After you block your time, stick to it. It doesn’t matter which tool or app you use. The best tool is the one that you consistently use. Choose something and stick to it.
“You train people how to treat you.” Mel Robbins
A month later, audit your blocking and make changes. This is structure with grace — not a prison sentence.
Do you need clients? We all do. How do you let people know what you do? It’s so important to keep telling people what you do — not in a smarmy way — but as it is appropriate. If you stop marketing, people stop thinking of you.
Read that again.
When we first start, we’re excited to tell everyone what we do. However, as our audience and peer group expands, it is necessary to remind people (and let new people know) about what you do and how you can help their business.
You Need a Marketing Strategy
A content marketing strategy is important. It is easy to presume people know you for a certain skill. But what about the new people? Also, maybe you shifted your niche. How do people know your product or service is still available?
“You Do Twitter?”
Recently during a sales call, this very thing hit me. The client saw my content planner on Twitter and was glad to purchase it. During a follow up call, after reading the planner, she confessed she had no idea that I manage social media accounts for businesses.
I thought to myself, “How is it possible that new peers don’t know that I manage Twitter?“
She apologized. But it wasn’t her fault.
It was my fault. Why?
Simple: I stopped talking about that part of my business.
The risk to not marketing completely is that people only know certain things about you.
Quite a few referrals have come my way over the years. I have one thing to say about pay-per-click (PPC) ads. Are you ready? Ads alone won’t save your business. If that is your goal, you will be throwing away money.
“Don’t simply wish for results to show up; know what your looking for specifically and how the strategy your company has come up with is helping you achieve those goals in a way which is both realistic and relatively speedy.” Mitch Britt
Organic social media with a killer website and PPC is a great combination. It’s marketing love. In other words, PPC done right is in concert with a wholistic marking plan.
What is Organic Social Media?
Social media is a way to post online. Organic social media is the combined efforts of your organization through various platforms (media) to build relationships (social) that will lead back to your website (findability). When you start paying for posts to be boosted or buying clicks, you’re in the world of advertising.
What is Pay Per Click (PPC)?
Pay Per Click is the art of creating campaigns and landing pages in order to be seen by a particular audience. There are generally several campaigns and keywords being bid upon during this practice.
“Pay-per-click (PPC) is an advertising model that lets marketers place ads on an ad platform and pay the host of that platform every time their ad is clicked.” Search Engine Journal
Steve Bastien is one of my favorite people to have worked with during my time at Thought House. As an agency specializing in franchise development, we would create the website, write persuasive copy, and create landing pages. As we shared these pages on social media, we would look at what worked and what didn’t. Those high-performing organic campaigns, more often than not, became PPC campaigns.
“Taking advantage of all the opportunities you have to measure and improve your online marketing is the key to success. Google search is the gold standard for learning in real-time, and Google Ads is a great way to get on board.” Warren Laine-Naida
If you can, it is always best to think of every part of your marketing plan from the website to the people at the other end of the lead generation email.
Isn’t PPC just SEO?
In one word: no. PPC is not SEO. SEO is an acronym for search engine optimization. I like to call it “findability.” Meaning, SEO is a comprehensive strategy combining the technical structure of your website, the quality of your website’s content, and social signals.
“SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.” Moz.com
Granted, I’m not a technical SEO professional. If you’re looking for that, contact my friend Pam Aungst’s agency.
Views, Clicks, and Impressions
An impression means the number of potential people who saw the thing. Think about billboards. Clear Channel sells these to this day. The rates are based upon how many eyes will potentially see them. Impressions are important in brand awareness campaigns.
A click is an action taken by a viewer. They viewed the website, video, or went to the app you’re selling.
A conversion is what happens after the person comes to your website. It can be a sale, joining a email list, a completed form, or a download. Your advertising agency should set up conversions for you in Google Analytics.
Data, Data, Data!
We’re all obsessed with data these days. Me? Not so much. Why? Because data only tells you what you measure. Read this again: data only tells you what you measure. It is impossible to measure everything.
Data is a snapshot of the past. It can’t predict the future. The data you do have is only helpful if you actually look at it and change your behavior. Confirmation bias and pride are generally deterrents to change.
I’ll never forget a client who insisted that the website didn’t work since all of their leads came via telephone.
“How did they find your number? Oh yeah. The website.”
These are the things that make me shake my head. It’s so important to ask where your leads came from. But that’s another blog post. You can watch me talk about it in this video.
Getting the Customer to Convert
You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink. Also, if your social media manager leads the horse to the “water” and the trough is empty, whose fault is that? Right. Not the SMM.
This is where a holistic marketing strategy is important. Hiring an agency that has professionals or gathering vendors and coordinating them is important to the effectiveness of your marketing.
Often, the business owner needs to focus their efforts. Founders tend to be idea people. Marketers execute on ideas. With that said, we still need participation from the business itself.
But you can also hire another advertising agency. Educate yourself. Empower yourself. This is the key to hiring better vendors and making great marketing decisions for your business.
Remember, social media and advertising are long-term solutions. If short-term is your last hope, you may want to try something else.
A marketing consultation or consult is where you hire a marketing professional for a conversation to gain their insight.
Marketing consults can be either phone or video calls, depending upon the consultant. The goal of a marketing consult or consultation is to unblock you. A good consultant should ask a lot of questions to help clarify your goals and help create a plan to go forward. If your marketing consultation doesn’t feel a little bit like therapy, it’s not the right person for you.
Most of my consulting clients take their own notes and leave with homework. Often they schedule a follow-up call.
Though I charge for the hour, I do not pro-rate the time. Meaning, the advice and insight given during a consultation comes from my considerable and diverse experience. The value is in the advice, even if it’s given in the last five minutes of the call.
Because I genuinely care for my clients, I often send them follow-up tools, materials, or referrals as it comes to mind. There’s no extra charge for kindness, right?
How Much Should Marketing Consultation Cost?
You can pay anywhere from $1.00/min to $16.67/min on Clarity.
The better question is what type of value and growth will happen once you execute the advice? The advice is awesome but you still have to do the work.
How much is investing in your own business worth?
Will your business make $1,000 more a month?
How much is that worth to you?
Do You Need a Marketing Consult?
It depends. Do you want advice? Are you stuck? If you don’t have time to follow up on the advice, maybe it’s not a good time. Like therapy, sometimes the act of talking to a professional brings the clarity you desire.
I’ve advised my clients on a variety of topics including:
Pricing
Job Costing
Time Blocking
Auditing Website Copy
Audience Insight
Blogging Topics
How to Reach Your Audience
Email Marketing Strategy
Social Media Marketing Strategy
Opposition Research
Reviews of Bridget’s Marketing Consultations
“…we ended our conversion with us both laughing after I said ‘I need more monitors for more chrome tabs…’ It was a great call. If you haven’t talked with her yet, you really should line up a call!” Malcolm Peralty
“Great chatting with [Bridget] today about marketing my plugins! Now I need to get after my homework.” Kathy Darling
“An hour of talking can make an impact! We have booked an hour-long video call with Bridget and it was totally worth it. She was able to quickly define our main problem and fears associate with it. In addition, tips and tactics on where to start and how to move forward were shared during the meeting. Before the meeting, I had small doubts that an hour is even enough to cover the intro part of the problems, but it was very productive.”Raitis Sevelis
As your website grows and you’ve been regularly publishing, there comes a time to audit your blog. What articles should you keep, delete, or revise?
Auditing Your Site Is A Lot of Work
So, when will you audit your site? You could do this every quarter or every year. It really depends upon your industry and how much it changes. If the things you write about change often (interest rates, for example), then you will want to audit posts of that type.
Regardless of how you decide to do it, it should be done. By all means, don’t just willy nilly delete posts that are older than X years. These aren’t tax records you’re throwing out. It’s content. Content is easier to revise than create. So, be mindful.
Of course, Yoast has extensive articles on this subject. You should definitely read their article on how to perform a SEO audit. My approach is less data-centric and more brand-centric. Is it true? Is it mostly true? Or is it total crap?
Keep These Posts
You read the post and you’re still proud of it. It resonates with your brand. The message is spot on. The facts are still true. Maybe this is an article you should post on Facebook and boost for $20. Get that bad boy some more traffic! It deserves attention.
Delete These Posts
When you’re writing about things that evolve, sometimes products and services die. There may be some parts of the article that ring true and could be salvaged, but unlikely. If you read it and feel completely embarrassed. Delete it. I’ve deleted articles about Blab.im and Google Plus. If you even know what those are. They died.
If you have two articles that are similar they could be merged — then you revise them. Honestly, I think that’s more work.
You can 301 these articles or not. It depends on the SEO professional that you listen to and your own business goals. If I didn’t like it, I’m doubtful people are also looking at it. But refer to your own Google Analytics. I’m not going to pretend I’m an SEO professional.
Revise These Posts
Revising posts can be a great way to keep content fresh. Maybe you’re writing about Twitter like I do. Twitter changes things — often. I am constantly having to edit posts for technical details that have changed.
If the article still rings true to you and your brand, then keep it but update it. Maybe add in a video. Find quotes from your peers and their blog posts. Spruce it up. Spend maybe 30 minutes once a week on these.
Questions to Ask Yourself
Has technical information changed but the premise is solid?
Does the feature image need to be updated to reflect my current branding?
Is the meta description there and/or can it be revised to look better?
Is the headline good?
Should the URL be changed? If yes, then be sure to put in a 301 redirect.
For me, downloading some sitemap or looking at a giant spreadsheet of all of my articles would be so overwhelming, I would do nothing. My philosophy is that something is better than nothing.
So, I use Revive Old Post on this website to cycle my content on Twitter. When people respond to those tweets, it comes to my attention. I make it a point to look at one of those articles once a week. It’s part of my block of time that I dedicate to my business on Friday afternoons.
