Mediaboss Marketing

Dominik AngererContributor

Search engine optimization, PR, paid marketing, emails, social marketing and communications is crowded with techniques, channels, solutions and acronyms. Its little wonder that many startups strapped for time and money find defining and executing a sustainable marketing campaign a daunting prospect.

The sheer number of options makes it difficult to determine an effective approach, and my view is that this complexity often obscures the obvious answer: A startups best marketing asset is its story. The knowledge and expertise of its team, together with the why and the how of its offering provides the most compelling content.

Leveraging this material with best practice techniques enables any startup, no matter how limited its budget, to run an effective marketing campaign.

I know this approach works, because this is exactly what I did with my co-founder Alex Feiglstorfer when we set up Storyblok. To be clear, we are developers not marketers. However, our previous experience building CMS systems taught us that the main driver of organic engagement for most businesses was customer conversations around content.

Specifically, sharing experiences, expertise and what we learned. We had committed nearly all of our available cash to developing our product, so we knew that the only way to market Storyblok was to do it all ourselves.

As a result, we focused solely on problem-solving content. This took the form of tutorials on web development and opinion pieces on headless CMS and other topics within our areas of expertise. The trick was that what we published wasnt made just for marketing, it was based on our own internal documentation of problems we encountered as we developed our product. In essence, we were learning in public. Through this approach we were able to acquire thousands of customers in our first year.

Retelling this story isnt to blow my own trumpet, its to make clear that you dont have to be a marketer by training or commit a huge amount of time and resources to successfully market your startup. So, how do you get started?

Although theres no one-size-fits-all approach to how you organize your startups marketing function, there are some basic principles that apply in nearly every situation. A recent survey of 400+ executives from CMS Wire helpfully identified the following factors as the top digital customer experience challenges for businesses:

Challenges two to four are the pitfalls that we can focus on avoiding. They are directly related to how a startup produces, organizes and distributes its content.

With regard to the siloing of systems and fragmentation of customer data, the overriding goal is to ensure all your systems are integrated and speak to one another. In practice, this means that the data gathered in different departments whether its feedback from sales, engagement on your website, customer service responses or product development information is collected in a uniform and methodical manner and is readily accessible across the business.

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Even startups on tight budgets can maximize their marketing impact - TechCrunch

As marketers look for new ways to reach out to their target audience, many of them are turning to social media marketing. However, new research suggests that this remains a difficult tactic to measure in terms of return-on-investment.

Nielsen recently published its Annual Marketing Report, and statistics showed that over the next 12 months, the majority of marketers (more than 70%) said that they intend to increase their budget for social media. This was followed by search (approximately 70%) and online and mobile video (nearly 60%).

However, among those who said they were going to increase their budget for social media, more than 70% said they were not very confident in their ability to measure ROI, while just about 30% said they were very confident. This indicates that there is still work to do in this area before marketers can reap the benefits of initiatives in this area.

This is not the first batch of research to suggest that marketers have had problems in terms of measuring the impact of their work with social media. Previous data indicates that revenue is also difficult to attribute to this channel.

DemandLab conducted its Revenue Attribution Outlook Survey, and the statistics showed that out of all top digital channels, social media marketing (44%) is the most challenging to analyze in terms of how it contributes to sales revenue.

Content marketing (39%), display advertising (38%) and email marketing (33%) were also considered challenging. SEO (18%) topped the list of least difficult channels to analyze.

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More than 70% of Marketers to Boost Social Media Marketing Budgets - KoMarketing Associates

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Social media platforms have become some of the most powerful marketing tools in this day and age. Its almost impossible for any modern-day brand to survive, let alone thrive, without capitalizing on the reach and impact of social networks. No matter what your industry is, you cant afford to dismiss social networks hoping to move away from what some might consider too mainstream. Customers today across different demographics are shifting their focus towards brands that are relevant and can speak their own language.

If you want your new brand to launch with a bang or even if you want to breathe life into your existing business, the answer is the same: you have to nail social media marketing. Since marketing on social networks has never been more important, here are some tips and tricks that you can try.

While this might sound like an obvious suggestion, few businesses actually do it right. When it comes to marketing on social media, even though consistent posting is key, more is not always better. Flooding your customers feeds with random posts that lack coherence and structure can definitely do more harm than good. If you want your business to come across as professional and reliable, you must define what you hope to accomplish from marketing on social networks early on. However, not just any goals will do; they have to be SMART and align with your overall marketing strategy. To make sure youre headed in the right direction, including, numbers and timelines when setting your social media marketing goals.

For example, you can aim to grow your Facebook page subscribers by 20% over the next three months. Following this approach, youll be able to set a clear path for your marketing plan and evaluate its effectiveness. Later this information will help you to enhance and fine-tune your plan.

Treating your customers as if theyre mere segments wont get you far. Instead, try to really get to know your audience. Study and analyze your audiences likes, dislikes, and interests so that you can speak their language. A social media teams job should focus on following its target audiences every move online and identifying the trends in their behavior. However, especially if your business is still in the launching phase, it might be a good idea to entrust your social media management to a professional marketing agency that has experience in this area. Professional agencies have the necessary resources and expertise to uncover meaningful data about your audience that you can use to provide better products and an improved level of service. Knowing your audience will save you a lot of time and money that youd otherwise be wasting by focusing on the wrong platforms or posting the wrong content.

Your social media calendar will help you stay on top of your social media marketing. Your calendar should highlight important dates and events that your target audience would deem relevant. Plan campaigns for holidays and special events as sales usually tend to peak during these times. Furthermore, using a calendar to organize your social media marketing will improve your teams collaboration and help them manage their daily tasks more efficiently. If you dont know how to create your own calendar, the internet is full of ready-to-use scheduling tools that you can download. Most of them come with helpful features like the ability to queue your posts in the order you prefer across different platforms.

More than the quality of the product or service youre selling, the stories you create on your social networks can have an enormous impact on your sales volume. Customers love stories, and they want to believe that by buying your product, they are part of something bigger. When promoting your clothing brand, you can focus on showcasing the premium materials you use and the unique designs, and these things are certainly important. However, if you really want to increase sales, you can take your customers on a journey where you tell the story of how your brand came into existence and the idea behind the name you chose.

If you think about it, its like inviting your customers into your kitchen and letting them in on your brands secrets. Instagram stories are a great place for those kinds of posts if youre not sure where to start.

Marketing on social networks is so powerful that it can make or break your brand. The above tips can help you set your marketing plan into motion. With the help of a professional team, you can monetize your posts to guarantee that your business can stand up to competitors and thrive for a long time.

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Marketing On Social Networks Has Never Been More Important: Learn New Tips And Tricks - TechBullion

Competitor analysis is a key element in any effective digital marketing approach, providing insight into how your competitors have addressed similar marketing challenges to your own, and what's worked (and what hasnt) within their process.

Analyzing your competitors can help you better position your products and services within a specific niche, or compete head-to-head with messaging that plays to your strengths. And if you want to maximize your marketing, performing a competitor analysis is essential whenever you launch a new product or enter into a new market space, industry, or vertical.

In this post, I'll go over six key elements of competitor analysis that will help your marketing efforts win out.

But first off, in order to effectively analyze your competitors'digital marketing performance, you need the right tools.

Within this, you need apps which will:

Some great, powerful tools that cover these elements are:

Here's how to use these tools within your competitor analysis process.

1. Insights from Traffic Analysis

The first element you want to look at is web traffic, and how people are discovering your competitor sites - SEMRush can help with this.

You should analyze the traffic to competitor websites to discover how many visitors they have, unique visitors, pages per visit, visit duration, and bounce rate, which tells you how much traffic your competitors are getting, if visitors are finding the site content useful enough to stay on the site, and which content is most popular.

You can also see how visitors are finding their way to your competitors'websites.

TIP: Identify source domains to inform decisions about investing in search engine and social media advertising, as well as influencer outreach based on whats working for your competitors.

One of the most important things you can learn here is which of your competitor's website pages are most popular.

Seeing which landing pages are working best for your competitor can tell you which products and services have a successful online presence, and which dont. That can inform your approach to marketing products and services, and to how to run your campaigns.

TIP: For a campaign designed to go head-to-head with a competing product or service that is popular, dissect the messaging on that page and find ways to differentiate your products and services. Consider promoting those messages using aggressive demand generation, such as search and social advertising.

Backlinks help to build your domain authority and improve your rank for topics that other sites link to. Your brands SEO efforts should include a link-building component, and tools like SEMRush and AHRefs enable you to perform a backlink gap analysis to domains linking to your competitors, but not to you.

This will inform and improve your link-building efforts.

Analyzing your competitors social media activity can tell you which channels they use for promotion, how theyre positioning their products and services, and what content and messages have received the best reception from their audience.

It can also help you find gaps in their promotion strategy which can provide an opportunity for your brand.

Tools like Fan Page Karma can provide competitive intelligence on competitors social media activity.

You can see the channels theyre using for promotion, how active they are, the growth in their presence on the channel, and how actively theyre engaging with their audience.

TIP: If youre targeting the same audience as your competitor, consider focusing your activities on channels that have worked well for them.

You can also see the content theyre publishing, the topics theyre talking about, and which of those topics is of most interest to their audience.

TIP: This information can help you identify the topics that are of greatest interest to the audience, questions they have, and issues you can discuss to position the value of your products and services. Use this information to refine your content strategy, messages, and value proposition.

One of the most important things you can learn from your competitors is what keywords theyre using, and which theyre ranking for.

Your website and campaign content should be focused around a core set of keywords that will help your target audience find your site and content when looking for the solutions youre selling.

Your competitors will also be using, and trying to rank for relevant keywords.

TIP: Examine the keywords used by your competitors to find industry-specific keywords that you might be able to rank higher for in your site and campaign content, and to formulate long-tail keyword variants that you can rank for, and that differentiate your products and services from your competitors.

Another great feature offered by SEMRush is the ability to report frequently asked questions related to keywords and domains.

TIP: Develop lists of top questions about problems you solve, and the products and services you sell and create content that answers those questions. You can also take a more interactive approach and actively participate in Q&A sites and forums like Quora and Reddit and answer questions relevant to the products and services you sell, and post links back to your website content for additional information.

Analyzing your competitors'advertising information can save you a lot of time researching and formulating critical campaign elements like keywords and ad copy, and help you position your products and services more effectively.

SEMRush can show you traffic estimates, keywords, and cost estimates for paid search traffic, display advertising, and product listing ads.

TIP: The keywords used by your competitors are a great starting point for the keywords you can use for your brand and campaign. You may be able to compete successfully for core keywords, but you can certainly use this information to choose long-tail keyword variants that work well with the value proposition of your brand, products, and services.

You can see position changes for keywords used by your competitors.

You can even see competitors ad copy.

TIP: Seeing how your competitors are promoting their products and services shows you how theyre positioning their offerings, enabling you to construct website and ad copy to position yourself differently, by going after a slightly different niche.

When analyzing your competitors'best content, you can see if similar topics are a good fit for your brand, and assess the types of content that their audience likes to consume.

You can also discover gaps in content coverage, and frequently asked questions which your brand can then address in its content campaigns.

Look at their poor performing content, too, and try and determine why it didnt resonate.

TIP: Analyze competitors content with the goal of finding the best way to differentiate your content and messages to favorably stand apart from the pack. Do deep analysis to find trends and see if the audience prefers, longer or shorter content, fundamental or deeper analysis, conceptual vs. how-to content, graphics, videos, images, etc..

Regular analysis of your competition is important, because its like looking at the other teams playbook before you go out onto the field. It enables you to develop a campaign strategy and messaging that differentiates your products and services, accentuates your strengths, and positions you to win against the competition.

If you haven't undertaken a competitor analysis, it's worth taking a look, and these tools and tips will help.

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6 Key Elements of Competitor Analysis That Will Help Your Business Win Out - Social Media Today

Eating produce with the seasons can help consumers access fresher, more nutritious while directly supporting their local farmers and economies.

Eating seasonally often coincides with eating locally, Jerusha Klemperer, FoodPrint director, tells Food Tank. Local shopping and eating is more likely to be seasonal shopping and eating.

This also comes with a number of benefits. According to FoodPrint, seasonal foods can be fresher, tastier, and more nutritious than out of season produce because it is likely picked at its nutrient-dense peak, rather than harvested early and transported elsewhere.

Buying locally also helps lower consumers carbon footprint, because there are fewer carbon emissions associated with transporting that food shorter distances.

Money spent on local food also supports local farmers and farmland and contributes to the local economy. Through farmers markets and Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), consumers can help local farmers.

To help everyone eat with the seasons and access local distributors, Food Tank is highlighting educational guides for consumers.

1. The Agricultural Market Information System (AMIS) Crop Calendar

First published by the Mexican Agri-food and Fishery Information Service in collaboration with AMIS, this online resource provides an in-depth report of wheat, rice, maize, and soybeans around the world. For each crop, the report provides a table for the seasonality of planting and harvesting across two years. The report includes information on each crop as well and has a secondary resource formatted in a table.

2. Cuerpomente Seasonal Calendar (Spain)

Cuerpomente is a Spain-based health and wellness community with a website and magazine. The seasonal calendar shows what fruits and vegetables are in season by each month, and even differentiates produce that is generally in season and produce that is at its peak The calendar comes with illustrated digital graphics and a user-friendly table. Users can also visit web pages for each month that provide more information about the in-season produce and its health benefits.

3. Das Bundeszentrum fr Ernhrung (BZfE) Germanys Seasonal Calendar (Central and Northern Europe)

BZfE, the Federal Center for Nutrition in Germany, provides a Seasonal Calendar of produce that can also be downloaded as a mobile application. The information of the foods provided also applies to most of central and northern Europe. While the website is available in German, English speakers can also find an illustrated version with translations in a drawing series here.

4. Eat Seasonably UK (United Kingdom)

The Eat Seasonably campaign, based in the United Kingdom (U.K.), is a nationwide campaign to promote the consumption of seasonal food. They offer an interactive, online calendar and free, downloadable calendar poster that contains all the seasonal information of produce in the U.K. The Eat Seasonable campaign also has online profiles of the current in-season produce and tips to help growers determine what plant that month.

5. FAO Ethiopia Crop Calendar for (Ethiopia)

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization(FAO) country profile on Ethiopias agriculture system also features a crop calendar. It includes the major types of cereals and Meher crops those grown during the main crop season. The full agricultural profile on Ethiopia also includes data on vegetation and precipitation indicators and threats to crops. Users can search the websites country profiles for any countrys agricultural data.

6. FAOs Searchable Crop Calendar Database (International)

The FAOs information tool for seed security acts as a searchable database for different crops and countries around the world. Users can search the database by crop, category of crop, or country. The results even differentiate between agro-ecological zones. The database incorporates information on 44 countries and more than 130 different types of crops. It also provides information on the sowing rates of seed and planting material and the main agricultural practices.

7. The FoodPrint Seasonal Food Guide (U.S.)

FoodPrints Seasonal Food Guide draws from a database of more than 140 types of fruits, veggies, legumes, nuts, and herbs. The Guide allows users to search for produce by location in the United States time of year or food item. It also includes information about each produce item including its nutritional value, environmental impact, appearance when most ripe, and length of peak freshness. Access the Seasonal Food Guide online or via a phone app.

8. Harvest Select the Best Produce (U.S.)

Harvest is an iPhone application that allows users to see what produce is currently in-season by inputting a location and month. It then provides a guide for selecting the freshest, ripest, healthiest, and best-tasting produce using visual, touch- or feel-based cues. Harvest also provides tips on how to best store the produce and how long it will stay fresh. Finally, the application provides estimated pesticide levels in popular fruits and vegetables.

9. El Libro Sabio de Las Frutas y Las Verduras (Spain)

The Spanish Government s Ministerio de Agricultura, Pesca, y Alimentacin, created El Libro Sabio de Las Frutas y Las Verduras, which translates to The Wise Book of Fruits and Vegetables. This resource provides a look into 24 fruits and 29 vegetables in an easy-to-read, family-friendly format. The book provides information about the produce, its production in Spain, its nutrition, and its seasonality.

10. LocalHarvests Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), Farms, and Farmers Markets National Directory (U.S.)

LocalHarvest provides online tools to connect people looking for local food with the farmers who produce it. Their National Directory provides a search tool that allows users to search for CSAs, local farms, farmers markets, farm stands, U-Picks, grocery co-ops, and more, by inputting their zip code. The directory contains over 40,000 entries and is used by over 7 million people each year.

11. Por Precio y Sabor, Prefiera Frutas y Verduras de Estacin Campaign by the Chilean Government (Chile)

This health campaign, translated to For Price and Flavor, Choose Seasonal Fruits and Vegetables, was promoted by the Ministerio de Agricultura for World Food Day. The campaign includes four graphs of of seasonal produce by geographical area of Chile: Norte Grande (Arica-Parinacota, Tarapac and Antofagasta), Norte Chico (Atacama and Coquimbo), Central (from Valparaso to Maule) and South (from Biobo to Magallanes).

12. SeasonEats (U.S. and U.K.)

SeasonEats is a mobile application providing seasonal data for more than 130 items of produce in all 50 U.S. states and the United Kingdom. Its design allows users to search by location and month, sort by location or produce, or view by the whole year. It is iOS supported and also has an Apple Watch App for searching on the go.

13. South Africa Seasonal Calendar (South Africa)

EatOut provides a visual infographic calendar of the seasonality of produce in South Africa. The printable calendar is beautifully illustrated and provides a month-by-month look at what produce is in season, in addition to a section dedicated to a list of produce that is in-season year-round. The guide contains 54 different types of produce grown in South Africa.

14. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Education (SNAP-Ed) Seasonal Produce Guide (U.S.)

SNAP-Ed is a national grant program aimed at increasing nutrition education, social marketing, and policy, systems, and environmental change, and it can help people stretch their SNAP dollars further. The SNAP-Ed Seasonal Produce Guide provides an overview of the more commonly eaten produce sorted by season. The website allows the viewer to explore the different major fruits and vegetables through nutrition fact labels and external links to recipes, and other educational resources.

15. Union Freshs Seasonal Charts (Thailand)

Based in the Chiang Mai Province of Thailand, Union Fresh sources and distributes traditional Thai vegetables and tropical fruits. They provide a seasonal chart for both Thai Vegetables and Tropical Fruit for viewers all over the world. The color-coded chart features produce like carambola, mangosteen, rambutan, and durian.

16. U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Farmers Market Directory (U.S.)

Maintained by the Agricultural Marketing Service, the USDA National Farmers Market Directory is designed to provide customers with updated listings of farmers markets across the U.S. The directory can be searched within an adjustable radius around the users zip code. The directory provides farmers market information like market locations, directions, operating times, product offerings, and accepted forms of payment. Each listing has an external link to the website.

Photo courtesy of Jakub Kapusnak on Unsplash

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16 Resources for Eating Seasonally Around the World Food Tank - Food Tank