Tag: Marketing

This Is Why Email Marketing Still Outperforms Social Media

Patiently building your email list and perfecting how you use it remains your single best marketing channel: This Is Why Email Marketing Still Outperforms Social Media

What’s hot in visual marketing: 2015

Are images important? You betcha!

Not all visuals are created equal. While visual content plays a huge role in making your marketing efforts more effective, some visuals are hotter than others. In an effort to keep you hip and your visuals up-to-date, Shutterstock released its 2015 Creative Trends report this month. We were digging the great information, so we put some of the most important pieces in an infographic, below. Which of these will affect you and your business this year?

via What’s hot in visual marketing: 2015 | Allée.

What Does an SEO Do In Their Day-to-Day Work

There’s a common misconception that SEO is a “one and done” task — that you clean up and optimize a site, and once that’s done, you can focus your efforts elsewhere. There’s so much more to the day-to-day work of an SEO, though, and in today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand walks us through those ongoing parts of the job.

via What Does an SEO Do In Their Day-to-Day Work – Whiteboard Friday – Moz.

Watch Rand’s video here…

What Does an SEO Do In Their Day-to-Day Work - Whiteboard Friday - Moz

David Meerman Scott on the topic of marketing and sales

If you’re in marketing or sales, here’s a podcast that might stimulate some thinking on your part…

How many writers do you know that have written books about space, the Grateful Dead, viral marketing, social media, public relations and more? This is the life of David Meerman Scott, who in marketing circles is probably best known for his bestselling business book, The New Rules of Marketing and PR (which, for many, is the bible for social media in the business world). While he recently issued his latest book, The New Rules of Sales and Service: How to Use Agile Selling, Real-Time Customer Engagement, Big Data, Content, and Storytelling to Grow Your Business, he found out that his previous book, Marketing The Moon, had been optioned by a documentary filmmaker. In this episode, we discuss David’s desire to transition from a marketing author and speaker into the broader and larger space of sales and customer service (a trend that many marketing authors/speakers are following). We also look and how intrinsically connected sales, customer service and marketing have become. David is one of the most prolific writers and speakers out there. His new book challenges business to radically redefine how they connect with consumers (a topic that is near and to my heart as well). Enjoy the conversation…

Get the podcast here: Six Pixels of Separation – Marketing and Communications Podcast – By Mitch Joel at Twist Image

Unlocking the full potential of social media…

h/t to Sue Otten of SchwingAmerica for passing this on to me.

We can help you decode this if you’d like and implement it as well…

After the fact; applying ‘Einstein’s Razor’ to transformational ‘thought leadership’ marketing…

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Earlier this week I had the opportunity to speak to a group of interior designers about how to become known on the Internet. It was one of the most enjoyable presentations I have given in a long time because 97% of the audience were lovely females from co-eds at UWSP to practicing interior designers, but I digress…

Many people in this audience were new to social media and it quickly became clear that the primary focus should be what’s the least amount of tools and work I can do to get started in the social media space. The conversation around that topic inspired me to come up with the following diagram and the explanation that follows it. I hope you find it useful…

mecosystem too

Questions? Feedback? Comment below or connect with me so we can talk about how this applies to you and your situation…

By the way, here’s a copy of my opening presentation…

…and a link to my notes…

Yes, I can help you with a website…

…but a website is only a small part of the transformational thought leadership process — I can also help you determine what you should blog about and how! Here are a couple of examples of websites I’ve done for clients recently. Click image to enlarge…

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How I apply David Allen’s ‘Getting Things Done’ to social media and ‘thought leadership’ marketing…

When I’m teaching social media, I don’t spend a lot of time talking about whether or not social media works for lead generation or thought leadership — that’s been pretty well established at this point. I usually start out my classes by saying that the single most important issue in social media today — especially for my students were who are mostly business owners or traditional marketing professionals — is ‘how do I add social media to my already overflowing plate and still get home for supper?’. Most of the people in my classes are struggling to keep up with e-mail let alone manage a blog, four social networks and an e-newsletter…

As a consultant, every minute that I spend on my own Internet marketing is a minute that I can’t bill to a client, therefore, I’ve had to force myself to become pretty efficient about how I do things like process e-mail, consumer information and published to the Internet. My constant inspiration in this process has been David Allen’s classic work ‘Getting Things Done‘. I recommend it to anyone who will listen. The heart and soul of David Allen’s book is this diagram:

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How I apply Getting Things Done [GTD] to social media and ‘thought leadership’ marketing…

Thanks to David’s methodology I use as many containers as I need and not one more. I usually handle information only once — especially if I can process it in 2 min. or less. Here’s an attempt to depict what my thought leadership process looks like:

image

If you’re looking for a way to become more efficient about how you develop and document your expertise, comment below or use the contact form to get in such. I’d love to talk with you about applying David Allen’s Getting Things Done [GTD] principles to your world…

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Friend, mentor and client Nilofer Merchant posted recently about the problem of fragmentation:

It’s a fragmented world. And it’s only becoming more so. It used to be that when people wrote, they wrote more deeply. In the early days of the web (pre-twitter), I remember hand picking the few voices I would listen to and then putting them into my RSS feeder and checking for their essays. Essays, not tweets, were the way we shared what we were thinking. But as “content” has become more important to maintain a standing online, more and more people are entering into the fray. More and more people who may not even have a point of view to advocate but just want to participate in the conversation.

As content becomes more fragmented, you could try and compete with that by doing more and more, by curating other people’s content, by then running your content through Twylah, by having that “twitter magazine” come out which puts all your tweets and links in one place so that people can catch it if they missed each particular one.

Or you could do the opposite. You could go deep. You could be that voice that everyone listens to because when it speaks, it is so deep and rich that it’s worth slowing down to listen to. Sort of a Morgan Freeman voice, in the times of Justin Bieber bop. Maybe it will allow the light of an idea to be seen more clearly.” There’s more at the source: In a fragmented world, go deep – Nilofer Merchant

If I were talking with Nilofer, I’d gently push back on this one. ‘Going deep’ does not preclude using Twylah; rather, I think, the answer to fragmentation and ‘going deep’ is focus…

When I first started blogging I was not confident in my own skillset and my focus was a mile wide and six inches deep. My tagline was “Marketing, Sales and Technology for small business, non-profits and academic institutions”. It makes me laugh now because there are no dozen websites that can cover THIS landscape effectively. I used to curate anything and everything related to those topics sometimes posting over 20 times a day! I got traffic but it wasn’t really relevant and it didn’t get me customers. Over time, Nilofer helped me go deep and realize my ‘onlyness’ was really helping thinkers to become thought leaders through the use of a minimal toolkit for content marketing. Now my tagline is “content marketing for thought leadership” and I help experts get found when people are looking for what they do. By going deeper, I may lose the opportunity to develop a small business website but I might gain the opportunity to work with a TED Fellow like Nina Tandon which is much more rewarding in the long run. Now, too, I’m more confident in my onlyness, I only post a couple of times per week…

Nilofer and I have had this discussion before and I think we both agree: If our thoughts are going to resonate with our target audience we need to understand the questions they are asking and align our answers with their queries. If we position ourselves as the obvious answer to the questions of the people we want to attract, we will get found when people are looking for ‘that one voice’. It’s not good enough however simply to think deep thoughts; we need to let people know that we are thinking them. Nilofer is a great thinker on strategy but I direct my energy toward ‘thoughts, tools and tactics’ for content marketing and ‘thought leadership’ marketing; I think the answer here is not either/or it’s both/and. I don’t think Nilofer’s saying that Twylah is a bad thing and I think she’d agree you need to go deep thoughtwise AND master ‘thought leadership’ marketing toolwise because the two go together like peanut butter and chocolate — it’s just that mindlessly tweeting and retweeting doesn’t do much to add value…

In closing, here are the 3 tools I recommend for ‘thought leadership’ marketing:

  • Google Reader
  • WordPress
  • Twylah

Ed. 2019: The current version of this list would be:

  • Google News or Inoreader
  • WordPress
  • Buffer

I posted about them here just last week. They are the tools that will help you get found when you decide to ‘go deep’ and become the one voice [because it doesn’t matter how deep you go if no one can find you]…

Ever heard of the Pareto Principle? Mostly likely you have but may not know it by that name. “The Pareto principle (also known as the 80–20 rule, the law of the vital few, and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.” In the ‘e1evation workflow‘, 80% of my results come from having mastered just three tools. Why is this important? My clients include thought leaders like author Nilofer Merchant, author and professor Philip Auerswald, author and professor Timothy Kastelle, consultant Gretchen Jahn and professor and TED Fellow Nina Tandon; people like that don’t have the time or patience to learn an infinite number of tools — they need to know the three that will yield the most effective results…

I teach them [and all my clients] that if I could only use three tools for effective content marketing there is no confusion in my mind as to what they would be:

Why? No other combination of tools covers the basics of content marketing better. Google Reader helps me find great content that deepens my expertise. WordPress and Twylah help me document my expertise by turning everything I create or curate into content marketing with Search Engine Optimization [SEO] value for my domain. Let me explain…

Here are all the tools I use in the ‘e1evation workflow’:

And here are the 20% that yield the 80% of my results:

Questions? Feedback? Comment or contact me to talk more about how this applies to you and your situation…

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Heidi Cohen shares this valuable tidbit today:

About nine out of ten B2B marketers use social media to distribute their content marketing according to recent research by the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs. On average these marketers use five social media sites to spread their content marketing more broadly through social sharing.

For B2B marketers, this requires that your content marketing be formatted to work well on the social media platforms where you place it and that you encourage readers to share it. (Here’s a chart showing how to leverage different types of content marketing across social media.)

Respondents cited fourteen different social media platforms that they used to distribute content. (Here’s additional research and analysis from the content marketing survey.) Half of the social media venues were used by over 20% of respondents.

Source: Social Media: Where to Distribute B2B Content Marketing [Research/Chart] | Heidi Cohen

Go to the source if you’d like to have the rest of Heidi’s insights – come back here if you’re not sure how to put them into practice!

Open-mouthed smile

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content strategy, Men's Health Magazine

Some good thoughts from the Content Marketing Institute for bloggers that getting serious about blogging ‘on purpose’…

If one thing is certain in life it’s that very few ideas are genuinely groundbreaking, never-seen-before moments of genius. The reality is that almost everything that we do now is either a reinvention of the wheel or a plain-and-simple rehashing of something that has come before.

Some might say these ideas are lame concepts created for and by people too lazy to come up with something of their own. If you believe that, then you’re missing out on a lifetime of learning. Put simply, ideas are very rarely about the concepts themselves but more about the execution. It’s in the execution that brilliance lies.

I use reverse engineering a lot, and when it comes to content strategy, there are few better ways of using this little trick than by “borrowing” content flow and content strategy from the guys and girls who know it best.

Magazine planning has been perfected over decades of iteration, and the very best print-based titles leave a footprint that offers the ultimate blueprint from which you can create your perfect content strategy online.

Source: Reverse Engineer Content Strategy | Content Marketing Institute

For years I said I don’t need no stinkin’ editorial calendar but my results got better when I started thinking like a publisher. This article will help you understand how so go to the source and drink it in…

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Guy Kawasaki has a clever quote on Inbound Marketing. It goes like this:

“If you have more money than brains, spend it on outbound marketing but if you have more brains then money, spend it on inbound marketing”.

Let’s take a look at inbound marketing HubSpot style…

 

With all due respect to Guy, inbound marketing may be smarter, but many of the top tier inbound marketing ‘suites’ still carry a hefty price tag. Here are 4 that emphasize content marketing and curation that come to mind [listed most expensive first]:

My own ‘e1evation workflow‘ on the other hand costs less than $25 per year if you know what you’re doing and all the products used meet the following criteria:

  • Best in class
  • Free or freemium
  • Completely cross platform down to the smartphone level

Great inbound marketing doesn’t have to cost and arm and a leg. Comment below or connect with me so we can talk about how this applies to you and your situation. Remember, the key is to get found when people are looking for you and what you do and that doesn’t need to cost an arm and a leg!

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Get the rest here:  Content Curation a Marketing Must – Content Curation Marketing.

I just concluded my ‘lunch and learn’ series on information and content management at The Docking Station in Green Bay, WI today. The first two classes were shot via video camera and unfortunately you can’t see the screen but you can hear the narrative. The last class was captured using a Google+ hangout and I’ll be using that from now on. Questions? Feedback?

This is [almost] everything I think I know about the topic with a couple of bonus videos thrown in at the beginning…

25 Blogging Tips for Newbies and Veterans

Goins, Writer via 25 Blogging Tips for Newbies and Veterans.

Some people like to make things overly complicated. Me? Sometimes I like to grossly oversimplify things and take them back to the basics. Example? ‘Thought leadership’ marketing. To my mind, if you want to be a thought leader there are only two things you need to do well:

  • Deepen your expertise through a continuous learning program
  • Document your expertise through blogging and social networks

Everything else is just details…

When it comes to effective business development, or marketing and sales again, I think there are only two activities you need to master:

  • Generating leads
  • Managing leads

Again, everything else is just details…

Whether you are a freelancer or running a large enterprise I believe there are 7 databases you must manage effectively to succeed. They are:

That’s all there is to it! If you can effectively manage these 7 databases you can go from reacting to your market to dominating your market.

Questions? Feedback? I’d be happy to expand/expound on any of these topics…

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I coach a lot of people on how to use WordPress effectively for ‘thought leadership’ marketing. One of the most important things to include in every post is a relevant picture. Why? HubSpot says:

If you’ve ever read a book with a child, you probably know they find pictures more interesting than words; but are adults really that different? I wouldn’t be surprised (or offended!) if you found yourself gravitating more towards the picture in this post than the copy. But images drive more than just attention — they drive engagement. In fact, just one month after introducing timeline for brands, Simply Measured reports that engagement is up 46% percent per post, and visual content (photos and videos) have seen a 65% increase in engagement.

via Why Marketers Should Invest in Visual Content Creation.

Effectively using images in a blog post is an issue however, that separates blogger sheep from goats. In this screencast I focus on a couple of ways bloggers can easily get images into their posts with an emphasis on my favorite blogging tool, Zemanta for both WordPress.com and hosted WordPress…

[View the story “Other ‘images in posts’ screencasts” on Storify]

Other ‘images in posts’ screencasts

Storified by Todd Lohenry · Mon, Apr 16 2012 12:10:24

I love Zemanta!toddlohenry
How I used Zemanta on this posttoddlohenry
Google Reader and Zemantatoddlohenry
Blogging with Internet Explorer and Windows Live Writertoddlohenry
Windows Live Writertoddlohenry
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If your happiness is based on always getting a little more than you’ve got…

Seth Godin

…then you’ve handed control over your happiness to the gatekeepers, built a system that doesn’t scale and prevented yourself from the brave work that leads to a quantum leap.

The industrial system (and the marketing regime) adore the mindset of ‘a little bit more, please’, because it furthers their power. A slightly higher paycheck, a slightly more famous college, an incrementally better car–it’s easy to be seduced by this safe, stepwise progress, and if marketers and bosses can make you feel dissatisfied at every step along the way, even better for them.

Their rules, their increments, and you are always on a treadmill, unhappy today, imagining that the answer lies just over the next hill…

All the data shows us that the people on that hill are just as frustrated as the people on your hill. It demonstrates that the people at that college are just as envious as the people at this college. The never ending cycle (no surprise) never ends.

An alternative is to be happy wherever you are, with whatever you’ve got, but always hungry for the thrill of creating art, of being missed if you’re gone and most of all, doing important work.

via Seth’s Blog: If your happiness is based on always getting a little more than you’ve got….

I’m a huge fan of curation as a means of attracting attention to your thought leadership position. Here’s a great perspective from HubSpot on the value of curation done well…

Curated content, or content aggregated from various sources into one comprehensive resource (be it a blog post, an ebook, a presentation, etc.) can be a valuable part of any marketer’s content mix. That said, the process of actually curating it isn’t easy.

There’s a misconception among marketers that curated content is lazy and unoriginal, but we think it’s the complete opposite. It takes time and careful evaluation to create quality curated content, and the result is oftentimes a very valuable piece of content that helps people seeking information on a given topic to cut through the clutter on the web and save time. After all, what’s better than one awesome resource? How about 15 awesome resources? All accessible in one place! There’s a reason art galleries are so popular.

So how can you take advantage of the power of curated content? Here are our top 10 ideas for great curated content.

Source: 10 Great Ideas for Valuable Curated Content

Go to the source if you want the 10 great ideas. Here are some of my greatest posts and screencasts on the topic of how to do it…
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Some of my ‘greatest hits’ on the topic of curation for content marketing…

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Some of my ‘greatest hits’ on the topic of curation for content marketing…

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