisfaction of writing “complete” when you have finished a task – it just feels good.

  1. Hit the ground running

Once you feel comfortable with your critical path, you are good to go. It’s time to set your strategy in motion. Don’t be afraid to track results along to way to see if you need to tweak your approach as you go!

Candace Huntly is the Founder and Principal at SongBird Marketing Communications, an agency working to take organizational and individual brands to the next level. With a passion for all things related to creativity and strategy, she specializes in business intelligence, marketing & branding, content strategy & development, media & influencer relations, and social media. Basically, if you need to put your brand, product, or cause in the public eye, she will find a way to do it, while making it unique to you.

Connect with Candace

Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn/email/Website

If It Doesn't Spread, It's Dead

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I recently attended a meetup at Ryerson University, in their Transmedia Zone.  It was a fantastic evening of discussion and debate about content, media, and how the platforms we are using to communicate – social media, Youtube, The Internet itself – are changing our ideas around production and consumption of content, and even ownership of media.

One idea that came up was the idea that media, or content (we were primarily discussing video but it could as easily have been a discussion of any kind of media), is no longer something that we just consume.  It is something that we produce and in fact, it is a way we communicate as much as anything else.

We express our identities, our thoughts, and our ideas in media, as media.  We speak “video”.  And for those who don’t create their own, from scratch, we share what others have produced, as a kind of shorthand for what we want to say.  When I share a captioned photo on Facebook, or content created by a brand like Coke or Red Bull, I am speaking volumes about who I am, what “tribe” I belong to.

Where does content marketing fit in?

I stared to think about what role content marketing plays in this content-sharing-as-communication ecosystem, and why it is so important for business.  To define what I mean by content marketing, have a read of this article, or download a handy infographic here.  Content Marketing is a system in which a business uses content, not advertising, to generate and nurture leads for their business, build trust with their customers, and get found online.

I encounter an objection again and again when I work with clients who are-shall we say-not digital natives, when we get around to a content marketing discussion.  The objection goes something like this: “I am a private person; I don’t want to put myself out there in social media, or by blogging…I’m sure no one wants to hear what I had for lunch.  Plus, I am not willing to give away all my secrets in a blog!  If people want to get my help, they’ll have to hire me!”

That is kind of like moving to France and refusing to speak French.   Digital Media is communication tool, and content is a language that, as a business, you can’t NOT speak.  The best way to get your brand out there is to use media – video, photography, blogging, graphics – to communicate with your customers, and in fact to use media that they will want to share.  To use what Henry Jenkins calls “spreadable media”.

Henry Jenkins: Spreadable Media

This video, titled Spreadable content makes the consumer king, is an episode from Pull: How Technology is Changing the Conversation.  IT was produced by TVO and Q Media and it is taken from  a discussion I had with Jenkins in 2013.

Spreadable media is the best reason I can think of to generate content marketing for your business.  It is how you leverage your existing customers and followers as marketers, giving them the media they need to spread your message for you.

Jenkins also speaks in this interview about the new digital divide, that he calls the participation gap.  He talks about kids in schools who may not have access to skills and opportunities, but it just as effectively applies to business people who don’t have the skills, the training or worse, the willingness to participate in this new language of identity and brands, the language of content.

As Jenkins says: if it doesn’t spread, its dead.  Creating high value, sharable content that your customers can use is the best way to close that participation gap.

Christine McGlade is a Business Analyst, Content Strategist, and Usability Consultant.  With over 25 years experience in the media business, Christine helps small business, social enterprise, and Not for Profits how to leverage the power of the Internet to grow their business.  Learn more about Christine at analyticalengine.ca

Public Relations 101: What is it and what can it do for your business

CHuntly

Whether you are an entrepreneur looking to break into your industry or you are an established business of any size, your success is largely dependent on your reputation. Many different types of people can have an effect on your reputation such as customers, suppliers, employees and journalists. Their opinions of your business – good or bad – will affect the opinions of others.

Public Relations (PR) is part of your marketing strategy that focuses on managing your reputation through effective communication of your organizational message. It is the art of building and maintaining positive relationships and brand awareness in the public eye (AKA your target audience).

Simply put, PR is your strategy for getting your message – your story – out to your audiences. It is all about engaging your target audience(s) by connecting with them in some way. It should be complementary to your overall marketing and outreach strategies.

6 Key Factors of PR

  1. Media Relations: Building relationships with the media and other influencers with the goal of attaining editorial coverage (Not paid for). If you have ever read a story about one of your favourite brands, the latest celebrity gossip, or even a story about a politician, business owner, or prominent individual, chances are someone pitched that story angle to the media and they thought it was interesting enough to write about.
  2. Special Events/Experiential: Designed for both public and media outreach, these events usually have brand experience and/or informational components.
  3. Content Generation: Writing blogs and bylined articles both for your organization’s website as well as for other websites and publications is a great way to control your message.
  4. Industry/Competitive audits: Audits (research) will determine the best positioning for your organizational message in terms of making it stand out from your competitors.
  5. Crisis Strategies: As hard as you might try to maintain a positive image in the public eye, sometimes things go wrong. It could be a huge product recall, and it could be something as “small” as an internet troll leaving negative comments on your blogs. Having a crisis strategy in place before it happens is your best bet so you know exactly how to deal with it.
  6. Social Media: This is where there is a definite crossover with the rest of your marketing strategy. You need to make sure the messaging you are putting out on your social media channels fits with the rest of your outreach. It’s a great way to promote your story. It’s also a great way to showcase content across different mediums.

Why Your Business Needs PR

Your business would not go anywhere without some sort of customer, end user, network, or community of fans, which is why you need PR. You need to be able to reach them with your message.

PR helps your business to:

  • Connect with your target audience both through direct channels and infuencer touchpoints (working through people, media, and celebrities who influence your target audience).
  • Package your brand story for maximum effectiveness. A good PR strategy will create a foundation for your business to build its outreach and growth strategy.
  • Get your brand and organizational story in the public eye on your own terms (ie. You have some control of the messaging that is out there).
  • Define its voice. Your business is so much more than a brand name and a website. It has character, values, and purpose.
  • Utilize a variety of outreach channels so you can tailor your strategy to your budget and your organizational culture.

Maintaining a strong presence on multiple channels while reaching your target audience is priceless when it comes to building a business. Most people think the cost of running a successful PR strategy will be too much, but there are ways to work within any budget. Your reputation and business success depend on it.

Candace Huntly is the Founder and Principal at SongBird Marketing Communications, an agency working to take organizational and individual brands to the next level. With a passion for all things related to creativity and strategy, she specializes in business intelligence, marketing & branding, content strategy & development, media & influencer relations, and social media. Basically, if you need to put your brand, product, or cause in the public eye, she will find a way to do it, while making it unique to you.

Connect with Candace

Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn/email/Website

PLANTING ONE SEED (INVESTMENT) AT A TIME!

Amina

This past weekend the weather was finally amazing to get out in the garden, dig through the earth with my fingers and pull out all the weeds before planting my vegetable garden. It got me thinking that it takes one seed at a time to harvest your garden.

What if we took the same view on our investments?

When we first start we are so keen to learn and invest in anything that comes our way – but that can be foolhardy – especially when it comes to investing!  WHY?

Ask any successful real estate investor and he or she she will tell you that the secret to their success was knowledge.  They learned everything they could before investing in their first property.  They planted one seed at a time!  Did they stop there? No they keep learning and applying that knowledge to build on their portfolio.

As an investor you must take your time to learn, which strategy suits you best. Is it student rentals, multi-family, rent to own, buy & hold, flipping, just to name a few?  Or is it lending your money for a great return or investing in syndicated mortgages or even 2nd mortgages?

Lending your money or investing in 2nd mortgages, may not provide as big returns as a bricks and mortar property, but you also don’t have the hassle of being a landlord and dealing with tenant issues.

I was recently approached by a financial advisor, who only believed that the road to wealth was paved on people investing in the stock market.  I have nothing against financial advisors, but being a person who lost a lot in the 2009 crash, I did not want to repeat past mistakes, which included investing in the stock market.  Does that mean I don’t invest in the stock market at all? NO – I do but I self-direct my investmetns and don’t leave it to somebody else to do it for me – thus I don’t incur huge MER (management expense ratio) fees, which can cut into the growth of my investments.  He could not understand why I would not recommend him to my clients.

Taking charge of your financial future should not be left up to somebody else – burrying your head in the sand and hoping your money will be taken care of is also foolhardy!  Does it take work to look after your finances? YES, but isn’t it more rewarding to see your garden grow when you have planted those initial seeds yourself?

Planting those seeds takes time but when that garden (investment portfolio) starts to grow, you will reap the rewards!

To your Wealth!

Amina

Please “like” my facebook page here Please follow me on twitter here

Benefits of Experimentation For Every Industry

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Many years ago, I was involved in a high leveled art program. Everyone who was apart of the program was given their own studio, freedom to structure their workflow and access to anything from a photography dark room (Yes, it was that long ago) to oil paints.

However, there was part of the program that was structured. It was the requirement to produce something that they called ‘Experimental Studio Research’ (ESR). This wasn’t the perfectly polished framed painting that you may think your mentors want to see – no. This was the process. The work that brought you to that finished piece. The samples of palettes that didn’t work. The sketches that never produced a finished product.

At first, I almost had to force myself to experiment because I was usually quite certain of how I wanted to work. But I learned valuable lessons by committing to ESR, and it is something that I have taken into every business I have been apart of.

The lessons translate to business so well because as we all know – there are no guarantees and it is inevitable that some things will work better than others. For the purposes of this article – the ‘Studio’ can refer to your industry and the ‘experiments’ are considered strategies that you implement and programs, products and services you offer.

For example, let’s use the coaching industry. You may try offering one-to-one intensive retreats for the first time instead of your 3-month group packages.  You have never marketed such high priced service so you expand to advertising in high-end print magazines instead of investing in just Facebook ads. After two months you haven’t gotten any sales of your retreat but have gotten 25 phone calls about your 3-month packages and requests for year-long programs. Taking the risk (experimenting) with a different marketing approach didn’t get the desired results, but there was unexpected benefits. The results of the ‘research’ of trying a different approach then led to business growth by finding the coach’s clients and what their needs are.

As you can see in the example – one important lesson is that: effort in one direction may actually benefit you in another area that you don’t necessarily expect. The key is to be open to the findings of the ‘research’ and less focused on the unexpected turns that will inevitably come.

Another lesson I applied through this concept is that the ‘process’ is valuable too. You may not only get unexpected business growth, but you may find unexpected skills and interests of your own that you can apply to the future of your business. For example, the coach we talked about before may have found out that she really loved the long-term relationship that she was able to develop over a year’s worth of services.

The value of perceiving things this way is that you can really avoid the ‘failure’ mindset. If everything you do is used to inform your next decision (Ie: NO one bought that program, or I got 400 new sign ups with the newest opt-in), it is all valuable. Knowing what didn’t ‘work’ is just as important as knowing what does.

I hope that reading this you have considered how your ‘experiments’ within your industry can still contribute to the success and growth of your business, even if you ended up not proceeding the way you originally thought.

 

Tamara is the Founder and Creative Director of Sweet Clover Studios. Where she provides resources, planners, learning opportunities and inspiration for other creative small business owners. You can also see her personal gallery of products as a surface pattern designer at http://www.SweetCloverStudios.com

Summer Blog Tour 2015

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It was a pleasure to be invited to be a part of IC Publishing’s Summer Blog Tour.  I am looking forward to reading about other entrepreneurs like myself.  I would like to thank Shery Andrunyk for inviting me to be a part of this blog tour.  Here’s a bit about Sheri:

Sheri Andrunyk is the founder of I C Publishing (tour sponsor) and the I C Bookstore, entrepreneur expert, mentor, and author of Working From Home & Making It Work and Hearts Linked by Courage. She is writing two more books this year, and is extremely passionate about providing more choices, resources, and high level support to other writers, business professionals, wellness coaches, and spiritual mentors.

Bites and Blogs: What are your tips for creating meaningful content for social media? How do you determine what blogs you’re going to write, and why? How do you remain consistent?  How do you know you’re on the right track?

With regards to social media, content is king.  My approach is the ever so popular 80/20 rule.  I try to follow this as closely as possible.  It states 80% informative and 20% promotion is the best way to keep your audience engaged.  Within that 80% of content, I try to use content from my blog site, which in itself is a “soft” way of promoting the site itself.  I am a believer in using all possible platforms to promote your business, so use whatever hidden or soft ways of promoting your business that allows the reader to have your business in mind constantly.

Blogging is a great way to get your point across without having to engage an audience for a long period of time.  I personally don’t blog, but I do have contributors who are experts in their field who blog on a consistent basis for my blog site.  I am very firm on consistency when it comes to blogging.  I require a minimum of 1 contribution per month for 6 straight months from all my bloggers.

There are many “hot topics” out there in the world of blogging for small businesses.  My selection is based on the topics that are a firm requirement to assist with starting and growing your business.  The resources we provide via our blogs are those that we find answer all the questions that are being asked by aspiring entrepreneurs.  We have been fortunate enough to witness our success over the past three years based on the increase in our readers.   Our numbers have increased each year by 50% and so has the interactions.  We have also been fortunate enough to have experienced blog contributors, who have written pieces that resonate with our readers.

Talks: What steps do you take to create new workshops, programs, or keynotes?

Creating workshops that resonate with your audience can be challenging.  You have to not only consider your guests and what they need, but you also have to consider what your competitors are offering.  Our workshops at Canadian Small Business Women are largely based on materials that are necessary for your business.  We also don’t focus on having ‘big name’ speakers whose main focus is to upsell to my audience.  There are a few requirements that I have:

  1. The workshop must be less than 2 hours long.
  2. The workshop host cannot spend more than 10 minutes introducing themselves and their business.
  3. The workshop must be hands on
  4. The workshop must have a “to do” list that allows the attendees to implement everything that was taught in their business.
  5. Do, feel free to upsell, but you cannot upsell throughout the workshop. The last 10 minutes are usually dedicated to that.

Books: Everyone has a story, some a book. If you’ve written a book, what was your creative process? What encouragement would you give others just beginning their book writing journey?

I have not had the pleasure to write a book, but it is in the works.  I am fortunate enough to be surrounded by inspirational authors who have encouraged me to take that leap in to being an author.  I currently have a title and a short outline.  I will just have to find the time to move forward and start writing.  I welcome any suggestions from our readers as to how to find my way creatively.

What advice would you give your younger self?

Wow!  I would tell my younger self to pay attention to the small details.  I am not one to regret any decisions made and I definitely live each day to the fullest.  I would definitely tell my younger self to learn how to let go of things sooner and to not be so high strung!

What are you working on now, and how can we, as a collective community, help?

We are currently working on the launch of our membership website.  Our goal is to have our members benefit from the partnerships we have made with many companies across Canada such as Vistaprint and Staples.  We would love the readers to join our network as well as to refer the network to others.  We can be found at www.canadiansmallbusinesswomen.ca

 

Passing the pen to next week:

Sandra Dawes is a certified life coach specializing in helping women who feel unfulfilled with their 9-5 follow their dreams and pursue their passions. She holds an Honours BA, an MBA as well as a certificate in Dispute Resolution.  She has completed her first book Embrace Your Destiny: 12 Steps to Living the Life You Deserve!

Connect: www.embraceyourdestiny.ca,  www.twitter.com/sandradawes

 

Tamara is the founder and creative director of Sweet Clover Studios. A creative space where design, inspiration and the desire-to-grow combines to produce purposeful materials. From surface pattern designs to children’s books, the process and personal insights are shared to create community and an example of multi-passionate creativity.

http://www.SweetCloverStudios.com  or Instagram : @sweet_clover_studios

 

Happy Blogging!!

Grant Misconceptions

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Are you a business looking to apply for grants and a bit confused about the process? Well, we’re here to help you demystify some general misconceptions about grant funding and applications.

Misconception #1: Anyone can apply for a grant

The majority of grantmakers narrow the pool of grant applicants to registered charitable organizations and nonprofits. Incorporated businesses and startups are usually left out of the grant equation because, unlike nonprofits, they have the ability to sell a product or service for a profit. That’s why it’s important to be 100% sure your organization is eligible for funding before starting the grant-writing process.

This is not to say that there is no funding out there for small businesses and startups. It is just unlikely it will be in the form of grants, and rather in the form of tax incentives, hiring credits, and when possible, venture capital funding.

Misconception #2: Grant applications consist only of ‘writing’ and ‘submitting’

Grantwriting is based less on your style of writing and more on your capacity to plan a detailed project successfully. Forget flowery language, and focus on the content.

For first-time grant applicants, it is important to research grantmakers’ mandates, as well as their previously funded initiatives. Grantmakers want to make sure your organization is accountable for the funds they distribute to you.

Seeing as they don’t know you personally (yet), the onus is on you to make your case, and back it up with targeted research, data, and information. Take time to prepare grant applications. Make sure you are able to thoroughly analyze your project’s strengths and provide tangible solutions to mitigate any weaknesses.

Misconception #3: If your project is good, you’ll receive funding

This is by far the biggest misconception of all. In fact, there are a lot of great projects out there, created by trustworthy organizations, that will never receive funding.

Grantmakers tend to award funds based on a project’s expected impact in the community. Because grantmakers tend to receive a lot of applications during any given grant cycle, it’s their responsibility to find the ‘best’ projects within very large pools of applicants. They do this by reviewing applicants’:

  • Existing partnerships with community organizations and stakeholders
  • Social media networks and reach
  • Past organizational successes

If you are a new organization, it is likely you won’t have this information yet. To make it easier for your project to receive grant funding consider collaborating directly with a partner organization to build a track record for your project, as well as expand support for it in the community.

Misconception #4: Receiving grant money is easy and quick

The task of the grant reviewing committee is to thoroughly assess hundreds, if not thousands of applications per grant. Of course, this takes a lot of time and patience. That’s why grant funding decisions often take anywhere between 3-8 months, depending on the size of the grant (the bigger the dollar amount, the longer you are likely to wait).

So, if you are counting on a particular grant to fund your latest project, make sure you have alternative funding options at your disposal just in case grant funding is delayed, or doesn’t come through.

Some Final Questions    

Want to know how to avoid unnecessary pain when applying for grants? Prepare answers to the following questions before starting the application process:

  • Which community members and stakeholders will benefit the most from your project?
  • How will you involve participants during the planning and execution phases?
  • How will you measure or evaluate the impact of your project?
  • Do you have a workplan outlining all project steps, timeline, and resources?
  • What experience and/or qualifications does your organization have to carry out this project?
  • If activities continue beyond the term of the grant, how will they be sustained?

Written by Marisol and Silvia Fornoni, Founders of JDC.

JDC supports socially conscious organizations with finding sustainable ways to tell their stories using visual design, engaging content and non-traditional media. We help you with anything from organizing fundraising campaigns to web design and social media management.

http://www.joint-development.com

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Can you grow your business on passion alone?

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Not everyone is as lucky as Dries Buytaert.  Buytaert invented the open source content management platform called “Drupal”.  Lots of universities and government websites are built using Drupal; it’s a bit like WordPress only more complex and arguably, more powerful.

I’m not suggesting that Dries is lucky to be successful: he’s a brilliant computer scientist and an even better businessman, having leveraged his opensource platform into a multi million dollar business called Acquia.  This wasn’t the lucky part.  He is lucky because he stared out by simply doing what he loved, and what he was good at: writing computer code.  Dries Buytaert invented Drupal when he was a student, living in Antwerp in a dorm.  He wanted to build a message board to exchange messages and meetups with dorm mates, and he couldn’t find anything that met his needs, in 2000, when there really wasn’t such a thing as social media. This is eerily similar to the Facebook story: sometimes genius consists of building the thing you need, because no one has built it yet, and then it turns out that millions of others need it too.

Buytaert is lucky because he was able to follow a relatively simple path as an entrepreneur, the kind of “dream” path that any entrepreneur would strive to follow: he built something that he wanted, and it turned out to be something that lots of other people wanted.  He did what he loved, and it turned out that other people are willing to pay for it (or, in the case of open source, are willing to contribute to its success in a way that allows him to monetise it).

The perfect business formula

It’s not easy to find that perfect formula in business: we often go into business for ourselves because we just want to do what we love, until the reality of buying groceries hits home and, often at some point in the first year, we have to take a step back and ask ourselves some tough questions.  Questions like: who is my ideal client?  What is my niche?  How can I best make money and grow my business?

There was a saying that I heard often when I was promoted into management during my relatively short time working inside a medium-sized organisation and it is “what got you here won’t get you there”.  What that saying means is, everything that I might have done to rise through the ranks to a get a management position, wouldn’t be any of the things that would make me a good manager.

I have been reflecting a lot on this saying lately, as it has been slowly dawning on me that everything I knew about making money as a freelancer – what I have been for most of my career – is not much good to me as a small business owner.  For example, one thing we tend to do as freelancers is say yes every job that comes along.  And that is no way to run a business!

Identifying your niche as a business

The question we need to ask ourselves, especially if we are consultants, coaches, or running a small shop that provides a service of some kind is: what are the jobs we should be taking?  Because there is a tendency when you start a service-or-expertise based business to start quite broad.  But you learn over time that you need to go much more narrow, and in fact you need to have the courage to say no to some clients.

I was recently reminded of the book “Good to Great” by Jim Collins.  Collins talk a lot about change in the book, and what it takes for a company to grow from a good company into a great company.  He says there is no magic pill, but there is, in some sense, a magic formula, illustrated by one of the most useful Venn Diagrams I have ever seen, and here it is:

 GoodtoGreatVennDiagram

It shows so clearly where the magic formula lies: it shows what happens when, like Dries Buytaert, you can find that sweet spot where Passion (doing what you love) intersects with Ability (doing what you’re good at) and the Market (doing what people will pay for).  That middle part of the diagram is your niche as a business, where you uniquely can make a difference, and make money.

This is a great tool to map your business against, and it will become part of my annual ritual to make sure I list all of our passions as a business, all of our capabilities, and what I’m seeing the need for in the market, against this diagram to make sure that I’m narrowing down the field of the ideal job, and the ideal client, and having the courage to say no to the less than ideal clients.

And, of course, making sure that all of my marketing language reflects the needs of my ideal client: the more we think through this puzzle, the more targeted we can be in our language, blogs, and social media.  And this can only mean more of the right clients and less of the wrong.

For more resources and information on Content Strategy and to download a detailed description of what content strategy entails, go to analyticalengine.ca/resources or download a Content Strategy Info graphic at http://bit.ly/1qY9tYp.

Christine McGlade is a Business Analyst, Content Strategist, and Usability Consultant.  With over 25 years experience in the media business, Christine helps small business, social enterprise, and Not for Profits how to leverage the power of the Internet to grow their business.  Learn more about Christine at analyticalengine.ca

It's Time to "TALK" about Social Media

Sheralyn

As the saying goes “unless you’ve been hiding under a rock” there is a very good chance that you’ve not only heard of facebook and LinkedIn but are an active and engaged participant on both. We are reminded constantly of the need to be on social media, to maintain a social media presence and to interact with our customers by employing this type of technology. How much is too much however? At what point does your message become de-valued, meaningless white noise amongst the clamor for customer attention? At the same time, how much is too much for you, as a person trying to conduct business? Social media has a huge role to play in terms of its ability to distract and consume your time voraciously in a non-productive way. Let’s talk about how much we “talk.”

The word “talk” was very deliberately placed in quotes. Why? Because today, due primarily to the influence of social media, we don’t do nearly enough actual talking.  Our interactions with others on a human scale are some days, literally non-existent while our “interactions” on social media are exhaustive!  Social Media has created a “doors wide-open” philosophy where we are encouraged to post, post, post, often times with little regard for the quality of the posting.  There are entire blogs related to how often you should post and the rule of three has become the norm:  post three times sharing information, tips, tools, techniques or free giveaways, before posting any targeted and specific attempt at soliciting business. The problem is we are often left searching for content of value, re-circulating posts that have already made the internet rounds several times over and which are, at best, tenuously related to our business. Currently, “curated content” is the new buzzword. Let’s look at what that really is. Curated content is regurgitated. It’s a nice word for taking someone’s work, cobbling it together with other similar posts and offering them up under your banner for public consumption. Often, I find an attention-grabbing headline has been shared to a page but when you click on the link, the content has nothing to do with the business sharing it. Clearly this is an example of someone not vetting content or sharing information of value but rather, a person simply caught up in the rush to post, post, post.

Original content is king and making sure that it’s laser-focused and related to your business is paramount. Self-employed entrepreneurs must fight for attention amongst big business so it is particularly incumbent upon them to ensure content is relevant. More so, it is critical that you don’t get caught up in the minutiae yourself, trawling through LinkedIn in search of content but getting sidetracked along the way looking at what all your old high school friends are doing now. The same is true with facebook. As entrepreneurs, with no IT department to block your access, and no one to answer to other than yourself, it’s far too easy to flip through facebook laughing at the antics of your nephew as he plays with that cute new puppy. Social Media for business requires both social responsibility and effective time management.  Set aside just 15 minutes twice a day to touch base with your followers. Be very regimented about that time (use the alarm on your Smartphone) and before you hit the share button employ the “pause and reflect” philosophy. Ask yourself “is this of value, relevant or potentially helpful to my clients?” If the answer is no, don’t share. If you haven’t even read the content, definitely don’t share it and if you really don’t have anything to say – that’s fine too. Just as in life, don’t “talk” for the sake of talk, but rather, talk when you have something meaningful to say. After all, you don’t want to be the person “blocked” by your customers because they were fed up with a continuous and largely irrelevant barrage of “curated content.”

As Owner and Principal partner of “Writing Right For You” Sheralyn is a Communications Strategist – working together with entrepreneurs to maximize profit through effective use of the written word. Looking for web content that works, blog articles that engage or communications strategies that help you get noticed?  Contact Sheralyn today. Sheralyn is also the mother of two children now entering the “terrible and terrific teens” and spends her free time volunteering for several non-profit organizations.

Sheralyn Roman B.A., B.Ed.

Writing Right For You

Communications Strategies that help you GET TO THE POINT!

416-420-9415 Cell/Business

writingrightforyou@gmail.com

LinkedIn / Facebook / www.writingrightforyou.weebly.com

Map Your Content Marketing against the Sales Funnel

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A real eye-opener that I recently learned is that the marketing objectives for a product or service has a companion, parallel series of steps or objectives called The Buying Process-or at least we hope it does!  If marketing is to be effective, we have to design it to speak to our customers at each stage in their buying process, or to look at it another way, to speak to them at each place in the sales funnel.

For example, the standard marketing objectives for your product or service might be:

  • Domain Leadership
  • Position the product or service in the vertical or market
  • Make the value proposition clear, differentiate on the basis of value
  • Sales Promotion
  • Post-purchase customer service, retention

The parallel buying process might be:

  • Buyer recognises they have a need or problem
  • Buyer searches for information about their problem
  • Buyer evaluates the alternatives to solve the problem
  • Buyer makes a purchase decision
  • Buyer evaluates their experience and satisfaction post-purchase

If you were to map these processes alongside a typical sales funnel, it would look like:

SalesMarketingProcesses

In traditional models, marketing would do their thing and at some point, sales would take over.  In digital, marketing and sales activities come together and merge in the areas of social selling and content marketing.  What tends to happen is that buyers complete almost 70% of their buying process before companies even know they exist.  Customers do all of their problem recognition, and information search, and evaluation, and often make and transact purchase decisions, online.  So the most critical thing you can do as a business is make sure that you are there, online, with relevant helpful content, at every stage of that buying process.

In other words, when your buyer recognises they have a problem, you want them to be exposed to your Domain Leadership marketing messages.  Often, your domain leadership marketing messages, if they are well-crafted, can in fact be the trigger for the buyer to recognise their problem in the first place!

When your buyer is searching for information, you want them to find your positioning messages.  When your buyer is evaluating alternatives, you want your value proposition messaging to be what they are looking at.  And so on.

The only way to develop the right content marketing for your buyer – to be in the right place at the right time – is to know your target customer really, really well.  By knowing your target customer’s pain points, needs, and the questions they ask when they have a problem, sales becomes a matter of letting them find out if there’s a good match.

What does this look like in practice?

The first step is to create a persona of your ideal client or buyer, and make sure to include as many questions as you can based on what you get asked at trade shows, in client meetings, on the phone, etc.  The best way to really get to know your target customers is to conduct customer interviews: if you’re unsure about their needs, or about the potential value in your solution, ask them!

Then, think about what kind of content are they looking for at each stage of their buying process.  What can you teach them to help them understand if they are the right match for your products or services, and if you are the right match for their needs?  Different types of content work to address different phases of the buying cycle as well.  Map these questions, and these content types, onto the buying and marketing process.

For example, let’s say you are a small business law firm.  Your unique offering is that you really understand green tech and the pain points of the small business person in this complex area building a green tech business with all of it’s unique regulatory policies and practices.

Your ideal client is a factory owner who is converting what was formerly a tool and dye manufacturing plant into a green tech business, manufacturing wind farm parts.  This client lives and works in a small town outside Sarnia, and they don’t really understand the programs and support available for green tech: they just know that to save jobs in their community and protect their own livelihood, they need to capitalize on their physical facilities and equipment to manufacture something new.  They are looking for plain-language legal and business development support, someone who will be a partner in building the business and who can help with some of the complexities of policy and government investment in this area.  Let’s map this persona and her questions against the chart we created:

Full-Chart-Example

Try mapping your ideal customer’s questions and needs against this standard marketing and sales process, along with the content type suggestions.  You’ll be surprised at how easy it is to come up with relevant, targeted content so that you can make sure your ideal customer is finding out about you during that 70% of their buying process when you’re not yet aware of them!

For more resources and information on Content Strategy and to download a detailed description of what content strategy entails, go to analyticalengine.ca/resources or download a Content Strategy Info graphic at http://bit.ly/1qY9tYp.

Christine McGlade is a Business Analyst, Content Strategist, and Usability Consultant.  With over 25 years experience in the media business, Christine helps small business, social enterprise, and Not for Profits how to leverage the power of the Internet to grow their business.  Learn more about Christine at analyticalengine.ca

Can Your Brand Become a Movement?

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I just spent the last 10 days or so at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival.  Not to be confused with the very popular music festival, SXSW Interactive is a yearly pilgrimage of the Internet faithful to Austin Texas, that happens right before the music part of the festival.  There are upwards of 72 000 registrants at the festival, not to mention all of the speakers, and all of the people who don’t actually register for the conference but who travel to Austin for the networking and business opportunities.  Suffice it to say, it is packed!

The conference takes place in the giant Austin Convention Centre, and in every hotel in the downtown core, offering literally hundreds of possible sessions every day.  It is, in a nutshell, barely controlled chaos.  But it is also a unique opportunity to hear from some of the brightest minds in digital content, marketing, innovation, and forecasting.

Every year, there are themes: there is always a buzz, an undercurrent of new thinking.  This year, there was one standout theme that will change the way I think about marketing my business.  That theme is that what we think about marketing and branding, and even building our businesses, is broken.

Now, some things that were said were not new; things like:

  • The customer is in charge: social media has meant that our customers often know more about our products than our sales staff, before we even know that they are interested in us. As a matter of fact, the average person is already 57% of the way down your sales funnel before you even know they exist, having gathered lots of information about your business and your products from friends, reviews, searches, and other touch points that you don’t control.
  • Your brand is not something you can easily control: it exists as much (or more) in the minds of your customers as it does in your own marketing department. Consumers today interact with brands as if they are people: they want to trust them as much or more than they want to find their products or services competent.
  • Our decisions are not rational, they are primarily emotional. We make decisions based on guts, feelings, intuitions, and connections.  Think about buying a house (or in my case, a pair of shoes).  The spreadsheet goes out the window when you get that signal from your emotional brain that says “I’m home”.

What was new was a different way of looking at how brands, businesses, and their marketing departments need to adjust to this new reality.

 

Storyscaping

One of the most compelling cases I heard was from Darren McColl, the Global Chief Brand Strategist for Sapient Nitro.  Sapient Nitro was the company responsible for the  “Best Job in the World” campaign , an incredibly successful tourism campaign for Australia that was rolled out on a very low budget.  McColl talked about how, contrary to popular wisdom, brands are not built by telling a great story.  Rather, they are built by creating compelling experiences or worlds within which the company, the product or service, the employees and other stakeholders, AND the customers coexist, and interact with the brand.  It is described in their blog and book as Storyscaping.  Storyscaping is a move from advertising and storytelling, which they refer to as “Story Yelling”,  to creating participatory storyscapes.   He points out that brands need more than a great story: they need a storyworld that leaves room for the customer to integrate the brand into their life and their story.

 

Brands as Movements

John Hagel, Chairman of the Centre for the Edge at Deloitte, took this idea one step further.  Hagel’s talk was all about brands and movements, and he made an important distinction between story and narratives.  As Hagel points out, a story has a beginning, a middle, and an end.  It is told to a listener, and doesn’t really involve the listener.  In contrast, a narrative is something different.  A narrative is an idea, it is a story that doesn’t have an end, in which the listener is involved and in fact, is empowered to create the ending.

For example, a story might be told about an immigrant family who comes to Toronto and makes their life here.  A narrative is “Ontario: the land of opportunity”.  There is no ending to that narrative, it is dependant on the individual to create their own ending should they become involved in the narrative.

Narratives are Storyscapes.  They are open ended, experience-based worlds that great brands create.  Think about the Apple brand, and its devotees: the narrative is that the world can be a different, better place if we just “Think Different”, think outside the box, think creatively.  Apple doesn’t really tell stories, rather, it invites customers to take part in what feels more like a movement and what has been referred to as a religion!

 

Making Change in my Business

The simple way that I bring this back to my own business is by asking these questions:

  • What is the feeling I want my customers to have when they interact with my products or services?
  • What is the experience I want them to share with their friends and colleagues?
  • How can I invite them to participate in helping me make the world a better place with my business offering?

You don’t have to be Apple to create a narrative or storyscape around your business, you just have to think in a radically customer-centric, customer-experience, customer-first way.

 

For more resources and information on Content Strategy and to download a detailed description of what content strategy entails, go to analyticalengine.ca/resources or download a Content Strategy Info graphic at http://bit.ly/1qY9tYp.

Christine McGlade is a Business Analyst, Content Strategist, and Usability Consultant.  With over 25 years experience in the media business, Christine helps small business, social enterprise, and Not for Profits how to leverage the power of the Internet to grow their business.  Learn more about Christine at analyticalengine.ca

Where do content marketing ideas come from?

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Most business people feel like surfing the internet these days is like trying to sip water from a firehose. It is overwhelming, and with so many businesses out there, online, your business can seem like a grain of sand on an endless beach.  How can a grain of sand stand out?  The simple answer is, Content Marketing.  What content to create is a harder question to answer.

In the last five instalments of this six part series I have walked you through the content strategy process which answers the questions:

1) Why does my business need to produce and publish useful, relevant content? Have a look at post number one, a content strategy primer, and post number two, which is all about getting started and defining your brand values.

2) Who do I target with this content (and where do I find them)? Have a look at post number three, which is all about understanding your target customers as users, and post number four, your social strategy SOS.

3) Where should I focus my efforts to get found? Have a read of Post Number 5, Getting Found by Search Engines.

Content Marketing is about using content to drive sales.  And if you do it right, it’s your best opportunity to stand out and make more money.  It is unqieuly suited to small business because smaller businesses are closer to their customers, with a greater ability often to engage in dialogue with customers and stay aligned with customer needs.  That dialogue is where you find out what content you should be producing.

Getting content ideas from your sales funnel

I never realsied, before becoming a business owner, that I would also need to be a salesperson.  But this is job number one for every small business owner, and content marketing is a great way to warm up your leads: it can help you to generate those leads in the first place and then move those leads down the sales funnel closer to purchase in a gentle, helpful, and purposeful way.

Your sales funnel is also a great place to look for content ideas.

Sales-Activity-Funnel

Are there places in your sales funnel, or in the greater value chain that surrounds your business, that your customers are getting “stuck”?  Understanding where your customers are stalled in the funnel is a good way to figure out what kind of content you need to produce and where you need to produce it.

 

When in doubt, ask!

In the Getting Found post in this series, we talked about the questions cusrtomers ask you as a great place to get keywords.  This is also a great plce for content ideas.  What questions do your customer ask you?  When you’re at conferences or other events where your customers congregate, what questions do you hear people asking speakers or other vendors?  As a speaker, I always ask my workshop attendees to tell me their biggest challenges, so I have fodder for blog posts, webinars, and podcasts in the future.

Interview your customers.  If you’re not sure what to ask them have a look at your value proposition and circle your assumptions, then validate those assumptions with your cusomters.  Google survey is a really easy tool, as is mailchimp for keeping email lists.  Use these tools to ask your customers what they need help with!

 

Quality trumps Quantity

And don’t panic if you don’t have a huge base to work with.  The Lean business development model recommends talking to 50 potential customers to find out if your business idea is solid.  User experience designers often only interview 6-10 ysers to find out if their ideas address user needs.  The average number of supporters it takes to fund a successful kickstarter camapign?  Only 100!

You don’t need a huge customer base to do well, if your customers love you.  How will they love you?  Deliver content with TNT: that generates Trust, that targets their Niche concerns, and that Teaches them something, that helps them

The same principle applies to your content: if all you can reasonably manage is one blog post a month, then write one a month, but make sure it is of the higest possible quality, and filled with TNT (Trust, Niche, Teach).   Conisistency also trumps quanitity: a regular monthly podcast is a better idea than a podcast published sometimes weekly, sometimes biweekly, or sometimes not at all.

Consistency is important in the visual langauge you use as well: make sure you maintain a consistent use of your logo, the colours in your brand palette, and that the visual language in your photography and graphics aligns with your brand values and your user needs.

 

Build your editorial calendar

A mistake beginning publishers of content often make is basing their editorial calendar around generic, seasonal events.  Base your calendar on user needs, or events important in the lives of your customers.   In terms of frequency of different types of content, and keeping in mind the advice above (quality trumps quantity), an editorial publishing pattern that quickly build a great content library would be:

  • 1 blog post per week
  • 1 piece of feature content per month such as
    • ebook, whitepaper, or report
    • infographic
    • a webinar
    • a presentation, workshop, or speaking opportunity
  • 3-7 social posts per week

Your editorial calendar should capture the publishing pattern you choose and the topics you will focus on.

One advantage of building your library using the pattern above is that at the end of a year of publishing, you will have enough content to publish a book.   Self-publishing is a great way to get your content into the biggest search engine for experts in the world: Amazon.

Benefits, not features

Your content strategy is the backbone of your online communications whether you are able to content market or not.  If you don’t think your writing skills are up to par, hire a copywriter: your content strategy provides the guidelines they’ll need to review so they can write for your business.  And if in the end you decide that content marketing is not the most effective way for your business to get found, (see last month’s post for more details), sometimes being useful is all about using benefit-driven language in your communications rather than feature-driven language.   If you take nothing else away, remember “Benefits, not Features” as your guide when writing copy for your sales and product pages.

And, print out and post this handy infographic that sums up the content strategy process.

For more resources and information on Content Strategy and to download a detailed description of what content strategy entails, go to analyticalengine.ca/resources or download a Content Strategy Info graphic at http://bit.ly/1qY9tYp.

Christine McGlade is a Business Analyst, Content Strategist, and Usability Consultant.  With over 25 years experience in the media business, Christine helps small business, social enterprise, and Not for Profits how to leverage the power of the Internet to grow their business.  Learn more about Christine at analyticalengine.ca

SEO: Getting Found by Search Engines

SEOsweetspot

 

In the fourth post in this series, I described social strategy: which social platforms you may want to prioritise for your business, depending on your conversion funnel.  Over the next 2 months of this series, we’ll finish fleshing out the remaining pieces of the content strategy puzzle, and this month we’ll tackle a murky and mysterious area: search engine optimisation.

There are 6 basic ways to get your business found online, and while each one is important and some of them are closely connected, how you prioritize them and which one(s) you focus your time and money on depends on the way your target users are seeking your type of product or service, and the value of a conversion for your business.

 

The Six Basic Ways to Get Found

1) Directory Listings

2) Advertising (I’m referring to Google Adwords or Google display ads)

3) Having a Social Media Presence (covered in post 4)

4) Inbound Links

5) Content Marketing

6) Organic SEO or search engine optimisation

Organic SEO encompasses all of the other tactics to a greater or lesser degree, so it will be our focus for this article.  And organic SEO is almost synonymous with, or at least shares many tactics of, content strategy itself.  In fact, one of the primary reasons to have a good content strategy is so that your digital business will get found, because the bottom line is without content, you will not get found.

The intersection of organic SEO, content strategy, and usability or user experience design is a sweet spot where you will get found, get customers, and make money.  We’re going to talk a lot about the keyword aspect of organic search engine optimization because it is a great way to focus in on the words and phrases that will best target your users and help them to find you. Getting found using organic SEO is all about search engines like Google, so it’s worthwhile to describe very briefly how Google works.

 

How does google work?

Google’s mission statement is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.  In order to do this, they have what are called Search Spiders: these are little bits of computer code that “crawl” the Internet, scanning pages as they go.

Google has an algorithm that then ranks each and every page; giving it what Google calls “page rank”.  Page Rank is based on multiple factors that only Google really knows, but they are things like:

  • Does this read like real content or does it sound false or fake?
  • Are there certain words that are used enough times (2-7% of the time) so that we, the robotic spiders, can guess what this page is about?
  • Does anyone else on the Internet, especially sources that have a good page rank and therefore good reputation, link to this page?
  • Does this page load quickly?

Then, when a user searches for, say, “Content Strategy”, Google’s algorithm looks for all the pages that it ranked as top quality for the words “Content Strategy”, and it serves them up on the Search Engine Results Page or SERP.

The goal of getting found online is ultimately to be there on the first page of Google’s search results when people are searching for the kind of product or service you offer.  Very few people will ever look on the second page of Google, and in fact, very few people will ever venture beyond the first 3 results served.

 

Keyword Optimisation: the basics

To drive traffic and develop a relationship of trust with your customers, you really must create relevant, helpful content.  But optimising that content for keywords is an important and useful practice, because it will increase your visibility in search and it will also help you focus your content.  What this means is that you need to choose a word or short phrase that represents what you believe your target users might be typing into Google’s search box when they are searching for your product or service.  You need to imagine what words THEY would use.  Then, you need to make sure that those words comprise 2-7% of the text on the page you are optimising.  Every page on your website should be optimised for one keyword (or keyword phrase); this keyword should appear in the URL for the page, the page title, in the body copy of the page, even in any image descriptions on the page.

There are lots of simple places to look to figure out what keywords you might use to focus on in your blog posts, landing pages, and product pages.

Look on competitor websites and see what kinds of words they are using to describe products and services similar to yours

Listen to your customers: what words do they use to describe their problems, their solutions, and their needs?

Type your ideas into Google and see what alternatives appear as you type

Look at the bottom of the SERP or search engine results page; you will see further variations there

Each page should also have 4-6 secondary keyword variations, so as you are doing this research, try to group keywords and phrases and their close variations together on a spreadsheet so you have lots of options when it comes time to write your blog posts, landing pages, or other site copy, and try to include location as keywords if your product or service is local.  Imagine your website as a series of landing pages: every product page, every post, should be created and written with keywords in mind.

Keyword optimisation is something you should do on your website even if you are not blogging!

 

Inbound links

When we talk about inbound links, it’s really important to distinguish these links from the links that you might put on your website, between pages or linking out to other websites.  When we say inbound links we’re not talking about the links ON your pages, we’re talking about the links TO your pages, FROM other websites

Inbound links are as important as keyword optimisation as far as helping your pages to rank well for Google.  They are especially important if your conversion funnel is more weighted towards passive discovery rather than active discovery and they are critically important if your service is consultation, thought leadership, expertise, or education.

The easiest way to get inbound links is to submit your site to directories; while some directories cost money and therefore give you what is called a “no follow” link, they are still really important if you are a very active discovery type of business or to build your credibility as might be the case, for example, with being listed by your community’s Better Business Bureau.

However, if you are more of a passive discovery business where customers require multiple touch points before they make a buying decision, you need to use content to generate trust and develop the relationship, much in the way a traditional salesperson might do.  This is where Content Marketing in the form of blogging, white papers, report, eBooks, videos, or info graphics can serve double duty.  They can be keyword optimised to drive organic search traffic, but they also provide you with key pieces of content that can be leveraged to obtain inbound links from Influencers.

Influencer ‘Backlinks’

What is the ecosystem surrounding your product or service, the community?  Who in that ecosystem influences your customers’ buying decisions?  Making contact with these bloggers or businesses online and making them aware of content you might have that might interest their users is a great way to develop a mutually beneficial relationship with them, one in which they might link to your valuable content, giving you a valuable inbound link or ‘backlink’, and you will have access to their audience and may drive some of that traffic to your site.

 

Advertising

Google adwords can be an extremely inexpensive way to catapult your website onto the front page of Google in the form of an ad.  Paying for advertising will not improve your website’s organic search ranking, but it will help you get your brand in front of consumers while you build your content marketing bench strength, and it is an excellent research tool, enabling you to really finesse your keywords and see very clearly what words to drive traffic and conversions.  You need to figure out the balance between advertising spend, which can be very low, and organic spend.  To do a good adwords campaign, you need continuity between your keywords, ads, and landing pages, so there is no way around having good, focused content on your website, but sometimes one really good ad & landing page can drive more traffic than a whole bunch of blog posts, so it can be a good idea to advertise early in your content marking lifecycle so you can drive immediate traffic while you build you bank of landing pages.

While there are no hard and fast rules, the 70/10/10/10 rule outlined in this chart can help you to prioritise your efforts:

MyFindabilityTacticsMatrix

On this chart, I’m assuming that active discovery means your users need very few touch points with your brand before they buy, whereas passive discovery means they need more touch points  before they buy.  If you need a refresher on active vs. passive discovery, have another read of last month’s post in this series.  You can use the chart above to prioritise you SEO efforts behind specific tactics that will make the biggest difference, the most efficiently.

 

What we haven’t covered

This series is about content strategy, but when it comes to very thorough SEO, there are issues that impact on your ability to get found that are more technical in nature.  The easiest and most important one to address is the speed of your webiste.  Your pages should never take more than a couple of seconds to load.  The bottom line for SEO is that if your site is reasonably fast and you have authentic, focused content, you have a great base on which to build your SEO.

Next month, the last in this series, we’ll cover Content itself: what are the options in how you can most effectively and inexpensively generate the kind of content marketing that will move your digital business into the spotlight.

For more resources and information on Content Strategy and to download a detailed description of what content strategy entails, go to analyticalengine.ca/resources or download a Content Strategy Info graphic at http://bit.ly/1qY9tYp.

Christine McGlade is a Business Analyst, Content Strategist, and Usability Consultant.  With over 25 years experience in the media business, Christine helps small business, social enterprise, and Not for Profits how to leverage the power of the Internet to grow their business.  Learn more about Christine at analyticalengine.ca

Social Strategy SOS

SocialStrategy

In the third post in this series, I discussed why you need to consider your customers as “users” and how you go about creating a User Persona to help you target your Content Strategy to your ideal users. Over the next 3 weeks of this series, we’ll finish fleshing out the remaining pieces of the content strategy puzzle, and this week we’ll tackle what is possibly the most perplexing and time consuming part of your digital business: your Social Media Strategy.

Do I really HAVE to have a social media strategy?

Social strategy is complex: there are so many social networks, and sometimes it feels like there is a new one every day.  How does a business owner know which ones to pay attention to, and which ones to ignore?  Engaging in Social Media can be extremely time consuming with little visible return on investment: It can be difficult to clearly see how a social media strategy can help your business.

But social media can also be a virtual goldmine of new customers.  It can be a way that you can develop a relationship of trust with your customers, engage in customer service activities, and even recruit new employees. Social media is here to stay and it is an essential part of every business owner’s sales, marketing, and business development toolkit.   A smart, targeted social strategy can deliver brand awareness, new customers, and even conversions, but it is important to understand why you’re doing it and what exactly you should do, and this is unique to each and every business.

Conversion has changed – forever.

Think about how your customers convert nowadays.  It used to be that customers would become aware of your brand or product through a limited number of expensive and highly controlled channels: perhaps through a television, radio, or newspaper ad, or perhaps through word of mouth.  Their decision to buy was made primarily at point of purchase, that is, when they saw your product on the shelf in the store: the “first moment of truth”, as it was called in the traditional marketing model.

Google has recently described a new model that very accurately captures the new way consumers become aware of, and make decisions to purchase, products and services today, and they call it the Zero Moment of Truth.  The Zero Moment of Truth is all about digital discovery: the extensive searching, recommendation reading, and consulting with Facebook friends that we now engage in before making a purchasing decision.  For products and services big and small, we rarely convert until we have had at least 7 and sometimes as many as 17 digital “impressions” or touch points with a brand.

ZMOTequation

This Zero Moment of Truth is perhaps the most compelling reason that each and every brand, every business selling every product or service, needs to ensure that when the consumer is engaging in this foraging behaviour, that they are there, building trust and clocking impressions that may lead to conversion.  These impressions come from your business website and your social media activities, especially what people are saying with you and about you in social media.

There may be a small segment of the population that doesn’t use social media, but this is a rapidly shrinking segment.  The fastest growing segment of social users is adults 45-54, and more and more seniors come online every day.  In many ways, Social Media IS the Internet, and the Internet IS Social Media.  It’s difficult today to grow your business without a strategy that covers how, for whom, and how often you will engage your customers in the two-way conversation that Social media has to offer as a marketing tool.

So Many Platforms, So Little Time.

Scheduling tools like Hootsuite make it easy to track and control the frequency of your social media communications, and they make it easy to post the same content simultaneously to multiple social platforms.  But while it may be tempting to try and broadcast your messages to multiple platforms at once, it is rarely a good idea.  In his book “Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook”, Gary Vaynerchuck makes a strong argument that business owners should heed: not all social platforms are created equal.  The kind of storytelling that works really well on Facebook for a particular user will not work on Twitter, or Linked, In, or Pinterest, or….

Knowing which platforms to prioritise is perhaps the most difficult part of your social strategy but also the most critical.  You stand to lose a lot of precious time if you prioritise a platform that really doesn’t work for your business, and you can even erode or undermine your brand if you post something clearly inappropriate for that platform: so how does a savvy business owner choose?

There are three factors to consider:

1) What are the various social platforms “good at”?

2) Which of the social platforms do your users tend towards?

2) What is the nature of your business conversion funnel?

1) A Brief Primer on Social Media

There is much crossover between the various major social media platforms: all of them are, of course, social, meaning they are about engaging in a dialogue with others.  But because each one operates in a slightly different way with different rules of engagement, they require different kinds of Storytelling.

Twitter

  • Has over 230 million monthly active users
  • Twitter followers are 60% more likely to recommend you than a Facebook Liker
  • The average age of a Twitter user is much higher than Facebook, at 39 years
  • 70% of Twitter users expect to hear back from a brand, and 53% want that response within the hour
  • Twitter is good for establishing thought leadership, expertise, for sharing news, and for customer service and customer relationship management

Facebook

  • Facebook is the largest social platform in the world: if it were a country it would the third most populated, after only China and India
  • Facebook does have an influence on purchasing behaviour, even if not a direct one. Your Facebook fans are more likely to convert than non-fans.
  • Facebook is great for visibility in social search
  • Facebook is getting into the retail game with Facebook shops if you are selling a product
  • The new killer app on Facebook is the short video

YouTube

  • Has moved from being primarily a video search engine to a powerful social platform where many brands have been born and built. Khan academy, for example, and Justin Bieber.
  • Web videos are a great way to reach out to new and current customers and generate inbound links to your website
  • Because it is owned by Google, embedding YouTube videos on your website gives those pages a double-boost in Search Engine Optimisation

Google Plus

  • Great for local businesses, reviews, and Google search “juice”
  • Ties your business address into a Google Map and ties into other Google services

Linked In

  • The largest professional network, you must have a personal page on LinkedIn; it is far more common to connect with business contacts on LinkedIn than to keep a Rolodex or stack of business cards or emails.
  • Linked in generates 200% more leads than the other social networks

Pinterest

  • The fastest growing as of December 2012
  • Pinterest is very visual, about ‘things’, items they find interesting, but it works even for small businesses that aren’t visually stimulating.
  • Pinterest is good for referral traffic because the source of the pin is a link to your site, especially images you might be posting in your blogs. Even if you don’t maintain a page or presence on Pinterest, installing a “pin it” button on your website pages is a good idea

2) Where Are Your Users Hanging Out?

The short answer is, everywhere.  But you have to narrow that down a little to come up with a feasible strategy.  It’s important to note here that there are multiple social platforms not listed above, many of them attracting niche audiences where you might find a treasure trove of users interested in exactly what you have to offer.  This article outlines 60 niche social networks and it is worth doing a bit of digging to see if any of them resonate with your business goals.  Another tool that you can use is socialmention.com; social mention searches blogs and social networks for topics or brand mentions and can be a good way of finding out where conversations are taking place that align with the kinds of conversations you want to be having with your customers.  And social crawlytics at socialcrawlytics.com can be very insightful, generating a report that will tell you which pages of your website have been shared in social media, where they have been shared, and even by who.

3) What is the Nature of Your Conversion Funnel?

Typically, the more expensive the product or service, the more touch points the consumer will require before purchasing.  What are you selling, and how many touch point’s do you think your customers need before they buy?

Is your product or service more suited to an active discovery process or a passive discovery process?  For example, if I need an emergency plumbing repair I tend to engage in some very active discovery to find one.  I search Google and will probably call the first few service providers I see.  Social Media is better at passive discovery, at marketing products, services, and ideas that consumers don’t need right away or in an emergency.

Do you have a lot of competitors, so will need more touch points or more visibility in the market, or very few competitors?  Are you in the B2B or B2C market?

How much customer service does your product or service require?  And how much brand awareness do you already have in the market?
SocialStrategySOSWorksheetImage

Document the answers to these questions on this worksheet; by indicating on the sliders in the worksheet where your business lands on these various conversion factors will give you some pointers towards which platforms you might want to prioritise as well as the frequency of posting you might want to consider.  Note that the worksheet is more art than science and is intended only as a starting point: they only way to really get good at social media is by doing it, so start small, perhaps with your LinkedIn page, and build slowly using the worksheet as a guide.

The biggest question the Content Strategist has to answer is “Do I need a website AND a Social Strategy”?  The answer is yes, for a myriad of reasons, not the least of which is the findability of your content in Search.  Next month, we’ll cover Search Engine Optimisation and Influencer Marketing, the two biggest ways you can make your website work for your business.

For more resources and information on Content Strategy and to download a detailed description of what content strategy entails, go to analyticalengine.ca/resources or download a Content Strategy Info graphic at http://bit.ly/1qY9tYp.

Christine McGlade is a Business Analyst, Content Strategist, and Usability Consultant.  With over 25 years experience in the media business, Christine helps small business, social enterprise, and Not for Profits how to leverage the power of the Internet to grow their business.  Learn more about Christine at analyticalengine.ca

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