5 AdWords Metrics Every Business Should Be Tracking Posted on February 28, 2017July 12, 2018 by Jeanna Barrett Running Google AdWords campaigns can be expensive and time-consuming, especially for small businesses. If you find yourself with limited resources and budget, you want to maximize the effectiveness of your campaigns by focusing on the right metrics. It’s easy to get lost in the numbers and analytics tied to AdWords and to feel confused by jargon (CPC, CPR, CPA, etc). To make it as simple as possible for you, we’ve created a list of the five most important metrics you should be tracking in your campaigns. Click-Through Rate Top marketers who run Google AdWords campaigns most often cite Click-through rate (CTR) as the most most important metric to measure. Your CTR indicates how compelling and relevant your ads are to your target audience. If nobody clicks your ad, then they’ll never even see your landing page or website. How CTR is Calculated: The number of people who have clicked your ad divided by the number of people who saw your ad equals the click-through rate. If people aren’t clicking, then chances are your ad copy isn’t compelling and could use some work. CTR also heavily influences your Quality Score, which is how Google scores your keyword campaigns to determine how much you’ll pay per click and who will see your ads. If you visit the Keywords tab in your AdWords account and hover over the speech bubble icon on each of your keywords, Google will show you how your CTR stacks up against your competition by giving each a “below average,” “average” or “above average” rating to expected click-through rate. The industry benchmark for an average click-through rate is 2 percent. Quality Score Google scores every brand’s keyword campaigns with a Quality Score. Quality Scores have enormous influence over how much you’ll pay for your campaign and directly impact the performance of your campaign. For that reason, this is a huge AdWords metric you cannot miss tracking. How Quality Score is Calculated As mentioned, Google uses CTR as a top metric when determining your Quality Score. But they also look at the relevance of each keywords to its ad group, landing page quality and ad text. In addition, your historical AdWords account performance will factor into your Quality Score as well. How to Improve Your Quality Score Ensure your keyword research finds and targets the most relevant keywords for your brand Organize your keywords into keyword groups Optimize the copy for each of your campaigns by testing and finding what works best Follow landing page best practices to ensure your landing page is high-quality and converting Exclude negative keywords that aren’t converting and are wasting your budget Conversion Rate The goal for your AdWords campaigns should be to convert search traffic to customers, so tracking how many website visitors from your ads are converting to customers is extremely important. You don’t want to find yourself paying high amounts for Google Adwords campaigns, yet none of that money is turning into customers. When setting up your Adwords campaigns, you’re given a tracking code to help track conversions through form submissions, online orders, phone calls and offline sales. If set up properly, you’ll be able to view your conversions with your AdWords reports, and it will all be seamlessly and clearly tied together. We highly recommend setting up correctly before launching your campaigns, so you can get a clear understanding of how your ads and landing pages are converting for your brand and where you need to improve. How to Improve Conversion Rates Evaluate ad campaigns. Are you targeting the right keywords for your audience? Watch CTRs. Poor click-through rates mean that your ads are not resonating with the people they’re reaching. Measure landing page conversions. If you’re driving traffic to your landing pages, but no one is converting, test a new version to see if it helps. Track customer lead source. Measure which ad campaigns generate the most customers – and the most ROI – for you business. Cost-per-Acquisition (CPA) & Cost-per-Click (CPC) CPA and CPC are both common terms used when tracking acquisition marketing, and both are metrics you should be watching to understand the financial effectiveness of your AdWords campaigns. CPC (cost-per-click) is how much you pay for each person who clicks on your campaign, so it’s a very important financial metric. You should monitor CPC to understand if you’re overpaying or underpaying per click. CPA is how much you’re paying per person your business acquires. CPA will likely always be higher than CPC because not everyone who clicks and visits your website or landing page will convert. However, if you’re paying a high CPC and CPA, you might be paying for customers and not making money off of them. So track these metrics closely. Now that you understand five important Google AdWords metrics and how to track them, you should be better equipped to succeed at online advertising without breaking your budget. Just remember your business goals, and build and optimize your AdWords campaigns around these business goals. To get a deeper understanding of the effectiveness of your AdWords campaign, you can also use this free Adwords Performance Grader from WordStream. It will look at key metrics such as Quality Score, CTRs, mobile performance and more and see how you stack up against industry benchmarks and the competition. Stick to watching and improving these numbers, and you should be equipped with the knowledge to get the most bang for your buck out of your Google AdWords campaigns.
Just Say No: How to Maintain Work-Life Balance as a Small Business Owner Posted on February 27, 2017June 20, 2018 by Jonathan Herrick If you find yourself working at all hours of the day (and night) or scrolling through Facebook because you need human contact, something’s gotta give. Small business owners work harder than most, and it’s not always fun. Which is why setting limits for yourself is a must. Any business owner who is willing to spend countless hours on their craft must get some sort enjoyment out of it. That said, it shouldn’t be your only purpose in life or you’ll burn out while burning the midnight oil. You need work-life balance. Learn to let go. Your business’ health depends on you hiring employees. If you keep trying to do everything yourself, you will fail. You have a limited amount of energy and a limited number of hours in your day, so you need to be careful with both. As your business grows, you need to learn to delegate. If your company is not earning enough to allow you to hire but the work is too much for a one man team, you need to make a change very quickly. There are tasks that only you can do. These include business strategy, investment decisions and networking. These are the only tasks you should be spending time on because these will affect your future. Find time to plan. If you’re updating your website, writing sales material or posting on social media accounts, you’re not being the leader your business needs. None of these jobs needs your energy or vision, so find someone else to do them. Building your personal brand is another story. Identify your productive hours. If you’ve built a successful business, you clearly know yourself and your strengths very well. But it’s equally important to acknowledge your weaknesses and work on those. Understand how your mind works. If you feel most creative in the morning, spend those hours working on your business strategy and development. If you’re more of a night owl, adjust your schedule to allow a later start to your day. OR maybe you should train yourself to gradually wake up earlier, just as other successful people have. If you use your productive hours of the day for business-related tasks, you’ll get them done faster, leaving you more time for family, hobbies and exercise. Take time off. Really. When you start a business, you are the only person in it, so you do everything. We get it. The business is your baby, and it’s hard to trust others with it. Especially when you’re away from the office….for an extended period of time (sounds scary, I know). But let’s be honest, if you don’t have employees you can trust, you’ve got a bigger issue. The people you’ve hired to be part of your team are those you’ve identified as capable and cognizant of your company’s core values. Trust them. And take some time for yourself. Find a hobby. A work-life balance depends on you having other interests (which might seem difficult when you’re juggling all the tasks owning a business throws your way). Get outside of your mind and find something new that peaks your interest. It can be anything: hiking, online courses, public speaking with Toastmasters, charity work or even just spending a few extra hours with your family. Your business depends on your good health. And your mental health is a huge part of that.Take time to stimulate your mind and stretch your muscles. Your employees (and your bottom line) will thank you. Make the change. Your day is already full which means it probably seems overwhelming to add extra activities. But surely you’re not working at 100% efficiency already. Take a step back to see where you can become more efficient. You may not even realize the wasted time that you could be reclaiming or the activities you’re stealing time from. Lazy mornings in bed – Get up one hour earlier and go for a walk, do an exercise class or meditate. Or use that early morning time to answer emails before the rest of your world is awake. Rushed meals – Sit down with your family and enjoy a meal. If you’re going to make the time to do it, you should find enjoyment and slow down. It’s an important way to recharge. Any mindless activity such as watching TV – Everything you do should be as the result of a deliberate decision. Watch a movie by all means, but let it be a decision rather than the result of lethargy. Meetings – Before you schedule (or accept) that meeting invite, make sure it’s something that really needs to be scheduled. Can a few emails or a Skype knock the topic out quickly? Save everyone a wasted hour. Get a good night’s sleep – If you’re feeling like there aren’t enough hours in the day, think about how much more productive you’ll be tomorrow with a good night’s sleep tonight. Instead of burning that midnight oil, get some shut eye. Tomorrow is a new day. You chose this life, but not to the exclusion of everything else that is worthwhile in your life. Is life passing you by? Your health, wealth and life depend on finding a solid work-life balance.
Take Your Social Media From Stale To Stellar With These 7 Tips Posted on February 24, 2017January 25, 2023 by Allie Wolff Most of us are overwhelmed by information on a daily basis. So if you’re trying to catch the attention of your customers through a strong social media presence, you’ll have to get creative. There are legions of other businesses like yours vying for “mindshare,” too. Fortunately, it isn’t hard to up your social media game. By taking a few key steps to keep your social media feeds interesting, you’ll find it isn’t hard to stand out from the crowd. Pump up the visuals. If you’re not adding photos, graphics or videos to your Tweets and Facebook posts, you’re missing out on clicks. Many readers are more attracted to images than words. Don’t worry about springing for a professional photographer. It is possible to take very good quality photos and videos on an iPhone. If you’re feeling ambitious, design a custom graphic on Canva, a free graphic design site aimed at beginners. Declutter your web links. It’s tempting to push the “share” button on articles you like to spread the word about them Twitter and forget about them—but that can make for clunky Tweets laden down with long URLs. Take an extra 30 seconds to shrink links you post on Bitly. You’ll be surprised at how much more receptive readers are to your messages if they don’t include visual clutter. Make it about “You,” not “I.” Most people’s favorite subject is themselves. When you’re writing about a topic that interests you, try to make the focus of your social media messages “You,” to pull in more readers. For instance, if you run an agency and are announcing new product offerings, you’ll do better with a Tweet like, “Does your website need a facelift? We can help you with that!” than with one that says, “We’re proud to announce that we now offer web design.” Curate it. Your customers have probably missed at least a few of your best blog posts during the year. Why not repurpose them into a blog post highlighting your most popular pieces of the year or most commented blogs—and share that post on social media? It’s a great way to get readers clicking around your site and to get more eyes on overlooked content. Say it in numbers. Chances are you have access to a great deal of data that may interest your customers. Turning it into an infographic is a great way to keep them engaged. Canva has a free infographic tool aimed at non-designers to help you turn numbers into something more digestible for your audience. Promote other businesses. Your customers are part of a community—whether a geographic one or one made up of people with similar interests, the same profession or some other common bond related to your business. Posting on social media about non-competitors that serve the same community can help your business in unexpected ways. We’re strong believers in the power of partnerships to help small businesses grow. Shooting a compliment your neighbors way could be more beneficial than you think! Ask questions. One of the best ways to engage social media followers is to seek their input. Ask them what products or services they wish you offered, for advice on a challenge you’re trying to tackle at your business, like the best place to post job listings in your town; or for insight on something that is related to your business. Dish out instant inspiration. When you read the news every day, look for quotes from inspiring people to share with your social media followers. Many sports stars, artists, musicians, poets, business leaders and life-saving heroes share thoughts in the traditional media that are worth quoting—and can be great conversation starters with your customers. Pay attention to performance metrics. There are many tools to measure your engagement levels on the social media you use. Using a weekly social media report can help you get a good grasp of your social media performance and track important KPIs. Don’t forget to review them regularly. There is no point in spending your time sharing information that, for whatever reason, is falling flat with your followers. If you’ve written a great Tweet or shared an Instagram photo that had a lot of engagement, study it to figure out why people responded to it. Is there a way to piggyback on what you did successfully, without overkill? That can be a shortcut to ideas for other viral shares—saving you lots of time in the long run. When you find something that works, share it again. We love digging into Buffer’s analytics to see what our best tweets were for the week. If a tweet was retweeted hundreds of times or received a boatload of clicks, it means it was a hit with our audience. We have no problem sharing it again to take advantage of a great tweet. So, if something works well for you on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn, don’t be afraid to post it again in the future – you’ll likely get the same awesome response.
Ready to Elevate Your Email Game? You Need These Free Templates. Posted on February 23, 2017July 12, 2018 by Jessica Lunk Email is one of the easiest ways for small businesses to communicate regularly and stay top of mind with potential, current and past customers. But you need to make sure that your email looks professional (clean, well-designed) and communicates effectively (straight to the point, easy to read). Whether the recipient is on their desktop, laptop, tablet or phone, your email should easily adapt to any environment. Using a pre-designed email template allows you to create beautiful emails and newsletters, but also lets you personalize them and make those emails more likely to be read. In fact a recent study found that about one third of email marketers don’t optimize their email marketing—by personalizing emails, primarily, but also using specific subject lines and customized offers. Only about half of marketers test out different subject lines to see which ones have the best deliverability and response rates. Even though email marketing remains one of the top revenue-generators for small businesses, a surprising number of them send everyone on their email list the same email. Sending out tailored, personalized emails individually targeted to your customers can feel overwhelming – but it is well worth your time. Also, it’s not as tough as you think! There are a plethora of free, customizable email templates just waiting to be sent and tested, and we’ve compiled a list of some of the best of them: Themezy Don’t let the quirky name fool you. Themezy offers a ton of free, beautiful website themes AND email templates. It’s also a great resource to view the digital creations of artists globally, to help inspire your own creativity. All the templates on the site are free to download and—depending on the license—free to use. And when you choose a template or design, the site shows you what others who have chosen that template also downloaded, helping narrow down the selection of designs you are more likely to want. 99designs You may have heard of 99designs as a marketplace full of artist and designers that can provide a logo, branding and marketing design at a much lower cost than an agency. However, it’s also a growing online community and collaboration platform for small businesses. They recently launched their “Email Design” category and ran a contest asking designers to create three templates: newsletter, promotional and notification emails. 99designs chose a dozen of the best and made them downloadable for free on their site. Litmus Litmus has a free email templates for all sorts of purposes, like launching a product, selling a product, marketing or account management. Under each category are several design choices, all very clean and straightforward. You’ll have to create a Litmus account to access the templates, but then they’re free and all yours to wow your subscribers with. Zurb Foundation Zurb offers several responsive email templates for free. They don’t have lots of bells and whistles that the other guys do, but they do the job and are easily adaptable to whatever you need. The templates come with a separate CSS stylesheet and HTML file. Another awesome resource for more advanced email designers that Zurb offers is their Responsive Email Inliner. If you’ve dabbled in email design, then you know that many email clients strip the <head> tag out of HTML emails. This means that for your emails to look great across all clients, you need to include your CSS styles inline. This tool does it for you automatically – moving the styles for the <head> tag inline. GitHub’s Responsive HTML Email Template If you’re not code-literate enough to be dealing with complex frameworks, GitHub will help you out. They offer a template designed to work on all major email platforms, and it’s been built to be responsive for smartphones that support media query. It’s also very easy to customize. GraphicsFuel The Free Newsletter Template from GraphicsFuel is beautiful, clean and modern. If want you want is a simple design for your email newsletters, this should do the trick. Especially for small businesses in the creative professions—graphic designers, agencies, consultants—this is a good fit. The template comes in three colors and is offered in a Photoshop (.psd) file. Cerberus Cerberus is a framework for creating a responsive email—it gives users a few simple HTML patterns that can be put together to create whatever works for you. According to Cerberus, what they’ve created is “just a few responsive email patterns that go a long way. The code blocks are compartmentalized so that they may be used, combined, and nested to build an email.” EmailOnAcid We’re huge fans of EOA here at Hatchbuck. Not only do they offer a boatload of email templates, but they also allow you to test your emails for responsiveness on pretty much any platform you can imagine. They’re setting you up for success by allowing you to see how your email will be displayed on any provider you can imagine. No more stretched images or wonky text!
Capture Your First 1000 Email Subscribers With These Five Steps Posted on February 21, 2017July 12, 2018 by Jessica Lunk At this point, you’ve probably realized that we Hatchbuckers are email fanatics. We write and talk a lot about the value of email marketing. And not without good reason. An eConsultancy study found that email delivers an average ROI of $38 for each $1 spent. How can you pass up that kind of deal? But before you can get that type of return on your email investment, you need to have subscribers who actually want to hear from you. And that’s definitely not as easy as it sounds. To help you build your subscriber list and reap the benefits of email marketing, we’ve put together these simple tips to get you started. 1. Start With a Plan Our good friend Benjamin Franklin famously said, “Failing to plan is planning to fail.” As is with everything, to have a successful start you have to sit down, outline your goals and determine the way you approach them. In today’s digital economy, people don’t just give away their email addresses. For most people, an address is a valuable piece of private information. To receive and use that information, you need their permission. And that’s where content marketing comes in. Creating high-quality content provides your customers with a value you can exchange for the permission to contact them. So the first question you should ask yourself is: what kind of content are you going to produce? It can be blog articles, videos, podcasts, books, etc depending on the type of audience you’re trying to attract. The second question is: what do you need to generate your first 1000 subscribers? In general, you should be able to convert at least 2% of your web traffic. That means you’ll need to get at least about 50,000 visitors, or improve your conversion rates. 2. Discover What Your Audience Wants In this second step, you want to identify who your target audience is and what will capture their attention. To answer the first question, you can choose to target three types of audiences: Your customers Your potential customers Anyone who interacts with your potential customers According to Moz founder Rand Fishkin’s content marketing manifesto, for maximum reach, you should target anyone who interacts with your customer. Successful companies such as social media scheduling app Buffer reached millions of subscribers following this strategy. (Note: this approach will not yield a mass following immediately, it takes time.) To make it work for your business, find out what gets in the head of your target audience. What kind of value can you offer? In other words, you need to find out what kind of problem these people have, that you can solve with your content. The best way to find out is to reach out to them directly. Use email, social media, go to meetups and meet them in person. Start conversations and find out what their most pressing problems are. Let’s say you’re a marketing agency and you learn that most of your target audience struggles with Instagram marketing. Now you need to create content that answers their questions. But not any kind of content, you want to provide massive value. In content marketing, you should try to stick to the “10x rule:” you must create content that 10x better than anything out there. That takes a lot of research and commitment. We’ll say it again…the returns will be worth your dedication. 3. Start Converting Leads Once you start creating content you want to be able to convert traffic you get into leads. The first thing to realize is that people won’t just sign up right off the bat. You have to ask for it, and then, make it ridiculously easy for them to sign up. That means make your forms as simple as possible. If all you need is their email address, ask for their email only (although – we always recommend grabbing a name as well. See: personalization). Get rid of all unnecessary steps and forms. There are several ways you can convert your traffic. You have to be careful because there are always tradeoffs between experience and efficiency. If your blog or website is cluttered, it will scare people away. A foolproof way to convert your traffic is to offer something in return. It can be an eBook, webinar, white paper or something of a relevant value. Then there are content upgrades. Content upgrades are something that expands your existing content, a checklist, a list of resources or even something as simple as a PDF version of the article. Once you have something to offer, you want to strategically place several CTAs on your blog or page where you host your content. Pro Tip: If your primary form of content is YouTube videos or podcasts, you should create a landing page where your audience can sign up and direct the traffic there. 4. Getting Traffic Aside from paying for traffic, here’s a list of free ways you can use to generate visitors. Reach out to social media influencers: A single endorsement from a big name can kickstart your traction. Partner with popular Facebook, Linkedin, Meetup etc. groups: Reach out to owners and offer an exclusive deal for their audience. Partner with newsletter owners: There’s bunch of newsletters that may either feature your ad or partner with you. BTW, email is the most powerful conversion channel. Write answers on Quora: There’s a number of examples of companies gaining traction through Quora. It takes time and commitment, though. Write guest posts: Reach out to relevant blogs and websites and offer to share your knowledge and experience with their audience in a form of a guest post. Ask for referrals: Ask people in your network as well as your existing users and fans for referrals. Twitter Search: Search for keywords such as “looking to solve X problem” etc. Warble and Buzzsumo are great tools to automate this. Piggyback on a trending controversy: Is there a controversy in your market that’s currently trending? Share an alternative opinion. (Be careful with this one – while some people may agree with your two cents, others may be alienated.) Publicity stunts: If Richard Branson could become a billionaire thanks to this tactic, you can definitely get few customers out of it. Build partnerships: Partner with complementary blogs and companies. Sponsor & organize meetups: Buy few boxes of beer and pizza and get to pitch audiences at meetups with 100+ attendees. 5. Optimize Now you’re getting traffic and hopefully converting leads. At this point, it’s all about gathering feedback and improving both your content and conversion rates. Use surveys, engage with your audience and monitor your CTAs. Then, use that data to constantly improve.
Have You Lost Sight Of Your Company’s Core Values? Posted on February 20, 2017July 12, 2018 by Jonathan Herrick As a business owner, there may be nothing more frustrating than seeing an employee defy (accidentally or on purpose) your company’s core values. But maybe what is obvious to you isn’t as clear to your employees, especially if they’re new to your organization. Not everyone knows what is in bounds and out of bounds at work. By spelling out what your company stands for in a list of core values, you can make it clear how you expect your team to behave at work. Here is how to develop your core values and make the most of them while running your business. Put them in writing. Committing your core values to paper will help you get clearer on what your company is all about and, in turn, make it easier to convey that to your team. To begin your list, think about why you started the company in the first place, what you hoped to accomplish and how that has evolved since your launch. What values are reflected in your answers? Also consider what type of workplace environment and vibe you want to create, what type of behaviors contribute to it—and what practices you never want to see cropping up in your workplace. Look for the underlying messages about your workplace values in the answers that come to you. We went through this exact process here at Hatchbuck, and I recently had a chance to chat with WorkXO about the process and the importance of a strong workplace culture. As you answer these questions, start a preliminary list of your core values that represent what you stand for. Don’t worry if the list is long. You’ll have time to edit it later. Do a reality check. Many companies start out by listing about 20 core values, then break out the red pencil to winnow them down. Having too many core values will make it hard to embrace any of them, so cross off any that aren’t mission-critical and look for ways to combine similar values into a single one. Don’t try to tackle the editing alone. As the owner of the company, you may have a different sense of which values really matter in your workplace than your top lieutenants do. Ask them to look at the list you’ve created with brutal honesty to see if they have a different perspective. Are there any values that are aspirational at this point, but not really acted upon? If so, cross them off the list. It will be obvious to both employees and customers if you are not practicing what you preach. Once you’ve pared the list to less than 10 core values, ask other team members to weigh in and help you narrow it further. That should help you get to five or six final ones. Spread the word. Core values won’t do you much good unless all of your employees know what they are, take them to heart and live them out daily. Posting them in key locations, such as your conference room and on your website, can help reinforce them, but that doesn’t go far enough. Make it a practice to refer to your core values when making key decisions in your business. Let’s say one of your core values is “Be kind.” If you need to give negative feedback to an employee who is under-performing, you might ask yourself how you can handle the situation in a kind manner—without undermining other values. Your core values can also help you say yes to the right type of business and no to the wrong kind. Perhaps you run a professional services firm and clear communication is one of your core values. If, for instance, a client does not communicate clearly about the requirements of key projects and it is stressing out your team, you might want to consider “firing” the client and looking for a replacement client who does a better job of communicating expectations. It can be tough to make decisions to turn away business, but with your core values as a compass, it will be easier to make the right call. Core values are not meant to be static. You’ll probably need to adjust your core values to reflect your growth as you scale up. One sign that it is time to revise your core values is when you find yourself dealing with challenging situations that none of your core values seem to address. Fortunately, once you’ve gotten into the habit of relying on your core values to make decisions, you’ll probably come to enjoy updating them—so they can help you lead your team in growing your business.
16 Skills That Make You A Proficient Digital Marketer Posted on February 17, 2017December 8, 2022 by Jonathan Herrick For many people, digital marketing is a dream job. With the onset of many technology company perks and telecommuting jobs, digital marketing experts can make a six-figure salary, have unlimited vacation, and enjoy a flexible schedule that allows them to work from home — or even across the world as a digital nomad. If you’re looking to get a new job as a digital marketer this year or looking to become a digital marketing expert, make a career change, leave a desk job to travel as a remote digital worker, or improve your skills at your current digital marketing job — I’m here to help. I was able to grow my digital marketing career and take the plunge in 2016 to start my own business and travel and work in another country as a remote digital marketer. Here are the essential 16 digital marketing skills I learned throughout my career as a digital marketer that helped me advance in my digital career and ultimately start my own digital marketing agency: 1. Writing & Editing This might be the most important skill set to have as a digital marketer: I don’t think there’s one job I’ve had in digital where I didn’t have to write and edit. Because of the importance of content marketing, you’ll get very far in your digital marketing career if you know what makes a great blog post, how to source and write great content, and how to turn a bad piece of content into a good one. You should also know how to employ the help of copywriting tools like AP Styleguide. 2. SEO Organic search results are about 8.5x more likely to be clicked than paid search results, so it is IMPERATIVE to understand and utilize search engine optimization (SEO) in a digital marketing career. Today, “white hat” SEO tactics include content marketing, guest blogging, and link building through social marketing and high-quality content. But, you should also know technical SEO tactics such as updating title tags, H1 and H2 tags and incorporating keywords. Speaking of keywords, it’s essential as a digital marketer to know how to research keywords to include within website copy, blogs, and PPC to drive results for the brands you work for. 3. Design So much of digital marketing today is driven by visuals. Content on all of the social media platforms performs better when accompanied by great images. As a digital marketer, you need to know how to create and edit your own visuals. If you can whip together a banner ad, email banner, or social media image in Photoshop yourself, that’s one less person you have to go through, one less step to get your digital campaign launched – and one less person your client or employer has to hire. If Photoshop (or another Adobe program isn’t in your arsenal of skills, there are lots of tools like Canva available to help). 4. Social Paid Advertising The days of social media being “free” are gone — I lived through them and since I’m only in my 30s, that should tell you they didn’t last long. The best way to reach people now on social media sites and ensure your content gets distributed is to use social paid advertising. Understanding how to write copy — length and variations — and follow image best practices on each site will be extremely helpful in your career. As will understanding how to monitor and alter bids to optimize your ads or understand when to get help if you don’t have the time to spend on it every day. 5. Top-Notch Personal Branding As a digital marketer, you will likely be the face of a brand whether that’s through social media, content marketing, or a conference presence. It’s important to have a great digital presence online that shows you are active and professional. In addition, by utilizing top content sites, like Medium, to build your personal brand, you’ll ultimately understand them better yourself and how you can leverage them for the brands you work for. 6. WordPress WordPress now powers 25 percent of all sites across the web and 50-60% of the share of the global CMS market – making it the most popular CMS. The New York Post, TED, Thought Catalog, USA Today, CNN, Fortune.com, TIME.com, Spotify, TechCrunch, CBS Local, and NBC all use WordPress, so it’s not just a tool that small businesses use to patch together a website because they don’t have a developer. Chances are brands you work for will use WordPress, or they’ll need to switch to it. Understanding WordPress and all of its features and plugins will be a great skill in your digital marketing career. It’ll even help you set up your own website and blog for your own business. 7. Excel Snore. We’ve all seen the Word applications on every resume for the last decade plus. But, now with the increase in data and the importance of data analytics, it’s more important than ever to be proficient at Excel and understand how to quickly manipulate data and create tables and graphs from the data you’re looking at. Are you just listing Excel, or are you really an Excel whiz? Make sure it’s the latter. 8. Social Media Marketing Nearly one-third of the population is currently using some type of social media platform and 97 percent of the global share of companies use social marketing. This makes social media marketing an invaluable skill set in a digital marketing toolbox. There is a lot more to social media marketing than just posting on Facebook. You should know how to generate user engagement on all platforms, copywrite, build ads, create visuals, and analyze reach and engagement. You also need to understand all of the rapid changes on each platform and when to utilize different platforms for different internal business goals. 9. Email Marketing & Newsletters A number of articles on the web will ask the question, “Is email marketing dead?” I’m here to tell you, it’s not. Everyone still reads emails. It’s still a very effective way to reach customers. Any brand you’re working for will have content they want to distribute — email newsletters are a great way to tap into an email user base to extend the reach of content. 10. Google Adwords & PPC A number of businesses are able to drastically expand their reach and generate high revenue and brand awareness through pay-per-click advertising, otherwise known as PPC. If you’re able to do this for businesses, you’ll snag some of the highest-paying jobs in digital marketing. To do PPC well, you need to be able to think both scientifically and strategically, and effectively create, optimize and report on campaigns using both Google Adwords and Google Analytics in conjunction with each other. 11. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) The point of digital marketing should be to drive traffic to a website and convert that traffic to customers. CRO is the art of testing different website pages, copy, and calls-to-action (CTAs) to see what converts the best. It combines the art of website design, copywriting, and user experience. As a digital marketer, you should understand how to do an A/B test, and be proficient in tools like Optimizely to aid in your research. 12: Marketing Automation Marketing automation is the art of creating automated tasks for website visitors to save you time as a marketer. It’s important to know how to set up forms, create landing pages, and trigger drip campaigns that will nurture website visitors to become customers. It’s an essential aid in helping your sales team find sales-qualified leads from web traffic. Having a marketing automation tool that aligns with your business goals is essential. Try BenchmarkONE for free and see how our marketing automation and CRM software can help you capture leads on your website and nurture them toward a sale through the power of effective email marketing. Speaking of sales-qualified leads — if you know how to score website visitors to determine how important they are to a marketing team or a sales team, you’ll be ahead of a lot of digital marketers out there. 13. PowerPoint Design Try as I might, no one has created an application yet that has ubiquitously replaced PowerPoint. I know, I can’t believe it either. Throughout my entire career, I’ve needed to create PowerPoints. And as presentations to my clients become increasingly more important, I still use PowerPoint. In digital marketing, it’s important to know how to create a PowerPoint that’s not just text on a slide. You need to thread together a story and clearly state a strategy, so you can socialize your project and results across a number of important players — whether that’s to junior-level workers or leadership. 14. Influencer Marketing Brands can score big time by connecting with online influencers to raise brand awareness and distribute or co-create content. Understanding how to connect with influencers and move them from unaware to advocate is an important digital marketing skill. If you know how to use a tool like Traackr to find and track online influencers, you’ll be ahead of the game and save time. 15. HTML & CSS With the need to use WordPress, write copy and update websites, employ marketing automation and understand CRO, it’ll do you good to know basic HTML and CSS. If you can get into website code for a blog and update a title, this will save you tons of time from going to a custom WordPress developer or a brand’s product team. 16. Creative & Analytical Abilities Finally, digital marketing is both creative (photography, writing, and design) and analytical (Google Analytics, CRO, marketing automation). To be truly successful at digital marketing, you should be able to bring both art and science to your work and understand how to juggle both of these important skill sets. Master all of the first 15 skills and pull them together with the perfect mix of creative and analytical strategies in #16, and you’ll be the successful digital marketer you’ve always wanted to be.
8 Writing Tools To Make You A Modern Day Shakespeare Posted on February 16, 2017July 12, 2018 by Allie Wolff Between blogging, email marketing and social media, there are more opportunities than ever to connect with potential customers through the written word. That’s good news if you love writing, but if English wasn’t exactly your favorite subject, don’t despair. There are plenty of free and low-cost digital tools to make it easier to get your point across in clear, colorful language. Here are a few of our favorites to consider. The AP Stylebook If the tone and style you use in your blog or thought leadership articles is very different from what your readers see in other publications they read, it can be distracting and undermine your authority. The AP Stylebook can help you effortlessly mirror the professional style used in the nation’s top newspapers, magazines and online publications. When you’re not sure of a style point, simply look it up in the online version of AP’s stylebook. Access is only $26 for a year. Focus Distraction is the enemy of stellar content. Block the time-sucking websites that are keeping you from starting that blog post you’re hoping to write today with Focus. Available for Macs, Focus offers a free trial and will run you $19.99 if you want to keep using it after 60 days. Google Docs Every writer needs an editor. Sharing documents in the cloud through Google’s free service will make it easier to collaborate with whoever is giving your work a second set of eyes—whether it’s a spouse, a helpful colleague or a pro—and to avoid the version-control issues that take place when various iterations of a document are floating around in the inbox. Hemingway We can all learn a thing or two about clear, simple writing from the author of For Whom The Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea. Hemingway “Editor 3” helps you root out long-winded sentences, the passive voice and other enemies of the vibrant writing so you can grab the attention of your customers. Available for Windows or a Mac, Hemingway Editor 3 costs $19.95. OneLook Can’t think of the right word? OneLook’s free reverse dictionary/thesaurus lets you describe an idea in writing and then comes up with a bunch of related words to help you express it. You’ll never get stuck with a word on the tip of your tongue again. PerfectIt Hiring a copy editor can be pricey—and even if you bring on a great one, he or she may miss a few things. Enter PerfectIt, Intelligent Editing’s software for MS Word. It is designed to copy edit articles, contracts, reports and proposals. You’ll be surprised at how good it is at catching inconsistencies in style within the same document, acronyms you haven’t designed and other distractions for readers. If you have an in-house style guide, you can customize PerfectIt to reflect your preferences. The “pro” version is $99 per year. WordRake This site is another good alternative if you need to copy edit a document and use Microsoft Word or Outlook. It will suggest edits to declutter your sentences and make them clearer. It also catches unnecessary words and dull sentences. If you like it after the one week trial, it’ll run you $129 for a year. Upwork If you really can’t get yourself to sit down at your keyboard despite your best intentions, don’t give up on content marketing. Hire a freelancer to collaborate with through a freelance marketplace like Upwork, Freelancer or Outsource. Many freelance writers will be happy to interview you on a brief phone call and turn your ideas into a blog post, white paper or brochure. While this does cost more than tackling the writing you need yourself, it’ll help you with your end game: staying in touch with your customers—an investment that is bound to pay off for your business. Most of these programs do require a small investment. But when your company’s blog posts, marketing materials, white papers and other publications are well-edited, it telegraphs the attention to quality and detail you will provide to your customers on other fronts. That’s a great investment in the image of your brand.
Turn Your Content Into a Cash Cow with These 6 Lead Generation Tools Posted on February 15, 2017September 23, 2020 by Ann Smarty Creating content is one of the most powerful ways to generate leads and build your email list. There are already dozens of articles listing different content ideas that work well for encouraging readers to opt-in to your email list, so I decided to go for something a little different here. This article offers some tools that can help make sure your content generates more leads. Build Lead Magnets that Answer Popular Questions Creating lead magnets that entice readers to opt in is arguably the most efficient way to build an email list and generate leads. I’ve been a long-time proponent of creating “content upgrades” – i.e., allowing readers to download worksheets, checklists, cheatsheets, flowcharts, mind-maps while they are reading your article on the same topic, whatever that happens to be. But what’s the best way to determine which topics are most likely to generate interest and more users willing to opt in? Many experts recommend answering a popular question on your landing page as one of the most efficient ways to increase conversions. The guiding logic here is, if your lead magnet addresses frequently asked questions, it will be easier to attract readers and convert them into subscribers and leads. Here are two of the most efficient ways to research niche questions so you can turn them into content that also has content upgrades: 1. Serpstat Serpstat is an all-in-one SEO platform that offers one of the most advanced keyword research features. One of my favorite parts of it is the ability to see which questions containing your core term people tend to type in Google’s search box: You can also see most popular terms appearing in questions that contain your core term and thus identify more popular keyword modifiers and the most interesting areas that people tend to be curious about: Clicking each tag brings you to the list of questions that have your core term and the clicked tag in them. Additionally, clicking any question allows you to dig deeper into its search volume, competition and other ways to express it. There are more ways to use Serpstat to expand your list of ideas to build your content around. For example, “Cluster research” will show you the list of “related” terms and phrases, those that have very similar Google search engine results with your keyword. This way you can target more related phrases in your content. 2. Quora Quora is an awesome content creation tool. It helps with brainstorming, research and promoting. It is also a great way to research which questions interest your audience in your niche. You see recently popular questions as you type: Here are a few useful tips on how to navigate Quora to get question inspiration: You can see more question in each topic’s “FAQ” and “Answer” sections. Each question thread has “Related questions,” which will usually be extremely useful for keyword discovery. You can follow any topic on Quora to see new questions and answers in your Quora newsfeed. You can tell how popular each question is by the number of followers it has; in situations where a question has a lot of followers but few answers, you know the topic is likely to be in high demand. This is your opportunity to be one of the few to answer it well, offer an expanded reply and then direct Quora users to your lead magnet. 3. Reddit Reddit is another alternative here: There are lots of subreddits specializing on asking and answering questions which delve into for content and CTA inspiration. The problem with Reddit is that it is very complicated for a new user to understand. The whole Reddit etiquette thing can be very discouraging and Reddit users don’t treat newcomers too well either. DirJournal has a neat Reddit guide for you to go through before you try getting active on Reddit. Turn Readers into Prospects 4. Leadfeeder Leadfeeder is a cool app that essentially turns Google Analytics sessions into prospects. All you need to do is to give the app permission access to your site analytics, and it will identify companies reading your content and even show you how you are connected. Potential prospects are sorted by “quality” (which Leadfeeder seems to evaluate according to their engagement with your content – the more they browse your site, the higher quality the potential lead is). Clicking on the company name, you are able to see: How often the company rep visited your site and for how long. Which pages of your site they visited (look out for those who landed on an article page and then clicked through to your contact and about pages as well as your services or product pages; these are going to be your most valuable prospects). The company’s site and contact information. How many company employees are on Linkedin and how you are connected to them: Leadfeeder also sends useful email alerts with the most recent leads on your site, as recorded from Google Analytics. From there, you can go ahead and get proactive reaching out to the company representatives – especially if you are connected on Linkedin! Personalize Your Email Based on the Lead Magnet 5. BenchmarkONE BenchmarkONE allows you target automated emails based on numerous conditions and tag rules. For example, you can send a personalized email to people who have opted-in by downloading your ebook giving them more information on emails to follow. You can set up personalized follow-ups, relevant email courses and more based on the content they originally downloaded or which page they downloaded it from. It’s the most powerful way to improve your email engagement rate while automating the whole process. You’ll find plenty more useful marketing automation features in their platform including their task manager, email builder and tagging mechanisms. Collect More Leads from Inside Your Content 6. SumoMe’s “Click to Subscribe” SumoMe has a lot of cool content marketing tools, including sophisticated opt-in forms, easy integrations with just about any content management system, Google Analytics integrations and heatmaps. One of my favorite features offered by SumoMe is the “click to subscribe” functionality that lets you link any on-page text or button to your opt-in form. This is a great way to convert readers into subscribers right from your article. For example, you can mention your worksheet in the context of a post and link it to your opt-in form which will pop up in the overlay and allow the reader to subscribe without ever leaving the page. You can test this type of in-line call-to-action on this page by clicking “Get updates on my email marketing experiments and results.” The option is called “Click Triggers,” and it is part of SumoMe’s Pro List Builder product. To use it, create a new click trigger, copy the code and paste into the “Create a new link” field when writing your article. Here are more ways to build “click to trigger” popups. With the help of these incredibly effective tools, you can be sure that your content is actively assisting in your lead generation efforts.