by Marketing Manager | Blog, Blogging, Content Curation
In ancient times, a powerful king oppressed his people. The citizens of the land feared the king and begged the gods for help. So the gods created a wild man that could equal the king and stop his misdeeds. The wild man and the king fought a great battle, but the king showed superior strength. After all was over, the two men became friends and began a grand journey together that would see triumph, heartbreak, and the search for eternal life. This is the Epic of Gilgamesh, the earliest surviving work of literature, written around 1800 BC. Human beings are natural storytellers. We’ve been sharing tales around the campfire since the invention of the campfire! Even ancient cave paintings from 30,000 years ago tell stories of the hunt. So what does the Epic of Gilgamesh have to do with blogging? Turns out, a lot! How Do Stories Draw in Readers? Stories help your writing to stand out. In the unending ocean of blogs (over 500 million of them!), interesting stories share personality and entertain the readers. While they may be searching for answers to their problems, they also want to have a little fun! Clever storytelling also helps the writer to connect to the reader. It shares your unique voice and displays your personality. Telling stories is how you can get people to look forward to your content eagerly, instead of reading a blog once and never coming back to your site. One study showed that a blog post that opened with a story saw nearly 300% more readers scroll all the...
by Marketing Manager | Blog, Content Creation, Content Curation, Content Marketing, How To's & Info you can use
Professional copywriters are experts in sales and human psychology. They know what makes people tick and how to connect with an audience to get them to spend their hard-earned dollars on a product or service. They’re also very expensive. A top-tier copywriter can charge upper five-figures to write a website. And many small businesses aren’t prepared to make that kind of investment. Instead, they (or their head of marketing) will write the copy themselves. Fortunately, there are some quick tips that you can adopt to improve your sales copy today, whether it’s your home page, product descriptions, direct mail, or whatever else you use to communicate verbally with your customers. #1 Write Like You Talk As soon as we start writing “as our businesses,” we become stilted and formal, like we’re trying to impress our high school English teachers. We replace perfectly good words like “use” with “utilize” to try to sound more professional. But all we’re really doing is making it harder for the reader to understand. A good rule of thumb is to write your copy to a 6th to 7th grade reading level. That doesn’t mean you’re dumbing it down. The Lord of the Rings is written at a 7th grade reading level, and J.R.R. Tolkien was no slouch. To prevent falling into overly formal writing, write like you talk. Keep sentences short, and use contractions like “didn’t” instead of “did not.” Starting sentences with transition words like and, but, although, and instead can help the reader to follow your thoughts. After you’ve finished your draft, read it out loud. It...
by Marketing Manager | Blog, Blogging
Guest posting has long been a tool in the content marketer’s arsenal. But it’s still one of the more misunderstood tactics, with unscrupulous SEOs sending out poorly written content and breaking the rules for links. When done right, guest posting still has a lot of value. So we’re going to talk about what it is, and how you can get started. What is Guest Posting? A guest post is a blog post that you write to be posted on someone else’s website. There are several benefits to writing guests posts: Get your name exposed to a new audience Connect with other industry professionals Establish yourself as an industry leader Some guest posting advocates also say that it is a useful way to get more backlinks to your website, thus helping your SEO efforts. But Google doesn’t agree — at least not if you’re only after the backlink. Some marketers have used spammy tactics in the past, flooding sites with crummy guest posts just for the link. That’s not helpful to users, so Google often penalizes sites who do it — both the site hosting the post and the site that the post is linking to. To avoid this problem, make sure you’re writing unique, valuable content. Great guest posts aren’t a 500-word rehash of topics already on the web. They’re often long-form, original works like case studies or thorough how-to guides. If you treat the guest post as a piece of important information regardless of the link, you should be just fine. The Rules for Guest Posting Google’s goal first and foremost...
by Marketing Manager | Blog, Marketing Tips, Stats and Infographics, Trends
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced us to take a long, hard look at some things we used to take for granted. Over the past year, we’ve explored the wide world of masks, found a new appreciation for our wonderful public school teachers, and learned about the true value of toilet paper. We’ve also learned that for many small businesses, we can complete our daily work activities quite efficiently, even when the entire team is working from home. While the coronavirus didn’t start the shift to remote work, it certainly sped things up. Only 3.2% of the American workforce worked from home in 2018, compared to 42% in 2020! This dramatic and rapid shift is forcing employers to consider their own policies. Are you keeping an office because it’s useful, or because it’s the way things have always been done? When it’s safe to gather again, will it be time to let the office space go? Is Work-From-Home Working? Before considering ditching the office permanently, you have to consider the way the change has affected your business. Is your team more productive, or less? According to research by Global Workplace Analytics in the late 2000s, businesses are losing $600 billion annually due to workplace distractions. That same study says that many companies like Best Buy and Dow Chemical report that remote workers are 35-40% more productive than on-site workers. With meetings moved to video conferencing platforms like Zoom, they are less likely to get off topic and drag on unnecessarily. And with no commuting time, some employees are actually spending more hours at their desks, getting...
by Marketing Manager | Blog, Content Curation, Content Marketing, Marketing, Marketing Tips, Mobile Marketing, Trends
Kentucky Fried Chicken brought back vintage chicken buckets from 1966 and 1971 for the holiday season. Cobra Kai, the continuation of the Karate Kid franchise, is one of the most popular shows on Netflix. And the Nintendo Switch continues to be one of the hottest gaming consoles, with a full catalog of old school video games. Noticing a trend? Each of these brands is benefitting from the emotional power of nostalgia, a wistfulness for days gone by. Nostalgia marketing has seen a major resurgence over the past several years, and the COVID-19 pandemic has made the trend even more ubiquitous. Here’s what you need to know about nostalgia marketing, and how it’s shifting in 2021. What is Nostalgia Marketing? Nostalgia marketing uses imagery, music, or pop culture references from the past to tap into our collective longing for a simpler past. It creates a “remember when” feeling that helps your audience feel more connected to you and your brand. Millennials respond particularly well to nostalgia marketing. Now in their mid-20s to mid-30s, these young adults are looking back to a time before social media and constant connectivity, when your neighborhood was your world. Well into adulthood, this demographic is raising their own young children in an environment drastically different from the one in which they grew up. Nostalgia marketing can also address the changes that we all go through over time. LiftMaster’s Ferris Bueller’s Day Off commercial winks to the audience, showing Cameron all grown up and preventing his own son from getting into the same Ferrari-related scrape that he faced 30 years...
by Marketing Manager | Blog, Facebook, Photography, Social Media, Twitter
The world of social media marketing is noisy these days. Getting your content to the people who are most likely to buy your products or use your services is akin to trying to flag down a car going 90 miles an hour on a six-lane highway — when you’re in a building on the side of the road. It’s tough going. The only way to succeed is to make sure that your social media posts stand out in a crowded playing field. You need to create content that’s compelling and irresistible if you want to grab attention from your competitors — or, let’s face it, from your followers’ friends and family. Here are some things that can help your Facebook posts and Tweets stand out in 2021. Up Your Emoji Game You might not think of emoji as professional but the bottom line is that internet users love them. Incorporating them into your social media content can help your posts stand out. Go to GetEmoji.com and you’ll find a huge bank of emoji you can copy and paste into your posts. It’s important not to overdo it. Using one to three emoji per post is the right range. A word to the wise: make sure you know what an emoji means before you use it. I’ve seen more than one example of the “tears of laughter” emoji being used to express sorrow. If you don’t know what it means, don’t use it. Add Images to Tweets While it’s common to see photographs and graphics attached to Facebook posts, visual imagery is...
