Author Archives: Kristen Hicks

Link Building is Dead, Practice Link Encouragement

Within the most of marketing industry, to say that link building is dead isn’t terribly controversial. Nonetheless, many businesses haven’t yet left behind the idea and come to marketing firms and consultants convinced it’s what they want for their business.

The shift in the direction that SEO and online marketing have taken in the past couple of years due to recent Google updates is good for consumers, but bad for businesses looking for an easy fix to outrank the competition.

If you care about competing online, you can’t hire someone to do a little SEO work for you as a one-off project and expect results. Instead, you’ll have to drop the idea of an easy fix, and think bigger.

Content Marketing=Link Encouragement

It’s certainly still true that gaining links back to your site is mostly a good thing, but the quality and relevance of the sites giving you those links matters more than the quantity. The only way to get a link from a site with any authority is for them to want to give it you.

They have to believe that what you’re offering provides value for their visitors, and feel comfortable associating their site and brand with yours. Without that, you won’t get anywhere.

For this reason, the best approach is not to set out to “build” links, you need to encourage them by providing something that relevant sites will value. As you’ve probably surmised by this point, that means content.

The Good News

Content marketing is not an easy, quick fix. It’s a long-term process. But, it comes with many benefits besides link encouragement.

Content gives you the opportunity to earn trust from your audience and demonstrate that you know your business. A consumer trying to choose between a business that talks about how good it is, and one that shows how good it is by giving a taste of the knowledge and expertise it’s able to impart has an easy choice.

With some time, effort and strategy put into it, your business can build up a community around its content that doesn’t just attract customers, but creates advocates. A customer that feels she has a relationship with your business will make sure that people in her life know who to turn to when they need your services. A loyal customer that feels a bond to your brand is a better marketing tool than anything a marketing firm can do for you.

The Secret to Good Marketing…

The end goal of marketing is to help a company make more sales. Each company must determine the best intermediary goals their marketing should accomplish in order to reach that point. But to be successful, marketing must aid in creating a more profitable business.

Nonetheless, marketing serves a different role than sales does.  Sales is about getting a person to cross that final line of making a purchase or signing a contract. Marketing is about getting them to the line to begin with.  If you meet a new guy at a party and he spends a lot of time talking about how awesome he is, you probably won’t walk away from the conversation convinced. If you hear from your good friend Joe how awesome this guy is, or if he impresses everyone at the party with great jokes and stories, he’s a lot more likely to win you over as someone worth knowing.

In the same way, a business offering up a sales pitch about how great they are won’t gain much traction without a reputation to back that up.

Marketing (alongside the equally important customer service) is an important tool in building that reputation. You have to:

a)    Make sure people know your company exists (and what you do), and

b)   Build up enough trust that you’re the first place they’ll turn when they need what you offer.

To do so, you have to focus less on yourself and how great what you have to offer is, and think more about what the customer needs and how you can help.

…It’s About Giving

Content Marketing Means GivingThe secret is that you have to set ego to the side and focus on providing something of value. You should already be doing this for current customers, whose testimonials and positive word of mouth are some of the best marketing tools in your arsenal. To attract new customers and gain their trust, you need to think about what you’re willing to offer them for free that will demonstrate your knowledge and integrity.

In many cases, this means content. Turn the expertise and good ideas you have into blog posts, articles, videos and other forms of informational tools that answer questions your prospective customers are likely to have.

It could also mean a free version of your product with lighter features than the paid version.  If you’re a service provider, this could take the form of a free consultation that gives potential clients a taste of your expertise tailored to their needs.

None of these forms of giving are selfless. They’re designed to help you gain attention for your business and build a reputation around your expertise. Even so, isn’t it nice to embrace a business approach that doubles as doing something good for people?

Know Where to Draw the Line

Ok, so giving plays an important role in good marketing, but you’re still running a business. You have to approach your giving with a strategy in mind.

If you’re providing a free version of your product, decide just how much functionality you’re comfortable giving away before users have to upgrade to the paid version.

If your focus is more on content, most of what you produce should be focused on value for the consumer, but some of it can be about you. MacKenzie Fogelson recommends the 80/20 rule when it comes to social sharing. The same can be reasonably applied to the content you produce.

If 80% of your content is all about helping your target audience, 20% can be about product updates, special deals, and other forms of promotion. If you do enough preliminary work to gain the customer’s trust, those pitches will only be getting to an audience already interested in what you do.  By that point, you’ll be the guy at the party with Joe’s recommendation and the stream of jokes that have already made everybody laugh, and people won’t be as inclined to doubt you’re as awesome as you say you are.

3 Steps to Prioritize Your Small Business Social Media Strategy

If you’re a small business owner, you’ve likely been hearing left and right that you should be using social media for business. Although it’s been a ubiquitous marketing buzzword for some time now, if you’re new to using social media for business, it looks like an intimidating, time consuming undertaking.

There are so many social media platforms that it’s hard to know where to be and what to do once you’re there.

If you’re thinking about taking the plunge to get started with a social media strategy for your business, you should start by accepting that it will take some time. By thinking strategically and determining where to prioritize your social media efforts, you can make sure that time is spent effectively.

Step 1: Consider your goals.

What do you want to get out of the time you spend on social media? Some possibilities to consider are:

  1. Greater engagement with current customers
  2. Establishing authority in your industry
  3. Increasing brand awareness
  4. Developing new leads and increasing sales
  5. Improving SEO

These are far from the only goals achievable with social media, but can offer a sense of some of objectives to be thinking about.

Step 2: Understand the difference between the main platforms.

Facebook – A dominant force in social media, largely because it’s where the most people are. Most people use it primarily to stay connected to friends and family members. The upside to a presence on Facebook is that it might be the best of the bunch for attracting eyeballs. The downside: people don’t log on to facebook to buy things, some are annoyed to see marketing items show up in their feeds and are unlikely to engage with your business that way.

Nevertheless, it might be a good fit for your business based on the goods and services you provide and your target audience. If you’re B2C, especially if you’re offering something that falls in the realm of entertainment, Facebook may be the perfect fit.

Google + – Until recently, Google + wasn’t a key player, in spite of its owner’s online pedigree. Now, Google’s tying its ever important search algorithm to Google + usage, meaning a presence there can play an important role in improving site SEO. If your business is producing content as part of your marketing strategy (and you should be) , Google + is a very useful platform for sharing your content and interacting with others in your industry.

Twitter – Everything on Twitter is short and fast. Unlike Facebook, most users are quick to connect with a large number of people and businesses, and are less inclined to care if something that shows up in their feed is promotional – it’s just one of a steady stream of messages of varying level of interest.

LinkedIn – Designed for professional networking, LinkedIn allows businesses to create pages and share business news. Individuals can also share the company’s content in order to help give it a larger reach.

YouTube – Specifically for videos. If you have created any video ads, tutorials, webinars, or any other form of video content, it’s good to have a YouTube page to share it on. (Vimeo is another network to consider for this purpose)

Foursqaure – While not serving as large of an audience as most of the platforms on this list, Foursquare can be a great tool for local businesses. If you’re business primarily serves a local audience, especially if you offer the kind of service that people value geographic convenience for (e.g. restaurants, retail shopping, entertainment venues), this is a good place to be listed.

Pinterest – This is an extremely visual platform, based on people sharing cool images or visual ideas they come across. There are some type of businesses this is a perfect fit for: photographers, graphic designers, artists, florists, etc.

 

That’s a long list. Maintaining an active presence on all of the above platforms is a daunting task, and not social media strategynecessary for the vast majority of businesses. Based on your goals and industry, think about which of the list is likely to be the most useful for your business. Where is your target audience most likely to be? How are they most likely to interact with your business?

For all of these, it’s important to engage. You can’t effectively use social media if all you do there is promote yourself. You need to interact with others: reply, share others’ content, like, re-tweet, etc. Mix in your interactions with your own promotional updates and content shares and people will be more likely to follow and pay attention to you.

Step 3: Develop a social media plan and content strategy.

Determine how much time each day you intend to devote to social media. Developing a content strategy ensures you regularly have something to share (and comes with a whole host of other benefits). Research and make use of social media tools like HootSuite to make managing your accounts and scheduling your updates easier.

Now, get started!

If it seems overwhelming and you need help, there’s a whole industry of social media and content specialists you can bring in to take over some of the more time consuming parts of the work.

The Danger of Going “Too Broad”

I thought I had a pretty good idea of how to communicate my services, when I found myself fumbling recently over the question of my specialty. When you’re talking to people who work in different fields, an elevator pitch that offers a fairly general description of the work you do is usually good enough. But, in a room full of people who do similar work, it becomes important to know how to identify and articulate just where your strengths fit in.

The lesson reminded me of a conversation I had with a professor in college. I was trying to pick out a subject to focus a paper about Absalom, Absalom on and as I kept listing off topics, she kept saying “too broad.” After a fair amount of listing, I finally came up with a focused enough subject for her approval. I ended up writing over 15 pages on one particularly notable scene in the book. She was right, anything more broad would have made for a behemoth of a paper.

I started off freelancing thinking I had to be good at a long list of specialties to make it work, and spent the first few months learning what my professor had taught me years earlier: the importance of having a focus.

You can either be mediocre at a lot of things, or really good at a few.

Having a specialty or niche has a number of benefits:

  • It gives you the room you need to become an expert at something. No one person has the time to be an expert at a long list of skills and subjects, but any one of us can get a lot closer to that title a lot faster by honing in on a particular specialty.
  • It makes it easier to find your target audience. Whether you’re a freelancer or a business, looking for customers and clients from a massive audience is more challenging than being able to focus on a target group. A writer with experience working with oil and gas clients knows who to target, and can make a more persuasive pitch for why she’s the right pick than one casting a wide berth for any client at all.
  • You can become a part of a community. In any field, who you know is important. There’s a wide world of people out there and if you can focus your efforts on making connections with people in a few select industries, you can get more out of the relationships you have.

If you can pinpoint a focus that best fits your skills, you can approach your marketing with much greater efficiency and get more out of the time you spend on the work you do.

Introduction to Content Marketing for Small Businesses: An Austin Copywriter White Paper

introduction to content marketing for small businesses whitepaper

Are you a small business owner interested in learning more about content marketing? If you’ve heard that content marketing is a good way to promote your business and improve your brand reputation, but want to learn more before you get started, this white paper lays out some of the basics.

Content marketing allows your business to attract new customers and develop relationships with current customers by offering something of value to them.

With this white paper, An Introduction to Content Marketing for Small Businesses, you can get a feel for whether or not you’re ready to get started developing and deploying a content strategy for your business.

If you have questions, feedback, or would like some help developing quality content to promote your business, feel free to contact me at kristen@austin-copywriter.com.