Category: Personal Branding

Starting a new blog can be scary. Terrifying, even. It’s important to note that coming up with topics for your blog doesn’t have to be intimidating. There are a few things you can do to ensure you never have difficulties coming up with something interesting to write about, and they aren’t as difficult as you may think. In fact, they are actually pretty simple.

We’ll be going over some of those tricks in detail, so if you’re ready to start learning, keep reading.

Take Some Time to Brainstorm Ahead!

First, you want to start with a good old-fashioned brainstorming session. This is because taking the time to brainstorm topics is a major must when starting a new blog. With all the fake news out there, you’ll need to have unique ideas and supporting evidence, if you want your blog to stand out from the get-go.

Before you can come up with an entire list, though, you need to get the ball rolling and write down one or two of the topics that are already swirling through your mind. Even if you can only come up with one idea at the beginning, it’s all you need to get started.

From there, you simply need to change scope.

Let’s say, for example, you want to write a blog post about the importance of marketing. This is a pretty broad topic on its own, but if you change the scope, it opens up a world of opportunity. And before you know it, your one idea has turned into 6 or 7.

You can also write about topics like the importance of organic marketing, the most recent changes that have happened with marketing strategies in your niche, the differences between marketing on different social media channels, and much more.

All it takes to successfully change scope is a different perspective, a good brainstorming session, and the willingness to take some time to plan ahead.

Use Content Tools Like Google Analytics to See What’s Working

With that being said, though, you also want to make sure the topics you come up with will work. That means using content tools like Google Analytics, HubSpot, and ClickFunnels to keep an eye on how your blog posts stack up against the competition.

When audience members read content, they’re looking for a number of things, including easy-to-read layouts, mobile functionality, engaging copy, and accurate search engine optimization. Having the data from each blog post at your fingertips can give you the ability to analyze whether your topics and overall blog can satisfy those needs.

No Need to Look Far: Write About Topics That Concern Your Site!

No matter how well thought out your blog topics are, there’s no chance they will perform well if they don’t fit in with the content on the rest of your website. So if you’re having trouble coming up with blog topics, look no further than that topic! Most notably, your site’s security.

Cybersecurity is a major issue for every website owner, including you, and it can provide a broad range of topics for you to write about. Some examples might be the best way to ensure the backend of your website is secure and the best way to establish strong security initiatives among staff members.

How-To Guides Are Always Great and Really Popular!

If all else fails, you can never go wrong with writing how-to guides! These have been shown to perform well on a regular basis, especially in the online blog space.

Think about it.

One of the most common things people do is Google the answers they’re looking for. Your goal with how-to guides is to walk your readers through a process they don’t yet know how to do and provide them those answers.

Write What You Know

No matter what your blog is about, it’s always going to be possible to come up with topics. All it takes is a little time, a new perspective, and excitement regarding the experience your readers will receive when they click onto your content. What is more, there are plenty of writing and editing tools and services like ClassyEssay which apart from providing academic writing help can also assist you in creating catchy headlines and high-quality content on various topics for your blog.

And if you ever struggle to come up with new topics, just take a moment to breathe and walk through the strategies we outlined above. You know about more than you think, and there are plenty of people out there who want to pick your brain about every aspect of whatever your overall branding focuses on.

So go out there and start writing. You’ve got this!

In the field of internet, promoting your content is a race, and ‘content marketing’ is leading this race. 

Yes, SEO has made gains in this race over the years, but content marketing is still at the forefront. In fact, other areas of marketing exist only because of content.

Everyone is fisting off content. Isn’t it? Think about it. What would you have optimized if there was no content for search engines to index?

Similarly, if there was no content, what would you post on social media? Nothing. If there was no content, then how would you communicate a message that resonates with an audience?

In content marketing, ‘you never know everything.’ New tactics and strategies emerge every day, and there are thousands of them. You ‘can’t use them all.’ You have to decide on useful trends and include them in their strategies.

In this blog, we will focus on the ‘most popular trends’ of content marketing and what direction it might be headed in 2020 and beyond.

1. Tell your story through visuals

Visual content has been trendy for a long time, and it will remain that way, because, honestly, we’d rather see images than reading. Internet users, especially the millennial generation and Generation Z, are always short on time.  You must appeal to their imagination through your interactive content. 

According to Pew Research, social platforms that feature visual content, like YouTube, Snapchat, and Instagram, reign supreme among adults. In fact, YouTube continues to be the most popular and widely used platform among U.S. adults. The video-sharing platform is used by 73 percent of adults, topping even Facebook. 

Source

Additionally, a HubSpot survey revealed that 56 percent of users aged 25-34 years prefer video content from the businesses they support. The numbers are telling you that visual content is trendy, and more marketers will use it in 2020.

But wait, if everyone is using visual content, then how can you stand out in the flock? Simple answer: engage the readers with catchy visuals. Be ingenious and tell your story.

2. Purposeful content

When we look for something on the internet, we only want the content that gives us ‘the exact answer we need.’  In 2020, marketers will increasingly target queries to provide a purposeful answer for users.

They will come up with content tailored to the interests and desires of people. You have to find a balance between the information and the promotional message of the brand.

As the competition in the digital landscape gets fiercer, brands will find it harder to rank for popular keywords. If everyone is creating quality content, marketers will need to adopt ways to set their content apart from the lot.

To stand apart, your content must carry certain qualities. According to Growth Proton.com, effective content must adhere to three core values:

• Efficiency
• Accuracy
• Excellence

Keep your content unique. Add some numbers in it. Keep the tone conversational. You do that, and you will have satisfied customers with answers to all their queries.

3. Memes

Add memes. We all like to chuckle. Don’t we? Memes have emerged as engaging marketing content. It can hit all the right spots in people’s minds. It has a personalized effect that is reflective of your brand’s personality.

Memes are so effective that they are can make you presidents of the U.S. According to Bloomberg, presidential candidates have a meme strategy to reach out to millennials and Generation Z. 

Now you know how vital memes are?

The viral tendency of memes makes it a useful tool to increase your reach and widen the customer base. If I like a meme, I will share it. Right? There is your chance of free promotion.

4. Podcasts

Podcasts have been growing exponentially over the past few years. According to the UK’s Office of Communication, 1 in 8 people now listen to podcasts each week. This indicates an increase of 24 percent over 2018, and it will only grow from here.

Statista also reported that the number of podcast listeners in the U.S. has almost tripled within a decade. Podcast publishers now achieve millions of streams and downloads per month.

Increasing demand for audio content means that it is now essential for marketers to initiate a podcast and help their brand establish some credibility within their field of expertise.

5. Optimize content for voice search

The use of voice search is rising thanks to voice assistants like Siri, Google Assistant, and Alexa. If I can search with voice, why would I write?

According to Voicebot.ai, 33 percent of users searched through voice every month in 2019. In September 2018, the same number was 25 percent. Stats are telling you that people are talking more than they are writing.

Since Google voice search and AI-powered assistants work differently, content marketers need to optimize their content for voice search. Engage with the audience conversationally and create content based on those conversations. Such content will incorporate long-tail keywords and address voice queries of the audience. 

6. Double down on your SEO efforts

Your content can be great, but you still have to tell it to people. It will only happen when you rise to the top of SERPs. Now, the focus is on SEO strategies and to deliver an excellent user experience.

This decade will also see more investments in tools that can automate and make SEO easier. Businesses will compete to show up in the featured snippets (also known as Position 0) to stand out from their competitors.

The sky is the limit here. You can achieve ‘top ranking in the search’ through an effective content marketing strategy that addresses the audiences’ needs.

Final words

The above content marketing trends will likely be on every marketer’s mind this year and the years to come. However, businesses don’t need to abandon the strategies that have worked for them in the past.

Utilize these trends and bring simple changes to improve their understanding of your audience and their needs. As they say, “Sometimes, the simple changes bring great success.”

Marketing isn’t always straightforward, and for many marketers and entrepreneurs, generating leads is a challenge. Facebook is a great platform to help you generate more leads. It’s a place where you can turn a conversation into customer loyalty and purchases, as well as getting to know your customers even better. Let’s see what it takes to generate leads on Facebook.

Why Facebook Is An Ideal Platform To Generate Leads On

There are a couple of reasons why Facebook is one of the best platforms to generate leads. And while you might have read that Facebook’s network growth has slowed down, they still have over 2.50 billion monthly active users. So, if you create a well-strategized presence focused on both organic and paid advertising methods, your possibilities on this platform are endless.

Another reason to use Facebook is that you can set different objectives as your goal with a campaign, which is something that most other platforms are not able to provide, even in 2020.  But not just that, the platform has made its name in lead generation with thanks to one of marketing’s golden rules: ‘know your audience.’ And while many marketers, such as yourself, might think that they already know their audience, the data you’ll gather when advertising on Facebook, might say otherwise.

Building Engagement And Expertise

f you want to start generating organic Facebook likes, it is essential to remember that you’re going to need to build a community that trusts you and create a lot of engagement.

Engagement And Community Building

Increasing or building brand engagement is important because the trust you create will eventually trigger more purchases. People are engaged with your content if they like, click, and comment. To make sure this happens, you will have to create value for your audience by writing exciting content, showing entertaining videos, and answering questions about your product/service.

You can also utilize customer reviews to build more trust. But if you do, it is an essential thing to keep in mind that you have to remember to always reply to messages, customer reviews, and questions. This will help you build a relationship with your potential customers, which will eventually generate more leads. 

Another thing you can do to improve the engagement with your brand and products is to build a community on Facebook. When you start with creating your community, you need to take a good look at yourself. A community is not about making a profit (or at least not directly); it is about personal success and helping others to succeed too. It creates mutually beneficial relationships that add value to your business, your own life, and that of the other community members.

When building a community, you can introduce the expert approach. This means you share valuable, expert level, information about topics that relate to your audience and product. The aim is to trigger a more in-depth conversation or discussion. You do this by asking questions and making comments as well as inviting others to share content too. Once you have established brand engagement and trust, you’re ready to start with Facebook Advertising. 

Facebook Advertising

Advertising is used for many different things, and such is the case with Facebook Advertising as well. Objectives like doing market research, getting customer feedback, and increasing conversion can be applied to create advertisements on Facebook. In this paragraph, we will focus on Facebook Lead Ads. 

Facebook Lead Ads are promotion forms that allow marketers, or anyone else who is interested in the matter, to collect information from possible customers. You’re also able to connect with prospects, get them to sign-up for newsletters, demo requests, and blog notifications. 

And by using dynamic creative, you can make sure to deliver the right message, at the right time to the right person.

Facebook lead generation lets you sync with your company’s CRM, which allows you to follow-up quicker and more efficiently. When you create a lead ad and someone clicks on it, they get presented with a unique form that automatically selects the information on their profile. After that, the users only need to confirm with a few clicks, super easy. You get the data into your CRM and will be able to give this new possible customer a quick call. You should also check out onlineacademy.com/ if you’re looking for some of the best training on Facebook advertising. This will help you cut your learning curve in half and go straight to making profits for your clients or your ecommerce website.

A tip for creating leads ads that will convert is that people are more willing to help you if you help them. Meaning, if you offer something in return for the data that you need, users are often more inclined to fill out the form. 

Building campaigns

Building campaigns with Facebook is relatively easy. The first thing you will have to do is to set a goal for your campaign. Facebook offers three different categories of objectives to choose from awareness, consideration, and conversion. If you’re going to get more leads, you’ll need to select conversion. These are the next steps to building a campaign:

• Specify the ad set, that will determine how your ad will run. Think about this carefully, because targetting will make or break your campaign. 
• After you’ve selected all the qualities of your possible customers, it’s time to build and test your ad creative. You can choose from different formats that are set up, which makes it easy to run. 
• Once this is done, you are ready to launch your campaign. 

Statistics

After you’ve set up your campaign and it is running, it’s time to take a look at Facebook Statistics. We’ve selected the five most important measurements to keep track of to maximize your Return On Investment with Facebook Ads. 

1. The first is impressions, also known as the number of times your ad is shown and seen.

2. The number of clicks and the click-through-rate shows how interested people are in your ad. You can calculate the CTR by dividing the number of clicks through the number of impressions. 

3. Conversion rate, the conversion relates to the actions taken on your website after users come from your ad. 

4. Return on ads spend is defined as revenue divided by the costs of the ads. 

5. Lifetime value is the projected value that a customer will have during his or her entire life. In marketing, you often set a goal as to how much you want that value to be.

Increasing click-through rates

The click-through rate (CTR) of your ads is one of the best ways to understand how your audience is responding to your ads. There are a couple of things that will help you increase your CTR. 

The first is to distill your audience. You are increasing your CTR through audience redefining means that you will only select the users who are most likely to click on your ad. Let’s say that you noticed that men between 20 and 30 are clicking the most, and women of the same age group almost not at all. You should retarget your audience to men between 20 and 30. This means you are targetting the highest quality audience, which will increase your click-through rate. In other words, you are shifting from volume to value-based marketing. 

Another aspect of improving your CTR is content. The images and text you use play a huge role in your CTR. Unfortunately, there is no easy fix for this one; you will have to test to figure out what works for your audience. 

Facebook Messenger

Another way of reaching your audience is through Facebook Messenger. Through a messenger, you will be able to engage in actual, live conversations with your prospects. These conversations can help you gather more information and ask in-depth questions.

It is also possible to create ads that have a click-through to a messenger. If you set up an automated chat, you will be able to get an excellent and full idea of who your potential customers are and what they are looking for in a product.  

Facebook’s messages objective is a tool that will help start even more conversations. Through this tool, your ad gets delivered to people who are statistically most likely to want to have a conversation with your business. 

Conclusion

We hope that after reading this article, you feel comfortable enough about generating leads on Facebook to give it a try. The platform offers great flexibility when it comes to marketing goals and has an immense network of possible customers. Facebook Advertising and Facebook Messenger allow you to get to know and understand your potential customers. If you are patient enough to build your audience’s engagement and earn their trust, you will soon be swimming in leads.

The importance of branding for a business in the 21st-century has been drilled into each of us. Ever since Apple became one of the biggest companies in the world developing an identity around a lifestyle brand rather than their products, the way new and existing businesses have to conduct and present themselves online has changed dramatically.

Creating a brand that your target audience can relate to is essential, but expensive. At least, you would assume. The advent of free online resources has made it easier than ever for a business to produce the essentials of a great brand. So how can your business make something out of nothing, and why are free resources the key to great branding? 

Professionalism

Whatever your business does, professionalism should be at the forefront of your mind. Even if you have a casual, anti-establishment and purposely care-free brand, it needs to be well-made and look as if you put care and attention into your public perception. 

Before, professional came at a premium. Now, you can create a sense of it around your business from your early days, without investing a significant portion of your budget. Your public-facing content can be given a professional edge by using free resources. 

First impressions to your audience are essential. Each contact point after that is about building an image of professionalism they can trust. How you correspond with your audience is an essential part of this.

Free resources can be used to help get across the professionalism of your business. How you communicate needs to be professional, from your email conversations to the invoices you send to both clients and customers. There are plenty of templates available to help you craft professional-looking invoices complete with your company branding and a layout that presents your business as an industry leader, or one with the potential to be. This is a great way to tell customers and business partners what your brand is all about. 

Free video chat tools such as Google Hangouts and Skype are also great assets for adding professionalism to your communication. They’ll allow you to communicate with business partners and investors in a more professional manner, without having to splash out on travel or dinner.

Good branding can be a lot of things, but one thing is should always be is professionally developed. Free resources are one of the best ways to do this quickly and make sure your company doesn’t seem, ironically enough, cheap. 

Creativity

A lot of creativity goes into establishing a brand identity. The most recognizable visual elements of top businesses weren’t created on the first try, they developed over time. Having the space to be creative and experiment with ideas is an essential part of the brand-building process, and free tools give you the chance to do just that.

Logos, for example, are a key part of a successful brand identity. They need to catch the eye and encapsulate the brand, whether it’s showing what you do, creating a sense of the lifestyle around it or giving a community something to rally around. 

Paying a designer is expensive, so getting creative with free tools is almost a must. Tools such as Hatchful allow you to develop professional-looking logos and experiment with different styles. Even if this ends up being a temporary logo, it’s given you an identity to build around as you get off the ground. Some of the biggest companies in the world have had to change their logo and branding over time.

Your brand will have numerous visual elements that need to be developed early on, from a color scheme to a font. Even if these are only temporary solutions until you can afford a more permanent paid option such as using a designer or investing in photoshop, these feel tools give you the chance to get creative and develop a visual identity. 

Awareness

Building your brand’s business is worthless if no one can find it. Not only do you need tools to create all the elements of your brand identity, but free tools help you spread awareness of your brand.

Social media is one of the best tools available for a new brand to spread awareness about themselves. While advertising on social media can be a quite costly endeavor, there are a number of free tools that can make your management of social media more streamlined ad profitable, teaching you more about the platform and your audiences on there. 

Some of the most popular social media management tools available like Hootsuite and Buffer, used by professionals across numerous industries, have robust free options. You can also make use of tools such as Google Analytics to get more insight into the inner works of your website and how traffic is traveling to it from the places you’re trying to spread awareness on. 

Content

A key part of your branding process is the content you develop to advertise and spread awareness of it. Creating quality content is difficult to do on a budget, despite how much phone cameras have developed and editing software has been streamlined. However, the promotion and presentation of this content is easier than to do than ever with free tools. 

YouTube is an obvious choice, giving you a free platform to upload your branding content and open it up to a huge audience. Video has become the dominant online content force, with audiences clamoring for more. 

Tools such as Headliner allow you to create great quality social and website content free of charge, although you are limited to a certain amount per month if not paying. You can also use tools to create great explainer content for free, giving you a great method of introducing your brand and website to new visitors.

Content is vital for growing a brand, and being able to create, upload and format this content for the most popular platforms for free is a huge budget saver. These tools will help you to do that. 

Some of the best things in life are free, and that includes brand-building tools. There’s no need for a business to spend heavily in the early days on trying out loads of different tools they may not want to use in a couple of months’ time. Even using free subscription samples is better. Don’t get locked into paying for months and squeeze every bit of brand building juice you can out of these tools.