Every brand, every entrepreneur has a story. How do you tell it? First let’s dive into what a brand story or brand narrative means. While these words might inspire thoughts of fiction, yours should be anything but. Your brand, your products and/or services exist in our world, they interact with your customers’ lives in one way or another. Your narrative or story is the way that you capture those interactions, and explain them to new and future customers. Let’s look at an example – the ever recognizable brand CocaCola. Their legacy product coke is a refreshing carbonated beverage best served cold. Coke is also full of sugar and acidic enough to take the rust off of metal so I’m told. Is that what they tell us through their branding? Absolutely not. Their current marketing initiatives, which all stem from their overarching brand…
Is Content Marketing Right for Small Business Owners The answer is a resounding “Yes!”. Cell phones and other gadgets like those in home AI units from Amazon and Google have made talk to text searches sky rocket. Think about the last time that you were looking for a new place to eat, or a salon to get your nails done…did you whip out your cell phone and go straight to your search engine of choice? Chances are really good that you did. My husband and I do this all of the time, and it turns out that a lot of other people do too. How do you make sure that our business shows up in the results for these searches? By creating content of course! If you are creating content that is relevant to your customers searches, you will show up in their search results. It…
And be consistent in your content Content Marketing requires us to create a lot of powerful content that is on message, and on brand, but what about on tone? Tone is a quality we use to describe voice. Can your content have a voice? Your voice, comes through in your content when you write. For example, informational content tends to have a more serious tone, but depending on who you are educating, you might take a different tone. Other content designed to entertain your audience, will tend to have a lighter, more humorous tone. Think of your content as the voice of your brand how you communicate with your current and prospective customers. Your actual voice should line up with that of your content to provide your customers with an authentic and consistent customer experience. There really is no right or wrong tone, (even a negative tone, as long as…
While You Might Be on the Journey to Work for Yourself, You Don’t Have to Go It Alone. About five years ago, I started out on this crazy journey to become an entrepreneur. I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I knew that I couldn’t keep working for terrible bosses and giving of myself in situations that were not replenishing me. I tried becoming an influencer and did pretty well, garnering over $5,000 in books and another $5,000 in yoga clothing and gear, in exchange for positive reviews. But I wasn’t able to monetize it and I didn’t see a sustainable career in it because it wasn’t me. I’m not saying that you can’t make a living through becoming a social media influencer, it just wasn’t the…
Getting to know your audience is a major component of your content marketing strategy If content marketing is creating relevant, and interesting or meaningful content, on a consistent basis, how do you find out what kind of content that is for your business? How do you find topics that your current and prospective clients or customers will want to read? This is where the rubber meets the road in content marketing. It’s not just enough to write a bunch of content that you think your audience will find meaningful, helpful and interesting. You need to get closer to them and actually test it out. Doing that is beneficial yet can be somewhat difficult if you’ve never done it before. That’s where working with a professional content marketer like myself comes in quite handy. But let’s talk through it more before I make…
What you say becomes you, becomes your business. These are terms used commonly and openly by many entrepreneurs but to me, they are shortsighted and have negative implications. Allow me to expound upon this thought for a moment. Let’s look at the definition of these words. Hustle: At best, the word means to be frantically about something, or to force something as in to force someone out of your way. Slang definitions of this term are even worse, one is to be aggressive with your sales or financial dealings, while another means to solicit clients in the form of prostitution. Even words like “side hustle” are starting to pop up now and frankly, it doesn’t make the effect any less potent. Grind: Literally this means to reduce to fine particles or to crush something. Are these really the words you want to be using…
Without Paying for Ads While paying for Google Adwords, Facebook Ads and boosting posts can help get traffic to your website, it’s important to first invest the time to create relevant and interesting content for your current and potential customers on a consistent basis. Then when you pay to get visitors to your site, they’ll have something great to read. Paid traffic requires a strategy, the creation of ads, and the corresponding landing pages, plus methods of capturing information. This is often referred to as digital marketing. But there is another way to get visitors to your site without making an investment in digital marketing. It’s called content marketing, and it uses content, like blog posts to attract visitors to your site. These visitors are known as organic traffic. Think of them as visitors that stop by “naturally”. How does Content Marketing…
Helping entrepreneurs, startups and small businesses architect their brand. When you launch your own business, there is so much to do. After coming up with the idea for your business and figuring out your business plan and how it will all work, you still have to name your business and brand it. Naming is tough, but you got it done. You’ve picked a name that is reflective of the products or services that you offer, with a bit of your personality. But the branding stuff, that’s the difficult bit. In my work with people who have just launched, one of the hardest parts is often their branding. We’re not all writers, or graphic designers. If we were, that would be our line of business. But that’s not you – you’re a photographer, or artisan, daycare owner, virtual assistant. Or maybe…
Partner with a web content specialist to create meaningful content and deliver it to your target market. With the plethora of easy to use content management systems (CMS), like WordPress, Wix, Shopify and countless others, almost anyone can build and manage their own website. This democratization of the internet has helped make being a small business, startup, entrepreneur, blogger or influencer a bit more attainable – as now you don’t have to pay a web design and development agency big bucks to carve out a small place on the internet. But, the benefits of being able to setup and manage your own website, to create your own content, have made the internet a crowded and clamorous environment. While the Googles of the world try to instill order and create organization, it can be difficult to reach your target audience, as they now have so many websites available to…