Category: Inbound marketing

Social Media Engagement

Why Engaging on Social Media is a Must For Your Business

Posted Ella AndrewsLeave a commentPosted in General News, Inbound marketing, Marketing

Why SOCIAL MEDIA ENGAGEMENT is a Must For Your Business

Social media engagement is a way of nurturing existing leads whilst attracting new ones.

Let’s start by asking yourself a simple question, do you have a social media engagement strategy?

Whether you have one hundred followers or one hundred thousand followers, the power of interaction can propel your brand forward. It allows you to build followers, brand awareness and interact with prospective clients.

Social media engagement is a way of nurturing existing leads whilst attracting new ones. 

Did you know that 73% of marketers believe social media has been “somewhat effective” or “very effective” for their business? And did you also know that on average, every social media user has 7.6 accounts?

To put it into perspective, the likelihood of your business being noticed on social media is extremely high. 

But.

Yes but and a big but at that.

It isn’t enough just to have an Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or any of the countless social channels that keep cropping up. You have to be active. 

In order to gain traction and build brand awareness, you have to be posting interesting and engaging content, and engaging with your target audience which will, in turn, attract customers. 

Interaction can be anything from posting on your feed to replying to a retweet. Interacting with other accounts can help to raise your engagement as well as pulling more valuable eyes to your page and consequently, to your business. 

Let’s not waste time and get stuck in!

  1. Establish your buyer personas- who are the accounts you need to be targeting? 
  2. Schedule time to engage 
  3. Don’t underestimate the hashtags
  4. It is NOT all about the likes.

Establish Your Buyer Personas- Who Are the Accounts You Need to be Targeting? 

Before you do anything, you need to narrow down who your target audience is, then you can take a more calculated approach. When it comes to interacting with these relevant social media accounts, you’ll know who you’re looking to engage with.

online marketing

Ask yourself some questions about your buyer personas:

  • What social platforms do they hang out on?
  • What are their interests? What kind of accounts do they follow?

This will be crucial when turning prospects into leads and in turn, customers.

Schedule Time to Engage 

If you have a posting schedule which allows you to plan your content ahead of time, it will help you stay on track with your goals. It will also free up some of your time and consequently, save you money.

By implementing a strict social media content calendar, you can schedule a set time for engaging on your social media platforms. Social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter and Facebook are more active during lunchtime, as most people are on their break at work.

So, if you schedule an hour to sit and reply to comments and engage with other accounts, it will bring more eyes to your profile. This will raise your brand’s awareness as well as engaging your audience.

Don’t Underestimate the Hashtags

Although ‘feed’ is an Instagram-sentric word, it can be applied to all social media. Whether you are tweeting, posting or sharing, your platform is your space to showcase what you have to offer.

There are many ways to make a feed more engaging.

Hashtag

It’s all about the captions and the hashtags. 

Firstly, captions can change the direction of your content completely.

Whether you are using stock images or older photos, you can always make it more compelling by adding a caption which directly relates to your business and invites people to interact in conversation.

Similarly, you can utilize the hashtag feature, which is present on most social media platforms.

Hashtags make you accessible and easier to search for.

Did you know that around 125 million hashtags are shared on Twitter everyday? 

People will generally use a hashtag to find, follow and contribute to a conversation about a certain topic. The more you use a hashtag, the more likely it is that your profile will become easier to find.

Another good idea is creating your own hashtag.This will establish your brand as a thought leader, make it more recognisable on social media and give your followers something to contribute too. 

It is NOT all about the likes.

Whilst having lots of likes on social media usually means your account is popular, it doesn’t always equal quality engagement. 

You don’t want just anyone viewing your Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn. You want real people who might turn into potential leads. One retweet or comment from an interested account could lead to a much more valuable interaction. 

Likes

One of the most important things about social media is that it allows a business to interact with their customers personally. It builds a level of trust and companionship between the brand and the user.

These tips will not only help you gain traction on your social media accounts but it could also help you come into contact with some new customers. Social media enables your business to boost traffic, exposure and even gain marketing insights

Communicate Your Brand

How to Compose a Killer Blog Headline in 5 Simple Steps

Posted Ella AndrewsLeave a commentPosted in General News, Inbound marketing, Marketing

How to Compose a Killer Blog Headline in 5 Simple Steps

Although a working title might be vital to good content writing, it’s not necessarily what the blog should be marketed as.

As content marketers, we’ve all been there when it comes to writing a good headline.

You’ve written the perfect piece of content: it tells a story, you’re targeting your buyer persona at the right time, and it’s SEO optimised.

But then comes the daunting task of creating an appropriate headline, one that will capture the hearts and minds of your audience and, most importantly, make them click on it.

Although a working title might be vital to good content writing, it’s not necessarily what the blog should be marketed as. Imagine if this blog titled “blog headline writing” popped up on your social feed. Would you have clicked on it among the variety of other articles promising to solve your day-to-day marketing challenges? I didn’t think so.

So, without further ado, Catch the Cat presents its blog headline best practices for composing a killer title that will leave your audience with no other option but to click.

Read on to learn:

Keep it Relevant

blog headline

Yes, we want people to click, but we also need to ensure the headline is still relevant to the piece of content in question.

For example, this blog could well be called “Free blog headline generator!!!”. Sure, it might get more clicks but more importantly, it would mean we were misleading our loyal readers, which we’re definitely not here for.

So, before you do anything else, make sure it’s clear in your mind what your blog is about, who it’s for, what challenges it solves, and how it serves your audience in their buyer journey.

 Pro tip: Write your content with a core keyword in mind, preferably something your target audience is likely to search for. Build your content and your headline around this keyword, making sure you’re always focused on what your audience can gain from your content.

Decide on a Key Takeaway

You don’t have to be an SEO expert to know how to identify keywords in your content. Whatever your blog may be about, there’s probably one key takeaway you want your audience to walk away with after reading it. The purpose of this blog is to provide you with the tools to create a killer headline, so that’s what we’ve called it. Don’t be afraid to keep it simple and explain to your audience what reading your content will do for them. After all, isn’t that all we’re looking for as consumers?

blog headline

Do a brain dump!

Ever heard of a brain dump? Well if not, prepare to have your life changed!

A brain dump can be any short period of time (let’s say a minute or two), where you pick a topic, then dump down all your ideas onto paper without thinking about them.

In this context, why not try brain dumping down as many headline options as possible for your content within two minutes? Then, go back and pick the “best” one, taking into account the steps in this blog.

blog headline 

Avoid clickbait

Clickbait may have had its moment in time – admit it, who hasn’t been tempted to click on one of those “Celebrities You Never Knew Dated” listicles before? – but that time is well and truly past us.

In 2019, clickbait-y titles should be avoided like the plague. Not only can they mislead the reader, but you’ll also risk alienating your audience.

Trust issues aren’t exclusive to relationships; a clickbait title might garner your website hundreds of hits the first time around, but it could mean your audience no longer trusts you as an authoritative source. Plus, you could be penalised by Google’s ever-changing SEO algorithms.

blog headline

Size matters

You might have found yourself asking the question, “How long should a blog post headline be?” Well, length may not always be the most important thing, but in the case of writing blog headlines, it’s definitely up there.

It might be tempting to include as many keywords as possible in your title but keeping headlines short is usually a safe bet.

That being said, if you’re marketing your content on social media it’s a good idea to get an understanding of how headline title lengths perform on each platform. For example, you definitely ought to veer away from lengthy headlines when sharing posts on Twitter, given the character limit for tweets sits at just 280.

Pro tip: According to Hubspot’s research, the most effective headline length if you’re looking to increase social shares is around 8-12 words.

Writing a good headline isn’t a science, but it’s definitely a skill you can learn and one that’s vital in the process of content marketing.

We hope these steps will help you nail your content writing, but if in doubt get in touch with the Catch the Cat team via the form below! 

Communicate Your Brand
lead nurturing

How to Generate More Leads and Nurture Your Existing Ones

Posted Ella AndrewsLeave a commentPosted in General News, Inbound marketing, Marketing

How to Generate More Leads and Nurture Your Existing Ones

If you don’t know what lead nurturing and generation is, you’re missing out on a great deal of opportunities to keep existing customers and attract new ones.

Many businesses either simply don’t have a lead generation / nurturing strategy in place as part of their inbound marketing or just don’t know how to implement one to produce measurable ROI on your marketing spend.

This blog post talks you through:

  1. What’s the difference between lead nurturing and generating?
  2. Ways of generating more leads
  3. Why you should be nurturing your leads

What is the difference between lead generation and nurturing?

A lead is a person who has indicated interest in your company’s product or service in some way. 

It works like this: a visitor clicks a call-to-action (CTA) that takes them to a landing page.

They fill out a form which gets them to download an eBook or sign up to a newsletter.  At which point they then become a lead.

Many make the mistake of thinking that lead nurturing and generating is interchangeable or the same thing. 

This couldn’t be further from the truth. 

In fact, for most businesses, regardless of the industry or the products and services being offered, lead generation and nurturing is a critical component of a successful sales and marketing strategy.

Let’s say you run a restaurant.

Keeping your customers happy by providing them with amazing food and service is the sole purpose.

You want them to keep coming back and to tell their friends too. 

As well as serving great food, you have to nurture these relationships to turn those customers into advocates of your brand.

As well as existing customers you also want to keep new customers coming into your restaurant. 

Lead generation is the process of attracting and converting strangers and prospects into someone who has indicated interest in your company’s product or service.  

Ways of Generating More Leads

lead nurturing

Let’s go back to the basics. 

A visitor comes to your website via your extremely compelling CTA, which then takes them to a landing page on your website. Here they have to fill out a form to receive free information i.e an eBook, offer or subscription to a monthly newsletter. 

To generate more leads there are a number of marketing techniques you can use to collect your prospects data and turn them into leads. 

 A few ways to generate leads are:

  • Use the social media channels your target buyer personas are using.

Now we’re not just talking about using Linkedin as a prospecting tool.

Your brand should be present on the main channels your buyer personas are. How else can you expect to connect with your audience if you’re not hanging out where they are?

Social media is also great for social listening and monitoring. This means you can get the chance to keep tabs on what your audience is interested in and what they’re saying about your brand.

Your social media is a chance to show some personality and interact with your brand in a more informal environment. 

  • Write blog content 

Are you writing blog posts yet? You should be.

Start by writing about what you’re an expert in. When producing topics for your content, think about the types of questions your target audience want answers to and will be searching for.

Use compelling call-to-actions inside your blog posts to direct traffic to a lead generating form to turn these prospects into leads.

You can also include internal links inside your blog posts, this keeps traffic on your website for longer, by bouncing your prospect around your website. This increases the chance of your prospects converting into a lead at some point on your website.

  • Attend networking events

Get stuck in at networking events!

Not only are networking events a great place to make new connections and generate leads- but they’re normally also great for bagging some free food or a drink at least! 

Make attending these events part of your lead-generation activity, it’s a great way to grow your reach and potentially drum up new business.

We know networking can be daunting- so we’ve written a few tips so you’re not jumping in completely blind!

  • Mingle, be human and have fun. Don’t take things too seriously!
  • Bring business cards to hand to your new acquaintances. Oo-er.
  • Ask to connect with people on LinkedIn if you think they have potential- you can just do it from your phone.
  • Eat and drink as much free food and drink as you can stomach.
  • Email sequences

Implement an email sequence for your generated leads, each sequence should be tailored to your lead and the way they have interacted with you.

For example, if a lead converts with you through a form in front of an eBook you can create an email sequence that follows up from that.

It would look something like this:

  • Email 1: Address the leads pain points derived from the eBook topic 
  • Email 2: Follow up on eBook download
  • Email 3: Reference a past case study
  • Email 4: Reach out one last time

Email sequences are an important part of your lead nurturing strategy.

They allow your brand to send a timely follow up to your warm lead before they go cold.

There is a 20% increase in sales opportunities from nurtured vs non-nurtured leads.

Also, the research reveals that companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales at a 33% lower cost!

Why You Should be Nurturing Your Leads

You might be a lead generating machine with compelling CTA’s, a kick ass social media strategy (build one of these here) with impactful e-marketing campaigns. 

BUT. None of this really matters if you’re not nurturing your leads once you’ve generated them. 

Implementing an effective and coherent lead nurturing strategy can have a huge impact on the results of your inbound marketing strategy. 

Marketers see an average 20% increase in sales opportunities from nurtured vs non-nurtured leads.

The aim is to coax the prospects you’ve created (from your amazing lead generation) to the point where they turn into paying customers. 

When it comes to lead nurturing, one size certainly does not fit all. 

Your lead nurturing strategy should be designed around each of your buyer personas, each persona will require a different type of messaging and different content depending on their stage in their buyers journey. 

Strategically nurturing your leads using targeted content can significantly improve the results of your marketing strategy.

What lead nurturing tactics can you use to warm your leads up from cold to hot hot hot!

Lead generation and nurturing are two valuable parts of your marketing strategy, get it right and you’ll notice an increase in revenue!

If you need any more tips and tricks on your lead nurturing / generating strategy, or if you simply don’t have one- then hit us up. 

We’re experts in growth marketing specifically inbound marketing, we work with you to create measurable campaigns with proven ROI on marketing spend.

Communicate Your Brand
marketingpride

The Marketing Pot of Gold at the End of the Rainbow

Posted Ella AndrewsLeave a commentPosted in General News, Inbound marketing, Marketing

The marketing pot of gold at the end of the rainbow

How brands use the power of marketing to capitalise on big events and festivities like LGBTQ+ Pride.

It’s coming into summer here in Brighton and with the sunshine comes rainbows!

If you’ve heard one thing about sunny Brighton it’s most likely either:

a.) We have dive bombing, food stealing seagulls the size of small dogs.

b.) We’re known as the ‘gay capital’ of the world.

c.) Brighton and Hove Albion Football club.

Whether it was A, B or C – we’re really lucky to live in such a culturally accepting little nook of the world.

Pride month is in full swing and in Brighton this year the main event is taking place on the 3rd and 4th August and we have Kylie Minogue performing at the notorious Pride in the Park.

But this really got us thinking. We see plenty of support for the LGBTQ+ community worldwide. All the big brands, the small brands and all those in between demonstrate their support.

We’re looking at how brands use big festivities to get a leg up on their marketing and sales without actually supporting the cause internally. 

Are brands using the Pride flag as a leg up on sales?

In the lead up to the LGBTQ+ festivities our Brighton is plastered in the symbolic rainbow flag, but you can also begin to notice the rainbow creeping into stores and making its way onto anything it can.

From Coke bottles to beauty products. The symbolic rainbow is plastered on everything and anything marketers can get their hands on.

We can’t help but think that amongst the true supporters, there are hundreds of brands using the rainbow as a ladder to climb up and over the rainbow to reap the profits of the big pot of gold the other side.

We believe true brand purpose is not just about creating ad campaigns but more about how companies actually operate.

If brands are celebrating the LGBTQ+ community this month it’s important to also ask whether this support filters all the way through their business model… And are they demonstrating such strong support throughout the whole year?

A great example of a brand that has done just this, is Skittles.

marketingpridemarketingpride

They’re whole marketing strategy is based on their rainbow branding and product, so when pride comes around every year- they remove the rainbow from the product and packaging completely in honour of Pride.

On top of this, 2p from every packet sold was donated to an LGBTQ+ charity.

The notion of removing the rainbow rather than adding one is an interesting take on Pride marketing, you can decide for yourself whether the allegations of racism due to the fact the promotional packs were mostly white are justified.

When the campaign launched in 2017, the promotional packets of Skittles were only available in Tesco in the UK. This looked like the company was just testing the waters with sales on the promotional packs, rather than actually showing its support.

If the Pride rainbow was the most important rainbow for Skittles, this would be reflected across their full range?

Skittles is owned by Mars. When you look into Mars’ own Human Rights policy to see whether it is a supportive and inclusive place to work- they don’t actually reference their LGBTQ+ workers.  It also doesn’t contain any information about inclusivity, which makes us think that maybe the company isn’t as supportive as you might think.

Be an advocate all year round

The LGBTQ+ community is big enough to stand on its own, brands should shy away from using the generic slogans about love and finding yourself and instead directly address the community they are essentially capitalising on.

We should all strive to be more socially conscious in our marketing, rather than using, abusing and climbing over culturally important topics to get to the pot of gold on the other side.

Brands should be ensuring all their campaigns are fully representative and supportive.

This doesn’t mean you have to be really overt about your support or put a rainbow on everything..

It’s also important to make sure that this public support brands are quick to shout about is reflected throughout the rest of their company.

It should be standard to have inclusive policies in place that address brand language and offer support to anyone within your company who is part of the LGBTQ+ community to really be a true advocate.

I believe the phrase is- practice what you preach.

As an industry we know the power of advertising, and we have the ability to normalise, as well as celebrate, a group of people who so rarely get to see themselves represented so greatly.

Think your business could benefit from a more holistic approach to your marketing?

Inbound marketing is just one part of a larger movement in the business world.

Inbound is a method of attracting, engaging, and delighting people to grow a business that provides value and builds trust.

As technology shifts, inbound guides an approach to doing business in a human and helpful way. Inbound is a better way to market, a better way to sell, and a better way to serve your customers.

Because when good-for-the-customer means good-for-the-business, your company can grow better over the long term.

Communicate Your Brand
keyword research tools

Keyword Research Guide For the Clueless

Posted Ella AndrewsLeave a commentPosted in General News, Inbound marketing, Marketing, SEO

The Keyword Research Guide for the Clueless

In this article, you’re going to learn how to perform keyword research for search engine optimisation (SEO) as part of your content strategy.

So you think you’ve written a knockout piece of content?

The only way you could’ve done that is by using our ultimate checklist for knockout blog writing and if you did that then you should of already done your keyword research..

We’re going to take a stab in the dark and say you haven’t if you’re reading this content. Or you are looking to understand content writing in even more detail.

In this article, you’re going to learn how to perform keyword research for search engine optimisation (SEO) as part of your content strategy.

Let’s get started:

  1. What is keyword research?
  2. How to start your keyword research
  3. The right tools for the job

What is Keyword Research?


Shall we start off with what are keywords?

Keywords are either a single word or phrase that search engines look for when crawling the internet, for relevant content for the searcher.

The overall goal of keyword research is to find out what your buyer personas are searching for and what it will take to actually rank for those keywords.

If you’re not sure who your buyer personas are, you better read this.

For example, when you type ‘Best Doner Kebab in Hove’ into Google after a big Saturday night out in Brighton, Google will search for relevant content that includes the specific keyword and variations, such as the following:

  • Doner kebab Hove
  • Kebab Hove
  • Best kebab Hove
  • Doner kebab
  • Best doner kebab

    keyword research

Even when you think you’ve listed out all the different keyword variations there are plenty more! One way to find common searches and variations of your keyword is to perform a standard Google search and note down all the searches that come underneath.

Keyword research is the process of finding those keywords and analysing the actual search terms that people enter into search engines against your business.

Why is keyword research important?

Simply put- because without it, how do you know which way you’re steering your content strategy?

By researching keywords for their popularity, search volume, and general intent, you can build content that answers the questions that your buyer personas are searching for.

However.

This doesn’t mean that you can just insert those keywords randomly in to your content and hope to rank number one on the first page of Google..

The way Google’s algorithm works, means that rankings no longer rely solely on the exact match of a keyword.

It’s the intent behind the keyword, and whether or not your piece of content solves that intent.

User intent is now one of the most important factors in your ability to rank well on search engines like Google.

Your web-page should address the problem a searcher intended to solve, rather than simply holding the keyword the searcher used.

Aimlessly adding keywords inside your content with no real user intent or purpose can be seen as keyword stuffing by Google. Once you’ve been identified as keyword stuffing there’s no going back with Google.

How to Start Your Keyword Research

keyword research

To kick off your keyword research, you’ll need to think about the topics you want to rank for.

When you’re creating this list of keywords, you should keep the following in mind:

  • What is your product or service?
  • Who is your target customer?

Had a think?

Do you have a list of 5-10 topics now?

These will be your core topics and are normally a much broader keyword like ‘Pizza’ or ‘Pasta’ if you were an Italian Restaurant.

Underneath these core topics, you will have 5-10 subtopic keyword phrases. For instance, let’s take ‘Pizza’ our core topic keyword and break this down into keyword phrases that we think our user will be searching for.

  • Margarita Pizza
  • Top pizza restaurants
  • Calzone
  • Pizza delivery
  • Pizza near me
  • Pizza deals

Repeat this process for each of your core topic keywords, making sure that you are using a mix of both short and long-tail keywords.

Long-tail keywords are longer keyword phrases that usually contain three or more words that are specific to your product or service.

Someone searching for ‘pizza restaurants in Hove’ has a much higher propensity to purchase than someone just searching for ‘pizza’. Including a mix of short and long-tail keywords will mean you’re guiding your buyer at every stage in your marketing funnel.

You should be left with a very large list of keywords and phrases, that you need to whittle down- let’s look at the tools you can use to do this.

The Right Tools For the Job

keyword research tools

There are a number of tools you can use to check things like cost per click (CPC), competitiveness and most importantly, average search volume.

Google Adwords; Keyword Planner

The Keyword Planner is easy to use and flags any terms on your list that either:

  • Have too little or too much search volume.
  • Have a high competition level.
  • A high CPC.

Terms that match the above don’t help you maintain a healthy mix.

Before you go ahead and start cutting out terms from your list, use the Google Trends tool to look at their search history and projections!

This will give you an indication into whether it might be something you should invest in now, and look forward to reaping the benefits later.

  • Competition – The Competition column gives you a sense of how many advertisers are bidding for a particular keyword. This data can help you determine how competitive the ad placement is.

     

  • Global Monthly Searches – The approximate 12-month average of user queries for the keyword on Google search.

     

  • Local Monthly Searches – If you specified a country or language for your search, this is the approximate 12-month average number of user queries for the keyword for those countries and languages.

     

  • Approximate CPC – This is the approximate cost-per-click you might pay if you were to bid on the keyword. The CPC is averaged over all the ad positions.

     

SEMrush

You can run a number of free reports using SEMrush that show you your top keywords for the domain you enter. This is a really quick way to see the types of terms your competitors are ranking for and to search for your own domain.

Our favorite features for keyword research:

  • Keyword magic tool
  • Topic research
  • Keyword difficulty

Moz

This tool has a whole host of amazing features that Google Adwords and SEMrush can’t give you. One of the features we use is predictive keyword. It tells you the keyword difficulty, volume, and expected organic click-through rate (CTR) to help predict your ability to rank and drive traffic.

Using a mix of these tools will help you make an informed decision on which keywords are going to help boost your SEO efforts and which ones just aren’t worth it.

What are you waiting for?

You’re armed with keywords for each stage in your buyers journey, now you just need to implement them into your content strategy.

Be sure to re-evaluate your keywords every quarter to ensure they are maintaining your current presence whilst being aware of changing trends in search volume and competitiveness.

We’re aware that keyword research is a large and timely task, hand over the stress of it all to us and we’ll deliver a comprehensive and in-depth keyword research for your business!

Communicate Your Brand

Your 4 Step Guide On How to be More Creative in Your Marketing Without Designing a Single Piece of Art.

Posted Laurence ChandlerLeave a commentPosted in Company News, General News, Inbound marketing, Marketing

Your 4 Step Guide on How to Be More Creative in Your Marketing Without Designing a Single Piece of Art.

We all associate inbound marketing with fancy billboards, catchy tag lines and the art of selling indirectly to our target audience.

We all associate inbound marketing with fancy billboards, catchy tag lines and the art of selling indirectly to our target audience.

There are plenty of ‘motivational speakers’ who talk about the things you MUST be doing. You only have to look as a far as Gary Vee, hats off to him, he has managed to build a substantial social following. The piece about ‘firing your best employee’ was a great listen, but I largely disagreed with it. That’s a story for another time.

Ultimately, what they don’t tell you, is how you should be using, quick wins and long term techniques inside your own business.

As consumers, we are exposed to marketing messages at every corner of our day.

Without even being aware, your purchases are subliminally being influenced by companies who see you as their ‘target audience’.

Your marketing communications should be doing the same. Why?

Long gone are the days of the hard sell or the last click conversion. We, as consumers, have no interest in working with people who’s only focus is to get us to buy stuff. It even goes beyond this, we have a moral obligation to be ethical in our ethical in our inbound marketing.

We want to be educated.

We want to receive free information and be consulted on best practice.

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Most importantly, we don’t want to just be a ‘customer’, just a number amongst hundreds of thousands of others. We want to feel valued and understood by real people and business’.

Micro breweries, including Phil Harding and the Boutique Bar Brands team, are a prime example of how tailored and personal experiences resonate better with our target audiences. There are more pubs in Brighton than days of the year to enjoy a fancy IPA or delightful Gin).

Mad Men is a great show (if you haven’t watched it, then you really should!). Mad Men outlines where marketing originally started, bar the questionable morales demonstrated by Don- that is something marketing isn’t about.

It is where everything was driving a ‘cool’ message along with some fancy imagery.

Not about educating your audience to allow them to make the best decision for them.

If we are honest with ourselves, creating fancy art is significantly easier now than it was 15, 10 or even 5 years ago.

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We’ve all got caught up in the aesthetics, pristine graphics, and everything having to be super easy on the eye.

Instagram is a great example of how fancy imagery and unrealistic visuals can be used to make us all buy into something we don’t even need.

Our good friend, Elin over at Brighton Journal is a great example of how Instagram is all about the visual (innocent plug of an account we manage!).

Marketing used to be about resonating with the audience and building a customer story to truly engage and drive your brand message.

Adobe Creative Cloud should be like second nature to any marketeer, whether you are in house or agency side.

Somewhere along the line we have lost track of everything marketing is trying to achieve.

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But that doesn’t mean we have to retire our creativity hats.

It means we have lost track of the creative part of marketing. Using your story, your brand and your expertise to deliver the right message at the right time.

Here they are. What the ramblings (just ask Dan Tyre, María Dómine and Coman Doyle about how much I love to ramble on) above has all been leading to.

How to be more creative in your marketing, without just using one piece of design software.

User segmentation

At its core, marketing is about delivering the right message, product, or service to the right person at the right time. In the Mad Men era of advertising, this was easier to do than it is today.

Products and services were fairly standardised and there were a handful of mediums that would cover a large percentage of people. Social ads weren’t a thing back then.

While each contact is a snowflake and should be treated that way, it’s important to segment your database to see who’s similar.

These segments can be divided in an endless number of ways: demographics, industry, company size, page views, numbers of emails opened — you name it.

Well.. why don’t you name it in the comments below!

There are three core ways you should be segmenting your data at its highest level:

  • Cleanliness
  • Organization
  • Audience

These are the foundations you need to lay before you start getting really creative with your segmentation. HubSpot are pretty much the gods at knowing how to segment data.

The true creativity comes when you start merging these different data points and attaching them to your buyer personas.

Be Don Draper, in that room full of smoke, a whiskey on the rocks, faced with a group of senior execs, all looking to you for an answer.

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Get your creative thinking flowing.

How can you begin tying different parts of a users demographic or behaviour together to create a brand new persona?

Smart messaging and content

Now we are super creative, and we still haven’t even opened up an Adobe product.. Who would have thought that would have been possible five minutes ago?

So there is a really cool trend building, smart content. It is almost nothing like having a smartphone, apart from the tag ‘smart’. If anything, it is most probably smarter than our smartphone.

What is smart content?

Smart content, also referred to as dynamic content, is website content that changes based on your interests or past behaviours.

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Smart content is designed to offer a more relevant and personalised experience to website visitors — one that static content can’t provide.

Guess what? You then include this content inside your work flows.

Why would you bother going to all that effort?

Your database is diverse. Whether you have 100 of 100,000 people within thereI can guarantee everyone’s needs will differ.

Think of it like going speed dating. You don’t repeat the same sentence to every person you sit in front of. If you do, and you were successful, it’s time you told us your secret!

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But, for those who take a more tailored approach, this one’s for you.

Pillar pages… within pillar pages…

There is a great video outlining everything you should be doing with your workflows.

It’s unfair to compare this to our good friend Don Draper. But, this demonstrates the advancements technology has given us to be creative.

Creative away from just building some attractive artwork.

Workflows are the way people get work done, and can be illustrated as a series of steps that need to be completed sequentially in a diagram or checklist.

Now, you will need a bit of time on your hands to get through the video above, so let’s quickly summarise how workflows allow you to be creative in your approach.

For those of you who are primarily B2C, you want to begin thinking about:

  • Basics
  • Email flows for a product sale
  • Birthday messages
  • Time lapse for X amount of time
  • Intermediate
  • Cross selling products
  • Upselling products
  • Reminder to purchase again
  • All out pro
  • Defined lists with presets
  • Propensity to purchase
  • Propensity to lapse
  • Smart content. Actually, we are getting too excited. More on that to come.

For those of you who are primarily B2B it’s time you think about:

Basics

  • Ebook download
  • New blog post

Intermediate

  • Product/service usage
  • Last interaction

All out pro

  • Propensity to purchase
  • Lead scoring
  • MQL to an SQL
  • SQL to an MQL
  • Smart content. Guilty! Getting ahead of ourselves again.

Within these, using your CRM and your data, you can then go ahead and start building your lead scoring and propensity models.

This is where it begins to get pretty smart.

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Everything we have spoken about above starts coming in to play.

Your:

  • Segmentation
  • Smart Content
  • Pillar Pages
  • Workflows

Start coming together.

The leg work is done, but we aren’t finished yet.

It’s time for you to be your own Don Draper and merge it all together.

Finding it a bit daunting? Well, we can’t give everything away!

You will have to schedule a 15 minute discovery call if you want to learn more. 

 

Pillar pages… within pillar pages…

t’s kind of like the evolution of social media, and why EVERYONE should be on it. For some industries it was much earlier, and for others much more recent. But, we all now know the business benefits on being nice and social.

Here is a nice article from the guys over at Moz to tell you a little more about it, more specifically Rand Fishkin who is only beaten by Matt Cutts on SEO knowledge: https://moz.com/blog/seos-direct-ranking-signals-google-whiteboard-friday

Pillar pages, your next social media craze. The only thing holding you back from doing this, is the knowledge it even existed. Because… if we are being honest… it’s the one thing you should be doing right now to get your company ahead of the competition.

Human search behaviours have changed, and so have the technologies used to interpret and serve up search results. Optimising blog content to rank for long-tail keywords is no longer the best way to rank in search engine results — and your blog architecture has something to do with that.

People are submitting longer, more conversational search queries.

Picture yourself before entering a Google search. If you were trying to find a local place to eat Pizza, would you search for “restaurants,”? or would you search for “Pizza restaurants near me”?

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Not only are they local to us, but they know local search, Brighton Local.

If you’d go with the second option, you’re among the majority: 64% of searches use four words or more when searching, we’re seeing a growing number of these longer-form conversational search queries that help people find the exact information they’re looking for.

But let’s say we aren’t doing local search. Let’s say we are wanting to learn about a new car.

The way most blogs are currently structured (including our own blogs, until very recently), bloggers and SEOs have worked to create individual blog posts that rank for specific keywords.

The result is disorganised, and hard for the user to find the exact information he or she needs. It also results in your own URLs competing against one another in search engine rankings when you produce multiple blog posts about similar topics.

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Your search will be different to the person sitting next to you.

Neil Patel speaks about the importance of creating a spider web in a post not too long ago.

But just to recap.

When you’re building your content, the user should always come first. Your primary focus is to make it as user friendly as possible for your user to find and explore the right content.

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Picture this, you jump in to your car and you begin a journey to a location you have never been before.

You follow your Google Maps (although we hope you are not using your phone whilst driving!). You follow the correct directions, take your left, take your right and so forth.

Then you come to a dead end.

There is now way through.

So what do you do? You turn around and go back.

Its disjointed experience.

We can think of this in the same way as when someone is reading one of your amazing articles. Don’t allow them to come to a dead end at the end of that post, lead them somewhere else!

 

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socially-conscious marketing

Why We Should Be More Socially-Conscious in our Marketing

Posted Ella AndrewsLeave a commentPosted in Company News, General News, Inbound marketing, Marketing

Why We Should Be More Socially-Conscious in our Marketing

Last week was #MentalHealthAwarenessWeek and we were looking at how and why we should be more socially-conscious in our marketing.

Our decisions are affected by inbound marketing every day.

Not sure what to watch tonight?

‘Oh, there’s a Kylie Jenner post, I’ll watch the Kardashians!’

Not sure if your six month old phone is still up to date?

“Oh look, a Facebook ad with financing to purchase a new phone”

socially-conscious marketing

We’re all being marketed too, whether you realise it or not.

Unfortunately in the world we live in now, marketing has become a key influence on the decline of mental health- specifically in teens.

The onus is on us to market more responsibly and to the right audiences. Not to easily impressional audiences.

While a lot of work has been done to change the stigma surrounding mental health, there is still a great effort that needs to be made in order to address the issue head on in society.

We’re going to take a look at:

It is our job every day to encourage people to take action. However, not at any cost, and most certainly not at the expense of people’s mental health.

What is Socially-Conscious Marketing?

Conscious marketing is all about building something so compelling it fits into the heart of your business and services.

You want people to tell others about you and share your business, these customers become advocates for you which means you require little advertising and mass marketing.

It starts with having a product or service that fulfils a human need, rather than creating a superficial want.

socially-conscious marketing

Let’s use the global crises of the worlds natural state rapidly declining, as an example.

We are all aware of global warming.

Some of us have taken a conscious decision to live a completely sustainable and ‘green’ lifestyle in an effort to save the world and it’s creatures. Recycling doesn’t just stop there, learn how to reduce, reuse and recycle your content.

Vegan-ism is becoming a large part of society, and rightly so. The core focus being on the environment.

Whilst some of us are just doing our bit by recycling in our homes, not buying and using plastic bags for our shopping or by using bamboo toothbrushes.

The rise in demand for us all to be more sustainable and conscious in our consumption and usage has naturally led to a change in marketeers messaging.

The conscious consumer will put their purchase on hold with loads of questions, and most likely some research leading up to their final decision to buy- based on a host of determining factors.

This is where our roles as a marketer, for social significance, becomes so important.

  • What does the customer think about?
  • What troubles them?
  • Where do they devote their thought, energy and time?
  • Is there room, wherever they are, for your message?
  • Could people feel wrongly pressured by your messaging?

Answering these questions before you tailor your marketing message to be more conscious will also encourage you to take on an inbound marketing approach.

What is Inbound Marketing? It’s all about being helpful, human and holistic by answering the questions your customer is searching for- in the hopes of attracting them to you.

socially-conscious marketing

How Can we be More Socially-Conscious in our Marketing?

It’s down to us as marketeers to take a step towards making more socially-conscious and informed marketing decisions. This means thinking about the negative implications a certain message could have on your target audience.

Socially-conscious marketing campaigns have gained popularity as brands respond to what millennial consumers are interested in.

Millennials are increasingly more connected to charitable causes and actively look to buy into brands that only align with causes that they care about.

They are much more likely to research into the causes and culture of a certain company before purchasing from it, meaning it’s more important than ever for your business to clearly communicate the causes that your company is committed to.

Missguided the online clothing retailer, noticed the trend in mental health being associated with body image in their target audience of young teenage girls.

socially-conscious marketing

 

Teenage girls are twice as likely to suffer from depression due to social media, than teenage boys.

They took a giant leap in fashion marketing and started to only use models with a diverse range of body shapes, sizes and ‘imperfections’ that would otherwise be photoshopped out.

They marketed themselves as promoters of body diversity and positive body image, not only by using plus size models but models in wheelchairs, models with skin pigmentation, stretch marks and scars.

What about the time ASOS recently used a social media user as their model after she was body shamed online for something she was wearing?

socially-conscious marketing

 

The brand took a stand against body shaming by using their marketing to position themselves as socially-conscious thought leaders in body positivity.

The fashion industry has held heavy connotations of perfect body image for years and it’s slowly breaking the mould and building bridges with the nations men and women.

But now we have a new epidemic on our societies hands.

The rise in reality TV and social influencers.

I’m sure we have all heard in the news the impact social media is taking on teenage girls body image and subsequently the heart-breaking knock on effect on their mental health.

This can all be put down to unconscious marketing of social influencers. Behind the screen of social media and the power of easily accessible and useable editing apps, you can create an unrealistic perception of a perfect life, body, family and lifestyle.

These perceptions are all just marketing messages that haven’t been conscious in their approach by only ever showing the good and pretending the bad doesn’t exist.

Think about it this way, you wouldn’t market the bad features of a product, you focus on the good.

This is how Instagram has become a marketing platform, but for people to market themselves.

Instagram now has an overtone of a place for ‘perfect’ Instagram girls, everyone wants to take and post the ‘perfect’ Instagram to optimise their chances of getting as many likes as possible. Although, could this be the end of Instagram as we know and ‘like’ it? The photo sharing platform is currently trialing the removal of likes.

As marketers we should all be making more socially-conscious decisions in our approach to our marketing messages.

By thinking about who we’re talking to, what they want, what they need and what’s important to them- so we can start to be more considerate in our marketing.

Socially- conscious marketing has become a powerful way for businesses to form their brand and connect with their consumers on a deeper level. This then brings new customers and a new sense of loyalty to your brand.

But it has to be done in the right way. Issue-based ad campaigns can be divisive and generate both positive and negative publicity.

Ads have the possibility of falling flat on their nose and pushing people away, if seen as insincere it could turn customers against your brand.

If you take the right approach, socially-conscious marketing is an extremely powerful tool, not only for your marketing strategy but for the wider society.  

We should all strive to be more socially-conscious in our marketing. We’re specialists in Inbound Marketing- a helpful, human and holistic way of marketing.

Think your business could benefit from a more inbound approach to your marketing strategy?- Schedule a quick 15 minute chat with us below!

Communicate Your Brand
recruitment inspire

Come Chat With Us at the UK Recruiter Inspire Event 19th June

Posted Ella AndrewsLeave a commentPosted in Company News, General News, Inbound marketing, Inbound Recruitment, Marketing, Recruitment

Come Chat With Us at the UK Recruiter Inspire Event 19th June

Book in a 15 minute slot for us to have a quick chat, about how we can place you more candidates, more frequently with more clients!

UK Recruiter are the leading online magazine for recruitment in the UK, they have built a network for UK recruitment professionals to come together and share industry knowledge.

To help inspire agency and in-house recruiters to be better, they have set up their own event, with support from ZipRecruiter and Boomerang Back Office, called Inspire Recruitment.

The Inspire event runs for 2 and a half hours from 5:30-8:00 pm on 19th June. However there is also a Recruitment Technology Showcase running through out the day from 10:00-17:00 pm.

The fantastic event has been running for 2 years now, the 2018 event had an amazing turn out and reaction from attendees.

What Inspire brings to the table:

  • Inspire was created to only share ideas that can be applied by everyone.
  • We are a forum for new voices, giving everyone a chance to share their ideas.
  • We are inclusive- Sharing views from across the industry.
  • We are a community- A hub that brings together the recruitment industry.

This short video gives you a flavour of what to expect from the speakers at the event.

It’s a great chance to network with like-minded people and make new connections. We will be at the London event on the 19th June, to listen to some of the inspiring speakers and network with some new faces! 

Why will you be there? I hear you say. You’re not recruiting professionals.

CTCM specialise in Inbound Recruitment, helping you place more candidates, more frequently with more clients.

We work with the most ambitious companies in attaching a rocket to their marketing, achieving their yearly targets within nine months.

We would love to chat with you about how we can work together to help you place more candidates.

It’d be great to meet you at the event, you can book in some time with us to have a quick 15 minute chat! But be sure to book your ticket to secure your place, there is only a limited amount available.

We look forward to seeing you there!

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Get Your Sh*t Together: Creating a Social Media Content Calendar

Posted Ella AndrewsLeave a commentPosted in Inbound marketing, Marketing

Get Your Sh*t Together: Creating a Social Media Content Calendar

A content calendar is the structure you need for planning strategic content for social media, whilst also helping you track your efforts, create content your audience loves, and meet your marketing goals faster.

 

If you’re reading this article then I have a sneaky suspicion that:

A.) You’re struggling to keep up with your social media posts and think it’s about time you got your sh*t together and created a content calendar.

B.) Your current content calendar isn’t quite doing the job, but you’ve been putting off creating a new one for a while, now you’re hoping this blog post will do all the hard work for you.

C.) You couldn’t care less about a social media content calendar, you just needed to click on something that you could get away with leaving on your work screen, whilst you daydream for a little while.

A, B or C this blog post will will give you a kick ass social media strategy

Getting your social media together consists of:

  1. Why do you need a content calendar?
  2. Planing your content
  3. Build your content calendar
  4. Have a 6 week review

Why do you need a content calendar?

Simply put- to save you time and money. But to also drive engagement. Not just likes, we all know Instagram likes could potentially be leaving us.

Just like a regular content calendar, you’ll decide what and when to publish—but with the added specificity of social platforms.

Treat reach platform differently. Your audience will interact with you differently on each.

Your business will need to generate enough return on investment (ROI) to justify the time and money you’ve invested in your social media strategy. If you haven’t already built one, head over here.

A content calendar is the structure you need for planning strategic content for social media, whilst also helping you track your efforts, create content your audience loves, and meet your marketing goals faster.

Planning your social media content in advance allows you to find a posting schedule that works for your brand.

This also means you can cultivate a posting schedule that is consistent. Consistency is key for building your brand awareness and following.

A content calendar allows you to leave room for time sensitive content. Typically, we allow for 20% of the strategy for time sensitive information.

You wouldn’t want your business to miss out on a good opportunity to jump on the bandwagon for a national hashtag or important date. Use this National Days calendar to stay on top of popular days.

Remember how impactful the World Cup was? Imagine if you hadn’t allowed any time to talk about it!

Let’s say your business is an Italian restaurant and #NationalPizzaDay is coming up, you’re going to want to use this as an opportunity to tweet about your amazing range of delicious artisan, wood fired pizzas- right?

contentcalendar

Or take the chance to engage with your followers on holidays like Mothering Sunday or Halloween!

These aren’t the only reasons why creating a content calendar is vital for your social media strategy.

There’s a whole list of benefits and we could keep singing its praises till the cows come home, but to name a few more:

  • Find a good mix of content, paid for, owned and earned.
  • Encourages the whole team to collaborate and pitch ideas.
  • Time saving
  • Avoid cross-platform errors
  • Ensures fresh content
  • Helps you figure out what works

Planning your content calendar

Planning your content calendar is a good idea for many different types of businesses from marketing teams to bloggers, here’s why:

Marketing teams: Marketing campaigns often include a lot of different components, including social media.

Organised teams  ensure everyone involved in a project understands the social promotion schedule.

Provide your marketing departments visibility on what’s going out and when, helps everyone know what’s going on and specific deadlines.

Small businesses: Stay organised with a calendar.

Not only are you going to save time, you are also going to maintain consistency. This is even more important for small businesses, where resources are limited.

Consultants: If you’re managing social media marketing for a number of clients, you probably sometimes wish you had an extra set of hands.

Getting each client organised on their own calendar can help immensely- especially when you add automation.


Media companies: If you’re creating editorial content, it’ll need social media promotion. Keep it all together on your content calendar.

Bloggers: If blogging is your business, you won’t have time to waste with dysfunctional tools and systems. Make sure every post gets promoted on your calendar.

When you’re planning your content calendar, at the core should be communicating your sales cycles, offers, new products/services.

In an ideal world you would have already downloaded our Ebook How to build a Kick Ass Social Media Strategy and followed the steps to understanding more about your content.

If you haven’t… go download it. Seriously, it will help.

It’s time to begin assessing your existing social media content offers. Creating informed and researched content from this is just the natural flow of your content calendar.

These next steps will allow you to assess your current social media content efforts so that you can create informed and researched content inside your calendar.

  • Set your goals

As a rule of thumb when setting goals, we always use S.M.A.R.T goals. Smart, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely goals allow for all employees, across all teams to be working cooperatively towards the same goal.

Add something funky, SMART is important.. But it’s very theory based,

Look at your current social media efforts, and ask yourself the following questions:

  • What platforms are you using?
  • Which ones are performing the best?
  • Should you continue publishing to all of them?
  • Or are there any that can be deprecated?
  • Are there any imposter accounts that need to be shut down?
  • What are all the usernames and passwords of each account?
  • How many times per day are you currently posting to each network?
  • What are the goals for each network?
  • Who is responsible for each channel?

     

It makes sense to attract and engage new prospects you need to be on the same channels as them, right?!

Turn each of your target customers into a buyer persona- give them a name, a job and think about their interest, what are they passionate about?

Find out what they like engaging with, this will be crucial when turning prospects into leads and in turn, customers. Maybe they might even start building your brand for you.

Ok, so you have compiled your audit. Analysed it and you are pretty confident on your buyer persona. It’s time to choose which scheduling tool you’re going to use to start inputting your content.

This could be:

Implementing your content calendar

So now we’ve taken all the relevant steps to start creating our content calendar, fully optimised for your target customer, to drive engagement, build followers and brand awareness.

Your content calendar needs to be scheduled in 12 weeks blocks  6 weeks in, review, review and review some more on what worked well, and what might need some improvement.

Dependent on which template you decide to use, or how you create your own you will organise your content differently.

We recommend splitting your content in to topics.

Each week will cover a different topic, and then each day will be split further into subtopics of that topic.

For example a main topic would be, Inbound Marketing.

This can then be split into subtopics of, Social media marketing, SEO, Blog writing etc..

The content will be broken down into month, week and days and by social media platform.

HubSpot has a really great template.

content calendar

6 Weekly Review

You’re not going to get your social media strategy right first time, if you do- kudos.

Once you’ve been through a 6 week cycle it’s time to take a step back and analyse your results.

You should be reporting on your social media marketing every week.

Take everything you’ve learnt from these reports and compile them into a list of learnings for you to start making changes to your content schedule.

Variables to analyse and test could be:

  • Posting time / day
  • Hashtags
  • Tone and Voice
  • Type of content- videos, infographics.
  • Target audience

We’re constantly playing with and testing different factors to see what works best or alternatively, if something could work better.

You should review your social media content calendar every 6 weeks, it may take awhile before you get the recipe just right or you may get it right straight away!

Be patient.

Its very much a snowball effect.

Now you have the knowledge and template to start building your very own social media content calendar, there is simply no excuse for not getting your sh*t together.

Now if you’ve got to the end of this article, let’s go back to the beginning and determine how you feel after reading it.

A.) You’ve found this really useful and feel like you can officially start to get your sh*t together.

B.) This has been helpful, and the process of building your content calendar is easier than you thought it was going to be.

C.) You’ve successfully managed to daydream for 5 minutes without your boss suspecting a thing.

Whether you’re A, B or C, if you’re still struggling with getting your sh*t together (your social media content calendar, not your entire life- Sarah Knight can help you do that..)

Schedule a face-to-face or book in a 15 minute phone call.

 

Communicate Your Brand
blog writing

The Ultimate Checklist for Knockout Blog Writing

Posted Ella AndrewsLeave a commentPosted in Content marketing, Inbound marketing, Marketing

The ultimate checklist for knockout blog writing

Blog writing isn’t exactly rocket science, but there is a science to writing an amazing blog post, people want to share and engage with.

Do you struggle when trying to come up with ideas for writing a blog post, or maybe you think you have the perfect recipe?

Blog writing isn’t exactly rocket science, but there is a science to writing an amazing blog post people want to share and engage with.

I put together the idea of an ‘ultimate checklist’ on Tuesday afternoon, when admittedly a sunny Easter bank holiday weekend had clouded my reality (and apparently my ability to think straight too).

I was putting together an article for a client when it all got too much, and inking out my thoughts in pen and paper was the only way I could see and think clearer to make sure I wasn’t missing a trick.

The outcome?

The ultimate checklist for knock out blog writing. (Jazz hands)

What’s covered in the checklist?

  1. Know who you’re writing for
  2. Keyword research
  3. Content outline
  4. A working title and introduction
  5. Writing a story
  6. Optimising and formatting
  7. Sharing the love

Let’s get started

 

Know who you’re writing for

This is probably the most important part of the whole checklist.

You can’t write knock out content without an intended audience. It’s like our age old analogy of going into a bar and just standing and talking in the hopes someone will respond to you.

If you don’t know who your buyer persons are or even what they are, HubSpot can help, how do you expect people to resonate with what you are saying.

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.

When you’re creating your buyer persona(s), consider including customer demographics, behaviour patterns, motivations, and goals. The more detailed you are, the better!

The details help you identify exactly who you’re writing for so you can address their needs, interests and wants.

When you come to thinking about blog writing and who you’re writing for, come back to these 3 things:

  • What’s the problem your persona is facing you want to address?
  • How much do they already know about the topic?
  • What’s the goal of your post? To educate, inspire, motivate..or maybe to simply to entertain?

Keyword Research

Don’t panic, this doesn’t need to be extensive.

Some basic keyword research should be done in the early stages of developing your idea.

A keyword could steer the direction of your topic or tone. Don’t waste your efforts on writing for a topic no one searches for or engages with.

I like to think of keyword planning as a tool for getting inside the minds of your prospective customers. What are they thinking about? What are they searching for online? What words do they use to describe what they’re looking for?

We use and love the following tools when keyword planning:

This tool was created by a fellow Brightonian! Besides being biased on that basis, this    tool is great for searching out what people are searching for. All you have to do is tap in a couple of keywords and it will pump out a whole list of search in the form of questions people are searching for. Very clever and handy! It’s almost like using Mystic Megs magic ball.

If you don’t already use this tool, you should start. It’s a staple when looking for search volumes, costs and competitiveness on your keyword. This will tell you the gritty information like the level of competition you are up against and the cost of tackling those words.

Autocomplete. The classic google search will provide you with countless options of search queries you can use to shape your blog writing. All you need to do is start to type in some possible topics then wait for Google to automatically produce possible search endings.

blog writing

Content Outline

You don’t need to be fancy with this.

This is for you to collect ideas and start shaping them into your fabulous blog post later on.

It’s just for you to use as a guide for writing your content. Kind of like building the structure of a tree house. You don’t just go straight in. You take your time and you make sure the foundations are right.

Create a list of a working title, the main topic and subtopics for headings. Once you’ve built the list of possible subtopics you can use this as the outline for your article in the introduction, so your readers can glance at your post and gauge what it is they will be reading about.

These subtopics are pure gold for your content strategy. Think about it, each subtopic can be take and developed into it’s very own article! Crafty, right?

You’re main article becomes your pillar page and each article and subtopic article after that can be linked to and from, creating a spiderweb of content for your readers to get caught up in! Neil Patel explains why pillar pages are so good for your SEO.

Use content you already have to get started. Want to learn how to repurpose your existing content?

We did this at the beginning of this very article.

You most likely skimmed the points discussed and made a decision there and then whether you want to read the whole post.

For extra ease for the reader, you can turn these outline points into anchor points for your article. Your reader can click on any of the points they want to read more about and be automatically taken there without having to scroll down looking for the right content.

blog writing

A Working Title and Introduction

Titles are down to your own preference.

Everyone has a different strategy for coming up with a title. Some like to finalise the title before they’ve even started writing, while others like write the title once they’re done.

But what you should really be doing is creating a basic working title before you create the body of the content for you to have have a direction from the word go.

TOP TIP!!

Ensure you use your keyword in the title.

Your introduction should sum up what your reader will take away or learn from the rest of the article.

Use your keyword inside the introduction (the smashing research you completed above), Google will use the first paragraph of your article when creating preview text if you haven’t optimised your meta description.

Google will always rank searches with an easy to find, relevant keyword higher up the organic search rankings.

Again, some people will choose to write the introduction last.

But to write a knock out blog you really have to leave that to the end. Don’t allow your conclusion to determine the body of your story.

Think of your introduction as a blurb on the back of a book. It draws in the reader, gives them a brief outline of the rest of the story and makes them want to read more!

Writing Your Story

I use the word ‘story’ here because that’s what every good blog post should be, a story.

You want your reader to be engaged. You want them to live what you are telling them. They shouldn’t just be words on a screen.

Creating and telling a story is waaay more interesting for you to write and inevitably more interesting for your reader to read.

When you do something you like, you typically deliver a much better outcome anyway.

If you find what you’re writing boring, it will shine through in your writing and turn people off reading your content. There’s a quote by Roald Dahl that says:

“If you have good thoughts it will shine out of your face like sunbeams.”  I think this applies to blog writing too.

Keep your buyer persona at the forefront of your mind as you write.

Too often, we use personas to choose a topic, but then forget about them as we actually write the post.

Questions to ask yourself throughout the process are:

  • What questions might my persona have at this point?
  • What other information might they be looking for that I haven’t included?
  • Is my tone appropriate for the audience I’m writing for?

If you write with these questions always in your mind, your blog is far more likely to go down well, and you’ll probably find the writing process goes much more smoothly, too.

Optimising and Formatting for a Knockout, the Final Blow.

blog writing

You have the main content written and you’re pretty darn happy with it.

Now comes the part where you optimise and format to make it a Mike Tyson knockout.

You need to set your blog post up for success. You’ve written a fabulous piece of content and now you need to optimise with your keyword of choice so that your target clients can find it.

But.

Don’t go overboard by inserting your keyword after every other sentence in a frantic panic to have Google rank you in search.

This is called keyword stuffing and Google don’t take lightly to it.

Things to think about when formatting your blog post:

  • Images

Blog articles with images get 94% more views! 94%!!! You can’t afford to not have images. Think about when you’re reading a blog post, it’s much easier to read and digest with relevant images that break up the text, right?

  • Subheadings

These make it easier for your reader to find the information they’re looking for and also help to break down the content into chunks to read and digest.

  • Internal/External links

Building backlinks to other industry leaders will help build relationships and your status as a thought leader. Your internal links are great for SEO, you want to build a spiderweb of content to link people from one piece of content to the next, to keep people on your website for longer. Want to find out more about internal and external links? 

  • Call-to-action (CTA)

What do you want to accomplish through your post? Are you just looking for page views? Or do you want readers to sign up for your list? Visit a product page or landing page? Buy a product? Decide exactly which action (just one) you want your readers to take, and then make it really clear within your CTA. Make it compelling, make people want to click that button or link.

Lastly that brings us to..

Social Sharing

Make it ridiculously easy for people to share your content. Your readers shouldn’t have to struggle to spread your good work.

There’s no point following these steps and writing a knockout blog post if it’s not going to be seen by the masses!

Make it easy for people to click the social media icon and share with colleagues, friends and family. Don’t be afraid to ask people to share your post, what’s the worst that can happen?

Places to think about sharing your blogpost:

  • LinkedIn (add it as an article and share in relevant groups)
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Medium
  • Pinterest
  • Email

Our posts typically hit 1,000+ reads within a week.  

If we had a trumpet in the office, we would most probably be guilty of blowing it right now.

These are the steps I use to make sure I’m covering every process for writing the ultimate knockout blog post.

Blog posts are a huge part of your inbound marketing content strategy, and are important for attracting your target clients to you, in a helpful and holistic way.

Are you struggling to see any backlash from your blog posts/content?

What if we told you we can deliver measurable results from your content marketing.

Well, we can do just that.

We have our boxing gloves on, have you?

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recycle your content

Reduce, Reuse and Recycle Your Content

Posted Ella AndrewsLeave a commentPosted in Inbound marketing, Marketing

Reduce, Reuse and Recycle your content

Reduce the time you spend on creating new content by reusing what you’ve already got, or recycling it into something new and exciting for your target audience!

Global warming and recycling are hot topics right now, (pardon the pun) and so they should be. People are finally starting to realise the critical state of the earth and are making conscious efforts to be more ‘eco-friendly’.

As a marketer you too can recycle your content to reduce time spent on creating, reuse what you’ve already got by recycling it into something new and exciting for your target audience!

Re-ally, you can!

What you can expect to learn:

  1. Why recycle content?
  2. How to use ACE to recycle old content.
  3. Republishing old content
  4. Recycling into new content

Why Recycle Your Content?

recycle your content

Recycling your content has a tonne of benefits for your team as well as your content strategy. Head over here for more benefits. 

By recycling your old content into new content, it reduces time spent creating new content for your team of content creators.

Instead of spending time generating new content ideas, you can focus your time on being more efficient, not only saving you time but effort.

The content you made 6 months ago isn’t always going to be relevant. However, it was once a super useful piece of content your target audience enjoyed. The first stage in your up-cycling of content is to find a different approach or more recent statistics/developments.  This initial step is a super easy chance to update any outdated information and bring it back to life.

Don’t think of content just as blog posts either, you can be apply this across multiple content formats. 

How to Use ACE to Recycle Old Content

ACE is an acronym we use when we’re recycling our content to prompt us to think about the following points:

Adjust- What do you need to adjust in your content to make it relevant again. Is there information you need to remove or add in?

Combine- Have you got content you can combine together to provide new value to your target client?

Expand- Can you expand the old content on a deeper level? Do you know more on the subject than you did previously? Is there a new case study you can add to support your context?

Using the ACE acronym when thinking about recycling your content will allow you to produce valuable and relevant content for your target audience.

Republishing Old Content

Some of your existing, old content may not need updating at all and can be republished and prompted as it is. Just maybe give it some additional bells and whistles.

This is called evergreen content, perfectly good content that maybe didn’t get the reaction it deserved or it was just so good it deserved to be shared again!

Once you’ve re-published the content it can be re-shared in social media and linked to in your other content as well.

A little like creating a spider web of content, which Matt Cutts from Google, explains in the  video below!

Your most recent subscribers are likely to not have seen some of your older content, so your evergreen content will actually still be fresh and new to many!

Alternatively, If a piece of content was particularly high performing, don’t shy away from re-publishing it again. Just make sure you leave a good gap in between the original posting.

There was clearly a demand for the content, so give the people what they want- again! And then again!

Be sensible with your republishing, try and limit this to just excellent, high performing content- you don’t want Google viewing your website as spammy. 

Recycling Old Content

recycle your content

With so many different types of content, across multiple channels and in different formats, there are a multitude of opportunities to recycle content. HubSpot make us pur with this explanation on how to effectively cross market your content into different formats.

Recycling your content can give you ample chances to create something new and spectacular for your target clients! Maybe even build on a some serious sub topics.

The first step is to identify a high-performing content format and topic. Identify an alternative method of message within that content and then build on it. In essence, you are rewording the old content but putting in to a new and exciting output.

To create a long-form offer:

  • Identify the format and topic
  • Make a list of supporting subtopics and chose the strongest.
  • Create content for each of those subtopics.
  • Download or create a template guide. 
  • Put all the content into a guide.
  • Add in relevant call-to-actions
  • Promote!!!

Recycling content allows you to reach new audiences and organically over time build more traction within your content. When you repurpose that content in a new format and/or update it, you can reach new audiences that otherwise may have never seen it. We don’t all consume content in the same way.

Your organic search engine optimisation (SEO) will benefit massively from this. Optimised content in various formats can give you a significant lift in organic visibility and traffic. Why?

Well by optimising different channels with links to and from other relevant owned media (find out the difference between owned, earned and paid media)  creating a web, it will significantly improve your chances of the spiders ranking your content as relevant and useful.

If you guest publish your content on reputable/industry relevant sites, then you’ll also have the benefit of backlinks. We all know how much Google loves backlinks!

So next time you write a well-researched blog post, milk it for everything it is worth. Use some of the suggestions we have spoken about above to save you money and grow your presence online.

There are tremendous benefits to recycling content, and it’s an easy way to fill the gaps of your content schedule. You have already completed the hard part The key is to spend more time promoting your content than you do creating it.

Want some tips on writing excellent content? Or maybe you need some fresh ideas on formatting your content for maximum exposure and engagement. We’re here to help!

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personalisation

Use Personalisation in Recruitment To Ask The Right Questions, At The Right Time, To The Right People

Posted Ella AndrewsLeave a commentPosted in Inbound marketing, Inbound Recruitment, Marketing, Recruitment

Use Personalisation in recruitment to Ask the Right Questions at the Right Time, To the right people.

Your clients and candidates will be going through a journey on your website, your job is to know at which stage in the recruitment process they are so you can ask relevant questions tailored to their experience.

A straightforward and effective way to segment your audience for personalisation, is to simply ask the right questions.

What is segmentation? It’s the first step in determining who your marketing efforts should target. Segmentation helps you understand which groups exist so you can later identify which groups to target and when.

Asking customers their reasons for visiting your website, becoming a user, or subscribing to your email can be remarkably easy, but invaluable. It can give you insightful data that can lead to your business sending incredibly targeted emails.

Asking the right question at the right time is just as important as asking the question itself.

There are two distinct differences to your database. The candidate and the clients.

Your clients and candidates will be going through a journey on your website, your job is to know at which stage in the recruitment process they are so you can ask relevant questions tailored to their experience.

There has never been more competition for our attention in the noise of the digital landscape. This is no different to how you attract your clients and candidates eyes and ears.

Many businesses have been incredibly slow to take up personalization. In fact “it has been reported that only 5% of companies personalize extensively.” – Econsultancy.

When we go to networking events, we don’t stroll in, stand in the middle and talk loudly and aimlessly in the hope that someone will hear us and decide to join the conversation.

When it comes to personalising your email marketing it’s exactly the same concept. You don’t want to be that person that sends out loud, pointless emails in the hope someone will respond.

There are relatively simple, yet sophisticated, ways to use personalisation in your emails that target the right people by delivering the right content at the right time.

What we’re going to cover in this article:

  1. What Questions Should You Be Asking?
  2. Do You Know Who You Are Asking Them To?
  3. Know When To Ask Them- Inbound Recruitment Methodology
  4. Showcase Your Businesses Personality.

What Questions Should You Be Asking?

Targeted, personalised emails are designed to exceed the expectations of your clients and candidates.

Instead of receiving a campaign with generic, one-size-fits-all offers and messaging, your subscribers will receive an email that is targeted directly to them. Imagine a world where a client receives information about hiring and a candidate receives information about applying for a new job..no, we don’t want to imagine it either.

You can do this through asking the right questions, or giving access to tools that are time relevant as part of the recruitment process.

For example, including a CV building tool on your website allows you to hit two birds with one stone. You know instantly that this lead is a candidate. Then you can segment even further to know that this is an active candidate, that’s looking to update their CV.

Use this information to your advantage. Take this information in the knowledge they are likely to be looking for a new role. Start to send content like ‘5 Failsafe Tips for Writing a Covering Letter’.

Forms are also a great way to capture data and a perfect chance to ask questions designed to squeeze out the information.The essential information you need to create a targeted approach.


These questions could be:

General data; Name, email address, phone number.

What role they are looking for? (Be candidate and client specific; hire or apply for)

What industry? (Hire or apply for)

Take all this incredibly important information and nurture, nurture, nurture & then nurture some more.

Do You Know Who You’re Asking Them To?

social media marketing

The information you take from asking the questions can then be analysed and interpreted into segments of your database.

Segmenting your database (which every recruitment agency should do) is the start of creating specific buyer personas.

Buyer personas are fictional, generalized representations of your ideal clients and candidates. Having a deep understanding of your buyer persona(s) is critical to driving content creation, product development, sales follow up, and really anything that relates to acquisition and retention.

For example, one of your personas could be ‘Client Clive’.

Client Clive is a director in the accounting and finance industry, looking to hire the top talent for his firm.

This enables you to target or personalise your marketing for different segments of your audience. Put it this way, you wouldn’t send an email to a recently placed candidate with tips on how to create a winning CV.

Look through your contacts database to uncover trends on how certain leads find and consume your content so you know exactly who you’re talking to.

If you need help in creating your buyer personas, HubSpot have a awesome guide. 

 

Know When To Ask Them- Inbound Recruitment Methodology

Using the inbound methodology allows you to know exactly when to ask the right questions or send the relevant content.

You can see in the diagram how the inbound methodology can be related directly to inbound recruitment. What’s more, it directly tells the process you go through to turn strangers into leads, candidates/clients and ultimately promoters that refer you to family and friends. [Recommendation stat]

Now you understand how the inbound recruitment methodology works.

Take these methods and apply them to your target clients and candidates but in a personalised way.

For example We all know that certain times and days are better for posting content than others. Why? Because of the way us, as consumers, choose to consume content in the natural stages of our days.

This works in the same way when you’re sending out emails. We are sure you have A/B tested this and found the optimum time to send your emails- if not, what are you waiting for?!

A/B testing, also known as split testing, is a marketing experiment wherein you “split” your audience to test a number of variations of a campaign to determine which performs better.

It’s more than likely not all your clients/candidates are in one location or respond to emails at the same time. They may be all around the world, scattered across different time zones, and possibly receiving your emails at non-optimal times.

To fix this, why not use the data you have to personalise your emails to be sent at the best times for each individual.

MailChimp have a pretty good tool to help you do this. 

It’s easy to forget the small things that could be making a significant difference to your open and click through rates.

Want to learn more about the inbound marketing for recruitment? 

Showcase Your Businesses Personality.

Personalisation shouldn’t just be limited to using your clients/candidates data. It is also about personalising your brand. Personalisation can soften the edges of big business and add a level of human connection between you and your ?

Your clients and candidates want to feel valued by you, but they also want to feel connected with you and your brand.

Having a brand persona can be just as important as personalising. Don’t be a stranger, we were always warned by our mothers to not talk to strangers.

Be a friendly, informative and helpful solution for your candidates and clients to feel nurtured, because that’s exactly what you’re doing. Nurturing your leads.

These tips will get you well on the way to understanding your clients and candidates so that you can resonate with them on a deeper level.

However, don’t threat. If you’re still in need of a helping hand or some expert advice on how to personalise, you’re in luck.

We specialise in Inbound Recruitment to help you place more candidates, more frequently to more clients.

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hubspot

Hubspot: The Saving Grace CRM for Recruitment Agencies

Posted Ella AndrewsLeave a commentPosted in Inbound marketing, Inbound Recruitment, Marketing, Recruitment

Hubspot: The Saving Grace CRM for Recruitment Agencies

In this blog post we’re exploring why Hubspot is such a necessary tool for Recruitment agencies, to help you place more candidates, more frequently, to more clients.

Want to know more? Here are the things we’ll be covering.

  1. What’s a CRM
  2. Who are Hubspot?
  3. Why Hubspot?
  4. The Inbound Recruitment methodology
  5. Become a Better Recruiter

What is a CRM?

“What is a CRM?” I hear you say. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management.

For every recruitment company, their most valuable and important asset is their database. It’s common in recruitment companies for , these details about those customers; who they are, how they’ve interacted with your organization, are spread out in many different places.

Your prospects and customers will feel the pain when your team isn’t on the same page. From their perspective, they have a relationship with one company, not a collection of different people and departments. Everyone on your team from your Sales department to Marketing, needs context about every customer’s needs, wants, and current state, so they can pick up the conversation where it left off.

A CRM is a tool that makes it easy as pie to build better relationships, nurture your leads and in turn place more candidates with more roles.

With one central place to organise all the details of your leads and customers, it’s easy for everyone on your team to gain insight into the state of your business, and the status of every candidate/client relationship.

Who are Hubspot?

 

hubspot

 

Let me enlighten you.

HubSpot (a company based out of Cambridge, Massachusetts; home to world-class university, Harvard! ) are the leading experts and founders of the inbound methodology. Not sure what the inbound methodology is?

Inbound marketing is just one part of a larger movement in the business world. That movement is inbound. Inbound is a method of attracting, engaging, and delighting people to grow a business that provides value and builds trust. Unlink outbound marketing, you don’t have to fight for your prospects attention, instead you attract them to you.

Still not sure what that actually means? Don’t worry, we’ve covered it. 

Simply put, HubSpot is inbound marketing and sales software that helps companies attract visitors, convert leads, and close customers.

To practise inbound marketing, you need a tool which delivers the information you want to disseminate. That’s where Hubspot’s CRM comes in. The message can’t be spread without a messenger, the CRM is vital to your company’s success. Once you adopt the inbound method and Hubspot’s CRM, things which would have labour intensive become automated and joyful.

Why Hubspot?

First things first, Hubspot CRM is completely free to use with unlimited users and storage of upto 1 million contacts. Yes you read it right, F-R-E-E for as long as you want it to be! And yes, 1 million!

“I demand the sum.. of 1 million dollars!”- name that film.

It’s suitable for growing companies of any size and allows you to set the foundation for your business with a free system, to build deeper relationships with contacts, from first interaction to happy customer and beyond.

If you find your business is growing, firstly- good work! Why not share some of you tips in the comments below. Wanting it to grow quicker? Why not comment what you are struggling with below. Secondly, there are a few add-ons and upgrades you can apply as and when you like.

As part of the free CRM you have access to;

  • Contact management – create a contact management strategy.
  • Deals – create a sales pipeline to manage your leads.
  • Lead analytics – know how successful your leads are.
  • Email scheduling – reach your prospects at the right time.
  • Contact and company insights – extra information collected from HubSpot’s insights database.
  • Tasks – keep track of your to-do-list.
  • Outlook and gmail integration – Make targeted marketing easier.
  • Facebook lead ads – connect your Facebook account to create or sync ads.
    & so much more, head over to Hubspot to be bowled over with features. https://www.hubspot.com/pricing/crm

Inbound Recruitment

The diagram above explains how you can apply the inbound methodology to inbound recruiting through attracting, converting, closing and delighting

The way people find, research, and apply for jobs has changed. Companies used to be in control of the recruiting process, but now, over 75% of job seekers start their search on Google.

Inbound recruiting creates a remarkable candidate experience through employer brand content and marketing strategies that help companies build relationships with top talent.

By taking an inbound marketing approach to recruiting, companies can connect with passive and active job seekers, engage with their network, and delight candidates and clients throughout the application and hire process.

Want to know more about Inbound recruiting?

 

Become a Better Recruiter

Your CRM can help you distribute content that resonates with your candidates and clients, the first step to successfully and effectively use Hubspot to become a better recruiter is to segment your database.

You will have two distinct customer types; clients and candidates.

When you’re marketing and selling to them, it can be difficult to determine who’s who! For example, if you send out a list of job openings to potential clients, you risk damaging that relationship as the content won’t be relevant to them.

These customer types can break down further into buyer personas, You can easily create buyer personas, what are buyer personas? Neil Patel has some great content on how to create your buyer personas for example a recently placed candidate will require a different type of content to a candidate that’s actively lookign for a new role, for example downloading content on ‘How to write a stand out CV’.

With Hubspot you can create separate workflows with different triggers and content being distributed to your different personas rather than a blanket message to your whole database. Who really walks in to a networking event and says the same stuff to the same people and receives ground-breaking results?

Inside Hubspot you are able to identify which pieces of content and exactly how each candidate or client has interacted with you to make it that bit easier!
There’s a whole host of tools that are extremely beneficial to a recruiting agency to help you place more candidates, more frequently to more clients and make your teams lives 10000x easier in the process.

As a Hubspot Preferred Partner we have a whole host of knowledge to divulge to you whether it’s to learn more about inbound marketing, or Hubspot.

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inbound marketing

The Difference Between Owned, Earned & Paid Media

Posted Ella AndrewsLeave a commentPosted in Content marketing, Inbound marketing, Marketing

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN EARNED, OWNED & PAID MEDIA

We will be exploring the difference between types of media and looking at how each of them are beneficial for both your content strategy and ultimately your inbound marketing.

An effective content strategy doesn’t rely on only one tactic. Generating qualified leads requires you to regularly publish compelling, valuable content, explore guest blogging opportunities, identify co-marketing campaigns, and devise a strategy for promoting said content.

  1. What is owned media?
  2. What is earned media?
  3. What is paid media
  4. Implementing this in your inbound marketing content strategy.

inbound marketing

What is Owned Media? 

 
Owned media are the assets your brand has full control over. For example, your website, blog and social media channels.These are the places you should be creating valuable content providing value to your leads as they move down the sales funnel.  
 
This content should be unique to your brand. Make it yours. This is what’s going to set you apart from your competitors. 
 
Your owned media is what you have full control over. You should be using this to your advantage. 
 
Answer helpful relevant questions, for the right people, at the right time in the buyer’s journey. At the end of the day, this content can help leads determine whether your brand is right for them, and whether they want to work with you. 
 
Note, owned media will consume the majority of your time. Creating and brainstorming thought provoking articles.  The output matches your input. The more time you put in to this stage of the process, the better the response will be. 
 
Content marketing gets three times more leads than paid search advertising. 
 
There are six different type of owned media:
  • Blog posts
  • Case Studies
  • Emails
  • Social media posts
  • Whitepapers & E-books
  • Video

What is Earned Media?

Put simply, earned media refers to media exposure you’ve earned through word-of-mouth.

Whether it was the amazing content you’ve distributed, your SEO efforts, the customer experience you’ve delivered or a combination of all three. Earned media refers to the recognition you receive as a result of your amazing content.

Earned media doesn’t just have to come directly from you, content or quotes to external industry publications are a powerful tool. Whether you’re receiving mentions on external sites or you’ve earned an opportunity to contribute to them regularly.

External publications help fuel the top of your funnel and introduce you to new leads.

A big driver behind earned media, if the increase in credibility, someone who isn’t paid by your company believes enough in your products, insights.

Typically, this comes in the form of: mention, quote, or promote your brand’s content on their own platforms.

This speaks volumes to a prospective clients.

“92% of people trust recommendations from individuals over brands.”

Here is the power of reviews and earned media.

The Content Marketing Institute have written a piece on 3 Earned Media Strategies for Content Marketing Plans.

There are five different types of earned media:

  • Press mentions
  • Positive reviews
  • Reposts
  • Recommendations
  • Contributing thought leadership content to industry publications.

What is Paid Media?

Paid media serves as a method for promoting content and driving exposure.

To get the most out of paid media you should be using it to promote your earned media. Paid Media is about amplifying the media you have already invested heavily in.

Paying to promote content creates exposure and pushes your content to a defined audience. Usually defined by your buyer persona.

Need some help building your buyer persona? Head over to Hubspot- the experts. 

Remember to think about where your buyer persona is likely to be hanging out.

For example Google Adwords is likely to be the most suitable starting position In 2017, Google accounted for over 79% of all global desktop search traffic, chances are your target client will be part of that 79%.

There are six types of paid media:

 

How to implement the three types of media in to your inbound marketing strategy

A comprehensive and effective content strategy includes a healthy mix of earned, owned and paid media.

Content is a fairly general term. But now you know the differences between earned media, owned media, and paid media.

Do not use these in isolation to one another. They combine to be a comprehensive inbound marketing strategy to deliver more leads directly to you.

Your content strategy is your secret weapon and crucial part of your inbound marketing strategy.

Utilise your content to engage and nurture your prospects, leads and customers all the way through the buyer’s journey – After all 67% of the buyer’s journey is digital.

Learn how best to build your content strategy.

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inbound marketing

What is Inbound Marketing?- How can it benefit your business

Posted Ella AndrewsLeave a commentPosted in Inbound marketing

What is inbound marketing and how can it benefit your business?

Inbound marketing is the act of attracting and engaging prospects through creating, relevant valuable content for the right person at the right time.

Not sure what inbound marketing is? Don’t worry, we’re about to break down what inbound marketing actually is, the three important stages to the recipe and why it could benefit your business!

  1. Attract, Engage & Delight
  2. Benefit to the business
  3. Type of content
  4. How to execute


 Why Inbound Marketing?

Unlike outbound marketing, with inbound marketing you don’t need to fight for your potential target audience/existing clients attention. Your inbound marketing does all the hard work for you.

You let your content, that’s designed to address the problems and needs of your ideal customers, attract qualified prospects and build trust and credibility for your business by offering them the valuable content. It’s about adding value at every stage in your customer’s journey with you.

Try thinking about how you personally search for information.

Then think about what you click on and why?

Does it give you the answer you’re looking for?

Or does it give you useful information to help you make a decision?

Most of us need a little push in the right direction before parting with our money and what a better nudge than free information in the form of your content?! Providing worth and value to your customer means they’re more likely to trust your brand and make a sale.

Attract, Engage and Delight

This is called the Inbound Methodology; the three stages within the notorious HubSpot flywheel to build this philosophy. The flywheel is an alternative way of looking at the classic sales funnel. The sales funnel produces customers but it doesn’t consider how those customers can help your business grow. That’s where the flywheel comes into play- it represents a machine, storing rotational energy. Who better to tell you about the Flywheel than the creators themselves, HubSpot.

inbound marketing

Attract

You don’t want just anyone coming to your website. You want people who are most likely to become leads and ultimately, happy customers. But, how do you really attract your target audience?

You attract more of the right customers with relevant content at the right time – when they’re looking for it.

A fantastic example of what attracting should look like. Some fascinating, valuable content from Neil Patel. 

Engage

This is the moment someone takes the desired action on your website.

You can then use conversion tools like call to action (CTAs), forms, and lead flows – to capture the information of prospects visiting your site.

Use conversation tools to create lasting relationships with prospects on the channels they prefer – through email, bots, live chat, or messaging apps.

Going back to that same piece of ‘attractive’ content from Neil Patel– we can see a whole host of engaging opportunities. Including a chance to win free content by simply entering your email address. 

Delight

Create memorable content your prospects can share with their friends and family by using a variety of content formats. Provide an outstanding experience designed to create advocates of your brand from your existing clients/users.

“71% of consumers who have had a good social media experience with a brand are likely to share it with others.”

As well as email marketing, Neil has a series of video blogs readily available to watch and share on his website.

Find out more about the inbound methodology.

How will it benefit my business?

Inbound marketing is extremely beneficial to both you and your target audience. It means you don’t have to go out searching for your target audience- instead you attract them.

For your target audience, it means they receive helpful, informative content to aid them in the buyer’s journey.
From the perspective of your company it helps build your contact database.

Remember the goal of inbound marketing is to build connections with your target audience .

A contact database is the heart of all your inbound marketing efforts, you don’t just stop nurturing once you’ve turned a lead into a customer – you continue to nurture and delight them (and become brand advocates).

Your brand awareness is created from the inbound marketing approach making use of social media, informative blog posts, infographics, PPC and SEO (to name a few tools), to get your brand in front of thousands of prospects and educate them about your company.

inbound marketing

 

 

What kind of content should you be using?

The kind of content you create is variable dependent, some things to consider are your buyer persona, what stage they are in the buyer’s journey, your keywords and what content you’ve already covered.

When it comes to the different types of inbound marketing the quickest and most effective include; blog post content, social media marketing and search engine optimisation (SEO) . Creating strong, relevant content targeted to the right people means it’s more likely to be shared, increasing your reach, brand awareness and customer acquisition.

There’s no reason as to why you can’t take old content and repurpose it across different platforms to make your life easier. Here are some handy tips on how you could do it.

inbound marketing

How can I execute it?- Building your content strategy

Once you have gained the trust of your prospect and lured them to your website through your quality content, you will have the chance to convert them into leads through conversion paths and conversations.

When the deal is sealed and you have attained your leads contact details – you can start to convert them into customers, powering your business with inbound marketing, by providing them with the right information, at the right time in their buying process.

It’s important to remember to carry on nurturing and upselling to your customers after the buying process, encouraging them to continue to love and promote your brand!

 

Inbound marketing is an investment in your time and resources. There are no quick ways to build a comprehensive inbound marketing strategy. We allow for 90 days of planning and implementation. However, Inbound marketing is something that every business should be taking advantage of for continued inbound leads and brand advocacy.

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Inbound Marketing for Recruitment

Posted Laurence ChandlerLeave a commentPosted in Inbound marketing, Inbound Recruitment, Recruitment

inbound marketing for recruitment

Inbound recruiting creates a remarkable candidate experience through employer brand content and marketing strategies that help companies build relationships with top talent.

By taking an inbound marketing approach to recruiting, companies can connect with passive and active job seekers, engage with their network, and delight candidates throughout the application process. 

Using a multi channel process and the power of your existing database you can place candidates quicker, fill client positions quicker and free up your recruitment consultants time.

9 topics important to inbound recruitment:

  1. Utilising your existing database

Utilising your existing database

Your existing database is the most powerful tool you currently have. The power of your database should become a central focus to your recruitment process.

 

This is the central location where you have all the information on everything that drives your business.

 

A CRM tool will help you identify which pieces of content and exactly how each candidate or client has interacted with you.

 

Before all else, let’s talk about the importance of your database and how that can be used to place more candidates more frequently.

Learn more about the importance of utilising your existing database in recruitment

Differentiate between candidates and client

 

As we talk more about your database. You need to think more about the different ways in which you can communicate with candidates and clients.

 

What a candidate is interested in may not be the same as what a client is interested in. What a Structural Engineer is interested in may differ from what a Marketing Manager is interested in.

 

There are times when a blanket message will be sufficient. Say, for something like a business update.

 

For everything else, you need a segments and micro segments within your database for specific targeting and messaging.

Learn more about the importance of differentiating between candidates and clients in recruitment

Nurturing candidates and clients

A candidate may not always be ready to move. They may either be happy in their role, personal restrictions or just recently changed jobs.

These candidates require nurturing ready for conversion. Imagine you have just moved job. The recruitment agency were amazing, and got you a great deal.

You love this job. The honeymoon period is still evident.

Then the same recruitment company sends you an email asking whether you would like to learn about the seven top tips on updating your CV.

You likely to have little to no intention of wanting to find out more.

Not only this, but you are likely to feel confused, lose trust in the recruitment company and question whether they really had your best interests at heart?

Why would you need to renew your CV when you have just started a new role?

Learn more about the importance of utilising your existing database in recruitment

Email Marketing In Recruitment

The communication between your recruitment consultants is likely to be predominantly through email and your website.

Only when a lead has been qualified through predetermined metrics are your recruitment consultants likely to use the phone.

Let’s see how email marketing works within the recruitment industry

Learn more about the importance of differentiating between candidates and clients in recruitment

Multi Channel Marketing

By now you understand the importance of engaging with your database on a regular basis with the right message at the right time.

But there is more than one way to communicate with your existing audience.

Using a selection channels, which you know your candidates and clients are using, broadens your horizons and gives you the platform to deliver the right message at the right time.

Think about social media and how each channel is used differently. LinkedIn is likely to be more engaging with clients than for example Pinterest.

Whereas, Instagram could be more engaging for build rapport with candidates.

Check out how we can use a selection of channels to deliver the multi-channel experience

Learn more about the importance of utilising your existing database in recruitment

Importance of social media in recruitment

If you have gone on to learn more about social media in recruitment, then you are likely to have heard some of this before.

Social Media, primarily LinkedIn (as you are aware), should be your go to platform to nurture your existing clients and candidates, whilst building your brand.

Not only a platform to spread your good word, but to also drive engagement in a natural environment. Different platforms require a different.

Learn how Social Media is a core aspect of the recruitment process

Learn more about the importance of socxial media in recruitment

Creating engaging content for the candidate

Engaging content in recruitment is so much more than just providing CV building tips.Think about how a piece of content to add value to a candidate months before they even consider changing jobs.

Put yourself in the shoes of your candidate. Are in them? Make sure they fit. You aren’t ready to look for a new role.But you have been in your role for 12 months, and you would like things to progress. But what does progression look like?

Wouldn’t it be handy if you had a piece of content delivered right to your inbox, or exposed to on social media, outlining career progression.Maybe you want to include some information about desirable skills, salary expectations. You name it.

The more value you can deliver the more engaged your candidates will be.

Learn more about creating engaging content for the candidate

Creating Engaging Content

Engaging content in recruitment is so much more than just providing How to interview tips.

Think about how a piece of content to add value to a client months before they even consider hiring someone.

Now, let’s put you in the shoes of your client. These might be a bit easier to wear. Your team is at full capacity.

Everyone in your team is happy.

All appraisals are as expected. But, sometimes the unexpected happens, whether it’s a new client taking up your excess capacity, or a member of your team leaving.

This is much more about planning for the unexpected, or the expected? Think about the type of information you would benefit from in times of consistency and stability. Developing skills? Industry trends? Information you originally was not aware of.  

Learn more about creating engaging content for the client

CV Builder

We have seen agencies provide value over the years, in a variety of different ways.

We have all (at least most of us) been a candidate at one stage and also a client. The biggest ‘headache’ has always been the dreaded CV.

Is it the right format? Does it have the right information? Is the information in the correct order?

There are so many different variations you quickly lose sight on what is the norm.

Imagine this.

A candidate has the capability to input the required information. In the pre-agreed format.

The CV is generated in a best practice. Your candidate not only has a value added service and a reason to give you their information.

But now every CV you receive follows an identical format/ Now imagine this. A client has a specific requirement for the information they need on every CV.

Every candidate builds their CV on your website to meet this requirement. The client receives the exact information they need to make an informed decision.

You guessed it… increase the chances of a hire!

Learn more about building a Resume Grader