Social Media

Social Media

Social Media is the ever present content monster always demanding more and more. Two things to think about when trying to keep up: 1. If you maximize your content, you will be looking at a variety of pieces for every one piece you make. 2. Document the daily life of your organization to help fill the gaps with pieces that are easy to make. Documentation is taking pictures of a meeting or showing what has recently arrived in a shipment. These quick pieces of content, when created with the customer in mind, can be great ways to help feed the social media beast. 

1. Platforms

When picking social media platforms, start with where your customers’ attention is. If your customers are all tweens, Linkedin might not be right. If you are dealing with all B2B sales with C Suite (executive level offices) folks, TikTok might not be right. We are not going to go into details here about which platforms are best for each demographic for one main reason: it changes all the time. New ones will emerge, old ones will lose favor, and customer bases will age and change their behavior. So the key concept here is to see where the attention is being spent by your audiences and invest there. 

2. Content Strategy

How do you lay out your content to succeed? One of the keys is to understand your audience. What are they looking for? How can we entertain/educate/delight them?

Some emotions we can try to invoke from our audience are: anger, awe, surprise, amusement, joy, sadness, laughter, inspiration, curiosity. Anger can be great for political campaigns and nonprofits, but maybe not a Heating and Air company.

The following list is long but it is not an exhaustive list of content types. These types of content can help give you some guidance on how to begin creating content:

Announcements, ask a question, expert opinion, get to know you, guides, holidays, how to, listicle, memes, polls, quizzes, testimonials, user generated content.

Mediums are the way we convey the information directed by the structure: Animation, audio, document, ebooks, graphics, interactive, live video, photography, stories, text video

This blog post is a portion of Attention and Action. The book walks you through the marketing process that Adelsberger Marketing follows with its clients. You can read this book for free as a blog on the Adelsberger Marketing website or purchase on Amazon.com.

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Live Events

Live Events

Live events can offer you an opportunity to interact with your customers. Whether this be a lunch and learn, a trade show, or a conference that you put on, with a bit of investment, you can build great relationships. A good example of this is the Marketing AI conference put on by Paul Roetzer and PR 20/20. They established an arm of their company to begin talking about AI and then created a conference that would be used to help solidify their position as an expert. It also generates some sales of their courses and tickets. In person experiences can help motivate people to attend and give you an opportunity to further establish yourself as an expert. This can also dip into experiential marketing which we will talk about later in this book.

This blog post is a portion of Attention and Action. The book walks you through the marketing process that Adelsberger Marketing follows with its clients. You can read this book for free as a blog on the Adelsberger Marketing website or purchase on Amazon.com.

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Webinars

Webinars

Webinars are a type of online speaking engagement. Some of the same rules apply: be wary of burdens of knowledge, provide value in what you’re talking about, and avoid the hard sell. Be sure to test your technology the day before to help remove the chance of computer errors. The advantage of webinars over speaking engagements is that they can go anywhere and be easily recorded and shared after the event.

This blog post is a portion of Attention and Action. The book walks you through the marketing process that Adelsberger Marketing follows with its clients. You can read this book for free as a blog on the Adelsberger Marketing website or purchase on Amazon.com.

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Speaking Engagements

Speaking Engagements

If you get invited to a speaking engagement, you have been handed a tremendous opportunity. This might be harder if you are not skilled in public speaking but hopefully you will have a window in which to practice ahead of time. Speaking Engagements are generally a fabulous way to help increase your brand awareness in a community. For starters, if you have been invited. This means that someone already views you as an expert. The invitation itself is a tacit endorsement of your capabilities. Unless you tank, that endorsement will likely be received well by the attendees. Be sure to avoid the hard sell and provide ideas that are valuable to the audience. These types of events can be great opportunities to increase your email list or give out physical goodies to help build relationships.

This blog post is a portion of Attention and Action. The book walks you through the marketing process that Adelsberger Marketing follows with its clients. You can read this book for free as a blog on the Adelsberger Marketing website or purchase on Amazon.com.

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Content Generation

Content Generation

The most difficult part of content marketing we have found is dedicating the time and brainspace to actually creating the content. Some of this can be manufactured by others. But for the content to be great it needs to originate with Subject Matter Experts. When working with busy clients, we will normally ask them to give us an outline of what they want to cover and we can usually take it from there or conduct an interview to get the information on paper. It’s important to remember that most of this content is going to be evergreen, meaning that it will be valuable for a long time as opposed to seasonal advice.

One of the most common problems in communicating is the Burden of Knowledge. The Burden of Knowledge is a communication hazard that shows up when someone who is an expert in an area fails to realize that not everyone has the same knowledge. As a videographer, I may know that white balance and working in rooms with LED lights can be an issue, but I can forget that not everyone thinks that way. Those could be two tips to set forth in content to help people but I may miss it due to my burden of knowledge. This also works out in some of the terminology that we use. People who are not thinking about their Burden of Knowledge may tend to use industry jargon which could leave a casual observer or someone who is just learning about this field in the dark. When we work on our content, we want to make sure we remove traces of the Burden of Knowledge that our potential customers would be lacking.

One other key idea in content marketing is that hard sales are a “no go.” You should use this information in a general way to show a better way to do things and lean on that knowledge. Trust that your material will naturally lead the audience to call you. Hard sales can jade an audience and undermine the content you are making. 

1. Where do we get ideas for content marketing?

When working through ideas for content marketing, here are a few places to start: What are the ten most common questions that your sales people get asked? If the same questions come up repeatedly, this is an opportunity to make content around that subject. A second idea is to look at your customer personas and brainstorm what they care about. If you are an ice supplier and a specific customer persona cares about clear ice for display, you can generate content about how to make that kind of ice or the common issues in ice production. A brainstorming session to generate ideas for content is a great opportunity to get the whole team involved. Consider: What are things that make you or your business unique? What are things you do better or only have compared to others? What do your customers care about? What are things you would want to talk about at parties?

We would suggest a brainstorming activity (like a madlib) that combines the emotion, the type of content, and the mediums directed at each of your customer personas to help develop content they would find valuable.

2. Maximize Content Usefulness
You can transform one blogpost into a lot of pieces of content for social. From that one blog post, you could write a script for a video, pull out quotes to turn into graphic, use the blog as a start for a podcast, or even create an infographic. The great part about reusing this content is that you can bring others into it easily. If you as the subject matter expert create a thorough piece of content, turning it into a bunch of side pieces of content by a marketing team will be much easier than having them try to create the primary piece of content. We love to extract as much content as possible to maximize the value of the time invested into that content and to help reach as many people as possible. Gary Vaynerchuck, better known as Gary Vee, is the Owner of VaynerMedia and Founder of WineLibrary TV. He is one of the all time great Entrepreneurs of our era. His personal brand team are the sterling examples of this practice. Check him out online by looking for @GaryVee. 

This blog post is a portion of Attention and Action. The book walks you through the marketing process that Adelsberger Marketing follows with its clients. You can read this book for free as a blog on the Adelsberger Marketing website or purchase on Amazon.com.

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Introduction

Content Marketing and Positioning as an Expert (Driver)

One thing we encourage almost all of our customers to do is pursue content marketing and positioning as an expert. What is content marketing? Content Marketing is the practice of creating helpful material that educates or entertains potential and existing customers to help build a deeper relationship with them. Positioning yourself or your company as an expert is along the same lines, but in this instance, the whole goal is to show your knowledge to the audience. These two plays allow you over time to build a good base for inbound lead generation.

This blog post is a portion of Attention and Action. The book walks you through the marketing process that Adelsberger Marketing follows with its clients. You can read this book for free as a blog on the Adelsberger Marketing website or purchase on Amazon.com.

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Google My Business Account

Google My Business Account

This can be overlooked by a business new to the online world, but a Google My Business account is absolutely key to being found locally online. Google My Business is a free tool created by Google to give you control over what information shows up when someone searches for you online. Google shows what the Google My Business listing has on it, so it’s a key place to make sure things like hours and services are correct. This listing will have information whether you keep it updated or not, so it’s best to take the time to claim it and update it. Protip: keep a running spreadsheet that has all the places with your NAP information so that, if it was ever to change, you would be able to change all the places in an efficient manner. 

This blog post is a portion of Attention and Action. The book walks you through the marketing process that Adelsberger Marketing follows with its clients. You can read this book for free as a blog on the Adelsberger Marketing website or purchase on Amazon.com.

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Social Media Accounts

Social Media Accounts 

Establishing the social media accounts that will work best with your business and customers is worth time to do right. Start by examining your customer personas and see where they spend their time online. Also see where you and your team can invest time. Youtube might take a bit more time then you have available while instagram can be done fairly quickly. It’s better to not have a channel then have one and abandon it. So consider the investment in time before you launch a new channel.

This blog post is a portion of Attention and Action. The book walks you through the marketing process that Adelsberger Marketing follows with its clients. You can read this book for free as a blog on the Adelsberger Marketing website or purchase on Amazon.com.

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Lead Generation Tool

Lead Generation Tool 

A freebie to help educate your audience is a great way to build some trust with your audience. For example, we put together a resource called “Digital Marketing Checklist.” That document walks someone through the major areas of digital marketing and gives them a few points to start with to make sure they get off on the right foot. We believe it provides some value, without providing so much value that would make us not worth hiring. But it does start to establish a relationship with our potential customers. We usually require someone to submit an email address to receive our freebies. This leads to more emails for your email list, which can help you stay in touch with consumers on a regular basis for almost no cost. 

This blog post is a portion of Attention and Action. The book walks you through the marketing process that Adelsberger Marketing follows with its clients. You can read this book for free as a blog on the Adelsberger Marketing website or purchase on Amazon.com.

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Hero Video

Hero Video 

Video has become a staple of any business that has an online presence. A hero video is the one video you want people to watch about your brand or product. We call it a hero video because it might be the best representation of you to the consumer. A hero video will cover the uniqueness of your company, your value proposition, possibly a bit of history, and will look good doing all these things. Ideally these videos will be 2-3 minutes in length so that they are not an enormous investment of time for someone learning who you are. Host this on Vimeo to prevent customers getting dragged elsewhere by suggested videos.

This blog post is a portion of Attention and Action. The book walks you through the marketing process that Adelsberger Marketing follows with its clients. You can read this book for free as a blog on the Adelsberger Marketing website or purchase on Amazon.com.

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