Leave your competitors in the rearview.
At Blended Sense, we know you wear a thousand hats as a business owner. Content strategy is often the last priority on your long to-do list. Content creation is also on the bottom of that list, even though you have a nagging feeling that you’re ignoring one of the most important elements of your business’s success.
You can’t afford to ignore digital marketing and creative content creation though. It should truly be a pillar of your existing business model. This isn’t a new theory. It’s tried and tested, with the most unusual backstory going back over 125 years.
Before we get to that juicy anecdote, let’s go over some key points about modern marketing that you may already be familiar with.
All marketing at its core is about building your business’s customer experience. In a nutshell, you need to build content that considers:
Many of the touchpoints in your customer’s journey have been eliminated or watered down due to current global circumstances. Despite this, you can still up your marketing game.
A customer touchpoint is any way a potential or current customer interacts with your business. This includes before they do business with you, during their relationship with you, and after they’ve done business with you.
Here are some examples, but by no means an exhaustive list:
Each of these areas is an opportunity to improve your customer experience. With Blended Sense, you get help creating content for multiple touch-points via:
Do it with custom digital content.
“Storytelling is one of the most powerful ways to breathe life into your brand and is also one of the main components of a solid marketing approach.”
- David Campbell, Right Inbox.
The core of your business is built on authentic relationship, developed as you tell your brand’s story and live up to the integrity and authenticity you create.
Entrepreneur Kevin Daum states in an INC interview, “The best way to demonstrate your integrity is to simply be your word.”
This is often bound together with your brand story. Did you start your company after noticing a problem someone was having, and come up with a solution?
It can be as simple as the brand story of a company like YETI with two brothers that wanted fishermen to have better coolers, or as profound as lowering America’s obesity rates as in a company like Goodlife. They used “real-life” heroes in their latest marketing campaign to extend their reach.
When Goodlife launched their “Live Your Good Life” campaign they used 15-30 second videos, radio, and TV spots to showcase heroes that are getting fit in cities all over the nation. This simple, content-driven story outperformed huge agency marketing campaigns that cost ten times more.
You need to inspire and be true to you. That’s where Blended Sense comes in. We not only get to know you and your business, but help you tell your story effectively.
“A good story makes you feel something is universal. They want to grasp your values and your commitment to excellence: be inspired and intrigued. Storytelling is the most powerful way to convey these ideas.”
— Mark Truby, VP of Communications for the Ford Motor Company
On the flip side, here’s what NOT to do:
Pepsi’ Co’s Naked Juice made claims that their product was “all natural” and “non-GMO,” but they ended up agreeing to a $75 million settlement when customers who bought their juices found out they were neither of these things. Oops.
Your brand story and your brand integrity are one and the same. Trust is built with integrity, and everything you do should be consistent with your story and it’s promise.
Talk to Blended Sense about building your brand story now.
Traffic without sales is useless. Just obtaining creative assets without knowing how to use them, well, that’s not so helpful either.
Organic search drives at least 50% of all traffic to your site, and that means social media needs to be used as a tool to convert once people land at your business’s virtual “home.”
Every social media platform has a different activity algorithm, based on hundreds of thousands of user behaviors. Here are a few insights that will help you know better how to use the digital assets that Blended Sense creates for you.
According to Sprout Social Media, successful marketing strategies differ depending on the platform.
You’ve got an audience of 2 billion people on Facebook, but they have habits to consider.
Genuine engagement is best when you follow the steps we’ve outlined herein, but you can still tweak your marketing campaign to get a bigger return on your investment by posting at optimal times:
If you’re posting digital assets to Facebook, remember to post 3 times a day, at least five days a week.
You can recycle content. Of course you should always prioritize fresh content, but if recycling seems odd to you, consider this:
Talk to Blended Sense about creating assets to share on social now.
Customer-based storytelling is key across every social media platform.
Instagram has an audience of 1 billion and growing. With the addition of IG Stories, your chance to engage with your customers is irreplaceable. Here are the best times to post:
Twitter doesn’t compete with Facebook and Instagram but there are still 500 million tweets sent daily in the U.S. alone. Make sure not to post outside of “key” hours since Twitter prioritizes content based on interest, instead of it’s chronological listing time. The best times to post on Twitter are:
YouTube, owned by Google, is not the only place to post videos, but the farthest reaching. You can also post on Vimeo, Metacafe, Dailymotion, Veoh, The Internet Archive, Crackle, and many other places.
When you post to YouTube, be sure to title your videos effectively, and to have a full description of what the video you’re posting is about, as Google and Youtube’s bots don’t rank your videos based on the video content itself, but based on your description and meta-tags. Meta-tags are a way to get more views.
Meta-tags are keywords that you include in your descriptions that tell the platform what your video is about, and who might be interested in viewing your videos.
Otherwise known as on-page SERP (search engine page results or search engine optimization). This is a key component of posting digital assets effectively.
When choosing keywords and meta descriptions include terms that you would use if you were searching for your services or products.
The best times to post video on YouTube are:
Every platform has ideal times to post. LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok and every other social media platform prioritize posts based on user algorithms. Here are some best practices to consider when posting your digital assets from Blended Sense:
As you learn how to leverage your social media and web presence, you’re essentially creating a presence. From here you want to measure what is delivering the best impact for your company.
You can also network by sharing content with other companies and creatives that share your interests, morals, and motivations. Share insights across channels with other brands to create a synergistic effect. Your audience will grow as you tap into fellow small business’s audiences and share in their engagement.
Some companies will see better engagement with YouTube videos. Others are more successful on Facebook. You won’t know until you look at the data. There are many analytics tools out there. You can choose one that works best for you.
Some great tools to see where your website traffic is coming from and how effective it is at converting are:
This brings us to that juicy little story we talked about at the very beginning of this article.
Before digital content creation became the beast it is today, John Deere of the little-green-tractor variety started what we now call “influencer” content marketing.
In 1895, Deere started a free magazine called The Furrow.
This humble little magazine catered to farmers. The magazine didn’t talk about John Deere tractors at all, but helped farmers with useful tidbits of information that helped them increase crop yields, and be better farmers.
Something miraculous happened by simply engaging his customers with content that they actually valued – it went viral, and well before the Internet even existed.
By the end of 1904 it had millions of subscribers.
If you want to build THAT kind of engagement, reach out to Blended Sense, we’re all about creating content that is just as useful to your customers.
