008 - Are You A Vitamin Or A Painkiller? Plus Promoting And Converting Content

Buzz 1: Are you a vitamin or a pain killer?
a. New project by Brent Claremont called 'Inbound internship'. A pliot program that matches students and junior marketers with inbound marketing agencies.
b. Great example of a pain killer that solves a dual sided problem..
c. If you know someone who could benefit from an 'Inbound Internship' be from an agency, educational provider or student side, contact Brent on @Brentc27

Buzz 2: How do you promote a blog and what tactics can you use?
a. Question asked: For blog entries how would you promote? What are your recommendations on how you would promote them? I haven't seen a lot of companies that promote on SEM, have you seen companies that do that with success?
b. Apply the concept or Owned, Earned and Paid media. Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielnewman/2014/12/03/the-role-of-paid-owned-and-earned-media-in-your-marketing-strategy/#7351a8c511d3
c. You need a supplement your efforts with paid promotion and it doesn't have to be a lot it does need to be consistent and dictated by logic.
d. Use a Content Mix rule after your define your personas in preparation to building a calendar e.g. a 3-2-1-1 rule: 3 lifestyle piece of content e.g. 5 apps for personal trainers, 2 TOF career related pieces of content e.g. How much does a marketing graduate earn, 1 campus life article, 1 MOF of content like an ebook e.g. 5 things you need to know about online learning.
e. The key is to try what works and focus on the pieces that will be most interesting to your personas or valuable first.
f. The other paid tactic, use content in your remarketing efforts. Remarket with content with an ebook or a guide, will help elevate your brand in the persona's consideration set.
g. Adopt the basics: Push every piece of content on every medium 3 times. Use a different angle or quote each time.

3. Buzz 3: Listener question 'How do I increased my engaged subscriber following'
a. Jessica Santosa from http://www.jessica-santosa.com/ fame asks:

Hey Moby, happy Monday! I'd love to know how to increase my ENGAGED subscriber following. I've seen hundreds of articles about quantitative growth but it means nothing if they don't convert into customers or repeat customers at that.

In this case, I have a few readers who email me and engage with me, which is SO much more valuable than people who just subscriber and don't even open the email

b. The focal part of the answer rests in understanding the inbound marketing funnel: http://www.hubspot.com/inbound-marketing
c. See methodology graphic that demonstrates the Attract, Convert, Close and Delight funnel with key tactics at each stage.
d. For instance at the attract stage you're using SEO, blogging, SM, relationships, mobile optimization. The idea is attract your targeted persona well before they are looking to buy something or realise a latent need to buy something. So to attract, you need to pull them in with something they will love or value.
e. Convert stage: objective is to convert visitors to leads. Here you need to develop and think about:
f. CTA's: Channeling Sam: "Once we find prospects what sort of CTAs are we going to use to engage them, how are we going to generate the conversation and it is just a conversation, it's not an application, oh they know about us oh now they are paying for a course"
g. Send personalised emails (hear examples in the podcast). Make them personalised, question led.
h. Use Forms and Landing Pages. Go back to a popular post, turn that into a download be it a guide or a checklist. Create a landing page and ask for 3 fields for instance e.g. Name, Email and an engagement lead question e.g. "How do you deal with negative emotions? "
i. Featured tool to get creative and fun with call-to-actions and engagement via Apestar app. Allows you to embed interactive cards where you can ask take quizes, polls, create personality tests so you can start building a profile for your audience : http://apester.com/