Marketing 101

Marketing is essential to any business. Most areas of your business depend on successful marketing. But what exactly is marketing? Marketing is a broad term that covers areas such as:

• Advertising


• Public Relations


• Promotions


• Sales


• Social Media


• Search Engine Marketing


• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)


• Blogging


• Customer Relations


• Community outreach


• Web Design


• Graphic Design


• Branding

Going crazy yet?

Marketing is a means of getting the “word out,” about the product of service you are offering. Without it, no one would know about what it is you are doing. Without marketing, your business may in fact have the best product and/or service, but no one would know about it.

 

Getting Word Out

For a business to succeed, the product or service it provides must be known to potential buyers. Unless your brand is already known in your community, you must use marketing strategies to create brand awareness. Without marketing, your potential customers won’t even know you exist. Using marketing allows for your company to be “discovered.”

 

More $$$

Once your business gets on the radar of your potential clients, your chances of them making a purchase significantly increases. This leads to happy customers referring your business to others, and the word begins to spread like wildfire. Without having the proper marketing strategies in places, these sales probably would not have happened otherwise.

The Face of Your Company and Your Reputation

The success of a company often rests on a good reputation. Marketing creates a sense of brand recognition and brand awareness. As you experience business growth, your reputation grown, and your business expands. The reputation of your company is created through effective communication.

 

Consider This…

Even though marketing is extremely important for a business to prosper, there are associated costs with any marketing effort. Make sure you set a clear budget and consider any and all costs of your marketing. I personally like to create a plan for each campaign. Then put the campaign budget into my overall YTD budget to see where my numbers are. You will want to make sure your marketing efforts are working; calculate your ROI. How much money are you spending to how much revenue are you getting in return?

Hope this info is helpful! Please reach out to me with any questions.

-Alissa

aimperatore@callagylaw.com

Marketing 101 #Advertising, #Marketing, #Socialmedia, #Strategy

4 Tips for Creating a Great Content Marketing Strategy

4 Tips for Creating a Great Content Marketing Strategy

visit our site for more info: callagylaw.com

 Posted on Thursday, August 21st, 2014.

   Written by Justin Fishaw

Your content is the most important element of your website.

Without the right content marketing strategy, your website will never reach its full potential. You’ll never get the full traffic you could have, and you’ll never get the exposure you could have.

Creating a successful content marketing strategy isn’t easy. The right plan includes the right content designed for the right audience and marketed in the right way.

Here are a few things you need to do to create a great content marketing strategy for your site:

Create Personas to Target

It’s not enough to identify a broad audience. You need to narrow it down by creatingpersonas. For example, you can’t just write a “mom” blog. There are millions of moms in the world, and they are not all the same. They don’t have the same experiences, they don’t have the same views of the world, and they don’t have the same beliefs about parenting. If you don’t create specific personas, you can’t hone your message and reach your true audience. For example, one persona you may want to target is the mom who is under 35, listens to popular indie music, might have a few tattoos, and believes in breastfeeding and co-sleeping.

You should create a few personas for the type of audience you are trying to reach with your content. You can then create a list of article ideas that someone with that persona would enjoy reading. You’ll create content that is more engaging for your target audience, which will help you to attract more visitors, to retain more readers, and to increase conversions.

Develop a Distinct Brand

Unless you’re in a very niche field, you likely have a lot of competitors. While you should keep an eye on the kind of content that your competitors are publishing, you should not view their content as a signal of what you should be publishing. Your readers don’t want another clone in the field. They want content that is unique and valuable.

Don’t focus on creating content that is simply “better.” Create content that is unique in order to develop a distinct brand. Consider the example of Darek Halpern. There were hundreds of blogs being published about online marketing when he startedSocial Triggers. Yet he found immediate success by finding a way to set himself apart. Instead of writing about the same online marketing topics, he used psychological studies and real cases to provide actionable advise for online business owners.

Do the same with your brand. What can you do to make your content unique?

Explore Multiple Types of Content

Variety in content can help you reach more of your target audience and give them more useful information to keep them coming back again and again. Brainstorm topics to create as much variety as you can. You can start mining topic ideas by looking at the e-mails you get from customers and seeing what questions or concerns they mention the most. Write blog posts that answer them. Other ideas for content include infographics, interviews with your company leaders or other industry experts, customer stories and case studies.

The more variety you have, the more interesting and unique your blog will be and the more readers you will reach.

End with a Call to Action

Don’t overlook the call to action in your posts. It is what will convince readers to sign up for your e-mail list, to browse through your catalog or to call you for an estimate. This is an often overlooked aspect of content writing, but it is one of the most important. Make sure you end each and every post with a good call to action.

Make sure there is variety in your call to action. If you end every post the same, your readers will start to overlook it. Use different strategies, and make different asks. As with your content, the more variety you have, the more successful you will be.
Creating a great content marketing strategy requires a lot of research, a lot of skill and a lot of luck. These tips can help you create a content marketing strategy that gets results and helps take your site to the next level.