Popularity and Effectiveness of Digital Marketing

 

One of the most important aspects in marketing is content marketing.

In order to have a great content marketing strategy, we have to write – and write LOTS! As marketers, we have a natural tendency to want to grow our business fast and write in every outlet possible. This means getting in front of as many outlets as possible. Not only does this involve spending lots of money, (remember, this article is about doing more with less) you don’t want to risk losing the real voice of your company by outsourcing too soon or having too many staff writers. It is wise to save money by building your audience organically. This way, your audience will be truly aligned with what you are selling. Although it may take time to build the audience, it is safer in the long run. Plan to spend your budget on high quality content. That way, when you are ready to outsource and have many staff members, your audience will appreciate the content because they are aligned with your voice, your product, and who you really are.

 

Wait a minute – what happens if I don’t even have content – a voice, or even anywhere to start?

That is an easy fix – segment your content off of one piece of content. For example this whitepaper is based off of this webinar. Let’s look at other popular marketing websites that do the same thing – Hubspot (Leading inbound marketing and sales platform) has an email marketing webinar and an email marketing infographic with most of the same information. All they did was repurpose their webinar information and make it into a delightful infographic. Take BuzzFeed for example, many of their popularvideos are based off their posts. Creating content can be very simple! It just takes one piece and from there you can produce up to 20 pieces of content if done wisely.

Lets break it down: One webinar = enough content for 5 blogs, 5 white papers, 1 podcast, 1 how-to-guide, eventually turned into promoted content, social media feed (live tweets throughout the webinar) and that webinar can be translated into SEO (search engine optimization) content (we use a system that picks up and captions the audio.)

 

Another form of marketing that is very popular is video marketing. When creating videos for marketing,it is important to have high quality videos (are we starting to notice a trend here?) So, how little can you spend on video marketing?

Well there are different teirs of camera’s and depending on the amount and the type of video work you are doing the cost of your camera may vary but you can start off with a good quality HDvideo camera or DLSR for about $1000, or you could buy a less expensive camera with DSLR quality like the Canon Powershot G7X for around $500. If that’s still out of your budget then you can always set up a newer smartphone like the iPhone 6 on a tripod and film your videos with that. Another way to not break the bank on a video marketing tool is a Go-Pro camera. They come with many attachments and product quality videos, and the new Go Pro Hero 4 Black has an improved microphone. One thing to keep in mind is the Go Pro does shoot at a wider angle.

Lighting and sound are important aspects you have to also take into consideration when producing videos – listen to our webinar (see what we did here) for more information on how to not break the bank on lighting and sound. So, you have your tools and are ready to produce a high quality B2B video: What happens if I don’t know anything about video marketing? Well, this is ironic, but, check out YouTube! There are many “how-to” videos on how to produce videos.We come across many prospects that are afraid to produce their own videos because they don’t have editing skills or music. A tip and trick: subscribe to a music service. These services let you download music royalty free and also give you tons of audio effects for editing purposes. They are very user friendly, you will be able to pick them up in no time – probably without even reading the instructions. Once you have your music head over to YouTube and watch some tutorials on how to use editing software; understanding the basics of sequencing isn’t very difficult and give you the ability to create your own video content.

 

What NOT to DO:

  • rely on a webcam
  • rely on a shaky iPhone (we suggest always having a stand)
  • rely on YouTube*

*YouTube is great for search engine purposes – not for embedding purposes. We suggest checking out Vimeo, or Wistia, as well as uploading on YouTube (for branding/SEO purposes)

 

Graphic Design

As a business, you know it is important to look good! You also know good-looking content is an important aspect as well. Everything from blogs, whitepapers, videos, infographics (pretty much everything we have talked about here) should be visually appealing to the reader. Not only will it keep your buyer engaged throughout their journey, it makes you and your brand look reputable and good.

If you are an advanced graphic designer keep doing what you are doing! If you consider yourself beginner to intermediate with Photoshop, keep doing what you’re doing, outsource if necessary. If you have never opened the Photoshop application or just are not comfortable enough in it we suggest outsourcing your graphics. If you choose to outsource your graphics you can simply go online and bid for services. It’s as simple as that! Another way to save your dollars is to work with students. Many eager students will work for experience.

To summarize, it is possible to do more with less. Whether you’re reading this because you are starting your marketing strategy, developing or just interested in how to save more money, we hope this was helpful. Let us know. Leave some comments. We would love to hear from you.