Anyway, if you aren’t going to take the time to watch it I’ll explain what it is.  This one in particular is about a young basketball player named Marcus LoVett.  He has serious moves and amazing talent.  Watching him juke, maneuver and make shots over all of the slower, Caucasian kids was truly entertaining.  Marcus has over 1,000,000 views as do some of the similar videos that I watched tonight.  It got me thinking about how things work today, how things are delivered to US, how the Cream Rises to the Top.

If you are a recruiter for the NBA or a Scout for any sporting team for that matter, videos like these have to be either a God-send or a horrible nightmare.  Good in a way that these “leads” are brought to you via your social network, viral-like delivered and sent through traditional channels.  Bad in a way that the scout will have to beat off all of the other scouts with a huge stick to get the attention of the young star.

What will the Scout of 2015 look like?  

I can foresee Johnny the scout sitting in a control room using a software to pinpoint hot-spots, active conversations and videos that are going viral.  Gone are the days of driving out to middle America, Tommy Boy style,  to find a redneck that happened to have a huge affinity for the sport you’re scouting for.  All the scout would do is LISTEN and ANALYZE.

The same thing is happening in human resources/ recruiting.  One’s social network is beginning to be more powerful and more reputable than the BS references people put on their applications.  One can learn more about one another via social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook than having a face to face talk (not saying that face to face isn’t good…its probably still and will be one of the best ways to get a true feel for someone).  Bottom line between now and 2015, if a recruiter is well networked, they will have qualified candidates coming to them.  All they will have to do, now and in the future, is to keep their social networks active and keep their eyes open for the next Marcus to fall in their lap.

Business Logo

Normally, the first place a company start thinking about their brand is with a logo. Here are some questions to ask yourself when developing one.

• Does it clearly identify my company?
• Does it appeal to my target market?
• How does it make my company different?
• How does it support the import aspects of my company’s USP?

Business Name

Right along side your business logo comes your company’s name.  Here are a few things to consider when creating a name.

• Recognition of your products or services: Is it clear what your company does?
• Differentiation:  Does your name stand out at all or does it blend in with the rest of your competitors.  (example; A law firm called Smith, Johnson and Anderson VS Traffic Busters.)
• Favorable association with your target market: You know best what your target market eats, where they live and what motivates them to buy.  Position your company in the best light with them and you’ll start to see more traction.

Working with a Graphic Designer

The next steps  will be different depending on how your business is structured, your size and relationships. If you’re a larger organization, you probably have an in-house graphic designer that wears many hats. This is the go-to person I would consult with first before utilizing outside sources to create any sort of branded material.   If things are busy and you need to reach out to someone outside of your company, I highly recommend you, at the least, include SOMEONE from your business that knows about your brand in the creative process.  It will save time in the long run and keep your brand consistent over time.   No one knows your business better than you or one of your employees!

There are a tons of ways to outsource graphic design as well.  One of my favorites…and in my opinion the best is…. 99designs.com.  This site not only allows you to crowd source your designs, but they allow you to provide a creative brief beforehand, rating and real-time feedback along the way.  I’ve used this service many times and it has always proven to be successful.  When using 99designs or a company like them (haven’t found one to be as awesome), you need to make sure you’re conveying the right things to the designer(s).

Make sure to include details like…

• Your business goals
• Your company’s story
• Your target audience
• What you don’t want

Giving enough information to the designer is crucial.  Yes, giving “full creative license” to them is easy to do….but please don’t.    Laying the correct and most strategic foundation for your business from a branding perspective is one of the smartest business decisions you’ll ever make.

*NOTE*  If you’re a small business, don’t get obsessed with branding your business.  There should be some definite thought, money and consideration there but it’s easy to get sidetracked.  Most small businesses don’t have the huge marketing budgets like Coca Cola,  Dell or Microsoft.  A small business’s marketing goal should be lead generation and getting people to RESPOND to your marketing messages.  More on this in a different post but wanted to add it because its an important point to remember.

Do you recommend any other graphic design services?  Did I miss anything else is relation to business branding above?  Comment below.

Related articles

• The first three steps to small business branding
• How to Express Your Logo Vision to Your Designer

Inbound Marketing Confusion

The concept of Inbound Marketing can be confusing for the non-digital native CMO.  There’s more to Inbound Marketing than hiring your nephew to write tons of witty blog posts.  The correct integration of Inbound strategies into your organization will make you a marketing hero, allow you to lower the COCA (Cost of Customer Acquisition), will tighten the relationship between sales and marketing as well as give you better piece of mind when presenting to the C-levels.

Here are 4 ways to become a better Inbound Marketing CMO.

Find the right software.

If you’re a medium to large organization, you need to purchase a marketing software to measure and consolidate everything that you’re doing.  Make sure it has easy reporting, source attribution, multi-user logins, email marketing, IP tracking, lead scoring, seamless integration with your CRM, keyword tools and website health checks.  (I’ll reserve another post to explain the many options in this space. ) If you’re actively looking for a marketing software, do several Google searches for “marketing automation software” and you’ll get a huge list of places to start.

Create Content for Each Stage of the Buying Cycle

Fact: Most people that come to your site, aren’t ready to buy.  Fact:  Most people that come into contact with your Inbound Marketing will never be a customer.  As a marketer, you have to create content that touches everyone at the very top of the funnel as well as each part of your particular buying cycle. You also need to GIVE these prospects VALUE in order to submit their name and email address so you can nurture to them over time.  By “carpet bombing” the people at the top of your funnel and using an intelligent strategy, you’ll start to recognize the prospects that fit your ideal prospect (lead scoring).

Once these prospects raise their hand, you need to know where your prospects are in the buying cycle in order to give them the most relevant content.   What are your prospect’s biggest pain points?  What are their most common questions? What are the things someone at the beginning of the buying cycle may be interested in vs someone towards the end?  You must have all of that content listed in easy to find areas on your site, have Calls to Actions to capture their information as well as have it optimized through the search engines.

Closed Loop Reporting

Having a tight integration with your company’s CRM is also a best practice for effective Inbound Marketing.  Once a lead closes to a deal…..before you take the sales team out to the local pub for burgers and beer…you should know what happened THROUGHOUT sales cycle with this particular deal.

For example:

New Closed-Won Deal

6 months ago:  The prospect finds site through a blog post, views 6 other website pages then disappears.

2 months ago: The prospect downloads a whitepaper

5 days ago:  The prospect fills out a contact form and connects with a sales rep.

In this specific case, the fact that your blog post brought this prospect into your site can later be referenced as attributing to the revenue that you have to report to your CEO.  Closed loop reporting along side your Inbound Marketing strategy will help you be able to know which marketing channels and what specific content it is at the top of the funnel thats attributing to all of your leads and closes.  Smart marketers then assign revenue to these specific channels and start creating more content similar to the content that’s attributing to the revenue.

(below is a screenshot from my Hubspot marketing software that shows where the lead came in and what content they interacted with)

Hiring an Inbound Marketing Team

A lot of the inbound content writing, strategies, tracking and implementation can be done in house.  I’ve also seen a lot of successful situations where 3rd parties were able to help create and manage content.  So, what should your Inbound Marketing team look like?  Well, if you’re a medium sized company, you probably already have a couple mid-level marketing managers and maybe an intern or two.  I suggest having one person take on the roll of coordinating everything inbound marketing related.  Because there are so many moving parts it takes a full time employee.  They should be good with managing time, coordination, able to think creatively but also be good with analytics.  I would also recommend having one person on staff that has a background in copy-writing/ publishing in the field that your company is in.  It will come in handy when writing the more technical pieces of content.

Of course, this is only part of becoming an awesome Inbound Marketing CMO.

What have you found to help you or other marketing professionals become more successful with Inbound Marketing? Please comment below.

Related articles

• What Does ‘Inbound Marketing’ Mean To You?
• 5 Reasons Why Your Inbound Marketing Isn’t Working

Here are 3 steps to finding your ideal prospect.

1. Start with your current customers.  

Arrange your customers in revenue value from greatest amount of money coming in to the least.  Do you see any similarities in the companies you’re making the most of your money off of??  I know it sounds crazy but a lot of businesses take on customers that end up wasting too much time and money.

2. “Referability” 

After you have taken away the list of customers that are time wasters and aren’t making you as much money as you want, start a new list from this list.  This tighter list are customers that are not only making you money but have referred you ….or have the affinity to refer you out.  This is your sweet spot.

3. Buy a hound dog and start sniffing around

By now you have a list of customers that make your business money and that refer you or that would be very willing to be an advocate to your business.  Don’t stop here.  If you’re a smart marketer and you’re using Inbound Marketing Techniques or tapping into the vast quantities of data we have now, you have another list to start building.  Find out where these specific customers came from.  Find out what web pages they viewed on your site.  Find out what they downloaded.  Knowing these things may help you design other content and user experiences for potential customers just like them.

Now that you have a list of money-making advocates, every one of your marketing decisions should revolve around your ideal prospect.  You’ll start seeing more qualified and more ideal leads coming though your pipeline.  Yes, there may be less of them coming through your online channels at first, but they will be easier to close and more apt to refer you other people that are more like your ideal prospect.  Win Win.

Dustin DeTorres

Orlando, Florida

In order to streamline and get a more successful start to implementing an inbound marketing strategy to your business, there are several things to consider first.

• Who is your ideal customer?
• Should I use a marketing automation software? (Disclosure: I’m a Certified Hubspot Partner)
• What makes your business different than your competition?  
• Are you willing to dedicate 5 hours a week to have a “publisher” mentality for your business?

Here are 3 steps to setting your business up for Inbound Marketing success.

1: Make sure your website is set up to capture leads.  

All the traffic in the world is pointless unless you have clear Calls to Actions located throughout your site.  You you should make it as easy as possible for someone to contact you via email, telephone, to connect on social channels, to download more info, etc.   Do you have calls to actions in each post or every page?  Remember that when you’re using proper inbound marketing strategies, most people wont come to your site via the homepage, they’ll find you through an organic blog post, video or landing page which will take them deep into your site.

Notice how a Hubspot client uses simple, relevant Call to Actions in the middle of each blog post.

2: Create great and consistent content. 

One question I hear a lot is, “How do I make time for creating content?” and “Where do I start?”.   The simple answers are this.  As a small business owner, you probably already know all of the questions  your customers are asking.  You already know the answers.  Why not start there?  (If you don’t know all of the questions, start doing research.)  The first batch of content should literally answer any possible question that one would ever ask about your company, product or service.  Offer up comparisons to your competitors.  ”vs” blog posts are loved by the search engines as well as your potential customers doing research.

Consistency is the key. Dedicate one hour a day to creating content.  People will judge your business by the lack of production of content.  There are also a ton of 3rd party companies and people that will physically write for you.  (never directly post that content, I would proof read several times and add your own personality and flair to it before it goes out).  Two of the companies I’v used before are wordsforless.com and zerys.com.

Think User Experience first…. then SEO.  What if you get someone to your site but they get an awkward feeling while reading your content that its made specifically for the search engines.  Today, social media plays a huge role in search engine algorithms, so when you create relevant, awesome and helpful content, people will reward you by sharing it across their social network which will ultimately increase its visibility and ranking on Google, Yahoo and Bing.  (This also leads to the other point of making your content as easily share-able as possible).

Overwhelmed with the concept of creating a Content Calendar?  Don’t even know what that means?  It’s ok.  The concept there is to organize, strategically all of your content into schedules so its better managed dependent of the many facets of your business.  My solution to that for a small business owner is doing this:  Create 12 topics that are related to your business.  Each month, focus solely on that topic for ALL of your content marketing efforts.  That way, it makes it easier for you to know what to focus on.  If you’re using a marketing automation software, which I recommend, you’ll know what pieces of content or topics resonate better with your audience.  You’ll then be able to make more of that same type of content.  Take a look at the Content Marketing Institute for great ideas on content marketing.

3: Stay active where your prospects are

Are most of your clients on LinkedIn?  Specific niche websites? Find out where they hang out, interact, ask questions and get very active THERE.  Most of my clients have had tons of success in creating their own LinkedIn Group specific to a broad topic or simply curating 3rd party content.  Doing so will keep your business and face fresh on their mind for the one day when they are ready to pull the trigger for a service like yours. Who will they think of first?

Of course, there are many more tips and strategies to creating an inbound marketing strategy but I’ll leave that up to you in your comments below.

Thanks!

Dustin DeTorres

561-703-2538

Orlando, FL

Related articles

• Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing
• What Does ‘Inbound Marketing’ Mean To You?
• Permission Marketing, Inbound Marketing & Content Marketing: What’s the Difference?

We will become more social 

Good:  Commonalities will be more out in the open.  Say you’re sitting in a restaurant and people sit down next to you.  Today, without physically walking up to them and starting an old fashioned conversation, there’s no way to actually find out information about them.  Yes, there are some mobile apps that help in this process but I haven’t found a good one yet.  In 2 years, you’ll easily look at them with your augmented reality glasses, see who you’re mutually connected to as well as any sort of common ground.

Bad: Is becoming more social really bad?  I don’t think so.   However, the people that are anti-augmented reality may encounter some discrimination.

Google will dominate our lives even more

Good:  Although I’ve read of several Google Glass competitors, none have the backing, technology, patents or infrastructure that Google has.  Google will be able to integrate even more seamlessly into our daily lives using the ever increasing amount of data streaming in.  It will make things easier to organize, find, connect to and to learn.

Bad:  Google Instant and Google Now are already one step ahead of our every move.  Will the futuristic version of this literally control our lives?  Will the Google affect change the way larger subsections of our population act?  We are already able to predict flu outbreaks by using big data.  I’m positive that when we’re all wearing Google Glass, something will surface that Google has formed the way we …as a whole…react to certain situations.  Big Brother may turn out to be a 24 year old developer in Cupertino.

Monetization of the Augmented Reality

Good: Creation of new industries, new innovations, competitive landscapes that push companies to create new things are all positives that will come from trying to monetize augmented reality.  The integration of context in ads will be a must or the click through’s or “interact through’s” will be super low.  The local business owner will truly get a lot out of this since he or she will now be able to do extreme local targeted advertising.

Bad: Google Adwords made Google over 40 billion dollars in 2012.  Taking an Adword ad and implementing it into an augmented reality isn’t the same.  My concern is that Google will risk the user experience in order to make sure they recoup the money they’re losing from people searching through augmented reality and not a laptop.

How do you think Google Glass or other augmented reality devices will change our lives for the good or bad?  Comment below.

Related articles

• What it Looks Like to Use Google Glass Augmented Reality Glasses
• Augmented Reality: new patent allows Google Glass to control appliances
• 5 Alternative Heads-Up Displays That Aren’t Google Glass

What has caused such a rapid crash between social and search?  3 things.

1: Big Data

It was destined to happen.  With the amount of useful demographic data that Facebook and all the other social networks are collecting on you while you sleep, it was only a matter of time before they used that same data to help us in our daily lives.

Where the data comes from:  Mobile phone searches, location based apps, people telling you intimate details about their likes or dislikes on social media and video.

2: Influence of Social Signals and Search Performance

Social signals definitely affect search results.  As of today, anywhere from 8 to 10% of the results you see in Google and Bing are affected via social signals.  Whether or not your organization has embraced social media and social networking, it emits social signals to Google.  Think about the social signals your business creates vs your biggest competitor.  Are you worried?

Case Study: A company called Tiny Prints saw a 47% increase in rankings by using Twitter.

3: Local Intent

According to Google, over 40% of all mobile searches have local intent and 20% of ALL Google searches have local intent.   Google Plus and Facebook’s new Graph Search are going to be the biggest social players in the local search game for years to come.  Soon enough, whenever you search for ANYTHING local you’ll start seeing your social graph integrated into the results.  How will that affect your decision?  My guess is that it will drastically affect how we choose where we eat, travel and shop in the future.

How do you see the combination of Search and Social affecting our lives?  Comment below.

Dustin DeTorres

dustindetorres@gmail.com

The term converged media really comes from the fact that paid, earned and owned media now overlap.  The Altimeter Group did a very comprehensive study and created the converged media infographic below.

Before brands can really grasp the theory of converged media, they need to understand what those media types are.

(some may overlap in some circumstances)

Paid Media:  Pay Per Click (PPC): Web, mobile, social. Display advertising.

Owned Media:  This includes your social channels, your blog, location based pages, Youtube channels, etc.

Earned Media: aka “Shared Media”  Retweets, likes, customer reviews and other user generated content that is not controlled by marketing teams.

Due to the rapid changes in today’s social, mobile and local world, companies of all sizes are now struggling to keep up.

To achieve a true converged media approach to one’s marketing, organizations must focus on 4 things:

1: Breaking down departmental silos

2: Integrating marketing automation tools into the sales/ marketing process

3: Getting out of the “old way” of doing things

4: Defining a content strategy that works across paid, owned and earned media

Have you integrated a converged media approach at your business?  If so and you have any feedback, please comment below.

Dustin DeTorres

dustindetorres@gmail.com

OK, lets get started.

What is a content strategy?

A content strategy is an evolving, always changing thing.  It’s more of a mindset  than anything.  Its a long term investment full of research, tweaking and analyzing trends.  Its an annuity that builds up over time.  It will generate your business leads while you sleep.  It will take people that are on the fence of buying your product and turn them into customers then later advocates of your brand.  Your sales reps can use the content you create during the sales process.

It doesn’t have to be some huge drawn process.  You can simply just think about the design, workflow, resources, goals and metrics and get started.  Mistakes will be made along the way but the key is……to just get started

Here are a few ways to get the creative juices flowing:

-Put together a list of your top FAQ’s
-Do research on related keywords using Google Analytics
-Start typing  in your business related keywords on Google and see what Google auto-fills in
-Look at the traffic of your current webpages and blog posts.  What gets the most traffic?

If you’re the one spearheading the content strategy in your organization, you should get content marketing buy in from your co-workers. The more content you have, the more chances you have to generate leads and content to spawn other content ideas from.  What if it gets overwhelming trying to coordinate all of this content?  There are a ton of companies that offer assistance with content marketing workflow. One of my favorites is DocuVantage.

Below is a nice visualization from the Content Marketing Institute on how your content strategy could potentially be broken down from very broad to detailed.  As you can see, having the ability to test all of your content marketing is very important so you’re able to make tweaks along the way.

A Monthly Content Strategy Approach

I’ve seen organizations take it a step “simpler” by having themes for each month.  For example, your content strategy could be 12 different topics that you know your prospects and customers are searching for online.  So for March, all the blog posts, video, Ebooks, etc are only about that one specific topic.  Then in April, you choose another topic etc etc.  After a few months of doing this, you’ll be able to see what content is ranking better, resonating the best with your audience and higher converting landing pages.

Whatever content strategy direction you take for your organization, you should also think about the perception of the consumer.  If your content strategy is done right and you get buy-in, the many people from the different departments will have a hand in creating content for you.  The end product should promote consistent, effective, efficient and seamless user experiences.

Now its your turn.

How have you implemented a content strategy into your organization?  Please comment below.

By Dustin DeTorres

dustin@dustindetorres.com

I think so.

When it comes down to it, we need more deals, more revenue, more leads, more clicks, more downloads and more eyeballs.

The top brands like Coke, Proctor and Gamble, Google and IBM need to focus a lot of time and effort to manipulate their brand in the eyes of the consumer.  On the other hand, small to medium sized businesses need to focus on having a bad ass products or services first and foremost.  They also need to focus on getting deals closed.

If I owned a carpet cleaning business and there were 80 other carpet cleaners in my area, why would I care about how cool my logo looked if I was broke?