If you are not working within these digital platforms on a daily basis, the changes can often be overwhelming. Fortunately, in addition to providing digital marketing services, the 435 Digital team strives to educate the business community about ongoing changes in digital marketing and the necessary strategies to be successful through ongoing seminars. These seminars are a mix of lively informative presentations, as well as engaging discussions with real business owners.

On April 3rd Joan Daluga and I led a two-hour Introduction to Social Media Marketing seminar with an eager group of business owners. Both Joan and I were able to interact one-on-one with each of the attendees, but Derrick Gillard of The Fashion Buddha was willing to answer a few questions after the seminar about his experience.

1. What did your business look to achieve at the Introduction to Social Media Seminar on April 3rd?

I didn’t know what to expect, really. I was open to the experience, and I was not disappointed. I was warmly met by one of the speakers and immediately made to feel at home. I was just in a space of wanting to understand, and 435 Digital delivered the whole package!

2. How did 435 Digital’s presentation resonate?

I love to communicate with all people and I feel a sense of loss when I cannot do so effectively. The tips, techniques, and social etiquette that were provided by Joan and Austin really resonated with me in helping me with what I love the most – effective and positive communication.

3. Would you recommend 435 Digital Seminars to other business owners?

Yes, I would recommend the presentations by 435 Digital to other business owners!

Developing a business can be a challenge. You are constantly wearing different hats and changing masks, depending on what you are seeking to accomplish for that day. I felt first-hand the concern and the desire to help me build my brand and I was able to sit in a one-on-one with one of the presenters to laser in on my specific needs, goals, and aspirations. You can’t find that type of commitment much anymore. Thank you, 435 Digital.

As 435 Digital moves forward with upcoming seminars, feedback like Derrick’s pushes us to continue providing the highest quality of content and value. With a deep understanding of many industries, our team can relate the value and strategies of digital marketing to your business needs.

If your business needs to polish-up or jump-start its digital marketing strategy, 435 Digital seminars are for you. Upcoming seminar topics include SEO, Website Development, and Google Analytics. Interested in one or all of those? Use the discount code “435BLOG” to receive 10% off your registration fee.

The post Digital Marketing Training for Small Businesses appeared first on 435 Digital.

In my last blog post I provided an introduction, definition and guide to one of the hottest topics in the B2B Marketing space: Content Marketing. In that post titled Content Marketing: The Engine that Drives B2B Marketing I noted that you’ll want to consider ways to repurpose existing content to make it more useful; more easily understood or simply more interesting, and that’s true. But there’s another reason to repurpose your content.

Why Repurpose Content?

Let’s use the Content Marketing blog article as an example. We took the time to research and write the article, and then we made sure it contained the right key words so it would help us for search. We posted the article on our blog, shared it on Facebook, Twitter and via LinkedIn. But maybe you missed it or maybe you’re just not the kind of person who likes to read blog posts.

There are people who would rather watch a video or quickly scan a slideshow, and repurposing the content simply means we take that blog article and create something new, like a PowerPoint Presentation. By way of demonstration we created a Power Point Presentation based on the blog post.

But what can we do with a presentation that will allow us to reach more people? We can use Slideshare!

What is Slideshare?

SlideShare is an online community where you can share PowerPoint, PDF, Video and Webinar presentations. And the site gets an amazing 60 million visitors a month, which ranks it as one of the 200 most visited websites on the internet.

By posting our new PowerPoint Presentation on Slideshare, we offer our potential clients a new way to interact us, we get a second use for the work we put into researching and writing the article, and we expand our reach to the 60 Million visitors slideshare has.

A Quick Overview of Slideshare:

• Upload PowerPoint, Video and PDF presentations
• Search for and View presentations
• Share your presentations on Twitter, Facebook and Link
• Embed your Presentations on your blog or in your website
• Create your own Channel just like on YouTube
• Slidecast: sync your slideshows with sound

Here is an example of a slideshare presentation summarizing content marketing.

The post Content Marketing Strategies: Repurpose Content with Slideshare appeared first on 435 Digital.

Why Content Marketing?

Every few years there are ideas that significantly dominate the “internet marketing” discussion. Mobile Marketing and Social Media Marketing are examples, and today the topic at the forefront of nearly every B2B (business to business) marketing discussion is Content Marketing.

David Kirkpatrick, Senior Reporter at MarketingSherpa recently wrote, “According to research from the 2012 Lead Generation Benchmark Report, content marketing was one of the top four channels for lead generation budgets for this year (2012). And, as a less quantitative measure of the importance of content marketing, it was featured in almost every presentation at the recent B2B Summit 2012, whether the main focus was lead gen, email, social media or event marketing.”

At the core of this trend is the fundamental desire for most B2B Buyers to conduct online research before we know they are interested in making a purchase decision.

According to SiriusDecisions 2012 – 70% of B2B buyers’ journey is complete before they ever become a sales lead. Which leads us to the fundamental question: “How do we influence a buyer before we even know who they are? Or if they are interested in our product or service?” For a growing majority of B2B marketers, the answer is Content Marketing.

Content Marketing Overview

Despite all the discussion and focus, there can be a lot of confusion around what Content Marketing is, and isn’t.

Content Marketing is not a direct sales tactic. It’s not fast, cheap or easy. Content Marketing is about understanding your target audience, systematically learning what pain they experience, what information they are likely to need at each stage in the buying cycle and then providing it to them, even if that information does not directly relate to your specific product and or service.

Content Marketing is about building a reputation within your market as a thought leader, as an information aggregator and as an industry collaborator. It’s about establishing a connection with buyers by providing information across multiple channels without the expectation of immediate gain or short term sales. Because in the process of helping your market, you are given the opportunity to build trust and respect with potential buyers in the first 70% of the buyers journey.

Content Needs Identification, Acquisition and Repurposing

So let’s say you’re interested in getting started and you’re wondering “What’s the next step? In answer to that question we put together a 4 point list.

· Create a Content Needs Assessment: Reach out to your current clients and ask them a few questions about what information they found helpful or what information they wished they could have found during their purchasing journey. Try to gather information that corresponds to the stages in the buying cycle. You may also want to creatively envision an improved buying journey to provide information or help your current clients may not have considered.

· Audit your existing resources for content: Your website, blog, sales presentations, research and sales collateral materials are good places to look for existing content.

· Use User Generated Content (UGC): Social media networks are a good place to look for unsolicited testimonials and customer experiences.

· Repurpose The Content You Have: Consider ways to repurpose the existing content to make it more useful; more easily understood or simply more interesting. Using information you have to create a SlideShow, or a Video or Podcast are examples of repurposing content.

Content Creation

At some point you will have exhausted your existing content resources and the focus will turn to content creation, which is neither easy nor free.

Daniel Burstein, of MECLABS recently shared this three point strategy for content creation:

“Identify your audience and understand their needs. Everyone, everyone, everyone has pain points.”

“Invest aggressively. Social media, especially blogs, aren’t free, and they’re not even cheap. This may be as simple as investing your time in writing rich blog posts that address those pain points in step 1. It may be investing your Subject Matter Experts’ time on the blog. Or it may go so far as a monetary investment in a brand journalist or social media manager.”

“Focus on helping your customers, not selling. And for this reason…I do not recommend sticking a copywriter on your blog. But if you do, make it clear to that copywriter that the point of the blog is not to sell.”

Unfortunately, as Daniel points out, new content creation isn’t easy and it’s certainly not inexpensive. There is no magic bullet and it will take both time and investment. Because of this we recommend you make plan that identifies your most important content needs, and sets a realistic goal for steady / ongoing new content creation.

Long Term Steady Gains

Remember Content Marketing is a long term effort and it’s focused on long term gains. Steady consistent progress is best. The goal is to develop trust and name recognition during that crucial first 70% of the buying journey, so that when they are ready to take the next step, they have been nurtured and guided to consider your solution set.

Content Marketing In a Nutshell

· 70% of B2B buyers’ journey is complete before they ever become a sales lead.

· Content Marketing is how we influence a buyer before we know who they are.

· Content Marketing is about understanding your target audience, systematically learning what pain they experience, what information they are likely to need at each stage in the buying cycle and then providing it to them, even if that information does not directly relate to your specific product and or service.

· Ask current clients what information they found helpful or would have liked during their purchasing journey to identify currently available resources and opportunities for new content creation.

· Mine your website, blog, social media, sales presentations and collateral materials for existing content.

· Repurpose existing content to make it more useful; more easily understood or simply more interesting.

· Invest aggressively in content creation.

· Focus on helping your customers, not selling.

· Make a plan for the consistent production of new content.

The post Content Marketing: The Engine that Drives B2B Marketing appeared first on 435 Digital.

What Instagram Can Do for your Online Marketing

Does your brand have a presence on Instagram? Are you missing out on 80 million active users by not being on it? Instagram is an Internet-based program that allows people to share pictures with others for free. Users upload pictures they take from their iPhones and Android devices onto the Internet using the Instagram app. It allows users to apply a series of filters to their photos in order to create a vintage look for their images that resembles a Polaroid.

Photos are a key element, if not the main component, to a successful marketing campaign. Instagram has become an effective marketing tool because companies can quickly build brand recognition and consumer loyalty through photos. It is an easy way to show your product and company. Even the catchiest copy cannot grab the customer’s attention better than an eye-catching photo. A company may be able to attract new customers and raise the level and quality of shared photos about a brand.

Below are a few ways Instagram can help take your marketing to the next level.

· Quick and easy way to promote your goods and services.

· The days of boring stock images are through and it’s all about creative and live snapshots. You want to make sure you avoid exhaustion and keep your photos fresh. Experts recommend posting three to four times per day. Be sure to avoid posting the same picture twice and too much self-promotion. There are ways to push yourself out there, but with a twist.

· Discover how you are pictured as a company.

· Instagram encourages the use of hashtags, just as Twitter does. As a brand you can search for how customers are portraying your company by simply clicking on ‘Explore’ and then ‘Hashtags’. When you search, you’ll learn a few things about your brand. The first items you’ll notice are which hashtags are the most popular and most frequently used when talking about your brand. Second, you’ll get to see what kind of content your community is already posting and what kind of photos will resonate with them.

· Host photo contests.

· Photo contests on Instagram can be a free way to attract, interact with and convert potential customers. Try launching a photo-of-the-day campaign to keep followers coming back to see to the page. Keep followers interest and ask them to submit captions for the photos. In this free marketing tactic, you can ask people to take pictures and publish them with your hash tag. You can also lead them to your website, like your Facebook page, follow you on Twitter and other social networks.

· Creative event marketing.

· What better way to promote a major event than with fun photos? Have a dedicated Instagram photographer at your event. The photographer can snap photos of the guests at your event, giving them a reason to follow your Instagram account on the spot. Be sure to continue using your Instagram account between events to entice your followers to stay active on your account and to encourage them to attend another event.

Looking to build positive press about your brand or company? Get your brand on Instagram and start providing visual proof of just how great you are.

The post Instagram For Online Marketing appeared first on 435 Digital.

If you haven’t already heard, the release of iOS6 for Mac products will be missing a very important app – YouTube. Don’t fret, just because your phone or tablet won’t automatically include the app doesn’t mean that you won’t have access to it. Google announced last week that the new and improved YouTube app will be available through the App Store. Phew!

Facebook took a step outside of its usual ad placements today by testing its own mobile ad network, which allows advertisers to place ads on other apps or websites based on your Facebook data. This isn’t the first time that Facebook has stepped outside of its own platform to place ads in front of Facebook users’ faces and will likely be just the beginning of their ever-expanding ad offerings, as they look for new ways to generate revenue without disrupting the user experience.

Also this week, Amazon announced the Amazon Maps API, causing many to speculate whether this meant that they, much like Apple, would be kicking Google Maps to the curb. Amazon hasn’t officially said either way, but considering they’re working on their own mapping technology, we imagine it’s only a matter of time.

Twitter has a mobile-first strategy, and yesterday was the launch of several updates that take advantage of the iPad display. You can update your own profile now, adding a big image. Will we see the same kind of creativity we’ve seen with Facebook cover photos? Early indications say “yes.” If you’re having trouble coming up with a big image that fuly expresses your degree of awesomeness, check out these “big image” tips from Mashable.

And because who doesn’t love a good bit of smacktalk on a Wednesday morning, check out what Twitter CEO Dick Costolo had to say about Apple and Facebook:

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, fresh from a day of smartphone Twitter app releases, said Tuesday night that his company saw Apple as a “mentor” to Twitter.

“Apple is in many ways a mentor company for us,” Costolo told PBS interviewer Charlie Rose. He said the companies had “a great relationship.” Facebook, by contrast, got this chilly description: “We’re very different companies.”

Facebook was pursuing symmetric networks, Costolo said, but Twitter saw the world as asymmetric. They were fundamentally opposed, and competed for ad dollars.

Buuuuurn. Our guess is we won’t see Costolo in a hoodie any time soon.

Have a great Wednesday!

The post What We’re Reading: Wednesday, September 19, 2012 appeared first on 435 Digital.

New Adwords feature: Shared budgets. Adwords announced today that they’ll be launching a new feature that allows advertisers to share a budget across several campaigns. Instead of having to adjust campaigns individually, you can set up your campaigns to share a budget, allowing you to increase clicks where demands calls for it.

Shared budgets is a new feature that lets you establish a single daily budget that’s shared by multiple campaigns in an AdWords account. Shared budgets can make it easier to match your AdWords spending with how your business allocates marketing budget. And they can save you time and improve your AdWords results. Let’s see how with an example.

How Shared Budgets Work
Say you’re an outdoor furniture seller with a single line of products. You’re currently running three campaigns:

1. A desktop search campaign
2. A mobile search campaign
3. A remarketing campaign to reach people who have visited your site but didn’t convert

Your overall marketing plan allows you to spend $100 per day across your three campaigns. Without shared budgets, you’d next have to decide how to allocate the $100 daily AdWords budget across each of your three campaigns. Say you set a $60 daily budget for your desktop campaign, a $20 daily budget for your mobile campaign, and $20 to your remarketing campaign.

Look out, Prezi and Pinterest fans – a former video game developer in Buenos Aires is working on a new collage-based social platform. Mural.ly creates online murals where you can post things surrounding an idea, including notes on Post-its to help you communicate to the people you share it with. With image-based communications becoming more and more popular, Mural.ly has a good chance of becoming popular if it can provide unique features and added value.

A sort of cross between presentation platform Prezi and Pinterest, Mural.ly is a “flexible content format” that lets users gather videos, pictures, text, and other bits of content onto a stretchable virtual canvas they can share with others. Digital Post-its and layering tools allow users to provide context to the materials, which can come from the web, a user’s computer, or an external drive. Once the materials are collected, Mural.ly can help organize them into presentations (unlike Lexi, presentations on Mural.ly are more of an added feature than a primary function).

Over at Crain’s Small Business Week survey, you’re asked to share your five biggest social media mistakes. You will remain anonymous unless you nominate your company to be profiled.

Meanwhile, at Facebook, participants at Techcrunch Disrupt last week may have had the chance to hear Zuckerberg speak in a little more detail about the future of Facebook’s search engine. Although we still don’t know when to expect anything he did confirm that they have a team working on search right now. We are soaking up all of the theories coming out of this discussion, hoping we will see a solution that both works for the regular Facebook user trying to connect with friends but also for the brand pages trying to connect with a new social-savvy customer base.

“Zuckerberg noted, among other things, that Facebook currently processes “1 billion queries a day” without really attempting to productize a search capability. He goes on to say, “Facebook is pretty uniquely positioned to answer the questions people have. What sushi restaurants have my friends gone to in New York in the last six months and Liked? Or which of my friends or friends of friends work at a company that I’m interested in working at — because I want to talk to them about what it’s going to be like to work there. These are questions that you could potentially do at Facebook if we built out this system that you couldn’t do anywhere else. And at some point we’ll do it. We have a team working on search.””

Finally today, raise your hand if you’re already trying to figure out where to order one of these:

Popcorn Indiana may or may not be working on something called a Popinator. Real or not, we’re loving this idea for hands-free popcorn launching. If only it could read minds.

The post What We’re Reading: Tuesday, September 18, 2012 appeared first on 435 Digital.

While most of the activity is checking posts from friends and posting one’s own updates, more and more people are interacting with brands and organizations on social networks. About 58% of users in the U.S. read posts from companies, and around 32% say they are likely to click on ads while networking.

The number of people engaging in social networks through mobile devices – phones and tablets – is massively increasing. The 64.2 million is up 77% from the year before, and the 38.2 million engaging daily is up 88%. With increasing smartphone adoption, these numbers will continue to grow rapidly.

With the upcoming Facebook integration with iOS 6, these numbers will soar even higher.

With iOS 6, Siri can now post Facebook status updates. If you had iOS 6 right now, you could ask Siri to post to your Facebook wall that you’re reading a great blog post from 435 Digital – or that you’re leaving in five minutes to try out the new Korean BBQ place just a few doors away.

In Apple’s new App Store, you’ll be able to “Like” a song, which will appear on Facebook. This might lead more people back over to Apple’s App Store.

Twitter is already integrated; with iOS 6, Facebook will also be integrated. If you want integration with Google +, you’ll surely need an Android device.

Whatever mobile platforms and devices people are using – mostly iOS and Android in the U.S. – any business that wants to reach people through social networking must get serious about not only their social presence but also their mobile-ready websites.

The post The Steady Rise of Social Mobile appeared first on 435 Digital.

Spotify: how to create a playlist

The post How to make a Spotify playlist from ’30 Second Social’ appeared first on 435 Digital.

“The new Levi’s collection was designed with you in mind. And we would like you to represent it,” reads a photo uploaded by Levi’s to the site. “It could be you, it could be someone you know, it could be someone you’d like to know.”

The positive press plus all the great photos already uploaded makes the campaign is a win-win for Levi’s. The toughest thing the company will have to do is go through all the photos and make a decision.

View #IAMLEVIS Instagram photos through Web viewer Statigr.am/iamlevis.

The post Levi’s showcases Instagram’s focus on business appeared first on 435 Digital.

It’s a great question. And one that many people are rushing to answer, because your advertising dollars – dear readers who are local businesses — represent billions of dollars in revenue for  advertising agencies or  media companies.

But for the small or medium sized business owner, this question is daunting. While you’re minding your business and budget, your advertising options are rapidly changing.

Your mission is to find out where your customers are hanging out these days and why.

Nearly every day of the week, you can see the knowledge — and confusion— advancing in this sphere.

This week, much-read newspaper world observer Newsosaur, issued a warning to local media companies that digital giants such as Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft will be making a fierce push into their territories. Meanwhile, just today The Pew Internet and the American Life Project released its complete report on Where people go to learn about restaurants and other local business. I reported on an earlier phase of this research in October.

Among Pew’s findings:

People looking for information about local restaurants and other businesses say they rely on the Internet, especially search engines, ahead of any other source. [51% of the 55% of adults surveyed who say they seek this info.]

Newspapers, both printed copies and the websites of newspaper companies, run second behind the Internet as the source that people rely on for news and information about local businesses, including restaurants and bars. [31%]

And word of mouth, particularly among non-internet users, is also an important source of information about local businesses. [23%]

Let’s not forget the ·8% who rely on local TV, either broadcasts or websites. The study also found that a rather upscale 60% of adults say they get news and information about local businesses other than restaurants and bars. Of these, 47% say they rely most on the internet, ·30% turn to newspapers, 22% rely on word of mouth from family and friends, 8% rely on local TV and 5% listen to the local radio.

So this data shows that folks are looking for local businesses first on the Internet and then with traditional media, i.e. newspapers. [And hey! Google could be taking fun-seekers to a news site or listing] But that doesn’t mean that the big digital players are necessarily the winners in the advertising game, says Gordon Borrell, head of Borrell Associates, whose expertise is  local advertising.

“There’s never been a case where an out of town media company – somebody without a physical presence in a local market – has been able to get and sustain a significant share of advertising dollars, “Borrell says.

“They can make the predictions all they want about Yahoo and Google coming in and stealing market share,” Borrell says. “ But in the end it will churn out. “

The big digitals are the bogeymen, and they won’t win the game,” says Borrell, who admits with pride that his firm “is pretty steeped in following the money.”

One  winning trump card is physical presence in the local market vs.  telemarketing.

Did you get a call from Facebook last week? I did. They are willing to stand at my side, virtually, and hold my hand for a full month so I can better learn to build my business on Facebook. All I have to contribute is – cough! – $2000.

And those telemarketing calls will be their downfall. Borrell says that local advertising tends to be sold, not bought. Big digital’s ideas of self serve and telemarketing just won’t pan out.

He attributes that to local businesses and their bad case of the John Wanamaker syndrome: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

Local businesses don’t know what kind of advertising is going to work. They’re too busy flipping pizzas, selling haircuts and facials and in general paying the bills.

So they might try the next new thing — buying keywords etc — for a while, but Borrell says his experience tells him these forays generally don’t work.

That makes sense to me. I’d rather toss my dime to the ad rep who reads poetry on his Friday night at my local café than to the ad rep calling from Mountain View, Calif. It’s always been the case that local connections are more persuasive. We like our neighbors to have food on the table .

Borrell cites two other reasons Big D will fail.:

1) Self-serve ads don’t work.

2) The big digitals would need a massive workforce.

Of the 91,000 local ad sales reps in the country, about 27,000 work for newspapers, Borrell says. Pure play Internet follows with 15,000, Radio follows with 17,000 and behind radio are directories like the  Yellow pages with 14,000 sales reps. Reps for Cable, TV and misc. sources make up the 18,000 difference. [Figures revised 12/15/2011]

Sources: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, November 2011 © 2011 Borrell Associates Inc.

These 27,000 sales reps walk the walk and talk the talk of local, because they are local. As such they are trusted and highly influential. Over time, despite their ups and downs, local media brands are still the most trusted. And they are rapidly adapting to the Internet.

“I was talking with Warren Webster , the CEO of Patch, when he was on a panel I had set up,” Borrell said. Borrell asked Webster what local media companies have that he wishes Patch had.

“Webster said: ‘I wish I had their brand,’ ” Borrell says. Despite Patch’s physical presence, none of its sites are profitable, he added.

Borrell believes that in the digital sphere, events will roll out as they did with cable, with TV and with radio. In the end, local media/newspaper companies are adapting to the digital world and will win because of the strength of their brands.

“History is repeating itself,’ he says.

That’s one opinion, at least. More to come.

The post Why big digital won’t win local business advertising appeared first on 435 Digital.