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Tag: digital marketing

  • 5 Ways Instagram Is Different

    I started using Instagram in late 2014 for the simple purpose of learning how it works and why it’s become so popular. What got my attention is that Instagram passed Twitter for the number of monthly active users (MAU) using the service. Along the way, through teaching the Digital Marketing class at GA and using Instagram almost every day, I’ve found that Instagram is different in some very specific ways from other social channels like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Linkedin.
    Here are five ways that Instagram is different than other social channels.
    1. Instagram starts with the image, obviously, since it’s an image sharing service. But this distinction makes Instagram stand out, because on any other social network you can share all you like without any image (not recommended). But on Instagram, it’s all about the visual. That’s the reason Facebook paid $1 billion for Instagram: the killer app within Facebook is – and has always been since it was “The Facebook” at Harvard – the images.
    2. The key to getting engagement on Instagram is to share an exclusive image that nobody else will be able to see, as opposed to a meme that’s raging around the interwebz. That’s part of the impetus for Instagram’s #WHP weekend hashtag projects. They’re prompting users to find and take pictures of things that are unique, that most other people would never see, except on Instagram.
    3. Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn all recommend that we keep our posts short, specifically under 100 characters, because people don’t read long form social media posts (generally). On the other hand, Instagram recommends that users tell a brief story using about 200 words, almost a mini-blog post, about the image that you’ve shared.
    4. Twitter has many studies showing that using more than 2 hashtags sends your engagement down the tubes. Instagram recommends that we use at least three hashtags, though they do limit you to no more than thirty (30!) hashtags.
    5. While it’s ok to tag people tag people on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ (I’ve inquired with LinkedIn as to why they don’t have a method of tagging people…no reply), there are limits to the number of people you can tag on Twitter (10) and Facebook (50), there are no limits to the number of people you can tag on an Instagram post (if you can find any, please ping me, because I couldn’t).

    I’m still using Instagram, along with 300,000,000 millenials who are no longer using Facebook because their parents (that’s me) are on Facebook. What I like best about using Instagram is the simplicity of sharing an image, and also sharing that image across other social channels. I do wish that Twitter would allow full integration of Instagram photos, but alas…

  • Knowledge vs. Understanding

    If you know about and already use the Google URL Builder tool, you can stop reading and move on to the next blog. If you’re still with me, wondering what the heck a URL builder is, then the next 3 minutes belong to you.

    One of the major components of digital marketing is measurement and metrics. The best thing about digital marketing is the ability to conduct small, measured experiments that take just a little time, but teach us so much about what will or will not be effective. The experiments usually involve driving traffic to a web property, and behind that web property should always be an analytics tool. The biggest, baddest, and most free is Google Analytics (hereafter referred to as G.A.). G.A. allows you to see, track, and measure every activity on your website, and most importantly who arrived there, how they got there, and where they came from.

    That said, many people are only getting the knowledge that comes from seeing that you got X number of visitors from Twitter and Y number of visitors from the email newsletter, etc. What that looks like is you see a bunch of traffic from “t.co” or “email” or “Google organic”. That gives you the knowledge, generally, of where your traffic came from. But you have little or no understanding about how that visitor’s journey took them to your web site.

    Here’s a very short exercise to demonstrate what I mean.  First, Google “Atlanta Tech Blogs”. Since you’re Googling the name of my website, it’ll come up first on the search engine results page. If you click on the link, you’ll get to http://www.atlantatechblogs.com. Simple, right? No. Not simple. At this point, you have knowledge that you searched for Atlanta Tech Blogs and when you clicked on that link, you got to atlantatechblogs.com.

    That’s not good enough to have a deep understanding of your web audience traffic. So go back to that results page, and right click on the link to Atlanta Tech Blogs, then “copy link address.” Then paste what you copied into your browser or even just into notepad or whatever you take notes on. It’ll look something like this:

    https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CB8QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.atlantatechblogs.com%2F&ei=KANUVcRJiL6CBOjKgOAK&usg=AFQjCNHi-IdD2nILrIOojDCH6YjDO0dR8w&sig2=N-Ews1iaKjmVcc93V9rcjw

    See all that junk in there? If you look closely, you can find your website’s URL in there. Everything else is what we call “UTM Parameters”, which is a big fancy technical term for “all the other data you need to track this campaign.” And you have the power to track every click from every campaign just like Google does.

    Here’s how. It’s a simple, free tool from Google called Google URL Builder. Using this tool, you can (and should) enter, and then track every aspect of each and every campaign you run. Simply fill out these fields with terms that you understand, and hit “Generate URL” at the bottom.

    • Website URL (the page you want the visitor to end up on, aka “landing page”)
    • Campaign Source (where is the campaign taking place?)
    • Campaign Medium (what kind of campaign is it?)
    • Campaign Term (Google assumes you’re using Adwords, so they ask for your key word)
    • Campaign Content (Name the content that’s driving the campaign)
    • Campaign Name (what are you calling this campaign?)

    Here’s the “hard” part. I quoted “hard” because it’s just manual, not hard. When you create one of these long UTM parameter URLs, it’s ugly, long, and you don’t want to paste that into Twitter or any other medium, so you use a URL shortener (Google has one of those, too), or make that the link behind your call to action button.

    When visitors click on that link, you have knowledge of where they came from, but more importantly you have understanding of what brought them there. Instead of “t.co” when a visitor arrives from Twitter, you’ll see the entire URL that you created, and now you can track as part of measuring the effectiveness of a campaign. Every campaign. Ideally, every campaign you run has it’s own unique URL with UTM parameters, and perhaps even multiple URLs, if you run a single campaign across multiple digital channels like Twitter and Facebook.

    That’s the difference, in digital marketing anyway, of knowledge vs. understanding.

  • More Speaking & Teaching In May

    We had so much fun last Saturday offering the Digital Marketing Bootcamp at General Assembly that we’re going to do it again in June! It really was a great class, thanks to the 14 future digital marketers who attended and shared their visions for what they want to do in digital. We’ll be offering that same Saturday class again on Saturday June 20 from 10-4pm.

    But before we get to that, here’s what’s coming up in the next two weeks:

    • Advanced Social Media Strategy – Wednesday May 13th from 1-4pm – Social media marketing is an extension of content marketing. In this half day class, we’ll walk you through practical best practices for each social marketing channel, what not to do on each channel, and how to really engage your customers using simple techniques that anyone can practice on a daily basis.
    • Blogging Bootcamp – Need to blog? Silly question. Everyone needs to blog, especially startups and small businesses. But not everyone has a WordPress developer at their disposal. The good news is, you don’t need one. In this Saturday bootcamp, you’ll start with nothing, and leave with your own domain, a fully functioning WordPress blog with all the necessary plugins, a content strategy just for you, and your first three blog posts ready to go.
    • FailCon – You read that right: FAIL con. A conference about failure, because we all fail, have failed, are failing, or will fail at something. If you’re not failing, you’re not growing. I’ve failed a lot, so this one’s going to be just a little more personal than a bootcamp. If you’re up for some heartbreak, some joy, and some fun, please attend FailCon Atlanta on May 21st.
    I hope to see you at one or more of these events. They’re all going to be lots of fun. Thanks to GA for hosting all these great events.

  • The [DGM] Breakfast Club

    No, this was not us this morning, but I did spend an entire Saturday with 14 future digital marketers at General Assembly.

    The genesis of this offering was the 10-week Digital Marketing class that I led from Jan – Mar of this year. In the final session before Demo Night, we did a complete review of the entire course in a little less than three hours. That went so well that we decided to create a one-day “DGM bootcamp”, and that’s what we delivered today.

    First, thanks to everyone who attended and participated. It was a great group, with lots of unique marketing challenges, opportunities, and questions, and I thoroughly enjoyed leading this unique offering.

    We broke down the 10-week DGM class into 6 parts, walking through the nuts and bolts of each section, as listed below.

    1. Brand creation – starts with your core values; brand is everything you do; we used Atlanta Tech Village as an example of intentional branding & culture, and showed the Simon Sinek TED Talk on “Start with Why”.
    2. Measuring & metrics – measure everything, focus on 2-3 KPIs, analytics tools; we introduced the Google URL Builder as a very simple way to track each click in each campaign to have understanding vs. having only knowledge.
    3. The marketing funnel – reach –> CTR –> landing page –> conversion –> revenue –> loyalty loop; we watched the short Dave McClure (500Startups) video on “AARRR!“
    4. Owned content marketing – everything we produce is content; social marketing is content; we looked at Salesloft’s success in content marketing to build their company from nothing to $6M+ ARR in 2 years.
    5. Paid content marketing – Adwords and ads on social media channels are inexpensive, highly targeted, and powerful; we investigated how simple it is to advertise on Google Adwords, Twitter, and Facebook to conduct fast, cheap experiments to determine where your audience is and the best use of your digital marketing ad dollar.
    6. Marketing calendar – nothing hurts like a date and nothing helps like a plan; a plan implemented with a marketing & content calendar like the Insightpool freebie gives you freedom to win like Arby’s and Oreo and countless others.

    GA served up Chipotle for lunch, and we had a couple of minutes left for Q&A discussion. I think this offering is a great way for new marketers to get a solid overview of the digital realm, for those considering a career in digital marketing to see what they’re getting into, and for managers and leaders to understand the basic ideas and functionality behind digital strategy.

    I look forward to leading this class again on Saturday June 20.

  • Got Presentations? Create Blog Content.

    The average American reads approximately 300 words per minute. The average time that a speaker talks per slide of a presentation (one with slides, of course) is at least 30 seconds, and, depending upon the complexity of the content, up to three minutes per slide.  For the purpose of this blog post, let’s assume it’s 2 minutes per slide, so for a 30 minute presentation you would use approximately 15 slides.

    Now let’s do the math. If you talk for 2 minutes per slide, that’s approximately 300 words x 2 minutes, or 600 words, which is longer than the optimal length of a short, SEO friendly blog post. The image at the top of this post is a good example.

    The image is one slide out of 45 slides that I used to deliver a 3-hour seminar on “Advanced Social Media Strategy” at General Assembly last week. (Shameless plug: the class is offered again Wednesday, May 13 from 1 – 4pm). From this one slide, highlighting best practices for using YouTube videos to market your business, I was able to create a 622 word blog post, which is a 2-3 minute read.

    Unfortunately, I can’t make a blog post from every single slide in that presentation, since some are topic introductions, session dividers, examples, etc.; however, if I can use even half of those 45 slides, that’s a series of 20+ posts on one subject, each post a short, easily-digestible chunk of usable information.

    This technique is what’s commonly known as re-purposing your content. I spent about 3 hours creating the slide presentation, and about 20 minutes creating this first blog post, which can be shared over and over and over, not to mention I’ll be teaching this session again.

    If you or someone at your business presents slide presentations regularly, you already have TONS of content, and that doesn’t even include video of the presenter in action!

    How much content do you have? More than you thought.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.