Marketing automatization is the use of software and technology to streamline, simplify, and measure marketing tasks and workflows, making them more efficient and effective. It allows businesses to target and personalize their marketing efforts to specific customers or groups of customers.

One of the primary benefits of marketing automatization is the ability to save time and resources by automating repetitive tasks, such as sending emails, posting on social media, or tracking website activity. This frees up marketers to focus on more high-level tasks, such as strategy and planning.

Marketing automatization also enables businesses to collect and analyze data from various marketing channels, such as email, social media, and website analytics. This data can be used to better understand customer behavior and preferences, and to develop targeted marketing campaigns that are more likely to be effective.

There are a number of tools and platforms available for marketing automatization, including email marketing software, social media management tools, and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. These tools can be integrated with one another to create a comprehensive marketing automation system.

To effectively implement marketing automatization, it is important to have a clear understanding of your target audience and marketing goals. This will help you choose the right tools and create a strategy that is aligned with your overall business objectives.

Marketing automatization can be a powerful tool for businesses of all sizes, but it is important to remember that it is just one aspect of a comprehensive marketing strategy. It is essential to have a clear understanding of your audience and to regularly review and adjust your marketing efforts to ensure that they are effective.

Overall, marketing automatization can help businesses to streamline their marketing efforts, save time and resources, and better understand and target their customers. By using data and analytics to inform their decisions, businesses can create more targeted and effective marketing campaigns that drive results.

If you have any questions or need assistance with marketing automatization, don’t hesitate to reach out to us. Our team of experts would be happy to help and provide guidance on this topic. Simply contact us and we will do our best to address your concerns and offer the best advice.

White label marketing services are a type of outsourcing where a company provides marketing services to another company under the company’s brand. This means that the company receiving the services can offer them to their own customers as if they were their own, without having to invest in building their own marketing team or capabilities.

There are several benefits to using white label marketing services. First, it allows companies to offer a wider range of services to their customers without having to invest in the necessary expertise or resources internally. This can be particularly useful for small businesses or startups that may not have the budget or personnel to build out a full marketing department.

Second, white label marketing services can save time and money by allowing companies to focus on their core competencies rather than having to spend time and resources on marketing activities. This can help businesses to be more efficient and effective, and can free up time and resources to be used elsewhere in the business.

Finally, white label marketing services can provide companies with access to expertise and resources that they might not otherwise have. For example, a company that specializes in social media marketing might be able to offer a range of services to other businesses, such as search engine optimization (SEO), email marketing, and content creation. This can help businesses to benefit from the latest marketing strategies and techniques, without having to invest in building their own internal capabilities.

Overall, white label marketing services can be a valuable tool for businesses looking to expand their marketing efforts without having to invest in building their own marketing team or capabilities. Whether you are a small business owner looking to offer a wider range of services to your customers or a larger company looking to outsource some of your marketing activities, white label marketing services may be worth considering.

If you are in search of high-quality marketing services provider and want to white label them, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We have a team of experienced professionals who are ready to provide you with everything you need to successfully market your business or expand your services.

Below is a collection of general tips that can boost your productivity. While nothing is ever universal, these are generally helpful for any company, especially for first-time founders.

Productivity

1. Prioritize and only do what matters. Avoid busy work and going in all directions. Say no to stuff that won’t move the needle.

2. When everything is important, nothing is important. Establish a language of P1, P2, P3 — levels of priorities. You only do some P1s in practice. Relentlessly prioritize.

3. Refuse to accept vague goals. Distill to clarity, then execute.

4. Never add new tasks in front of the queue, add them to the bottom. Complete what you are doing first.

5. Create and manage your schedule in a calendar. Use time blocks for different types of calls, meetings, heads-down work and even email, family time and workouts.

6. If it’s not on the calendar, don’t do it. Don’t assume that you will be working on something unless it is on your calendar.

7. Tweak how much time you spend on what. Find the combination that works for you.

8. Review each week ahead of time on Sunday so that you are prepared.

9. Avoid synchronous communication channels. Use asynchronous ones.

10. Don’t use chat clients or text messaging — they are a big productivity killer because they disrupt your flow. Be respectful of your own time and team’s time overall.

11. Cut down on unplanned team meetings. It’s OK to pull people into the conference room to brainstorm, but just make it clear this is what you are doing. Don’t turn these sessions into long meetings.

12. Set a time expectation and limit for all team meetings. Typically, one hour meetings are the max. Thirty minutes is way better, unless it’s a long brainstorming session, but even then, break it out into chunks.

13. Be respectful of other team member’s productivity — don’t throw in tasks on top of their queues. This sometimes happens with CEOs, who tend to ask people to just do something quickly for them. A sequence of the quick things becomes very hectic and disruptive to the team members, particularly engineers.

14. Take care of yourself. Take breaks during the day and take time off to rejuvenate.

15. Regular exercise is highly recommended. Block off exercise times on your calendar, or it won’t happen.

16. Make sure you get enough sleep (less than usual but enough). Watch out for signs of exhaustion.

Email

1. It is a beast. You need to rule it or it will rule you.

2. Do not refresh or check for new messages, or have email opened all the time. It will kill your productivity. Establish specific hours for doing emails of different types.

3. Master CC. Don’t CC people unnecessarily and ask not to be CC-ed when you don’t need to be. This particularly applies to CEOs, as they tend to want to be in the loop on everything, and it can be overwhelming.

4. Master BCC. Quickly move people who don’t need to be on the thread (like someone who just introed you). Teach other folks to move you to BCC appropriately as well. Same for reply all.
Use your email signature wisely: Put in information that’s relevant and avoid logos and images. They feel heavy and get filtered.

5. Master the art of the short email — two to three sentences or paragraphs max. Check how it looks on mobile. If you scroll a lot, it’s too long. Use the least number of words possible and iterate on the emails before sending them out.

6. Be thoughtful. Do not copy and paste. It is better to send fewer emails that are thoughtful than more boilerplate messages.

Asking for introductions

1. Avoid cold emails if possible. Use your network to get an intro.

2. Good tools for intros include goconspire.com and LinkedIn.

3. Connect and continuously build and expand your network on LinkedIn.

4. Master reading LinkedIn profiles — for hires, biz dev, venture capital. It’s useful to spend time on the profile to understand people’s backgrounds.

5. Always find relevant people and never ask for open-ended intros.

6. Don’t ask for open-ended intros to VCs and angels. Study and understand what they are interested in investing in by looking at their portfolios.

7. For biz dev intros, make sure that the person is in the relevant role. Find a few people who could be right, and check their relationship on LinkedIn.

8. Vice presidents are pretty magical in most companies. They either make decisions or will route you to the right director or manager. Focus on getting intros to VPs for biz dev deals.

9. Master forwardable emails. For someone to intro you, send them a brief and clean email addressed to the target, so they can forward it and add their part. This makes it easy to do the intro.

10. Have a preference for email intros, but LinkedIn intros are fine too.

Scheduling meetings

1. Get efficient at scheduling meetings by creating pre-defined time slots for different types of meetings in your calendar.

2. For example, “M-W-F 9AM-10AM 15 mins intro calls; M-W-F 2PM-4PM 30 min follow up mentor meetings, etc.”

3. Always propose three to four specific times for a meeting, depending on the type of meeting, and fit it into available time slot.

4. If the person you are trying to connect with is super busy, be flexible, break your blocks and accommodate them.

5. Minimize the number of emails to schedule a meeting. If a person agreed to a meeting, propose specific times immediately. Don’t ask them to suggest the times.

6. General pointers for durations of the meetings:

• Intro call: 15 minutes — people will love you for sending invites for 15 minutes and sticking with it.
• Intro meeting: 30 minutes — one hour is a lot, stick with 30 minutes for most in-person meetings you are traveling to unless the other person is asking for more time.

If you are not sure, ask them if you’d need more than 30 minutes. This is true for business meetings and those with investors. The exception might be if someone is coming to see you and expects more time because they are traveling to the meeting.

In the meeting

1. Don’t be late. It is rude. Be a bit early.

2. Don’t take up more time during the meeting than needed.

3. Avoid unrelated chatter. Its OK for just a little.

4. Know the purpose of the meeting, and get to the point.

5. Don’t be afraid to make an ask, but don’t be too pushy.

6. Be attuned to who are are taking to and what their motivations and interests are.

7. Do your homework on the person, understand what they do and don’t do, what they invest in and what they don’t invest in, etc.

8. Don’t just pitch, listen. Most business deals are closed not with a lot of talking, but with a lot of listening. Don’t talk past the other person, hear what they are saying. Ask questions.

9. If it’s a no, it’s fine, understand why and move on then follow up later.

10. Sell by being good and finding out what’s needed, not just by upselling. Always explain the benefits to the customer.

11. Always have a clear meeting wrap up — ask or propose next steps at the end, whether it is a follow-up email, call, meeting, introduction, more materials, etc. Summarize the meeting to wrap up.

Hopefully you will find these useful. Feel free to add tips that worked for you in the comments section below.

Everyone has the same amount of time in a day, yet some people can be amazingly productive while others struggle just to keep up. What’s the difference and how can you elevate your productivity by 3, 5 or even 20x?

The good news about being productive is that it’s a skill you can learn and get better at with practice. Just like anything, though, it requires discipline and a willingness to improve.

By analyzing how the world’s best CEOs get more done in a day than anyone else, I’ve put together a list of 6 productivity secrets you can start using today to dramatically improve the efficiency of your life – both professionally and personally.

#1 – Use your calendar like your life depends on it

What’s the number one mistake made by people who are busy but not productive? They only use their calendar professionally. As the week progresses, they add so many professional events to their calendar that they never have time to do 1) important things and 2) personal things.

Think of your calendar as the center of your life. Start by writing a list of all the personal events you want to accomplish every week – the recurring things you deeply care about such as time with your kids, hitting the gym or exercising, a date night with your spouse, etc.

Pencil those in first and make them repeating events that are blocked out in your calendar every week. Make them a different color as well, something fun like a bright blue or pink.

Only once you’ve scheduled these in, do the same for your weekly professional commitments. The key here is to also schedule time every day for email, which is the next tip.

#2 – Only check email at specific times of the day

8am for 30 minutes and 4pm for 30 minutes, for example. Add these to your calendar as daily recurring events as well. Don’t fall into the trap of living in your inbox.

If you’re expecting a reply from someone important, use the VIP feature in iOS or use Dropbox’s Mailbox app to be reminded about specific emails you need to keep on top of.

Everything else can wait until the next time you check your email. If something is important, you’ll no doubt receive a call. Also make sure you disable all new email popups and notifications on your desktop, phone and tablet as well.

#3 – Use labels and conditions in Gmail

Another email tip, yes, but a good one. Don’t let all of your email drop straight into your inbox. If you use Gmail (or Outlook), setup specific labels for the people, teams, clients, partners, etc you regularly communicate with and use rules to automatically move their emails to those labels as soon as they arrive.

By doing this, you know that 95% of emails in your inbox are noise – otherwise they would already be in one of the labels you setup. This little trick can easily save you 15 minutes a day sorting through hundreds of emails to find the important ones you need to reply to.

#4 – Block out 2 hours a day where you can’t be interrupted

Whether you’re a manager or maker, you need quiet time to get productive work done. What’s the best way to stop interruptions? Either work from home (or a nearby cafe), or simply put a sticky on your office door that says “Please DND, doing important work. Come back at 11am or email me”.

If you’re a manager, your team will respect the note and will either come back at the time you’ve mentioned or send you a quick email. Another trick that works is asking “is it important?” when someone turns up at your desk for a quick chat. These chats can easily waste an hour of your day if you’re not careful.

#5 – Decide your weekly priorities on Sunday afternoon

Plan your week or you’ll be part of someone else’s weekly plan. On Sunday afternoons, sit down and write out your priorities for the coming week. Keep those priorities close by during the week and block out time in your calendar to make progress on each item.

If you feel off track, pull out your list of priorities to realign you. On Fridays before you leave the office, look at your list and decide how you’ll handle the items you didn’t get time to complete. Either move them to the top of next week’s list on Sunday, or scrap them.

#6 – Use NETT time to your advantage

NETT time it’s one of the best ways to instantly 2x your productivity. Put simply, while you’re doing one activity, merge it with another. For example, when you’re on the treadmill in the gym, return a few phone calls. Or when you’re on the bus to the office, blast through your emails.

The most accomplished CEOs and leaders defend their time like it’s their life and you should too. Learning to be productive is an important step to master if you want to get the biggest return on your invested time, regardless of whether it’s personal or professional.

There are many free stock photos sites out there and it can be difficult to navigate through them. If you’re using a paid image websites like Shutterstock or iStockphoto, your rights and responsibilities are clear: You pay for the rights to use the image.

However, if you’re choosing to go the free route–and really, why wouldn’t you?–it can be confusing to know how you’re allowed to use the photos, and what are your limitations.

This post will give you a list of 10 sites that offer 100 percent free images for use on your blog or social media posts. And the best part? All the sites below offer free images under the Public Domain or the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license. This meansno attribution (link) is required.

In case you’re unfamiliar with copyright categories, here’s a brief overview of the three main types:

Public Domain–Images in the public domain are works whose copyrights have expired or whose creators have relinquished all rights to the works. These are free for personal or commercial use. There is only one exception to the “free for all use” policy for public domain images: If you’re using an image of a recognizable person, you may need to get his or her permission to use the photo. Some sites offering such photos will already have obtained a model release, so if in doubt, consult the license agreement that comes with the image.

Royalty Free–When images are offered royalty-free, this simply means that the purchaser pays a fee and can then use the image without paying additional royalties or licensing fees. This also means the purchaser doesn’t have to give attribution. This is the model used by paid stock photo sites.

Creative Commons–Photographers who license their images under Creative Commons (CC) can choose how their images will be used by specifying a particular CC license. For instance, a CC0 license means the owner has relinquished all rights to his or her works, while CC 2.0 requires the user to provide attribution.

CC0 is the most flexible license by far: “CC0 enables scientists, educators, artists and other creators and owners of copyright or database-protected content to waive those interests in their works and thereby place them as completely as possible in the public domain, so that others may freely build upon, enhance and reuse the works for any purposes without restriction under copyright or database law.”

Please note that the sites listed below are all either public domain or creative commons, and none require attribution. I’ve done our best to specify which license each site uses. However, please do your due diligence before using images from the sites below, particularly if plan to use them for commercial purposes.

Creative Commons 0 (CC0) and Public Domain image sites.

1. Pixabay–A huge database of public domain images
2. New Old Stock–Vintage images from the public archives
3. Unsplash–10 new high-quality images released every 10 days. Released under the CC0 license.
4. Foodie’s Feed–High-res free food images. Free to use without attribution; however, the may not be resold.
5. Death to the Stock Photo–Free images for commercial use. Delivered monthly to your inbox. You do not have the right to claim these free images as your own.
6. Magdeleine–One free high-res photo every day (and access to a full repository of images). Use the handy filter to find images that are either public domain or require attribution.
7. Public Domain Archive–All images are completely free for personal or commercial use, no link or attribution required. I personally use this for my latest startup Duefor some of the amazing whitepaper images that we’re putting together for the big launch.
8. Good Free Photos– Public domain images taken by the owner of the site. Offers some good location-based images.
9. Free Range Stock–Free high-res images, registration required. It is suggested you link back to the site and give credit to the photographer, but it isn’t required. You cannot resell, distribute, or claim ownership of the images.
10. Pickup Image–Searchable database of public domain images.

 

What is better than hundred views on your website? Thousands of views! Have a website but the unique visitor numbers are small? Looking to increase traffic to your website? Follow the tips below to increase your number of visitors to your website.

Content is king

With the search engine algorithm changes and the need for good content, it is no surprise how important great content is to increase traffic. Write for your target audience, not for robots. This will help build your brand AND improve your overall online visibility. Link for relevant content and keep the links to a minimum (3 to 5 links). Don’t forget to link to your own website and other pages – this is data-rich food for search engine crawlers. The added bonus is that your users will have the content they need in a sensible way. This builds credibility and trust.

Social integration

Social Media is a great way have to connect with your audience. It is very possible that your business is using a multitude of social channels and engaging with your audience. Be sure to add a call-to-action on these social channels to get more potential clients on your website. 140 characters to influence and have your audience seek for more interesting information. Use your social efforts to drive traffic to your site. Are you looking to gain more traffic on social media channels? Use it regularly and use #hashtags appropriately. Are you unfamiliar with #hashtag*?  The hashtag connects your message with the #topic or #cause so those seeking information can easily find it.

*Too many #hashtags can have the reverse outcome and users will see this as spam instead. The bet practice is to use 1-3 hashtags per message.

Multimedia = attention grabbing

Video and images capture the attention of your users and search engines alike. Multimedia increase visibility because all are inherently intrigued by visuals. Including an video/image on your press releases, social media channels, blog posts and website puts a bull’s eye target for your users’ line of vision. Simply put: multimedia gets noticed and being noticed is the first step in driving traffic to your website and brand. Take the next step and use the multimedia efforts within your social media strategy.

Marketing departments, whether one person or one hundred, have kind of a lot of balls to juggle.

Lead generation, PPC, SEO, website design, social media, PR, content creation. Yeah, I’d call that a lot of balls (and that’s not even all of them).

It’s no wonder that sometimes all of it can’t get done with just the people you have in house. Maybe your current team doesn’t have the skills to do it, they don’t have the time to do it, or you don’t have the budget to hire more in-house staff to do it. And that’s why we outsource.

Thing is, outsourcing’s not always a good idea. Then again, sometimes hiring someone in house is way more trouble and cost than it’s worth. So how do you know which route to choose?

We’re going to break down all those marketing tasks that are on your plate that can be successfully outsourced, and help you decide in which scenarios it’s better for you to keep it in house, and when it’s better to outsource it to an agency or contractor. And if you have some of these tasks covered already, feel free to scroll to the specific function(s) you need help with.

Lead Generation

Wait, you can outsource lead generation? Sure can. Let me explain. Ideally, most of your leads are coming from inbound marketing — people who raise their hand to say they want to hear from you by doing something like filling out a form on your website. So to say that you’re outsourcing lead generation as an inbound marketer is kind of like … outsourcing all of your marketing. The thing is, a lot of the people who outsource lead generation are really talking about outsourcing cold calling or appointment booking, so it’s aspects of the lead generation process that are being done outside your office’s four walls. Here are some instances where outsourcing lead generation might make sense, depending on the structure of your sales organization and the product or service you’re selling:

• Verifying Contact Information: If you have a high volume of leads coming in and a problem getting quality contact information, you could outsource this function so your sales organization only works with verified contacts.
• Qualifying Leads: Similarly, organizations with a high volume of leads don’t have time to qualify all of them manually, and sometimes, your marketing team isn’t sure how to go about it. Working with a consultant or agency that can help with your lead qualification might be worth it to improve sales efficiency.
• Booking Appointments: There are plenty of services out there than can handle appointment books for your sales team, whether they’re in-house or field sales reps. This saves them from the more tedious up-front work that takes time away from closing deals.

Pointclear interviewed one Karen Hayward, EVP and CMO for CenterBeam, who had a great quote on this idea of outsourcing that should help organizations vetting good service providers. “It’s no longer enough for a provider to be experienced in a single area like teleprospecting or telesales. Best-practice expertise in all areas — market identification, database management, process management, recruiting and staffing, training, program management, and data analysis and content — is now the key to a program’s success.” That means if you don’t have a solid lead generation and qualification process already, and your prospective service provider isn’t capable of helping you sort it out, you might not be ready for outsourcing quite yet. For outsourced lead generation to work, the process has to be rock solid both internally, and with your vendor.

And, of course, you need to ensure that outsourcing this work really does increase sales and marketing efficiency, and the revenue you generate is still significant enough to warrant the cost of outsourcing. In fact, keep that caveat in mind for all the processes you experiment with outsourcing.

PPC Campaigns

A lot of marketers make the mistake of thinking that, once you set up your AdWords or social media PPC campaigns, it’s like a light switch. Just turn it on when you want leads, off when you’re done, and you’re good to go. It’s an oversimplification of the process, though. Proper PPC campaign management takes consistent monitoring, otherwise you can find yourself wasting money really fast.

If you don’t have the 1) ability or 2) time to do what it takes to manage PPC — and paid lead generation is of significant impact to your marketing strategy — I think it’s worth the investment to outsource it to an agency that knows what they’re doing. Keep in mind that many agencies have minimum budgets you’ll have to invest in the campaign, as well as the additional cost of maintenance that comes with agency work. So if PPC is critical to your marketing strategy, this additional cost to maintain your campaigns could be worth it — especially because you don’t want a novice managing big PPC budgets.

Whichever way you opt for, make sure the in-house or external PPC pro is actually a PPC pro. If you’re having trouble figuring it out, reference this blog post that has some questions you can ask to help you differentiate PPC pros from PPC posers. Or if you’re trying to tackle PPC yourself, take a look at this template that should help you manage your campaigns more effectively.

SEO

Where most companies go wrong when outsourcing SEO — or frankly, when hiring an in-house SEO professional — is focusing just on keywords. SEO is about more than just creating content around specific keywords; you need someone, or a team of people, who understands on-page SEO, technical SEO, and even has a flair for co-marketing to help you build quality inbound links.

So whether you’re outsourcing or keeping SEO in-house, it’s critical you really vet your provider to make sure that:

• They’re not selling you on rank. If a potential hire or service provider is building value around SERP rank, they’re not up to date on SEO best practices.
• They have a comprehensive skill-set, in both on-page, off-page, and technical SEO.
• They definitively do NOT have a comprehensive skill set, and you are knowingly hiring them to only focus on one particular area of your SEO.

And if you even look to outsourced link builders, tread extremely cautiously. If there is absolutely any talk of black-hat tactics, like link farming or link buying, run for the hills!

Social Media & PR

Social media has to be, duh, social. In my opinion, the best social media accounts are handled in house, because there’s an in-house community manager that “gets” the organization’s personality in a more intimate way than any outsourced service can. Is it possible for you to outsource social media management to an agency or consultant? Sure. But you need to have a solid grasp on your brand’s personality in order to do a hand-off to someone who isn’t involved in the daily minutiae of your business that typically helps paint a more complete picture of what a company thinks like.

It’s also critical to establish terms and best practices up front if you’re outsourcing social media. For example, what’s your stance on social media automation? Are you okay with someone automating your updates? We’ve seen it go haywire in the past — you might recall AT&T’s debacle with outsourced social media automation in which automation actually turned into outright SPAM. That’s an all too common instance of outsourced social media turning into a PR problem (hence my combination of the two in this section), that it’s critical you’ve set up damage control scenarios for. Be really clear about 1) what you want in terms of voice, personality, content, and methods of connecting with fans and followers 2) what you unequivocally don’t want, and 3) how to handle PR problems that arise in social media with either your in-house or outsourced community manager.

Content Creation

Content creation is one of the easiest things to outsource if you’re looking for a high volume of pretty good content. There are plenty of content marketplaces out there with freelance writers that you can pay pretty nominal amounts of money to create relatively good content — the kind that wouldn’t get you dinged by Panda or Penguin for using.

But what about if you need A+ content? You can certainly outsource it and get premium results. But you’re going to have to pay premium prices for it, and you might not find your writers as easily as you did for your “pretty good” content. Similarly, to get an extremely high volume of A+ content while outsourcing, you’ll still need to hire in-house staff to recruit, train, manage, and edit the freelance writers, not to mention lay out the content strategy and methodology used to scale your outsourced freelance writing program.

So, what does this mean? It means you could easily outsource content creation if you don’t need the cream of the crop for every single piece of content you publish. If, however, you view your marketing content creation more like a publishing house, you could certainly outsource the content creation — but you’ll still have to have at least one person, if not an entire editorial team in house, to help you manage the outsourced writers and the content creation process.

Visual Content Creation

Similar to written content creation, it helps to have a brand strategy already sussed out if you’re going to outsource your visual content work. It’s much less time consuming for you to hand over a visual brand and style guide to a designer with things like preferred fonts and hex codes than to ask them to figure it out on their own. But I do think outsourcing design work makes a ton of sense, because keeping a creative team in house can be pretty cost prohibitive if you’re not in need of their expertise on a daily basis.

Either way, make sure the person you choose knows how to not just make things look pretty and on-brand, but also function correctly. For example, your website shouldn’t be in flash — it’ll look pretty, but your organic search rankings won’t. Or maybe your email template looks mighty fine, but no one reading it on a mobile device can render it. These are the kinds of things you should consider when outsourcing … if you can’t find people to make your marketing beautiful, functional, and at your price point, I’d say it’s better to have something that’s done in house andfunctions than outsourced and breaking your bank. Even if it’s pretty and right at your price point, it’s better to have something that works and isn’t beautiful than beautiful and isn’t functional.

Video Production

This can overlap for visual content creation in a lot of respects, but video production is different enough from design work that I think it warrants its own section. People are often scared to create videos because they think they have to be perfect, and perfect costs a lot of money. But video content creation doesn’t have to be cost prohibitive, because it doesn’t have to be lit like a Hollywood movie set. Thus, I think it’s easier than many marketers think to create their own videos using free or cheap tools like Final Cut, iVideo, and Camtasia that are also very user-friendly.

I also think, however, that there comes a time in the growth of your business when you need to step up your game. Perhaps you’re an enterprise organization that’s selling to high-profile B2B clients, for example. They might not find your unsteady camera hand so professional, nor will they be so forgiving of it. In instances like this, you might want to hire a professional to shoot, say, case study videos to help enable your sales team. Whether it’s worth it to hire a professional or keep it in house for things like this depends on whether you’re creating enough video content on a consistent basis to warrant it.

So, do you see your video needs only increasing from here on out? Do you already have an in-house creative or design team on which it would make sense for them to join? Do you have a brand style guide already created that those in-house designers are following? It probably won’t be too hard to integrate a video professional into that team, and will be more efficient — if the volume of video you’re creating warrants a full time hire — to bring someone in house. If you’re still sorting all of these things out and don’t need a ton of video support, or alternately, don’t have an established brand style guide to which a video person will adhere, an outsourced creative agency could help you do all of that so you kick off your high-quality video production the right way.

Source: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/33825/When-You-Should-and-Shouldn-t-Outsource-Your-Marketing.aspx

Sometimes you’re just flat out of ideas.

It’s not a matter of talent — you’ve written great stuff in the past. But lately, when you go back to the well for a fresh idea, it’s coming up dry.

This happens to the best of us — even veterans who consistently produce quality content have their off days.

Yet they continue to write.

They may grumble about how hard it is to get going and create something solid, but they still do. Again, and again, and again.

They aren’t super-human, and they don’t have magical content-producing powers. So what is the secret?

They do it by pulling out the well-worn toolbox of strategies for creating awesome content.

Borrow content and ideas

If you’re flat-out exhausted and out of ideas, then get them from somebody else — either content, or ideas, or both.

I’m not talking about real stealing, of course — it’s more like “borrowing with the author’s blessing”.

Done right, this can produce some valuable content that the authors you “stole” from will thank you for using!

1. Curate content. Find your ten favorite websites, and then find your favorite post on each of them. Publish a post listing these top ten posts, and explain why you like them.
2. Ask friends for ideas. If you’re tapped for ideas, then reach out to your friends and colleagues, and ask them what they’d like you to write about. You can do this with offline friends, or with like-minded online entrepreneurs.
3. Ask your audience. You can kick the last strategy up a notch by reaching out to your audience. This can be done in several ways — it can be as simple as running a “what would you like me to write about” post (which is a bit lame), or it can get more interesting by asking for their input on a problem.
4. Do an interview. There are lots of reasons why interviews are great for blog content, but right now let’s focus on the simple fact that it’s a lot easier to write a handful of interview questions than it is to write an entire post! Plus, it can be a great way to connect with really interesting people.
5. Solicit guest posts. This is a great source of content, and it’s easier than most people think – find a handful of blogs that are your size or smaller, whose content you really like, and invite them to write a guest post for you. They’ll be flattered, and happy to get exposure to your audience. They’ll work hard to bring their A game, and not only will you get a great post, but they’ll happily tell their contacts about it, and bring you a few new readers in the process.

Create content without creating content

If you have to create your own content, then there are a whole bunch of ways to do it without “creating content”.

In other words, you can write something great without having to be creative or original.

This doesn’t mean that the content won’t be good — only that you’re going to rely on creativity and originality that has already been percolating in your mind.

1. Create a best-case study. Think about your favorite blog, company, or product, and write a post about why you like them so much. Explain what you think they’re doing right, and what others can learn from their example.
2. Create a worst-case study. Same thing, but focus on a blog, company or product that you hate. This can be even more interesting, particularly if it’s a popular offering. Explain your frustrations with it, explain why it is successful anyway, and explain what you would do differently.
3. Write a review. Think about a product that you like, and are happy to endorse, and write a review about it. No need to get too creative, just explain what you like about it, and why. And then write what you don’t like about it, and why — easy peasy.
4. Explain your success. Think about a time when something went really right for you, and write a post explaining how you got it to happen. Don’t just brag about successes — explain all of the steps that you took to get there. Draw out the lessons that you le
5. Explain your failure. If there’s anything that people love reading about more than a great success, it’s an epic business failure. A post about your most challenging experiences is likely to be powerful just by virtue of how intense the original experience was for you, and you don’t have to make up anything original or creative — just tell it like it is (or, was), and explain what you learned from the process.
6. Link to old favorites. Go through your archives, and make a short list of your old favorite posts that newer readers probably haven’t read. You can even do a quick deconstruction, and explain what you were thinking when you wrote the posts, what worked, and what didn’t.

Borrow some name recognition

Okay, so maybe what you really want is to find a great original idea to write about, but it just isn’t happening.

In that case, all you need is a creativity jump-start; a useful constraint that can send you off in the right direction.

The idea is to take two unrelated things, and force them together into a really interesting post. It’s really easier than it sounds.

Start by picking something that your readers are interested in, and then pick something unrelated, that your audience will be familiar with.

Just to get your brain going, here are some of the things that you can plug into the “fascinating hook” part of that equation:

1. Use a movie. Use either the name of a movie, or a character from that movie. Think about the last movie you’ve seen, and think about what you can learn from that movie about your topic of interest. There’s always something there, if you dig deep enough.
2. Use television. Same idea, but this time pick a television show that your audience is likely to watch.
3. Use a book. Just make sure it isn’t a book about your subject matter
4. Use a comic. There’s a reason why they’ve been remaking movies about Superman, Spiderman, the X-Men, and half a dozen other, more obscure comic book characters. Unless it is a spectacular failure, you can pretty much count on a certain volume of sales at the box office. By the same token, if you lean on the super-powers of one of these characters, your post should perform just as well!
5. Use a celebrity. This is a blanket category for any kind of icon that your audience would recognize. It could be your favorite pop star, movie star, or blogging star… as long as your audience would recognize the name, it should be solid.

Get inspired

The last thing you can do when you’re fresh out of ideas is to recharge and get inspired.

This may sound difficult when you’re looking at a desk covered in crumpled note papers with lousy ideas, but it can be done.

There are at least four ways to do it.

1. Go for a walk. This is the generic advice that you’ve probably heard a hundred times before. If you just can’t do it anymore, then take a break, go for a walk, and get some fresh air. It’s not quite that simple, but it’s close: we all have routines and practices that are good at triggering high performance mental states. It’s just a matter of finding the right triggers for you.
2. Go to the theater. The theater is a fantastic source of ideas — much better than just going to a movie, because there’s so much more atmosphere, and so much more happening, which means there’s that much more for you to deconstruct and draw analogies from. Find a show in your area, get out of the house, and come back refreshed and ready to start writing.
3. Explore new cultures. No, no, I’m not suggesting you book a vacation every time you’re out of ideas. You don’t have to fly half-way around the world — why not start with an authentic restaurant? Go somewhere that you aren’t familiar with, and really pay attention to the experience. All of this is fodder for analogies that can get your creative juices flowing.
4. Tell your story. This is if you’re ready to kick yourself into overdrive, and write a post about an experience that is powerful and deeply personal. For this, you’ve got to dig deep, and pull up a formative story in your life — share a real crisis that you overcame, and how you became a better and happier person for it. This isn’t an easy thing to do, but you don’t really need original content, because it’s all stuff that has already happened to you.

Bonus #21 — Write when you do have ideas

You can fall back on these strategies when you’re fresh out of ideas and don’t feel like writing, and with a bit of discipline you’ll be able to create a really solid post.

But that doesn’t make it easy.

The reality is that when you’re feeling uninspired, it isn’t the best time for you to do your writing. That’s why the last strategy is to do the writing when you are feeling inspired.

Write a handful of articles and keep them in an “emergency posts” folder, to run when you absolutely don’t feel like writing.

And of course, you can use any of the ideas described in this post as a starter for filling up that folder. So go to it — start writing! But first, join the discussion.

Which of these methods has worked for you? Which one do you plan on trying first? Leave a comment below and let me know.

As creative thinkers we have to think of new and exciting ways to grab people’s attention every day. Sometimes it is by creating interesting ideas. Perhaps it’s by coming up with a better marketing strategy.

In order to help you with creative advertising inspiration, we decided to search the web for the best examples of guerrilla marketing we could find and show them to you. Below you’ll find 20 different examples of creative marketing campaigns.

Nikon Guerrilla Marketing Campaign

Swiss Skydive Guerrilla Marketing Campaign

Fitness First Guerrilla Marketing Campaign

Sharpie Guerrilla Marketing Campaign

Wii Guerrilla Marketing Campaign

Discovery Channel Guerrilla Marketing Campaign

Peugeot 308 Guerrilla Marketing Campaign

Stop Global Warming Guerrilla Marketing Campaign

Unicef  Guerrilla Marketing Campaign

Extra Thin Schnitzel Guerrilla Marketing Campaign

Duracell Guerrilla Marketing Campaign

Bounty Guerrilla Marketing Campaign

Charmin Guerrilla Marketing Campaign

Tyskie Beer Advertisement

Toyota Ambient Ad