Digital Marketing Rocks!
Aug 8, 2022
Successful Marketing 101: If there is no base level, how high would you set these? What factors influence that decision?
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ANSWER: Set business / marketing / campaign objectives. And align all efforts in meeting those goals.
More episodes from Digital Marketing Rocks!
Mar 13, 2023
Balancing Emergency Customer Need & Marketing Prowess
When a customer is dealing with an emergency, it’s unlikely they wish to read your most beautiful and intelligent marketing prose. They want to know what you do, why it will benefit them, how much you charge, and when you can come to resolve the issue. While not all firms will need to consider this potential client need (it’s unlikely that someone will need to buy a new sofa in an emergency situation, for example), the companies that can cater to this possible requirement really do need to accommodate it.
That said, this doesn’t mean you should throw out all your marketing prowess and insight in one fell swoop. There’s a balancing act at play here, between accessibility, and of course, making sure that a potential customer chooses you over others.
In this post, then, we’ll discuss how to balance emergency customer need and marketing prowess in equal strokes, so that you can better curate your website and contact possibilities to gather as much of this business as possible:
Make Separate Landing Pages For Each Service & Location
It can be tempting to write one large page which gives your visitors a handy resource to see everything you do, but this can take too long to read, and search engines won’t raise text or image dumps to the top of their rankings. This is why it’s good to be careful about how you present your information, as splitting this up into separate pages for services and locations can be helpful, and with a little company-specific optimization, like roofing SEO, you can ensure a better outcome.
A Frequently Asked Questions Page Helps
FAQ sections not only provide customers with an immediate answer, but they can provide confident responses to save your support staff from having to answer the same questions daily. On top of this, search engines can provide your answer in their own search results list, allowing you to become an authoritative resource. Moreover, the FAQs won’t have to be pre-empted and never changed, you can alter these as customers do ask questions frequently. It’s not hard to see just how beneficial this can be in the long term, and the positive effect it might have from there.
AI & Live Chat Personnel
AI chatbots can allow for the answering of questions, or at least helps those visiting your website find the contact information to your support team when they need it. You can also use live chat personnel to provide this function during the work week. However, you can also tailor these AI bots and professionals to upsell, to refer to landing pages, or even to become a one-stop resource for handling complaints or guiding someone through your business app. As you can see, this serves as a marketing tool you can proudly discuss, but also a functional utility that helps you guide customer focus in the best possible context. It’s not hard to see why people find value in that outcome. Leveraging tools like this is marketing wisdom, but also provides accessibility for customer needs, even in emergencies.
With this advice, you’re sure to balance emergency customer needs and marketing prowess in the same time.
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Jan 31, 2023
Why Are These Bestsellers Smashing It on Instagram Stories?
Since their launch in August 2016, the interactive, real-time nature of video, image, and music-based Instagram stories has become a mainstay of social media campaigns with staying power, heralding an age where brands can enjoy the benefits of more time-consuming content like video in true low-fi, fly on the wall style. Now, as stories soar onto Facebook as well, brands looking to find any form of success on social media need to think about the stories they’re telling, and the bestsellers that they need to beat, or at least learn from, to find success here.
With 400 million users making Instagram stories even more popular than runaway successes like Snapchat, there are luckily already plenty of brands writing the right narrative to get themselves seen here, and any one of them could prove the perfect role model. Whether you’re new to the world of Instagram or are simply struggling to write a narrative that your followers feel invested in, we’re going to consider some companies that are quite literally taking their stories by storm right now.
1. Converse
Unsplash Image: CC0 License
Converse has always made its name by appealing to the alternative masses, making the uncool cool, and harvesting a cult following that’s taken it from strength to strength since its launch way back in the early 1900s. Now, these iconic baseball-style trainers are yet again leaning on their iconic cult standing by creating a social media presence worth following. On Instagram especially, the brand is using the media options available to its full advantage by uniquely realizing that stories are no standalone thing. Rather, Converse picked up early on to the fact that real success here means writing an ongoing series that connects feed to story for seamless, free-flowing traffic that goes both ways. This is a strategy that Converse launched with the release of their x Golf Fleur, feeding into the repetition mindset that, most definitely, worked out pretty well in this instance.
2. Glossier
Unsurprisingly for a brand that was literally born out of social media, Glossier is also bossing it on the stories front, and it does so by understanding its following so well that it comes across like a friend giving advice. Instead of 2D story uploads, Glossier takes things to the next level with interactive, audience-focused story uploads that include Q&As, link-offs to interesting articles, and polls to get the audience involved. Taking the full media offerings of modern-day stories by the horns, Glossier also provides a rich media journey by taking the time to add music to Instagram story uploads through their playlists and more. When alternated with the brand’s feature products or information on pop-up shops, these rich stories provide a reliable and comfortable shoulder for customers who are way more likely to buy down the line.
3. Twitter
Unsplash Image: CC0 License
We all know that the age of competitive advantage is nigh, with every brand now better able to watch and track their competition online without any risk of discovery. This has heralded an age where trends move faster than light as brands always try to one-up each other, but Twitter has boldly taken the competitive bull by the horns where its story uploads are concerned. Far from watching Instagram from the shadows, Twitter has swaggered right into stories by sharing highlights from its main feed in true ‘this is where the ‘real’ stories are,’ style. Bold, perhaps, but swipe-up links attached to each of Twitter’s highlight uploads have seen them converting a fair amount of traffic away from their closest competitor by using the very advantages that competitor puts on the table. It’s bold, it’s cheeky and, more importantly, it’s working out pretty well for them.
4. Everlane
It’s difficult to find a better example of the benefits of social media than is evidenced in Everlane’s story uploads. This digital-first apparel brand made its name on Snapchat, so its skill in the video format should be no su...
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Jan 27, 2023
5 Marketing Lessons from Pirate Movies: Loot All Your Competitors
With the Gasparilla Pirate festival coming this weekend to pillage the city of Tampa, it’s only fitting to talk about pirate movies.
Taranran Taranran Taranran Taranran
If you didn’t remember the Pirates of the Caribbean movie after reading this last paragraph, read it again, but as a song now.
Today we’re going to talk about what Jack Sparrow and other characters from popular pirate movies can teach us about marketing.
So, without further ado, let’s get started!
1 – Pirates of the Caribbean: Get People Talking About You
In the first movie of the Pirates of the Caribbean series, there is an interesting dialogue that goes as follows:
You are without a doubt the worst pirate I’ve heard of (James Norrington)
But you have heard of me (Jack Sparrow)
Getting people talking about you is one of the most important things to build your brand. Naturally, you want people talking about you in a positive light. However, you don’t need to be afraid of bad publicity either.
Getting people to talk about you – both positively and negatively – will go a long ways when it comes to building your brand awareness. After all, it’s always better to have people talking about you than have no one talking about you at all. Plus, when people talk badly about your brand, it gives your loyal fans an opportunity to go out and defend you. And who doesn’t love knowing that there are people out there who are willing to go to bat on their behalf?
At the end of the day, your brand is the personality of your business. It’s what makes you truly unique from your competitors. People who love what you are doing will gravitate towards you, and those who don’t will flush themselves out.
And guess what? That’s OK. Your goal shouldn’t be to appease everyone.
2 – Pirates of the Caribbean: Hook People Right at the Beginning
Catching people’s attention early on is imperative to contente marketing success. If you don’t engage people enough for them to keep reading, the rest of your content will be of no use, because no one will read or watch it.
We can see that in the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie. It starts with an interesting opening scene, which is pretty much everything you’d expect from a pirate movie: a mysterious vibe, with the ocean covered in fog, allowing you to see almost nothing. Building upon that, all you can hear is the “yo-ho” song.
This opening scene catches our attention and sets the tone for the story right away.
Applying this to marketing, you should always invest time into creating a great headline, as well as an interesting opening paragraph or intro to your video. Time is a limited commodity. Do you REALLY want to waste it producing content that no one will ever see?
3 – The Princess Bride: Be Yourself
Being yourself is an extremely important part of building your brand and attracting the right types of customers to your business. This advice comes from Fezzick, who states:
People in masks are not to be trusted
(and no, they are not referring to COVID masks)
In marketing, the concept of polarization is still alive and well, and it can easily be applied to brand building. A natural way of being polarizing is by not being afraid to be yourself. So, be bold and be brave by sharing your values, your mission, and what your company stands for. just perhaps not to the extent of the Elon Musk’s and Donald Trump’s of the world, otherwise you run the risk of coming across as crazy and unhinged.
We first heard about this concept from Russell Brunson. The following graph does a really nice job of explaining it.
If you want to attract raving fans to your brand, you need to be yourself and start being a little polarizing.
4 – Blackbeard: Reputation Matters
Blackbeard is one of the most famous pirates in history. What made him so famous was his reputation. So the biggest take away here is that reputation matters. and it matters a lot.
Blackbeard is painted as a violent and dangerous man who committed a lot of violent crimes. However, he wasn’t actually that ...
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