Showing posts with label Marketing Strategy. Show all posts

Friday, 11 August 2017

How to Use a Facebook Contest to Promote Your Business

FACEBOOK has emerged as one of the most influential social networks in the world. It has also become a platform for companies to increase their reach and promote their business. However, one of the most highly interactive ways to do so on Facebook is also one of the most under-used: a contest.

Contests provide a great opportunity for businesses to generate a buzz, and increase brand recognition. Here, we will outline the process of hosting a contest on Facebook to promote your business.

Step 1. Preparation

Using a contest requires preparation, but first and foremost, you should review Facebook guidelines for organizing a promotion. Knowing the rules and guidelines set forth by Facebook will allow your contest to be completely legitimate. This is vital to your success so we recommend you read the guidelines in their entirety. To summarize, any promotion on Facebook (such as a contest or sweepstake) must contain:

Official rules
Terms and eligibility requirements
A complete release of Facebook by each entrant or participant

Once you are familiar with Facebook’s rules, spend some time researching other contests that have been successful. Explore feedback, review what participants have said about previous contests and take note of which contest posts had the highest engagement. This will help you establish some best practices for organizing a Facebook contest, and be informed about current contest trends.

Expert tip: Optimize research by seeking out competitors in your niche. Targeting preparation by investigating your competition will help maximize results.

Finally, establish a method for hosting the contest. While a Facebook page may be used for this purpose, you may find a hosting app to be more suitable. Hosting apps often feature contest management tools, quantifiable insight and reporting components, branding capabilities and more. Fandom Marketing recently published a top 10 list of the Best Social Media Contest Apps, which is a great reference to get you started.

Expert Tip: Contests may be administered on Fan Pages, Business Pages or within apps on Facebook. Personal Profiles may not be used for sponsored promotions.

Step 2. Planning

Once you have finished preliminary research and preparation, move onto planning your specific contest. Every social media marketing strategy needs a solid plan, but not every marketer knows where to start. If this is your first Facebook contest, here are some important things to keep in mind:

Budget – Will your contest require hosting, traffic/advertising? How much will be spent on prizes?
Promotion – How will participants learn about your contest? Ads, Emails, Social Media Posts, Etc.
Contest Length – What are the start & end dates? What is the length of time allowed for entries? When are winners announced?
Entry method – How do participants join? What information is required to do so?
Participants – Who can participate? Amount of entries allowed (total, and per person)?
Prizes – What are they? What value do they bring?
Winners – Number of winners? How they are determined?
Legal Documents – Privacy Policy, Terms of Use, Etc.
Goals – What quantifiable results do you want to achieve? What is your baseline for success?
Tools – Does your hosting app cover the basics? Do you need other solutions to track statistics and measure goal achievement?

Each of these components will be important when it comes time to take action. Be sure you set yourself up for success and plan accordingly.

Expert tip: Planning sets the stage for your entire promotion, and can make or break your contest. Don’t skimp on time or effort with this step!

Step 3. Take Action

With a defined plan, you are ready to take action. Begin by implementing the contest strategies outlined during the planning phase.

Compile your prizes, sign up for your hosting app, and create the content needed for your contest. For example, if your advertising plan centered around using your email list to reach previous customers, design an effective series of messages that will help you reach these subscribers and urge them to participate.

Then, up your engagement! Since Facebook is a social network oriented towards user interaction and social relationships, connect with participants.

The end goal here is to promote your business, right? So, take this time to really interact with Facebook users who are interested in your contest. Use the research compiled during your preparation phase and post some targeted and highly engaging updates.

Expert tip: Engagement matters! Ask questions. Answer questions. Like. Share. Post pictures and spread the word about your contest.

Step 4. Monitor

Planning and hosting a Facebook contest is great for promotion but don’t stop there! We also recommend that you closely monitor performance metrics.

By carefully monitoring your contest, you have the opportunity to notice if an ad doesn’t convert, if a link is broken, if a follower posted an inappropriate comment or anything else that could be having a negative effect on your promotion.

Observing statistics during your contest allows you to recognize issues and, more importantly, adjust accordingly. For example, if paid advertising for the contest is not resulting in conversions – quickly pause your campaign, revamp your ad to increase the click-through-rate and encourage more Facebook users to join your contest.

Crisis (and wasted funds) averted.

Step 5: Analyze

You set out to host a contest, so once the contest is over and prizes have been awarded, you’re done, right?

Well, kudos on the follow through, but since the real goal was to promote your business your work is still not quite finished: The final stage of organizing a Facebook contest involves analyzing the results.

Analysis is important because it helps you determine:

If you met your planned goals
What worked and what did not
If this type of promotion is worth repeating

The best way to analyze your results? Compare the before and after.

Use trackable links and other marketing tools to compile data and make comparisons based on standard metrics. If you chose an application for hosting, this is a great opportunity to review the data, and analyze the efficiency of your Facebook contest. The more information you gather before, during and after the contest, the better. When it comes to analysis, you want to have a well rounded set of data to reference and draw conclusions from. This information will help you set standards for future marketing efforts.

Wrapping It Up

Facebook contests can be a viable marketing strategy to generate results for your business. A successful contest goes beyond just having participants and giving away prizes; requiring preparation, planning, action, monitoring and analysis. These steps offer a guide to building a contest that will promote your business to a larger audience and with real, tangible results.

Over to you! Take a minute to post comments or share any ideas you have about Facebook contests. Have you used them before? What worked, and what didn’t?

We’d love to hear from you!

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Wednesday, 19 July 2017

Action Content: Turn Fans into Customers [Plus a Free Bonus for You]

This article is part of our series on the 4 Essential Types of Content Every Marketing Strategy Needs. Make sure to get your special free bonus at the end of the article.

So far, we’ve covered Attraction, Authority, and Affinity content. Now it’s time to turn your fans into customers with Action content.
And this is where all the work you’ve done as a content marketer starts translating into revenue for yourself, your clients, or your organization.
The good news is that Action content is probably the easiest type of content to understand. But the bad news is that it can also be some of the most difficult to produce.
We’ll dig into the reasons why shortly, but since we are in the habit of defining each term before we get started, let’s do that here for Action content:

Action content is content designed to get somebody to take an action.

How about that for easy?

The marriage of copywriting and content marketing

Content marketing is a new kid on the block in some ways, surging in popularity in the last five years.
In other ways, content marketing has been paired with advertising for quite some time. Take John Deere’s 118-year-old magazine, The Furrow, as an example.
The Michelin Guide, first published in 1900, is another great example of classic content marketing.
However, what I’m talking about here is the marriage between copywriting and content marketing.

A marriage between copywriting and content marketing helps you attract attention, increase engagement, and then ultimately, persuade someone to take action.

Types of actions

When you create content, you should have an action in mind that you’d like the reader to take. Actions could include, but aren’t limited to:

Asking your readers to comment on a blog post
Asking your readers to share an article or podcast
Asking people to participate in a poll or survey
Encouraging people to download a free video training course
Persuading people to subscribe to your email newsletter
Convincing people to follow you on social media
Enticing people to hire you
Getting people to buy your product

Naturally, you’ll want to start off with small requests. Get people used to taking your advice and following your instructions.
You first want people to say, “Hey, I want to pay attention to this person (or this company, or this brand) because it’s really relevant to my current challenge and the journey I’m on.”
You get people to warm up to you and trust you — step by step — until the sale, and then the repeat sale or the recurring sale.
Let’s look at some successful pieces of Action content.

Examples of Action content

The most obvious piece of Action content you will create is promotional — sales copy that you publish and run for the duration of the offer. After the sale is over, we recommend you remove the post from your site.
Action content also includes landing pages, like this one on content marketing that encourages visitors to register for Copyblogger’s content library.
In addition to those two cases, your best content will combine all four types of “A” content. Here’s a stellar example: What’s the Difference Between Content Marketing and Copywriting?
What makes it so great?

It’s useful. The headline suggests you are about to learn something important. The question-style headline also helps attract attention. People wonder whether or not they do indeed know the answer. They think, “This might be too important to miss.”
It’s authoritative. Sonia Simone’s years of working in the copywriting and content marketing world turned what could have been a shallow answer into an extended clinic in effective writing.
It takes a stand. The content exposes people to one of our core philosophies at Copyblogger: Really good content is unsurpassed at building rapport, delivering a sales message without feeling “salesy,” and getting potential customers to stick around.
It’s laced with action. You might not see it at first blush, but this piece of content motivates readers to check out the educational resources Copyblogger has to offer — from the My.Copyblogger free membership site to the paid offers like Authority and Content Marketing Certification.

The success of this content wasn’t accidental. There was a plan: the content primes people for when we actually do make an offer.

How to write Action content

Writing something interesting to fill space and keep people reading won’t cut it here.

You need to pair your content with a business goal.

That’s not as complicated as it might seem, because all you have to do is ask yourself this simple question before you write each piece of content:

What is the action I want my audience to take?

Now, getting people to actually take that action requires some skill. Like I said above, this is the hardest type of content to master. It takes time to learn copywriting skills, and it also takes time to master them.
The following resources can help you:

Once you’ve worked through that list, the next best thing you can do is to practice. Write. Then write some more.
And on that note, let me close with a little encouragement.

Keep your chin up

When I first got into copywriting, I threw myself into it whole hog.
I devoured every book I could get my hands on. Tore through successful promotional pieces. Listened to a legion of cassette tapes on the art of direct response copywriting, human psychology, and negotiations — yeah, this was way before podcasts. Wrote a mountain of sales letters, emails, and text ads (and then watched mentors tear them apart).
This went on for years. I thought I knew my stuff. However, it wasn’t until about Year Five when things clicked … when I turned the corner and all that head knowledge became heart knowledge.
The moral of this short story is that if I can learn how to write Action content, so can you. But it’s going to take time. Don’t expect too much of yourself too soon. Just start learning, publishing content, measuring results, adjusting, asking for feedback, and so on.
You can do it.

Get your free ebook: 4 Essential Types of Content Every Marketing Strategy Needs

Build a content strategy based on the four content types in this series! Get your free ebook, 4 Essential Types of Content Every Marketing Strategy Needs.

Click to get the free ebook

Over to you …

What’s your favorite example of Action content?
Drop us a note in the comments section below to share your thoughts.

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Tuesday, 18 July 2017

Authority Content: Build an Audience that Builds Your Business

This article is part of our series on the 4 Essential Types of Content Every Marketing Strategy Needs. Make sure to get your special free bonus at the end of the article.

In a famous 1963 experiment at Yale University, psychologist Stanley Milgram learned that people’s duty to authority runs pretty dang deep.
Here’s how he conducted the study.
Two participants met and were placed in separate rooms. One participant was the “learner,” and one was the “teacher.” Unbeknownst to the “teacher,” the “learner” was an actor.
The teacher was instructed to ask the learner a question. If the learner got the question wrong, the teacher was directed to shock the student.
And here’s the disturbing part.
When a “researcher” wearing a grey lab coat told the teacher to keep shocking — even if the student was screaming, kicking, and begging for mercy from the adjacent room — the teacher would continue to shock 65 percent of the time. All the way up to 450 volts of electricity.
On the other hand, when there was no encouragement from the researcher, the teacher would quit delivering the shocks early on.
Keep in mind these were typical, healthy people — just like you and me — shocking the daylights out of strangers. Of course, no electrical shocks were actually given. But the teachers didn’t know that.
It seems our sense of duty to authority does run pretty dang deep.
Fortunately, we are content marketers around here, so we deliver products and services, not electrical shocks. But does authority have anything to do with people trusting you when money is involved?
That’s exactly what we’ll explore in this post.
But first, what does authority look like in content? Here’s a good definition I culled from a conversation with Brian Clark:

It really boils down to the demonstration of expertise through delivery of valuable content as opposed to claiming expertise or saying, “We’re number one.”
It’s the difference between marketing messages and content that actually creates the experience of authority. This is an important distinction that can be summed up with the short phrase: “Show, don’t tell.”

In other words, telling people you are a world-class copywriter does not have the same effect as showing people that is the case.
Take someone like Joanna Wiebe, for example.

Demonstrating world-class expertise with Authority content

Joanna got her start in the copywriting world while working at Intuit. While with the company, she was known for digging into the results of campaigns to inform her new ideas. She regularly adjusted copy to make it perform better.
After Intuit, Joanna took that reputation with her when she worked for Conversion Rate Experts and a few agencies, all the while increasing her reputation as a “conversion copywriter.”
Eventually, she struck out on her own with Copyhackers, where she established her authority by publishing a number of case studies. This led to a series of ebooks focused on copywriting.
These data-driven articles and ebooks demonstrated that Joanna knew what she was talking about. And it wasn’t long before organizations were asking her to speak at their events (like ours).
Joanna didn’t need to say she’s a world-class copywriter. She demonstrated it.

Empower your audience

If you examine Joanna’s content, you’ll realize that the goal behind Authority content is ultimately about empowering your audience.

You give them what they need to know in order to succeed, making them the rock stars, as opposed to a lot of chest-thumping about your business, your clients, or your organization.

In the early days of Copyblogger, Brian accomplished this by publishing content almost exclusively on copywriting. Gems like:

While Brian was an effective copywriter long before he launched Copyblogger, he never once said that he was. He simply demonstrated it through his content.
Brian would write posts as if they were mini chapters in a section of a book. The first series he wrote was Copywriting 101. This was just his standard two-times-a-week content.
It took Brian five weeks to get that 10-part series out. But once he was done, he bundled all of those articles into a cornerstone content page.

“I created it like the table of contents in a book, or a section of a book. Each of the 10 parts was laid out there with beautiful, nice navigation. I had intro copy. I had outro copy with a call to action at the end to join the email list or subscribe. I called it Copywriting 101.” – Brian Clark

Back then (2006), it was rare to see content organized that way. Not only was it authoritative, it was new, too.
What happened as a result of packaging that copywriting content in an authoritative way? People found it. They shared it. They linked to it.
Copyblogger subsequently ranks at the top of web search results for the term “copywriting.”

Elevating your Authority content

Fast-forward many years and content bundles are now common. That means it’s not enough to just create authoritative articles and landing pages. You’ve got to up the value to get attention.
And that’s what we did a few years ago.
Over the years, Brian and Sonia Simone had created a handful of these series.
In 2013, they were edited and formatted into PDF ebooks, and then offered behind a gateway or “free paywall” — what we call a content library.
We made them available as a comprehensive content marketing library and created the My.Copyblogger free membership community where you access the content.
You don’t have to pay any money. You just register for the site, give us your name and email, and we give you all that good stuff.
The cornerstone content evolved into a more appealing and more convenient format behind a free gateway. It was a new concept to the content marketing world.

Create your own Authority content in 4 steps

Here’s an outline for creating Authority content:

Pick a topic. Select a topic you’re knowledgeable about and have experience with. Keep a narrow focus. For example, if you own a chain of local laundromats, you can create authoritative content on subtopics like “laundry detergent,” “dryer sheets,” and “folding garments.”
Write a series. Break down your topic into five articles. Think of these five articles as chapters in a book. Publish one article from this series each week. Incorporate elements of Attraction content. You may need to include surveys, stats, lists, and downloadable assets.
Bundle the series. Once all five articles have been published, bundle all of these articles into a downloadable PDF, and create a cornerstone content page for the PDF bundle. (By the way, there is an important difference between a cornerstone content page and a blog post.)
Promote the series. Share the series on social media sites, link to it in your blog posts and guest posts you write on other sites, and notify your email list subscribers.

Again, the four content types may overlap, but Authority content will get people to actually do business with you.

The unstoppable power of Authority content

Authority content is the type of content that’s going to be the most likely to attract high-quality links to your site — both links from other websites and, even more importantly, authoritative sites (like popular media publishers, Wikipedia, or government sites).

When you combine Authority content with Attraction content, you’ve got an incredible one-two punch.

Authority plus Attraction is where the heavy-duty value begins. It tends to attract links and get a lot of shares. This is because — as I showed you in this article’s introduction — authority is one of the most powerful psychological influencers out there. And what’s really cool is you’re helping people, not tricking them.
Authority content gets attention, yes. But it gets it in a very meaningful way that’s going to eventually translate into action (which we’ll explain in the last article in this series).
Furthermore, people trust authorities, particularly authorities they like, which leads us to Affinity content (the content type we’ll discuss tomorrow).

Check out the other articles in this series

Get your free ebook: 4 Essential Types of Content Every Marketing Strategy Needs

Build a content strategy based on the four content types in this series! Get your free ebook, 4 Essential Types of Content Every Marketing Strategy Needs.

Click to get the free ebook

Over to you …

Do you have any questions about Authority content? Drop your thoughts or questions in the comments section below.
And let us know about your favorite piece of Authority content (whether or not it was something you created). While you’re at it, let us know who your favorite authority is.

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