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3 fixes for Netflix’s “What to watch?” problem

New Post has been published on http://www.readersforum.tk/3-fixes-for-netflixs-what-to-watch-problem/

3 fixes for Netflix’s “What to watch?” problem

Wasting time every night debating with yourself or your partner about what to watch on Netflix is a drag. It burns people’s time and good will, robs great creators of attention, and leaves Netflix vulnerable to competitors who can solve discovery. A ReelGood study estimated that the average user spends 18 minutes per day deciding.

To date, Netflix’s solution has been its state-of-the-art artificial intelligence that offers personalized recommendations. But that algorithm is ignorant of how we’re feeling in the moment, what we’ve already seen elsewhere, and if we’re factoring in what someone else with us wants to watch too.

Netflix is considering a Shuffle button. [Image Credit: AndroidPolice]

This week Netflix introduced one basic new approach to discovery: a shuffle button. Click on a show you like such as The Office, and it will queue up a random episode. But that only works if you already know what you want to watch, it’s not a movie, and it’s not a linear series you have to watch in order.

Here are three much more exciting, applicable, and lucrative ways for Netflix (or Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, or any of the major streaming services) to get us to stop browsing and start chilling:

Netflix Channels

For the history of broadcast television, people surfed their way to what to watch. They turned on the tube, flipped through a few favorite channels, and jumped in even if a show or movie had already started. They didn’t have to decide between infinite options, and they didn’t have to commit to starting from the beginning. We all have that guilty pleasure we’ll watch until the end whenever we stumble upon it.

Netflix could harness that laziness and repurpose the concept of channels so you could surf its on-demand catalog the same way. Imagine if Netflix created channels dedicated to cartoons, action, comedy, or history. It could curate non-stop streams of cherry-picked content, mixing classic episodes and films, new releases related to current events, thematically relevant seasonal video, and Netflix’s own Original titles it wants to promote.

For example, the comedy channel could run modern classic films like 40-Year Old Virgin and Van Wilder during the day, top episodes of Arrested Development and Parks And Recreation in the afternoon, a featured recent release film like The Lobster in primetime, and then off-kilter cult hits like Monty Python or its own show Big Mouth in the late night slots. Users who finish one video could get turned on to the next, and those who might not start a personal favorite film from the beginning might happily jump in at the climax.

Short-Film Bundles

There’s a rapidly expanding demographic of post-couple pre-children people desperately seeking after-work entertainment. They’re too old or settled to go out every night, but aren’t so busy with kids that they lack downtime.

But one big shortcoming of Netflix is that it can be tough to get a satisfying dose of entertainment in a limited amount of time before you have to go to bed. A 30-minute TV show is too short. A lot of TV nowadays is serialized so it’s incomprehensible or too cliffhanger-y to watch a single episode, but sometimes you can’t stay up to binge. And movies are too long so you end up exhausted if you manage to finish in one sitting.

Netflix could fill this gap by bundling three or so short films together into thematic collections that are approximately 45 minutes to an hour in total.

Netflix could commission Originals and mix them with the plethora of untapped existing shorts that have never had a mainstream distribution channel. They’re often too long or prestigious to live on the web, but too short for TV, and it’s annoying to have to go hunting for a new one every 15 minutes. The whole point here is to reduce browsing. Netflix could create collections related to different seasons, holidays, or world news moments, and rebundle the separate shorts on the fly to fit viewership trends or try different curational angles.

Often artful and conclusive, they’d provide a sense of culture and closure that a TV episode doesn’t. If you get sleepy you could save the last short, and there’s a feeling of low commitment since you could skip any short that doesn’t grab you.

The Nightly Water Cooler Pick

One thing we’ve lost with the rise of on-demand video are some of those zeitgeist moments where everyone watches the same thing the same night and can then talk about it together the next day. We still get that with live sports, the occasional tent pole premier like Game Of Thrones, or when a series drops for binge-watching like Stranger Things. But Netflix has the ubiquity to manufacture those moments that stimulate conversation and a sense of unity.

Netflix could choose one piece of programming per night per region, perhaps a movie, short arc of TV episodes, or one of the short film bundles I suggested above and stick it prominently on the home page. This Netflix Zeitgeist choice would help override people’s picky preferences that get them stuck browsing by applying peer pressure like, “well, this is what everyone else will be watching.”

Netflix’s curators could pick content matched with an upcoming holiday like a Passover TV episode, show a film that’s reboot is about to debut like Dune or Clueless, pick a classic from an actor that’s just passed away like Luke Perry in the original Buffy movie, or show something tied to a big event like Netflix is currently doing with Beyonce’s Coachella concert film. Netflix could even let brands and or content studios pay to have their content promoted in the Zeitgeist slot.

As streaming service competition heats up and all the apps battle for the best back catalog, it’s not just exclusives but curation and discovery that will set them apart. These ideas could make Netflix the streaming app where you can just turn it on to find something great, be exposed to gorgeous shorts you’d have never known about, or get to participate in a shared societal experience. Entertainment shouldn’t have to be a chore.

[readersforum]

The Plain-English Guide to Progressive Web Apps

New Post has been published on http://www.readersforum.tk/the-plain-english-guide-to-progressive-web-apps/

The Plain-English Guide to Progressive Web Apps

Whether it’s in sports, music, or business, rivalries always seem to make things more interesting. In basketball, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson transformed the faltering NBA into one of the most popular sports league in the world. In hip-hop, Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur broke a rather niche music genre into the main stream. 

But imagine if some of the world’s fiercest rivals put their differences aside and teamed up to assemble the best product or service on the market. Could you imagine how electric an NSYNC-Backstreet Boys concert would be? Or the sheer power of a Microsoft-Apple supercomputer?

In the digital age, you could say mobile websites and apps are rivals. Brands developed mobile apps to phase out the use of their fast yet janky mobile websites when the demand for mobile devices exploded. Unfortunately, they soon discovered that mobile apps are quite sluggish and require more steps to access than mobile websites, like finding and downloading them from the app store.

To develop an app that offers the speed of a mobile website and the user experience of a mobile app, Google decided to end the rivalry between mobile websites and apps and blended their best functionalities together, birthing the progressive web app in 2015.

What’s a progressive web app (PWA)?

A progressive web app or a PWA is an application built on a web framework, allowing users to immediately use or install them on their phone by just visiting a website and not having to find and download them from an app store. Users can also use PWAs offline and receive push notifications from them. In a nutshell, a PWA is basically a mobile website that has the functionality of an app, giving users the speed of the internet and the experience of a mobile application.

Progressive Web App Examples

Uber

Starbucks

2048

Pinterest

Housing.com

1. Uber

Image Credit: SimiCart

To provide their users who use low-end mobile devices with a similar web experience as their mobile app, Uber built a progressive web app that works on 2G networks. So regardless of your network speed, device, and even location, you can use Uber’s PWA to book a ride. This is especially helpful if you’re in a location with spotty service or your phone isn’t compatible with their mobile app.

2. Starbucks

Image Credit: SimiCart

Starbucks’ progressive web app is quite similar to its native mobile app, but the biggest difference between the two is that their PWA takes up significantly less space than their native mobile app and it works offline. When you’re offline, you can use their PWA to browse their menu, customize your orders, and add items to your cart. When you’re online, you can check each store location’s prices and place orders.

3. 2048

Image Credit: SimiCart

There’s arguably no other game as addicting as 2048. When it was released in 2014, the video game attracted over 10 million unique visitors in its first month, and when it was rolled out as a mobile app, it attracted even more downloads. When you play 2048 on its progressive web application, it looks and feels just like its mobile app, but its main differentiator is that you can play the game both online and offline.

4. Pinterest

Image Credit: SimiCart

When Pinterest discovered that only 1% of their mobile users converted into sign-ups, logins, or native app installs because of their app’s poor user experience (a 23 second load time), they reconstructed their mobile app into a progressive web application. Within three months, their PWA saw a 40% increase in time spent over five minutes, a 44% increase in user-generated ad revenue, and a 50% increase in ad click-throughs compared to their old mobile app.

5. Housing.com

Image Credit: SimiCart

Housing.com, India’s main online real estate platform that attracts over 9 million visits per month, has a target audience of low-end mobile device users who only have access to network speeds of 2G or 3G. So to cater to their users and boost their conversion rates, they built a progressive web app that users can quickly find property on even when they’re offline.

[readersforum]

What Are Email Whitelists, & How Do You Get On Them

New Post has been published on http://www.readersforum.tk/what-are-email-whitelists-how-do-you-get-on-them/

What Are Email Whitelists, & How Do You Get On Them

A few weeks ago, I planned a trip to Charlotte. I booked my flights, and the day before I was supposed to leave, I tried to find my confirmation email.

I couldn’t find it anywhere. Panicking, I called the airline. “Ma’am, your payment was denied. We emailed you about this.”

Very quickly, I learned the importance of email whitelists.

Fortunately, I was able to book another flight. However, this didn’t save me from the stress or frustration I felt at the airline for being unable to contact me any other way.

At the end of the day, you don’t want a similar experience to happen to your customers. And, as a marketer, nothing is more frustrating than realizing your email marketing tactics, meant to engage and delight new prospects, aren’t working simply because they aren’t being delivered to your prospects’ inboxes.

Here, we’ll explain what email whitelists are, and how you can ensure your company is on the whitelists of your email recipients.

How To Get On Your Email Subscribers’ Whitelists

To get on your email subscribers’ whitelists, you can ask your subscribers to whitelist your email address.

There are a few different ways to ask subscribers to whitelist your email address. First, you might simply send the following message:

“To be sure our emails always make it to your inbox, please add us to your email whitelist.”

To make it easier for your recipient, you might also want to incorporate steps to do so. To add someone to a whitelist, your subscriber simply needs to add you as a contact. To make the process simple, you can include instructions in your email, like this:

“To be sure our emails always make it to your inbox, please add us as a contact. If you have a Gmail account, follow these instructions. Alternatively, if you use Apple Mail, click here.”

You can add instructions for any email provider, including Outlook, Yahoo, or Android — this largely depends on the typical provider your recipients use.

However, perhaps you don’t want to ask outright if recipients can add you to their whitelists. An alternative to the above message might simply be asking recipients to add you as a contact.

For instance, United Airlines sends the following message, asking recipients to add United to their contact list and explaining why it’s critical they do so:

Image source: AWeber.

You might use your own flair and brand voice to craft a compelling email message. Ideally, you’d include this message in the first email you send new subscribers, since it might be frustrating for recipients who have already successfully received your emails in the past to randomly receive an email instructing them to add you to their contact list.

Additionally, you can help mitigate the possibility that your recipients’ email providers mistake your emails as spam by following email marketing best practices.

Finally, if you’re a HubSpot customer and your contacts aren’t receiving marketing emails from your HubSpot account, there are several steps you can take to ensure your emails are delivered to your subscribers’ inboxes.

[readersforum]

How to Create an Editorial Calendar [Examples + Templates]

New Post has been published on http://www.readersforum.tk/how-to-create-an-editorial-calendar-examples-templates/

How to Create an Editorial Calendar [Examples + Templates]

If you’re anything like me, you’re consistently working out of at least 20 browser tabs, four journals, a yellow legal pad or two, and a myriad of Post-it notes stuck around your computer monitor.

To the average overseer, it’s nothing short of chaos. To the blogger, it’s evidence of a (desperate) need for an editorial calendar.

My muddled system transforms dramatically when I work with a team. I realize the need for organization and structure, and this could not be more necessary than with managing a blog. Without a mutually agreed-upon system for planning, writing, and scheduling content every week, you can find yourself in a pile of missed deadlines, unedited blog posts, and a fair amount of team tension.

There’s no such thing as a perfect editorial calendar — it all depends on the needs of your team. Nonetheless, there are a number of questions you should ask yourself to determine what your editorial calendar should look like. These include:

How frequently are you publishing content? Do you have stuff going live every day? Once a week? Perhaps multiple times a day? Finding out how often you publish can tell you how best to visualize your editorial calendar on a regular basis.

Do you create more than one type of content? If you upload as many videos to YouTube as you publish articles to your company blog, your editorial calendar will need to distinguish between the two.

How many people will use this editorial calendar? The best editorial calendars allow multiple people to brainstorm, collaborate, and provide feedback on assignments in real time — directly on the calendar.

What are the various stages content goes through before it’s published? How complex is your content pipeline? Is there a substantial review or approval process that each piece of content goes through? Make sure your calendar can distinguish between two similar assignments that are in different stages of creation.

What platform will you use to manage this calendar? There’s no such thing as a perfect editorial calendar, but some software is better than others at helping you solve for your team’s goals. Pick a platform that offers the features or interface that your company needs the most. Your free options include Trello, Airtable, Meistertask, and Google Sheets.

Editorial Calendar Examples

To help you implement an editorial calendar, we’ve also included two real examples from a few of the most successful content teams out there. Check them out below and find out what makes their calendar so useful.

Buffer’s Editorial Calendar

Platform: Trello

This is the actual editorial calendar of Buffer, a social media content scheduling platform. Naturally, the company’s own content is supported by an editorial calendar that describes an assignment’s author, title, publish date, and where it is in the company’s editorial workflow (content can be in the “Ideas” stage, in the “Pipeline,” “In Progress,” or “Editing”).

Each rectangular tile shown above represents an individual piece of content — whether it’s a blog post, video, or even a podcast episode.

As you might be able to tell, Buffer’s editorial calendar is built on Trello, a common project management tool. And although you can use Trello more than one way, Buffer uses most of its available features so everyone has the information they need within a few clicks — regardless of what they do for the company and how the calendar affects their work.

“An editorial calendar should be a resource for your whole team, not just content creators,” says Ash Read, Buffer’s editorial director. “It should be something anyone can easily access to see what’s coming up and also suggest content ideas. Sometimes the best content suggestions will come from people outside of your marketing team.”

In the next screenshot, above, you can see what’s inside each rectangular tile. When you click on an assignment, Buffer logs feedback as the content is created and reviewed. Says Ash: “It’s not just a calendar, but a place to share feedback, editing notes, pitches, ideas and more.”

Unbounce’s Editorial Calendar

Platform: Google Sheets

This is the editorial calendar of Unbounce, a creator of landing pages and related conversion tools for marketers, as well as a HubSpot integration partner. Unlike Buffer, this company uses Google Sheets to manage their entire content production, and the way they’ve customized the spreadsheet above would be pleasing to the eyes of any content creator.

In addition to organizing their projects by month, what you might notice from the screenshot above is that Unbounce also sorts their content by the campaign they’re serving — as per the first two columns on the lefthand side. This allows the business to see what multiple assignments — listed vertically down the third column — have in common, and track content that extends beyond the Unbounce blog.

Shown below, the Unbounce blog has a separate editorial calendar in Google Sheets that allows the blog to work alongside the larger company initiatives. Nonetheless, using spreadsheets for both content workflows has proven to be the best choice for the company’s growing operation.

“We’re a small content team, so other platforms would likely overcomplicate things,” says Colin Loughran, editor in chief at Unbounce.

Ultimately, this editorial calendar keeps Colin’s team in sync. “While we try to lock dates a few weeks in advance,” he explains, “the reality is that sometimes we need to make changes very quickly. A product launch might move into a slot we’d planned for something else, for instance, or a guest contributor will be delayed in delivering a revised draft. When that’s the case, having a centralized resource that everyone can check is a necessary safety blanket.”

Editorial Calendar Template

Ready to make your own editorial calendar? No matter which platform you ultimately want to work out of, a spreadsheet can help you take inventory of what content you have and how quickly it moves from start to finish. That’s where our free Blog Editorial Calendar Templates come in.

Using the templates linked above, you’ll be able to organize, categorize, and color code to your heart’s content. Use these templates to target the right readers, optimize posts with the best keywords, and pair each topic with a killer call-to-action.

In this download, we’ve included three different templates for you to choose from. Why three? We recognize that not all content teams are the same. While some feel most efficient with a centralized editorial calendar solution, others may need the gentle push of an upcoming deadline right on their personal calendar. Therefore, you’ll have access to all three templates in Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, and Google Calendar.

With a little customization, your blog calendar will be running smoothly, leaving you time to be the content-writing, lead-generating machine you strive to be.

[readersforum]

How to Craft a Sales Page That Generates Revenue [+Example]

New Post has been published on http://www.readersforum.tk/how-to-craft-a-sales-page-that-generates-revenue-example/

How to Craft a Sales Page That Generates Revenue [+Example]

Last week, I did something I promised I’d never do to myself: I made an impulse purchase over $100. Now, for you less frugal shoppers out there, you might scoff at my definition of splurging. But what I found most interesting about my sudden compulsion to buy glasses that filter blue light wasn’t the impulse itself. It was how quickly the advertisement below convinced me that I needed the eyewear in my life.

  Image Credit: VeryGoodCopy

Out of all the advertisements I’ve ever read, this is arguably the most persuasive one. Not only did it inform me about the damage a computer screen can inflict on my eyes, but it also offered me an affordable, stylish solution for protecting them.

Now, advertisements and sales pages are two different animals. But they have the same exact goal: convert website visitors into customers. So even though you won’t model your sales page exactly after an advertisement, you can still incorporate its copywriting and psychological principles into your sales pages.

What is a sales page?

A sales page is a web page that highlights your product’s or service’s benefits and features and attempts to persuade your audience to convert into customers.

To help you craft a sales page that generates revenue, we’ll analyze one of the content marketing industry’s best copywriters’ sales pages on his website VeryGoodCopy. His name is Eddie Shleyner, and he’s written conversion copy for some big-time brands, like The North Face, GEICO, and Swatch.

How to Craft a Sales Page That Leads to Revenue

1. Lead with a universal benefit that your target audience desires.

There’s a copywriting adage that goes “features tell and benefits sell”, and it’s an advertising truism that’ll stand the test of time. Since features only appeal to the logical part of your brain, they don’t drive action nearly as well as appealing to the emotional part of your brain does.

So while a list of features tells your target audience what your product or service does, it doesn’t specify how your solution will improve their lives. On the other hand, highlighting your product or service’s benefits can help your audience visualize a better future — one that includes your solution in their lives.

For instance, at the top of Eddie’s sales page, notice how he leads with the benefit of growing your business instead of telling you he can write articles that get found, read, and shared. By structuring his heading and subheading this way, he can instantly pique his target audience’s interest with an opportunity to achieve a high aspiration (growing their business) and a path towards success (investing in his articles).

2. Describe exactly how your product or service can help your target audience attain the universal benefit.

Once you pique your target audience’s interest by offering them the chance to realize one of their main goals, you need to explain how your product or service’s features can actually achieve them. Promising your target audience something of value gets them in the door, but laying out how your solution will provide it ultimately keeps them interested.

For example, in the next section of Eddie’s sales page, notice how he describes what articles can do for your business and backs his claims with data. This bolsters his service’s credibility and makes his initial promise more believable.

3. Relate to your target audience’s most pressing pain points and frame your product or service as the solution. 

Empathy is one of the most powerful tools in a marketer’s arsenal. If you can truly relate to your target audience, they’ll appreciate that you actually understand them, that their feelings are valid, and that they’re not alone.

Feeling heard is a psychological need, so once you confirm your audience’s pain, you can offer them your solution. However, if you jump right into how you can solve their problems without acknowledging their pain, your solution won’t register with them. Because if you don’t confirm their pain, they’ll stay fixated on it.

For instance, in the middle of Eddie’s sales page, he does a terrific job of empathizing with his target audience by steering right into their pain of writing compelling articles. Only then does he offer his expertise to alleviate their pain points. He even provides examples of his work to prove that he can get the job done.

4. Leverage customer testimonials as social proof for your product’s or service’s quality. 

After offering a solution to your target audience, consider proving your product’s or service’s quality by segueing into some customer testimonials Humans evolved to follow the crowd and assume the majority is always right, so the more testimonials you have, the more reliable your solution will seem.

For example, towards the end of Eddie’s sales page, notice how he includes a raving testimonial about his work at HubSpot and a link to more of his customer testimonials. It provides the social proof necessary to convince his audience that he’s a credible copywriter.  

5. Prompt your target audience to take action.

Ending your sales page with a clear next step is crucial for persuading your target audience to take your desired action — it packs an emotional punch and crystalizes the desired action in their minds.

For instance, at the end of Eddie’s sales page, notice how he asks his target audience a question related to his service, suggests that they work together, and writes a uniquely polite call-to-action.

He also leverages the scarcity principle, a psychological tenant that states people value objects and experiences that are rare, by including a snippet of how he gets booked quickly, ramping up his audience’s sense of urgency to do business with him.

[readersforum]

The Top 11 Best Email Marketing Services in 2019

New Post has been published on http://www.readersforum.tk/the-top-11-best-email-marketing-services-in-2019/

The Top 11 Best Email Marketing Services in 2019

For many growing companies, an email marketing service provider is one of the first tools you need in a marketer’s tool belt — and for good reason. Email marketing is a quick way to engage with your leads and nurture them into loyal customers. It’s also extremely cost effective, with some studies showing an ROI of up to 4400%.

As email service providers (or ESPs) continue to develop, features like A/B Testing, automation, and personalization have made the tools even more valuable to a marketer looking to engage with an increasingly fragmented audience.

And, in 2019, email marketing is just as essential as it’s ever been.

But with so many tools available, where should you start? Which tool meets your business’ unique needs? And how can you differentiate one tool from the next?

To help you choose the most powerful tool for your team, let’s take a look at the best email marketing services on the market today.

Best Email Marketing Services

HubSpot

Constant Contact

Campaign Monitor

iContact

MailChimp

AWeber

SendinBlue

ActiveCampaign

AutoPilot

GetResponse

Ontraport

1. HubSpot

HubSpot’s email tool is easy to use, has an extremely high deliverability rate, and has all the bells and whistles you’d expect to see within an ESP.

When creating an email, you can pick from one of many drag-and-drop email templates, or you can craft a custom template tailored to your brand. Once you’ve got your template, incorporating content is simple and intuitive.

You can also personalize your emails for different recipients based on device type, country, or list inclusion — or use a simple personalization token to ensure that each email includes content that is specific to each recipient.

Plus, within HubSpot, you can preview an email as a specific recipient, on a specific device type, or within a specific email provider — ensuring your email looks exactly how you want it to regardless of how your customer needs to view it.

When it is time to send, using the smart send feature will ensure that recipients receive your email at an appropriate time. Additionally, you can run A/B tests to compare different versions of an email to understand which one resonates the most with your audience. You also won’t have to worry about deliverability — HubSpot maintains a 99% deliverability rate across the network for all marketing email sends.

Outside of the email marketing functionality, HubSpot offers a wide range of reports on your email’s performance, letting you judge what is resonating with your audience and optimize your strategy accordingly.

You can report on something as broad as your overall email performance in Q1, or you can get granular and see how one particular lead is interacting with your emails.

In addition, HubSpot’s automation platform makes it easy to scale your email marketing strategy, which will help you quickly turn leads into loyal customers.

2. Constant Contact

Constant Contact is a popular email marketing service for many industries.

It comes with over 100 email templates that you can either use as is, or customize to meet your specific objectives.

Once your email looks good, you can easily schedule it to send to your contacts. In addition to drip email campaigns, you can also have emails go out at a regular cadence to celebrate specific events — for example, you could have a regular email go out on each customer’s birthday.

Constant Contact also makes it easy to manage your contacts.

Additionally, once a list is uploaded, bounces and unsubscribes are automatically updated. They also have “Plus” features that let you execute very specific types of campaigns — such as a coupon offers, donation collections, or surveys.

Image source.

3. Campaign Monitor

Campaign Monitor prides itself in providing powerful, personalized email marketing tools that are simple and easy to use.

Their drag-and-drop email editor is intuitive, and the included analytics make it easy to optimize your email strategy and create targeted segments of your customers.

Personalization is key for campaign monitor. They use data to increase personalized content, and inform your list segmentation to boost your engagement. They also have a visual marketing automation tool so you can create unique customer journeys at scale.

On top of a great email tool, Campaign monitor has an extensive library of resources, helping you become a pro at email marketing.

Image source.

4. iContact

iContact has been providing one of the best email marketing services available since 2003.

In the time since then, they’ve built out an easy to use email marketing tool that helps you and your team see results fast. While they have all the simple editing and automation features of other tools in this list, it’s their support and customer services team that sets iContact apart.

Customers are paired with a strategic advisor, who helps you get your email marketing strategy right and find success with their tool.

They also have Social+ marketing consultants that will help boost your entire online presence through creative social posts that drive traffic to your site.

Image source.

5. MailChimp

Although MailChimp has recently added landing pages and various ads tools, their email marketing service is still their claim-to-fame.

They have millions of customers in over 175 countries, and they use the data they collect off those customers to provide you with actionable insights to improve your email strategy. Their tools are flexible enough for an enterprise company, yet simple enough for someone just getting started with email marketing.

Best of all, MailChimp has over 300 integrations that help you match their tool to your business. By using these integrations to further personalize your marketing, you’ll get the most out of your email strategy.

Image source.

6. AWeber

Aweber is an email platform built specifically for small businesses and entrepreneurs.

Their goal is to make it simple for people just getting started with email marketing to segment their contacts, design a professional email, and start nurturing leads. Customers have praised AWeber for its deliverability, and AWeber’s deliverability team monitors their servers around the clock to ensure your campaign consistently reaches the customers’ inboxes.

Image source.

7. SendinBlue

SendinBlue is a marketing software platform that sends more than 30 million automated emails and text messages every day. On top of email, they also have a forms tool that lets you collect new leads, which you can then segment into specific lists, and enter into email nurturing campaigns.

Not sure how to kick off your email nurturing campaign? No problem. SendinBlue has a Workflow Library that gives you access to a number of pre-made automation campaigns tailored to specific goals you might have. If you want to run a more nuanced email nurturing campaign, you can always create a campaign from scratch to meet your specific business needs.

Image source.

8. ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is a marketing automation platform that offers live chat and a CRM service in addition to their email marketing tool.

By adding a CRM to their marketing tool, ActiveCampaign can help you surface the right leads to your sales team through tools like lead scoring. It also lets you serve up dynamic content within your emails, so you can send one email and provide a different experience to your contacts based on how you segmented them.

Image source.

9. AutoPilot

Autopilot differentiates themselves from the other tools in this list through their visual marketing tools.

Everything from their email editor to their automation tool is set up to work through a drag-and-drop interface that is intuitive and easy to use.

They also provide collaborative tools, which let your entire team work together effectively on an automation campaign. Using the ‘annotate & collaborate’ feature, you can quickly mark-up a customer journey and ask your team for feedback or assistance. You can also quickly share your work with your team, ensuring that everyone is on the same page before you start your campaign.

Image source.

10. GetResponse

GetResponse is a marketing automation service that is available in over 20 different languages.

On top of email marketing and automation, they also offer a CRM, landing pages, and a complete webinar solution.

They offer over 500 templates to help you get started with email marketing, and also integrate directly with Shutterstock so you always have a library of creative options directly at your fingertips. Their drip campaign tool is managed through a calendar interface, allowing you to see exactly when you will be reaching out to your leads.

Image source.

11. Ontraport

Ontraport offers a full suite of marketing automation tools — including e-commerce functionality, which lets you sell directly to your customers online.

Their visual campaign builder allows you to create detailed campaigns to engage with your audience. Create your campaign from scratch, or tap into their marketplace where they offer dozens of the most common marketing campaigns for you to take advantage of, including abandoned cart nurturing, or webinar sign-up and follow-up.

Their platform also gives you insight into detailed reports that provide information on a number of different questions you might have on your pipeline, including what channels your best customers originate from, and how long it takes to convert a lead into a customer.

Image source.

The Options Are Endless for Email Marketing Services

Most email marketing tools offer all the essentials needed to craft a basic email newsletter, but your options start to narrow down when you want better customization and deeper data analysis. As a marketer, you might want to consider combining your email marketing tool with a CRM, which will give you all the capability to power your entire customer experience.

Ultimately, for you, the best email marketing tool depends on your team’s purpose and particular business needs.

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Every Question You’ve Ever Had About Keywords, Answered

New Post has been published on http://www.readersforum.tk/every-question-youve-ever-had-about-keywords-answered/

Every Question You’ve Ever Had About Keywords, Answered

For a long time, digital marketers organized their entire content calendar around specific keywords. They’d work with their teams to brainstorm core keywords relevant to their products or services, as well as all the variations of that keyword most likely to bring them high-converting traffic.

And, ultimately, it worked. Users from around the world could enter specific search terms into a search engine and, if their intent matched your keywords, they’d land on your site.

Unfortunately, as time went on, publications began stuffing irrelevant, poorly-written content with specific keywords just to get more traffic. Search engines weren’t helping users find the information they needed anymore, because searches weren’t going to relevant information — they were just going to a keyword-stuffed filler page.

Eventually, search engines realized they had to adapt to account for bad content. As search engines, largely led by Google and its constantly-changing search algorithm, became more advanced, the power of keywords waned in favor of a more contextual-based approach to content.

Nowadays, it’s not uncommon to see a plethora of articles with titles proclaiming the “death of keywords”, to mark the shift away from a purely keyword-focused world of SEO.

But don’t buy flowers to send to the funeral just yet. While keywords may not be the SEO powerhouse they once were, they’re still hugely important to growing your organic traffic.

Mastering keywords can still help your content strategy substantially as long as you approach them with an updated perspective — here, we’re going to tell you how.

What are keywords in SEO?

SEO keywords refer to words or phrases that describe what a given piece of content is about. Keywords allow search engines to properly rank your content, and also help users find relevant content to their search queries. For instance, you might search ‘what are popular Instagram hashtags?’ on Google, and a blog post ranking for the keyword phrase ‘Instagram hashtags’ will appear on page one.

  Once a search engine crawls a website and determines what it’s about, the search engine is then able to associate a piece of content with certain keywords being searched. This helps relevant content show up for specific searches.

As previously mentioned, for a long time this meant bloggers could stuff their content full of specific keywords and rank well — but that’s no longer the case. More sophisticated search algorithms have changed the way keywords are associated with content.

Now, while keywords are still useful tools for conceptualizing and planning your content strategy, their effectiveness is entirely rooted in context.

Remember, the purpose of a search engine is to deliver the most useful content to each user. Ultimately, search engines aim to deliver a similar experience to the way people communicate with each other in real life. If I were to walk up to you on the street and say “marketing”, you wouldn’t find the conversation very useful (and you might think I’m crazy).

However, if we were sitting together in a cafe and I said, “I enjoy creating content that helps people get better at digital marketing,” you’d have context regarding my intentions, and we’d then be able to engage in a dialogue.

Keywords work the same way. The power of a keyword is not in the word itself, but in the context in which it’s used. When it comes to search engines understanding what your content is about, think of your entire website as various parts of a sentence. You may have a blog post centered on the keyword “software”, but if it’s an orphaned blog post and the rest of your website doesn’t mention software again, you’re probably not going to see much organic traffic to that post.

However, if you’ve written other pieces of content about the various aspects of B2B software and have been fleshing out a topic cluster to show that you’re an authority within the field, then Google is going to have the context it needs. Your keyword “software” won’t be standing on its own — Google and other search engines will be able to see it as a complete thought: “I am an authority on this topic, so this piece of content is likely to prove useful for the person searching this term.”

Unfortunately, the internet is a busy place, and it’s virtually impossible to be the only person writing about any given topic … so even if you’re creating great content about a specific keyword and providing helpful context for search engines to understand your content, how do you stand out from the crowd?

That’s where keyword difficulty comes into play.

What is keyword difficulty?

Keyword difficulty, otherwise known as keyword competitiveness, is a measure of how challenging it is to rank well for a specific keyword. In addition to how many pieces are already ranking for a specific keyword, your domain authority and paid search volume factor into the keyword difficulty for any given search query. The lower a keyword’s difficulty, the easier it is to rank for that keyword.

Oftentimes, the keywords with the highest difficulty are the ones for which everybody in an industry wants to rank well. For example, broad keywords like “insurance”, “marketing”, or “technology” are all going to be highly competitive because they apply to a wide variety of searches, and there’s already a ton of content written on these topics.

The market for these and similar broad terms is completely saturated. Getting a foothold for a search term like “marketing” would be like constructing a generic coffee shop with no name recognition between a Starbucks and a Dunkin’ Donuts — you may get a bit of business here and there, but if someone thinks of coffee in your area, they’re probably going to go to one of the established businesses they know.

For your business to truly gain SEO traction, then, it’s important to take less competitive keywords into consideration. Focusing on less competitive keywords enables you to demonstrate what makes you different and reach an audience that’s best fit for your business.

If we go back to the coffee shop example, concentrating on less competitive keywords is like branding yourself as the only ‘specialty cat cafe’ in the city. In this situation, it’s easier to stand out because you’re focusing on what makes you unique to your target buyer persona.

After all, the person looking for a cat cafe to sit in and relax is probably not the same person wanting a quick cup of coffee on their way to work — just like someone searching for “technology” is not the same person searching for “small business technology setup service”.

What’s great about leaning into less competitive keywords is that it will allow you to clearly define your niche and build your authority within a specific field. Because there is less competition, it’s easier to establish yourself as a thought leader on a given subject — and, ultimately, establishing authority is invaluable when it comes to SEO.

The more authoritative you are on niche topics, the more authoritative your website will be overall. Building authority through great content, backlinks, and user experience is your best bet for getting your foot in the door and being able to compete with established players for more competitive and more valuable keywords.

Unfortunately, there’s no magic trick to jump to the top of the food chain when it comes to SEO. To rank well on search engines, you need to consistently create high-quality content and plan ahead to think about how all of your content will fit together in the long-term.

How to find keywords

Clearly define your target persona

Narrow your focus and investigate competitiveness

Collect data, analyze results, repeat

1. Clearly define your target persona.

Having a clear understanding of your ideal audience is going to be key for any marketing endeavor. With keyword research, it’s especially important to understand what questions you can answer or problems you can solve for this target persona. At this point, it’s okay to think in broad terms regarding what those problems or questions are.

For instance, if you’re a PR agency, you need to find leads who are interested in hiring a third-party to help them run a PR campaign. To do this, perhaps you begin by writing content that answers the question “How to run a successful PR campaign”.

A broader topic is a good starting point for building a pillar page for your topic cluster.

2. Narrow your focus and investigate competitiveness.

Once you’ve determined the overarching question or problem you are addressing, it’s time to get more specific. Getting more specific allows you to cater your content to your audience, and it helps you leverage less competitive keywords.

I like to narrow my focus by using lsigraph.com. LSI, or latent semantic indexing, is a process of generating search query variations by determining how closely a given search term relates to other search terms. Think of using latent semantic indexing tools as a way of brainstorming and generating a lot of keyword ideas quickly and easily.

From there, using other tools to analyze how competitive a keyword is — such as Google’s Keyword Planner — can help you determine which keywords have the most potential for your business. Again, if you’re organizing your content in a topic cluster, this is a good way to decide what your sub-topics and supporting content will be.

3. Collect data, analyze results, repeat.

As you create content around specific keywords, keep in mind that a great content strategist doesn’t just throw content out randomly to see what sticks. Consider using a tool like Google Search Console to keep track of how you’re performing for your keywords.

Google Search Console can also help you see whether you’re generating traffic from keywords you hadn’t planned on ranking for, which can inform your future strategy. Having this knowledge is crucial for further refining your keyword planning and identifying those green territories that have significant potential to bring you new customers.

Whether you’re just getting started with keyword planning or looking to amplify your SEO efforts that are already underway, keep your customer persona at the front of mind and don’t be afraid to recalibrate your strategy as you collect more data. Great inbound marketing is about having the right content reach your ideal potential customers when they need it, and getting smart with your keyword approach is a fantastic way to do that.

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How to Launch a Successful Online Community: A Step-by-Step Guide

New Post has been published on http://www.readersforum.tk/how-to-launch-a-successful-online-community-a-step-by-step-guide/

How to Launch a Successful Online Community: A Step-by-Step Guide

It’s no secret that the way people buy has fundamentally changed over the years.

These days, people are conducting their own research, reading product reviews, and seeking out recommendations before making a decision, and online communities are beginning to play a role in this process.

As of 2018, according to the B2B Buyers Survey Report, 45% of business buyers spent more time and resources researching purchases than they did the previous year. So, the more platforms you can launch your brand on, the more you can strengthen your buyers’ research.

B2B communities like

These forums provide people with an opportunity to learn from existing customers experiences and offer space for community feedback that can be used to bring trust and authenticity into an otherwise stale procedure.

If you’re launching a new community or refreshing an existing one, taking time to prepare a plan is crucial for ensuring success. The best way to start is to determine why you are building the community to begin with. Reasons may range from you are trying to support your existing business or marketing efforts to wanting to counteract negative reviews and identify passionate fans.

Either way, there are two questions you should consider when creating an online community:

Why should I engage with my customers online?

What’s the best platform to do it with?

To walk you through the process of setting up an online community in more detail, keep reading.

Free vs. Owned Community Forums: What’s the Right Move?

Although social networks and community platforms seem interchangeable, there actually is a clear distinction.

Social media, in general, is composed of users who have nothing in common (only using the platform because their friends are on it). Communities, however, revolve around a specific issue, and it’s up to you to take the social network and engage certain users on that platform to form a community that’s focused on your industry.

With this in mind, there are two types of communities you can launch: free or owned. Here’s the difference:

Free Community Platforms

There are “free” platforms like Facebook and Twitter, which offer community-like features, but using them has its pros and cons.

One key pro is that it’s free for users and comes with a built-in audience. In other words, you can stand up an account, create content, and publish it to your followers for free, as long as you do the leg work to find out who on this platform you want to reach

The con, on the other hand, is that you don’t truly “own” your community and are therefore beholden to the decisions these companies make for how the platform serves your content to others. Right when you’ve mastered the platform your community lives on, the content algorithm changes, and you’re forced to pivot your content strategy to retain your users’ attention. It’s been known to happen.

Here’s a brief list of free platforms to consider, if you decide to launch a community in this way:

Facebook

Twitter

LinkedIn

YouTube

G2 Crowd

GetApp

Quora

Discourse

Glassdoor

Slack

Owned Community Platforms

Then there’s the owned platform like a community forum. This is a place that is owned by the brand and offers all the benefits of a social media platform, but with much more control and flexibility on how you communicate with your members. For example, if you launch a blog or website with a forum or comment section for your visitors, this is an owned community that you can manage yourself.

As with free communities, there are pros and cons to an owned community. We’ll start with the con this time: From an audience perspective, you’re starting from scratch. Owned communities give you more freedom over your brand’s messaging, but until your customers find out about your community, you have way more promoting to do to grow that community than you might have on a free platform.

One major pro to owned community platforms is that they give you tighter controls over your branding and messaging — without having to compete with the noise of other communities on the same platform. A toy store on Twitter, for example, might have a built-in audience to engage, but this business has to compete with all the other toy stores on Twitter that are interacting with the same people.

Community platforms also allow you to go beyond the limitations of social networks. Features such as deeper analytics, single sign on (SSO), gamification, more access to your members and custom design allow you to create a better experience for your fans. If you require a secure, private area for your fans to interact with one another, this might be your best option.

1. Choose a platform for your community.

There are two types of forums: one revolving around shared interest and the other that is more informational in nature.

With a shared-interest forum, you’re bringing together people who happen to be interested in a common topic where they can explore and connect with each other on a larger range of topics. Collaboration between members is key here.

Informational forums are largely used when you want to create a space for the community to search for and share content related to your product, service, or designated topic in one location.

Once you’ve identified the use case and the type of engagement you’re after (i.e., customer support operations or brand loyalty), you’ll want to start looking at detailed features that would support your community goals. These can range from:

Deeper analytics

Ease of use and good user interface

Customer support

Platform flexibility

Integrations

Mobile

2. Develop a launch framework.

When determining what business problem you want to resolve with your community, consider the following.

Are you looking to:

Increase your customer satisfaction ratings?

Decrease costs related to customer support?

Increase demand of your product/service?

Identify and mobilize influencers and advocates?

Increase collaboration?

What is your use case? Will you use the information gained internally, externally, or a combination of both?

Knowing these answers will make it easier for you to identify why you are launching your online community and help you align its purpose to your intended goals.

3. Identify key internal stakeholders for the community.

After determining the need for forming your community, your next step is to identify your company’s stakeholders. You can consider three categories of stakeholders:

Those who will be managing the community. For external facing communities, this group of stakeholders may include the community manager, marketing department, and/or customer support. The stakeholders may vary greatly for internal communities.

Those who will be impacted by the community. If your community is external facing, marketing is generally involved because the answers you are seeking will have the most impact on them. If there is feedback from the community regarding product improvements, product management may also be involved.

Upper management. This stakeholder is the person who is responsible for the community and all that are affected by it. Usually, an executive could be an operations manager or a CMO who oversee all digital experiences.

Another way to go about identifying stakeholders is to lump the role of the community manager along with the social media management role. Your marketing team, operations department, customer service, or perhaps a specially created department may be put in charge of the community launch. In this instance, each department is likely to put focus on key performance indicators (KPIs) that are meaningful to them.

Marketing KPIs

Market share

Customer sentiment

Mobilizing influencers and advocates

NPS – Net Promoter Score

Operations

Operational efficiency

Reducing support costs

Customer Service

CSAT – Customer Satisfaction Score

NPS

Product Management

Product testing

Market research

Beta testing

Customer feedback

Typically, only one person will be tasked with the community launch. However, by leveraging resources and other talent within your company, your launch can be less stressful and more successful.

4. Set up your community.

Making a decision on what platform to use for your community is the first step. If you are launching the community on your own or taking a team approach, you will want to make sure that you or your team are familiar with the software you will be using. This is a good opportunity to play with a demo or go through some hands-on training.

After you and your team have a good understanding of the software you’ll be using, you can move on to making some setup decisions. These include:

Keeping your community pre-launch private. You do not want outsiders having access to your community until you are ready, so make sure to enable your privacy settings.

Displaying a list of recent discussions for the forum on the “homepage view.” New members or first time visitors may be more apt to join in the discussion if they see what is trending in your community.

Creating your initial categories. Remember, your initial category list is not carved in stone and you should avoid creating too many categories at the start. Keep it simple and let your categories evolve. This will help keep a handle on discussion noise.

Reviewing the sign-up process for members. The easier the process is, the more likely people will want to sign up for your community. You should consider a setting up a single sign-on (SSO). It is also important to thoroughly test your sign-up process before the pre-launch.

Defining the roles your staff and members. Decide what roles will be included within your community, such as moderators or super members. Consider who on your staff will be the community’s admin, moderators, or community manager.

Assigning permissions for roles. You will need to assign and test permissions to the roles you create. For example, you may restrict new accounts from posting pictures or links.

Deciding which features will be enabled. This includes plug-ins, add-ons, and other features that are integrated into your online forum. Some features may not be needed right away, but others may be crucial to getting your team the data they need.

Setting up gamification. Start thinking about the perks you want to reward your members with. This could be badges or other types of recognition for different achievements, such as being a beta-tester.

Implementing your theme. You will want to tie your forum into your brand. Do not settle for impersonal default settings. For example, utilize your company’s color scheme and add other personal touches.

Configuring spam controls. Take advantage of your software’s spam controls. Test the controls against a baseline of your trusted users. Adjust the settings as needed if you find that valid content is being labeled as spam.

Setting up outgoing email. Decide what email address will be used for forum notifications. Review your welcome and registration emails to make sure they say what you want.

Testing. You need to test everything before over and over until you are happy with all the parts of your forum. As you get closer to launch-time, your testing should become more stringent. Consider all types of probably scenarios and prepare yourself beforehand that not everything will be perfect. Get ready to decide on a launch date.

5. Begin a soft launch.

Once you are satisfied with the workings on your community, it is time to get ready for a soft launch. The purpose of a soft launch is to get your community ready for your full and public launch.

A great example of a soft launch is from BigFish Games with the introduction of their new game: Dungeon Boss. While preparing for the launch, they placed their app in the Apple Canada store and drove users to their community forum in a closed and private environment. They got a lot of customer feedback, some of which was incorporated into the Dungeon Boss game title. Consequently, when they launched worldwide, it became one of their most downloaded games.

Your soft launch should occur in three stages:

1. Preparing for the Soft-Launch

At this point, your community should be ready to be launched. All test content has been removed and any known issues have been fixed or have been scheduled to be fixed. It is time to pre-populate your community with quality content that will spark discussion and make good use of your existing content. Start off with at least 10 discussions using your existing material. Recruit your colleagues to get the ball rolling with these discussions. Tone is important, so you will want to set the right tone before moving on to the internal soft-launch.

2. Internal Soft-Launch

The purpose of the internal soft-launch is to identify problems using trusted people from your organization, colleagues, and friends before your forum goes public. While they are trying out your community, they can provide you with valuable feedback and report errors they find before moving to the full launch. This phase will allow your moderators an opportunity to learn how to use the tools that will be used in your forum. Any training deficiencies should be addressed and additional training provided if needed. Request feedback from your internal users. Then, set a deadline to move to the next phase: your public soft-launch.

3. Public Soft-Launch

This launch should be limited to a select audience that you will encourage to give you feedback on your new community forum. To form this group, try requesting volunteers from trusted customers, creating a banner on your website, or including a mention of it in your company newsletter. During your public soft-launch, address the following questions:

Who should you include in this group?

What problems do you want to solve while in this beta stage?

What is needed to transition the community to live status

What is your hard deadline to take your community to fully live?

Your goals should include:

Getting the public involved

Refining your community

Receiving feedback

Ensuring that your moderators and team are comfortable with the platform

6. Promote your community.

Once you have your date set, it’s time to get the word out to your target audience. The best way to do this is to take advantage of your existing presence online. Promote your launch all over your website, through email communications, and by having your sales team and customer service reps tell your existing and potential customers about the launch.

Here are some more tips that will help you drive the first 100 members to your community:

Invite your contacts. No, it’s not always fun to bombard your family members, friends, or professional contacts about something you’re working on … but it works.

Discuss with everyone and anyone. Get in the habit of talking to people everywhere you go, especially if your community is centered around a broad product or service that has value for many people.

Enlist the help of new members through gamification. Ask your growing, early group to help you broaden the network by inviting their friends, colleagues, and digital connections. You can encourage this through contests or reward systems integrated into your platform.

Partner with influencers. Collaborating with a related and complementary company can be an effective way to promote your new community and welcome new members who like both products and services.

Make sure you have configured all your Google and Webmaster tools accordingly. Provide a sitemap and make your community visible. If you have completed all these steps, the odds are that your online community launch will be successful.

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6 Fundamental Video Marketing Tips for Every Skill Level

New Post has been published on http://www.readersforum.tk/6-fundamental-video-marketing-tips-for-every-skill-level/

6 Fundamental Video Marketing Tips for Every Skill Level

Nowadays, most marketers obsess over how they can amplify their content’s reach as much as possible. More views means more leads and customers, right? While this convention can be true, it’ll only pan out if you optimize your videos for humans before you optimize them for algorithms.

Resonance is the most important determinant of whether your audience will take action, and your video’s creative is the most important determinant of whether your video will resonate with your audience. So even if your video reaches a million people, if it doesn’t resonate with them, it won’t persuade anyone to take your preferred action, let alone remember your brand.

With this insight in mind, let’s go over six fundamental video marketing tips that’ll help you craft videos that resonate with as many people as they reach.

Video Marketing Tips

Hook your audience.

Tell stories.

Evoke positive emotions.

Make your videos “sticky”.

Rely on visuals.

Add appropriate soundtracks to your videos.

1. Hook your audience.

When Facebook analyzed their users’ video consumption data in 2016, they discovered that 45% of people who watch the first three seconds of a video will keep watching it for at least 30 seconds.

This data indicates that sparking your audience’s curiosity with an attention-grabbing title isn’t enough to engage them. You also need to instantly hook your viewers within the first three seconds of your video — the human attention span isn’t long enough to be entertained by sluggish content.

But what actually hooks people? What we’ve discovered at HubSpot is that an effective video hook visually engages viewers and previews the video’s core message. Creating these types of hooks can simultaneously grab your viewers’ attention and generate interest in the rest of the video.

2. Tell stories.

In the neuroscience field, researchers have proven that storytelling is the best way to capture people’s attention, bake information into their memories, and resonate emotionally with them. The human brain is programmed to crave, seek out, and respond to well-crafted narrative — that’ll never change.

In fact, when someone tells you a story, they can plant their personal experiences and ideas directly into your mind, so you start to feel what they feel. For instance, if someone describes eating a plate of lobster mac and cheese, your sensory cortex lights up. If someone recounts scoring their first touchdown, your motor cortex enlivens.

In other words, powerful stories evoke empathy because they activate parts of the brain that’d operate if you actually experienced the stories’ events. And by using their own memories to recreate your story’s sensory details, your audience can turn your video’s events into their own ideas and experience.

3. Evoke positive emotions.

Psychology tells us that emotions drive our behavior, while logic justifies our actions after the fact. Marketing confirms this theory — humans associate the same personality traits with brands as they do with people. So choosing between two alternatives is like choosing your best friend or significant other. We go with the option that makes us feel something.

If you want your videos to resonate with your viewers, consider kindling warm feelings rather than fear, anger, or disgust. In fact, happiness, hope, and excitement are some of the most common emotions that drive viral content, so if your video can evoke these emotions, it could rake in a ton of views and generate a lot of engagement.

4. Make your videos “sticky”.

In their book, Made to Stick, brothers Chip and Dan Heath taught readers a model for making ideas “sticky”, or, in other words, making ideas digestible, memorable, and compelling.

By analyzing countless amounts of “sticky” ideas, like JFK’s “Man on the Moon” speech and even some conspiracy theories, the Heath Brothers noticed that a “sticky” idea usually follows six principles:

Simple: its core message must be easy to grasp.

Unexpected: it should break cliche and evoke enough curiosity to grab someone���s attention and hold it.

Concrete: it should be vividly painted in people’s minds.

Credible: it should be supported by evidence.

Emotional: it should have a purpose and relate to people.

Story-driven: it should tell a story that inspires people to act.

The Heath Brothers recommend following as many of their “Made to Stick” principles as possible when devising your idea, so check out this blog post about The Psychology Behind Marketing Viral Videos to learn how five brands followed most of these principles with one of their videos and succeeded in capturing viral attention.

5. Rely on visuals.

When we were babies, we relied on vision to associate objects with behaviors, like a ball meaning play time. Vision was the only way to learn about the world.

That’s why you can understand visual information in 250 milliseconds and why your visual system activates over 50% of your brain. Watching something has always been the best way to learn.

Visual storytelling helps people grasp concepts and data easily, so consider complementing your video’s text and narration with dynamic graphics, popular movie and TV scenes, and footage of real people. If you do this, your viewers can listen to the information and watch a visual representation of it, helping them form a concrete understanding of your video’s core idea.

6. Add appropriate soundtracks to your videos.

Choosing the right soundtrack can be the difference between a video that grips your audience from start to finish and one that they can barely get halfway through.

Play a fitting soundtrack or jingle in your video, and you can grab your audience’s attention and evoke the specific emotions and feelings you want them to associate with your brand. Neglect the musical aspect of your video, and people might actually think less of your brand.

In a 1994 study that tested music’s effect on brand attitudes, half the participants watched an apple juice commercial with music while the other half watched it without music. 23% of participants who saw the apple juice commercial with music reported that one of the beverage’s benefits was “drinking a natural drink”. But out of the participants who watched the commercial without music, only 4% reported the same belief about the apple juice brand.

Music can make your videos much more captivating, impactful, and, in turn, convincing. So whether you’re creating fun social media videos, persuasive product videos, or even serious training videos, you must remember that music can separate your video from the rest of the pack.

Resonance is arguably more important than reach.

For most marketers today, reach is the metric they want to see growing on a consistent basis. But without strong emotional resonance, having a wide reach doesn’t really matter. So before you start optimizing your videos for algorithms, remember to optimize them for humans first and craft the most compelling content you possibly can.

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KOLs: What They Are & Why They're Key to Your Marketing Strategy

New Post has been published on http://www.readersforum.tk/kols-what-they-are-why-theyre-key-to-your-marketing-strategy/

KOLs: What They Are & Why They're Key to Your Marketing Strategy

Over the past few years, influencer marketing has become an incredibly successful strategy for brands looking to reach a targeted audience on social media. And, with an average ROI of $6.50 for each dollar spent, it’s undoubtedly powerful.

If you’re a marketer, I’m willing to bet you’ve heard the term ‘influencer’ before. But what about key opinion leaders, or KOLs … have you heard of them?

Despite certain commonalities between KOLs and influencers, the two terms aren’t synonymous. And if your brand is looking to reach a specific, niche demographic, you might want to consider implementing a strategy that incorporates KOLs.

Here, we’re going to explore what KOLs are, and why they’re a critical component of your 2019 marketing strategy.

What are KOLs?

To consider what a KOL (key opinion leader) is, let’s start with a real-life example.

Jaclyn Hill is a makeup artist and YouTuber whose channel focuses primarily on beauty products. With 5.8 million YouTube subscribers (as well as 6.2 million followers on Instagram), Hill is considered a makeup and beauty expert by her online community.

In 2015, Becca Cosmetics partnered with Hill to create a limited-edition highlighter known as “Champagne Pop”. The product was extremely successful, breaking Sephora’s record for most-purchased product on its first day of release.

Becca Cosmetics could have chosen another influencer to collaborate with, but the brand knew Hill had a specific niche community they wanted to reach.

Hill was ultimately more than just another influencer to Becca Cosmetics — she was a KOL, or key opinion leader.

A KOL is similar to an influencer in regards to follower size, but a KOL has a more targeted audience. For instance, Hill’s YouTube channel is dedicated solely to beauty trends and products. If she were to post a cooking video, it might not be well-received by her community. Her fans rely on her as an authority figure in the beauty space.

Since KOLs are considered experts on certain topics, they’re often regarded as trustworthy and authentic. Their authenticity enables them to have influence on the opinions and preferences of their audiences — which is why partnering with a KOL is a particularly powerful strategy for your brand.

There are three major benefits to using a KOL as part of your marketing strategy. Let’s dive into those, now.

Benefits of KOLs for Your Marketing Strategy

1. A KOL can help you target your ideal audience.

Whether you’re interested in boosting awareness or generating leads, a KOL can help you quickly identify and reach your ideal audience. Essentially, a KOL has done all the hard work for you — she’s taken the time to engage with a specific, niche audience, and she’s grown a community centered around a specific interest.

A KOL is a particularly powerful opportunity to reach your ideal audience. For instance, let’s say your business sells organic smoothie products. Your product is relatively niche, so you don’t necessarily need to cast a wide net when attracting and engaging new leads.

Rather than posting Facebook ads or cultivating a strong presence on Google, you might be better off reaching out to a KOL like Massy Arias, who has 2.5 million followers and posts content exclusively related to health and fitness. Since Arias’ typically posts organic health and fitness content and has proven an expert in this realm, her fans are more likely to trust when she recommends your product.

2. A KOL can help you generate sales.

A KOL can help you attract attention to a new product or raise awareness of your brand, both of which can help you boost sales. With 82% of consumers saying they’d follow the recommendation of an influencer, it stands to reason a KOL could have tremendous impact on your bottom line.

Alternatively, your company might consider collaborating with a KOL to create an exclusive product — like “Champagne Pop” by Becca Cosmetics and Jaclyn Hill. Since your KOL is well-aware of industry trends and uniquely engaged with the consumer market, she’s more likely to help you identify areas for improvement in your current product or overall marketing strategy — so you’ll get the most for your money if you use her as a collaborator, as well.

3. Increase your own reach.

A KOL can help ensure you’re reaching the ideal target market for your brand — and, additionally, she can enable you to reach a much larger percentage of potential consumers than you might’ve otherwise.

Without a hefty marketing budget, it could be difficult for your brand to reach one million people via traditional advertising methods — plus, traditional ads don’t allow you to target a specific group of people.

Alternatively, you could collaborate with a KOL who has one million followers on YouTube, Instagram, or another platform, and reach one million people who are specifically interested in your industry. A KOL partnership is cheaper, quicker, and potentially more effective than most traditional advertising methods — so, if it makes sense for your brand, why not try it out?

How to Find a KOL

Finding a key opinion leader in your industry is relatively easy. On YouTube, you might try searching keywords related to your product or service, and peruse the various accounts that show up as search results. Alternatively, you could search hashtags on Instagram to find influencers who specialize in a specific, targeted field.

You might also check out “The Ultimate List of Instagram Influencers in Every Industry (94 and Counting!)” — since these influencers are separated by niche industries, you’ll likely find a key opinion leader whose audience directly matches your target market.

[readersforum]

Apple could be adding Siri Shortcuts and Screen Time to macOS

New Post has been published on http://www.readersforum.tk/apple-could-be-adding-siri-shortcuts-and-screen-time-to-macos/

Apple could be adding Siri Shortcuts and Screen Time to macOS

Apple wants to add more iOS features to macOS according to a report from 9to5Mac’s Guilherme Rambo. And it starts with improvements to Siri.

While Siri has been available on macOS for a while, it feels like a scaled-down version of Siri. Sure, you can ask for the weather, NBA scores or a word translation. You can also turn off the Wi-Fi or look up a file on your hard drive.

But Siri on macOS doesn’t work with any third-party app. You can’t send a message on WhatsApp, you can’t send some money using Square Cash, you can’t order an Uber.

According to 9to5Mac, this will change with macOS 10.15 this fall. Apple is working on adding support for Siri Shortcuts, which means that you’ll theoretically be able to create custom voice shortcuts to trigger actions in third-party apps.

Existing macOS apps won’t be able to add hooks for Siri Shortcuts — the feature should be limited to iOS ports that leverage the upcoming Marzipan framework. As a result, you can also expect a Shortcuts app to create your own scripts in a visual interface. Shortcuts has become the equivalent of Automator for iOS. Let’s see what happens to Automator after macOS 10.15.

The macOS update won’t just focus on Siri. You should expect to see Screen Time, the iOS feature that tells you how much time you spent in each app on your devices. The current implementation of Screen Time combines your usage across all your iOS devices, such as your iPhone and your iPad. But adding macOS data to the mix is key if you want to see the full picture.

Finally, Apple will let you control your Apple ID more easily from the Mac. Instead of relying on Apple’s website, you’ll be able to set up family sharing and more from a new panel in System Preferences.

[readersforum]

3 steps to signing more clients

New Post has been published on http://www.readersforum.tk/3-steps-to-signing-more-clients/

3 steps to signing more clients

If you’re reading this, chances are that your agency is already using or considering a marketing automation platform to help your clients grow their funnels of customers or prospects and win more business.

Despite using it for clients, however, many agencies are still not using marketing automation internally to support their own business development strategies. Marketing automation is hands down the best tool for achieving the three “gets” that any agency needs in order to grow: Getting found, getting the meeting, and getting the business.

In this issue of Agency Perspectives from Sharp Spring, you will:

Learn why you should use marketing automation internally for your agency in addition to using it for clients.

Discover new strategies for generating awareness, leads and conversions.

Get actionable tips for optimizing your lists, workflows, content library and more.

Visit Digital Marketing Depot to download “3 Steps to Signing More Clients.”

The post 3 steps to signing more clients appeared first on Marketing Land.

[readersforum]

New customer acquisition vs. retention: 7 best practices for search

New Post has been published on http://www.readersforum.tk/new-customer-acquisition-vs-retention-7-best-practices-for-search/

New customer acquisition vs. retention: 7 best practices for search

Here’s how retailers should map their audience strategy for new-versus-returning customers to search.

The post New customer acquisition vs. retention: 7 best practices for search appeared first on Marketing Land.

Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

[readersforum]

Digital marketers on Pinterest IPO: Get in early while costs are low, learning opportunities are high

New Post has been published on http://www.readersforum.tk/digital-marketers-on-pinterest-ipo-get-in-early-while-costs-are-low-learning-opportunities-are-high/

Digital marketers on Pinterest IPO: Get in early while costs are low, learning opportunities are high

January Digital CEO optimistic the company will grow exponentially if it continues to develop the right tech stack.

The post Digital marketers on Pinterest IPO: Get in early while costs are low, learning opportunities are high appeared first on Marketing Land.

Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

[readersforum]

Here’s how to get the most out of your marketing analytics investment

New Post has been published on http://www.readersforum.tk/heres-how-to-get-the-most-out-of-your-marketing-analytics-investment/

Here’s how to get the most out of your marketing analytics investment

Build organizational structure and develop analytics leaders who bridge data science with marketing strategy to improve your return on investment.

The post Here’s how to get the most out of your marketing analytics investment appeared first on Marketing Land.

Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

[readersforum]

How National Public Radio reinvented itself for an on-demand audience

New Post has been published on http://www.readersforum.tk/how-national-public-radio-reinvented-itself-for-an-on-demand-audience/

How National Public Radio reinvented itself for an on-demand audience

At MarTech West, NPR’s Meg Goldthwaite highlighted how agile the news organization has become in developing different listening formats for their popular content as voice-enabled devices have grown.

The post How National Public Radio reinvented itself for an on-demand audience appeared first on…

Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

[readersforum]

The One-Hour Guide to SEO: Link Building - Whiteboard Friday

New Post has been published on http://www.readersforum.tk/the-one-hour-guide-to-seo-link-building-whiteboard-friday/

The One-Hour Guide to SEO: Link Building - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

The final episode in our six-part One-Hour Guide to SEO series deals with a topic that’s a perennial favorite among SEOs: link building. Today, learn why links are important to both SEO and to Google, how Google likely measures the value of links, and a few key ways to begin earning your own.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. We are back with our final part in the One-Hour Guide to SEO, and this week talking about why links matter to search engines, how you can earn links, and things to consider when doing link building.

Why are links important to SEO?

So we’ve discussed sort of how search engines rank pages based on the value they provide to users. We’ve talked about how they consider keyword use and relevant topics and content on the page. But search engines also have this tool of being able to look at all of the links across the web and how they link to other pages, how they point between pages.



So it turns out that Google had this insight early on that what other people say about you is more important, at least to them, than what you say about yourself. So you may say, “I am the best resource on the web for learning about web marketing.” But it turns out Google is not going to believe you unless many other sources, that they also trust, say the same thing. Google’s big innovation, back in 1997 and 1998, when Sergey Brin and Larry Page came out with their search engine, Google, was PageRank, this idea that by looking at all the links that point to all the pages on the internet and then sort of doing this recursive process of seeing which are the most important and most linked to pages, they could give each page on the web a weight, an amount of PageRank.

Then those pages that had a lot of PageRank, because many people linked to them or many powerful people linked to them, would then pass more weight on when they linked. That understanding of the web is still in place today. It’s still a way that Google thinks about links. They’ve almost certainly moved on from the very simplistic PageRank formula that came out in the late ’90s, but that thinking underlies everything they’re doing.

How does Google measure the value of links?

Today, Google measures the value of links in many very sophisticated ways, which I’m not going to try and get into, and they’re not public about most of these anyway. But there is a lot of intelligence that we have about how they think about links, including things like more important, more authoritative, more well-linked-to pages are going to pass more weight when they link.

A.) More important, authoritative, well-linked-to pages pass more weight when they link

That’s true of both individual URLs, an individual page, and websites, a whole website. So for example, if a page on The New York Times links to yoursite.com, that is almost certainly going to be vastly more powerful and influential in moving your rankings or moving your ability to rank in the future than if randstinysite.info — which I haven’t yet registered, but I’ll get on that — links to yoursite.com.

This weighting, this understanding of there are powerful and important and authoritative websites, and then there are less powerful and important and authoritative websites, and it tends to be the case that more powerful ones tend to provide more ranking value is why so many SEOs and marketers use metrics like Moz’s domain authority or some of the metrics from Moz’s competitors out in the software space to try and intuit how powerful, how influential will this link be if this domain points to me.

B.) Diversity of domains, rate of link growth, and editorial nature of links ALL matter

So the different kinds of domains and the rate of link growth and the editorial nature of those links all matter. So, for example, if I get many new links from many new websites that have never linked to me before and they are editorially given, meaning I haven’t spammed to place them, I haven’t paid to place them, they were granted to me because of interesting things that I did or because those sites wanted to editorially endorse my work or my resources, and I do that over time in greater quantities and at a greater rate of acceleration than my competitors, I am likely to outrank them for the words and phrases related to those topics, assuming that all the other smart SEO things that we’ve talked about in this One-Hour Guide have also been done.

C.) HTML-readable links that don’t have rel=”nofollow” and contain relevant anchor text on indexable pages pass link benefit

HTML readable links, meaning as a simple text browser browses the web or a simple bot, like Googlebot, which can be much more complex as we talked about in the technical SEO thing, but not necessarily all the time, those HTML readable links that don’t have the rel=”nofollow” parameter, which is something that you can append to links to say I don’t editorially endorse this, and many, many websites do.

If you post a link to Twitter or to Facebook or to LinkedIn or to YouTube, they’re going to carry this rel=”nofollow,”saying I, YouTube, don’t editorially endorse this website that this random user has uploaded a video about. Okay. Well, it’s hard to get a link from YouTube. And it contains relevant anchor text on an indexable page, one that Google can actually browse and see, that is going to provide the maximum link benefit.

So a href=”https://yoursite.com” great tool for audience intelligence, that would be the ideal link for my new startup, for example, which is SparkToro, because we do audience intelligence and someone saying we’re a tool is perfect. This is a link that Google can read, and it provides this information about what we do.

It says great tool for audience intelligence. Awesome. That is powerful anchor text that will help us rank for those words and phrases. There are loads more. There are things like which pages linked to and which pages linked from. There are spam characteristics and trustworthiness of the sources. Alt attributes, when they’re used in image tags, serve as the anchor text for the link, if the image is a link.

There’s the relationship, the topical relationship of the linking page and linking site. There’s text surrounding the link, which I think some tools out there offer you information about. There’s location on the page. All of this stuff is used by Google and hundreds more factors to weight links. The important part for us, when we think about links, is generally speaking if you cover your bases here, it’s indexable, carries good anchor text, it’s from diverse domains, it’s at a good pace, it is editorially given in nature, and it’s from important, authoritative, and well linked to sites, you’re going to be golden 99% of the time.

Are links still important to Google?

Many folks I think ask wisely, “Are links still that important to Google? It seems like the search engine has grown in its understanding of the web and its capacities.” Well, there is some pretty solid evidence that links are still very powerful. I think the two most compelling to me are, one, the correlation of link metrics over time. 

So like Google, Moz itself produces an index of the web. It is billions and billions of pages. I think it’s actually trillions of pages, trillions of links across hundreds of billions of pages. Moz produces metrics like number of linking root domains to any given domain on the web or any given page on the web.

Moz has a metric called Domain Authority or DA, which sort of tries to best replicate or best correlate to Google’s own rankings. So metrics like these, over time, have been shockingly stable. If it were the case someday that Google demoted the value of links in their ranking systems, basically said links are not worth that much, you would expect to see a rapid drop.

But from 2007 to 2019, we’ve never really seen that. It’s fluctuated. Mostly it fluctuates based on the size of the link index. So for many years Ahrefs and Majestic were bigger link indices than Moz. They had better link data, and their metrics were better correlated.

Now Moz, since 2018, is much bigger and has higher correlation than they do. So the various tools are sort of warring with each other, trying to get better and better for their customers. You can see those correlations with Google pretty high, pretty standard, especially for a system that supposedly contains hundreds, if not thousands of elements.

When you see a correlation of 0.25 or 0.3 with one number, linking root domains or page authority or something like that, that’s pretty surprising. The second one is that many SEOs will observe this, and I think this is why so many SEO firms and companies pitch their clients this way, which is the number of new, high quality, editorially given linking root domains, linking domains, so The New York Times linked to me, and now The Washington Post linked to me and now wired.com linked to me, these high-quality, different domains, that correlates very nicely with ranking positions.

So if you are ranking number 12 for a keyword phrase and suddenly that page generates many new links from high-quality sources, you can expect to see rapid movement up toward page one, position one, two, or three, and this is very frequent.

How do I get links?

Obviously, this is not alone, but very common. So I think the next reasonable question to ask is, “Okay, Rand, you’ve convinced me. Links are important. How do I get some?” Glad you asked. There are an infinite number of ways to earn new links, and I will not be able to represent them here. But professional SEOs and professional web marketers often use tactics that fall under a few buckets, and this is certainly not an exhaustive list, but can give you some starting points.

1. Content & outreach

The first one is content and outreach. Essentially, the marketer finds a resource that they could produce, that is relevant to their business, what they provide for customers, data that they have, interesting insights that they have, and they produce that resource knowing that there are people and publications out there that are likely to want to link to it once it exists.

Then they let those people and publications know. This is essentially how press and PR work. This is how a lot of content building and link outreach work. You produce the content itself, the resource, whatever it is, the tool, the dataset, the report, and then you message the people and publications who are likely to want to cover it or link to it or talk about it. That process is tried-and-true. It has worked very well for many, many marketers. 

2. Link reclamation

Second is link reclamation. So this is essentially the process of saying, “Gosh, there are websites out there that used to link to me, that stopped linking.” The link broke. The link points to a 404, a page that no longer loads on my website.

The link was supposed to be a link, but they didn’t include the link. They said SparkToro, but they forgot to actually point to the SparkToro website. I should drop them a line. Maybe I’ll tweet at them, at the reporter who wrote about it and be like, “Hey, you forgot the link.” Those types of link reclamation processes can be very effective as well.

They’re often some of the easiest, lowest hanging fruit in the link building world. 

3. Directories, resource pages, groups, events, etc.

Directories, resource pages, groups, events, things that you can join and participate in, both online or online and offline, so long as they have a website, often link to your site. The process is simply joining or submitting or sponsoring or what have you.

Most of the time, for example, when I get invited to speak at an event, they will take my biography, a short, three-sentence blurb, that includes a link to my website and what I do, and they will put it on their site. So pitching to speak at events is a way to get included in these groups. I started Moz with my mom, Gillian Muessig, and Moz has forever been a woman-owned business, and so there are women-owned business directories.

I don’t think we actually did this, but we could easily go, “Hey, you should include Moz as a woman-owned business.We should be part of your directory here in Seattle.” Great, that’s a group we could absolutely join and get links from. 

4. Competitors’ links

So this is basically the practice you almost certainly will need to use tools to do this. There are some free ways to do it.

The simple, free way to do it is to say, “I have competitor 1 brand name and competitor 2 brand name.I’m going to search for the combination of those two in Google, and I’m going to look for places that have written about and linked to both of them and see if I can also replicate the tactics that got them coverage.” The slightly more sophisticated way is to go use a tool. Moz’s Link Explorer does this.

So do tools from people like Majestic and Ahrefs. I’m not sure if SEMrush does. But basically you can plug in, “Here’s me. Here’s my competitors. Tell me who links to them and does not link to me.” Moz’s tool calls this the Link Intersect function. But you don’t even need the link intersect function.

You just plug in a competitor’s domain and look at here are all the links that point to them, and then you start to replicate their tactics. There are hundreds more and many, many resources on Moz’s website and other great websites about SEO out there that talk about many of these tactics, and you can certainly invest in those. Or you could conceivably hire someone who knows what they’re doing to go do this for you. Links are still powerful. 

Okay. Thank you so much. I want to say a huge amount of appreciation to Moz and to Tyler, who’s behind the camera — he’s waving right now, you can’t see it, but he looks adorable waving — and to everyone who has helped make this possible, including Cyrus Shepard and Britney Muller and many others.

Hopefully, this one-hour segment on SEO can help you upgrade your skills dramatically. Hopefully, you’ll send it to some other folks who might need to upgrade their understanding and their skills around the practice. And I’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

In case you missed them:

Check out the other episodes in the series so far:

The One-Hour Guide to SEO, Part 1: SEO Strategy

The One-Hour Guide to SEO, Part 2: Keyword Research

The One-Hour Guide to SEO, Part 3: Searcher Satisfaction

The One-Hour Guide to SEO, Part 4: Keyword Targeting & On-Page Optimization

The One-Hour Guide to SEO, Part 5: Technical SEO

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