Taking time for reflection can help personal and professional growth. As you head into the new year, make time to pause and reflect on the past year, the lessons learned, wins achieved, and goals you'd like to continue to work towards. These prompts can help you get started.
Throughout the 24 years we've been in business as a branding and design firm, we’ve seen many organizations refresh their brands with new websites, messaging, and logos. We’re no different. We’ve tweaked and refreshed the insight180 brand several times, as a way to commemorate a shift in focus or celebrate a new chapter for the business. Each time, we’ve approached the process similarly to the way we would advise our clients if they were considering a logo refresh. If you're considering refreshing your logo, read about when and why you may want to do this sooner than later.
When was the last time you checked your social media metrics? Not just your company’s page, but your personal LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram pages? People want to engage with – and be inspired by – people, not companies. Allowing your audience to get to know you first helps them decide if they want to invest their time and money in your product or services. When done right, an active personal presence on social media can be an effective form of networking which can bring in leads and new clients for your business. So how do you know that what you are posting on your pages is resonating with those potential clients? Social media metrics. Read this blog post to learn more.
Whether you’re a small business striving for growth or a seasoned B2B company looking to stay ahead, reviewing and updating your marketing SOPs and Best Practices can make all the difference. Here are five essential steps to ensure your marketing efforts stay relevant, effective, and aligned with your business goals.
Social media for businesses should not and simply can not stand alone. While social media is an integral piece of the marketing mix, unless you have other pillars of digital marketing (i.e. writing blogs, email marketing campaigns, other ways to drive traffic to your social media channels) to support it, don’t expect much of a ROI from social media. Additionally, especially for B2B companies, solely having viewers across your social channels may not mean much of anything beyond brand awareness, which is important, but again, don’t expect a surge of interested clients from little effort!
If you want something you can measure, the end goal must be to get users back to your website (or landing page) to complete an action (i.e. sign up for an email list, give an email address in order to receive an e-book, fill out a contact form). Some people view social media for business as fluff. If done correctly, social media can be a strong ROI. When your marketing and sales efforts are aligned, social media can be the element that enriches your brand and pushes you ahead of your competition. If you spend the right amount of time and energy creating a great plan and carrying out social media campaigns that convert, it could become your brand’s greatest asset!
When beginning to use social media for business, the first steps should be creating a content creation strategy followed by beginning to create content. Whether it’s blog writing for SEO, guest blogging on sites that your audience visits or creating infographics that will be featured within an industry publication, content strategy and creation should be the first steps.
In addition to having something to share across your social channels, content creation is also beneficial for SEO purposes. If Google sees that you are actively adding pages to your site and users are finding the content on these pages useful and relevant, your site will gain recognition as being a good answer to queries users are searching for. While creating great content is definitely not all that goes into SEO and fixing any errors, speed problems, etc, should be a SEO priority, content creation is still beneficial and can snowball if you’re doing it correctly.
Social Media is usually seen as an all encompassing term but it’s really just a piece of the marketing mix–a piece that brings everything that your brand creates in front of your audience. If you see a brand posting graphics on a social media channel they have implemented a content creation strategy by doing research to find out what their audience responds to the best. After concluding that a certain set of graphics were the right fit, they are posted across the brand’s social channels. Posting on social media is a step in a company’s marketing strategy.
In addition to deciding what exactly a brand should post on social media, there is also the strategy behind which users to follow and interact with. A best practice is to follow people within your audience, people who are interested in the types of content you’ll be posting and even competitors. One great way to strategize who to engage with on social media is to go after your industry influencers. Also, if your brand is location specific, for example, if your company is strictly baltimore based, follow and interact with a lot of Baltimore based users that meet your criteria.
When you create a strategy for which users to follow and interact with, eventually your profile, specifically on Twitter, will show up under the “Who to Follow” section. Because we post a lot about branding, marketing and social media, users who are interested in those topics will often see our profile in this section.
Additionally, when users who are interested in our content share our links their followers will see our content as well.
Did you know that
44% of email recipients
Those of you who know me and are familiar with my role and responsibilities as “Principal of Practicality” at Insight180 will chuckle at how NOT surprising it is I would coin the phrase or espouse the concept of “Practicality Marketing.” (Well, some things should be predictable in life, shouldn’t they?)
So, let me explain what I mean. These days, there’s a lot of evidence to support the importance of writing blog posts and white papers to demonstrate your thought leadership and high level of expertise to your prospects. We advise it all the time and we’ve seen the benefits first hand with our own advisory firm clients who’ve adopted the practice as a successful marketing strategy. For many firms, it has catapulted them to significantly higher levels of business. But there are right and wrong ways to go about it and how well or poorly you do it makes all the difference.
All too often, such content is written to demonstrate how smart a firm is, how much “better” their expertise level is, how much “more” they offer the prospect. And these things might actually be true, but coming right out and saying so can make people’s eyes glaze over and create skepticism.
The best way to communicate such messages is to focus on your ability to provide practical answers to clients’ common problems and quantify their success in some way. I like to call it “Practicality Marketing.” What was the practical, bottom-line result of what you were able to do for your customers? How do they benefit? What do you help them achieve? (And just as important, what would THEY say you help them achieve?)
“Practicality Marketing” is a way of looking at, and framing what you offer in a way that is more customer-focused and relatable. Marketing from a practicality perspective forces you to think in terms of what prospects want from you and how you can help them instead of what you want to brag about. Don’t get me wrong. Bragging has its place. Marketing is all about telling the world how great you are. It just comes off better when your clients’ successes do the talking for you.
— Chris Quinn, principal and brand strategist
How you rank with search engines is an important part of building a successful business. But the active tasks of search engine optimization (SEO) are very different in 2014 than they used to be even just a year ago.
Certainly, with WordPress, SEO is more automatic and simplified, but there are still precautions to take to ensure that you don’t violate any of the search engines’ terms of service or recommended practices — there’s reason to be cautious and stay informed. According to Entrepreneur Magazine, “Google is taking a hardline approach. Shady link-building tactics, poor quality content and bad design are just a few factors causing websites to get penalized.”
In early January, 2014, lyric-annotation website Rap Genius made headlines for sending spammy emails, asking bloggers to insert Rap Genius links into their sites, with the hope of ranking higher on Google, and exchanging those links for promotion in the Rap Genius site. It was essentially, link exchanging—but on a large scale—a practice many companies use. But it’s against Google’s terms of service. Google detected the spike in links, which was more than double, with more than 20,000 new links in a few months, and downgraded its ranking below where it was before the spike.
Did they do it on purpose, trying to trick Google’s algorithm? Or were they just being creative in how they solicited back-links? They admitted they deliberately used tactics to pursue large-scale link building results. But they did not realize it would have such repercussions.
Entrepreneur explains the importance of links this way. “On the internet, links are like votes: Every link to your web site tells search engines that you are important. The more links you have, the greater the importance — helping your competitive advantage. Links continue to be one of the most important ranking factors in Google and Bing’s search rankings.”
But there are rules about how you acquire those links. You can’t buy them or acquire them through an exchange. Entrepreneur advises:
To learn more about newsjacking, read my article, “Newsjacking: Reaching Your Audience in Real-Time” and check out the chat below.
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A large part of creating a great blog and engaging social media posts is having great content. If your company is creating useful, relevant content that your audience wants to see, share and interact with, you’ll grow your audience, see more engagement and establish yourself as thought leaders in your field. Not to mention all the SEO benefits. Some of the best ways to create content are through images, videos, screencasts and webinars. If you don’t have design skills, you might have been using MS Paint, Word or PowerPoint to create anything visual. Please, close Paint and take a look at our article on Social Media Today, “The Ultimate List of Content Creation Tools for 2014.”
Continuing from our post, Digital Marketing Predictions for 2014 Part 1, we’re taking some time to reflect on digital marketing trends of this year and what might become the core practices in 2014.
Content Marketing
For companies, blogs will continue to be an important piece of their content marketing. Google’s Hummingbird algorithm is designed to quickly comprehend the meaning, context, and intent of search queries, which will improve search quality by taking synonyms into account. In the most simple terms, the new algorithm is meant to keep up with longer, more advanced search queries that come through Google. Instead of simple keyword queries, Google is working to accommodate questions on par with what users might ask their friends off the Internet. (e.g. “Tell me about an artist.”) (source).
“Google might look at the query [What is the best place to find and eat Chicago deep dish style pizza?], and understand that a searcher looking for results for that query would likely be more satisfied with the use of “restaurant” instead of “place”.
Interested in what’s new in digital marketing for 2014? As 2013 comes to a close, we’re taking some time to reflect on some marketing trends of the past year and what to expect for the next. These practices aren’t simply adrift in the marketing world, this new wave of practices is moving from trend to convention. Learn what you should be adding to your digital marketing mix in part one of our digital marketing predictions for 2014.
According to Nancy Bhagat, VP of Marketing Strategy at Intel, we’re going to see a huge increase in location-based marketing this year. This isn’t surprising after the news that Foursquare recently raised another $35 Million in funding. If you haven’t heard of foursquare, this gamified app allows you to compete against other users through gaining points by checking in to the places you go, all while the app mines your valuable user data, which marketers are very interested in! Users can leave tips, upload pictures, and gain badges based on how many times they’ve checked into a certain type of venue (I have a level 10 Pizzaiolo badge…and a level 1 Gym Rat badge…clearly, some priorities should be rearranged! ) You may not have the Foursquare app downloaded on your phone, but that doesn’t mean you don’t use it. If you’ve ever set a location with Instagram, Vine, Waze, Untappd or any of
these other apps
It’s that time. You know you need to write another blog post, but you’re just not feeling it. Where do you start? If you are an expert advisory firm, you are aware of the importance of providing valuable thought leadership, also known as lead-generating content. Your website needs to substantiate the work you do for your clients. When a prospect who is “on the fence” about your services comes across your site, your content can make the difference.
What value do you provide? How are you better at a particular business niche than any other service provider in your space? What is the difference you can make to a prospect’s business? Anytime your content can inform, educate, inspire or entertain your particular clientele, you are providing value. But how do you come up with great content when you’re stuck? As a busy executive, coming up with another great blog post or white paper, can feel like just another task on a long list of to dos.
Isn’t this something you can pass off to someone else? Truth is, we don’t always have time, and many executives do delegate. However, as the expert, the CEO, the actual thought leader, your voice is necessary. Yes, other talented staff can fill in, and should take turns blogging and providing content, insights, firm news and updates, expertise, but ultimately your website and content need to have the voice of the one who leads — your perspective is important.
So where do you go for ideas? Here are seven sure-fire ways to be inspired.
1. Keep a morgue file.
