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.
Your website looks great. You’ve spent a lot of time, energy, and resources to develop a wonderful, purpose-driven business that is making a positive impact in the world. You have a track record of helping those that you serve. You’ve developed a beautiful product. You’re ready to go. But when it comes to reaching out to your network, you freeze. What’s happening here?
You’ve developed great content, you’ve designed the perfect newsletter, and you can’t wait to share the information to educate or inspire your audience. So you hit SEND. What could go wrong? One big thing can get between your newsletter and your audience, and that is the spam filter. “But I have opt-in permission from every person on my list,” you say?
[Editor’s Note: This post was recently featured in Social Media Today. Well done, Tara!]
As some of our previous posts have detailed, LinkedIn is an extremely useful tool for recruiting, job hunting and networking. Now with Company Pages, LinkedIn can also be used as a powerful tool and enhancement to your content marketing plan.
Granted, this will depend on your goals and your audience. In her book Content Marketing, digital marketing expert Rebecca Lieb suggests creating personas for the each of your target audience; boil down your customers into a group of individuals that represent your clientele. Creating personas will help you to segment your audience and understand what interests them. Only after you do this, will you be able to determine what types of content you should be sharing.
Write a short paragraph that tells the age, personality and interests of a specific client type. Below are two examples of persona types taken from Leib’s book, Content Marketing.
Don’t create content for everyone. Direct it at a specific person – direct it at Jill or James. If you truly know your audience, then you will be able to provide them with content that interests them.
Once you have determined whom you are speaking to, you can begin to write. There are three main categories of content.
What are people talking about at the water cooler? Usually it is the funny stories that they have heard, the stories that make them laugh and smile. So, let that be you!
