Mighty Marketing Mojo

Tag: research

9 Ways for Busy Solopreneurs to Keep Up With the Latest Marketing Trends
Check Out 9 Ways You Can Keep Up with the Latest Marketing Trends

Staying on top of the latest marketing trends can present quite a challenge. With that being said, there are a few ways that you can stay on top of the game and make sure you are using the most up-to-date methods of marketing your business.

As a business, it is essential to make your presence known. Keeping a professional website is the first step in making sure that is done. Your website is the “storefront” for your business and this is what actually sets the tone for those that express an interest by visiting your website. Make sure your website is search engine optimized. Having a perfectly optimized website is awesome, but make sure you gain the exposure you need in order see the success you are hoping for.

But having an awesome and optimal website isn’t enough. You need to do your homework to stay on top of the latest and greatest marketing opportunities available for you and your business. But hey, I’ve done the homework for you! Check out these trend tips:

9 tactics that can keep your solopreneur marketing one step ahead:

Visit Internet/Digital Marketing Blogs

Interact with others in the community by visiting forums and read posts by others regarding marketing methods they have tried or those they intend to try. If you see a new opportunity that arises, take advantage of it. Few of my favorite marketing blogs to recommend (other than my own here!):
- Duct Tape Marketing – from author and small business marketing expert, John Jantsch
- Marketing Profs – articles, training, strategies, conferences for both marketing departments and individual marketers
- Content Marketing Institute – want to know more about the world of Content Marketing, this is THE place and they do awesome yearly benchmarking research on B2C, B2B and nonprofit CM.
- Chris Brogan’s Blog – speaker, author, consultant, marketing guru with a focus on entrepreneurs; personable, approachable style.
- WebInkNow – blog from best-selling marketing book author, David Meerman Scott
- HubSpot – they are the ultimate model of content marketing – they teach it, live it, help other businesses execute it properly. It’s well worth giving them your email address in exchange for some of the fantastic guides, planners, spreadsheets and tools they offer as lead magnets.
Participate in Conferences

This will allow you to meet other people, many of whom are right on top of the game. This is a great way to gain useful insight and information that will prove to be invaluable for you and your business. This might mean planning for 1 conference a year that’s not in your clients’ fields, nor your own professional association, but a marketing-centric meeting or conference. Look for ones with other small, solo businesses so you can pick up tips from others facing similar challenges. It doesn’t help to learn about tools that only the really BIG girls and boys can afford.

Networking

Take time to network with other business marketers. It’s good for more than building your contact list, it can build your knowledge too if you ask interesting questions and listen a lot! Share information with others and gather information from those who are trying to do the same thing you are. This allows you to stay on top of the latest marketing trends, and extract information from others as to their experiences with certain methods.

Research

You know this is one of the most important actions you can take that will help you gain knowledge about current marketing trends. Put your research skills to use and find information about the newest marketing trends. If anything in life is certain, it’s the fact that marketing trends are always changing. Keeping up-to-date can really be like a rat race if you don’t do your homework and commit time and effort in keeping up with the changes presented into today’s marketing world.

Subscribe to Alerts

You can use Google Alerts and get an email any time Google finds new results anywhere that matches your topic(s). Use it for tracking your competitors, key influencers in your niche, tracking the main industries of your clients, and of course keeping up on specific marketing topics. Note: Google Alerts has been buggy and not 100% reliable for a little while.

Alternatives to Google Alerts:
- Talkwalker Alerts [FREE] – simple, bare-bones style, sends alerts to your inbox or an RSS feed reader.
- SocialMention [free again] – especially good at monitoring blogs, social networking, videos and the comments sections for your selected keywords/topics.
- Mention – probably most powerful monitoring tool – you pay for power and reliability though! [Free trial, solo plan starts at $29/mo]
- Meltwater News – [paid] big time, industry level online media monitoring (a good tool for info pros to know of for their own work – if you have it, don’t forget to use it to monitor YOUR brand and how to boost your own biz)
Subscribe to Blogs and News Sites

You can subscribe individually to many blogs and get the latest posts emailed to you automatically (check the sidebar to the right and sign up for posts from me, The InfoHound). Or you can grab the RSS feed of a blog.
The RSS feed is NOT dead – and with many new magazine style apps out there for mobile, there are more ways to read and keep up with your favorite blogs (like this one!) and news sites. Basically, an RSS feed talks to the feed reader (aggregator) and every time something new hits a site you’ve subscribed to, it’s sent to the feed reader and it’s ready, waiting for you.

I personally love Feedly (Web-based version – I only use for making some adjustments and doing a lot of content curating to Hootsuite; I use the Feedly app on phone + tablet DAILY!) and have TONS of sites feeding in, organized by various topics. I can keep News and Politics separate if I want (hard to do in life!) and I have ‘folders’ for Marketing, Tech, Photography, Libraries, etc. It’s simple to set up and you don’t have to know anything about RSS feeds really, you just tell it the URL of a site you want to have added to your ‘feed’.

Feedly RSS Feed Reader – Keep your content filled up

I also use a similar app called Flipboard that pulls my preferred topics from an assortment of news sites and blogs. It shows all the images as well as original text and is easy to read on mobile devices.

Get Social

Besides reading forums and blogs, go join some LinkedIn Groups, Facebook Groups, or start a list in Twitter. Ask questions in those marketing related groups about what others are seeing as emerging trends, hot trends, trends that don’t really matter, and their best practices. Create a list on Twitter of influential people, who post regularly with helpful Tweets, on the marketing for small or solo businesses [Here’s a few I like: Melissa Galt, Edmund Lee, Ken Watson, Barbara Schenck, Viveka Von Rosen, Berrak Sarikaya, Melinda Emerson, SCORE Mentors (do find your local SCORE chapter too!) and Ian Brodie]. Add a few who are overall marketing luminaries (like Guy Kawasaki, Ann Handley, Jay Baer, Chris Brogan, and John Jantsch) and see what they’re talking about. You can even create a hidden or secret list of your competitors and monitor and learn from them in real time too – maybe see what NOT to do!

Be Ok with Change

Make yourself readily available for change. Be resilient and flexible. Don’t forget what the main goals of your business really are. Think outside the box. Those are all ways of motivating yourself to entire ownership of the actions you take in marketing your business.

Never Stop Learning

Sign up for 1-2 courses, workshops, online training or webinars every 3-6 months. The world moves fast, technology changes, best practices in marketing shift around – so stay on top and keep learning. Professional development and education expands your business mind, keeps you up to date, gives you new tools and insights to help clients with, and makes sure you stay on top of your game.
HEY – maybe you want to check out new offerings from me, The InfoHound!

Your success really is based on your efforts in putting your business name right in front of your intended audience. Using the information given will give you the insight and knowledge you need in order to help you keep up with the latest marketing trends for your business. So will reading the blog here with me, The InfoHound, and signing up for classes, webinars and the training I offer especially for small, solo info-preneur businesses like yours (and my own!).
June 29, 2016
Where Do You Research For Content Creation

Where Do You Research for Content Creation Help?

You’ve done some brainstorming and you are coming up with new ideas to write, blog, or create videos on for your audience. But now you’re really working on the actual writing, sweating out creating the work. You’re looking for things to add, examples or data, a case study to highlight for your community, or just new ways to approach those topics. Great!

Where do you usually head first?

Yeah, probably Google.

Ok. Google is a good starting point. But you can’t stop there!

Use Google to find sources of reliable info and other sites to check rather than just accepting the first result that comes up. But you know that already, right? You’re not new to the search game! So consider this a friendly reminder.

So where might that Google search lead? What is your content research plan beyond Google?

How about some national associations? – professional groups, trade groups, educational orgs – all with a focus on a specific topic and often with a research mandate. Often some of THE most authoritative sites for original research on a niche topic. Do keep in mind that some of the trade associations and such are pushing their industry’s agenda, but many may partner with educational institutions and such to create more open, unbiased research so they are taken seriously.

What about online communities? Forums? Discussion groups? Email lists? Facebook Groups, LinkedIn Groups, G+ Circles and even Reddit. Try Boardreader.com and its Trendy tool, OMGILI or Comment Sniper to search forums, message boards and more.

Where are your people hanging out, talking to each other, asking questions? Go there! Yes, right now!

Ok, you’re back from checking out a few? Found great fodder and inspiration I bet! They have questions, they ask the community and sometimes they get good answers.

But what if you can provide even better answers? Wouldn’t that be really helpful? Wouldn’t your audience probably love you for that? So go write up some of those answers and give them tools and resources for the specific question you saw popping up a lot. Then go back to the community and post a link to your post, ebook, report or video with the awesome answer you crafted.

Social Media – it’s not just for talking about Game of Thrones or your friends’ kid pictures!

Do research on SM platforms where your audience hangs out. What are the trending topics, most used hashtags, most RT’d accounts or posts? Who are the influencers that you follow – or should be.

Check out social media monitoring tools or sites such as:

BuzzSumo – specifically a ‘content’ analysis tool – so it monitors websites, blogs and beyond social media

Bottlenose – mostly a paid tool for ‘social intelligence’ because you can create a dashboard and one-stop-shop for monitoring, tracking, analyzing

Google Alerts – still exists, although there have been rumors of its demise. [I use TalkWalker Alerts as a free supplement or alternative to Google Alerts]

IceRocket – may win the coolest name for a tool! A ‘brand monitoring’ tool with easy-to-read results

Topsy – [UPDATE: Topsy is no more. 🙁 ] ~~limited free searching of real time and archival Twitter, G+ searching; search on KWs, hashtags; filter to only tweets, photos, videos, etc; paid ‘pro’ accounts~~

Tweepz.com – Want to see who is Tweeting on any topic, location or skill set? Try using Tweepz. You can get inspiration if you’re lacking sufficient information about any topic. It’s also a great way to find movers and shakers to follow on Twitter.

Social Mention– Use this tool to find out who is mentioning you on social media (or your competitors, industry trends, keywords or products). Nicely broad coverage of social platforms and good metrics on strengths, reach, sentiment. You can follow the buzz about any topic which can also help you come up with content for your niche.

Netvibes.com – free and paid versions; mostly for monitoring brands or larger companies

Twilert.com – ‘real time alerts via email when brand names, keywords or hashtags are mentioned’

Issuu – free and paid plans; more a publishing or content aggregating tool than a monitoring tool

There are so many tools for social monitoring or listening I can’t keep track or list them all – but thankfully sites like Social Media Today , KissMetrics (itself a monitoring and analytics tool) and Social Media Examiner have already created lists. Go read their lists and find a few tools you like and will use regularly.

I’ve created an updated list of my favorite marketing tools that I use and recommend –
check out fave tools here.

Ask your own questions of your audience on social media – a quick poll or quiz or just a ‘pulse check’. But, don’t give them too many choices. It should be more like when you get your child ready for school – give them two choices: this or that? Give your audience a choice between two different videos you can create or webinars that you will host. Then, ask them to vote or decide.

Content Aggregators –aka RSS feed readers or ezine collectors. Try tools such as Feedly to collect blog posts and RSS feeds on topics you’re interested in, or AllTop and select from their lists of blogs or topics to follow. Use apps like Pulse, Zite, Prismatic, Longreads or FlipBoard to collect articles from multiple news sources all in one place on a variety of topics. You can curate or share that content as-is, or use it to dig a little deeper on topics and find additional info sources.

There are so many tools available that there’s no reason not to do a little more research and monitoring so you can find the current topics, trends and news that is affecting your audience. Be a hero and share that with them and show them how to make sense of it all.

Want more tips and cool tools to make your marketing smarter and easier?
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February 17, 2015
Google takes away the keys to keyword research for marketers

Google, keyword research and marketers

Well, hell.

Figuring out how folks found your website and landed there has gotten a whole lot harder thanks to Google. A staple tool of webmasters (novice and pro alike) and marketers – keyword research – is changing or disappearing.

Google has basically ‘hidden’ the search results of ALL users – not just those logged in to various Google properties – from its keyword research. These 2 reports tell all in detail:

HubSpot – https://blog.hubspot.com/google-encrypting-all-searches-nj

Search Engine Land – https://searchengineland.com/post-prism-google-secure-searches-172487

What’s been happening with keywords and search terms?

If you have a website you very likely have a Google Analytics account to see where your traffic is coming from and if you are doing well for the key terms that are important to your site. Using Google for open keyword research has been a standard tool for website owners and marketers. BUT … If search terms are encrypted (hidden) then what gets passed to Analytics is “not provided” for that given term. And there has been a huge spike in the number of “not reported” showing up for many sites.

% of terms ‘not provided’, from Search Engine Land

Why has this happened? And do we believe Google’s explanation?

2 main reasons are being thrown around for why Google has done this. And it’s questionable which might be the driver in this – if either is accurate.

1) Because they’re getting slammed for supposed cooperation with the NSA and the NSA’s huge dragnet of web data. Google has also been losing some traffic to sites like Duck Duck Go which promise ‘secure search’ to begin with.
Irony – Google has said it wants to be more ‘transparent’ in regard to requests from spying entities – sooooo, they’ve hidden the data – from everyone.

2) Ad dollars. Money. Because what is NOT encrypted are clicks on ads.
Ads Google sells.
And Google wants more people using AdWords (it had already started making it harder to get free Keyword data without having an AdWords account). Google can say all it wants about this encryption being ‘a good thing for our users,’ but I think they really mean for users of their ad buying tools.

If you want a very nice recap of how tracking works for search terms and page analytics – see this post from HubSpot earlier this year (when they were pondering if 2013 was the year keyword research disappeared – looks like they were right. Unfortunately.)

What can you do to learn about where your traffic is coming from?

Try Bing and Yahoo. Or Ask.com or even AOL. Yes, they have small pieces of the search market – but since they often return much of the same data as Google, they may act a bit like proxies for learning about search habits.

AdWords. Sigh.

You don’t (as of now!) have to actually buy pay-per-click ads from Google in AdWords – BUT if you link your new AdWords account to you Google Analytics account you can do some keyword research.

Tell me what other work-arounds YOU’VE found for doing keyword research!

September 25, 2013