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Hire a Best Press Releases Agency – Step 11

You’ve launched an amazing product or service. Now what? Now, you need to get the word out.

But you’re on a budget and can’t afford the $10K a month to hire a fancy agency and put out press releases. That’s fine. You’re better off executing you’re on strategy or hiring a really awesome consultant.

When done well, good PR can be much more effective and less expensive than advertising. For cost-conscious businesses, ROI is crucial. Every penny spent on marketing should generate revenue. PR is no different. Here are the steps you should take to form a successful strategy for your business:

  1. LET GO OF THE AGENCY ALLURE

    The sad truth about PR is that existing process are broken. They’re outdated, costly, and inefficient.

    • Many agencies are still buying very expensive ‘media lists’ and blasting our press releases and pitches to hundreds of journalists at a time.
    • It’s hard for the PR industry to track and measure the value of what they do.
    • Press release blasts entirely miss the mark on target audiences.

    At Lean Startup Machine Weekend, part of my team’s exercise was to interview journalists about their experience with PR pitches. They all said that 90 percent of the sometimes hundreds of pitches they get a day are spam; totally irrelevant to what they write about.

    JANE BOLAND, PR consultant via American Express OPEN Forum

    To succeed with PR, you need to focus less on the appeal of an agency and focus more heavily to focus on results. Prioritize what you want to achieve, not outdated ‘best practices.’ If you want to get in front of journalists, for instance, you are likely better off forming 1:1 relationships than bombarding them with irrelevant pitches.

  2. KNOW WHEN PRESS RELEASES ARE WORTH IT

    A press release is worthwhile if your announcement is over-the-top catchy and newsworthy. But here’s the thing — most press releases read like giant sales pitches. If you think that journalists and publishers are going to be attracted to lukewarm content, guess again. They’re not. They don’t care. Their email inboxes fill up with 100s of spam messages again.

    We hate to say it but marketers — get your head out of the clouds. The world does not revolve around your business, and journalists could care less about what you have to say.

    If your goal is to get targeted placements for your brand, you will be better off cultivating a unique and thoughtful pitch in your area of specialty. A press release won’t cut it. Position your organization as a valuable, reliable, and trustworthy source of information instead.

  3. FOCUS ON BUILDING RELATIONSHIPS AND MAKING CONNECTIONS

    The problem with PR is ‘spray and prey’ or ‘broadcast’ mentality. If you shout at journalists with a megaphone, they’re not going to listen.

    Above all, journalists care about compelling stories. They want to hear about your founders’ emotional journeys. They want to know what problem your company is solving and what motivates your team to wake up and come to work in the mornings.

    Treat journalists like trusted business partners, not eyeballs. Develop a conversation. Let them ask questions.

    Know your 2-4 stories in and out. Hustle hard for the small, one-off mentions. These usually come as a result of work done on the business development and partnerships side of things.

    HEATHER ANNE CARSON, PR expert & co-founder at Onboardly

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Organic SEO – Improving and promoting Your Website – Step 10

SEO is less complex than marketers make it sound. We promise. The field has been around since the earliest days of the internet, and the goal has always been the same — to rank as high on search engine results pages (SERPs) as possible.

As you could imagine, the competition in this space became very cutthroat, as more and more companies realized how important it was to rank for certain keywords.

In February 2011, Google reached their breaking point, and released Panda — the first of a series of user experience-driven search engine updates.

Almost overnight, “thin” or “shady” sites folded. Chaos ensued as multi-million dollar web businesses lost a large proportion of their web traffic.

And the sites that came out on top?

These were the Wikipedias of the world that focused on building a genuine and healthy user experience. Tricks and tactics lost, while relevancy and quality won.

Which brings us to the most important lesson of SEO:

User experience is everything.

If you’re not focused on building a genuinely great product, your SEO will suffer. So here we are in a day and age where Google and Bing have put total power in the hands of consumers. User experience dominates the search engine market. SEO and strong marketing go hand in hand.

Search engines are constantly monitoring your website for key user experience cues. As much as your website, marketing, products, and services need to support a strong user experience, you need to make sure that your strengths translate into a language that search engines can fully understand.

And this pressure pushed people to do some real shady marketing — buying links, keyword stuffing, link farms, arbitrage, and who knows what else.

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Affiliate Marketing – Increase Your Sale – Step 9

Connections are the heart of online marketing. Affiliate programs take that concept to the next level.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could finalize the deal?

With affiliate marketing, you can.

Company A > Directs Customer to Company B > Transaction Occurs

Company A will earn a commission from the transaction on company B

Let’s say that you’re running a company that specializes in shoes. Your customer base knows that you’re a shoe expert but also values your input on other high quality products — like handbags. Maybe your customers have asked you about handbags, and you find yourself recommending the same options over and over again. As a shoe vendor, you’re acting as a marketer for the handbag company.

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Start Email Marketing – Build Personal Connections – Step 8

Think about it. When you send an email, you reach your audience in one of the most personalized ways possible. Our email inboxes are literally in the palms of our hands. We’re glued to email at work, after work, first thing in the morning, and right before bed. It’s an understatement to say that email is a powerful marketing channel.

Even with all the junk out there, email marketing still has ROI. According to an Econsultancy study, two-thirds of marketers rate the ROI from email marketing as ‘excellent’ or ‘good.’ Harvard Business Review did an analysiswith one detailer and discovered that the dollars earned per email sent was around $15.79 for sales generated in store and online.

It’s hard to believe that email marketing is so effective when there is so much spam out there. The marketers who come out on top will focus on three core concepts:

Content. Relevancy. Value.

The problem is, we’re also bombarded with spam. Take a look at your email inbox right now. Does it make you want to tear your hair out? Finding a great brand email can feel like a diamond in the rough. You’re literally looking for a unicorn. But they’re there.

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Find the best Paid Marketing Channel – Step 7

FIND CUSTOMERS THROUGH
PAID CHANNEL ADVERTISING

You might be surprised to learn that the paid channel advertising landscape is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. In 2011, the ad-supported Internetcontributed more than $500 billion to the United States economy.

Holy smokes. That’s a lot of spend. But what is the exact ROI?

The numbers alone tell us that this marketing channel far too robust to ignore, but more often than not, marketers are scared to take the plunge for two reasons:

  1. It costs money to get up and running and
  2. There’s a big chance you’ll lose money if you aren’t smart about your strategy.

Over 10 years ago I fell in love with PPC because it was the most measurable and optimizable marketing channel. Yet as PPC has become more and powerful and thus more optimizable, sadly, the average AdWords account manager is optimizing less stuff in their account — to the point where I believe that today, most AdWords accounts are dying of neglect.

LARRY KIM, PPC Blogger and Expert via WordStream

Paid channel advertising is a powerful marketing medium because it is measurable. It’s possible to calculate both a long-term and short-term value for how much revenue resulted from even one incoming website visit. You can also deploy targeting features to ensure that you’re reaching the right audiences.

LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Google all offer products for marketers looking to reach customers.

Which network should you use?

The answer to that question goes back to user psychology. Understand what people are doing when they’re using LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Google products. These details will help you determine which channels are the right fit for your brand and advertising message.

Paid channel marketing is something you’ve probably come across in some form or another. Other names for this topic include Search Engine Marketing (SEM), online advertising, or pay-per-click (PPC)marketing. Very often, marketers use these terms interchangeably to describe the same concept — traffic purchased through online ads.

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Build Audience Connnection With Content Marketing – Step 6

You’ve heard the term tossed around a million times. Content marketing. The phrase seems simple enough, but what exactly is it?

Content marketing is just what it sounds like. It’s the process of engaging and growing your customer base through high quality content.

Content marketing is an investment.

It’s part of a larger marketing framework.

It requires strategic insight.

It targets users across the entire conversion funnel.

It should be held accountable to a standard set of success metrics.

Content marketing is NOT social media, an intern’s job, or limited to a company blog. Like any other marketing practice, it requires commitment to systems and standards. It should be held accountable to measurable results.

Now that consumers are totally in control of the buying process, you are seeing enterprise brands working to adapt to that. The whole movement to get found in search, or drive online leads or create business opportunities with social media starts and ends with a content marketing strategy.

In order for any of that to work, enterprise brands have to have something meaningful to say that, in some way, links to their marketing and business objectives.

JOE PULIZZI, Founder and CEO at The Content Marketing Institute via
The Content Strategist

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Start of Conversion Rate Optimization – Step 5

Traffic acquisition is only half the marketing equation.

In addition to bringing visitors to your website, you need to keep them there. Not only that, you need to transform them from interested prospects into customers. Your website needs to move the relationship forward (and seal the deal).

And once they complete their first transactions?

Conversion optimization is the process of transforming new website visitors into paying customers — and first-time customers into repeat buyers.

This is a concept that every online marketer needs to thoroughly understand. If you don’t have a website (or marketing strategy)that’s optimized for conversions, you’ll end up wasting your web traffic.

Conversion optimization isn’t rocket science. In many ways, it’s common sense. But you need to actively think about what you’re doing. Know your best practices.

You need to convert your first-time visitors into repeat buyers.

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Now Find your Customers – Step 4

You’ve built an amazing website, mobile app, or online storefront. Your brick-and-mortar customers love you, and you have the Yelp reviews to promote.

Now what comes next?

If you build it, they will come.

It doesn’t matter how slick your website looks: If no one comes to it, good luck building that Web business.

JOHN BRANDON via Inc

Just kidding. If it were that easy, the multi-billion dollar internet industry would be totally useless.

Your website could be amazing, but it’s probably hiding in a digital dark corner where web traffic is like the lochness monster. As much as you want it to exist, it doesn’t.

So what should you do?

You need to actively think about how you’re going to bring new visitors to your website. You need to build your traffic acquisition strategy. From paid channel advertising to content marketing, you have a range of options. We’ll get to these topics but before we do, we want to explain a key concept:

Audience connections.

You need to leverage your traffic acquisition strategy to connect with the right audiences — people who are most likely to become paying customers.

If you’re new to online marketing, you’ll probably read a lot about blogging, paid channel advertising, and social media marketing. This guide is going to take a different approach — we’re going to give you the holistic education you need to build a powerful marketing framework. Traffic acquisition is so much more than your SEM strategy on Google AdWords. It’s the single-most important marketing strategy for reaching your target audiences.

So let’s get to it. Here’s a bird’s eye view of the traffic acquisition landscape.

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Tell Your Brand’s Story – Step 3

Tell Your Brand’s Story – Human-to-human connections are the heart and soul of business. At the end of the day, you’re dealing with people — your company is solving problems, alleviating pain points, and providing delightful customer experiences. Revenue is something that happens as a byproduct of a sound business model and a positive customer experience.

Storytelling is a powerful technique for building relationships. It’s an age-old concept that brings people together and keeps them engaged. It doesn’t matter where in the world you’re based or how much funding your startup has.

Good stories give big voices to small ventures. That’s why it’s mission-critical that companies take the time up front to fully develop their approaches to storytelling.

Good writing and content strategy makes products, and the marketing of those products, much better. When we do our jobs well, the things we launch are easier and more fun to use. We’ve seen how changing copy can positively impact sign-ups, engagement and sentiment.

TIFFANI JONES BROWN, Content Strategy Lead at
Pinterest via Contently

Storytelling and marketing go hand-in-hand. Just think about it. Whether you’re producing infographics, writing copy for a Facebook ad, or writing a free online guide(like this one), you need to capture your audience’s attention.

On a daily basis, consumers (yourself included) face advertising overload. Marketers are constantly competing for their prospects’ and customers’ attention. More likely than not, your brand will be buried under spammy advertising messages.

How can you make your brand stand out? Storytelling.

Chapter 3 is an all-inclusive guide that explains why your brand should prioritize storytelling and how your organization should get started. This is not fluffy stuff, either. Storytelling is a powerful and actionable marketing technique. Convinced? Let’s get to it.

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Know Your Marketing Framework – Step 2

Now, you need to build a scalable, sustainable marketing engine. Think about it:

  • You wouldn’t build a house without a blueprint.
  • You wouldn’t start a business without a business plan.
  • You wouldn’t take a road trip without your navigation system.
  • You wouldn’t build an online app without wireframing the UX.
  • And you wouldn’t spend six figures on a house without knowing what you’re buying.

Why should your marketing plan be any different?

Whether you’re spending $100 on Facebook ads or $100K on customer education videos, you need a carefully planned strategy. Trust what we say when we tell you that spray and pray is not an effective approach to marketing. Every marketing plan needs to start with the results that you want to achieve. ROI is not a guessing game.

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