How to Market Your Small Business in Today’s Digital Space: Part II

The last time Paul Kortman came onto the Magnificent Marketing podcast, he had so much valuable information that we ran out of time. And yet, there was so much more that he had to offer.

Thankfully, he agreed to come back and offer some digital marketing strategies for small business owners.

If you’re not familiar with Paul’s work, he’s the owner of Connex Social. This is a digital marketing agency that specializes in increasing conversions and quality traffic. He is committed to achieving his client’s business goals through solid strategy and on-time tactics every single time.

And I have to say – the guy knows what he is talking about. The strategies he recommends are pure gold. Start implementing them and you’ll notice a change in your digital marketing results.

Paul Kortman Shares Five Strategies That Are Essential in Our Digital Space

In Part II of our conversation, Paul offers these five digital marketing strategies that small business owners will find are essential to their company’s growth and success.

1. Start Producing Videos Regularly

Video is becoming increasingly important in our digital age. More companies are utilizing this medium to get in front of potential customers and to establish themselves as experts in their field.

Something that I thought was especially interesting in our conversation was this: Paul doesn’t recommend switching over solely to video.

Some people have been doing this, thinking that it’s the wave of the future.

Well, they’re half right. Video marketing is one of the best ways to market your business. However, it’s important to remember that not everyone is a visual learner. Some people process information better by reading it, while others prefer audio content to visual.

It’s important to remember, too, that people can’t watch videos whenever they want to. If they’re at work or in a public place and don’t have ear buds/earphones, their best option is to read content.

So, the goal here is to offer a nice mix of digital content: Audio, video, and written content. Doing so allows you to appeal to a wider audience.

2. Make Introductory, Testimonial, and How To Videos

When you do make videos, though, what type should you make?

Paul pointed to some of the mistakes people make with video, like talking only about what the business does. Not only can this be an incredibly boring way to make a video, it doesn’t speak to what matters most to the customer: What’s in it for them.

Another mistake is making super long videos. In the world of digital marketing, a five minute video can seem like an eternity. People just don’t have the patience for that, especially when they’re just learning about a new company.

Paul offered the following tips.

·        Make an introductory video describing what your company can do for customers.

·        Keep your videos short. Introductory videos should be 30-60 seconds.

·        Create How To videos. For instance, a shoe repair shop could make a video about how to repair shoes. You may wonder, though – won’t this take business away from them? Actually, it’s the opposite. People may try their hand at the info in your video but realize they just aren’t good at it or don’t have the time for it. In other words, they learn that they’d rather pay someone (you!) to do the work for them.

3. LinkedIn Is a Golden Marketing Opportunity

The most interesting tip about LinkedIn that Paul shared with me was this: View your LinkedIn profile as a mini sales page as opposed to a resume. If you’re a coach, people who are looking for your type of services won’t care that you worked at McDonald’s when you were a teenager.

Make sure your profile shows potential customers what you can do for them, what value you can provide for them.

4. Collaborate with Other Business Owners

This doesn’t necessarily mean collaborate with your competition. Instead, collaborate with business owners who are in the same sphere, or similar network, as you. These are the folks who provide a product or service that your target audience would be interested in.

Collaboration is all about sharing. You do something for them, they do something for you.

You can collaborate by working on a webinar or podcast together, or writing guest blog posts. You will promote their content on your site, and they’ll promote yours on their site.

5. Encourage Your Clients to Write Online Reviews

Is your client happy with the work you did? Great – go outside of your comfort zone and ask for a review on Yelp.com or LinkedIn.

It can be intimidating to ask for a review, but think of it this way – they’re happy and most likely happy to tell others about you. And if they say no – fine. But the more you try, the more people will end up saying yes.

Keep Learning, Keep Growing As the Digital Market Evolves

Digital marketing is constantly evolving. It seems like only yesterday written content was the best way to reach potential clients. These days, it’s a mix of video, audio, and the written word.

In closing our conversation, I asked Paul about his predictions for the future of digital marketing. He told me that voice search is and will continue to be an important part of marketing.

With Siri and now Alexa, more people are searching for online information by speaking instead of typing. The technology isn’t perfect yet and can, at times, be somewhat frustrating. But technology is always changing and improving. At some point, the majority of online searches may be through one of these devices.

And that will change how we create digital content. Why? It’s simple – people tend to speak differently than they type. This will change how we utilize keywords and put information in front of people.

This is why it’s so important to keep educating yourself. We all need to do this. Learn what the trends are, and then find out how to utilize them in your business. Doing so will ensure that you always stay in front of your target market.

Do you want to get helpful tips about online marketing on a regular basis? Paul can be found on LinkedIn and Twitter. His posts will keep you up to date with the latest digital marketing trends

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ABOUT PAUL KORTMAN

I’m just a regular guy. A follower of Jesus from Michigan in the US. My story is unique just like yours. This blog varies from stories about my family and struggles with raising our kids to helpful technical articles. This is just me in zeros and ones.

Top Quick Wins for your Content Marketing

Content marketing is a marathon rather than a sprint. Almost everything you do is about long-term results that fuel the growth of your business.

However, this doesn’t mean that quick wins are inapplicable here. In fact, there’s actually a lot one can do to create some momentum immediately.

In this article, we’ll talk about top quick wins that you can use for your content marketing strategy and obtain appreciable results right away.

1. Use Pop-ups to Drive Immediate Results

The most important goal of any marketer is to convert more leads into customers. Unfortunately, most people are hit-and-run visitors. For example, they find your website, read something there, and leave quickly. They don’t interact with the content and don’t provide any contact information.

This problem should be fixed. You can install a popup plugin like SumoMe which makes it easier for visitors to share your content and join your email list.

2. Grab New Content Ideas

Struggling to get new ideas for your content? Not enough time to research industry news and trends? No worries, you can find new ideas by using the following tools:

• Hubspot’s Blog Ideas Generator. Fill in three fields with nouns you’d like to write about, and the tool generates relevant titles for articles.
• Portent’s Content Idea Generator. Another great title maker that requires only a subject of potential articles.
• HARO. Provides a database of sources for upcoming stories and daily opportunities for sources.

3. Reduce Size of Your Images to Improve Website Speed

Website performance is a critical SEO and user experience factor. Even an insignificant delay in a couple of seconds can cause visitors to lose patience and leave. “Imagine a customer having an urgent request,” says Cameron Suarez, a B2C marketer. “I had one customer requesting “write my essay!” in the middle of the night because he had to turn it in the next day… Do you think that customer had time to sit around and wait for websites to load?”

Let’s test your website by using awesome performance tool called Page Weight by imgIX.

If the tool says that your website could lose some weight to improve performance, you can do the following to resolve this concern:

• Convert images to JPG with Free Online Images Converter. It uses a combination of the best optimization and compression algorithms to reduce the size of images (keep your largest images around 2000 pixels)
• Read Optimization tips for Images from Google
• Use image optimizer Kraken.io.

4. Avoid Stock Photography

Regardless whether you’re doing business in photo industry or not, you should go for real, unique photos taken or bought by you. Why? Because stock photos are everywhere on the Internet; they’re free and many websites use them. If a visitor sees the same image he or she saw on seven other websites, it is very likely that the trust to you will be undermined.

So, hire a professional photographer or buy unique photos to increase trust of visitors.

5. Test Page Load Times to Improve User Experience

Customers do not like to wait not even an extra second. Yes, even though one can binge-watch an entire season of TV show at a moment’s notice, one gets really frustrated to wait for five seconds in order for a website to load.

As you can see, every second counts. So, it’s a good idea to test the speed of your website and see if the visitors get a pleasant experience browsing it.

PageSpeed tools. These are the tools developed by Google, so they’re probably your best bet.

Pingdom Website Speed Test. Cost-effective and reliable uptime and performance monitoring tool.

6. Focus on the Right Content Type

There are a number of different content types you can use in your content marketing strategy, including infographics, how-to articles, lists, videos, and others. Are some of them more popular than others?

Yes, according to data provided by Odork and Buzzsumo.

As you can see from the graph, internet users prefer infographics and list-based articles. That’s why you should design the content which is popular at the moment. For example, you can use Infographic Maker by Canva or Vengage to produce beautiful infographics your visitors will love.

7. Make Your CTAs More Effective

If you’re looking to increase the effectiveness of CTA buttons of your website, there are some techniques you can choose:

• Use a button in a contrasting color
• Address the viewer’s fear of commitment by including text like “no credit card required,” “no commitment,” or “no loopholes” near CTAs.
• Use clear language without an element of burden: “download here,” “subscribe to get,” and “check out.”

In Conclusion

The full implementation of these quick wins takes minutes but it can go a long way in improving the overall performance of your content marketing.

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About Tom Jager

Tom Jager is professional blogger. He works at Awriter.  He has degree in Law and English literature. Tom has written numerous articles/online journals. You can reach him at G+  or  Facebook.

Grow Your Business with Smart Automation Tactics

To entrepreneurs and their marketing and sales teams, the concept of automation is a fascinating one.

Just imagine – robots doing what people used to do.

This technology cuts way down on the “busy work” of content marketing that many marketing and sales teams have had to do, taking them away from other important tasks.

Content marketing takes a lot of time and effort. And the amount of time and effort a company invests has increased over the past few years because the internet has become so saturated with content.

So when automated systems were introduced, a lot of companies jumped on the bandwagon.

Some had great success. Many, though, haven’t.

What has contributed to their automation failure? And what tactics can your marketing and sales teams implement that will actually see results?

That’s what I discussed with marketing expert and award-winning blogger, Matt Heinz.

Why Automation Isn’t Working for So Many Companies

In working with big companies (like Amazon and The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) is that budgets for content marketing have been on the rise. This is great because content marketing is one of the best ways to reach out to clients and prospects.

However, Matt’s noticed a worrying trend – the spending increases and content proliferates, but the companies aren’t seen a commensurate tie between that content and their business results.

His theory is that companies are putting out a ton of “crappy” blog posts that make the companies feel good because they’re getting clicks and web traffic. However, that content and traffic aren’t actively translating into business value.

To Matt, marketing automation is the means of creating consistency and repeatability of certain actions that connect the right content to the right prospect at the right time.

But a lot of companies tend to look at automation as “set it and forget it.”

Good marketing and sales technology mean automating something that robots can do better and more efficiently than humans. The robot can be on the lookout for and track your prospects activities.

They can even take care of some of the follow-up work, like sending the next email in your drip campaign when a client takes a certain action, like downloading a white paper or signing up for your newsletters.

But robots aren’t going to (and shouldn’t!) replace what Matt calls “the human touch.”

Prospects don’t want to communicate with robots – they want to communicate with people.

Therefore, the idea that a robot can take care of complex sales needs is a fallacy.

Yet, many companies think that once they purchase their automation software that’s all there is to it. The robot will take care of everything.

There’s so much more to it, though, if a company is to be truly successful, see growth, and garner repeat customers.

Automation Tactics That Will Help Your Business Grow

How can we take advantage of automation technology without losing the human touch?

The first thing we need to do is slow down and come up with a strategy.

To do that, ask yourself these questions.

• What does success look like? What is my ultimate goal? (This is usually a sales or revenue number.)

• Who is my ideal customer?

• What are the issues they care about?

• What type of content will you create to fit each stage of the purchasing journey to engage prospects?

Matt made a really good point: before you can sell to someone, you have to have their attention. What are you going to do to earn and keep their attention?

At this stage, it’s best to forget about technology altogether. Right now, the focus is on the client – their needs, their concerns, what they’re trying to accomplish in their life and/or business.

If you address that in your content, you’re more likely to get their attention and get them interested in a particular topic.

The next step is to consider what else you can share with them that is relative to their topic of interest.

Once you’ve figured out what is going to interest your customers at different stages of the sales process – then you can create something that is scalable and repeatable that marketing automation can now help with.

During these initial strategy stages, both the sales and marketing teams need to be involved. They have a good idea of what kind of persona you want to market to and how you’re going to accomplish this.

Then, have your teams figure out when and what the marketing teams should put in front of prospects, as well as when and how the sales team should engage with customers.

Your Key to Success: Everything Should Be Client-Centric

When it comes to marketing, a lot of companies get really caught up in everything they need to get done – their ever-growing To Do list. What they forget to think about is why they’re doing what they’re doing and for whom.

Matt repeatedly told me (and this is something I’m hearing from a lot of marketing experts these days) that we need to make sure we stay client-centric.

One-size does not fit all when it comes to sales and marketing.

Different people want different things for different reasons and at different times.

The goal of a marketing campaign is to get the right information to the right people at the right time.

Always think about your ideal customer – the customer you want to sell to, the customer who really needs your product, and the customer that you want coming back again and again.

Remembering that your clients are people with needs and desires just like you can make that easier. Think about how your product will serve a person or company. Now think about what other ways you can help them once they have your product.

Start with this and you will start to see successful automated marketing campaigns, as well as the business growth you’ve been wanting.

Would you like to learn more from my award-winning guest, Matt Heinz? Be sure to subscribe to his blog and follow him on Twitter. You won’t be sorry

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ABOUT MATT HEINZ

Prolific author and nationally recognized, award-winning blogger, Matt Heinz is President and Founder of Heinz Marketing with 15 years of marketing, business development and sales experience from a variety of organizations and industries. Matt’s career focuses on consistently delivering measurable results with greater sales, revenue growth, product success and customer loyalty. Matt is a repeat winner of Top 50 Most Influential People in Sales Lead Management and Top 50 Sales & Marketing Influencers.  

7 Strategies to Develop Content that Ranks Quickly in the SERPs

In March 2016, Google has confirmed that links and content represent the two most important factors which influence your website’s rankings. What could that mean for contemporary content marketers and website owners? I see it pretty simple. You build high-quality links and publish high-quality content on a regular basis, and Google will reward you. Really simple!

However, things get complicated when you need to start the actual work. Or you might have started it and the results might have been disappointing. Nevertheless, developing top-notch quality content is more like a combination of art and skill.

You need to have the proper knowledge and the genuine commitment to practice consistently. You can only become better at content development if you keep doing it constantly. As you go, optimize your process and learn new things as new experiences show up.

In today’s post, we’re going to explore several effective strategies for developing excellent content which will have a tremendously positive impact on your SEO marketing performance. In short, we’ll help you write the type of content that Google and all the other important search engines favor through their algorithms. Let’s begin:

1.     Write Unique Content – All The Time

Let me share a simple yet very important rule: whenever you post content online, it should be 100% unique. That might confuse some of you, so let me put it another way. You can’t write content that has been previously posted online, so stay away from copy-pasting exact phrases. There’s a lot of software that detects duplicated content, and Google knows very well whether you wrote it by yourself or copied it from somewhere else.

Therefore, even though you may get some inspiration from other blogs, you should present the information from a different perspective. Create an outline and follow it strictly.

2.     Develop Content with Unique Value Inside

Unique value is different from unique content. Unique content means not copying someone else’s work, while unique value means showing a website visitor something else. Something out-of-the-box. Something they haven’t seen on any other website or brand. You see, this is an aspect that differentiates your brand from the rest. The unique value you provide is super important for a prosperous growth!

Here are some clues on how to make your content unique and valuable at the same time:

• Make it helpful – It has to deliver solutions to problems and needs.
• Make it relevant to your specific audience – write for your audience only. You can’t solve everyone’s problems so don’t even try to do so. Focus on being relevant to a specific audience only.
• Make it unique – Bring something unique from your own personality, or approach a topic from a different angle.

3.     Make Your Website’s Pages High Quality

Content creation and distribution is your first step. Then, you need to make sure that your website visitors will have a great user experience, which means that they’ll be able to go through your website’s pages without problems. You cannot permit any errors and mistakes such as broken pages and broken links.

Moreover, you need to optimize your website’s loading speed. Your users want to find information quickly. If your pages are loading slowly, many visitors will just leave because they’ll be annoyed. That will affect your brand’s reputation and therefore your business performance.

4.     Make Your Content “Shareable”

To make your content shareable means to make it likable to the public. In order for it to be so, it has to be very simple to grasp, usually short (but not always), and it should be extremely relevant to a specific audience. For example, if you are targeting individuals who need counseling, you need to make your content emotional so they can open themselves up.

Mara Hudson, SEO Professional at EduGeeksClub, suggests:

“When you manage to make your readers feel emotional, they’ll immediately want to share the piece of content which impressed them. Make your content remarkable. That means worth remarking, so you can’t come up with something that everyone’s talking about. Develop a unique angle and you’ll capture your audience’s attention!”

5.     Publish Only Impeccable Content

Impeccable content is error-free. Google doesn’t really appreciate webmasters who neglect their content. To neglect your content means to neglect your business and your customers. Therefore, you’ll be penalized whenever search engine crawlers detect misspelling and misuse of words and sentences.

You can avoid this problem by allowing different tools and software to aid you in your content development process. For example, tools like Grammarly or ProWritingAid can make your life so much easier. You can adapt them to your Word Processor and check your grammar as you type.

6.     Pay Attention to Keywords

Many bloggers and website owners are trying to be “perfect” in the eyes of Google. How do they do that? Well, they try to find the “perfect keyword density”, an aspect which is almost impossible to get right. Google always changes its algorithms, so agonizing over your keyword usage is going to get you stuck.

Google is very fair at judging a website’s content value. Here’s what you need to know: you need to optimize your content and you need to use the right keywords. But like with anything in life, exaggerating will do more harm than good. One of Google’s webmasters suggested that keywords overstuffing decreases your website’s rankings, so stay out of the danger zone!

7.     Figure Out the User’s Intent

When people search something on Google, they are obviously looking for something. Let’s dig deeper. That “something” is probably the solution to a problem or the fulfillment of a need. You need to find information regarding a local place? That’s a need. You want to play a game? A need. You need to learn how to cook? That’s a solution to a problem (of not knowing how to make your own food).

You see, everyone’s looking for answers. Therefore, your content needs to be optimized for the user’s intent. You must know your audience very well, you must detect their needs and wants, and you must know their most common problems. If you are able to figure that out, you’ll have no problem with leading them towards the right solutions.

Google truly appreciates content that solves problems, and they see it through the reflection of your website’s high engagement and social performance.

Takeaways

Developing high-quality content comes with a price. You need to commit to a journey, a learning curve, and maybe many challenges. However, that shouldn’t scare you off. Every failure represents an opportunity to learn and do better next time. No one’s rushing you, so you can take your time learning how to expose your information better all the time. Good luck!

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About Antonio

Antonio is a marketing specialist and a blogger. He loves writing about SMM, marketing, education and productivity. He's also crazy about riding his bike and bumping into new people (when he's on foot). He will be happy to meet you on Facebook and Twitter.