All Entries Tagged With: "digital marketing"

Should You Outsource Your Business’ Marketing?

Who is in charge of marketing – creation and execution – within your business? Is it a person or a team? If it’s a single person, is that his or her sole focus, or is he or she wearing multiple hats and ‘handling marketing’ is one of them? So often, small businesses (we’re talking solopreneurs to businesses with 50+ employees) don’t understand the value of a solid marketing strategy. We’re not criticizing you here, not at all…it’s what we do and sometimes even we struggle with prioritizing our own marketing efforts! Marketing and sales go hand in hand. Yes, we know this is an age-old argument, but it’s true. Marketing compliments and supports (or at least it should!) sales, and without sales…well, all businesses need to sell, right?  

Some food for thought here on whether you might want to consider outsourcing some or all of your marketing. Larger companies with bigger budgets often have both internal and external (outsourced) teams, which is often optimal, but smaller companies can still experience similar benefits with an internal individual or point person and an outsourced team. Many smaller companies appoint an individual within their team who is ‘self-taught,’ and though that person may make the perfect internal point person or lead while working with an outsourced marketing company, they remain limited in their breadth and depth of experience and expertise.  

The 5 main benefits of outsourcing marketing:

1. Cost
2. Access
3. Time
4. Experience
5. Education

Cost: 

Let’s start with money! Having a full-time, in-house marketing expert, or team, is expensive and can cost up to 6 figures. Hiring an external digital marketing team that remains educated and at the top of their field can save you money and bring you top-notch expertise!

Access:

Having access to individuals that focus solely on digital marketing and trends (which literally change on a daily basis) will often provide that extra edge over your competition. Not everyone understands, or values, the importance of staying agile and hyper focused on growth, and having an objective external team assisting with developing, executing and analyzing your growth strategies could give you the upper hand!

Time:

Recruiting, hiring, training and managing internal marketing teams takes time. We don’t need to remind you that time = money! Freeing up your valuable time to focus on what you’re good at is critical to your business’ success.

Experience:

Marketing companies have a depth of experience in all aspects of what you’ll need to create and execute a successful integrated growth strategy. Projects and tasks to consider when deciding on whether or not you might want to hire an outside team:

-Strategic Planning
-Designing Growth Strategies
-Executing Marketing/Growth Strategies and Campaigns
-Website Development
-SEO Campaign Development and Management
-Email marketing
-Social Media Marketing/Management
-Blogging & Content Marketing
-Video Marketing

Education:

Staying on top of the ever-changing marketing climate is like following a rocket ship that is zigging and zagging through outer space! From the many different social platforms’ nuances, to tweaking your company’s voice and messaging specific to your audience, to analyzing your SEO and so much more…it is literally a daily commitment to stay on top. If you’re one of the lucky ones that understands the value, and is able to invest in, the constant education for an individual or team, then we high five you!  

Marketing companies generally charge much less than it would cost to hire one full time expert and they provide fresh, objective and comprehensive input. While we understand that many business owners may be reluctant to hire an outside team, we wanted to outline some of the many benefits!

If Content Is King – Video Is The Emperor

Let’s face it – we’re obsessed with consuming video content. We’re all guilty of it – perusing YouTube, watching recommended video after recommended video, or watching one too many Facebook Tasty videos. The number of Snapchat users now exceeds Twitter users. We all love video, so why are so many small business owners still hesitant to invest in video marketing?

As we mentioned in last week’s blog, if content is king, video content is the king’s king! Video marketing is no longer up and coming – it’s a proven successful strategic marketing tactic, and it looks to be here to stay. But don’t just take our word for it. This infographicboasts a lot of impressive statistics about video marketing (who doesn’t love infographics?). For example, YouTube reports video consumption has risen 100% each year. Additionally, after watching a video, 64% of users are more likely to purchase a product online.

Video is human, which is inherently more engaging. Just think about it – video opens up a world of creative opportunities to tell a story, demonstrate your product, or promote your brand. The brain processes visual stimuli 60,000 times faster than words alone, because video appeals to the senses. Video also has the capability to encourage user-generated content and create positive buzz; when a video captivates us, we share it with our network. And we all know what higher engagement means – better ranking in search engine results.

We hear your excuses – “but video content doesn’t belong in my industry.” In the real estate industry? A 2012 National Association of Realtors study found that 85 percent of buyers and sellers “prefer to work with an agent who uses video marketing,” and that was 4 years ago! Since then, consumption of video content has only become more prevalent.Video marketing has a place in every industry –B2B (use video to explain your product or service offerings), education & learning (animation videos are really engaging to explain a topic), healthcare (video can be a great vessel to simply sensitive topics),technology (to show audiences what your technology is capable of), and so on!

A few video marketing best practices:

• As with everything, know your audience and their consumption habits. Of course, that’s always key, and it goes back to our previous blog: are you where your audience is?
• Get creative, and invest in high-quality. We all love video content, but most consumers have a keen ability to pick up on quality, original content. Be unique, and invest in professional video.
• For Facebook videos, people love the dialogue to be in subtitles. This is for so many of consumers who watch Facebook videos at work, or keep their phone volume on silent.
• Don’t lose sight of your brand story. It’s easy to get caught up in all the creative aspects of creating a video, but make sure to keep in mind everything your brand is about.
• Keep it short. Our attention spans have decreased from 12 to 8 seconds in the last 15 years – so the shorter the better. As a general rule of thumb, keep your video under 90 seconds.
• Video marketing is not a comprehensive digital marketing strategy – it should be used as a part of a larger, strategic marketing plan.

Are You Where Your Audience Is?

Seriously, understanding human behavior, or more specifically your audience’s content consumption habits, is key to creating consistent quality content that will keep your current clients, prospects and brand ambassadors engaged.  We know you’ve already clearly identified your audience and we know you’re totally committed to producing really great organic content for your social posts, blogs, email campaigns, newsletters, videos, white papers, articles or other information but really identifying how your audience is consuming that information is key to your integrated marketing campaigns and efforts being effective.  We don’t want you to just feel like a hamster spinning on a wheel after all!   We often refer to ourselves as ‘Professional Spaghetti Throwers’ because we are constantly throwing spaghetti against the wall and quantifying what is sticking, what isn’t, what we should shelf, trash or invest more time, money and energy into.  We do this within our own business and for all of our clients every day, every week, every month…it is SO important to really understand which efforts are creating a positive ROI – makes sense, right?

We often get that glazed over eye, deer in the headlights, reaction when first discussing social media campaigns with prospective clients or when giving a presentation or workshop because so many of you feel overwhelmed enough already with the amount of work it takes to run your business and the thought of adding social media with all those different platforms can make your head spin.  But, it is often not as complex as most think.  No, really.  Oftentimes, it’s really a matter of identifying which platforms make the most sense for your business to reach your audience.

As an example…

Let’s say you’re a realtor. You’re going to want to have a professional logo and a solid web presence that clearly represents your differentiator and unique value proposition, a Facebook page, a comprehensive personal LinkedIn profile and a company profile.  All of these will of course be streamlined with a clean consistent style and with tons of relevant engaging content.  Are you still with us?  Once you’ve mastered these basics, which we’ll refer to here as the super important foundation, (which is often the hardest part to build) the rest is fun! …Well, for us it’s fun, let’s just hope it’s not painful for you! Now you’re ready to add some more floors to that solid foundation.

Instagram: What about Instagram?  We’re guessing you’ve got some pretty nice listings and/or you’ve sold some pretty nice properties to some happy clients?  Take pictures when you’re working and post away!  You’ll need to continue to follow a fairly consistent style or theme.  Here are some great tips!

Snapchat: Okay, we know your 13 year old uses Snapchat – you must be thinking we’re crazy.  Why on earth would we be suggesting you should use it for your business?  Here’s an eye-opening article by Gary Vaynerchuk that’ll back up our suggestion and prove that we’re not going cuckoo!  It all goes back to understanding your audience, so this platform may or may not be a good idea.  If you’re selling some stylish condos in an highly sought after area that is super popular to 20 and 30 somethings, Snapchat is a great idea, but if you’re selling retirement properties…probably not so much!

Pinterest: Women are BIG decision makers and major players in the consumer real estate market so chances are Pinterest is a no brainer for the realtors out there.  Here is a great article that talks specifically to that.

We didn’t touch on video in this blog but let’s just say if content is king then video content is the king’s KING!  Video is consumed more and more and if done right, you can’t go wrong with video content.

We’ll be following up next week with a very beefy blog all about video content and best practices for using it in your integrated marketing strategy.  Until then, happy content creating!

The WHY Behind Hub Digital

What is your ‘WHY’?  What is your reason, goal(s), or impetus that gets you out of bed in the morning?  Your ‘WHY’ might be raising a happy healthy family, getting a degree, making a million bucks…

Here at Hub Digital Marketing, our‘WHY’ is all about helping businesses grow through digital marketing and customized growth strategies.  Our ‘WHY’ fuels our quest for learning and growing.  Can’t stop, won’t stop!  We read, watch videos, attend webinars and online classes, and go to presentations and workshops with an almost obsessive dedication.  We practice new ideas and platforms out on ourselves, and our own business, ALL the time.  We truly enjoy meeting with people and hearing their stories.  We are always interested in learning about client’s businesses and we revel in identifying their strengths and weaknesses, their growth stories and pain points then we love working with them to identify, build, and execute growth strategies specific to each and every one of them.  We really love what we do and do what we love!

Now you know what our ‘WHY’ is, so what about the HOW and WHAT?

Marketing…what is marketing really?  As defined by Miriam Webster:

Full Definition of marketing

1. 1a :  the act or process of selling or purchasing in a market b :  the process or technique of promoting, selling, and distributing a product or service
2. 2:  an aggregate of functions involved in moving goods from producer to consumer

Then there’s Digital Marketing, which really is the skeletal structure and/or foundation of everything we do – from the design and development of a website, content marketing, email marketing, social media marketing and all that goes into search engine optimization – that is ‘WHAT’ we do! Digital marketing is an umbrella term for themarketing of products or services using digital technologies, mainly on the Internet, but also including mobile phones, display advertising, and any other digital medium.  Wikipedia’s full definition.

Content is king…you’ve heard that, right?  Well, it’s true.  Content creation is the contribution of information to any media and most especially to digital media for an end-user/audience in specific contexts.  But let’s think of content as content marketing…Content marketing is the marketing and business process for creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

And, of course SEO (search engine optimization) is at the heart of it ALL.  Search engine optimization is a methodology of strategies, techniques and tactics used to increase the amount of visitors to a website by obtaining a high-ranking placement in the search results page of a search engine (SERP) — including Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines.