3 Signs You’re Meant To Change The World

I never thought I was going to change the world. Like many of you, I grew up in a small town with typical parents and an ordinary childhood.

If you were to tell me I was going to build a multi-million dollar company, feed thousands of children, rescue girls from sex trafficking, or dig wells for villages in Africa, everyone (including me) would have laughed.

I never expected to be on the covers of magazines, appear on national T.V., or keynote to thousands of employees at companies like Facebook, Adobe, or Panasonic. But that’s often how life works. The ordinary become the extraordinary. The secret is knowing how to see the signs, how to discover what you were designed for, and how to shift from desire, to doing.

So on that note, I’m going to share with you 3 signs you’re meant to change the world.

1. REMEMBER WHO WERE ARE BEFORE THE WORLD TOLD YOU WHO YOU SHOULD BE

I was born and raised in Rancho Cucamonga California. I was a small boy who loved baseball and bonfires. A cub scout for adventure and a heart for helping those around me. But something changed as I grew older… for some reason, I believed I had to change my identity to find my calling. As if who I currently am was incapable or unworthy.

I journeyed down this path as a social chameleon for years. Becoming all things to all people. I would change my clothes, conversations, habits and hobbies all in hopes to impress those around me.

But I learned this: Life is the most difficult exam of all. Many people fail because they try to copy others not realizing everyone is answering different questions.

It was this moment I realized becoming who I once was, was better than becoming someone else.

I realized the real me, the little boy from my past was not just capable, but qualified to change the world. I turned to what I knew was true of my heart and my hands. I loved to build and to elevate others. I loved charity, children, and big change. But I needed my passion to become a profession.

It was this adjustment that cured the brokenness of my pursuit and healed the heart behind it. It was the beginning of the real Dale, the birth of wisdom, and the start of what I was meant to do.

The lesson is this: You are worthy how you are. Your uniqueness is actually vital to your life’s mission. If you change you, you might miss your calling. Nobody was intended to become someone else in order to find their purpose. Quit the false you and step into the adventure you were made for.

2. DON’T PRAY FOR AN EASY LIFE; PRAY FOR THE STRENGTH TO ENDURE A DIFFICULT ONE

As an entrepreneur, whether I was building Sevenly, StartupCamp or even my Rock Climbing Gym, I was confronted with the weight of grueling responsibility. To bear the stresses, emotions, and fears of the organization. To know the bad news, the hard news, and the reality while having an unshakable vision for fulfilling our mission.

On multiple occasions, I remember walking outside of my home around 2am to sit in the grass and weep. The pressure on certain days was just too heavy. Then in the midst of reading the biography of Theodore Roosevelt, I came across this statement:

“Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty… I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life. I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.”

Changing the world is not for the faint of heart. It’s for people crazy enough to step into the pain. They carry a courage that makes people question their sanity and a focus that leads others to follow them.

The lesson is this: Turn toward the pain, the fear, and the difficulties. The road for world change is riddled with bandits, potholes, speed-bumps, and accidents but the destination is even greater than one can imagine. To operate in sync with your dreams and to stand at the end of your existence with the confidence your life left a dent in time.

3. DOUBT IS MORE DANGEROUS THAN UNCERTAINTY

Uncertainty is a permanent part of the World Changer’s landscape. It never goes away. Where there is no uncertainty, there is no longer the need for leadership. The greater the uncertainty, the greater the need for leadership.

Your capacity as a world changer will be determined by how well you learn to deal with uncertainty. But remember, it’s not our responsibility to remove the uncertainty. It’s our responsibility to bring clarity into the midst of it.

As leaders we can afford to be uncertain, but we cannot afford to be unclear.

People will follow you in spite of a few bad decisions. People will not follow you if you are unclear in your instruction. The individual who can communicate the clearest vision, will often be perceived as the leader.

It comes down to this: Clarity is perceived as leadership. Clarity is required for world change. 

The lesson is this: Uncertainty exposes a lack of knowledge. Pretending exposes a lack of character. Changing the world doesn’t require you to have perfect clarity, but it does require you to express your uncertainty with confidence. To convince those who are following you that clarity is coming and debilitating fear is not part of your equation.

At the center of today’s lesson remains this truth: You can’t change the world if you can’t change yourself.

If a fire burns in your chest to solve an issue, to influence a movement, to rework the norm, or to even alter the very mindset of the known; you must remember change begins with you.

As world changers we can afford to be broken, but we cannot afford to be immature. People will follow your vision in spite of a few bad decisions. People will not follow you if you are unaware of your weaknesses. As a leader, you must develop the elusive skill of leading confidently and purposefully growing or you will forever stand still.

READY TO TAKE THE NEXT STEP?

Do you want to become a captivating leader? Maybe you’re a new entrepreneur or dreamer. Or maybe you own a small business already. If you’re looking for a practical guide with timeless principles that never fade, principles that push for a healthy type of success, one with integrity, honor, and respect, consider my program below.

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What are your thoughts? Was this information useful on your journey to unearth your purpose? Let me know in the comments below.

The post 3 Signs You’re Meant To Change The World appeared first on StartupCamp.

This Is Why Your New Singing Refrigerator Should Be Free

Yes, you read that right. Free. Because the truth is, IOT products have many other potential earnings opportunities.

5 Ways to Make Your Blog Post Interactive on the Cheap

Static marketing content is as outdated as print-only newspapers. Just as day-old newspapers become litter in the streets, static digital content is useless to the average reader. With such an inundation of static marketing content, one piece hardly stands out from others, meaning brands blend and ideas fade.

Readers crave the dynamic nature of interactive digital content. An ion Interactive study measured the success and general feeling from marketers regarding interactive content. In terms of effectiveness, 93% of marketers say interactive media is great at educating buyers; 88% say it’s effective at differentiating brands, whereas static was found to be only 55% effective. Not convinced yet? Did you know that interactive content also drives 2X more conversions than static content?

Despite these numbers, many marketers shy away from interactive content. It might be because it has a reputation for being expensive and labor-intensive. But that is an unfair reputation. Creating interactive elements is, in fact, easy, fast and even free.

These five tools allow you to start immediately interacting with customers, which draws them in, converts at higher rates and gives feedback to improve your business.

1) PlayBuzz

The original PlayBuzz site is for the average Internet user interested in which Hogwarts house she belongs to or wants to test her knowledge about 1990s TV shows, but PlayBuzz’s business site is tailored to empowering companies to generate an interactive feature, embed it in their marketing content and watch user engagement rise and their network grow.

With PlayBuzz you can create free countdowns, polls, personality quizzes, flip cards, trivia, rankable lists, general lists, gallery quizzes and a swipe voting feature made popular by dating apps. Each element has an appealing quality that catches readers’ attention and can communicate information quickly in a visual manner. It also keeps visitors on your page longer and is designed for social sharing.

When choosing from so many options, remember highly interactive features like quizzes and swiping are good for social platforms and visually driven posts, while flip cards and polls are good for text-heavy content.

When you are designing these embeddable features, keep in mind your company’s brand and voice, this will ensure consistency while adding that added bonus customers appreciate. The best way to track the success of PlayBuzz content is to monitor its social performance in shares, engagement and views.

PlayBuzz is so user-friendly, you will forget you are marketing while playing with the design tools and fun features. Check out these flip cards we made with it.

2) SlideShare

Slide presentations are something nearly every professional has seen or used, whether it’s from business trainings, college lectures or group projects. Putting information in a condensed, easily-digestible format is one of the most popular marketing, sales and proposal tactics because of its familiarity and logic.

SlideShare can be embedded into any blog post and breaks down a topic for readers in a much more visual and attractive manner than static paragraphs of text. Try it with an existing post that needs more visits but provides valuable content.

Take text from the blog, simplify it for each slide, keeping word count at a minimum, include a CTA on the last slide, and embed the feature somewhere in the post. If you put the slides near the top, you can include a friendly disclaimer such as, “Don’t have time to read the rest? We summed it up for you here.”

Readers appreciate options for taking in information and really appreciate when you understand their limits. SlideShare transforms already written content into powerful snippets of data.

Don’t think of SlideShare as a place to put all the information in bullet points; think of it as a place to present an idea in a visual and condensed manner. It might be a good challenge to fit a hefty amount of information into a slide show. This exercise will help you write succinctly and think about content in an out-of-the-box way.

Give the most important points priority instead of cramming an entire blog post into a slide show. Graphs, statistics and quick thoughts are especially effective on SlideShare.

3) Make a GIF

Regardless of how you pronounce it (“JIF” or “GIF”), these little graphics excel at entertaining and inserting some fun into your digital content. It shows you have a sense of humor and don’t take yourself too seriously. That said, make sure to use GIFs sparingly and only for appropriate topics.

Many websites have tools for creating your own animated GIF or have a domain of popular ones for every emotion and situation. This imagery also warrants the use of BuzzFeed-worthy titles and descriptions to accompany your chosen GIFs.

This type of interactive content performs excellently on social platforms because of the flashy element and viral qualities. These qualities lend themselves well to tracking social success easily by monitoring shares, likes and engagement.

When choosing or creating a GIF, make sure it is a reference your audience will understand. You wouldn’t want to use a GIF from a popular TV show if it’s not likely your customers are familiar with it. However, if pop culture references are common in your content, feel free to use GIFs as freely as you'd like. 

Websites such as GIPHY make the art of finding the right GIF quick and entertaining, while at the same time providing you with everythin you need to share with your audience. Take the GIF below - I typed "content marketing' into the search box, found this gem from Mad Men, and simply copied the embed code into the blog. Easy!

via GIPHY

4) Qzzr

If the products or services you are marketing lend well to quizzing your prospects, Qzzr is the right tool for engaging them further. This free quiz-making platform allows you to create a quiz in minutes, embed it into any post and track the results. It also comes with a WordPress plugin for easy integration.

Customers love to test their knowledge, if only to prove how much they know. They also love to reveal pieces of their personality and discover new sides of themselves. Giving your customers these opportunities through quizzes is the perfect gateway for interaction and connection.

Keep quizzes as short as possible so as not to fatigue your readers. Make sure the answers are pointed and don’t allow quiz takers to avoid questions. There is nothing worse than a vague answer and worthless results. And there is nothing better than seeing interactions with customers and the fruitful rewards of getting specific.

You might use a quiz if you are trying to target specific products or services to your customers as they begin their buying journey. The fashion-delivery company Stitch Fix requires all first-time users to take a fashion quiz to determine which products will please them most.

You can emulate this model or use a quiz for testing your customer’s knowledge about your industry, current events or other relevant topics. Readers especially love quizzes that tell them which [car, building, time period, scientist, politician, 1980s pop star, etc. they are most like.

The great thing about Qzzr is the ability to integrate with CRM systems. This feature allows you to track the success of each quiz, pull data from the results and target customers more accurately and personally.

5) Podcasts

Podcasts aren’t just for Serial fans or listeners of public radio. The audio format is a gold mine for the busy professional. It gives multi-taskers a chance to consume your content on their terms. There might not be enough time in the day to read all the content circulating within certain industries or interact with specific companies.

But if marketers give professionals a way to gain all the benefits of static content during their daily commute without burying their faces in a screen, they might see a rise in interest and customer conversation. It’s also great for audio learners and is a much more casual and open environment for bringing guests and commentators to foster a fruitful discussion.

Before creating a podcast, study up. Listen to all different kinds of podcasts to figure out what works. It’s also good to pay attention to which length is appropriate. If you are getting more downloads and listens for shorter episodes, your customers might want quick conversation. But if you see a demand for longer form podcasts, your customers probably appreciate deep dives into certain topics.

Bring in guests for fresh perspective. Try implementing different segments to break up the monotony of a single episode. But make sure to get into the groove of podcasting before you give up or count your early success.

As you develop your podcast and find what works, you will find you can adjust and evolve episode to episode based on listener feedback or performance statistics. The key is keeping your eyes and ears open. Podcasting is just as much about listening as it is about talking.

Wrapping it up

Interactive content rules the marketing landscape for now and the foreseeable future. There’s no denying customers want more than some block text on a page. They want to dive in, learn more, give feedback and get to know the company. Just ensure you are balancing the message within the format and you will see immediate success. Trying any of these methods should result in an increase of engagement and possibly even leads without the headache of a complicated tool and it won’t cost you a cent.

12 Critical Building Blocks to a Successful Digital Marketing Campaign

Think back to the last digital marketing campaign that blew you off your feet. Maybe it was one that made you stop and think. Maybe it was one that made you laugh so hard you cried. Maybe it was one that made you realize you needed something you never even knew existed. No matter what it made you do or feel, the fact that you remembered it means that it was at least somewhat successful.

So how was that company able to connect with you so successfully? It certainly wasn’t just blind luck, you’re too sharp for that!

While I don’t know what the marketers responsible for your favorite digital campaign actually did, I can say with almost 100% certainty that they spent a large amount of time researching their market, analyzing different pieces of data and building out detailed strategies that helped them blow you away through flawless execution.

The fact of the matter is that running a successful digital marketing campaign takes a lot of time and energy, not only during its implementation but also during the build up to go-live. If you’re looking to capture the attention of your target market like your favorite campaign did to you but don’t know where to start or need to hit the refresh button on an existing digital campaign, these 12 pieces of content and strategy have been proven to help establish a solid foundation and direction for inbound marketing to move forward successfully with.

1) Personas

Everyone knows that you should build out detailed personas before starting a campaign so I won’t waste much time here. If you don’t know your target market and the key players within it intimately, you’re not going to have a good time! Work with your sales team, senior marketing members and anyone else with experience working with your industry’s customers (customer service reps, store managers, etc.) to build out a detailed profile around their background, job roles, goals and challenges so that you can better create content that will connect with them.

Tips:

• Interview experts within your company. This will help you build a general idea of who you are targeting and how your product/service connects with them.


• Reach out to current customers for short, 30 minute interviews. Have a list of questions worked out beforehand and spend more time talking about them and their job/company vs. your product/service. This is where you will be able to build out a more well-rounded profile of a qualified persona and how your company can successfully win business.


• Reach out to prospects that your sales team recently lost (if possible). Run them through the same interview as above but try to focus a bit more of your time at the end of the interview collecting information on why they decided against your company. This will help you build out a better understanding of major objections your sales team faces.

Takeaways:

The more time you spend on this single aspect of your campaign buildout, the more likely you are to succeed. While a number of the other items on this list might lend themselves to less prep time and energy to create, personas require more and can make or break your overall campaign.

2) Competitive Analysis

To paraphrase Sun Tzu, “Know yourself and your enemy and you shall win 1,000 battles.” In a time where nearly every prospect compares multiple options online before making a purchasing decision, you can’t afford to ignore what your competition is doing with their digital efforts.

By knowing the ins and outs of all public areas of a competition’s marketing from social media to blogging to offer creation and more, you can better understand who they are targeting with their marketing, what content they are focusing on and where they have found the most success. Once you know this, you can better understand how you can and should position yourself on these different mediums to stay one step ahead of everyone else.

Tips:

• Find a solid list (about 5-7) of both direct and indirect competitors to analyze.


• For an overall look at your competition’s digital marketing efforts, use HubSpot’s Marketing Grader to see where everyone stands.


• Use the Alexa Toolbar to find yours and your competitors’ traffic rankings.


• Search your target keywords and note who comes up on the first page or above you in the results.


• List out what social media sites your competitors are on (they should promote which platforms they are on through their site on either their header, footer or contact page).


• Note how many followers your competitors have on each platform


• Note what content your competitors are sharing and how. Do they promote a lot of their own stuff or industry notes? What tone do take? How much engagement do they get from their followers?


• Search each of your competitors’ sites for a blog. If they have one look at how often they blog, what they are blogging about, and what kind of engagement they are receiving.


• Search each of your competitors’ sites for a resources page promoting any type of offer and try to download them (I know, it sounds sleazy, but get over it. They’re doing the same to you) to see whwat kinds content they produce, what are they doing well and what are they missing.

Takeaways:

The more you know about your competitors, what they’re doing and what they’re finding success with, the more information you will have to create a more advanced and successful campaign of your own.

3) Voice & Messaging

Understanding who your personas and competitors are is one thing. Understanding how to properly connect with those personas and differentiate yourself from your competition in a succinct manner is another. While your sales team may already know how to approach prospective customers in a way that connects to their goals and challenges while differentiating themselves from their competition, do you as a marketer know how to do the same with your content?

Taking the time to go through different exercises to help you verbalize and document how you can position your content to better connect with your personas and differentiate yourself from competitors will help you immensely when it comes to creating content to effectively convert qualified traffic into leads for your sales team.

Tips:

For each of your main personas, answer the following questions to fill in this very telling (slightly run-on) sentence: “We will target (Blank), specifically (Blank), who (blank). We (Blank) that (Blank) unlike (Blank).

• What type of companies (or consumers for B2C) are you targeting?


• Who is the decision maker within that group that you will focus your marketing efforts on?


• What are the major needs and challenges that this persona faces that your company sees as an opportunity to help with?


• How is your company’s solution categorized by this persona? If they had to describe your solution, how would they do it?


• What are the main benefits that this persona gets from your solution?


• How does your solution differentiate positively from your direct competitors? Indirect competitors?

Takeaways:

You almost certainly already know in your mind what your company’s voice and messaging are but having an idea and fully working it out on paper are two very different things. Spend the necessary time to perform a brain dump before organizing it with help from the sentence in the tips above and you will walk away with strong phrases that both you and your sales team can use moving forward.

4) Target Keywords

Successful inbound marketing and content creation campaigns require targeted search engine optimization strategies. Do you know what keywords your personas are using to search for your solution? Do you know which ones you have an opportunity to start ranking for? Having a detailed and focused list of relevant, attainable target keywords for you to optimize your content for is the best way to ensure that you are as effective and efficient as possible when it comes to both SEO and content creation.

Tips:

• Before you start listing off dozens of keywords on a page, narrow your initial list down to about 3 to 5 keyword that your client base would probably be searching. Put yourself in their shoes and try and think about what they would look for.


• Use either Google Adwords or HubSpot’s Keyword Tool for the actual research. Use the keywords you selected above to get related keyword suggestions, average monthly searches, and competition of a keyword.  Make sure you track these keywords and numbers in a spreadsheet.


• Consider how many searches a keyword gets, and what the search results for a keyword look like. In the end, it is best practice to choose about 3-5 target keywords.

Takeaways:

Progress in improved page rankings takes a detailed and realistic strategy regarding the keywords you choose to target with your website and blog content. The more research time you spend uncovering the most relevant and attainable keywords, the more quickly you will be able to improve your search engine rankings and traffic.

5) Optimized Meta Data

Before you start taking your newly selected target keywords for a spin with blog articles and site page content, you should focus first on optimizing your meta data. Do you know what your page titles should include for both search engines and site visitors? What about your meta description? Have you considered your alt text and page URL’s? Knowing what on and off-page optimization areas to focus on when implementing new keywords is extremely important when it comes to optimizing your website for search engines.

Tips:

• Use Screaming Frog to compile a list of pages. Once this list is compiled, make sure to keep track of the links, Meta Titles, and Meta Descriptions.


• Meta Titles are meant to be an accurate description of a page’s content. It is a critical component since it creates value for the search results pages. The optimal page title length is about 50 to 60 characters, but stay around 55 characters to be safe. 


• Meta Descriptions give a concise explanation (roughly 155 characters) of the contents of a webpage. It is most commonly used to give the user a preview snippet for a given page. Although they do not affect search engine rankings, they are extremely important to user clicks to the website.

Takeaways:

Creating a document that tracks your keywords and meta data decisions will allow you to ensure you are checking off all of the “SEO boxes” while making your life easy when it comes to tracking any and all keyword changes that may occur during your campaign. You might not be an SEO expert performing high level optimization techniques, but you will be able to at least cover some of your basic bases here.

6) Funnel Analysis & Offer Strategy

Inbound marketing helps generate leads through the promotion of pieces of free premium content. We all know that but what do you do when you already have a library of resources but are unsure who they are for and where they best fit in the buyer’s journey? You perform a funnel analysis of course!

Understanding what content you currently have live on your site, what assets you can potentially repurpose and convert into premium content and how you can best position them to convert, educate and nurture the right leads will then give you a much better idea of what content you will need to create moving forward in your campaign.

Tips:

• List out every piece of content that you currently have and connect specific offers to both personas and lifecycle stages.


• Create and prioritize a list of offers and pieces of premium content that you will need to either rework, repurpose or create in order to start filling any gaps found in the persona-buyer’s journey table.

Takeaways:

It can be very easy to want to immediately jump into creating a new ebook when starting an inbound marketing campaign or refocusing one already in progress but it’s not always the right option. Documenting and sorting the different assets that you currently have (either live on your site or ready to repurpose) will give you a much more strategic view of what needs to be created and when so that when it is time to create that new ebook, you’ll know who it should be for, how it should be laid out and what you should focus its content on.

7) Lead Management Strategy

While the generation of leads is a key milestone for inbound marketing, it’s not the end goal. Customer creation is. So how do you go from leads to customers? You manage them through various areas of your website and marketing automation to help move them through the buyer’s journey. Mapping out and detailing all of the different elements and tools at your disposal before you begin managing and nurturing leads is crucial when it comes to the overall success of a campaign.

Tips:

• Consider different ways in which you can help leads move through the buyer’s journey through automation


• Are you consolidating the number of forms you’re using in your campaign to reduce clutter and more easily connect form submissions with areas of the buyer’s journey?


• Do your forms ask questions that your sales team needs to know in order to qualify leads when they first fill out a form?


• Are you utilizing progressive profiling to collect added information from contact reconverting on your website?


• Are you using thank you pages over inline messages?


• Are you trying to push for reconversions on offers further down the funnel?


• Are you pushing for the next stage in the funnel (awareness to consideration)?


• Use Smart CTA’s to provide offers are the most relevant to this persona and where they likely are in the buyer’s journey


• Use Inline Personalization to personalize your site’s written content to better connect with the lead?


• Can you use smart content to make sure they find what they’re looking for on that page so that you can more quickly move them through the buyer’s journey?


• Do you know what your different personas need/want to see next in the different stages of the buyer’s journey? Can you create persona and lifecycle-specific workflows that will help automate the nurturing process?

Takeaways:

Lead management is much more than just nurturing workflows. The embarrassment of riches when it comes to the marketing automation tools at your disposal means that you can create a highly complex automated system that can better convert and nurture your database of leads in different ways at different times. The more time you spend mapping out and documenting how you can continue to push leads further through the buyer’s journey faster, the better off you’ll be once you turn the automation on.

8) Sales Handoff Strategy

Leads are great. Qualified leads are even better but sales ready leads? Those are the best. Inbound marketing helps generate these types of leads so that your company spends less time in the selling process but that doesn’t mean it can close the deal on its own. Your marketing needs sales just as much as your sales team needs your marketing.

Without sales, you as a marketer would have a whole list of sales ready leads and no experience or understanding of how to close the deal. Without your leads, your sales team would instead be spending too much time with unqualified leads through cold calling and prospecting. Still, as knowledgeable and experienced as sales may be, contacting and initiating a sale with a warm or hot inbound lead is different than contacting a cold lead.

If you have a sales team who are bought in on getting the most out of the leads your inbound marketing generates, mapping out the process of when, how and to who you will hand off leads as well as how they should be contacted will help you set the foundation for that oh so elusive “closed loop reporting” that your boss has been bugging you about for ages.

Tips:

• Who from marketing will be responsible for tracking and qualifying leads generated from inbound marketing efforts? Who from sales will be responsible for reviewing the leads initially handed off before contacting them?


• How will the leads be generated (what technology will marketing use)? How will the sales opportunities be tracked (what CRM/lead tracking technology will sales use)?


• Does every person connected to this process fully understand why it is important? 


• Understand when sales wants to see leads come to them. Establish a clear set of instructions that will help marketing qualify leads based on these criteria so they can better handoff only qualified leads tosSales.


• Outline the handoff, contact and tracking processes


• Does sales have access to your marketing analytics and insights for the leads handed off? Do they know how to use the tool?


• Does sales know the “do’s and don’ts” of contacting inbound leads?


• How will both marketing and sales track the quality and progress of the prospects generated by inbound marketing?

Takeaways:

While inbound marketing is an incredibly powerful and productive form of lead generation if done properly, every connection between a company’s stakeholders needs to be thoroughly mapped out and signed off on.

Marketing needs to understand what sales is looking for, sales needs to understand how to use the information provided by marketing to the fullest, and key decision makers need to be able to see tangible proof that both sales and marketing are proving ROI through proper tracking and reporting. Until you cover these bases, you’ll never be able to fully defend inbound marketing from internal skeptics that might emerge later on in a campaign.

9) Email Strategy

Just because you’ve created offers that will convert visitors into leads and have built out nurturing workflows that will automate a portion of the education process for personas doesn’t mean that every lead you get will be qualified and ready to talk to sales by the time the workflow ends.

Different leads require different elements of marketing. Some may reach out to your company right when they’re ready to buy while others may take more time to completely understand and compare options, including you. For those leads that may fall in or closer to the latter, there is email marketing. Who will you target with your emails? What content will you share with them? How will you present that content? How often will you send it out? These are all great questions to know the answers to when it comes to building out a successful email marketing strategy.

Tips:

• Do you have a current database of contacts? Does that database meet CAN-SPAM requirements?


• Analyze the data to see what has shown success in the past so that you can work to replicate it in the future with your new strategy.


• Know who you will be emailing so you can tailor your content and voice.


• Know what you will want to generally share.


• Know how often you will want to send emails. Try to set up general timelines where you will want to send people 1 email during then. If it’s once a week, work through your email strategy to ensure that you avoid sending emails to people who have already received an email from you that week.

Takeaways:

Email marketing is not a standalone strategy. It is just one tool in a fully integrated marketing campaign that can and should connect to a number of different elements you create regularly. Knowing who you want to target with your sends, what you want to share with them and how often will help you create a simple, yet effective strategy that will lead to more database engagement and less unsubscribes and harsh email responses.

10) Social Media Strategy

According to LinkedIn, there is an overabundance of “Social Media Experts” yet few businesses really seem to be setting the social media world on fire. Social media marketing can be broken down into 3 areas; strategy, publishing and monitoring and engagement. What sets a good social campaign apart from a great one is the amount of time spent in the first area. Above all else, a social media campaign that knows who it’s targeting, the voice and persona it is portraying and what it is sharing will almost always find success.

Tips:

• Establish a baseline


• Analyze what your competitors are doing? Keep them in mind as your form your strategy moving forward.


• Find and monitor different resources for content. Follow the 10-4-1 rule: out of every 15 posts, 10 come from a third-party, 4 should come from your blog, and 1 should be an offer.


• Pick which social platforms are best for you. Don’t spread yourself too thin by creating a presence on every social media site there is.


• Create a publishing strategy that answers the following questions for every platform you’ve decided to target:


• Establish a monitoring and engagement strategy.

Takeaways:

Social media is much more than #ThrowbackThursdays and cat pictures. It’s about knowing who your target audience is, where they are on social media and what they want to see while there. Once you know that, the more detailed you are and the more prepared you can be for the various things social media throws at you, the more likely you are to be successful in building a strong fan base that you can then use to drive traffic and leads back to your website.

11) Blog Strategy & Editorial Calendar

It would seem that everyone and their mom is blogging nowadays but why is that? Would it be because more and more people are turning to search engines every day with questions that blogs can answer? Is it because blogs help establish and showcase industry thought leadership? Is it because blogs can act as gateways to convert highly qualified visitors into leads? Yes. To all of them.

While there are numerous benefits to blogging, the reality is that the secret is out when it comes to business blogging and as competition rises for content creation on the various frequently asked questions and topics surrounding your industry you will need a strong strategy to help you stand out in the pack.

Tips:

• Review your current strategy and establish a baseline.


• Analyze what your competitors are doing. Keep them in mind as your form your strategy moving forward.


• Spend time reviewing your personas and utilize what you know about their goals and challenges to craft topics as well as voice and messaging that will best connect with them. 


• Create a list of keywords you would like to start ranking for. Keep these keywords in mind when creating and optimizing articles.


• Create a list of relevant long tail keywords and continually add to it as you begin writing. Use Google’s “suggested searches” at the bottom of results to inspire new topic ideas.


• Get buy-in from subject matter experts. Unless you’re a “lifer” in your industry with decades of experience, you most likely are not going to be able to write on every topic your personas are interested in or at least not to the level needed.


• Make an appointment with yourself and keep it. Blogging is one of the easiest things to push, but it has continually proven to be one of the most effective areas of inbound marketing when it comes to traffic and lead generation and you need to make sure you continually churn out fresh, quality content on a regular basis.

Takeaways:

As blogging becomes even more popular in what is now an already saturated environment for content, the action of actually blogging takes a back seat to strategy and topic generation which is what all the great blogs up until this point have already been doing. Understanding who you’re targeting, what they’re looking for online and how you can get the best information live on your blog on a regular basis is crucial when it comes to creating a blog strategy that will actually work.

12) SMART Goals

There’s no point in implementing an inbound marketing campaign (or any other marketing campaign) unless you have plans for growth. And while starting off with a new campaign is great, you need to be able to not only track its success but show that it is (or is trending toward) bringing some sort of return on investment back to the company. While goal setting is one of the hardest things to do properly in a marketing campaign, a genuine SMART goal makes all the difference when it comes to measuring the success of a campaign through reporting.

Tips:

• All inbound campaigns should at least have goals set for website traffic, lead generation, qualified lead generation and customer generation. 


• When finalizing goals, always run every iteration through the SMART framework. Is it specific? Is it measurable? Is it attainable? Is it relevant? Is it time-bound?


• Once goals are set and all major stakeholders have signed off on them, establish a schedule for reporting on these goals to ensure visibility and accountability of all parties throughout the campaign. 

Takeaways:

Everyone in business is (or should be) held accountable for the results they generate. If you are responsible for the success of your marketing, you must take the time to create SMART goals that everyone involved with your campaign knows, understands and accepts before you move forward with any other marketing actions. Only once stakeholders have signed off on them and key members have bought into them will you be able to properly use these goals to guide the marketing actions you’ve mapped out in all the others strategies above.

Wow, that was a lot…

Now that you’ve read through all 12 building blocks, think back to your favorite digital marketing campaign. Try to envision what each building block would have looked like as their marketing team came closer to winning you as a client.

Marketing often gets a bad rap for being nothing but creative types who spend little time on research, analysis and strategy build out. In reality, some of the best and most successful marketing campaigns had multiple hundreds of man hours dedicated to nothing but strategy well before any prospect got a glimpse of the final product.

If you’re looking to take your marketing to the next level, consider these 12 foundational building blocks before starting your next campaign and see where your creativity goes from there.

                   

           

2 Hurdles to Increases Your Referrals and Retentions

Discover exactly how many steps it takes to get customers from prospect stage to evangelical ambassador stage.

Dan Harris on the Power of Meditating Even If You’re A Skeptic

The first time I meditated was in high school when my sister shared a guided visualization with me to help me before sports games.

It was powerful and I did that same visualization for years.

Then I got busy and stopped playing sports and stopped meditating.

Bad idea.

Recently, I’ve picked it back up and noticed a huge difference.

You might be in the same boat.

Meditation and mindfulness has been coming into the spotlight for the past few years and for good reason.

But today’s guest on The School of Greatness is an unlikely advocate of it.

Dan Harris is the co-anchor of two ABC shows (Nightline and the weekend edition of Good Morning America) and has worked for ABC for 16 years, traveling the world covering major stories. He’s a back East kind of guy and very skeptical of anything woo woo.

Which is why his new book all about meditation, and how he got into it, is perfect for anyone who feels the same way.

Dan has spent years talking to the leading minds in meditation and is now an advocate for anyone who wants to get the benefits of meditating but doesn’t know where to start.

We go into his whole story, how easy his personal meditation practice is today, and why he believes so strongly in it.

Get ready for straight talk and deep insight from Dan Harris in Episode 297.

Subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher Radio or TuneIn

The School of Greatness Podcast

“I don’t think we should put upon ourselves expectations of perfection that are not attainable.”

Some questions I ask:

• How do you prep a guest before you interview them for a show?


• What is your specific meditation practice today?


• What do you think the purpose is of our day to day lives?


• How do we stay present when there’s so much happening?


• Why do we react so quickly to challenges instead of remaining calm?

In This Episode, You Will Learn:

• What Eckhart Tolle told Dan in an interview that inspired Dan to pursue meditation


• How taking drugs led to Dan’s panic attack while filming Good Morning America


• Why Dan said the 10 day silent meditation retreat he went on was so hard but so worth it


• That Dan says he is a Buddhist but isn’t religious


• Why Dan views mental exercise the same way as physical exercise


• The future of meditation in this country


• Plus much more…

Continue Seeking Greatness:

• 10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works–A True Story


• Unplug


• 10% Happier App


• Joseph Goldstein

FOLLOW DAN

Website | Twitter | Facebook

Have you signed up for The School of Greatness Academy yet? This is my 8-week online course and mastermind that will change your life and business. If you have what it takes, apply today! I want to see you make something great.

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  HAVE YOU READ THE SCHOOL OF GREATNESS BOOK YET? ORDER A COPY AT HTTP://LEWISHOWES.COM/BOOK

  
  


• Music Credit: Nebula Rush by Sentient Pulse

You may also like these episodes:

• How to Meditate Like a Zen Monk In a Fraction of the Time


• How to Think, Train, and Thrive Like a Champion 


• Arianna Huffington on Building an Empire and Her Key to Success

Did you enjoy the podcast?

If Dan can learn to meditate and get huge value out of it, any of us can. Are you a skeptic or believer in meditation?

The post Dan Harris on the Power of Meditating Even If You’re A Skeptic appeared first on Lewis Howes.

4 Traits of Expert Communicators

While there is no outwardly visible signs of an expert corporate communicators, here are four surefire ways to tell you are in the presence of one.