Welcome to Productive People, my blog and podcast series dedicated to learning from productive people who are smashing their goals and getting stuff done.
In this episode of The Productivity Podcast I talk to Nicholas Scalice from Earnworthy all about productivity for marketers. Nicholas is a freelance marketing consultant who specialises in marketing for non-profits. In this episode we talk about what marketers can do to be more effective and efficiency with their online marketing efforts.
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KEY TAKEAWAYS
Introduction to Nicholas & Marketing Productivity
Nicholas is a freelance marketing consultant who specialises in marketing for non-profits. He has dabbled in all sorts of areas within marketing, including; lead generation, affiliate marketing, social media marketing, domain name investing and more.
Nicolas's new website Earnworthy is all about helping marketers to be more productive. “Marketing Productivity” as a topic is all about how to become a more efficient and effective marketer so you can accomplish your campaign objectives. Or, to use Nicholas's definition:
“Marketing Productivity is the framework of ideal principles, processes and platforms to effectively and efficiently generate attention, consideration, trust or transactions from a specific group or target audience.”
To sum up, Marketing Productivity is not just about what tools to use, it's the all inclusive principles and processes that we need to consider to be more effective and efficient with how we conduct marketing. TEST.
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The 80/20 of Marketing
You should always start with the fundamentals. A lot of brands jump straight into launching Facebook ads without first thinking about who they're serving or what problem they're trying to solve. It really is vital to nail these fundamental questions before getting started with these more advanced ideas. The most successful campaigns are always rooted in the fundamentals and the marketers behind them have a very clear idea of who they're serving, how to talk to them, what problems they're solving and why they're solving them.
Another common mistake marketers make is to close the loop too soon. For example, when you follow someone on Twitter and they send an automated reply back with some call to action where they ask you to check out their book. You need to build trust first and deliver value multiple times before you even ask for something in return. The lesson here comes from Gary Vaynerchuk's book; Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook which emphasises the importance of delivering value before asking for the sale.
The key is to build trust with your target customer. So instead of collecting someone's email address and abusing it by spamming them with useless emails, you need to deliver real value and help them solve a problem before you ask for something in return. The best brands have built this trust and really look after and respect their audiences.
Productivity Tools
The most productive marketers have a successful system that allows them to be more effective and efficient with their marketing. Here are some of the common tools used within these systems:
- Buffer – Buffer is used for scheduling and automating your Tweets.
- Hootsuite – This is a great tool for listening to your audience and tracking the keywords and phrases that they use.
- RavenTools – This is an all in one SEO platform. It's ideal for freelancers as you can set up loads of campaigns and keep clients separate.
- Manage Flitter – This is a Twitter tool which lets you strategically follow specific users that you'd like to target and it's easier to follow lots of users using Manage Flitter than it is in the normal Twitter user-interface.
- Opt-in Monster – This is a WordPress plugin for adding popups and dropdown boxes that let you collect email addresses in a non-annoying way.
- Lead Pages – Lead Pages lets you collect email addresses and setting up landing pages. Even better you can split test your landing pages to optimise for sign-ups.
- Fantastical – This is a calendar app for Mac.
- To-Doist – This is a lightweight yet powerful to-do list and project management app that lets you organise your work.
How to Get Started with Your Online Business
Start off by nailing those fundamentals that we talked about earlier. You really have to understand your audience, what problems they face, but also know yourself and know what you're good at. Your strengths will become you main advantage when it comes to how you market yourself. For example, if you like talking on camera, use YouTube and Facebook video. If you're better at writing, focus on blogging and producing long-form content. The key here is to align your strengths here with your target audience.
When it comes to channels, try a little bit of everything and find out what works, what you're good at and what works with your audience. When you've tried a bit of everything you can work out what you're going to continue with vs. what you're going to drop.
Talk to friends and family to get their feedback and see what they think of your work. They'll be able to tell you things that you miss, for example, they may notice you're a really good speaker and so you might want to try podcasting or video. Talking to people and getting qualitative feedback is a great way of identifying which channels to hit first.
Tips for Producing Great Content
The key is to figure out what's going to be trending soon that's not in the spotlight yet. This is obviously very difficult but can give you a huge advantage if you get it right.
You can use tools like Google Trends and BuzzSumo to identify up and coming search terms and popular content. These tools are great for identifying what's working on your site, your competitors site and coming up with topic ideas that have been proven to perform well.
Another great tool to check out is Quora. On Quora people ask questions that they want an answer to. So you could type in a keyword related to your topic and see what kind of questions people are asking related to this. Then it's simply a case of coming up with content that answers the questions that people have.
MORE ABOUT NICHOLAS
You can find Nicholas over at Earnworthy where he blogs about marketing and productivity. Be sure to follow Nicholas on Twitter as well.