Reaching Your Profitable Destination

Marketing a digital agency takes time, and you could actually fill a textbook as thick as your arm with the proper steps to take, and information necessary to properly take those steps. This is no textbook, but is rather a “menu”, if you will, describing a number of dishes which precede, sustain, and follow a meal.

Content marketing will be explored specifically in this writing, as it has a very high level of ROI—though it’s worth noting that the same general precepts apply to other avenues of marketing. For example, content marketing requires a certain level of original content to be created and disseminated for proper effect. In the same way, using a billboard would require a certain level of time left standing to reach the requisite number of potential clients and have any real impact. It’s the same thing, just in a different medium. Accordingly, variables change.

You’d need to cover them all in detail to be comprehensive; but if you understand where those variables are, and that marketing essentially reflects the same kind of practice in different ways, then you can take a general article like this one and apply it to a broad level of outbound marketing strategies.

So following we’ll look at the “meal”, beginning, middle, and end, which most generally characterizes the most popular and, as some would consider them, successful means of digital agency marketing today.

1: The Appetizer, Marketing Built Around User Experience

A good way to get around all of these is to focus your marketing campaign around fulfilling the needs which have resulted in a certain kind of user experience. Say, for example, that your digital agency develops apps for smartphones, and is specifically designing one that is used in dating.

You’d want to collect as much information as you could pertaining to other dating apps, and that which is both lauded and despised in their regard. You’d then want to compile that information and associate it with your new app. In terms of marketing, you would want to focus on how what your app does is better than the competition in one area, and fixes problems of the competition in another. You’re focusing on singing your app’s praises, and fixing problems that similar apps have that monitors and showcases problems for developers.

User experience is a great way to reap this information, and you can find it for free all across the web—all you need to do is research appropriately. When you have that research, both the quality of your digital agency’s products or services, and the quality of marketing surrounding them, will be more effective. Additionally, this “appetizer” sets you up for the main course: developing actionable content that is likable, sharable, interesting, and valuable to target markets.

2: The Entrée, Continuously Produced And Creative Content

There’s a process here that looks like this:

•         Research is conducted pertaining to the market your digital agency serves
•         Ideas are generated for content addressing that market
•         Varying online markets sympathetic to your agency are identified
•         Content is created that is informed by all these facts
•         Content is published
•         Content is promoted

Here’s an infographic from Moz.com which really illustrates these points:

There are a few things to add to that, like recirculation and guest-blogging. Both would technically fall under what’s known as promotion. Basically, you want to get your content—written or otherwise—featured on guest sites that serve markets which either correspond or are adjacent to your target market.

Adjacent markets can bring crossover clientele and expand your market reach. Target markets are more likely to have those in a demographic sympathetic to your products or services, and apt to convert. Again, these principles generally apply across all kinds of outbound marketing. Research, creation, and dissemination of advertisement materials follows an essentially uniform process.

Where your digital agency really differs has to do with specific online means of presentation. Not only do you want to have this content available in visual, video, blog form and other video streaming sites on your company’s website; you want to utilize things like social media to get the word out. This step is, appropriately, the “dessert” of the whole enterprise and one which will provide you with a clear understanding of how whitehat works.

3. The Dessert, Maximizing Social Media Platforms

Check out this infographic from DailyInfographic.com showcasing twelve steps worth considering for social media marketing success:

That says it all in a nutshell. Again, you can see how the principles outlined in the creation of general content above have some parallel qualities to those explored in this process. Researching what you’re going to write, and where it’s going to go, creating the content, promoting it—all are very similar to conventional content creation and dissemination which exists regardless of dedicatedly social platforms that constitute the bulk of today’s media.

Where you’re going to find some differences between the conventional process, and social media marketing, is in terms of data examination and re-examination. Social media has an amorphous quality that is constantly shifting. Where in terms of conventional blog-related content marketing, you’re looking at broad trends designed for ROI in a year or two’s time, with social media you can catch a “wave” and ride it in to viral success very quickly if you’re wise about how you conduct your campaign.

In the process outlined in the infographic, you’ll find a section pertaining to KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators. Now these are going to be different for different social media platforms, and there are a lot of social media platforms out there. Snapchat, Facebook, LinkedIn, Minds, Twitter, YouTube, Gab, Reddit, the list goes on. Each has enough KPIs to write an article as lengthy as this one. You need to determine which platforms are in greatest alignment to your target market, and which KPIs to focus on branching off from there.

At that point, you want to get all the team-members who’ll be involved in the social media campaign “on the same page” regarding KPIs and the like which you plan to focus on. Only then do you start producing the content which will eventually be disseminated across the social media platforms which align to your operation.

Scrum at the start of each week in order to establish weekly social media goals, and review your progress at close of business on Friday to see what was accomplished and what still needs work the following week. Part of that scrum should involve planning out content campaigns. Think of it like the release schedule for Marvel’s recent proliferation of superhero films. Disney execs got together and ironed out a schedule of release, making a sort of tree on a whiteboard that helped them organize based in terms of plot, budget, marketing, etc. You need to do the same with your social media marketing team.

It also makes sense to utilize more than one social media channel if at all possible, and treat each of those channels idiosyncratically. You need individuals dedicated to answering prospect responses both positive and negative, and you need to review the campaign every month to see what needs improved, what isn’t working, and which forward steps make the most sense.

A Fine Marketing Meal

With an appetizer of market research pertaining to user experience, you can establish what kind of content to produce such that it most appropriately meets the needs of your target demographic. When you design that content, you’ll have a research and development process unique to each marketing campaign, but which will most likely take a year or more to reach maturity.

Your content should be disseminated across a variety of blogs you run, and guest blogs you’re able to post on, as well as social media. If you can design visual and video content, do so.

Social media is a means of advancing your primary content, which is why it is listed in this writing as a “dessert” of sorts. While it is an end in and of itself, you’ll need to design content for it specifically; so it makes sense to use what you’re already spreading through other digital avenues, as such crossover minimizes marketing cost over time.

That said, there are quite a few different ways to go about marketing, and as has been pointed out, there is enough information out there to write many books about. Which is most pertinent to you will depend on your business. That being said, the primary thrust of your marketing campaign for your digital agency will involve research of the market, creation of content, and dissemination of that content in a managed way that adapts as necessary.

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B2B Content Marketing Agency London

Marketing Fundamentals Ltd is a B2B Content Marketing Agency in London that creates Content and manages Social Media for Professional Services firms. We hope you find this information useful.

If you would like our help creating and executing a Content Marketing Plan for your business or organisation give us a call on +44 (0) 845 2264 247. You can also email us via mail@marketingfundamentals.com

On our YouTube channel you will find marketing advice, business advice & inspiration. Subscribe if you work in Marketing for Professional Services or are a business owner or solo-preneur trying to grow your business. New uploads on Wednesdays.

Best regards,

Marketing Fundamentals Team

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This is blog post number 470.

The post 3 Ways To Market Your Own Digital Agency In 2018 appeared first on Marketing Fundamentals.

To name a few, Aeroflot and Karcher are the users of the  email sending platform SendPulse. Some may argue that the presence of some business bigwigs among customers is not the reason to focus on a particular platform. However,  the trust of the big brands corresponds well to the social proof which is appreciated by marketers for many reasons.

Of course, the contemporary email marketing environment does not suffer from a lack of the email bulk sending services. Dozens of them are available now on the market. Moreover, quite a big number of the comparative reviews of such services have been made by numerous observers on the internet.

Nevertheless, what is really missing here is the thorough dissection of every particular email sending platform, at least of those that constitute top 10 by the user ratings. Hopefully, the present review of SendPulse can be useful for the marketers who are used to making a conscious choice of an email sending toolkit.

The home page and the general view

Under quite a minimalistic interface of the SendPulse website users can find the sufficient functionality. The customers’ feedback along with the description of advantages and capabilities of the platform is represented by the website home page. The piece of information is big, but users can hardly get lost there since everything indicated is relevant to the main goal of the service. Products, price, and help sections provide users with the detailed information of how to arrange their marketing campaigns. The popular flat design of icons and visuals of the main page demonstrates that the SendPulse team follows the trendy approaches to the development of the user interfaces. The well-balanced proportion of the textual and visual contents on the website makes the information perception convenient.

Emphasizing the artificial intelligence on the home page is worth special mentioning. No matter from what perspective you look at it, the highlighted AI capability of the platform is a right move. Few topics on today’s internet can measure up to the AI popularity. Indeed, the machine learning technologies create the efficiency improvement opportunities beyond the reach of purely human intellect. Why not apply them to the email marketing optimization?

The email service

The registration in the email service of SendPulse is free as well as the one-month trial period. During the period you can send 15 000 emails to 2 500 readers from your mailing lists. The section’s interface looks ascetic that does not mean primitiveness, however. Both vertical and horizontal functional frames provide access to various features and subsections necessary to create and optimize an email campaign. The last campaign infographics available on the front page shows the major metrics. The size, design, and position of tabs make the entire page easily graspable in a few seconds even for the new users.  No redundant prettifying or irrelevant data is present. Thus, the user-friendly interface focuses on the functionality that is actually expected from the well-structured marketing toolkit.

Creating a campaign

The “create a campaign” tab redirects a user to the first stage of the process in the form of a table where a mailing list is proposed to be created. UniSender and MailChimp services can be applied to import contacts to the newly created mailing list. However, the manual input is also possible. The sender email address can be edited if the one indicated by default is not appropriate for some reason. The sender’s name and the email subject are to be defined in the relevant lines. The most interesting option here is the possibility of personalization. Even though the personalization criteria is limited by only a few variables such as name and a customized introductory text, the option as such reflects the advanced approach SendPulse applies to email campaigns.

Templates

This is where the true creativity begins. The second step of the campaign’s creation represents the section of the email templates. The section is divided into four subsections at the user’s choice: the “my templates” one allows to import your own templates, the “template editor” provides developing the customized emails, the “pre-designed email templates” collection offers numerous pre-designed templates of various  specializations from real estate to Christmas’ smiles, and the “HTML editor” is made for the programming-savvy users. It is worth noting that even the pre-designed templates are editable. The rich functionality of the editor with a simple drag-and-drop method and the abundance of the professionally designed ready templates make users stick around for a long time surfing through numerous creative opportunities.

Finalization and sending

The final stage of an email campaign implies indicating some data regarding the initiator of the campaign when the email designing is finished.

Then, the email should pass through the SendPulse moderators. It takes a few minutes to get an email notification that your campaign is approved. So, the whole process of the email campaign’s creation is simplified without loss of functionality which is equal to MailChimp and other advanced email platforms.

Before sending the email to the subscribers it is possible to check how it looks on different platforms by clicking the “preview” tab or a “test email” one. Besides, in order to personalize your campaigns in a more profound manner, A/B testing is available there.

Price

The price section looks like a calculator where the service cost depending on the number of emails is indicated. Moreover, the number of subscribers is the variable which can be adjusted by users in order to get information about the cost of either a yearly subscription or a monthly rate. Without having to dive deeply into a comparison between SendPulse and many other competitors regarding the service cost it can be stated that the quotation of SendPulse is average. It means that it is almost half the price of MailChimp, for example, being at the same time twice as much as numerous lower class email services.

Tips and tricks

Like any reputable email sending platform, SendPulse cares about the users with regard to the success of their email campaigns. The “knowledge base” section of the website represents various learning materials suggesting how to improve email campaigns. The topics covered by this section constitute the experience which should be shared by a capable email marketer. It is undoubtedly a good practice since many novice users are spared from having to explore the email marketing tips and tricks on the third-party websites. The helpful hints beginning from the message creation and up to the autoresponder system activation are available there along with links to many other relevant articles.

Conclusion

The only missing feature is an automatic re-posting on social media to consider SendPulse just a perfect platform.  In other respects, SendPulse corresponds to the advanced-level email sending services. The minimalistic user-friendly interface, rich functionality, flexible editor, abundance of templates, and considerable service cost all make SendPulse attractive to both the experienced email marketers and the beginners. The fast launch of campaigns and the AI-powered optimization are the peculiar advantages of the platform. So, getting back to the first line of the present review, Aeroflot and Karcher have the sufficient number of reasons to be the customers of SendPulse.

B2B Content Marketing Agency London

Marketing Fundamentals Ltd is a B2B Content Marketing Agency in London that creates Content and manages Social Media for Professional Services firms. We hope you find this information useful.

If you would like our help creating and executing a Content Marketing Plan for your business or organisation give us a call on +44 (0) 845 2264 247. You can also email us via mail@marketingfundamentals.com

On our YouTube channel you will find marketing advice, business advice & inspiration. Subscribe if you work in Marketing for Professional Services or are a business owner or solo-preneur trying to grow your business. New uploads on Wednesdays.

Best regards,

Marketing Fundamentals Team

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Online courses:

How to TurboCharge Your Business with a Blog
Meet Edgar Social Media Management
TurboCharge Your Twitter Presence
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This is blog post post number 427. This a a featured post.

The post SendPulse: The Worthwhile Platform for Email Campaigns appeared first on Marketing Fundamentals.

Why oh why do we do this to ourselves! As if the 9 to 5 grind wasn’t enough, we throw in a bunch of unnecessary meetings, and then fill them with quite literally the worst phrases the English language can come up with, because apparently, we live for the pain. We cannot stop ourselves using business jargon.

Business Jargon

It doesn’t matter if you’re a seasoned veteran or a new graduate, there are some business sayings that will leave you wondering what the hell was actually just said and why people can’t just speak normally. For example:

Blue sky thinking: as opposed to green or pink sky thinking, which is an absolutely different thing. What this means nobody has ever actually been able to determine, however a team of researchers are still working on it. We’ll update you as soon as we have more information.

Low hanging fruit: can anyone actually ever use this phrase without making you think of fruit? And exactly what fruit does hang low, and have you ever picked it before? We’ve quite literally never seen a tree or a bush or a shrub with low hanging fruit. Apart from blackberries. Yeah maybe blackberries.

Not enough bandwidth: why can’t you just say you’re busy Steve?! There is no other time in your life anyone uses this phrase. When your mum asks if you can come around and help set up for your grandad’s party, at no point do you reply, ‘sorry mum, I just don’t have the bandwidth’. Because it sounds ridiculous that’s why.

You can’t fit a square peg in a round hole: have you ever tried to put a square peg in a round hole? No, exactly! And who has a square peg anyway.

A pedigree candidate: again, in no other situation in your life do you use pedigree in regard to people. You only ever really use it when you’re looking for a new pet.

The Worst Business Jargon

Open the kimono: if someone says this, you are in under no terms obligated to open any part of your clothing whatsoever. Keep everything snuggly tight and closed. No one needs to see an open kimono.

Think outside the box: is there anything more annoying than when someone asks you to do this, because naturally, all you can think of is a box. Big ones, little ones, colourful ones. And then you start thinking you need to come up with some crazy ideas and you spend your night brainstorming the weirdest ideas and that my friends, is a dangerous rabbit hole to fall down.

How much runaway do they have: in the world of recruitment this often means, how old is the candidate. But alas, you’re now sitting daydreaming about planes and holidays, exotic destinations and remote beaches, which incidentally is more fun than trying to guess the age of your candidate, but inevitably not what you’re supposed to be doing.

Holistic: this one is a real classic, and if you listen carefully, you can hear it being whispered in office across the land. It basically rose to fame some years ago and is stubbornly clinging on like a Big Brother contestant, refusing to go anywhere when you know it really should.

Leverage: the most polite way of trying to determine how much room you have to play around before you need to seriously start doing anything.

By close of play: no one is playing here, let’s be real. Just say the end of the day like a normal person. Using the verb play to describe your working day, won’t trick you into believing you’re having a good time. It’s a ruse.

We could carry this list on all day, because apparently, it’s never ending, but we wouldn’t do that to you.

About Access Recruitment

Access helps the UK’s top recruitment agencies to simplify the everyday running of their business to improve productivity, control costs and enable growth. Access recruitment software brings together best-of-breed products onto one single platform to make a difference to the entire recruitment process – from sourcing the right candidate, paying staff, billing clients and complying with confidence.

B2B Content Marketing Agency London

Marketing Fundamentals Ltd is a B2B Content Marketing Agency in London that creates Content and manages Social Media for Professional Services firms. We hope you find this information entertaining.

If you would like our help creating and executing a Content Marketing Plan for your business or organisation give us a call on +44 (0) 845 2264 247. You can also email us via mail@marketingfundamentals.com

On our YouTube channel you will find marketing advice, business advice & inspiration. Subscribe if you work in Marketing for Professional Services or are a business owner or solo-preneur trying to grow your business. New uploads on Wednesdays.

Best regards,

Marketing Fundamentals Team

Subscribe to

Follow us on LinkedIn

Online courses:

How to TurboCharge Your Business with a Blog
Meet Edgar Social Media Management
TurboCharge Your Twitter Presence
Quora For Business

Follow Mike on Twitter

This is blog post post number 414.

The post The Worst Business Jargon appeared first on Marketing Fundamentals.