The Things Inside You That Will Help Market Your Business

What are your core values?

What are the guiding principles that you will pass on to your family?

Your Unique Selling Proposition

The beauty of being an owner of a smaller operation is that you can instill your values into how you do business, and how you do business is the only thing that really differentiates you from your competition.

How This Applies To Marketing

Content strategy can be challenging - what should your new blog, video or image be about, what should you be liking, sharing or commenting on?

What I’m suggesting is that you take a step back from ”What” and start looking at “How.”

Frame Your Content Through Your Core Values

If you know your core values, if you’ve gone through the process and worked them out for your business, working with content becomes easier.

When you’re creating new content, don’t just describe a thing, tell the story of why it’s important to you and how it reflects what you believe.

Likewise, before you share or comment on other people’s content, ask yourself how that interaction reflects your core values.

The Next Step

This can be pretty tricky to grasp but once you’ve got your head around it, the impact can be huge.  If you haven’t gone through the process of establishing what your business’s core values are, now might be a good time to start.

I’m going to be talking more about this over the coming weeks and will be sharing the process of how I worked them out for my own business.

If you’d like to see how it can work for you - get in touch.

Feeling a little down? Listen to this, it really helps you feel better.

Image credit:  Steven Van Loy on Unsplash

Link Building Advice from Beagles

Just like you - she can’t see them, but she knows they’re there!

Links!

Beautiful, tasty, high quality pieces of deliciousness - the more you have, the better life is!

Look at that guy on the right, he’s got bags of the things, how fair is that!?!?!?

Content first

Links are given to those that deserve them. 

Digital marketers share a lot with Beagles in this regard.  While they have to learn specific behaviors like sit, outside, walk, get off the couch!, our behaviors are more concerned with learning how to consistently produce content so good that people might throw us a metaphorical bone.

A smart puppy can suss this in a few weeks.  It can take a smart business owner years.

The thing about links

They’re not just lying around.  You can be the best trained Beagle on the planet but someone’s gotta notice you and have a link to give in the first place.

Once you’ve mastered “quality content production” the next step is to find those people who have links to give (and quality ones at that - not those lame ass Farmer John’s breakfast things)  and ask for one.

Here’s the bad news

Link building, it’s not easy

Getting good links is almost as challenging as creating the content in the first place.  It isn’t as hard in terms of bare brained creativity, but it takes time to do it right, and you really don’t want to do it wrong.

You could of course go off and spend a grand a month (for a minimum of 4 months) and have an agency generate 2 (yes, that’s right, two) quality links back to your site.

Or you could learn how to do it yourself.

But who has time for that?

Links are everything

The biggest factor in determining whether you appear in search is the number of quality links you have coming into your website.

If you feel you’ve got to the point where your content is worthy, maybe it’s time to start looking outward.  If you’d like to learn more about link building and how it would work for your business, drop me a line.

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Written while listening to: Breathe by music2work2

Image credit: erwartungsfrohes Warten an der Wursttheke by Axel Kuhlmann on Flickr

The Three Types of Content You Need to Master

Interested in digital marketing?  

Here are the three types of content you’re going to need:

Low Level

What is it?

• Small “bite-size” chunks of information, curated links, cool images etc.  This is classic social media, it’s personal, intimate, relevant and most of all, frequent.

What’s it for?

• Keeps you in front of your audience, kinda like coca cola brand advertising so that when a purchasing decision is imminent, your business is a consideration.

What do you need to learn?

• How to digest huge amounts of information and to quickly discern and share the good stuff.  You’ll need to get familiar with tools like RSS, Buffer, Dvlr.it, Evernote and once you have that down you’ll need to allocate time to interact with your audience.

Mid Level

What is it?

• This is you - these are your words - presented as a blog post or a video.  It’s where you first start to share what you know.  It’s no longer bite-size - this is a snack or an appetizer, it’s easy to digest but is enough to give people a feel for who you are and what you have to offer.

What’s it for?

• Helps people fall in love with you - develops an emotional attachment between you and the customer so that they not only choose to listen to you, but they give you permission to contact them.

What do you need to learn?

• How to be natural - whether you’re writing a blog post or producing a video you have to be 100% authentic.  How to format text, how to source a licensed image and crop it, how to use meta information correctly.  But most importantly, how to produce authentic high quality posts on a regular basis.

High Level

What is it?

• Typically your newsletter - this is the good stuff, your best work, the information you spend more time producing than anything else.  It is informative and entertaining, the opening rate is the number one KPI that drives your business.

What’s it for?

• It is how you cement the emotional connection with your audience so that when it’s time to buy, they choose you.

What do you need to learn?

• You can’t produce an effective newsletter without mastering both low level and mid level content.  You can’t inform your audience about the market if you aren’t absorbing the latest information and you can’t be consistently entertaining if you aren’t 100% authentic.

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Written while listening to: New Fazioli tracks by music2work2

Image credit: Zen Master by Okko Pyykkö on Flickr

2014 reflections oh, and about that Unicorn...

So that was 2014!  Pretty good year if you ask me.  I know some of you struggled, particularly in the retail sector but others thrived and there seems to be a general optimism for 2015.  About bloody time!

When I look back at the businesses I worked with this year a number of things stand out:

Web Platform

All sites this year were built on the Squarespace platform , I haven't built a new WordPress site since 2013. Not only are they great to look at, scale beautifully on Mobile and are easy for the business owner to update and use, not one of you has had to deal with an outage or a hack - this is huge!

New websites  from Simply Friday in 2014

The whole "managed" website idea, which can initially turn people off because they don't have full control is actually perfect for small business owners who don't have in-house tech resource.  If you're still futzing with servers, updating plugins and responding to ever more prevalent security alerts - you might want to think about changing.

Content Production

So we're all pretty familiar with blogging nowadays, but what I'm thoroughly enjoying is how everybody has their head around the use of Imagery.   Whether you're sourcing from the creative commons or getting creative yourself with iPhones and digital cameras, content is looking better than ever and of course that helps spread your message through your social networks.

What I'm perhaps most excited about is the development of video.  I know a few of you have it on your Q1 Ed. cal for next year but I've got to give a shout out to Keith at Greenstate Insurance and Winky at Schatan Optical Gallery for buckling down and learning how to do this.  Like everything, video is not difficult, but it takes time to learn and to find your voice.  For pure ease of information delivery and SEO value, you can't beat it - just watch this short video on who is covered to drive your car - and watch out for the rooster!

Outsourcing the boring but essential bits

We all know how hard it can be to actually create good content in the first place, but the whole image sourcing, adding of alt tags, proper meta descriptions, correct formatting and then sharing etc can be a pain in the butt.   Fortunately there are resources like Nicole Paulus over at Nico New Media who has been doing this for years and is great at her job.  She's now working with several people on this list and I know she makes their lives so much easier.

If you'd like to focus on the creative aspect and leave the formatting and delivery to Nicole get in touch with her.  Also, she's a fantastic writer, if you're not a natural wordsmith Nicole is a great resource for getting your ideas into well written SEO copy - check out this latest newsletter she wrote for Casa Victoria

Finally - about the Unicorn

It's the classic cobbler's children have no shoes thing, but for three years I have been growing this business without a defined brand or logo.  However, next year I will be developing my visual identity and defining my product offer on the website.  I had had an idea for a logo and sent it out to the list for feedback and while the younger online crowd loved it, the more traditional physical location business owners thought it was lame!

As I explained to a few of you - the color palette comes from the Scottish flag - The Saltire - which represents my background and heritage.  Blue is also a great color for a consulting business as it is seen as a very trustworthy color (and it's pretty masculine too!)

I like the circle approach as I think it will work well as a 50 by 50 pixel icon plus I like how the text works around the central image.  Below is a second iteration from a designer friend of mine in Berlin, Maja.  I like where it's going and I think a few more tweaks of the font and actual wording and we'll be pretty close.

As for the Unicorn, well, the Unicorn is the national animal of Scotland - bizarre but true - but in addition to that, amongst the digital marketing community a Unicorn is someone who possesses both Marketing and Technology skill sets, which would sum up my business pretty well.

But perhaps more importantly - it's a frickin' Unicorn!  And I think that's cool.

So - that's it for 2014, I wish you and your families  a very merry Christmas and a happy new year.  I will see you all in January and we'll continue to build on the great work you have done in the last 12 months.

;-)

Written while listening to: Stampy's Lovely World 1 - Keys YouTube by music2work2