Anyone involved in a business has a role to play in marketing. In today’s highly competitive world, marketing sits across every function of a business, and it’s not just down to ‘The Marketing Department.’ If you work for yourself or run a small business, sales and marketing will be as much a part of your working day as everything else that has to be done to make a profit.
Marketing can be a very complex subject, but anyone can develop a few of the core skills and see the results of their efforts. You may feel it’s something best left to the experts, but there are some essential marketing skills that can make a huge difference to your success in business.
The Pareto Principle (80/20 rule)
For technology behemoths, staying innovative is a constant challenge.
Many of these companies are forming internal groups — often referred to as skunkworks — tasked with researching and building innovative products. The goal is to ensure that new ideas are not stifled by bureaucracy.
HootSuite, Canada’s supremely well-funded startup known for its social media management software, is the latest to launch a skunkworks. Over the past few months, VentureBeat has learned that the company has been quietly building a new team called “Hootsuite Labs.” The Labs employees will be dedicated to new product development and will host the usual cocktail of hackathons, workshops, and design sprints in cities like Vancouver and San Francisco.
For those of you just joining us, our bracket-style elimination system is based on a variety of factors, including social reach and engagement, short answer responses, company size, brand voice, social influence, cohesive design, style of online conversation and quality and ratio of interactions.
These companies may be small, but they sure know how to work it on social media — especially on Twitter, which is why this round was particularly close in almost every match-up.
"Content is fire. Social media is gasoline."
Jay Baer uses this analogy to explain the idea that content is the main substance in any digital marketing campaign; social media channels ignite that content and help it to spread. What this means for marketers is that content must be at the core of your digital marketing initiatives. Content is what people find when searching on Google. Content is what people share on social media channels. Content is how brands tell their story and connect with customers. And content is what ultimately drives leads and sales.
But you can't just create a video, post it on Facebook, and expect it to generate tons of awareness, engagement, and sales. You need to put thought and structure behind the content you create and share on social media profiles. Start with these seven tips for managing and maximizing content in social media.
Building on an earlier post, this piece offers additional guidance to help professionals upgrade their LinkedIn profiles. It describes seven tasks that can be tackled in one sitting or over several sessions. These tasks include adding digital links, creating a summary and adding specialties, selecting representative skills and expertise, and customizing one’s public profile. Each task includes specific tips that reflect best practices and/or maximize the profile’s potential effectiveness.
Recently I updated and republished 7 Simple To Dos for Rookies to Enhance Their LinkedIn Profile, the first in a three-part series that offers a “crawl-walk-run” approach to helping folks upgrade their LinkedIn profiles from anemic to impressive and effective. The first post focused on a handful of basic things people should do to make sure they have created a respectable presence on LinkedIn that also lays a solid foundation to build on. Its ongoing popularity underscores the fact that even though LinkedIn is over ten years old, many professionals have barely begun to establish themselves properly on this professional network. If you haven’t read that post yet, I encourage you to check it out before proceeding with this one.
This post provides seven basic recommendations that can help digital rookies transform their LinkedIn profile from anemic to respectable. These tasks can be tackled in as little as an hour (and no more than a half-day session) and will produce a solid basic presence that also lays a foundation for future development.
To some people it may seem rather ridiculous to share this kind of guidance in 2014, but judging from the anemic LinkedIn profiles I view on a daily basis, it’s clear that it’s advice people still need. I know everyone is busy, but if how they represent themselves as professionals is important to them (and it should be), they need to make the time to get this particular digital house in order. Anyone who can manage to carve out time to go to the gym or get their hair cut/styled should be able to carve out time to ensure their basic cyber presence is well groomed too.
