4 Ways to Win at Local Content Marketing

When it comes to marketing content to local customers, you have to take a unique approach - the tactics that work for big businesses aren’t going to resonate with the target audience in your town. So what do you need to do differently? Here, I’ll discuss a new approach for marketing content to local customers.

1. Feature local experts in your content.

Most local marketers focus nearly all their content on their business alone, but there are a lot of benefits to also bringing in other local experts related to your niche. Incorporate quotes and interviews with local experts, or find other ways to feature them in your content through collaboration. As long as they’re not your direct competitors, you can work with them to create a mutually beneficial relationship to expand your audience base. Besides, keeping all your content focused on your business alone sets you up for some limitations.

7 Steps to Defining Your Niche Market

In their book, Start Your Own Business, the staff of Entrepreneur Media, Inc. guides you through the critical steps to starting a business, then supports you in surviving the first three years as a business owner. In this edited excerpt, the authors explain how you can find the right niche for your entrepreneurial needs.

You’ve come up with a great idea for a business, but you’re not ready to roll yet. Before you go any further, the next step is figuring out just who your market is. There are two basic markets you can sell to: consumer and business. These divisions are fairly obvious. For example, if you're selling women’s clothing from a retail store, your target market is consumers; if you're selling office supplies, your target market is businesses (this is referred to as “B2B” sales). In some cases—for example, if you run a printing business—you may be marketing to both businesses and individuals.

The State of Brand Journalism: Are brands becoming the media?

The old way of inspiring brand awareness and loyalty focused on influencing consumers by subtly “highlighting” a certain word or term in marketing campaigns. Today, users no longer respond to marketing language and advertising campaigns that speak generically about a brand. It seems to me that customers want a personal connection, and brand journalism allows companies to entrench themselves in consumer’s lives without the in-your-face, sales tactics people hate.

8 ways to build a marketing agency

Creating a digital marketing agency can be one of the most rewarding businesses you’ll ever create. In 2006 I created my first digital agency selling websites. I quickly learned that despite me knowing “everything”, what I was doing was setting me up for failure. There were a lot of other companies that my clients could choose from, why would they choose me? What made me different?

Over the following 8 years and 3 different companies, I learned what it takes to build a thriving agency. This has helped me to grow relationships, brand myself and earn a very good living over the years.

Here are a few of the mistakes that I made along the way for you to learn from on your path to building a large digital marketing agency.

5 Proven Strategies to Rid Sales and Marketing of Bad Blood

When your sales and marketing teams aren’t exactly seeing eye-to-eye, your overall productivity, revenue growth, and profit might seriously be suffering. In fact, companies who don’t have alignment between their sales and marketing teams could well be leaving a significant amount of money on the table each year.

According to a study conducted by MathMarketing, businesses with the greatest degree of alignment:

• Grow 5.4 points faster than their less-aligned counterparts when compared with businesses in the same industry
• Close 38% more proposals than non-aligned businesses
• Lose 36% fewer customers to competitors

Practical Marketing Strategies

From my personal experiences as a marketing student and later as a lecturer in Marketing with the Chartered Institute of Marketing, Ghana, I have realized that most text books are awash with foreign examples that are sometimes difficult for students to grasp. Marketing as a course is clearly related to our ‘day-to-day’ activities and it should be as practical as possible and full of fun.

The essence of marketing is the delivery of customer-centric solutions to maximize the achievement of organisational goals. Every organisation exists to offer some form of solution to its target market and those solutions can be in the form of products or services. 

Marketers should therefore devise strategies to help the organisation to improve its internal weakness and use its identified strengths to exploit the opportunities in the external environment and minimize external threats.

Bridging the rift between social media and traditional media

Is there a company concerned with marketing its products and services that has not yet tapped into the power of social media? Is there also a company that has never used traditional media for any form of advertising in times past though actively involved in the production of goods and services? What makes traditional and social media so different and how can these two come together for an organisation’s benefit?
There are indeed many differences between traditional and social media; the table below lists a few of these differences.