Content Marketing

I have been experimenting with lead magnets and using Beacon.by to create them. They work really well. And I found that adding a few tweaks to my page made them even better.

How many types of Marketing are there? Are they unique? How do they interact and help?

Campaigns are key to marketing planning. And that includes every piece of content.

I read “Guerrilla Marketing in 30 Days”, written by Jay Conrad Levinson and Al Lautenslager. Rather than write a review. I uploaded my notes.

I read “A History of Advertising”, written by Henry Sampson in 1874 and there were some useful notions that have carried through the years and remain applicable in today’s world of Social Media.

One way to learn any subject is to try and model success. Find people who you believe are successful, deconstruct their methods, adapt them and apply them to your situation. But ‘Success’ in marketing is to evaluate.

What is Success?

With marketing this can be hard:

• how do you know they are successful
• are they ‘popular’ or are they converting

‘Success’ in marketing is hard enough to evaluate anyway.

The problem with social media I encounter is not ‘creating the content’, the problem is ‘finding the time to promote the content’.

I try and address this by:

• re-purposing content
• syndicating content

If you want to “Growth Hack”, don’t spam people, instead try to add value and draw them in.

Marketing requires Attention.

Platforms provide ‘reach’.

Content is either curated or created. But we try to add value when we curate, so curation involves some creation.

I found myself this morning making a statement that summarised what I thought the fundamental difference was between Twitter and Instagram.

“Twitter is for sharing links to content. Instagram is for sharing content.”

Clearly that is too wild a summary but at a fundamental level…

HARO (Help a Reporter Out) is a service where ‘reporters’, or people looking for sources for quotes and content, can post a query, and then choose from response answers. If your answer is successful then your quote might appear in an article with a reciprocal link back to your content.

Getting business when you are a Digital Marketing Company can be hard. Cold calling might help, when done correctly.

The Linkedin platform changes all the time, and not all the changes are to maximise user interaction.

To write a linkedin pulse article, I found the process less than intuitive:

• Choose the “See posts” from your profile drop down
• Choose “Your Drafts” from the menu on the left
• Either Choose an earlier draft, or start writing

One of the easiest ways to expand your content reach is to target a new platform, or use new capabilities on an existing platform.

When I started learning marketing it seemed as though the first thing you had to do was build a marketing plan and to do that you had to identify your Unique Selling Point and build everything around that.

But that’s a hard place to start.

We need to go beyond organic traffic and hashtags if we want to convert from a Marketing relationship, into a Sales relationship. One bridge for this transition is a Call to Action post.

I’m learning all of this as I go to support my business so I’m less concerned about formal definitions, and more concerned about practical application that achieves results.

But I still need to distinguish between terms like Sales, Marketing, Branding… so here we go.

I use tools that monitor my social media accounts and send me emails about how I’m doing.

They do not auto tweet vanity metrics on my behalf. I suggest you switch off the vanity metric auto reporting.

I’ve noticed that many of the marketing companies that I see on Twitter and Instagram, particularly on Instagram, don’t create a lot of content.

I had to think about what they were doing, and the term Engagement Driven Marketing popped into my head. I’ll explain what I mean.

Sometimes you are operating without a specific campaign, or during a campaign you want to take a break from the main campaign but you still want to maintain awareness.

Engage in a Holding Pattern or a “Don’t Forget About Me Campaign”.

You can pretty much move from any piece of content to any other piece of content.

Longer content (e.g. presentations, talks, ebooks, blog posts) are converted to smaller pieces of summary or promotional content.

Strategy is different from Tactics.

Strategy is your longer term aim and vision.

You can use multiple tactics for implementing a strategy. You can change your mind about what tactics you use and experiment with new approaches - all the while keeping to the same strategy.

The two main reasons why I unsubscribed from your content:

• You put out too much content
• You put out irrelevant content

Don’t do either of these (hopefully I haven’t done either here).