5 Ways to Supercharge your Content Marketing

Happy to bring a guest post from Sarah Saker, she’s a business coach and freelance writer. She talks about supercharging your content marketing and these tips are golden!

Of course, you have a content marketing strategy, and you are fully engaged and vested in it. The first six months have gone well, but lately, you have noticed that everything you put out sounds, well, the same as everything else.

Apparently, your followers have noticed too, because traffic numbers are flat, no one new is subscribing to your newsletter, and conversions are low at best.

What do you do? You need to supercharge your content marketing strategy and give your followers and new ones something new to look at.

Shoot Some Live Video

From Facebook to Twitter and Instagram, live video has entered social media full force. What you do with it and what you talk about in your live videos can either supercharge or damage your content marketing strategy. Here are a few principles to follow:

Practice first: Just because it Is live video does not mean it must be unrehearsed. Prepare ahead of time and practice timing, choosing your words carefully, and keeping a friendly tone that is not nervous.
Keep it short: Remember, people’s attention spans are short on social media, which is why shorter posts get better responses. It is the same with video. Anything longer than about 90 seconds and you probably have lost your audience.
Make it relevant, exciting, or both: If you are skydiving or driving a race car, your video need not be relevant, but don’t share dull aspects of your life or business. Keep it exciting and relevant to keep follower interest.

Live video can be a great tool, but don’t overdo it. Make it something your followers look forward to so they tune in each and every time.

Take Some Unique Photos

Yes, every website and every post really should have photos. What makes yours stand out from the rest?

If you scroll through social media, you will see what kind of photos are popular by the number of likes, shares, or retweets depending on the network you are looking at. Pinterest and Instagram are great places to see what is trending.

When you share your photos, use a blend of what is popularly combined with things that are unique. Cat photos and videos may always be popular, but make sure you can make them relevant to what you do.

Start a New Website

That’s right. Sometimes a sister site or a new blog that talks about the same things you have already been covering by your content not only gives your followers and new ones a different perspective, it can increase your creativity as well.

How do you do it? Select a domain name that is related to yours or embodies one of your values. Of course, you will have to do a domain name search to make sure it is available. If it isn’t, play around with variations of the name, but be careful to make sure that running it together or using initials does not create a humorous or embarrassing combination.

Creating content on your site that links to the new site and vice versa creates a clear relationship that Google can see, and lends authority to both sites. You can use the sister site to enhance your content marketing strategy by posting more general topics and using your original site as a source.

Relate Your Hobbies

You do have hobbies outside of work, right? Everyone does, including your customers, and probably many of them can relate to your hobby even if it is not something they do themselves. How does what you do in your off time relate to your business? Can you draw some analogies there?

You can make these relationships through blogging, live video as mentioned above, or some photo or video essays.

This does several things for you and your business:

You show yourself as a human: we like to buy from people who are like us or who we can relate to. Sharing hobbies is a great way to do this.
You illustrate work/life balance: It is good for your customers to see you have interests besides business. You show that you are about more than money.
You inspire empathy: your customer can put themselves in your shoes because of what you do, and that begins a type of relationship, one that allows you to partner with them in business instead of just selling to them.

Sharing hobbies can at first seem daunting, especially if you are an amateur at what you do. Don’t worry, your audience can still relate. Everyone starts somewhere, and even failure shows your humanity and humility.

Refine Your SEO Targets

If your visitors and conversion rates are flat, maybe you are not targeting the right keywords and audiences anymore, or perhaps you have saturated that market and need to find a new one.

One way to remedy this is to look at your current customer base using social media listening, and ask yourself some simple questions:

First, ask yourself if your concept marketing persona matches the persona of your current customers and followers. If it does not, brainstorm about why. It could be that your content is not reaching your desired audience, or perhaps you should revise your content persona.

Second, ask yourself if there is a segment of the market you are missing. Your content could be reaching a new audience you didn’t even think would use your products or services. Intentionally targeting them in the future could change your business entirely.

Finally, ask yourself if there is another segment of customers you are not reaching but should be targeting. If a particular demographic is lacking in your social following, ask yourself why, and how you might reach out to them and make them your customers too.

Get Your Content Marketing Supercharged

Content marketing is important, but it can get stale if we let it. Every now and then it pays to take a look at your strategy and supercharge it. Not only will it affect your bottom line, but you will be more engaged and energized as well.

Let us know which of these content marketing tips you’ll try in the comments!

How To Find & Define Your Small Business Mission

How to Find and Define Your Small Business Mission

Super happy to bring a guest post from Kayleigh Alexandra from Micro Startups! She’s bringing us knowledge on creating a small business mission.

In a nutshell, your mission describes the function, goals, and purpose for being for your small business or nonprofit. It is your guiding light, the driving force that leads you throughout your journey to success. It’ll form the foundation for your one, five, and ten year plan, and it’ll form the essence of what your business stands for.

But how do you find it? What makes for the perfect mission statement? What questions do you need to answer when you’re defining yours? Let me break it down for you.

Identify your value proposition

Let’s start at the start: your business’s value proposition. This is your business’s purpose, whatever you make, sell, or provide, and why you do it. Maybe you had a great idea for an innovative product or service, or you saw a niche market that you thought you could fill. Whatever it is, that’s your starting point.

When you’re nailing down your value proposition, you need to ask yourself:

What product or service does my business provide?
Who is my target audience?
Why am I different to other businesses on the market?

There are lots of brands out there today all jostling for a piece of the action, and it can be hard for small businesses to get themselves heard. To achieve this, you need to formulate a value proposition that really makes you stand out.

Find your customer niche

So you’ve got your value proposition. Next, you need to identify your niche. This is essentially who will be buying your product and why they’re buying it.

Your business should be customer-centric, with everything you do working towards meeting their needs. Use useful business tools like Soovle or Social Mention to find out what questions your customers are asking and what they’re talking about. Once you know their concerns and interests, you can more effectively define your business and how it meets those needs.

Finding your target market is vital for small businesses. You can’t afford to cast a wide net — it’s simply not viable. Instead, you should do your customer research and tailor your marketing to the audience that is most likely to buy and engage with your product.

Once you’ve got your value proposition and you’ve identified your target customer, you can create a market-defining story. This is a story that details how and why a customer decides to buy your product or service. It sets out not only the reason why people shop with you, but who they are and what they’re getting from you.

Set out your company culture

While your customers certainly form a vital part of your business mission, your employees are also very important too. Your business’s longevity is built on happy employees and a positive company culture, so it’s crucial that you outline this from the start.

This can include things like diversity and respect, with an emphasis on openness and honesty. Your customers are important, but your employees are the lifeblood in your business’s veins. Creating a positive environment where everyone can flourish is the starting point for true business success.

Part of your company culture will also lie in your social responsibility. Your CSR is more than just a statement of what your business or nonprofit stands for, it is the actions that make it true. Charity initiatives, community events, employee welfare commitments — all of these go towards your company’s social responsibility, and will form a significant strand of your mission.

But what if you’re a solopreneur? Your company culture still matters. This is because you should work in a business that you are proud of. What do you want from your workplace? It could be as simple as turning off your work devices after a certain time so you can spend time with your family. Even solo businesses need a positive company culture, so always strive to get satisfaction out of your work.

This aspect of your mission statement will help guide you as your brand grows further down the line. And remember, simply defining it isn’t enough. You need to make your words a reality by staying true to them everyday.

Always be flexible

Your mission is an important part of your small business. It’ll help guide you as you build your business, informing key decisions you make about your direction. You’ll refer back to it time and time again.

But while it’s important to always bear your mission statement in mind, it’s worth staying flexible. Your business will grow and develop with time, and you might see new avenues opening themselves up to you.

For example, before ecommerce software provider Shopify first appeared on the scene, its CEO, Tobias Lutke, was originally selling snowboards. As part of his business plan he needed a website, so he designed an online store that was easy to set up… then realizing how successful this could be as a SaaS product, he went full-time with it. And online retail giant Amazon originally started selling books…Today it sells anything and everything under the sun, as well as running a successful video streaming service. Finally, Finnish brand Nokia is best known as a mobile communications giant. But they had their humble roots in the paper mill industry. That’s quite the career change!

Your mission statement should never be set in stone — it will change. Stay flexible and stay open to new opportunities, but always keep your mission statement at the core of your business.

Once you’ve written your mission statement, you should go back and revisit it. Chop and change it to really make it the best it can be. Even months or years down the line, you may need to go back and redraft it as you face new challenges and situations. And you should always refer back to it with every new decision you have to make, making it the driving force behind everything you do.

Email Marketing: The Power of Personalization

I’m excited to introduce you to Caryl Anne Crowe, guest blogger from Allegra Marketing. She’ll go through an important piece on email marketing for business – personalization.

In today’s hyper-competitive business environment, business owners must find clever ways to attract new business prospects to their businesses. The use of newsletters is one of the oldest digital marketing methods that has been used by businesses. Most businesses send their newsletters and other business communications to their prospects and repeat customers via email. Communication aimed at persuading a prospect or a repeat client to buy what you are offering is termed marketing and since the communication is done via email, this type of marketing can be termed to be email marketing, also referred to as digital marketing. Granted, there are two modes of email marketing that business owners use in their campaigns, these include automated email marketing and personalized email marketing. In this article, we argue for the benefits of the latter – personalized email marketing.

What is Email Personalization?

In the context of email marketing, personalization can be defined as the act by which you target an email marketing campaign to a particular subscriber by using the information and data you have about the client. This information could include anything ranging from their name, where they live, the last product they bought from you, how many times they visit your website among others.

The degree of personalization can vary from basic to advanced. In basic personalization, you might want to use tactics such as the name of the subscriber on the subject line. You can employ advanced personalization by customizing the content of the email based on the location, gender and other personal details of the subscriber.

Benefits of Personalization

There are a number of benefits that accrue to businesses that personalize their email marketing campaigns:

Higher Conversion Rates Emails
A personalized subject line has a higher chance of being opened than one that is automated. Your goal as you send out these emails is to encourage the subscriber to open them and take some action. Therefore, you need to aim at your emails getting unique open and click rates. Remember, the higher the open and click rates, the higher the chances of the subscriber taking action and making a purchase.

Increasing Customer Retention
Email personalization has a way of making customers feel special. Remember, customers like having that feeling that you are talking to them and not at them. When you address a customer by his or her name, the customer will develop a feeling that you understand him or her and this will in turn earn you a loyal customer. Additionally, you can use the data you have on the customer to design an email that draws his or her attention to a product or an offer you think might interest him or her and this will in turn increase the chances of you getting a sale.

Anticipating Developments in Trends and Business
Use personalized email marketing to ready your clients of developments that will soon hit the market. For example, if you are into the fashion business, you might send out emails alerting them of a collection that you will be having in store soon. This will serve as an invite to them to partake in the offer.

How to Personalize Emails for Marketing

Having looked at the benefits of email personalization. Let us now turn our attention to the steps you can follow to design your own email marketing campaign:

Address the customer by his or her name.
Have a catchy subject line that you believe will resonate with the person of the subscriber.
Customize the content using the personal data you have on the subscriber.
Use fonts and colors that will be attractive to the subscriber e.g. pink for female subscribers and blue for male subscribers.

Which of these email personalization tips have worked for you? If you haven’t tried any of these, which one will you try?

Let us know in the comments!

Stomp Fear and Try Something New

In the past month, I found myself stretching my brain power in ways I’ve never imagined. I’m trying something new.

Let me rewind just a bit, I’ve always had an intense hate for math. In college, the counselor said I needed to take math as a pre-requisite and I loathed. I used every chance to move away from it. There was a deep feeling of powerlessness when math and I were in the same room. This feeling started since elementary school, I was never any good at it. At least, this was my preconceived notion.

Fast forward back to the past month, I’ve been praying for a new direction in life. I asked God to move me in His direction, to do His will. How can I do that with my life? I thought about going back to school, maybe a new course or certification will bring me new strengths or skills I need for my new journey.

Will I Stretch My Brain Power with a Course?

In a Facebook group, called Tech Ladies^®, they mentioned Udacity. Udacity is a website offering various types of tech courses: machine learning, AI, self-driving car engineering, digital marketing, programming, etc. So many amazing different technology-based courses! Many of the courses are part of nanodegree programs, which means in Udacity’s words:

“A nanodegree program is an innovative curriculum path that is outcome-based and career-oriented. Every program has a clear end-goal, and the ideal path to get you there. Courses are built with industry leaders like Google, AT&T, and Facebook, and are taught by leading subject matter experts. Students benefit from personalized mentoring and project-review throughout, and have regular access to instructors and course managers through moderated forums.”

Graduates earn an industry-recognized credential and benefit from extensive career support. The ultimate goal of a Nanodegree program is to teach the skills you need, for the career you want, so you can build the life you deserve. Sounds awesome, right?

I joined the notifications for scholarships to see what they had to offer as some members of Tech Ladies said they received one and loved it. I was thinking I’d enroll if anything digital marketing came up, you know, something easy that I’m familiar with.

After a while, I received notification that they were offering a Data Science scholarship. I checked it out and found that the prerequisites involved math. NOPE. Not doing it.

Although the Business Analyst nanodegree program seems interesting with ways to visualize data and learn methods to extract data. It intrigues me but… there’s math. Oh yeah, I’m definitely not applying. What for?! It lingered on my mind a bit and so I prayed on it. The next day I started to apply but then there were math related questions so I stopped. Then I received Udacity’s automated email letting me know I didn’t finish my application.

Yeah…yeah…yeah, I’m not doing it!

https://giphy.com/embed/TPl5N4Ci49ZQY

via GIPHY

Will I Let Fear Take Over or Stomp it Down?

Then I remembered all those times my kids told me that they weren’t any good at math and I would tell them to not lose confidence to keep trying.

I told myself I need to keep trying. I want to learn something new and I love looking at surveys and data. Anyway, what are the chances of me getting a scholarship? Right?! If God sees this being part of my life then I’ll get accepted. If I don’t get accepted then it’s not a big deal, it’s not God’s will for me.

I pushed through the application and thought about the notification date to recipients…occasionally. I didn’t want to overthink it. I wasn’t going to let fear take over me.

An Email Starts a New Journey with Udacity

Receiving an email from Udacity with the subject line below was shocking, to say the least.

Lillian, congratulations! You have been accepted into the Bertelsmann Data Science Scholarship program

All I could say was, “Lord, are you sure I can handle this?” Well, He knows what’s best! The email detailed that it was a challenge course. Yep! Definitely going to be a challenge I think.

I was thrilled, excited, shocked, and scared! A very emotional state of being for 7 whole days awaiting the details of how and where to start. They also provided this badge to share on social media, which I honestly did not share until recently because again fear set in – what if I don’t pass the course? I stomped that fear down and thankfully found so many other people in the course to be in my same situation. Moms at home with no data science background whatsoever, introverts, and people completely unsure if we’re in the right classroom. LOL

The course starts off with the rules and guidelines, which was very easy to follow. They open up a Slack messaging space for all participants to chat, create channels, and have AMA (Ask Me Anything) sessions with course moderators. This area is completely overwhelming!

Did I mention that there were 15,000 scholarship recipients? I’m very honored to be a part of this group. But imagine 15,000 people on Slack chatting and since it’s all new to them they are all asking the same questions. The moderators sure do have their work cut out for them. So. Many. People. With. Lots. Of. Questions. YIKES! The moderators are cool, calm, and collected with extreme patience and have ensured that the Slack area will soon slow down once everyone is in their studies.

It’s been almost a month and it has slowed down. Thank goodness!

There is a forum within the Udacity course area to chat and ask questions as needed. It’s a much quieter space in the forum, where I found other introverts. Yay!

There is also a Facebook group where I found many of the stay-at-home moms and other people who are not currently in the data science field. This was encouraging also as there are many people who are supportive.

Are You Ready to Stomp Fear and Try Something New?

I know this was a huge step for me to take but I’m not letting fear take over. So I give you this challenge – Try something new! Something that you are afraid of, take the plunge and do it. It could be for your personal or business life.

Let me know in the comments if you’re trying something new.

If you do plan to challenge yourself, say a prayer to let God lead and guide you.

Meet the Woman that Empowers Small Businesses to Create Visuals [Interview with Louise Myers]

Every entrepreneur and small business owner tend to find themselves stuck with visual marketing their business at one point or another. They then flock to Google and search for social media graphics or visual marketing tips. Guess who’ll they’ll find?! My good friend, Louise Myers! She has the best design and social media tips that are consistently updated and helps entrepreneurs the best way to DIY their visual marketing.

I met Louise through a blogging club years ago and I loved her posts from the beginning. From topics about blogging, Pinterest, and social media sizes, she has all the visual marketing tips people crave to learn more about visual content.

I found that we have a lot in common and she uses her faith in all areas of her life including her blog. I’ve shared Louise’s awesome posts with my email community and social platforms because each post provides so much value. I think it’s about time to interview her to dig deep into how she got started with her blog and what her passion is. Let’s get this interview started!

Interview with Louise Myers, Visual Marketing Expert

Listen to the interview or watch the interview at the end of the post.

What is your brand name?

Louise Myers Visual Social Media

What’s your website?

http://LouiseM.com

What is your brand mission?

My goal is to empower small business owners and bloggers to create their own graphics for social marketing success

What’s the story behind the mission?

When I lost some large corporate design clients, I realized that small business owners like myself couldn’t afford professional design services. I decided to encourage them to try the easy design tools available! And offer them ideas to inspire their content.

What type of people do you help?

Small business owners, including bloggers and social media managers!

What’s your big goal for this year?

Have more fun with my business, and take more time off! 🙂 As far as business goals, I plan to launch an affiliate marketing program and try promoted pins in the Fall, both for my 2019 Social Media Content Planner.

Do you feel satisfied on a spiritual or purposeful level?

I do, but am always trying to discern God’s will for my next moves. My blog, planner, and new business direction of the past few years is something I would never have expected 7 years ago when I started LouiseM.com

How can people get in touch with you?

Subscribe to my blog newsletter or follow me on Pinterest!

Video Interview with Louise Myers

Get your Visual Marketing Fix and Visit Louise

Isn’t Louise the sweetest gal? She is so helpful and all she wants to do is help entrepreneurs and small businesses out with her visual marketing tips. I encourage you to get to know her and visit her blog to get valuable information for your business. Don’t forget to sign up for her social media planner!