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Category: Digital & Content Marketing

Our blog on content marketing and digital marketing

  • 1-Day Digital Marketing Bootcamp @ GA

    Next Saturday, May 2, we will be hosting a 1-Day Digital Marketing Bootcamp at General Assembly in Ponce City Market from 10am to 4pm.

    After leading the 10-week part time Digital Marketing class this winter, we decided that a one-day, fast moving but hands on primer would be valuable to those who either (a) need to understand the language (e.g., talk the talk) about this juggernaut called “digital marketing” or (b) are considering a career as a digital marketing practitioner.

    During the 6-hour class, for which lunch and snack will be provided, we will spend approximately an hour on each of the following topics.

    • Brand – If you aren’t intentional about defining your brand, the market will define it for you. Your brand is where your digital marketing strategy starts.
    • Metrics – If you don’t measure it, you can’t manage or change it. You can track just about anything in Google Analytics, and we’ll get you started.
    • Funnel – To measure your ROI, you must create a visual marketing funnel, from total reach to total revenue, set goals for your click and conversion rates.
    • Content – Every word you type, image you post, audio you podcast, video you stream, wherever you post them, is your content. Your content should reflect your brand and engage your target audience.
    • Ads – Buying Google Adwords or Facebook & Twitter ads is easier, more efficient, and more powerful than ever. Regardless of your budget, you should give these traffic-makers a try.
    • Calendar – What sets you free from the daily stress of social & digital? Your digital marketing and content calendars. Plan your campaigns, work your plans, and free yourself up to experiment.

    At the end of the day, in addition to a well-deserved beer, you will have a full understanding of how to go about creating a digital marketing strategy, from brand to plan. You’ll definitely need to bring your laptop and be prepared to take lots of notes, so you can apply each of the lessons we’ll cover in these topics to your business.

    Whether you’re working towards a job in DGM or need a solid understanding of the elements involved, the DGM Bootcamp will be a great investment of your Saturday, and you’ll be home in time to watch the Kentucky Derby!

    Sign up here, and we’ll see you next Saturday.

  • The Interview

    When I’m not creating content (aka writing), I’m getting content from those who know it best: entrepreneurs. That’s the heart of the routine as your content creator & strategist. I ask you an open ended question, you tell me your entire story, which then becomes blog fodder for your content marketing calendar.

    If only it were that simple. That’s what it looks like from 100,000 feet, but down here on good ole terra firma, it’s a little different.

    1. Introduction (email, phone, LinkedIn, Twitter)
    2. “Who are you again? Oh, ok.”
    3. Set the playing field: content is king and you must blog.
    4. Arrange the first session.
    5. Reschedule first session due to conflicts.
    6. First session. Light bulbs go on.
    7. Create one-page strategy doc.
      • Content buckets
      • Voice, Message, and Mix (60-20-20 rule)
      • Schedule / Frequency
    8. Set interview schedule.
    9. Interview.
    10. Blog.
    11. Repeat steps 1 – 11 until success
    So, like most professions, there’s a lot of other stuff that has to get done and surrounds the best part of the entire process: interviewing and blogging. Or, said another way, learning your story and telling your story. That is the joy of this business. That’s what doesn’t feel like work. The interview is by far the most fun, because I’m learning something brand new. I may have an insight or two from a business or experience angle, but nobody knows your stuff better than you.
    The interview. It’s kinda like going back to school every day to learn something completely new.

  • Two TED Talks That Tempered My Tongue

    When I started Pitch Practice in June of 2013, I didn’t know what it would eventually be or what value it might have to others. It was simply a fun gathering of fellow entrepreneurs to help each other answer the question, “So, what do you do?” a little better, and also help us prepare for events like Atlanta Startup Village and Startup Riot. The weekly event certainly has accomplished all those reachable goals.

    However, it wasn’t until running the meeting for a more than eighteen months that I found two TED talks that completely changed the way I lead Pitch Practice, and the way I help startup entrepreneurs (a) develop their elevator pitch and (b) tell their story.

    In developing a 30 second elevator pitch, I developed the following formula, and have used it in every pitch talk since.

    1. Name
    2. Company name (if you have it yet)
    3. Problem you’re solving
    4. Solution
    5. Customer (who pays you money)
    6. Ask

    There’s no right or wrong order, and you don’t have to use all these elements if you don’t want to, but this is a place to start, a structure, a set of boundaries that will help you get from a blank piece of paper to a very short and eloquent elevator pitch that you can say to anyone and they’ll get it.

    “Problem” is in red because that’s where your focus should be in starting a tech business today. We get this structure from the Lean Startup Methodology, codified by Eric Ries and Steve Blank. The basic tenet is that you don’t come up with great ideas. Rather, you create solutions to really big expensive problems. So, if you’re not solving a painful market problem, you might want to re-evaluate your idea. That’s where your focus is in your 30-second pitch, because when you’re talking to your proper audience, they will all get it, and immediately want to know more about your solution.

    You’ve heard the adage, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink,” but I say that’s a myth and a hoax. You can make that horse (your audience) drink, if you put salt in their oats. The problem you’re solving is the salt. That gets us to the first TED talk (sorry it took so long), which is from 2009, in which Simon Sinek brilliantly explains that people don’t buy your “what” they buy your “why”. Sinek refers to Apple as one of the examples of how a brand can be so good at their “why” that it doesn’t matter what their “what” actually is. Why would you buy a music player or a phone or a watch from a computer company?

    Because you know it will break all the previously defined boundaries, just like the Macintosh did in 1984, the iPod did in 2001, the iPhone in 2007, the iPad in 2010, and perhaps the iWatch in 2015.

    In your pitch, the problem you are solving is your “why”, and is the focus of all your energy and words. When you can simplify a huge market problem into just a few words so that your 5 year old kid or your 85 year old grandmother understands it, then you truly understand it and can convey your vision for solving that problem to anyone. Too often, great ideas are presented by entrepreneurs who have no desire, preparation, or structure for telling their story, so the problem goes unsolved until a “visionary” who can focus on the “why” enters the market.

    The second TED talk involves actually telling your story in a pitch much longer than 30 seconds, and is a bit more complex, but incredibly powerful when utilized properly. Part of Apple’s amazing success is the ability of its founder, Steve Jobs, to keep his audience on pins and needles. Nancy Duarte took a deep look at the speech Jobs gave in introducing the iPhone in 2007 and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech. She dissected both speeches so thoroughly as to bring out a purposeful and powerful pattern that keeps the audience thoroughly engaged and on the edge of their seats.

    The pattern itself is simple: down and up and down and up and down. But what does that mean to the entrepreneur pitching his or her startup to any audience? It really is simple, and yet so powerful:

    • Down: The market space today has a problem
    • Up: I know how to solve that problem.
    • Down: The problem is costing us billions every year.
    • Up: The problem can be solved.
    • Down: There are many obstacles to this solution.
    • Up: We have a plan to change the market!
    • Down: The competition is fierce and well funded.
    • Up: Our team is the very best in the space.

    This simple pattern of carrying the audience to new highs and new lows one after the other has an amazing effect on the listeners, mainly by keeping them thoroughly engaged until the peak of the speech in which the solution is shared and the vision cast.

    I’ve listened to and offered suggestions for more than 700 pitches from all kinds of markets and entrepreneurs, but until I heard and applied Sinek and Duarte’s TED Talks to Pitch Practice, it was based on nothing but “that seems to work better”. Now I have wonderful inspiration for positively leading entrepreneurs to focus on the problem they are solving as their “why”, and to tell a story with a pattern.
    Having a structure to anything makes it so much simpler to begin, and having a structure to your pitch and your story can carry your startup a long way towards success.

  • Four Upcoming Speaking Events @ GA Atlanta

    My speaking & teaching calendar for April and May just got a little busier, thanks to the great folks at General Assembly. If you haven’t visited their sweet new space at Ponce City Market, you should do yourself a favor and head to midtown Atlanta and have a look.

    While you’re there, you can get some learning in, too. Here are the workshops I’m leading in April & May at GA Atlanta.

    • Wednesday April 15 – Advanced Social Media Strategies – Step by step, we’ll dig into how best to engage your target audience on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media channels through best practices and some little-known but powerful personal tactics.
    • Wednesday April 29 – How to Measure Social Media ROI – You know social media is powerful, but now that it’s become part of your marketing mix, you have to measure its ROI. How do you do that? Join me for this hands on workshop and leave knowing how to measure the fiscal effectiveness of your social media marketing efforts.
    • Saturday May 2 – Digital Marketing Bootcamp – the entire 10 weeks of Digital Marketing in one day! Bring your PC and something to write on, because you’re going to need them both as we cover branding, analytics, social, content, the marketing funnel, and your marketing calendar in a blazing fast half day.
    • Saturday May 16 – Blogging for Your Brand Bootcamp – Come with your PC and leave with a fully functioning WordPress Blog, including a custom domain, vital plugins, a great theme, social media connection, a content strategy, and your first three blog posts.

    There are certain skills everyone needs to thrive in today’s digital marketplace, and GA is covering them all. I’m excited to help new marketers and bloggers dive in headfirst and learn skills that they’ll actually be doing in the workshops and then take home to their businesses the next day.

  • Time

    Building on one of the most important aspects of our Digital Marketing Demo Night on Thursday, I need to emphasize the importance of time, mainly how fast it passes, both in the macro and micro.

    In the macro, guess what? It’s spring. How’d that happen? We get busy. We plan each week in minute detail, and plan each weekend with wild abandon so we make sure we don’t get in bed on Sunday night and wonder what we did with our weekend. There’s basketball season (Final Four tonight! Go Duke!), football season, high school & middle school soccer season, and now spring break. And before you know it, you’ll be making Memorial Day weekend plans.

    Time passes really, really fast, especially when you have children. It’s shocking sometimes. This summer, we will celebrate TEN YEARS since that glorious day we made it back to Atlanta after a harrowing 46 hour global jaunt with our two newly adopted children. They were 3. Now they’re 13. And I’ve been told too many times to count that the next 5 years will go even faster. How is that possible?

    In the micro, we experienced how fast five minutes passes in harsh reality on Thursday night as our digital marketing class brought its 10 weeks to a conclusion. No fewer than 8 of the students looked at me in horror and said “Wha…? Really??” when I interjected with “one minute!” Five minutes is a really long pitch, but for these new marketers, it was like snapping your fingers.

    I asked afterwards how many had practiced their presentations beforehand: six out of 17 had actually said the words and walked through their slides before Thursday night, meaning those six had experienced how fast time passes when you’re up in front of 50 people presenting the work that you created.

    Others were very prepared. On at least 3 occasions, when I said “one minute”, the presenters looked at me and quietly said, “that’s ok,” and clicked to their “Thank you / Q&A” slide. Boom.

    Whatever you’re doing, if you’re going to be timed, you would do well to practice before the real deal. Now, how do we practice being people, so we don’t run out of time?

  • Digital Marketing Demo Night

    Last night over beer & Fox Brothers BBQ, we experienced 17 excellent and entertaining Final Presentations from the 2nd cohort of Digital Marketing students from General Assembly Atlanta. All the students said beforehand that they were very nervous, but all of them were very entertaining, engaging, and the presentations were great. I think there were about 50 people in attendance, including co-workers, spouses, and even some parents. Thanks to everyone who came out to support these new marketers, and thanks especially to GA Atlanta and our T/A Liberty White, who made all this happen without a hitch.

    I asked a couple of questions to everyone who presented during the Q&A after their 5-minute presentations. These were questions like “what was the hardest concept you learned in this class?” or “what one takeaway helped you the most?” Here are some of the things that came out of those presentations and the Q&A.

    • Time went by really fast – I asked everyone at the end how many people practiced their presentation before last night. Maybe 5 or 6 of 17 had done that, and the rest got a real shock when I interjected “one minute left!” at their 4 minute mark. Five minutes is an eternity to wait for a red light to change, and goes by in an instant when you’re in front of 50 people presenting what you’ve accomplished.
    • Relaxed and entertaining – The most effective presentations last night were those who talked about what they know. Just like blogging, when you are totally immersed in a knowledge domain, you can easily converse or present about it to anyone.
    • Video in a presentation is tough – one student had asked beforehand if he could include a short video in his presentation, and while I agreed, I warned him of the potential dangers. Murphy’s law took over and the video did not work, and then when it did, the sound didn’t work. Prepare for the worst, and have a backup plan.
    • Content rules – every single presenter made sure “content marketing” was a huge part of their DGM strategy, no matter what the end product was. Content is king. Every picture, post, pin, tweet, and update is your content. You control it. Content is king.
    • Marketing is math – This concept really caused a lot of students to stumble. The marketing funnel is a difficult concept to imagine, so we made it visual with a literal funnel. That helped, but many of the students still struggled with getting from total exposure down to actual revenue. It’s all about the math.
    • Starting point – having a framework from which to start a marketing strategy is golden. When newbies dive into marketing, they have no idea where to start. It all starts with your brand. Define it, be intentional about it, live it, and defend it.
    • Six new businesses were launched because of this class. Wow.
    • What’s your message? – One student realized her message was about “me”, so she changed it to be about her customers, giving advice to them instead of promoting herself. Total game changer.
    • “Brand is everything we do.” – I cannot tell you how often I repeated this phrase. Towards the end of the class, I would say, “Branding is…?” and the class would shout, “everything you do!” And it’s true. From Chick-Fil-A employees saying “My pleasure!” after every customer interaction to Uber’s cloak and dagger competitive nature to destroy Lyft, everything you do is your brand. Either you define it, or the market will define it for you.

    Congratulations to these new marketers. It was a challenging 10 weeks, but they earned it last night as we brought it all to a close. Thanks to GA Atlanta for their brand, which is open, helpful, willing-to-try-anything, and all about making learning extremely fun and engaging. GA is a top notch addition to the Atlanta tech community. Well done everyone.

  • Why You Must Blog If You’re Running A Startup

    I’m in the content marketing business, so that’s generally the subject that ensues when someone asks me what I’m up to these days. When someone asks me what that means, I break it down into two parts: I create content strategy and I create content.

    What kind of content? Blogs. Those who understand the value of content marketing have no more questions. Those who do not (yet) understand the value of content marketing continue asking, mainly to determine how (and why!) one might make a living creating content (aka writing blogs) for other people.

    After a few minutes of explanation, the conversation usually ends up in the same place, which is what Mark Suster has said any number of times: if you’re a startup, you must blog. I could quote Suster’s Techcrunch article over and over and over, and I highly recommend that anyone considering a startup just bookmark it, and refer to it anytime you wonder why you’re trying to create prose when you’re not creating product. So go there and read it, and heed the advice of one of the most respected tech marketers on the planet.

    But there are other resources out there who (duh!) agree completely and offer up even more reasons that startup entrepreneurs should blog.

    Still not convinced? That’s ok. You will be, either by trying it and seeing the results for yourself, or seeing one or more of your competitors winning through inbound marketing strategies, the simplest of which is starting, growing, and maintaining and active blog.

    Suster repeats what I’ve heard so many times: “I’d like to blog, but I don’t really know what to talk about.” Don’t make it harder than it is. You know enough about something to start a business, right? Then you know enough to blog about that thing you’re building for that space you’re building it for and that problem you’re solving.

    That’s what you blog about. To quote Suster again, and wrap this thing up, “If you write about something for which you’re both knowledgeable and passionate, I’ll bet you can pump out more than you think.“

    Start your startup’s blog. Today.

  • Digital Marketing 101: Developing Your Brand Strategy

    Cross-posted from the General Assembly blog.
    Branding-For-Startups

    Before you start planning and executing a digital marketing strategy, you need to make sure that you have your branding strategy buttoned up first. Branding makes perfect sense to very experienced advertising and marketing professionals, but to the startup or small business owner, the term “branding” can be hard to nail down.

    In this first post of six in the series “Digital Marketing 101”, we’re going to give you solid steps that you can use to create and execute your brand strategy.
    Start with “Why?”


    Simon Sinek’s 2009 TED Talk is a wonderful explanation of the importance of where to start in your branding strategy, and that is “why do we exist?” This understanding, and the resulting ability to articulate your “why” very clearly and concisely in language that your target audience can understand, will be the foundation of your entire brand. Your “why” must be based on solving a problem for a large enough market segment to create a sustainable business. You exist to solve someone’s problem. Remembering the following point throughout the brand strategy creation process and then throughout every marketing tactic you ever use will be your guiding light: Your brand is everything you do.

    With this understanding (start with why, and your brand is everything you do), you can create your core branding statement by answering this question as briefly and simply as possible: why does your business exist? Your answer should be in terms of solving a problem for a market or market segment. For example: “ABC company builds MVP web apps for startups in 2 weeks for $5,000.” This statement identifies the customer segment (startups), the problem (startups need a minimum viable product to get to market and test an idea quickly) and their solution (MVP in 2 weeks for $5k). Furthermore, ABC company understands that startups don’t have (a) a lot of money or (b) a lot of time, and they’ve addressed both aspects of that customer profile.

    Know your customers

    At some point, you’ll actually meet and get to know your actual clients, but when you’re starting off, you need to “know your customers”, which means understanding who your ideal customer is. Create a persona of your ideal customer, name him or her, dress them up in the clothes that your customers wear, understand the words they speak, where they get information and influence, and most importantly, where they look to find what you will offer. Ultimately, complete customer profiles include an understanding of their identity, needs, and behavior.

    Your customers’ needs should match up exactly with your “why”, which is solving someone’s problem. In other words, your customers need your solution to their problem. Therefore, you must have a deep and complete understanding of that problem. That understanding usually comes from your own personal industry experience, in which you’ve lived that problem.

    Understand your business model

    The short version of your business model is “how do you make money?” Ultimately, you make money when you provide value for a customer who pays you for your product or service. That’s the easy way to think about it. But you must go deeper than that, and consider the following: 

    • How does your customer learn about your business? (marketing)
    • How long does it take for your customer to get from learning about you to purchasing? (sales cycle)
    • Where – specifically and exactly – does the purchase transaction take place? (distribution)
    • How do you deliver your product or service? (delivery)
    • Is your customer a one-time purchase or a subscription (or other repeat) customer? (lifetime customer value)
    • What kind of support does your product/service require, and how do you deliver that support? (customer service) 

    No two businesses are exactly the same, and if two businesses are very similar, branding is what sets them apart to the customer. Your brand is everything you do, and if you are not intentional about defining your brand, then the market will define your brand for you.

  • DGM2 Digital Demo Day

    With only two sessions remaining before our Final Presentations in the Digital Marketing class at General Assembly, tonight we’ll be doing a rapid fire three hour review of the last 9 weeks. The final projects that the 18 future marketers have to complete consist of a full digital marketing strategy document (less than 10 pages) and a stand up presentation (less than 5 minutes) with slides to the class. I’ve positioned this presentation as a pitch of a digital marketing campaign to the “board of directors”, which will be the rest of the class, and anyone else who wants to attend.

    That’s right, this is a demo day for our new digital marketers, and you’re invited. We’ll have beer, food, great company, and 18 short but fantastic presentations.

    Here’s what we’ve covered in since the last week in January, and what we’re thoroughly reviewing tonight.

    • Your Brand – where everything starts. What do you stand for? Why are you even in business? How will you treat your customers, users, employees?
    • Measuring & Metrics – there are certain metrics that any SaaS company must keep a close eye on. What does your business need to measure when it comes to digital marketing?
    • The Marketing Funnel – everybody’s got a marketing funnel. Does yours end with email subscribers, customers, users? What kind of exposure do you need to bring enough visitors to your website so your conversion rate and average order amount brings you your revenue goal?
    • Owned Content – what’s in your content arsenal – blogs, video, images, technical data – and how will you publish that content?
    • Paid Content / Ads – Where are your customers? That’s where you should be buying ads, but how do you know where they are? Facebook? Google? Twitter? Find out through small experiments, then stomp on the gas.
    • The Marketing Calendar – every marketer’s best friend. If you’re going to market with content, and we all do, whether we know it or not, then we must have a content marketing calendar. It’s as simple as a spreadsheet.

    So join us from 630 – 930 on Thursday April 2, at General Assembly at Ponce City Market. Yes, free beer, but you might also find your next great marketer. Either way, you’ll get a solid dose of what new marketers are learning.

  • Nothing Hurts Like a Date

    A wise friend and business partner many years ago said something to me when we were planning a project with our team. We had the what, the where, the why, and the how. We were all in agreement, and then he asked “when?” We all kinda mumbled and didn’t really give it any credence. Then he said with a little more emphasis, “When are we pulling the trigger? Nothing hurts like a date.”

    Nothing hurts like a date. Now I say that all the time, because it’s just so true.

    It’s easy to say you’re going to do this or that, but when you put a date on it, it becomes real. Put it on your calendar, and you’ll do it. You can tell a lot about a person by looking at their checkbook register (or nowadays their debit card charges) and their calendar. What do they do with their time and what do they do with their money?

    Yesterday, in preparation for their final projects, I was providing feedback for several Digital Marketing students, and the most common two pieces of feedback were (1) that their strategy documents were too long and (2) that there were no dates & times to anything. When we create goals, those goals should be “S.M.A.R.T.”: strategic, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time sensitive. Scripture us to  “number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” When you put it on the calendar, it becomes a real thing.

    One of the things that I notice about people on a daily basis is whether or not they have any sense of urgency about what they’re doing. Does “when” even matter to them? Yes, we live in a microwave super-size society, so we have come to expect things immediately, but when you’re building something, shouldn’t there be a sense of urgency in building it? That doesn’t mean to hurry and do a poor job. Rather, it means to count the days in which you have to do the thing you’re setting out to do.

    How do you number the days? You put a date on the calendar, make it real, and get some sense or urgency behind your action. Then go do it. Nothing hurts like a date written down on a calendar shared with your team.