Tag: blog - Page 3

Blogging is essential for each and every business, especially within this day and age. Most businesses underestimate the importance and added value blogging brings to the table for both your customers and your stakeholders.

The world of social media can be a difficult one to navigate, as it comes with a variety of endless opportunities and possibilities for businesses future overarching success. The overwhelming growth of social media platforms creates a sense of pressure on businesses to display a conscious active presence on all these diverse platforms; from Facebook, Instagram to YouTube, this list goes on and on. One of the main causes of failed social media strategies are due to businesses utilising and prioritising the wrong social media platforms for their particular industry and consumer market.

It’s time to Blog!

We recommend for all of our clients to have a blog page on their website, as well as to write blogs regularly, and post them on their social media accounts. We have been asked many times by clients why this is beneficial, and why they should take the time to do this. Read on to find out why!

Super blogger Jeff Bullas describes this age as the Age of Visual Culture, and in this period of time where everyone has a camera phone on stand-by to capture one of life’s many moments, the moniker certainly stands true. 

Visual content has become a universal language. It is Esperanto in image form and has people from all over the world sharing the language with each other. The image may be of a dog named Pippa with her own Instagram account or it could be an infographic detailing the complex nature of how to bone a fish Masterchef style. It may be a moving image of someone repairing a car engine or attempting fine tapestry.

Well-written short articles that are related to specific industries can position a business as a thought leader and increase credibility among customers.

With the right kind of marketing, the creation of these business related articles may go viral enticing a bigger audience to your product or service than you ever expected.

We all know that content is king. In the magazine world, from where I have come and which is vastly different to that of marketing, content drives advertising, audience and sales. Come to think of it, perhaps there isn’t much difference between the two.

What makes a magazine successful is a good mix of editorial and features written from within the editorial department and outsourced articles written by experts within particular fields. As a business editor, I would ask contributors to supply specific topics on property, investments, risk management and marketing. In-house editorial combined with carefully curated content, creates a magazine that encompasses the most important aspects of readability: information and entertainment.

As part of my new time management ritual, I am cutting back on my time surfing the net, checking for updates on social media and reading blogs.

When you run a business such as mine, it's hard to find time to do everything that you want to do, at the level you would like to do it at. So, I spent some time this morning reading over 50 different marketing blogs and was amazed at the varying levels of content quality.

There have been five writers that have truly stood out in the past few years, and although it would be fair to say that they have the following of the most loyal marketing and entrepreneurial crowd, they also come with thought leadership and strong opinions - which makes for great reading.

The lines blurred sometime in the last 10 years, but I don't know exactly when it happened.

Having started my first business at 25 years of age, specializing in technology marketing, I thought I had it all. A marketer who understood technology marketing and who could talk the talk which at that time seemed to be, the height of the dot com boom, the most lucrative marketing position one could hold.

Then of course, someone came along and started talking about company culture, and marketers took a turn to start embellishing the on-boarding process of new recruits, with a mixture of "people marketing" with "technology marketing" - and for a time, that was all the rage. It seemed to be the only thing people were talking about and marketers started to play a role in human resources, giving recruiters and in-house HR managers the tools to "sell their brands" like they were a front line sales executive needing to close the deal in order to reach their quotas.

UPDATE: There were 70,000 plus views within 48 hours of publishing story.

Who would have thought that a blog titled "Why married women are more successful" would receive 54,256 views in less than 24 hours, 555 likes, 634 comments, 702 Facebook likes, 2,632 shares on LinkedIn and 79 retweets on Twitter? I did. And that's exactly why I wrote it. I am a new author on LinkedIn and I know a thing or two about blogging and going viral. If I just write about marketing, at most, I will get between 1,000 and 10,000 views over a week. If I write about something personal - more. But if I write about something that people have strong opinions on or that hits a raw nerve - the sky is literally the limit.

It's no secret that I have taken a few days off. For a start, my social media accounts have come to a stop and I am not checking my emails. Instead I am giving myself time to think and soak up the atmosphere of Christmas and family, without disruptions. 

I won't lie by saying that I don't want to do all of these things, but I know that in order to give 2014 my best shot, that I will need to have a few days off and really get back to grassroots.