7 Habits of highly effective people

1. Be proactive

Start small by first being conscious of your thoughts, values, and actions. Every day, see how controlling your responses to situations will affect your circle of influence. Don’t rush, but, be more mindful on how you process your thoughts and feelings in every situation you face.

2. Begin with the end in mind

Focus your energy on your desired outcome. Then, make a plan and as much as you can, stick to it. Yes, there may be times you may need to be flexible and make changes, but never lose sight of what you want to happen. Remember, it’s always about changing your ways to get to your goals, not changing your goals itself.

3. First things first

Everyone has the same 24 hours in a day, so why do some people seem to get more things done than others? Priorities. Be absolutely critical of how you spend your time and make sure you organize your activities to the goals you want to achieve. Concentrate only on tasks that will bring you closer to achieving them.  

4. Think win-win

The world is full of great opportunities, more than enough for everybody. Always aim to have a win-win approach to your strategy, whereby both or more parties get the best-desired results. That way, the task is motivating and are the definite success for all.

5. Seek first to understand, then to be understood

Having great interpersonal and communication skills go a long way. Just think of all successful people — Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Tony Fernandes — they are master communicators. Their strong ability to effectively articulate their vision, engage their consumers, as well as convince their stakeholders and partners, all require some good communication skills. Remember that building good relationships mean being a good listener and being able to read the ‘body language’ as well.

6. Synergise

I’m sure you’ve heard of the paradox of 1+1=3, but how’s that possible? Simple, the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts. Great talents with different strengths coming together with a shared vision can achieve remarkable results, compared to even the most efficient person alone.

7. Sharpen the saw

This involves forming a habit of reflecting and evaluating yourself. This should cover four aspects of your life: physical, spiritual, mental and social/emotional. Be equally honest and critical about yourself and take daily steps to make the changes needed to achieve what you want.  

  Source : http://bit.ly/1T3AYOK

4 Ways to Turn Marketing Ideas Into Engaged Customers

Having engaged customers is, of course, the holy grail for marketers. Some may argue that increasing sales would be the ultimate goal but I would argue back that the most engaged customers are the happier they are and in turn the more revenue will be generated.

A recent global survey of 255 executives across a range of industries and functions from both the brand agency sides of the aisle conducted by Forbes Insights and sponsored by Oracle Marketing Cloud, identified four (4) keys to success in translating marketing visions into more engaged customers via a better relationship between brands and agencies.

1. Successfully mine all of the today’s rich sources of data. 

There is, of course, no shortage of data available. In this context, however, attribution is essential for understanding the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and knowing which investments will deliver the best results. 

Lisa Donohue, CEO of Starcom USA says they tag all the digital media used in each campaign, whether the channel is the Internet, mobile devices or television. “This helps us understand who is clicking on the ads and what do they as a result. Ultimately, we can then tell if they have made a purchase, which puts us in a better position to track the efficacy of the strategy that we implemented.” 

However, Kevin Koh CEO of DDB Group Korea cautions marketing organizations to not lose sight of the art and science of the profession. For example, he sees great value in information that can help convince clients of the efficacy of a new campaign. But while important, the wider use of data analysis shouldn’t be allowed to quash creativity. 

2. Capitalize on the latest technologies for understanding customers and managing marketing programs. 

Survey results revealed that marketing executives express a widespread understand- ing that the latest digital technologies are powering marketing efforts for agencies and marketing organizations alike. 

Survey results also showed that brands and agencies are relying on a range of technologies to further their customer- engagement efforts. Among the most widely deployed applications are social networking tools, web analytics, digital advertising platforms, marketing automation systems and multichannel campaign management programs. 

3. Enhance professional and personal skills.

 New demands mean agencies and brands require new skill sets to be successful. This includes finding people with a broad understanding of businesses, not just the marketing function. “As corporations rethink the role of marketing, we’re seeing deeper integration not only between marketers and their agencies but between marketers and peers in the operations, technology, product and finance departments,” says Patrick Adams, Head of Consumer Marketing, North America. “What makes a stellar head of marketing today is someone who not only has the marketing skill-set but who can also flex across technology and product/merchandising. That skill-set makes for a great marketing leader and will ensure success in the future.” 

4. Balance local and global imperatives. 

Mindful that brands have a global reach, marketing executives must pay attention to regional differences across various international markets. Top local considerations, according to the survey, are what existing technology foundations are prevalent in a target country and the cultural characteristics that must be addressed. 

Executives say brands can’t effectively connect with local customers without a strong regional presence in important markets. Adams says PayPal relies on marketing teams dedicated to overseeing consumer experience in local markets and those teams interact frequently to discuss performance results, new product launches, and other initiatives. 

Source: http://bit.ly/26I4EF9

Quote of the day.

5 Obvious Truths About Successful Entrepreneurs

Every entrepreneur hopes to be successful. Some entertain the remote possibility of becoming very rich. But most entrepreneurs do not achieve the kind of material wealth that Bill Gates enjoys. You may wonder -- what are the secrets to their success?

I have been fortunate to start several software companies myself and now lead the team at Aha! -- I always want to keep learning. So, I read as much as I can about innovation and entrepreneurship, as well as the stories of successful entrepreneurs. 

Of course, their upbringing, influences, and personalities are all very different, as well as the companies they lead. But I have noticed a few important qualities that any entrepreneur should emulate if they want to be successful.

Here are five obvious approaches that you should definitely follow:

Work with the best

Having a great idea for a business is not enough. You need the complementary talents of others to help you reach your goals. As Marc Andreesen once said, "Everyone wants a Sheryl, the high-powered business person with deep capabilities in sales, marketing and operations," referring to Sheryl Sandberg, who Mark Zuckerberg hired as the Facebook Chief Operating Officer. 

Takeaway: Surround yourself with great people who will round out your team and challenge you to bring your best. 

Tackle tough problems

Elon Musk could have easily developed a line of gasoline-powered cars and been successful. But he believed that electric-powered cars mattered for the health of our environment, and sought to make them affordable with his latest model. He is also tackling a second problem -- how to keep those cars powered -- and is rolling out a network of charging stations across the world. 

Takeaway: If you are looking for an opportunity, consider taking on a difficult problem that most others are afraid to tackle.

Pursue your passions

Many successful entrepreneurs first focused their energy on what made them happiest and it paid off. Self-taught software developer Larry Ellison started Oracle so he would have a working environment that he enjoyed. Likewise, Bill Gates spent countless hours programming as a kid, launching his first business at age 15 along with school friend Paul Allen (his partner in founding Microsoft.)

Takeaway: You cannot go wrong if you are pursuing what you love.

Live generously

Many wealthy entrepreneurs have realized they can put their money to good use and change lives for generations. Bill and Melinda Gates, Larry Ellison, Warren Buffett, and many others have signed the Giving Pledge to donate half of their wealth to charity. Sheryl Sandberg started the Lean In Foundation to empower young women and is also working to stop hunger in the Bay area.

Takeaway: No matter how much you have, being generous will help you live a life of purpose.

Know when to innovate

Being first matters. Case in point: In the 90s, Jeff Bezos heard the Internet was growing by 2,400 percent annually and recognized the great opportunity there. Inspired by the digital catalogs of book distributors, he created a book distribution channel that completely upended the publishing industry (and Amazon panned out for other kinds of merchandise as well.) 

Takeaway: Always stay curious, keeping your eyes open for game-changing ideas. 

There is no foolproof recipe for achieving success, and there is no getting around the hard work and perseverance required. But you can learn great lessons from wildly successful and wealthy entrepreneurs and develop the qualities that will position you for success. 

 Source: http://bit.ly/24mpmZ3

6 Ways Startups Waste Money on Marketing

Marketing will be where the majority of startups spend most of their budgets. The average B2B marketer spends 42 percent of their budgets on marketing. Yet there are so many startups that don’t always get the results they want simply because most of their dollars are being wasted. If you are failing due to ineffective tactics and tools, this guide is going to show you some of the most common mistakes you may already be making, and how to turn things around.

Building a Following on Social Media

Your marketing budget should be spent partly on social media. But so many startups are convinced that building a following is going to lead to success. The problem with this is that social media reach is no longer what’s best for business. Facebook has seen organic reach crippled. Investing all this time into building a following is nearly pointless because what you’ll quickly discover is that you can have 100 likes on Facebook yet still make more money through advertising than someone with a thousand likes.

When only a fraction of your following will ever see your posts, building a following on social media is an entirely fruitless pursuit, so save your money.

Building a following remains important, but it should come through purchases of your products not through ‘like’ building campaigns.

Giving Up Too Soon

Startup owners believe that their product is so great that it’s sure to gain traction within a matter of days. Many small businesses begin with a twinkle in their eye and then realize they are not going to have an easy time.

Rather than persevering, they give up too soon. Many small business owners begin with high expectations and then when these aren’t met they believe it’s a problem with their business. You have unrealistic expectations if you demand that your business becomes a success within two years.

Not Understanding Your Audience

You can target any niche in the world with advanced marketing and advertising tools these days. To make the most of this you have to actually understand your audience, though. It’s necessary to have the image of your perfect customer, along with their likes/dislikes, and where they hang out.

If you are unable to understand your target audience, your targeting is always going to be slightly off. Conduct customer research before you start to waste your marketing dollars.

You Have No Idea How You Attracted Your Loyal Customers

The most loyal customers in your brand will be the ones who purchase every new product or service without question. These are the people you can rely on. At the same time, you need to know how you got them in the first place. It’s important for you to have a good idea for how you found your most loyal customers, so you can continue to replicate these tactics.

With most startups, the top fifth of your customers may account for up to 70 percent of your overall revenue, and this won’t change much as you grow.

Wagering Everything on One Marketing Campaign

Marketing is a game of trial and error whether you’re a small business or a large business. There are lots of things you can try and part of your growth period is to test out all these different tactics. But it’s difficult to do this when you’re wagering your entire marketing budget on a single campaign.

Don’t give yourself one shot to make your startup work. There’s a time and a place for this, but it’s not now. The best way to handle marketing as a startup is to start with extremely small scale tests.

Scaling up your marketing efforts should be done with extreme caution and only when you are sure that you are actually getting results. If it doesn’t work at a small level, it’s certainly not going to work at a higher spending level.

Not Tracking Your Results Well Enough

And then there are times where you are simply not tracking your results well enough. This tends to happen when startups gain a little bit of success in the beginning. They become so caught up in their success that they forget to track their results and compare them against the past.

Only by keeping track of your marketing results can you keep an accurate record of what works and what doesn’t. Without accurate measurements, you are going to repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

 Source: http://bit.ly/1VjevgT

3 ways marketers can improve customer experience

Customer experience is a hot-button topic in marketing.

As more and more marketing pros seek to add this skill to their toolkit, advice from one of the leading minds in the field, Brian Solis, can help.

I met Solis, a former public relations and digital media executive, a year ago. My blog post about our conversation, Is Customer Experience the Next Killer App? was one of the most widely shared, liked and tweeted blogs that I have ever written. Since then, marketers are chiming-in everywhere you turn about improving CX.

I was talked to Solis again while he traveled to one of his worldwide speaking engagements discussing CX, and gathered more insights. Here are three main ways that Solis says PR and marketing pros can improve customer experience:

1. Uncover points of friction.

The first step is the most difficult. It requires that you recognize that customers’ experiences could be improved and requires you (and others) to step outside of your roles and collaborate to bring about sweeping change. But, it can start with small steps.

Any employee or manager can address customer experience by looking within their domain—whether it is sales, marketing, product development or customer service.

A good place to start is uncovering points of friction. This can be done personally or with the help of other team members and customers. Look at the experience within and outside your department, paying attention to what happens before and after your department becomes part of the customer experience.

When you involve your customers and other departments, interesting developments can appear, enabling you to identify things that are broken and how to fix them.

2. Place innovation over iteration.

Changing the customer experience may not require a complete product or customer journey redesign, but every aspect can benefit from a benchmark review through the eyes of the connected customer.

To make meaningful changes, you need to look at the experience from both ends. This leads to improvements and opens the door to innovation. It’s important to find a balance between innovation and iteration. Both are required for success.

Take a note from Steve Jobs and the development of the iPhone. Jobs didn’t want designers with traditional cellphone experience on the team, because he didn’t want any previous biases. Rather than focus on what a phone was, Jobs looked at what it could be.

3. Rethink what success means to CX.

Improving the customer experience can have widespread value. It is important to determine goals and how to measure them early in the process. Goals should focus on business value as well as how they affect the customer experience.

What’s the ROI of customer happiness? You can use existing metrics, but to truly track experience, rethink what success means and develop additional metrics that ensure how the two align.

Track key performance indicators related to customer satisfaction, shared experiences, customer paths and conversions. Focus on new customer growth baselines, looking at revenues and return on revenues once changes are completed. Also look at the journey and whether or not it is efficient for customers based on intent, context, device and immediacy.

The more tangible goals that you set, easier you can measure success.

  Source : http://bit.ly/24Uyndd

4 Benefits of Social Media Beyond Marketing

The most recent Pew Research study of social media usage shows that 65 percent of adults now use social media sites—up from only 7 percent just ten years ago! And, social media isn’t just for digital natives these days. Pew’s research shows that while those ages 18-29 are still the most prolific users (at 90 percent), those 65 and older are jumping on board as well—in 2015, 35 percent of those 65+ reported that they use social media sites, compared to only 2 percent in 2005.

This is all good news for marketers, of course, and if you spend any time at all on social media sites you can readily see that companies, large and small, are using the sites to market their wares to both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) markets.

But social media has applications that extend beyond marketing.

Recruitment

LinkedIn is probably the social media channel most thought of as a recruitment tool. The site, in fact, started out as a means for job seekers to connect with potential employers and recruiters. Today, employers both post job openings and also “troll” profiles looking for “passive” candidates that might meet their needs. Passive candidates are those who are not actively looking for a job. Recruiters have also extended their reach beyond LinkedIn to use other social media sites—like Facebook, Twitter and even Pinterest—to find job candidates.

Customer Service

If you’ve ever posted a somewhat negative comment or complaint about a company online and received an almost immediate follow-up response from a representative from the company, you’ve experienced how social media can be used as a customer service tool. Savvy companies set up processes that allow them to monitor and curate online comments so that they can quickly intervene and address any issues consumers may have.

Employee Communication and Collaboration

Many social media sites offer the opportunity to create closed, or proprietary, groups that only pre-selected members can join. LinkedIn and Facebook are two examples of this. This can provide big benefits for organizations that want to provide employees who may be geographically dispersed with an opportunity to engage and connect. Setting up such groups can also be an important part of a crisis communication plan—providing an opportunity to get messages out to employees, and other key audiences, in the event of an emergency.

Market Research

There’s a lot of data to be found through social media and a lot of insights to be gleaned about consumers’ interests and preferences. While companies need to be cautious about drawing too many conclusions from what is qualitative information, these insights can serve as the basis for further quantitative research and can also provide early indications of key trends that may be impacting your markets.

Source : http://bit.ly/1TqJvdS

10 Ways to Kickstart Your Business Idea in 2016

It’s never been a better time to start a business. Access to online environments and innovations such as smart devices and cloud technology mean that many entrepreneurs can set up on a shoestring and get things going without needing excessive start-up budgets. Add into the mix the wide availability of cloud-funding platforms and cheap marketing through social media and it’s easy to see the many opportunities that people don’t want to miss out on.

Here are just some ways to get your business idea off the ground if you have the entrepreneurial spirit this year.

1. Find the Right Support

You may have all the personal and physical tools in place, but you’re nowhere without friends. There’s no better time to start networking, building business associate relationships, and getting sound advice from people in your local area and online. The great news for startups is there’s plenty of guidance from other entrepreneurs who are happy to help out for free.

Take the opportunity to make solid, long-term contacts and research all areas of running a business. A good place to start is the Government’s own business portal.

2. Organize Your Funds

While it can be cheap to set up a business nowadays, especially if you have the right idea, it’s a good thing to check what you can currently bring to the table. This should include any debts you have, which may need to be addressed first, and the amount of collateral you can use, if needed, to apply for a loan. If you are finding it difficult to make ends meet, you may well have more problems down the line when you start your business.

3. Come Up with the Right Idea

What may seem like a good idea over a couple of drinks in the local bar might not seem so bright in the cold light of day. Coming up with a good idea is imperative if you want to have any chance of success.

This includes researching how others are running businesses in a similar industry or niche. It also means being honest with yourself.

For a very successful business, the question of scalability is always an issue. In other words, when you come to grow, how easy and cheap is it going to be to carry that out? If you run a restaurant business, that might involve giving out franchises or spending money on new premises.

4. Plan the Business

This is the crucial stage of any startup and the step that many entrepreneurs get wrong. It involves setting out clear stages and strategies, from getting financed, setting up websites, marketing, brand development, and deciding whether you need to have staff employed and where you are going to find them. As far as staff are concerned, there are plenty of options to hire freelancers who can do the initial jobs for you, though you may have to do some hard searching to find the right ones.

You also need to plan for a long-term future and not just look at the immediate setup of your business. There may be a lot to do but it’s important that you have your direction set for some time to come. Your plan should include how you are going to build capital and secure your business future.

You’ll need a strong business plan, especially if you are going to be heading to the bank for a loan or looking at crowdfunding. Check out this article from Start Up Donut for some sound advice.

5. Check Yourself Online

If you have been working for a number of years, no doubt you have a persona online and you need to have a quick search to make sure it doesn’t have any negatives associated with it. Another thing to check, if you don’t want egg on your face, is the name of your new company and whether someone else has got there before you.

6. Register Your Business

One thing you are going to need to do is register your business. This used to be a complicated process, but with online sites such as www.companyformations247.co.uk, everything is reduced to simplicity and you can register everything within 3 hours. You need to do this in the UK if you have a limited company, and it includes registering with Companies House as well as designating directorial roles within your business.

7. Raise Money

Getting the finances together for a business idea is much more viable nowadays. You can use your home or other properties as collateral for a bank loan or choose to sell property and self-fund. Increasingly, many entrepreneurs are turning to crowdfunding to get their business ideas off the ground. If you have good presentation skills and a solid business plan, and can communicate how strong your idea is, then this a great way to get capital. You generally pitch your idea online and people from all over the world can help fund it in exchange for something you offer, for instance a free product or share of the company.

8. Develop Your Brand Online

If you are going to run a business nowadays, you need to develop your online brand and that means marketing. You should have looked into this in detail in the planning stage of your business idea, as it’s the key to success or failure.

You need to build brand awareness, find a following, engage with customers, and use all the free and paid resources out there that help make your business thrive. This may include doing a lot of it yourself at first, but you can also engage with online marketing companies to help you choose the right options.

9. Test, Evaluate, Tweak, Test

While you had strong ideas for how your business would begin to develop, the chances are that things will not go completely according to plan. Even the most experienced entrepreneurs encounter hitches along the way. This is where you need to put in more hard yards. It’s a question of testing everything, evaluating it, tweaking, and then testing again to guide you in the right direction.

10. Plan for Growth

Once your business is up and running and you are satisfied with its progress, it’s time to take a look at that plan again and check whether you under or overestimated growth in the future. Now that you have a bit more experience in the real world, there will no doubt be new ideas that have to be incorporated to guarantee more success. You might need to think about getting other experts on board, or you could be looking to expand into profitable new markets.

There’s no doubt that running a new business requires a lot of good thought, strong planning, and putting in the effort, not to mention often working long hours. With some 50% of startups failing within the first five years, it may seem that you are swimming against the tide in the effort to succeed. If you have done the planning, come up with a great plan, and have the enthusiasm and energy to carry it forward, you stand a better chance of success than other ventures.

 Source : http://bit.ly/24EgCyv

Top 6 B2B digital marketing predictions for 2016

As we stepped in 2016, we looked back at the digital marketing landscape, which is evolving at astronomical rate in comparison at any other industry; that’s because the web, itself, is changing faster than ever.

With heaps of data pouring out of new devices, products and social platforms every minute, it is of utmost importance for marketers to understand how this data will impact their content & community marketing strategies in 2016.

Therefore, in this article, we try to boil down what changes are requiredfor tomorrow, what traditional strategies are no longer relevant, and what marketing trends will carry us forward in the coming year, especially for the B2B Businesses.

Here our 6 digital marketing trends to watch out for in 2016:

1. Be Mobile Ready –

This includes responsive websites, landing pages, mobile marketing, and mobile-specific content. With the number of smartphone users worldwide predicted to surpass 2 billion in 2016, this could turn out to be the game changer of marketing trends. In 2015, we saw brands allocating almost half of their digital advertising budgets to mobile, a 50% increase over 2014 spending.

In 2016, we expect location-driven mobile marketing to gain momentum through wearable technology, augmented reality, and the Internet of Things.

2. Be the veritable social butterfly –

It’s true, the importance of social media, social engagement, social networks and social sites can no longer be denied. The world has gone social, and marketing is the veritable social butterfly. In 2015, social media marketing was rooted in personalization. Brands can use platforms like Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and Twitter, to deliver targeted messages to their customers.

In 2016, in a bid to grab their share of marketplace attention, brands will need to connect with their customers in real time. Live social sites likeSnapchat will dominate the social media marketingdomain as Virtual Reality (VR) technology goes mainstream.

3. Watch out for content marketing as it continues to dominate –

As mobile and social media marketing takes over the more traditional forms of advertising, the demand for platform-centric content is going to get bigger than ever.According to CMI, 51% of B2B firms plan to increase spending on content marketing in 2016.

The biggest advantage of content marketing is that it helps prospective customers move through their Buyer Journey much faster because the brand is providing answers to questions that are being asked before the prospect is reaching out to the sales person.

In 2016, B2B firms will need to adjust their marketing budgets, increasing investment in content marketing– from people to vendors, to tech solutions, which manage, measure, and optimize content.

4. Be ready as search indexing evolves yet again-

Every year, Google comes up with almost 500 changes to their algorithms, so organic search is on a continuous cycle of evolution. Currently, we’re at the precipice of two major shifts in how people will be searching on the web, both of which will have a significant impact for B2B marketers to take notice this year.

The first major change will be in terms of how Google and other search engines index mobile apps. And the second significant change will be in the way that search engines incorporate virtual assistant app data, like Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Facebook’s M.

In addition to the traditional keyword-based, social signal-based, and link-based SEO, B2B firms will also need to re-examine how their content is being crawled and indexed for the always on-the-go user leveraging one of these assistant apps.

5. Be ready to embrace video content –

While 2015 was a significant year for online video, according to a report the medium will become an even more essential part of the digital marketing mix in the coming years. With many teenagers preferring YouTube to traditional TV, online video is particularly key to engaging those under 18, or Generation Z.

Where user behavior goes, so must your digital marketing strategies, and B2B marketers who start video early will gain the first-mover advantages with their prospects as well as with the media.

6. Ride the marketing automation wave –

Over the last year, we have realised that a business with any number of customers needs to have a CRM system to manage customer information, send those customers time-based or trigger-based email communications, and recognize when a customer might be ready to buy again. This will not only ensure customer retention, will also facilitate repeat purchase from those loyal customers along with positive word of mouth.

While most of us spent a majority of our time looking for the ‘Next Big Thing,’ B2B firms need to ensure that their strategies are adaptable to the changes happening in the industry, while still positioning their brandfor success by staying ahead of the most important digital trends.

In 2016, B2B firms should focus on creating a refined, almost personalized digital journey that is consumable on all devices, at all touch point, and can be attributed back to the marketing efforts of the brand.

Source : http://bit.ly/1TOTfhT

What Is a Content Marketing Strategy?

According to Google Trends, interest in content marketing has been on the rise since January 2011.

But this should not surprise anyone. We all seem to be awash in content marketing.

What’s surprising is that many content marketers don’t have a documented strategy.

First we need to clear up a little confusion about content marketing strategy.

Content marketing strategy defined

Some people like to make a distinction between the terms content strategy and content marketing strategy. The distinction, they suggest, is best explained with a Russian doll: a smaller strategy is inside a larger one.

In this case, content marketing strategy is the smaller strategy inside the larger one,content strategy.

There is some truth to this.

Content strategy, according to Kristina Halvorson and Melissa Rach, involves the planning, creation, governance, and maintenance of content, whereas content marketing strategy focuses on the narrow discipline of marketing content.

Fair enough, but I think this distinction is confusing and needless because we can also talk about content marketing strategy as the planning, creation, governance, and maintenance of content … and not lose any sleep.

I’d like to proceed with a clear definition of a content marketing strategy.

So, if strategy means “a plan, method, or series of maneuvers or stratagems for obtaining a specific goal or result,” the specific goal or result for content marketing would be “building an audience that builds a business.”

For our purposes, then, let’s define content marketing strategy like this:

A content marketing strategy is a plan for building an audience by publishing, maintaining, and spreading frequent and consistent content that educates, entertains, or inspires to turn strangers into fans and fans into customers.

Which brings us to the next important question.

Do you need a content marketing strategy?

If you are a small business with a few employees or a one-man or one-woman shop, you may be thinking that your content marketing is so simple that you don’t need a plan.

Won’t a list of things that need to happen written on the back of an envelope get the job done?

Yes, that’s one way to begin, especially if you are typically a perfectionist and just need to start your content marketing rather than waiting until you have the perfect plan.

But at some point you will need to develop a more comprehensive plan — and then document it.

• Content marketers with a documented strategy feel more confident in their work.
• Content marketing challenges don’t seem as overwhelming when you have a strategy in place.
• A documented strategy makes it easier to get buy-in from stakeholders.
• It’s easier to chart your success when you have a documented strategy.

Crafting a simple content marketing strategy

Let’s be honest: Unless you are a content marketer for a big company, you don’t need much. Just a plan to help focus your time, money, and energy.

In fact, you can document your content marketing strategy in the time it takes you to answer the following 13 questions:

1. Who are your users?
2. Who are your competitors?
3. What do you bring to the table?
4. What do you hear?
5. What content do you already have?
6. What is the purpose of your content?
7. How often should you publish content?
8. How will you distribute your content?
9. Who is in charge of your content?
10. Who will produce your content?
11. Who is going to maintain the content?
12. Who is responsible for the results?
13. What’s your destination (core strategy)?

Your content marketing strategy begins with this person

The person I’m talking about is your customer.

Your customer is the focal point of your content marketing strategy. You need a substantial, deep, and comprehensive understanding of who she is.

When you do, the strategy will write itself. You won’t have to guess or wonder. But a weak, flimsy, or flat-out wrong understanding of who your customer is will sink your strategy every time.

Check out these five resources to help you understand who your customer is:

• Research checklist: Don’t Create Your Content Strategy Until You Research These 6 Things
• Empathy map: A Complete Guide to Crawling Inside Your Customer’s Head
• Worldview: Tap into This Psychological Driver to Create the Ultimate Message
• Customer experience map: How to Use Customer Experience Maps to Develop a Winning Content Marketing Strategy
• Personas: How Creating an Imaginary Friend Can Make You a Better Writer

Understanding your content

Once you thoroughly understand who your customer is, evaluate the content you already have.

This exercise will not only help you spot the gaps in your content that you need to fill, but it will also help you see that old content can become outdated and cost you top positions in search engines, cause user-experience failure, and more.

So, here are four resources to help you review your current content:

• A Brief Guide to Fixing Your Old, Neglected, and Broken Content
• How to Conduct a Content Audit for Quality and Audience Experience
• How to Plug the Holes in Your Content Funnel that Are Costing You Money
• The Single Best Way to Create Hit Content in Record Time

Measuring your content marketing efforts (conversion)

Ultimately, it comes down to this: how do you know if your content marketing strategy is working?

You’ll know if your content marketing strategy is working if you measure it.

This is why question 13 on the content marketing strategy worksheet (What’s your core strategy?) is so important.

That core strategy should:

• Give you room to stretch, fail, get back up, and grow
• Allow you to adjust as your environment changes around you, without having to make a drastic change
• Align with your values, so you’ll be able to sustain it and endure challenges over time

But how do you measure that? If you are like me and the words “analytics” and “measuring” make you uncomfortable, check out Mike King’s article:

• A Quick-Start Guide to Measuring Your Content Marketing Efforts

That should keep you busy for a while.

In this hour-long session, our Chief Operations Officer, Tony Clark, and Chief Content Officer, Sonia Simone, talk about:

• Why content creators should have a basic understanding of web analytics
• What tools you must use (forget about the rest and focus on these)
• The essential metrics you should measure to get the best performance out of your content
• What to do with the information once you have it

Source : http://bit.ly/1KPMXvO