15 Ways to Supercharge Your Digital Marketing #DSMPLS
- Updated on: 2017-08-10
- Read original article here
Good marketing programs involve strategy, goals, target audience, tactics and measurement. Great marketing programs often include a special ingredient to really supercharge the engine of leads and sales.
To help you supercharge your marketing success, I’ve reached out to some of the most trusted voices in the digital marketing world speaking at the upcoming Digital Marketing Summit Minneapolis conference for their quotable advice. Marketers from companies like 3M, Thomson Reuters, IBM, The Economist Group, BMC Software, Pandora, Salesforce, Adestra, Schwinn Bicycles, SEMRush and our own agency, TopRank Marketing have joined experts including Seth Godin and Ann Handley to share their pithy tips on a variety of digital marketing topics.
What topics you ask? How about: Content Marketing, Influence, Social Storytelling, Artificial Intelligence, Email Marketing, Social Customer Service, Purposeful Marketing, Reputation Management, Thought Leadership, Audio Marketing, Creative Content & Promotion, SEO, Design Thinking and Marketing with Microinfluencers. Enjoy!
The Misfit Advantage “You’re more powerful than you imagine. In our new connection economy, it’s the misfit who has an advantage. The artist that we seek out, the maker of ruckuses.
What we need are your generosity, hubris and insight. The true voice that you’ve been hiding… the world is ready for it now.”
Less is Better “What’s one thing marketers can do to supercharge how they approach content for marketing?
Supercharge your marketing by (ironically) doing less.
Why? “”Well, less is more, Lucrezia: I am judged,” wrote poet Robert Browning a century and a half ago.
In modern marketing parlance (probably an idea Browning couldn’t fathom!), Less Is More means you focus on creating less content that will have greater impact.
Content that has real value for your audience.
And content that will sustain your organization, and (importantly) that you can be proud of.
Sounds like too lofty a goal? Too high a bar? Not in my view. (And that’s what I’ll be talking about in Minneapolis!)”
Ann Handley @marketingprofs Chief Content Officer, MarketingProfs Digital Summit Presentation: Lunch Keynote – Good Content vs. Good Enough Content: A Sight for Sore Eyes
Co-Create to be Great “When buyers are overwhelmed with information and distrustful of advertising, marketers can improve reach, trust and engagement by co-creating content with peers, experts and influencers. If you want content to be great, ask your brand’s community to participate!”
Engage Where They Live “While every brand is facing the same challenge: where should we spend our time? Stop debating the platforms and which one is better (ex: Instagram vs. Snapchat) and start placing a higher emphasis on engaging your community, including prospective customers, on the platforms where they live through content that’s fun, creative, or educational. Storytelling is the new content marketing.”
Carlos Gil @CarlosGil83 Head of Global Social Media, BMC Software Digital Summit Presentation: Snapchat Strategies for Marketing Your Business
Clean Data = Smarter Insight “When experimenting with new machine learning applications from technology vendors, make sure you have LOTS of good data (clean and comprehensive) or the machine output of analysis, content or recommendations may be of low confidence, or worse – wrong or inconsistent with your brand.”
Loren McDonald @lorenmcdonald Marketing Evangelist, IBM Watson Marketing Digital Summit Presentation: AI and Machine Learning Technologies: What They Mean for Marketers Today and in the Future
First-Person Marketing “Become a First-Person Marketer, someone who looks at a list of email addresses and sees people, with needs, interests, goals and attitudes, not just records in a database. They use email addresses to identify customers across channels and incorporate data to sharpen their targeting and messaging. The more marketers who do this, the better off we all will be.”
Engage with Purpose “Be proactive in your social listening and then engage with a purpose. Remember that you’re a human writing to other humans – be real, be transparent, and take your time with one-on-one interactions. People don’t want to hear from a lofty brand figurehead, they want to hear from a person. Be a person.”
Optimize Experience with Authenticity “Purpose and authenticity are the connective tissue between brands and customers. Create that connection by speaking with ideal customers face-to-face. Organize insights from conversations into their questions, feelings, and actions so you can fully optimize the customer experience.”
Mack Fogelson @mackfogelson Founder & CEO, Genuinely Digital Summit Presentation: Evolve to Survive: How Purpose and Authenticity is the Future of Brands
Audit Your Reputation “To understand how your customers experience your products and brand online, run a search for your flagship products on all the social networks. If you don’t understand and like everything you see, you need to work on digital reputation management, starting with a detailed audit of the existing accounts.”
Help Audiences Get Smarter “Thought leadership is about solving, not selling. People wake up thinking about their problems, not your product. In our research, Thought Leadership Disrupted, only 28% of marketers cited helping their audience become more knowledgeable as a primary objective. True thought leaders don’t push product; they understand their audience and share ideas to help them tackle issues.”
When Voice Replaces Touch “Consider the future importance of Audio. When Voice replaces Touch as the way we communicate using screen-less connected devices, marketers will need new strategies to build their brands. Audio is the one medium which reaches consumers across any device, any time, to deliver true cross-platform messaging.”
Gabe Tartaglia @gabetartaglia VP Sales, Pandora Digital Summit Presentation: Engaging in A Connected World Through the Power of Audio
Supercharge Content Reach “When content promotion is treated as an afterthought, it’s like putting water in your gas tank. To supercharge content reach, take the time to create an amplification strategy that is creative, optimized and focused on the customer experience.”
Focus on the Now of Search “Be relevant in the moment! Use Google Analytics and Search Console to find the top pages driving non-brand, organic traffic and conversion. Improve engagement on page by adding or updating the content to focus on the now. Build internal links to those pages from new or existing content that supports that topic.”
Jacob Hagberg @jacobhagberg Digital Marketing Strategist, SEMRush Digital Summit Presentation: Real-World SEO Examples Every Digital Marketer Can Learn From
Design Sprints FTW “Design thinking compels marketers to leverage the creativity of those around them. To make your next campaign truly innovative and deeply relevant, brainstorm—or better yet, do a “design sprint”—with colleagues in other departments that interact with your customers differently than you.”
Human Influence “Be human – influencers do not want to work with a brand that treats them like a commodity. Invest a bit of yourself and humanize your brand. This dedication and compassion will keep your influencers active, loyal, and engaged, even when the contract is complete.”
Don’t forget, if you’re attending Digital Summit Minneapolis, you won’t want to miss the closing keynote on Tuesday at 4:05pm: Supercharge Your Content with Influencer Marketing. The deck cover is below and after the conference, I will swap it out with an embed from SlideShare.
Here’s the abstract for the presentation so you can get an idea of what it’s about:
Content is both king and kingdom in the marketing world but what good is great content if no one sees it? Confronted by information overload, distrust in advertising and the growth of ad blocking, successful companies are adding an essential ingredient to their content marketing mix: influencers. By co-creating content with trusted experts that have active networks, brands increase both quality and quantity of credible content that is trusted by customers and stands out from the competition.This presentation will outline a framework, best practices, tools and examples for integrating influencers with content marketing that will help marketers attract, engage and convert more customers.
BONUS! Be sure to register for the Supercharged Marketing Cocktail Hour being hosted by TopRank Marketing on Monday night, August 14th.
