Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

As a busy blogger, you’re probably juggling a multitude of different tasks, many of which are repetitive and frankly, quite boring. For your blog to take off and scale into something greater than a company of one employee, you must use your time efficiently and learn to automate and delegate.

Read on to learn about the practical tools of automation and how to use them to grow your business.

The most successful inbound marketers learn skills and create habits in their first 100 days in this new role. To make sure your trajectory is set correctly, we've catalogued much of what you'll need to succeed in inbound marketing.

Don't be scared by the length -- remember, this document is one to use over the course of three months. Still, it's not intended to be a complete list of every little thing you need to know -- rather, it’s a fairly comprehensive collection of the fundamentals. Your company's own plan can be tailored based on the goals you need to achieve, but this outline is a good guide to begin with....

Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) get almost 24 calls a month from marketing providers looking to sell them advertising or marketing products and services. Competition is fierce, and SMBs often have a difficult time choosing a provider.

Last month, I covered how the trend of fake online content leads to a general distrust of digital and online media. But the local digital marketing industry, especially in the area of SEO, suffers from its own share of issues that lead to a lack of trust by SMBs.

LSA (Local Search Association) conducted a survey to examine what challenges SMBs face when shopping for a digital marketing provider and what areas they feel are most important for marketers to address when trying to gain their business.

Below I discuss the results of the survey, data regarding client churn in the industry and ways in which marketers need to respond....

SEO and SMM are like pizza and cheese: you can get one without the other, but, believe me, it isn’t worth it.

Nowadays SEO cannot be effective without well-executed content curation. And that’s where social media kicks in — it helps you unlock untapped potential. Compared to other marketing channels, social media benefits SEO in unexpected ways. It’s not surprising that SEO and SMM have slowly become closely intertwined activities that all businesses want to take advantage of.

But how exactly can SEO and SMM work together? Do social media signals affect your site’s visibility in Google? I’ve been investigating this topic for quite a long time and here's what I’ve learned so far

Marketo vs. Eloqua vs. HubSpot. Kapost vs. Newscred vs. Percolate. Sprinklr vs. Buffer vs. Hootsuite. And so on, and so on. The list of marketing technology vendors keeps growing. Which makes sorting through and implementing those martech tools a job in itself.

But how does the explosion in martech help your marketing team get sh*t done today?

It doesn't. So, while waiting for you to evaluate, decide, deploy, integrate, and optimize the spaghetti of solutions, try feeding your team a few lightweight apps that cost next to nothing and are dead simple to use....

When was the last time you clicked on a banner ad? Was is it on purpose? As many as 60 percent of banner ad clicks are accidental. Only 9 percent of them are viewed for more than one second. Yet every day, experienced marketers waltz into the office with their latest banner ad idea. Or worse, autoplay video. 

This is partly why I'm building an AR company that helps make ads more interactive, but also a tell-tale sign that disruption is inevitable. 

Marketers are desperate to increase numbers and generate traffic using old-school techniques such as SEO, content, social, email, webinars and influencers. Of course, consumers sense these tactics and are feeling increasingly suffocated by belligerent ads while marketers aimlessly spin their wheels....

With the caveat in the section above–that we’re often doing a little of both–and some informal polling of many esteemed marketers I know, here is where I’ve landed on social marketing vs. content marketing.

Social marketing is a channel where we find potential customers by listening to earned conversations and analyzing our owned accounts. We then interact with those people to move them through the customer journey.

You can use various tactics to make that movement happen. Content marketing is a tactic. It’s a method of marketing that allows companies to add value for potential customers by creating and distributing (sometimes through social) collateral like blog posts, videos, and web pages.

These pieces of collateral entertain and educate your target audience about topics related to your product. They’re intended to generate interest in your offering by reinforcing relevant problems, challenges, misconceptions, and, finally, solutions....

So the question shouldn’t be how can I create content on the cheap, but rather, how can I do more with less?

The answer: create masterful content that is worth more.
Content that generates traffic. Content that inspires shares. Content that gets written and talked about. Content that earns conversions. Content that wins trust. Content that positions you as an authority. Content that wins business, retains customers, and invokes referrals....

As social media marketing becomes more challenging and time-consuming, it’s time to get more organised when managing your brand’s social presence.

It’s not easy handling a brand’s social presence, but its successful management can lead to great results. Social networks keep growing and they are heading into a more mature phase, which means that the challenges grow for every brand that tries to stay competent.

No matter what goals you set for the new year, you still need to stay on top of your brand’s social media marketing and the right checklist may help you with all the tasks you need to do at the beginning of the year....

Some 53% of small business owners say social media is now their main tactic for online marketing, according to recent research fromVistaprint Digital.

The report was based on data from a survey conducted in September 2016 of 1,000 owners of businesses in the United States with fewer than 10 employees. The researchers also included data from a survey conducted in May 2016 of 2,000 consumers in the United States.

One-third of small business owners say their company website is a primary marketing channel, and 53% say their online presence is very important.

Some 70% of respondents say they use a mix of print and online tools to market their small business.

Check out the infographic for more findings from the report:...

I think many marketers are still reluctant to go all in on LinkedIn simply because they don’t understand how to utilize it properly. It’s also possible they don’t fully understand all the opportunities it presents.

Maybe it’s because of its robust set of features, the inherent learning curve, or the lack of understanding of the nuts and bolts of the platform. Whatever the reason, there’s a definite trend of marketers failing to extract LinkedIn’s full potential.

In fact, a study from the Content Marketing Institute found that an overwhelming number of LinkedIn users consider it to be ineffective as a marketing tool:

B2C marketers in North America in particular saw only limited results.

But what if I told you that there’s a way to kill it on LinkedIn and generate valuable, ongoing leads for your business? What if you could have an amazing ROI by following a fairly simple formula?

It’s definitely possible. The key is to infiltrate LinkedIn Groups....