Tonight General Assembly hosted the second session of “Blogging for your Brand” at their new facility in Ponce City Market. This session was different from the first session back in January for several reasons:
New GA Facility
Paid ($10) vs. Free Event
Second Time Around
So it was different, but very good. The staff and facility at GA Atlanta are both top notch, and everything went as smooth as it could possibly go. What I liked best about tonight’s session of this 2-hour workshop were the group’s new questions and the new perspectives that those questions brought to me and the rest of the group.
For example, one of the questions was directed at me and the business behind Atlanta Tech Blogs: “How do you create a content strategy and branded content for someone you don’t even know?” Great question, and the answer started with the fact that I get to know their brand first, then their audience, and then I can begin to create a strategy and original content based on their brand.
Another great question was about frequency of blogging. There’s no standard for how often you should blog. David Cummings’ posts arrive between 9pm and 10pm every night, whereas John Saddington has several posts spread throughout the day, and Salesloft adds content to their blog 2-3 times each week. There’s no standard. Your frequency is up to you. The more important idea is consistency: whatever the frequency, be consistent.
Also, an attendee asked about engaging with social media influencers, and whether or not one should engage those influencers using their personal twitter handle or the company’s twitter handle. Again, there’s no rule; however, that decision should stem from the company’s brand and culture, which drive social media engagement methods and boundaries, and ultimately drive the content that the company produces and shares.
One of the longer discussions we had tonight was about branding, and how content itself as well as content strategy must come after branding. Branding determines your content voice, your content audience, your words, and your values. Those things make up content, so you should make branding decisions before you engage in a content marketing strategy.
Thanks to everyone who attended, and to GA Atlanta for hosting. I look forward to leading this workshop again soon. Next Thursday, I’ll be leading a new workshop called “Pitch Camp“, which will be based on Pitch Practice, but focus far more on the mechanics of the pitch rather than having everyone stand up in front of the room and deliver a pitch in exchange for feedback. I hope you can join me at this event next Thursday from 11am-1pm.
Next week and the following week, I’m giving two talks at General Assembly’s newly opened campus at Ponce City Market. They have a fantastic new space in the renovated old building that’s prime for small and large group gatherings, and I’m excited to do these two talks in those new digs.
First, this coming Wednesday, March 18th, from 6:30-8:30pm, I’ll be leading “Blogging for your Brand.” I gave this same talk back in January at GA’s old temporary space next to Dancing Goats. The crux of the talk is that everyone should be blogging and that anyone can create and maintain a useful, active blog for themselves or their company. Here’s the outline for the two-hour event.
Platforms – Blogger, WordPress, Medium, etc.
Starting – Most people’s biggest hurdle.
Writing – “I don’t even know what I’d write about!”
Best practices – How to make it count.
Promotion – You have to tell someone or nobody will know.
Measuring – Yup, Google Analytics.
Success stories – Be a millionaire! Or something.
The following week, as part of General Assembly Atlanta’s “Launch Week”, I’ll be doing a similar talk to the one I gave at ROAM Dunwoody last fall called “Pitch Camp.” Pitch Camp will be on Thursday March 26, from 11am-1pm. For those two hours, I’ll be doing a much expanded version of the intro I give at every session of Pitch Practice, going deeper into how to craft and master your best pitch. Here’s how it’ll run.
Why everyone should learn to pitch
The anatomy of each type of pitch
30 second elevator pitch
3 minute pitch
5-6 minute investor deck
I hope you’ll join me for one (or both!) of these events. As always, both events will be full of learning, fun, and laughter. Both events are just $10 to attend.
The fourth and final of our guest speakers in this 2nd cohort of Digital Marketing at General Assembly was none other than coffee & beer master Jason Dominy. I met Jason in person in his office at The Dalton Agency last fall after we engaged in numerous digital conversations. Jason is a firm believer in 2Dto3D conversations.
Last night, Jason joined us at Ponce City Market to teach us about Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook & Display Ads: what they’re good for and what they’re not good for.
Jason started us off with a primer on the power of digital media advertising. We used to be “on the ground” with advertising, and could only go where paper could take us, but now we can go anywhere we need to in order to get our audience, and rise above all the stuff on the ground.
So where do we go in digital marketing? You go wherever your audience is. You can even go everywhere, but you don’t need to, because your audience isn’t everywhere. You determine where you go (by which we mean what ad channels and social networks we use, by learning where our customers are, what channels they use the most. There are dozens of tools to find this answer, but the easiest and most effective method of finding this information is to simply talk to your customers.
Then create great content that your customers will like. But how do you know what type of content they’ll like, share, and engage? The best types of content are the types that we want to see in our timelines. Do you want to see what you’ve created? If not, change it. We’re all bombarded with content, so we need to market differently so that we stand out from the spammy noise makers.
We don’t have a lack of content. We have a lack of quality content.
Twitter
Twitter is good for…
short updates
quick engagements
real time info
Quotes
Easily digestible content
targeting – amazing how granular marketers can get with twitter; e.g., if people follow a certain twitter user, target their timelines; and it’s not very expensive.
The best Twitter ads don’t come across as ads. You get the audience’s attention with something that stands out.
Twitter is not good for…
conversations
posting lots of information
overall reach for single tweets – tweets get served to all followers, but not everyone can see it.
posting out just marketing
The average lifetime of a single tweet is measured in seconds, so it’s helpful and very much acceptable to post several times during the day the same content, even several days in a row at different times. You can’t do this on Facebook because their timeline algorithm is different. Also, sponsored tweets sit up near the top, so they may get seen more, but they’ll also get ignored more.
Finally, if you have an egg as your avatar, you’re doing it wrong.
LinkedIN
LinkedIn is great for…
connecting B2B
recruiting / hiring
search – their blogging platform gets far more engagement
providing a great background for your business
targeting
LinkedIn is not good for…
connecting with your fans
total reach
paid ads
tracking
Display (aka banner) Ads
Display Ads are great for…
targeting
tracking
catching attention
budgets
Display ads not great for…
people who hate banner ads
your grandparents
bang for your buck
formatting – specific sizes for specific places on specific web sites
x marks the spot – we’re trained to click the X to close the ad
Retargeting
Retargeting is great for…
re-targeting those who already visited you
tracking
catching attention
reminding
success
Retargeting is not good…
because it can be a little creepy
because it can backfire
because it causes brand fatigue
because your customer can’t turn it off
Facebook
Facebook is the most cost effective method of paid marketing today. Jason puts out ads every day for $20 and reach 8,000 people or $30 and reach 25,000 people. Really cost effective and hyper targeted.
Facebook’s organic reach: if you have 20k followers, Facebook determines who sees your content and how often they see it, so now you really have to pay to play. That said, Facebook is still ridiculously cost effective to advertise.
Knowing all of these channels are out there, available, and relatively cheap, you should find out where your audience is, and then put your money where your audience is.
Thanks again to Jason Dominy of the Dalton Agency for taking time out of his Tuesday night to educate a group of future digital marketers. If you ever need help in that area, or in making a great cup of coffee or creating a great batch of craft beer, Jason is your guy.
Right from the get-go, we knew we were in for something different from Van this night. He started us off with a simple exercise that took less than a minute, but made a huge point. Pair up, and take 15-seconds to tell the person you’re paired up with 3 things: where you live now, where you went to high school, and your favorite color. Then switch. Simple. Now, on the count of three, everyone YELL the answer to this question as loud as you can: where were you born?
In the first portion of the exercise, connections were made, information exchanged. In the second part – the yelling part – nobody could hear any information. In 10-seconds face to face, we learned more than screaming the same information all at one time. Is this what social media was meant for? Boom.
At this point, Van started bombarding the class with nuggets of digital wisdom that have the power to completely change how you do social media.
The dreaded auto-DM on Twitter: “Thanks for following! Please subscribe to our newsletter.” I don’t even know you. Don’t be like Ned Briarson from Groundhog Day. Van did not want to be Ned Briarson, so he developed a different model which became Relational Equity, to invest in the people who pay them for something they never use: Insurance. Insurance is like an epi-pen. You must have it there, but you hope you never use it. But Van does it differently. He uses social media to invest in the success of his clients. The results are uncanny.
Remember that very first week on a new job, working for the man? You’re special! Three months later they hire a new group of fresh faces, and you’re no longer special. When you start a business, your first clients feel really loved, because they are your only lifeline, but not after you have 50, 100, 200 clients. We all want to feel loved all the time, not just because we’re your first or 8th client, but because we are people. And people need to be loved on.
Whose content is more valuable, your content or your clients’ content? Try this to get a clear answer to that question: What would happen if you did not listen to your spouse for a month? People share what they are passionate about online. Listen to those you care about. In business, you should care about your clients, so listen to them on social media. How are you using social to create a relational equity with those who pay you? In business and in life, relationships are all that matter.
We don’t apply the 60-20-20 rule that Lindsay Trinkle espoused in real life, but we should. Imagine what would happen if, in real life, when you spoke, 60% of the time you were adding value to those you were speaking to by teaching them something new.
Some facts about the average digital media user:
The average Facebook user has 338 friends.
The average Twitter user has 208 followers (those who have more than 1,000 followers are the top 1% in the world).
The average Instagram user has 112 followers.
The average Pinterest user has 67 followers.
Some facts about how users of digital media make purchase decisions:
53% of people on Twitter recommend products in their tweets.
93% of shoppers make a buying decision based on social.
90% of consumers trust peer recommendations.
Only 14% of people trust advertisements.
Now do some math:
If 5 Facebook friends like a post, that means up to 1690 people might see it.
If 2 Twitter users RT, then your exposure is up to 416 users.
If 2 Instagram followers like our picture, that’s exposure of up to 112 users.
Two Pinterest repins gets you exposure to 134 users.
Total eyeballs from a few seconds on digital media: 2352
But that’s “organic” reach. If you’re paying for advertising, and you’re not paying for advertising on Facebook & Twitter, you’re missing the boat. It has never been easier and more economical to directly target the people that you want to be your customers.
Which is better: you talking about you or other people talking about you? Shut up and listen.
The 4 Ps of marketing don’t matter in digital. Now it’s the 4 Cs:
Create
Curate
Connect
Culture
Van and his company use Evernote to capture life events of their clients – the little things – so they can bring them back up on special dates. Van once noted from one tweet that a client of his loved – I mean really, really loved – a certain kind of pickle. So Van bought him a jar of these pickles for the client’s birthday. Client’s. Mind. Blown.
Van gives access to his company Instagram account only to clients. Then he shares very specific things with only those clients, like a free Starbucks offer that they can use, simply because they are his clients.
Mobile alerts: get notified when your clients tweet.
Van has setup a very simple thing in Twitter: mobile alerts. Every time his clients tweet, he gets a notification, and then he engages with a comment or a favorite or the old fashioned “RT”, which works better, because you’re not one of many. It’s a separate notification to that user, and they see your name. Free advertising, and dirt simple to setup.
Everyone loves to receive love, but it’s even stronger to give love, whether the recipient knows it’s you it or not. Don’t invest for ROI, but for “R.O.R.” – return on relationships.
It’s also simple to create lists in Facebook. Create a list of your clients, and like, share, and comment there first, before you get lost in all the other garbledeegook of Facebook.
You must use Twitter Lists. Put everyone on a list. From your corporate account, follow back only people who are clients.
Make a private account (also using your name or company name) in Instagram, and follow only your clients who use Instagram. Then, every day, scroll through and double tap every picture. How often are you the only user liking someone’s pictures? That’s giving love in a really easy way, and again, they are seeing your name in their digital media life. Free advertising.
Using these simple methods, how many times will your clients see your name in a day? In the Relational Equity model, you don’t ever have to post or tweet. Just follow, like, and share.
And, some quotes from Van that might rock your world, or at least your perception of who you are on digital media.
“None of us are as busy as we think we are.”
“There’s not a lot of people encouraging others on social.”
“Don’t ever just ask people to like your Facebook page. Give them a very specific reason. Tell them what they will get for liking your page.”
“Always engage on a personal level if you can. Most of the time, on the other end of that social account is a person. Engage with them as a person.”
Finally, this amazing thing that I don’t even know how to describe: Van’s company buys Facebook ads for his clients. He invests in the success of his clients.
If you have the opportunity to invite a guest speaker to talk about building real relationships in an increasingly digital world, you should book Van Baird. You’ll be glad you did.
As we begin the second half of our 10 week Digital Marketing class, we welcome another great guest speaker from the Atlanta digital world. Our first speaker blew the doors off of market & customer segmentation, setting the bar high for our remaining three guest speakers. Tonight, Lindsay Trinkle, whom I met at The Village and is now at Write2Market, where her aim is “to help entrepreneurs find their voice and tell their stories,” put down some fantastic information about content.
Example: moz – read it and think, “wow, this company actually cares about me”; they never pitch their product in their eBook; they just tell you how to do SEO better, which builds trust.
20% conversational posts
This one is tricky; this is where the “CEO is on social media” thing comes into play; your brand must be personified, humanized in some way for it to be relevant and trustworthy; put a human face to the words; focus on the team (e.g., “We’re going to SXSW!”) adding a human element, face, name, job function; “conversational” isn’t the accurate word, since we’re not engaging in discussion, but rather just more “human”, talking about the people of the brand and what they’re doing.
20% promotional posts
posts that actually talk about your product, brand, or services; tips on how to use the products, etc. Keep this to a minimum; never over 20%. Don’t work this into every other post. Keep this separate. Your instinct is to create a great educational post, and then put a call to action to get an offer at the bottom. Don’t.
More about this formula for content creation:
This rule of thumb is hard to define when you’re putting it into practice.
The point of white papers & eBooks is to put them behind a form and do lead gen. WPs no longer than 15 pages, or else it’s an eBook. Both are PDFs, just formatted differently. Put it behind a marketing automation tool.
If they’re interested in your content, then they’re interested in what you have to offer.
Other golden nuggets of content marketing from Lindsay:
SEO, linkbuilding, blah blah blah yada yada yada: focus on creating content that connects you to your audience.
Re-purposing content is wonderful, but you have to be creative about it.
And finally, “Does SEO make anyone feel warm & fuzzy?” Consistently create great content that engages human consumers, and you’ll win the SEO game.
Lindsay killed it. The class loved her, and peppered her with questions that she handled like a boss.
Next class, we’ll be joined by the one and only Van Baird, of Relational Equity, the most interesting Insurance salesman in the world, as he brings his own version of digital marketing: ““Shut Up & Listen!” Using digital for Referrals, Retention, Revenue, Relationships and Other Words That Start with R.“
There are many ways to share the content that you’ve created on your blog; however, the most reliable method of promoting your blog to your intended audience is through email. Most people check their social networks regularly, but everyone reads – or at least checks – their email at least several times each day.
There are three very simple methods of sharing each blog post you create via email, and you don’t ever have to worry about spamming anyone because all three methods are opt-in. The tools to share your blog posts via email are WordPress, Feedburner, and Mailchimp, all probably already familiar names.
WordPress
Using JetPack by AutoMattic (the people who operate WordPress), it’s very simple to activate the “Subscriptions” functionality of Jetpack, and then let WordPress.com handle all the rest. You’ll add a widget to your WordPress blog, and the software does the rest. Every time you post, everyone who has opted in to receive your blog via email will get a nicely formatted email containing the full text to your blog and a link to read the blog on your site.
To implement Jetpack Subscriptions, follow the following steps.
Install the Jetpack plugin.
Go to “Settings” under the Jetpack menu.
Scroll near the bottom and find “Subscriptions” and activate the service.
Click “Configure,” which will take you to a new page to configure all email options for WordPress. At the bottom of this configuration page are two check boxes to allow you to choose whether Your visitors follow your blog, or your blog’s comments, or both. We recommend choosing the blog only.
Activate the Subscriptions widget, by going to Appearance → Widgets.
Drag the widget labeled “Blog Subscriptions (Jetpack)” into one of your sidebars.
That’s it, and it really is that simple.
Feedburner
Feedburner is a service from Google that creates an RSS feed for any web site. When you create a Feedburner RSS feed, you have a lot of other options, but one of the most basic is to allow people to subscribe to your blog via email.
Follow these steps to create your Feedburner RSS feed and offer email subscriptions through Feedburner.
Login to http://feedburner.google.com/ with your Google account. If you don’t have a Google account, you’ll need to create one.
Just below the words “Burn a feed right this instant. Type your blog or feed address here:” enter your blog’s url, e.g., kevinsandlin.com, and click “next.”
If Feedburner finds more than one valid feed on your blog (there may be a separate feed for comments), choose the RSS feed for posts.
Give the feed a title, something simple like “My blog feed” or the name of your blog.
Click on the “Publicize” tab at the top of the page.
Scroll down to Email Subscriptions and click on that link.
Click “Activate” at the bottom of that screen.
Then you’ll see this success message at the top of the page:
Copy and paste the snippet of code on the resulting page into a widget on your blog, and anyone can now opt-in to get an email every time you post to your blog.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp offers simple forms and code for widgets to add to any blog. Mailchimp’s documentation and instructions are simple, thorough, and very friendly to the new user. The concept is the same as using the WordPress plugin or Feedburner:
Setup an email list at Mailchimp.com.
Configure the widget code.
Copy/paste the widget code into a widget on your blog.
The complete instructions from start to finish for using Mailchimp to create an email subscription service for your blog are on Mailchimp’s website tutorial called “Mailchimp for Bloggers.”
Each of these service options is very simple to setup, and each is popular and reliable, so it’s a personal choice. The best part about enabling your readers to subscribe to your blog posts via email is that you are also creating a very powerful marketing tool: an opt-in email list.
We’ve been talking about the marketing funnel just about every session of Digital Marketing, but we hadn’t really brought it to life yet. So, in our mid-term (10th session) of the #DGM2 class, we focused completely on the math of the marketing funnel.
A photo posted by Kevin Sandlin (@kevinrsandlin) on Feb 26, 2015 at 6:24pm PST
It helped that this class was also our maiden voyage into the very cool new General Assembly space at Ponce City Market, so we had Willy’s and beer to help the presenting and teaching. The 18 new marketers presented in their groups of 3 or 4 from our lesson from the previous class, in which each group had the assignment to create a marketing budget to do an ad buy on Google Adwords or Facebook Ads with the goals of 1,000 new users and a 100% ROI on the spend.
Then we dug deep into the marketing funnel, because that was a challenge for most of the group. Here are the six specifics that should be considered when engaging in an early (e.g., very first spend) digital marketing buy.
Information is imperfect – the first time you tackle Adwords or Facebook Ads, you’re guessing. You don’t know what your CTR will be, what your best keywords are, or what your conversion rate is.
Social media channels want you to spend – so they make it really easy to spend a few dollars at a time to get you hooked on short term results, but their model is to get you spending a little more each time and keep you spending.
Finding correct keywords is difficult – trial and error are best replaced here with test & measure, because that’s how we figure out which words work for our campaigns and why.
The top of the funnel has to be huge – CTRs from Google and social channels are going to be small, despite “viral marketer” claims that “I got 28% CTR on my first Facebook ad!” so you need to start small, and build your own historical information, upon which you can then make more educated guesses about larger spends in the future.
Experiment, experiment, experiment – the first assignment I gave the class after GA so generously supplied them with $25 Visa cards (no beer or shoes!) was to go test something. Just getting used to the process of a social ad buy is a major learning event. Repetition of testing and measuring come much easier with understanding of how things work.
Buying the ad is the easy part. Determining the math that goes into the proper ad buy is the hard part.
In the end, the visualization and MS Excel formulas were what brought it home for the class. Marketing is all about the numbers, and it starts with that top of the funnel: total addressable market. Then the key metrics of CTR and conversion rates (into email, warm lead, trial user, user, customer) must be measured and improved to improve the bottom line.
This session was completely off-the-cuff from the students and myself. No slides, no agenda, just digging into a big, important roadblock that had to be destroyed. The beer & Tex-Mex helped a lot.
If you are or aspire to be a digital marketer, then you must embrace the beast that is Google Analytics, and learn how to use it, piece by piece. Why? Because if you don’t measure it, you cannot manage it, and measuring your web site and marketing metrics is the foundation of digital marketing.
To get over the first big hump that greets most beginner bloggers, I wrote a series of posts for GA on connecting your blog to Google Analytics.
How to connect your Blogger account to Google Analytics – You’d think that, since Google owns Blogger, Analytics would be automatic, but you’d be wrong. Blogger has its own “Stats” package, but the numbers are always different from Analytics.
I was also planning to write a similar post on connecting Medium to Google Analytics, but it would have been a very short post, because you just can’t. I talked to the folks at Medium, and they said they were working on a couple of things in that realm.
Using Medium to blog on a custom domain, instead of medium.com/@yourname
Building their own analytics tools to compete with Google Analytics
You kinda have to take what the folks at Medium say pretty seriously. One of the founders of Medium was a founder of Blogger before Google acquired Blogger, and then that same guy went on to build a little company called Twitter. You know him better as @ev.
I’ve known Chris Turner, the founder of 10Rocket since early last year, when he and I met at Tech Talent South. Shortly after that, Chris enrolled in The Iron Yard‘s Ruby on Rails software developer course, because he wanted to be able to build the software product that he had envisioned. A few months later, Chris showed up at Pitch Practice and started working on his pitch for what is now 10Rocket.
Since then, 10Rocket has rocketed to some serious success as Chris refined his pitch to what it is now:
We build MVP web apps for startups in 2 weeks for $5k.
Boom. Well, last time Chris showed off his pitch at Pitch Practice, I reminded him that 10Rocket needs to start telling its story via a blog. They came out swinging today on Medium. Chris is right: most blog posts teach you something or make a list or tell you “How to” this or that, but few posts cause you to do something. 10Rocket’s first blog post challenged its readers to write a haiku about their startup. Brilliant!
To take it even further, 10Rocket wrote a haiku about Atlanta Tech Blogs in this tweet.
Tonight we got a special treat at our #DGM2 class: Maria Joyner of Synapp.io laid down the growth hacking truth on the class, setting the bar very high for our next three guest speakers. Who knew that Synapp.io was her first salaried job? The key to Maria’s success?
“Find a startup that’s killing it, and take credit for all their success.”
As a growth hacker, here’s what Maria has done since starting work at Synapp.io:
email marketing
rebranding the Synapp.io web site
relaunch the web site
a/b testing
building out the support team
Moving into the new office
interviews for a sh**load of new employees
product management
API integration for partners
work with web site designers
write cookbooks
learn basic HTML and markdown
What the heck does any of that have to do with digital marketing? Everything, and segmentation. That’s startup life. If you work for a huge company, you’ll do one of these things. At a startup, you’ll do all these and more. Learning basic coding is very helpful to anyone in a startup, but specifically for a growth hacker.
So we’re now in our 4th week of Digital Marketing class at General Assembly, and these new marketers are rapidly learning that “digital marketing” is far less about fun web sites, apps, and banner ads, and far more about the numbers, and Maria helped drive that home with a thorough talk on customer segmentation.
Last week, we slogged through a couple of sessions of Google Analytics. Now that we’ve slayed that beast, tonight we dug into the world of data analysis and visualization. You know what that means, right? Excel. In all its glory. Microsoft Excel, whose replacement has been the motivation for hundreds of SaaS startups, still rules the day when it comes to analyzing data. In fact, just today, I retweeted this gem:
That’s right. #4 behind three kinds of software gurus is the person who is most adept at making sense of all that data. I got my first promotion out of B-school because I could make an Excel spreadsheet sing with pre-IPO numbers. Remember: marketing is all about the numbers that go into the top of the funnel and the percentage that make it out the bottom of the marketing funnel and into the loyalty loop.
