A Successful Content Marketing Program Begins with Your Employees

Do you know how many of your employees subscribe to your business blog? Follow you on Facebook and Twitter? Even know that you have a Google+ Page? If the answer is “very few” or “none”, you’re not alone.

When starting any type of content marketing or social media program, getting buy-in from your employees is an important first step.

1. Be sure your employees know that you have a company blog.

When you introduce your company blog to the public (via email or some other announcement), be sure your employees get the message, too. Give them an overview of the blog, including what they can expect to read and how often you plan to update it.

2. Make sure they know that they can sign up to receive new posts via email – and ask them to subscribe.

It’s a sure way to know they’re aware of any new post that’s written. If your mail service allows you to add addresses yourself, you may consider subscribing them all directly.

3. Give your employees a role in the blog’s success.

A few ways to involve employees:

• Ask for their content ideas and input. Some may even welcome the opportunity to be a guest blogger.
• Set up an in-house “Name that Blog” contest. Ask employees for their ideas, and may the best name win!
• Feature your employees in your blog. Whether in a regular (monthly) column, in a welcome post for new employees, or in coverage of a special accomplishment, just about everyone likes to see their name in print.

4. Let your employees become your company’s social advocates.

Invite them to follow your company’s Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Twitter page. Depending on your company’s culture, you may encourage them to share, retweet, or comment on your posts.

Of course, before you ask for this level of engagement, your company should establish some guidelines that define what it considers appropriate behavior on social media sites. A written policy that is shared company-wide can go a long way to maintaining a positive online reputation. It’s also a good idea to be sure employees understand the etiquette of different social media sites. Read our post Putting the Social in Social Media for more tips on how to put together a team of employees for your content marketing program. And subscribe to our Growth Spurts blog for an upcoming how-to on creating a company social media policy.

Quick Tip Tuesday: 3 Ways to Use Pinterest You May Not Have Thought Of

If you’re a consumer-oriented, “visual” business, you’re most likely using Pinterest – a virtual bulletin board for images – to gather and share pictures and videos that you find on the web. And since Pinterest is more of a social media site than a photo sharing site, you’re probably building boards that are a good mix of your own and other content and working to build a community by sharing what you’ve found.

Pinterest can be more than a social media site, though, and we have three easy ideas to get you started:

Secret Boards: You may be using secret boards as a place to gather inspirations and ideas that you’d like to keep to yourself. But how about a Secret Board for your business? We work with a client who creates floral arrangements for weddings. She had tried email and a shared Google Drive folder for exchanging ideas with her brides and their families, but both were very cumbersome – emails got lost, images were too big, even logging in to Google Drive was an issue. We suggested setting up secret boards for each bride, where she could post pictures of flowers she liked, our client could post her thoughts and ideas, and together they could arrive at the perfect colors and arrangements for the bride’s special day. Brides – and their mothers! – loved having their own special board and the simplicity it offered.

Here’s how: Scroll to the lower third of your Pinterest page, where you’ll see the option to Create a secret board. In the details pop up, be sure to add the people you’re sharing the board with in the “Who can add pins” section.

Embed a Board: Your website needs fresh content, but with everything else you need to do, keeping it updated isn’t always a priority. You can maximize the time you spend on Pinterest and update your website at the same time by adding a Board widget to a page on your site. This way, any time you add images to the board on Pinterest, you will be updating the page on your website, too.

Here’s how: Select the board you’d like to embed, click the < > button, and copy the code in the pop up. Paste this code on your web page, and voila – your board will appear, showing up to 30 of that board’s latest Pins. To customize the embedded board, select Analytics, then Tools, then Widget builder. Choose “Board Widget” from the menu on the left, choose the appropriate Custom Size option, click Build it! and copy the code.

Create a Slideshow: An alternative way to showcase images from a board is to create a slideshow of the board and even embed it on your website.

Here’s how:

• First, set up a storify.com account and install the bookmarklet.
• Visit the board with the images for your slideshow.
• Use the Storify bookmarklet to add each image you’re using to your Storypad.
• Create a new story, using the images you selected.
• Once it’s published, you can grab the Embed code – choose Story, Grid or Slideshow – and add it to your website.

Have you used any of these ideas? Do you have any other ways your using Pinterest to share? Please let us know!

Thanks to The Daily Freeman blog for the Storify idea.

How to Grow, and NOT, Grow Sales: SalesMemes 49 Free Media?

How to Grow, and NOT, Grow Sales: SalesMemes 48 – Doing Good Can Pay

Client’s Collaboration with Sales Renewal Leads to New Strategies, Brand, Site, Marketing Programs and … a Blue Ribbon

It is generally rare for two different companies, let alone a client and its vendor, to work together so thoroughly, on so many levels, that the resulting whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

However, thanks to Sales Renewal’s revolutionary JointSourcing Solution (a unique hybrid combining elements of joint venturing with elements of outsourcing, in which shared risks and rewards align Sales Renewal’s economic incentives with those of its clients), such synergies are the norm.

If you’ve been wondering how JointSourcing and its three, Blueprint, Build and Sell steps actually works in practice, in the real world, this latest installment of our JointSourcing in Action Case Studies series is for you.

This issue provides a detailed, step-by-step view of how Sales Renewal partnered with our client MATsolutions to overcome their business, marketing and sales challenges to produce a marketing & sales system neither company could have developed as quickly or efficiently on its own. One result of the collaboration: MATsolutions receiving the prestigious Blue Ribbon Small Business of the Year for 2014 award from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

As Steve Wedler, VP Sales and Marketing, MATsolutions has said:

“Over the last year with Sales Renewal’s critical assistance, we’ve rebranded the company, launched a new e-commerce site and introduced marketing programs and supporting technologies that truly distinguish MATsolutions from its competitors. Having two highly dedicated and bright teams responsible for this transformation has allowed us to deliver something far superior than either team alone could have. This award is a great acknowledgement of the advances we have made.”

Read the JointSourcing in Action case study.

How to Grow, and NOT, Grow Sales: SalesMemes 46 – Promotions

Quick Tip Tuesday: July Digital Marketing Advice

Each month we start our Quick Tip Tuesday series with a roundup of useful, hands-on digital marketing advice from experts in their fields. We’ve extracted the most useful information into tips you can use, and we’ve also provided a link to the full articles in case you’d like to learn more.

Looking for more information like this? The Sales Renewal Advice from Across the Web page features a selection of the best, actionable marketing & technology advice and, importantly, adds our perspective. Think of it as a Marketing Clipping Service for the modern world.

Here, then, are our favorite tips for the month:

Customer Reviews to Drive Revenue: We’ve written about this before, but we can’t emphasize it enough. Customer reviews and testimonials are important for all businesses, but are essential for businesses with a local presence. From providing excellent customer service and never paying for reviews to making sure your site has the correct schema markup for the search engines, this article offers five helpful tips for managing local reviews. Not sure where to get started? As you can see from this Infographic on MarketingProfs.com, Yelp is often a good place to begin.

Making Sure Your Site Is Mobile-Friendly: With more and more ways for visitors to view your website, having a responsive site (one that adapts to the screen size and platform of the user) is a given. As reported on TechCrunch.com, Google is now helping address this poor user experience in two ways. First, it will let users know if the website is not properly set up for smartphones and instead of sending you to the search page you’ve requested sends you to a single home page (“faulty redirects”). Then it lets you decide whether to proceed or not. Second, if you have Webmaster Tools enabled, Google will send a message if it detects that any of your site’s pages are redirecting smartphone users to the homepage as well as any faulty redirects it detects in the Smartphone Crawl Errors section of Webmaster Tools. Details here.

Twitter Tips to Keep Followers Following: This Ragan.com article offers some useful tips for managing your Twitter account. Highlights:

• Don’t rely on automatic reposting of your content – write content specific for your Twitter feed
• Stay away from ALL CAPS
• Don’t overuse #hashtags
• Use a shortened URL service for links – makes a better visual presentation of your content
• Interact with others – use mentions in your tweets, for example

Content Marketing Idea Generator: Stuck in rut with your content marketing? Facing a writer’s block? This article introduces five keyword-based tools – like Hubspot’s Blog Topic Generator – that may just help you get going again. Read more here.

How to Grow, and NOT, Grow Sales: SalesMemes 45 – July 4th Special

How to Grow, and NOT, Grow Sales: SalesMemes 41 – How to be a hero for $200

A Cost Effective Way to Attract Prospects, Customers and Partners

Press clippings. Anyone who has worked in a large office as recently as the late 1990s knows what this means. “Back in the day, ” employees would receive packets of photocopied articles and news items related to their company and industry, delivered daily by the PR department.

This was not an inexpensive proposition, and companies needed to either have a dedicated department or hire a press clipping service.

Traditional clipping services still exist (and can run a company several thousand dollars a month), but in today’s digital age, monitoring and reporting on what’s going on in a particular industry can be affordable for any sized business. And that’s good news, because this kind of third party content can be a cost effective way to regularly attract prospects, customers and partners to your business.

Take, for example, Sales Renewal’s recently launched Sales Building Advice from Across the Web, where we offer actionable, practical marketing and technology advice to visitors. This broad-based content (sources recently cited include the NY Times, and Ted.com) is a perfect complement to the Sales Renewal focused content we also generate in our blog, infographics, and social media pages.

How It Works

On a regular basis, we review online publications, websites, blogs and other sources of information relevant to your company and industry and select the most interesting, informative and, sometimes, fun items, publishing them on a dedicated page on your website, as well as on your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google+ pages.

So wherever your prospects, customers and partners come into contact with you, your industry knowledge and expertise will shine through (and is another reason for them to bookmark, like or follow your company).

The News Service not only helps demonstrate your firm’s knowledge, but also keeps your site and social pages fresh – providing a rationale to come back often (plus, search engines really like it too).

Think of it as a clipping service for the modern world. To learn more about this new, cost effective service, contact us .