The Blog - Marketing 261 | Your Go-To Marketing Shop

Marketing Predictability: Flip Your Marketing Funnel On Its Head

Thanks to Leadsift for having me contribute to their 1-Minute Learning Series. The original video interview with Alex Field highlighting how to reverse engineer your marketing funnel lives on Leadsift’s Linkedin page.

Reverse Engineer Your Marketing Funnel

For a good majority of marketers in the tech industry, our core mandate is to generate leads, and more times than we can count, CEOs, executives, and sales aimlessly tell marketing, “we need leads.”

No. You want revenue.

Sure, leads get you to revenue, but let’s get everyone on the same page. Revenue is what matters‚ nothing else.

So, when you have business leaders asking for leads, and a sales team that is hungry to bring in revenue, it’s time to reverse engineer your marketing funnel and put a plan in place that highlights both leads AND revenue.

From My Tribe To Yours: A Holiday Gift Guide For Working Moms

By Michelle Urban michelleurban
November 20, 2018
Side Note

Finding the perfect gift can be tough, especially for the working mom who doesn’t need another candle, kitchen towel, or tube of lavender hand lotion. What she needs are items that can make her everyday routine and workday simpler and overall more enjoyable. To help lift the stress and ideally bring more joy to your gifting experience, we’ve crafted a thoughtful list of gifts that will bring ease, delight, and add a touch of luxury into any working mom’s lifestyle (and dads!). The products mentioned in this post have been personally used, loved, and enjoyed by me or recommended by my tribe of working moms. These are real products used by everyday parents. This post does not contain any affiliate links.

Monthly Newsletter Challenges: How to launch a Newsletter That Drives Engagement [with template]

By Michelle Urban michelleurban
October 12, 2018
How-To

“We need a monthly newsletter!”

Yep, the familiar battle cry from many online marketers… especially after seeing statistics such as “email marketing delivers an ROI of 4,400%!“

When done right, email marketing is a powerful tactic to engage with your prospects, nurture relationships, move them along the sales funnel, and increase conversion rates.

Here are just a few reasons why an email newsletter should be an essential component in your marketing mix:

It’s very affordable.
It drives traffic to your website.
It’s easy to track and analyze the metrics.
It allows granular segmentation and personalization.

Everything You Write Is Your Brand….Everything!

Within the last 30 minutes, you might have sent an email to a client, responded to a reply on Twitter, made a comment in your user community, and shared a new blog post on LinkedIn.

In your mind, this is just maintenance work: Keeping up on correspondence, communicating with customers and prospects.

True as that may be, each minor email and a quick Twitter reply is doing much more than you may realize. They all contribute to telling your brand’s story and connecting that story to customers.

Traffic and Clicks Don’t Matter: Why It’s Time To Change How You Measure Marketing Success

There’s good news and bad news.

First, the good news: Your startup website is getting traffic, which means your early digital marketing efforts are generating some results. With the content landscape more competitive than ever, reaching an audience is far from simple, yet you’ve managed to do it.

Now, the bad news: The results you’re getting might not be the results you want. Traffic is excellent and necessary and all that, but there’s a difference between good traffic and bad traffic, and quality is impossible to tell when you’re only counting clicks.

Keep the Story Alive: How to Repurpose Your Content

Does Your Marketing Strategy Include Repurposing Content?

How long does it take you to create a piece of content? And I’m not talking about your run-of the-mill, 300-word blog post. I mean content with purpose and substance.

HOURS!

Full transparency here: This blog post took me about 10 hours from brainstorm to distribution. For a small little marketing shop like Marketing 261, that’s a big chunk of time spent.

If you’re anything like us, you probably lack the resources to regularly spend this much time producing content. And, you also want more from the content you’ve already spent hours creating.

That’s where content repurposing comes in. It’s using your existing material to your advantage AND breathing new life into content you’ve left on your website to collect cobwebs.

By reimagining, reworking, and reformatting your existing content, you can produce fresh pieces without starting from scratch each time. Here’s how content marketing pro Benji Hyam uses content repurposing at Grow & Convert:

Give Your Blog a Personality……Create a Blog Style Guide

By Michelle Urban michelleurban
March 21, 2018
How-To

How To Create A Blog Style Guide

If you’re in charge of your company’s content, you’re undoubtedly in charge of keeping it consistent no matter who’s writing it: you, a colleague, or even outside freelance help.

How do you stay consistent? How do you make sure the quality of your blog posts—no matter who’s writing them—never wavers?

A blog style guide, of course. So let’s talk about building one.

Revenue Is The Only Marketing Metric That Really Matters

Thanks to Leadfeeder for having me as a guest blogger. The original post, All sales teams would love a 2000% increase in their monthly lead volume… Or would they? can be found on Leedfeeder’s blog. You’ll learn more details on the marketing campaign, as well as the specific steps I would take to improve it.

I once launched an inbound marketing campaign that increased lead generation by 2,000%. With that kind of result, you would think I was popping open the Champagne and celebrating, right? Well, not exactly. In fact, if I could go back, I’d do it all differently.

When Your Content Isn’t Getting Any Love

We’ve all been there. You launch a great piece of content (or so you thought), and then….

Crickets.

No likes, no shares, no retweets, and no comments.

What happened? Or better yet, why does this keep happening?

If you’re creating content consistently, but failing to get the results you want, it may be time to reflect on your content marketing strategy.

For starters…

Productivity Apps and Why They Don’t Work

By Michelle Urban michelleurban
August 15, 2017
How-To

App overload is definitely a thing.

115 Productivity Apps to Maximize Your Time?! Are you kidding me?

There’s a point of diminishing returns when it comes to productivity apps and I’m pretty sure you’d hit it way before you download the 115th one.

Why You Probably Don’t Need 115 Productivity Apps

Here’s my beef with lists like these and other people swearing by certain apps that claim to help you kick your work day into gear: you can’t tell someone how they should manage their work. Not without knowing what type of person they are, how they work best, and what their motivation to do good work is.

If you’re a visual person, like me, you might find the app-less route helpful. Below is a step by step system to which I attribute my relentless craving to get things done.

How I Made a $30K Marketing Automation Mistake

Is marketing automation necessary for your startup?

I once spent $30K on a marketing automation solution that was completely unnecessary.

It wasn’t my finest moment. So much so that I want to share share with other marketers—especially startups—because it was an expensive lesson that I don’t want others to repeat.

Now, before you get the idea that I’m a spendthrift, let me explain. It was in the early days of my marketing career, I was the marketing head for a startup and bound and determined to launch the business better and faster than anyone else could envision.

I had had previous experience with marketing automation at another company and naturally thought this small company could benefit from it too. I just thought it was something all companies needed.

But let me share the three problems with this thinking:

A Content Marketing Guide for Using Trello

From brainstorming to writing the first draft to design, edits, and publication, there are a lot of hands involved in getting an article blog-ready.

I don’t know about you, but by the time we’ve hit each of these steps (and run it up the flagpole each time), there’s anywhere from 3-4+ different people involved in getting it all done right.

That’s a lot of collaboration. So what’s a content marker to do? Use an editorial calendar—or actually, something we think is even better—a system. It’s a clear and organized funnel that blog posts travel through from brainstorm to publish. And we do it all with project management tool Trello.

Marketing AMA: When You Need A Little Boost

Marketing is Complicated, Sort Of

Marketing originated in bringing goods to physical markets for sale or trade. Setting prices, showing products, promotional shouts of “Get your apples here,” all happened in one place.

If it was only that easy in today’s startup world, right?

Today’s marketing involves creating relevance for your brand, building awareness of your product or service, developing compelling validation for your solution, and taking the right mitigating actions along the path to purchase. All with limited resources and sometimes with tiny, non existing budgets.

Marketing AMA: Ask Me Anything

We believe this entire process can be made more effective and does not have to be as daunting as it seems. Our AMA sessions are formed to help CEOs and marketing leads recall that marketing retains its simple, uncomplicated foundations if it’s backed by:

a well defined strategy
an organized & attainable plan
purposeful execution

By targeting your marketing efforts around these three interdependent drivers, we’ll help you focus your marketing initiatives so they all lead to measurable business growth.

What Startups Get Wrong About Their Marketing

“If I could go back, I would do one thing differently,” a client recently told me.” I would have hired a good marketer right from the start. Now I am playing catchup and feeling like I am a bit behind instead of leading the pack.”

This is a common story in the startup world. While many tech companies are built on great products and software solutions, the people behind those solutions don’t always know how to properly market their company to their target audience.