Tag Archives: content marketing

Personal Branding: How to Make Your Mark [Infographic]

7 ways to make your mark- personal branding.

7 ways to make your mark- personal branding.
Should you market yourself? Competition is tough in most industries, so you’ll need personal branding to stand out.

Personal branding refers to how you market your skills and experience to the world. It’s not too far off from promoting a product or service. The only difference is that you’re advertising yourself. It can help fill gaps in your resume, stand out from competitors and manage how others perceive you.

7 Tips for Marketing yourself

1. Find your Niche

To develop a personal brand, start with finding your niche. Where do you excel? What topics are you an authority on? What is your expertise? Your brand should start with something you are good at or qualified to give advice on.

2. Choose a Target Audience

Next, who do you want to appeal to? A product or service has a specific audience. You have one, too. Don’t try to cater to a wide audience. Determine who your target audience is.

3. Build a Brand Personality

When you know your strengths and your audience, it’s time to build your brand personality. However, you choose to present yourself, be authentic. You are your brand.

4. Create Relevant Content

On the heels of your brand personality is your brand equity, which refers to the worth of your brand. To cultivate brand equity, create relevant and interesting content. You have a variety of channels to choose from. You can write blog posts, publish newsletters, design infographics, shoot videos, and host podcasts. Also, share content from other key players in your specific niche.

Check out this infographic below to learn about tips 5,6, and 7 along with tips for success from moguls like Elon Musk and Rhianna.

[infographic] Increase Traffic and Convert Leads with Inbound Marketing

Increase-Traffic-and-Convert-Leads-with-Inbound-Marketing-315

Increase-Traffic-and-Convert-Leads-with-Inbound-Marketing-315Many SMBs are shifting to inbound marketing. It’s easy to measure and promises a greater return on investment (ROI) compared to traditional strategies. Here’s how to set up your inbound campaign for success.

Attract Visitors with Compelling Content

Content marketing involves using content to attract visitors and increase site traffic. There are several types of content to consider. Including,  blog posts, white papers, e-books, infographics, and videos just to name a few. Don’t forget to optimize your content for search engines (SEO) and promote them on social media.

Convert Visitors to Leads and Nurture your Relationships

To convert visitors to leads, you need landing pages. If need be, find a professional to help you create highly effective landing pages. Every visitor who provides their contact information on the landing pages is automatically added to your contact list and becomes a lead. For example, the two best tools for lead nurturing are social media and email marketing.

Convert Qualified Leads to Customers And Build Loyalty

Inbound marketing is tailored in such a way that you can know who’s just looking around, who’s shopping, and who’s ready to buy. Furthermore, it’s imperative that you close those who are ready to buy without delay. The content marketing campaign should help build loyalty in due course. Meanwhile, take time to analyze the inbound strategy, identify weak points, and adjust as necessary.

Thanks to The Whole Brain Group for this informative infographic.

How to Use Video Content for Different Marketing Goals

How-to-Use-Video-Content-for-Different-Marketing-Goals-315

How-to-Use-Video-Content-for-Different-Marketing-Goals-315

People love to watch videos. Notice the astonishing amount of videos whenever you scroll through your Facebook news feed? It’s pretty hard not to watch even just one clip. That’s not surprising since Facebook alone is being populated by videos. Meanwhile, YouTube pulls in 1.8 billion users monthly and counting.

Indeed, videos are dominating the digital space, particularly social media. User watch videos to entertain themselves and learn new things. The power of sharing allows social media users to distribute videos to their friends and network. This makes video an incredible marketing tool.

Video Content for Different Marketing Goals

Digital marketers know how powerful videos are in engaging their target audience in every stage of the customer journey. In a simple yet amusing way, it can draw attention to your business, engage potential customers, and influence their action.

In fact, video content has been proven effective in helping businesses increase their conversions. Statistics gathered by Wyzowl concluded that “72% of businesses who use video believe that it has improved the conversion rate of their website”.

Video marketing campaigns can also help launch your brand forward and boost brand awareness. Posting video content on your social media pages can draw in hundreds, even thousands of views.

Using videos, you can share your brand story, values, and services in a way your audience can better understand and connect with your business.  According to statistics, users love to share, so a video that resonates well with your audience will more likely be shared on their new feed or chat groups, allowing you to reach a wider audience.

Before you outsource video content services or create your own, it’s important that you pin down your marketing goal first to know the type of video content that will meet your specific objective. To help you, here’s an infographic by MicroCreatives that illustrates the types of video content for different marketing goals.

Stats To Understand SEO in 2018 [Infographic]

Stats-To-Understand-SEO-in-2018-315

Stats-To-Understand-SEO-in-2018-315SEO is always changing, so it’s advisable to keep up with the latest trends. For 2018, here are some important factors that influence ranking:

Bounce rate

A rank-1 site’s bounce rate is generally 8.7% lower than a rank-10 site’s bounce rate. A low bounce rate means people are staying on the site longer.

Backlink profile

Sites with higher ranking have almost six times more backlinks compared to sites with a lower ranking. More backlinks imply the site is seen as an authority within its niche.

Click-through rate

Higher CTR translates to higher rankings. A good CTR is proof that a site’s ads are relevant and helpful.

Content quality

Google favors long-form content (think almost 2000 words) over shorter articles. Informative content without the fluff wins over keyword stuffing, an old and outdated SEO tactic.

Page speed

Top-ranking sites have an average speed of 1900 ms, which is 17% faster than other sites. People tend to abandon slow sites, resulting in a higher bounce rate.

Photo usage

Websites on the first page of results have at least one image featured on their page. Visual appeal attracts and retains more visitors.

SSL security

Around 27% of the top 10 search results use HTTP Secure (HTTPS). Security matters to people and search engines.

Who knows what 2019 will bring, but for now, paying attention to these influencing factors will keep your site competitive.

Thanks to our friends at seotribunal.com for this interesting infographic on SEO Stats in 2018!

 

Additional Resources:

4 Reasons Why Your Social Media Strategy is Failing

4-Reasons-Why-Your-Social-Media-Strategy-is-Failing-315

4-Reasons-Why-Your-Social-Media-Strategy-is-Failing-315

Is your social media strategy failing? Would you like to fix it?

If your social media strategy is failing, you’re not alone as only 12% of companies feel they are using social media effectively.

Many companies struggle with social media because they are making some easily avoidable mistakes while executing their strategies. Therefore, in this article, I am going to list out what they are and how you can rectify them…

#1 You don’t update it often enough

If your social media strategy is based on what worked a few months ago, then, of course, it is going to fail. Social media is constantly changing.

Every social network will regularly update their algorithms, design, user interface, rules, etc.

Take Facebook, for example, they have altered their algorithm several times. Earlier when organic reach was high you could post content directly and drive high levels of engagement and traffic. Hence, lots of businesses did this.

But since 2014 when organic reach drastically declined some businesses evolved. They began investing in ads along with organic methods. They also modified their strategy to include other social networks like Pinterest, Snapchat, and Instagram which drive more engagement.

Those that paid attention and evolved are still thriving while those that still follow the strategies that worked before 2014 are failing.

Hence, stay updated with the latest social media changes by subscribing to official social media blogs and other social media news websites.

Also, keep an eye on your social media analytics to make sure engagement is regularly increasing.

And every time you get a hold of the latest news and statistics, modify your strategy to suit the social networks and your audience.

#2 Your content isn’t good enough

Years back businesses didn’t know the importance of content in social media marketing. They only shared links to their products on social media and hoped for sales.

Now businesses understand the integral role content plays. Therefore, a lot of them are creating it. In a month around 80 million blog posts are published on WordPress blogs alone.

4-Reasons-Why-Your-Social-Media-Strategy-is-Failing-3

But the problem is that most of them are creating content just for the sake of it. It’s not good enough.

To stand out from the sea of content, your content should be among the best.

One way to do this is by writing longer blog posts. Blog posts that are longer than 3,000 words get the most shares.

4-Reasons-Why-Your-Social-Media-Strategy-is-Failing-2

Most people write blog posts that are less than 1,000 words long. Therefore, when you write longer more informative posts you will easily stand out from the competition and drive more shares on social media.

Someone who creates long-form content regularly is Neil Patel. An example is this post, Social Media Marketing Made Simple. It is more than 3,000 words long.

4-Reasons-Why-Your-Social-Media-Strategy-is-Failing-1

Neil writes long posts just like this one on a regular basis. They also contain quality information all throughout.

You too should begin investing more time writing blog posts like this one.

#3 You don’t have a properly planned funnel

Many businesses have realized the importance of capturing leads as email is nearly 40 times more effective than social media in the acquisition of customers.

4-Reasons-Why-Your-Social-Media-Strategy-is-Failing-5

This is why when you visit most blogs these days there are several lead-capturing forms.

Once the person signs up they are sent a welcome email and their nurturing process stops right there. After that, the only emails they send are sales emails promoting their products and services.

If you want to stand out from the competition here too you should send out a series of educative emails containing several more tips.

They should be shared in a series of 4 to 5 emails. These tips will build trust and help you establish yourself as an authority on the topic.

You should also continue sending out more content to read once a week at least.

These emails, your lead capturing method, your content and social media comprise to form a basic funnel. Most people don’t plan this out properly and run them separately.

If you share quality content and build a strong relationship with your audience this way your sales email that is interspersed with educative emails will perform a lot better.

Hence, plan and set up a funnel from today onwards instead of only using social media to drive traffic and capture leads.

4-Reasons-Why-Your-Social-Media-Strategy-is-Failing-4

For detailed tips on how to build a funnel check out this free course, Email List Building, from Leadpages. I have been a subscriber to the Leadpages newsletter for a long and I can assure you they have a wealth of information on running funnels.

#4 You aren’t social

I have come across several social media pages that post quality content and drive tons of engagement in the forms of reshares, likes and comments. But the mistake they make here is not engaging back.

Social media is all about being social. If you want your social networks to bring in top quality results, you should engage back with people by thanking them for resharing your content and responding to comments.

When your social media management plan places an emphasis on communicating back it shows people that they are an important part of the community. This will encourage them to engage with your content in the future as well.

Therefore, from today onwards set a little time aside to engage back with your social media followers.

Now fix your social media strategy

These are the mistakes businesses regularly make with their social media strategies. Use my above tips to rectify your current strategy and avoid making them in the future.

What mistakes have you noticed others make with their social media strategies? How can they fix them? Please leave your comments below.