Getting Started with Marketing Automation in 5 Easy Steps Posted on November 3, 2015June 18, 2018 by jmiller If you are moving from an email marketing strategy to a marketing automation strategy, it can be overwhelming the first time you see how it all works. Once someone sees the level of sophistication of a marketing automation tool, it can cause spontaneous paralysis and a quick retreat into the old way of doing things. Don’t give in! Be ready to make a change…and…EVOLVE. I speak with customers every day about how to get started with marketing automation and how to avoid getting lost in the details. Marketing is not an exact science. You have to test, try new things, learn what works and improve. A solid foundation is the best starting point. Here are 5 steps to get started: Make an Offer Capture Leads Engage your Audience Stay in Touch Keep customers up to date Make an Offer The best way to attract a new client? Offer something that you have that they don’t have and want to have. Identify what that offer is and give them a taste of it. Come up with an enticing incentive, or lead magnet, to offer people in exchange for their contact information: Your offer could be something like: White paper Case study Report Free sample Free 30 minute consultation Leveraging existing content/expertise is the most efficient way to go. If you have multiple offerings, use them all. Test out different offers to see what works best to attract the right audience. Protip: Don’t give more than two offers on a single webpage, or more than one offer on a landing page. Capture Leads Putting a white paper on a website for instant download can limit perceived value. Don’t give away valuable content for free; require information in exchange for the offer. Design and embed a lead capture form on your website or landing page. The more value you offer, the more information you can request. For example, require an email address to sign-up for your blog, but request more information if you are offering someone 30 minutes of your time for a consultation. Protip: Make sure the information you request matches the offer. Engage your Audience Now that your contact has requested information, send them a little more information. An engagement campaign is a short term campaign that ultimately leads to a specific call to action, like request a meeting, signing-up, or downloading information. This type of campaign can be 3-7 steps over a 2-3 week period (this can vary depending on content available). Emails within an engagement campaign can include, but are not limited to: An introduction to your company A case study A testimonial Educational material The goal of the engagement campaign is to drive the contact into your sales process. Protip: A simple engagement campaign can have 2 emails and 1 phone call to follow up. Stay in Touch Not everyone is ready to buy right away, but it doesn’t mean that they never will. Build out a long term nurturing campaign to stay in touch will all of your contacts on an ongoing basis. A nurture campaign may include an email every 30 – 60 days. The goal of a nurture campaign is to educate your audience, offer validation as to why they should do business with you (case studies, testimonials) and simply to stay top of mind. The nurture campaign may have calls to action or offers that can pull someone into an engagement campaign or directly into the sales process. And, with marketing automation, you can track engagement activity; if someone starts to engage, a good marketing automation tool will trigger actions that can pull contacts into your sales process over time. One tip to help build out nurture campaigns is to use a resource like www.alltop.com, where you can leverage 3rd party articles and recommend them to your audience. Protip: 1 email sent every 60 days means that you only have to build 6 emails to stay in touch with your contacts for a year! Keep Customers Up to Date Don’t forget to share your blog, a newsletter or a deal of the month. “Just in Time” communications offer you the freedom to communicate when the mood strikes you. The objective here is the same as a nurture campaign but includes timely information; a new product offer, PR updates, recent newspaper articles, upcoming events. “Just in Time” communications can also be influenced by the season or time of year. Protip: Returning customers spend 20% more than first time buyers, so staying in touch with your customers is just as important as staying in touch with prospects. Getting started with marketing automation can seem like an enormous task. But, by taking a step-by-step approach, you can easily tackle attracting new leads, nurturing prospects, and staying in touch with customers.
Get Personal: Say Goodbye to Batch-and-Blast and Hello to Email Personalization Posted on October 7, 2015June 27, 2016 by Jonathan Herrick Without question, email is one of the most effective marketing tools in a marketer’s toolbox and most small businesses rely heavily on it. Email marketing is an efficient and direct way of communicating with customers and prospects. But here’s the rub. The way you’ve likely been handling email —using the ‘batch-and-blast’ method of sending the same message to all customers—doesn’t work anymore. It’s gotten much harder for small businesses who send an email to their entire database to get a good response. Sure, it might seem from a statistical perspective that sending more emails will net you more responses and, ultimately, more money. But if you’re sending emails that are irrelevant to those receiving them you’re more likely to lose a potential customer, because those people unsubscribe, both physically and mentally. The next time they see a communication from your company, they’ll send it to the junk pile without opening it. Blasting emails across the board to customers and prospects generally doesn’t turn prospects into customers, it just wears out their goodwill. There’s simply too much competing for our attention now. Inboxes are overflowing with marketing messages and our social media feeds are buzzing with posts from both people and brands. Nothing about an email that is sent to thousands or millions of people is going to stand out, and the conversion rate for batch and blast emails reflects that—it’s just below one percent. When you put down the bullhorn, however, and nurture relationships with more personalized, one-to-one communication, sales can skyrocket. You can do that by using data about your customers and prospects to send them an email they’ll want to open. It’s a behavioral-driven strategy, and it harnesses a wide range of data points to enable small businesses to figure out which people to email, which emails to send and how often. Sending emails triggered by someone’s behavior or an event—like a sale on products they’ve purchased before or the fact they abandoned an online shopping cart midway through a purchase—typically have much higher conversion rates than one-size-fits-all broadcast emails. In fact research shows relevant emails drive 18 times more revenue than broadcast emails. (Source: Jupiter Research) And more personal communication with prospects and customers builds longer and deeper relationships. Successful email marketing all comes down to relevance. Take a look at our small business guide about sending personalized email. Digital marketing is on the cusp of a sea change, where batch and blast is being upended by the ability to send personalized, finely targeted communications. These are emails that have relevance and that’s the key to engagement and, ultimately, conversions. Connecting with contacts is important but if you want engagement–and if you want your leads to become customers–you need to reach them with the right message at the right time. To do that: Make sure all your departments are working together—sales, marketing, customer service and information technology—so that you can really achieve the kind of personalized communication your business needs. Customers aren’t one-dimensional, so your approach shouldn’t be either. In all your channels and at every touch-point with customers and prospects, you should be collecting information about their behavior. You can’t personalize email marketing without data. Once you understand your customers and potential customers—and their buying habits and preferences—you can begin to anticipate their needs and communicate with them in a meaningful way.
10 Fool-Proof Emails to Send to Your Audience Posted on May 14, 2015September 21, 2016 by Jessica Lunk Email marketing reportedly has an ROI of $40 for every $1 spent. But your traditional monthly newsletter isn’t getting the engagement it used to. What should you send to increase engagement with your audience and create new and repeat customers? With an organized email list, you can pull contacts by their relationship to you (customer, prospect, vendor, lost deal, etc.) and their interests (puppies or kittens? red wine or white wine? homeowners or life insurance?). Then, you can send targeted emails that increase opens and click-throughs, driving sales for your business. Here are 10 ideas to fuel your email marketing efforts: 1. I thought you might like this article Perfect For: A new contact you’re building a relationship with. Not everyone on your email list is ready to buy right now. But that doesn’t mean they should be dismissed. Stay in touch with new contacts by sending a relevant industry article their way. Say you’re in the insurance industry and met a new contact, Joe, at a networking event. You find out that he’s thinking about buying a house for the first time. He’s not quite ready to think about homeowners insurance, but it’s definitely a concern that will need to be addressed in the next 6 months or so. Sending an informative, helpful article on homeowners insurance is a great way to stay top-of-mind with Joe and earn his trust. He’ll be happy to turn to you when he’s ready to buy. 2. Quick question…are you still interested? Perfect For: Those cold, pending opportunities in your pipeline Sometimes a contact will be eager to make a deal with you one minute, and disappear the next. You’ll never know why they didn’t convert, or if they may still convert – unless you ask. Maybe the timing wasn’t right. Maybe they went with another solution. No matter what the scenario, following-up is a great way to get insights into how you can better serve your customers, and potentially win back some of those opportunities you thought were lost. 3. If you liked x, you’ll love y Perfect For: Your customer base Are your customers familiar with everything you bring to the table? Repeat customers are a valuable asset to your business. In fact, according to SumAll, returning customers spend 20% more than first time buyers. If they bought the top-of-the-line fishing rod, they might be interested in some high-tech tackle. Likewise, if they’ve bought into an entry level consulting package and are happy with your service, an upgrade to the next tier might be a great move for them. Tapping into your customers’ interests can help you upsell and cross-sell products and services for a revenue win. 4. A new post from our blog Perfect For: Anyone in your audience whose interests align with the post. Need an excuse to say hello? Use your blog content to keep prospects, customers, lost deals, partners and more up to date on industry topics that they find important. Build a stronger relationship with your audience by sharing thought leadership and helpful how-tos that are in line with their interests. They key to increasing blog engagement is not to simply blast the same post to everyone on your list, but to identify the contacts on your list who are actually interested in the topic at hand. They’ll be more likely to read, and more importantly, share your content, boosting brand awareness and reach. 5. Check out this helpful guide Perfect For: Those prospects with whom you’re trying to build trust Your prospects have a problem you can help solve. Owned content (think whitepapers, guides, ebooks, infographics and videos) that gives actionable advice builds trust with prospects. Help them address an issue today, and tomorrow they’ll be hitting you up for the sale. 6. A compelling sales call-to-action Perfect For: Hot opportunities who are close to making a buying decision. You wouldn’t introduce yourself to someone for the first time and lead with your sales pitch – that can be a turn-off. The same is true with email marketing. It’s important to add value to prospects that are just looking until they’re ready to buy. But that doesn’t mean that you should never ask for the sale. Send a compelling, relevant call-to-action to prospects who have been introduced to your business and who know value you bring to the table. Ask for the sale to convert. 7. Checking in Perfect For: A follow-up to a sales conversation Have you had a productive sales conversation, followed by silence? Send a check-in email to stay top of mind and achieve next steps. 8. Thank you Perfect For: Your amazing customers! We have our first-time, our repeat, and our loyal customers to thank for our success. Without them, we might not be able to come to work every day and pursue what we love. The problem is, finding new customers is hard work. Once the deal is won, it’s easy to move on to the next opportunity. Reaching out to your customer base from time to time is well worth it. Saying thanks with a discount, a customer perk, or just a friendly note will create advocates who will go to bat for you when you need a reference or referral. 9. Check out this video Perfect For: Staying in touch Need a reason to reach out to your prospects or customers? No time to create new content? Share a great video with your audience. In fact, according to a report published by Forrester, including video in an email leads to a whopping 200-300% increase in click-through rate – just make sure you send all of that extra traffic to a relevant landing page. 10. See what our customers are saying Perfect For: Prospects at the bottom of the funnel who need a push to take the next step in your sales process Case studies and testimonials are powerful tools that help convert hot prospects into customers. While you may have these assets on your website, getting them into the right hands with email can boost conversions. With a well-organized email list, you can send personal, targeted messages to your audience. As you earn their trust with relevant, authentic emails, you’ll convert more people on your list into first-time and repeat customers.
How to Make your Small Biz Look Big (Without Growing Your Footprint) Posted on April 7, 2015July 25, 2016 by Jessica Lunk You’ve worked for corporate America, and know what big business feels like. You didn’t like it. But that doesn’t mean you don’t want to grow revenue while staying true to your small business roots. While putting more boots on the ground can help your small business win more customers, hiring a bigger sales force increases payroll and requires more management on your part. Today, though, there are innovative ways your small business can live large, attracting the bigger fish with less work – and without growing your small biz footprint. Your Website If your online presence is still a static website that is more like an online brochure, it’s time to update. Building a CMS-based (content management system) website on a platform like WordPress can give you the power to update your website whenever you please. With frequent updates to your website – like a new blog post or timely homepage announcement – you’ll actually look like you’re in business. It’s reassuring to your prospects and customers knowing that there’s activity going on behind the scenes of your online calling card. Even if your business relies on highly personal relationships, you can bet that visiting your website online is one of the main steps prospects will take before they decide to do business with you. A modern, up-to-date website that clearly communicates who you are, what you do, and how you benefit your customers can make you look a lot larger – without adding a single person to your team. Social Media Social Media has been an excellent vehicle to help small businesses get their story across without making huge investments in traditional advertising like print, television and radio. But is your social media presence making you look smaller than you are, or larger than life? Keeping social media manageable and updating your small business profiles every day or two can make you look larger, while neglected profiles can sink your status. The golden rule of social media is to do a few channels very well instead of spreading yourself too thin. If most of your customers are on LinkedIn, but not active on Facebook, cut out your Facebook channel and focus your efforts on sharpening your LinkedIn presence. Do one or two social channels well to project a professional, polished image and to boost engagement with your social fans. CRM If an excel spreadsheet and business card collection are your main contact organization tools, it’s time to upgrade. A simple CRM can make your business look a lot bigger. For starters, you won’t be scrambling to find information. A small business CRM can track and organize your customer and prospects’ activity in real time. You’ll have the information you need at your fingertips to pick up hundreds of conversations right where you left off. You won’t lose your friendly small business vibe, but you will be able to handle more interactions with prospects and customers more effectively. That’s huge. When you’re driving business development and sales for your business, your time is much better spent building on relationships with customers who are ready to buy now than wasting time cold calling prospects. A small business CRM can track notes on a contact record, record email conversations, keep tabs on your contact’s interests, and let you know which prospects you should be in conversation with. A spreadsheet just can’t do that. Email Marketing As a small business owner, you’ve got your hands in sales and marketing, and your business is built on the personal relationships you’ve developed with your customers. With the right email marketing tools, you can continue to communicate in a personal, but scalable way. Instead of blasting the same message to everyone on your list, small business marketing automation tools allow you to reach many prospects and customers at a time with an individual message just for them. We like to think of it as personalized mail. Sending the right content to the right person at the right time makes them feel like you know them. It also lets you write emails that say exactly what you would say to a prospect or customer over lunch. But instead of sending hundreds of individual emails, small business marketing automation takes the administrative stuff off your plate,e giving you the freedom to get away from your machine. You don’t need lots of employees to help your business run smoothly. Invest in a few smart small business tools to build up your brand and pump up your profits.
Why You Need a Love Connection Between Email and CRM Posted on February 6, 2015June 20, 2018 by Jessica Lunk In any relationship, communication is key. The same goes for your small business tools. Getting them to “talk” can keep your business running smoothly – without the drama of systems that just can’t relate. Integrating systems is valuable. You get better, more accurate visibility into your data. You can easily share information across your company so that everyone can do their job better. And, you can automate and streamline processes so you can scale. While integrating your tools benefits your business, it’s not always easy or feasible for smaller business that don’t have a boatload of time or money to spend on integrating tools they’ve already invested in. That’s where an all-in-one CRM and email marketing system can come in handy. You get the benefits of integrated sales and marketing tools without the pitfalls of integration. Getting Sales and Marketing On the Same Page If you’re like a lot of businesses, you’ve got a CRM that houses your customer and prospect data, managed by the sales team. On the marketing side, you may have an email marketing tool. When these systems are standalone and siloed, marketing is often left blasting the same content to everyone on their email marketing list. They have no insight into: Contacts currently in the sales process Hot prospects that are ready for a bottom-of-the-funnel call to action Cold leads who are still getting to know the brand At the same time, sales has no insight into which email marketing campaigns their contacts have received or what their contacts have indicated interest in. They can’t tell who their most engaged contacts are – the ones who open every email and click every link. Instead of speaking with their most interested and engaged prospects, sales ends up taking more of a cold calling approach. An integrated CRM and email marketing tool takes these pain-points away for sales and marketing. When there’s a love connection between your CRM and email marketing system, marketing and sales can ditch the one-to-many generic email blast and cold calls. Instead, sales and marketing can build relationships with their contacts, keeping them engaged and boosting sales. Here’s how: Personalize Correspondence With integrated CRM and email marketing, you can send personalized, one-to-one emails that resonate with your audience. Contact status and unique interests are tracked on the CRM side. Then, marketing can send highly targeted and relevant communication that feel like personal, one-off emails, instead of a generic newsletter blast. Personalization can go beyond first name and company to the products and services contacts are interested in and the main problems they are trying to solve. Automate Follow-Up We all know that the key to sales is follow-up. But sticky-note reminders to follow-up with prospects aren’t always super reliable. With an integrated CRM and email marketing, sales can create tasks and run simple email campaigns to keep in touch with prospects who aren’t quite ready to buy. In addition, marketing can automate processes like sending a thank you email to prospects who download a resource or subscribe to a list. Through automated follow-up, teams can spend less time trying to manage to-dos, and more time building important relationships. Email Nurturing According to KissMetrics, 96% of prospects who visit your website for the first time aren’t ready to buy…but that doesn’t mean they won’t be in the future. With a CRM tied to email marketing, you can offer a resource to capture contact information from new prospects when they hit your site for the first time. Then, you can automatically nurture these prospects with email over time, educating them about their pain-points – and your solution. Need more incentive to create sparks between your CRM and email marketing? Check out these stats:
How to Stay In the Inbox and Out of the Spam Folder Posted on June 9, 2014June 1, 2016 by Erin Posey Ready to send a bulk email to your list? Well, before you press send, we need to have “the talk.” The internet is actually just like high school. Your reputation always precedes you – and it means everything. Sure, you may be a straight-A student taking the right extracurriculars. But as soon as you sit at the wrong lunch table or go to the wrong party, your status takes a hit. It doesn’t take long for crummy associations to stick, damaging your sterling reputation for the rest of your high school career. It’s not always fair, but that’s how it works. Spam filters are like that, too. You may have the best intention of sending helpful, informative correspondence to your contacts. But if it starts to resemble the profile of spam in anyway (even accidentally), your email reputation takes a hit. Here’s How Email Works Your email resides on an email server. For example, if you have a gmail email address, then your email resides on gmail’s servers. When you send an email, your email server delivers your message to the recipient’s email server. It is the recipient’s email server that decides whether to deliver the email to their inbox, stick it in the junk folder, or not even deliver it at all. Email servers are picky – only about 80% of email actually makes it to the inbox. Now, when you send one-off emails from your personal or business email account, they will most likely make it to the inbox. It becomes more tricky when you send a single email to multiple contacts, such as an update to your list of customers. Email servers take a closer look at bulk email, because spammers send in bulk. It’s back to high school – uncool by association. When you send email in any volume, it becomes more difficult to get 100% into the inbox. Building Your Sender Reputation As you send email, you will build an online reputation for the quality of your email. Email service providers track everything when you send email: How many of your emails bounce, meaning they cannot be delivered because the email address is faulty or does not exist. How many recipients complain about spam How many recipients open your email How many recipients click a link in your email How many recipients quickly delete your email Red flags such as a high bounce rate or a high spam complaint rate will make you resemble a spammer, damaging your reputation and causing the email service providers route your email right to the spam folder. Getting a Bad Rep Just like in high school, problems usually start with the company you keep. In this case, that’s your contact list. In an ideal world, your email list is made up of people who share interest in your business and have signed up, or opted-in, to receive email from you. Because opt-ins want to hear from you, they will open your emails and won’t flag you as spam – keeping your sender reputation clean as a whistle. Unfortunately, lists can expire over time. Contacts who opted-in a long time ago may have had a change of heart and no longer open your emails, decreasing your open rates. Older email addresses may not exist anymore (especially if you have a list of business emails that tend to turnover more often) affecting your bounce rate. Also, if you don’t stay in touch frequently, old contacts may be wondering, “how do I know you?” and send you into the spam folder. Cleaning Up Your Reputation Cleaning up your sender reputation is as easy as keeping a clean email list. After all, what is the point of sending out lots of email to a huge list if no one reads it, or it doesn’t even reach the inbox? Remove people from your list who have not opened an email from you in a while. Send a re-engagement email to old contacts, re-opting them into your list to decrease spam complaints. Remove any bad or faulty email addresses from your list. Trim down your list to your best contacts, and you’ll see a boost in your engagement rate, getting more email delivered to the inbox and keeping your sender reputation clean.
Who’s it From? Five Questions to Ask to Increase Email Opens. Posted on May 19, 2014July 16, 2021 by Jessica Lunk When an email hits an inbox, there are two elements that are integral to the email being opened: 1. A compelling subject line. 2. A trustworthy from address. Subject lines get a lot of attention in the world of digital marketing, but the “from” field is just as important in getting your marketing email from “sent” to “opened.” Have you ever received an email that looked like a garbled mess of letters and numbers, or a suspicious sounding domain? A from address like that automatically signals to you, “SPAM” and “DELETE.” If you want to stay out of the virtual trash bin, it’s worth taking a few moments to ask yourself five important questions about your from address before launching your next marketing email. Is the From Name Friendly? Every email address has a human-friendly name that lets the recipient know who the email is from, like “ABC Company” or “Jane Smith.” While this may seem like a no-brainer, it’s worth taking a minute to check the name associated with your email address. For example, if all of your prospecting emails come from a sales person’s email address, using their name instead of your company name might be a friendlier way to reach potential customers. Is the From Address Familiar? Every email address is made up of a username and a domain name: user@domain.extension. This is the format we expect, and a garbled username or uncommon extension is all it takes set of our internal “spam” alarm. Keep your from address clean, simple and legit. “firstname.lastname@companyurl” always works, as does something specific like “deals@companyurl” or “updates@companyurl.” Is the From Address Professional? If you’re still sending email from an @yahoo.com, @gmail.com or @aol.com email address, it’s time to think about investing in your own domain. Any reputable business should have their own domain name and business email, and it isn’t difficult to secure one. Check out these resources if you need to purchase your own domain: GoDaddy BlueHost 1&1 Is the From Address DMARC Compatible? Not only does owning your own domain increase your credibility, but now it may be essential for getting your emails to reach prospect and customer inboxes. DMARC stands for “Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance” and is a policy that is being implemented globally on the good ol’ world wide web to reduce spam and phishing schemes. In order to reduce spam and email abuse, soon all the major ISPs (internet service providers) will stop delivering emails from aol.com, yahoo.com, gmail.com and other free domain email addresses unless they are sent directly from an AOL, Yahoo, or Gmail account. This means that if you send emails through an email marketing tool, those emails will be blocked or bounced by most major ISPs, like Gmail or Outlook.com. Is the From Address Recognizable? When sending email marketing messages, you want to be recognizable and known. That’s why opting prospects in to your email list is important. This confirms that your prospects want to hear from you and will engage with your emails, increasing your overall email deliverability. Does your From Address shout, “Open Me, I’m Important!” or does it scream, “Proceed with Caution!”? It’s worth taking a second glance to make sure that your emails are delivered and opened.
Content Grid: What to Send and When to Send It Posted on May 8, 2014June 9, 2016 by Jessica Lunk Part of a great personalized email campaign is knowing what types of content to send throughout a campaign as your audience travels down the sales funnel. Here is a handy grid to help visualize what to send to your contacts, and when to send it. You don’t need every type of content on the grid, but working toward a good mix of content for each stage of the sales funnel will help you fuel email marketing campaigns that raise awareness of your brand, deliver resources to prospects, help opportunities evaluate your product or service, and keep customers engaged. (p.s. Don’t forget that you don’t have to create every piece of content on your own. Supplementing email campaigns with curated content can also add value to your audience.)
To Create or Curate? Content that Feeds Your Email Marketing Campaigns. Posted on May 1, 2014June 1, 2016 by Jessica Lunk Your small but mighty business is running a tight ship. You know that content helps to entertain your audience, educate prospects, and convert opportunities into customers, but not many small businesses have resources that can be completely dedicated to creating content. When our small business customers think about sending an email marketing campaign, they often feel overwhelmed by producing enough content to power their email marketing. But feeding your email marketing engine can actually be pretty simple. Here are a few tips on what to create and what to curate: What to Create: Repurpose existing assets. Some content is evergreen and never goes out of style. Recycle your existing content to expand your content library. Combine 10 related blog posts into an ebook. Break up a guide or report into 10 new blog posts. Upload an existing presentation to SlideShare. Reimagine print material like brochures, handouts and packets into online presentations, articles, and guides. Customer stories. Your best customers are advocates of your brand who want to help you succeed. Interview your customers for powerful collateral you can share with your prospects. Ask how your business has impacted your customer for a compelling case study. Ask your customer how they have tackled a problem that your audience faces for an easy how-to article. Survey results. It’s the age of big data, and we love using data to draw conclusions and to back up opinions. Send out a quick poll to check the pulse of your audience and write up a blog post on your findings. Survey your current customers and create a sharable report. Images and Slides. While you might not be an infographic genius, tools like Canva, Powerpoint, SlideShare, and Prezi make it easy to look good. Break up an article into digestible chunks for a sharable presentation. Create a workbook using a Powerpoint template with prompting placeholder text. Use slides to highlight individual data and facts. Team Members. Often content creation falls on one person, whether it’s the marketing manager or the owner themselves. If you’re driving content creation, don’t forget to reach out to your team members for help. Interview a team member for a Q&A article. Ask a team member to write a blog post about their niche or give their view on a topic. What to Curate: Lists. Pick and topic and run with it. A top 10, the best of, the mostest – lists are like candy, they’re addictive, easily consumed and your audience loves them. Curate a list of articles. Take a page from BuzzFeed and compile a list of fun photos or gifs. List stats, facts, or data. News. Were you mentioned in an article? Is your industry in the national spotlight? Share with your audience. Set up a Google Alert or Talkwalker Alert to be notified when your business or industry makes news. Follow reputable sources in your industry on social media and share the news that’s going viral. Videos. Share informative and entertaining videos. Embed a video within a blog post. Curate videos on your YouTube channel and share the link. Infographics. Search Google images for powerful infographics that speak to your audience. Embed (and attribute) an infographic in a blog post. Send a link to a helpful infographic in an email. Industry Reports. As a smaller biz, you don’t necessarily have access to tons of customer data. Third party reports can help add credibility to your value proposition. Industry analyst reports. Reports published by non-competitors in your space. Thought Leadership. Share what thought leaders are saying about your industry or a customer pain-point. LinkedIn is a great place to start looking for thought leadership articles in your area of expertise. Photo Inspiration. A photo is worth a thousand words, but you may not be a photog or designer. Tap into others’ talents to inspire your audience. Create a Pinterest board and send it out in an email campaign. Creating your own content is extremely valuable, but can be time consuming. Don’t be afraid to supplement the content you’ve created with awesome third party resources. Not only will your audience love seeing something fresh, inspiring, entertaining or educational, but you’ll gain a bit of good karma by sharing (and attributing, of course!) in today’s social economy.