How National Companies Can Get Friendly in Local Markets

How National Companies Can Get Friendly in Local Markets written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Megan Hannay
Podcast Transcript

I’ve long been a big fan of partnering with not for profits in your community. (I wrote about this in The Referral Engine.)

There are so many organizations that need and deserve our support and by partnering you further cement your business as a community asset.

When an organization is new to a market or is trying to establish a local presence from afar, knowing who to partner with can be difficult.

My guest for this week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is Megan Hannay, co-founder and CEO of ZipSprout. She and I discuss the unique approach national companies can take to infiltrate local markets through community organizations.

Hannay has experience in Silicon Valley, Hollywood and independent consulting. With more than five years of experience in social media strategy development, data diving, and customer listening, she’s developed an attention to customer needs.

At 22, she “won” a job at a social media agency when the client chose her campaign, and she’s been brainstorming and building ideas ever since.

Questions I ask Megan Hannay:

• How can local sponsorships be a homerun for businesses?
• Where does ZipSprout’s marketing tactic fit into the marketing mix?
• What’s the hardest thing about being the co-founder and CEO of a startup?

What you’ll learn if you give a listen:

• How national brands can connect with local markets
• Why both local organizations and national businesses benefit from partnering with one another
• How ZipSprout matches successful partnerships

Key takeaways from the episode and more about Megan Hannay:

• Learn more about ZipSprout.
• Follow on Twitter.
• Connect on LinkedIn.
• Email megan@zipsprout.com.

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

Are you an independent marketing consultant or an agency owner? If so, you may want to check out the Duct Tape Marketing Consultant Network. It is a growing group of independent marketing consultants and agencies that are partnering and collaborating using the Duct Tape Marketing tools, and really scaling their businesses. Check it out at ducttapemarketingconsultant.com.

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You Know Influencers: 5 Tips to Unlock Powerful Employee Advocacy

[Editor’s Note: I am pleased to introduce you to Will Peterson, another new contributor on TopRankBlog.com. Will is an Account Manager that services many of our B2B Enterprise clients. Welcome Will!]

Don’t look now, but you’re surrounded by influencers. You may not realize it, and they may not realize it themselves, but you and everyone you work with carry an immense amount of potential influence. Read on to discover how to uncover a powerful hidden force that can add significant value to everything from your company’s social media presence all the way down to its bottom line.

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Are you in a book club? Do you share recipes with friends? Are you an avid reader and contributor of motorcycle racing forums? Anytime you’re discussing your interests with someone else, be it online or in person, you are exerting your influence on that discussion. The same goes for your employees, team members, and coworkers. Without going too much into the weeds about how to exactly define an influencer, we can safely say that your co-workers, team members, and employees each have their own sphere of influence. A look at some recent research shows that 88% of employees are personally active on at least one social media site. That means your people have people, and they are talking to them, tweeting at them, and sharing with them. So how do you encourage all that potential social influence to work for your team?

Influence the Influencers

Your employees or fellow employees are also consumers, and consumers in this day and age know how to sniff out a salesy marketing pitch. That being said, consumers trust other consumers, and according to multiple studies on trust, we know employees are seen as more credible than executives. Employee advocacy is a powerful marketing tool and encouraging your employees to speak as influencers about your company is a wonderful way to increase brand engagement. Follow these steps to capitalize on that trust and help your employees tap into their influencer power.

#1. Teamwork Makes the Dream Work

Everyone wants to be part of a winning team. Remind your employees that their positive comments about your company on social media make life better for everyone. With an improved online profile, your company will have an easier time recruiting top talent, earning top clients, and keeping top customers. Once your team realizes that they are only helping themselves, they will be more motivated to share!

One benefit of employees sharing their high opinions of our company has been TopRank Marketing being named one of the Top 100 Places to Work in Minnesota two years running. This has helped tremendously with hiring great people!

#2. All Social is Good Social

Not everyone has social media accounts on every channel. I barely touched my twitter account until I joined the team at TopRank Marketing. Now I regularly post about clients, company mentions in the news, and other marketing-related topics there and on my LinkedIn page as well. I don’t do much on Facebook however, because I’d rather keep it more personal and less professional. Don’t force your employees to use one channel over the other. If they’d rather sing your praises on Google Plus than Pinterest, encourage them to do so!

#3. The Right Tool for the Right Job

My dad always says you can do anything if you have the right tool for the right job. Make your employees lives easier and introduce them to Buffer, Hootsuite, or some other social media management tool. These can be incredible time savers and will increase the likelihood of your influencers getting the word out there more regularly. In just a few minutes each week, they can appear to be full-time social media mavens.

#4. Prevent Writers’ Block Before It Strikes

Some employees may fret that they “just wouldn’t know what to say” about their company. Not to fear, the Weekly Social Messaging Email is here! Send one email per week with some content ideas for your team to share. This could be anything from recent mentions in the news, client updates, relevant news stories for your industry, or even personal victories for your team members. The point is to get them comfortable with the process and help them build their voice on social channels so their spheres of influence hear it more often.

#5. To the Victors Go the Spoils

Track engagement of your company’s social mentions and let the team know who the biggest sharers (aka influencers) have been for the past week. Using a tool like Hootsuite Amplify, LinkedIn Elevate, or Dynamic Signal can create ease of use and make tracking a snap. Make it a challenge they want to win! Offer an extra drink at the company happy hour or a piece of company swag for the top dog each week! This kind of gamification is a great way to encourage participation among employees.

Practice Makes Perfect

Now that you know the benefits of tapping into the marketing influencers around you at work, and some of the ways to encourage them to get active on social media, get out there and make it happen. Your employees will feel good about this easy way to contribute to the success of their company.

What else can you do to influence your influencers?

*Disclosure: LinkedIn is a TopRank Marketing client.

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The Importance of Pairing Analytics with Engagement

When was the last time you took a look at your analytics dashboard? I mean a truly in-depth look?

Sure, all those high-performing landing pages and conversion numbers are great — but there’s something your analytics isn’t showing you —

Engagement.

“Well, that’s not true”, you insist. “I can see how many users clicked on this link or bought that product and ultimately converted into paying customers — isn’t that a form of engagement?”

The problem with analytics is the more we know, the more we realize we don’t know — and “engagement” is one of those elusive quasi-metrics marketers keep chasing after, as if to hold it up as the ultimate measure of a site’s success.

We can tie it to different data-backed metrics, but they don’t really give us the full picture. They tell us that the customer clicked on this, or bought that, but they don’t tell us anything about the customer experience that we’re all so keen to improve upon.

Avinash Kaushik, Digital Marketing Evangelist at Google, explains it this way:

“The reason engagement has not caught on like wild fire (except in white papers and analyst reports and pundit posts) is that it is a “heart” metric we are trying to measure with “head” data, and engagement is such a[n] utterly unique feeling for each website that it will almost always have a unique definition for each and every website.”

Analytics are Meaningless, Unless…

Unless you tie them to something that matters. You can think of analytics like the “Check Engine” light on your car. It tells you that something is wrong, but it’s up to you to fix the problem. Analytics give you raw numbers for different touch-points and informs you, but they won’t adjust for you if, for example, you see a drop off in your conversion funnel. That’s all on you.

No pressure, right?

Of course, by the same token, you can’t have engagement without the data to back it up. Otherwise you’ll never know which channel delivers the best ROI or which landing page is converting the highest. Analytics and engagement are not standalone silos that are independent of each other. They need to be able to mesh together in a way that not only gives you workable data, but makes that data actionable.

How to Correctly Measure Engagement

So if analytics give you the raw numbers, how do you actually measure engagement? As every site has a different purpose and different end goal, there is no “one size fits all” blanket metric that engagement can substitute for.

You can’t tie it to click-throughs because they don’t tell you what happened after the click. And you can’t pin engagement on conversions either because you’ll be continually moving the goalposts as to what a conversion actually is as the customer progresses through your funnel.

As Kaushik advises, you need to boil down “engagement” into what it truly is — by asking why your website exists. At it’s core, your website has a unique purpose, and properly defining that purpose and then defining which metrics lend themselves to it are going to make your marketing life a whole lot easier (and more measurable!)

You can look at key analytics data to help you get a better, data-backed picture of your customer engagement, using things like customer retention, number of unique visits and how recent they are, as well as regular customer surveys and market research. But again, you’re trying to apply quantitative data to a very qualitative metric, so you’ll still be getting pieces of the puzzle rather than seeing the full picture.

Fortunately, you can have both your analytics and your engagement metrics working together to provide you with the kinds of findings you need to optimize your business growth even further.

Kissmetrics: The Best of Both Worlds

There are three key parts to Kissmetrics that helps marketing and product teams engage and grow their customer base.

1. Analyze: This contains reporting tools like Funnel, Cohort, A/B testing, and the soon-to-be-released Activity report. Use these tools to track and analyze user behavior.
2. Populations: Keep track of your user base by viewing how many users are in a “Population“. Quickly and easily know if signups are increasing, if more users are engaged than 90 days ago, and much more. Check out this video to learn more:

3. Campaigns: Where the rubber meets the road. After tracking behavior in Analyze and Populations, send behavior-based messages to users to nudge them towards conversion.

We call our platform Customer Engagement Automation, or CEA if you’re into acronyms.

With CEA you’ll be able to measure, track and act upon customer-based behaviors. See what a customer or user is doing with our reporting tools, and provide a “nudge” with behavior-based messaging.

There’s no need to export your data into a third party tool to analyze it — the platform handles all of that for you. You get the data you need in order to make confident marketing decisions, along with the measurable customer engagement tools that move your business forward — all in one streamlined, highly-efficient package.

What’s more, you don’t even need any third party integrations to make Campaigns and our other suite of tools work for you. But Kissmetrics does play nice with others, by integrating with all your favorite tools including Woocommerce, Salesforce, Shopify, Optimizely, and more.

So stop digging through your analytics trying to find those elusive nuggets of “customer engagement” and start focusing on the metrics that matter. Because your data lives within the Kissmetrics platform, you’ll discover all kinds of powerful insights that analytics alone can’t provide. And when analytics and engagement are both working together like a finely oiled machine, there’s nothing stopping you from taking your business to the next level — full speed ahead.

Have you used Kissmetrics in your own business? We’d love to hear about your experience with the platform. Which engagement metrics have you found best reflect your business goals and objectives? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!

About the Authors: Sherice Jacob helps businesses improve website design and increase conversions with user-focused design, compelling copywriting and smart analytics. Learn more at iElectrify and get your free conversion checklist and web copy tune-up.

Zach Bulygo (Twitter) is the Blog Manager for Kissmetrics.

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The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast All-Star Team

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast All-Star Team written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Summer is a great time to kick back, relax, and listen to a podcast (OK, even if you don’t end up reading this post until December, it’s always a good time to listen to one). Whether you’ve been listening to the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast for awhile, or haven’t gotten started and want to binge on a new podcast, we’ve put a list together of our top 10 episodes of all time. (Check out the full line-up of shows here)

Enjoy!

Simon Sinek – Why Leaders Eat Last

Simon Sinek is the author of Start With Why and the most recent Leaders Eat Last.

Biggest takeaway: The message and perhaps paradox of leadership is that in the end, it is simply the act of helping others get what they want.

 

Click here to listen to the episode.

Ann Handley – How to Create Ridiculously Good Content

Ann Handley is the co-founder of early web news provider Clickz and currently, acts as Chief Content Officer at MarketingProfs. Ann’s latest book is Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content.

Biggest takeaway: Ann makes the case for the fact that writing is inevitable to success in business and that in some form or another, we can all stand to get better at this most basic form of communication.

Click here to listen to the episode.

Dr. Robert Cialdani – The Science of Pre-Suasion

Dr. Robert Cialdini is the author of the legendary NY Times Bestseller book, Influence (which sold over 3 million copies and has been published in over 30 languages.) He is also the founder of Influence at Work and author to a new book called Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade.

Biggest takeaway: The big idea of this new work, Pre-Suasion, is that there’s a step that must happen before you deliver your key message and that it’s the state the listener is in when they hear your key message that determines how receptive they will be to it. Without this set-up, you may be less likely to persuade.

Click here to listen to the episode.

Carson Tate – Work Simply

Carson Tate is the author aof Work Simply: Embracing the Power of Your Personal Productivity Style and founder of a productivity consulting practice Working Simply.

Biggest takeaway: Everyone has their own personal productivity style, and because of that, one person’s system won’t necessarily work for everyone. So, if you’ve tried to use GTD or Evernote and couldn’t wrap your brain around why others swear by them when you just can’t get the knack of them, turns out they just don’t fit your style.

Click here to listen to the episode.

Michael Hyatt – Turning a Platform Into an Asset

Michael Hyatt is the Chairman and former CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers and he writes the extremely popular blog at michaelhyatt.com.

Biggest takeaway: Hyatt embraced blogging very early on as a way to communicate with his organization and has turned this notion into one of the most followed blogs online. Even though Hyatt was considered a successful business person at the time, he effectively built a platform that extended his reach far beyond his role as CEO, aided the reach of his organization, and opened the door to the creation of his own books and products.

Click here to listen to the episode.

Jonah Berger – The Invisible Influences that Surround Us

Jonah Berger is a marketing professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and bestselling author. His newest book, Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces that Shape Behavior, explores the subtle, secret influences that affect the decisions we make—from what we buy, to the careers we choose, to what we eat.

Biggest takeaway: Most of us believe we are in charge of the decisions we make throughout each day. To some extent we certainly are, but many of the decisions we make – what to wear, what to eat, what to buy, what to say – are driven by forces at the subconscious level.

Click here to listen to the episode.

Sally Hogshead – Do you Fascinate?

Sally Hogshead is the author of Fascinate: Your 7 Triggers of Persuasion and Captivation. The book represents three years of research and explores the 7 universal triggers of fascination: power, lust, mystique, prestige, alarm, vice, and trust.

Biggest takeaway: We all have some amount of the seven potential fascination triggers. Each trigger leads to a different style of communication and a different type of relationship. The more accurately you identify your personality triggers, and the more intelligently you hone them, the more influential your message becomes.

Click here to listen to the episode.

Mitch Joel – Reboot Your Business and Your Life

Mitch Joel is the CEO of Twist Image and author of Ctrl Alt Delete: Reboot Your Business. Reboot Your Life. Your Future Depends on It who, in dramatic fashion, describes this state of denial that many business owners and marketers are living in as purgatory.

Biggest takeaway: The change we are undergoing right now will dwarf what we’ve seen over the past five years. Every bit of data and information we share and consume is headed towards a single source, or, a single pipe. We are moving beyond customer service and marketing messages to an era where businesses must be built to interface directly with the customer at every level.

Click here to listen to the episode.

Bernadette Jiwa – Nobody Talks About Boring Business

Bernadette Jiwa is the author of Make Your Idea Matter: Stand out with a better story.

Biggest takeaway: There are two parts to beating the boring equation – first you need a value proposition that allows you to both stand out and deliver something that no one else is. And then you need a story to carry your value proposition.

Click here to listen to the episode.

Chip Heath – Made to Stick Podcast

Chip Heath is the co-author, with his brother Dan, of the mega-hit, Made to Stick.  Chip and Dan also write a terribly smart column for Fast Company.

Biggest takeaway: There are certain characteristics that all memorable messages have in common. By changing the way you present an idea, you can drastically improve how much it sticks in people’s mind.

Click here to listen to the episode.

Is your favorite episode on the list? If not, we’d love to hear which one you enjoyed listening to the most!

For our podcast audience, we can’t thank you enough for your support over the years! If you like the show, click on over and subscribe and if you love the show give us a review on iTunes, please!

For a downloadable PDF of the list above, click here.

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The Key to Success? Taking Care of Your Community

The Key to Success? Taking Care of Your Community written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Brian Clark
Podcast Transcript

Community building is a big deal – so are a lot of things, but there’s no question that building and taking care of a large community of folks that trust you is a great way to build a business.

My guest for this week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is Brian Clark, CEO of Rainmaker Digital, founder of Copyblogger, host of Unemployable, and curator of Further. He and I discuss a whole host of things including how to build a business, how to build a brand, and how to take care of a community

In January of 2006, Clark started a one-man blog, Copyblogger, which quickly evolved into an influential digital trade magazine for the online industry. Both the Guardian and Advertising Age have recognized Copyblogger as one of the most powerful and influential blogs in the world.

Copyblogger never took venture capital and made it to 8 figures in annual revenue without advertising. It’s the Copyblogger audience that has been the catalyst for the multimillion-dollar tools and training company that Clark heads today. It’s this success that’s made him one of the recognized pioneers of the $44 billion content marketing industry.

Questions I ask Brian Clark:

• What’s new at Copyblogger and Rainmaker that our listeners should be aware of?
• What will be the role of AI play with marketing in the future?
• What advice would you give somebody who wants to start a business online?

What you’ll learn if you give a listen:

• Why just listening to what your audience wants can take you far in business
• Why it’s critical to document your strategy when starting a business online
• What Clark is most excited about when it comes to his business and marketing today

Key takeaways from the episode and more about Brian Clark:

• Learn more about Copyblogger.
• Learn more about Rainmaker Digital.
• Listen to Unemployable episodes.
• Learn more about Further.
• Follow on Twitter.
• Connect on LinkedIn.
• Email brian@copyblogger.com.

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

Are you an independent marketing consultant or an agency owner? If so, you may want to check out the Duct Tape Marketing Consultant Network. It is a growing group of independent marketing consultants and agencies that are partnering and collaborating using the Duct Tape Marketing tools, and really scaling their businesses. Check it out at ducttapemarketingconsultant.com.

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