The Mighty Marketing Newsletter
The Mighty Marketing Newsletter is a series of marketing tips from the pros. We round up the latest news, we put together relevant and useful marketing articles, and we analyze data to help you transition your business into a digital powerhouse.
Created by veteran marketers Luke O'Neil and Jordan Kasteler, The Mighty Marketing Newsletter provides valuable insights on topics like social media management, email marketing, content strategy, and more. Every day this newsletter reaches thousands of people across the globe with 100% open rates. Now it's your turn to get better at marketing!
6.4.4. Email List
Everyone should have an email list.
Your email list is the lifeblood of your business. It's the one place where you should always be in front of your customers so they can find you when they need you. If you've been blogging, as I hope you are, you're already on your customer's radar and they can find you if they want to. We'll talk more about how to grow an email list in Section 8, but for now just know that it's a crucial part of digital marketing and something you simply must do if the goal is any sort of success with your business.
Now, as I mention at the beginning of this chapter, your email list is also something you have to take care of. Just being on someone's "to do" list doesn't mean they'll open your emails or respond to them or give you any response at all. I'm sure that's obvious, but it bears repeating because it's so important. Your job is to make sure that every single person on your list knows how important and valuable they are, and how much you value their business.
The main points covered in Section 6.4.3:
- Content marketing is one of the most powerful tools in digital marketing, and it should be a cornerstone of your marketing strategy.
- Creating content is a lot of work, but it's work that will save you time and money in the long run.
- There are lots of different things you can create in order to flesh out your content marketing plan.
6.5. Section 6 Summary
There are endless ways to attract leads and customers to your business online. As we've seen in this chapter, there are a lot of different strategies and tactics that you can use to promote your business.
I firmly believe that content marketing is a valuable and powerful tool for businesses of all sizes and types. I've been writing blog posts, creating podcasts and videos, recording podcasts and blog posts, running websites, leveraging social networks, doing interviews with other prominent marketers…there's just no end to the amount of content you can create. There are literally hundreds of different ways to build your audience online.
So don't go through life thinking that you have to pick one or two "best" strategies for growing your business online. There are lots of different ways to market your business. You can engage your audience and promote your products, services, and content with more than one strategy at a time.
6.6. Final Section Recap: Focus On Your Customer
As you might have guessed by now, I'm a big fan of focusing on the customer . Whenever there are multiple ways to achieve the same goal, I think it's smart to go with whatever option will bring you closer to your customers (and potential customers). That's why I believe that content marketing is one of the best strategies for digital marketing.
If you're interested in listening to more podcasts of yours, you can find all the episodes and transcripts on Podcast Unbound at http://www.podcastunbound.com/guest/luke-oneil/
Chapter 7 – Outsourcing Digital Marketing Tools
Chapter 7: Outsourcing Digital Marketing Tools
Now that there's some money coming in from your blog and social media posts, let's talk about how you should use those sweet bits of income to promote your business. One of the best digital marketing strategies is outsourcing - getting someone else to pay for your digital marketing. This chapter will talk about how you can use outsourcing to keep your overhead low and increase the amount of money you have available for things like content creation and website maintenance.
7.1. Outsourcing: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly
One of the main downsides to keeping an online presence is that it costs money - lots of money, if you want to do it correctly. One year on Facebook costs thousands of dollars (just imagine how much they're going to charge when they go public). That's not including the time investment you're going to have to make if you want to be active and successful on Facebook.
There are lots of ways that people decide to save money in their businesses, and outsourcing is one of them. Lately there seems to be a trend where everyone wants to become an Internet marketing strategist or guru. It's a decent business if you can get it, but it's hard work - really hard work. As a result, lots of people tend to "copy" other successful gurus by using the same tactics they do, but with less energy or personal investment than their competitors. This is a bad idea for everyone involved though. It hurts everyone's profits and it doesn't actually help the gurus any more than you do.
Saving money can seem like a worthy goal for some businesses, but it's never the right thing to do in my opinion. Any time you use outsourcing as your main marketing strategy, you're sacrificing quality and wasting money. I've seen it countless times - big businesses will spend thousands on an expensive SEM campaign, only to get absolutely no sales out of it at all. If they'd spent that same money on a good old-fashioned search engine marketing campaign instead, they could have closed the sale before it even got to the point of needing marketing.
Learning to do things yourself is a great skill to develop and it will take some time for you to really master it and figure out what you like to do best, but there are ways of learning and figuring out your niche without spending thousands of dollars on an engagement agency.
For example, if you have a business that is not exactly centered around the Internet, doing your own SEO is likely not going to be very helpful for your business at all.
Conclusion: Outsourcing is a dangerous tactic because it wastes money and most of the time, doesn't help you with your goal. It's important that you define what your goals are before deciding on an outsourcing strategy.
If you want to learn more about outsourcing, check out the following books:
Robert Kiyosaki's Rich Dad Poor Dad series
7.2. Outsourcing On The Cheap
You can save a lot of money (and time) by learning how to do things yourself. If all you have is a laptop and an internet connection, you don't need to spend thousands of dollars on expensive marketing campaigns or online ads in order to get off the ground quickly with your business.