Ann Smarty – Cyfe

4 Steps To Create A Stress-Free Pre-Launch Marketing Strategy

Ann Smarty — Mon, 05 Apr 2021 16:58:40 +0000

Launching a new (digital) product is always overwhelming. There’s so much to keep in mind and take care of. This is a stressful time.

You can eliminate the stress by creating a solid pre-launch marketing campaign. Take steps to plan things carefully and prepare assets before launching anything. Your stress level will thank you and the success of your launch depends on it.

Here are a few things you can do prior to launching your new project…

Note: This is a “pre-launch phase” which means you are likely to already have your project ready (or almost ready). So here we skip things like finding a name, analyzing market gaps, creating a pricing strategy, etc. All those steps should have been followed in the product creation phase. Here we are already ready to launch!

1. Set up a lead generation landing page

This is usually the first step to launching anything: Create a site or set up a separate landing page for the product or project you are about to announce.

The thing is, whether you are doing pre-launch marketing to build up some anticipation or create awareness, you can use this page to help you start building your initial email list. Let people opt-in for news and updates with a simple form that captures their email address and you’ve leveled up to a lead generation page. Traffic and activity on this page will help you get to know your future customers and community better. If someone has opted in from your “Coming soon” page, chances are they are extremely interested in what you are about to launch.

Building a page like this has become extremely easy. My favorite solution today is Wix’s landing page templates, mainly because Wix’s SEO Mordy Oberstein is my good friend, but also because I just love what they have been doing recently. With Wix you can put together a custom page in minutes and it will also connect to your email marketing solution.

While setting up a pre-launch landing page is easy, getting the word out about your product may take some time. At the bare minimum, use a link to your page to:

Announce your project is coming soon on your social media channels
Send to friends and partners
When doing preliminary niche blogger outreach (see the step below)

Your “Coming Soon” page can help you start collecting valuable data on your future customers. At this point I suggest installing the following tracking codes to start building up your data:

Google Analytics (to know your most effective traffic sources and access user demographics)
Facebook pixel (to track people who come to your site and be able to target Facebook ads to them)
Finteza (to be able to create personalized campaigns for your site visitors)

Going forward, the more data you have, the more effective ads and on-site personalization options you will have at your disposal.

2. Plan your content strategy

Content strategy will take the most in your pre-launch marketing strategy because content is fundamental to the success of any digital marketing campaign (from SEO to ads). It makes sense to start preparing for your launch by creating some initial content now, before you’re busy with other things:

First, write your core content

This includes pages like Privacy Policy, “About us”, Terms of Service, etc.

Having these necessary – albeit pretty boring – pages done early will help you to focus on more important (and exciting) things when you launch.

Then, start working on putting your product in natural context

Which problems is your product solving? Start describing those problems and offering your product as the solution. Different content types you can start working on include:

Use cases
FAQs
Comparison with competitors (how does your project stand out?)
Blog posts

When you launch you want your site to address all possible use cases and initial questions. You may also want to have 5-10 blog posts to start gradually publishing them once your site is live.

To create your initial content strategy, use Text Optimizer. This service clusters your target search query into underlying concepts and entities. Use this to identify important associations with your target search query and build a page which would fit in.

For example, if I were to launch a book on SEO, a landing page announcing it would need to include concepts like “traffic”, “local search”, and “backlinks” as well as “entities” (i.e. names) like “Google Search Console” and “Ahrefs”. In the future, blog posts and guides on your site would elaborate further on these key concepts and important entities.

This will help you determine how to meet your future customers’ expectations in the best possible way.

The goal is to create context which would put you in Google’s Knowledge Graph (i.e. Google’s understanding of the topic) next to already established brands:

To help you out even more, here’s a good guide on creating an SEO strategy which includes goal setting and future result tracking which you may want to bookmark.

Lastly, start looking for your content collaborators

This is also a good time to identify who you are going to collaborate with when you launch. You need some niche influencers, bloggers, and journalists on your side to help you with your launch by:

Showing up for your launch events
Sharing about your product on their social media channels
Providing initial feedback and social proof
Announcing your launch on their website to drive traffic
Helping you create more trustworthy content by providing their expertise, etc.

So start emailing niche bloggers and influencers asking them if they would be able to help and on which terms. This step will also help you plan your pre-launch marketing budget carefully.

3. Plan your product announcement campaign

Depending on your budget, a product announcement campaign may vary. Here I am sticking to a modest investment:

Obviously, send an email to all your new subscribers (those you have generated through your pre-launch landing page). Make sure to note that they are part of pre-launch, so you’d love to know their feedback and get any help in promoting the project. This will build up some additional word-of-mouth marketing and turn some of those subscribers into beta testers and loyal brand ambassadors.

Consider hosting a Twitter party with your subscribers. A Twitter party is a one-time Twitter chat allowing people to exchange ideas using tweets that all have a unique hashtag.

Publish an official announcement on your social media channels.

Host a live video with your most active subscribers and / or niche influencers announcing the launch. You can stream to Youtube, Facebook and Twitter’s Periscope. You can later re-use that video as Instagram IGTV video as well as permanent content on your Youtube channel and Facebook wall.

When hosting a Twitter party and / or live video, collect some initial feedback on the project. This will generate some initial social proof for you to use on the landing page and elsewhere.

Invest in Facebook ads: Here you can go as aggressive as your budget allows. Just don’t forget to install Facebook’s pixel to keep record of people who visit your site and be able to re-market to them going forward. At this point you also start investing in data.
I suggest using these two resources to play with different ad formats:
- Here are a few Facebook ad mockups to create an eye-catching Facebook ad.
- Here’s an easy (and affordable) tool to create Facebook video ads.

4. Bring everything together using a pre-launch marketing dashboard

A dedicated pre-launch marketing dashboard will help you keep your sanity and everything organized. You can use Cyfe to build a dashboard that will give you a bird’s eye view of the scope of work of your projects as well as help you to delegate efficiently when you are ready.

To manage my pre-launch strategy, I’ve added the following widgets:

Project timeline to keep dates on track (I’ve added Google Spreadsheet via the iFrame widget)
Google Analytics to keep an eye on my traffic numbers
Brand mention monitoring widgets (Twitter mentions and Google alerts)
Mailchimp stats (to keep an eye on my automated campaigns). There are more email marketing integrations if you are using something else.

Down the road, when your project is launched and announced, you can re-use this dashboard for your next pre-launch marketing campaign. Simply create a copy. You will be able to use many of the current widgets and add new ones as needed.

Best wishes for a successful product launch!

Ann Smarty

Ann Smarty is the Brand and Community manager at InternetMarketingNinjas.com as well as the founder of ViralContentBee.com. Ann has been into Internet Marketing for over a decade, she is the former Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Journal and contributor to prominent search and social blogs including Small Biz Trends and Mashable. Ann is also a frequent speaker at Pubcon and the host of the weekly Twitter chat #vcbuzz

The post 4 Steps To Create A Stress-Free Pre-Launch Marketing Strategy appeared first on Cyfe.

Three Ways to Create an Effective Collaborative Marketing Routine in 2021 and Beyond

Ann Smarty — Wed, 02 Dec 2020 12:22:50 +0000

Have you figured out your marketing strategy for 2021 yet? It’s fast approaching and you don’t want to be caught flat-footed.

Here’s a great idea for you: Embrace collaborative marketing. When you’re working with a variety of people with different experiences, they can all bring something new and exciting to the table. Why not leverage their perspectives in your marketing?

What is Collaborative Marketing and Why Does it Matter?

As the name suggests, collaborative marketing is a marketing strategy that includes any (often several) forms of collaboration.

Collaborative marketing has been a quickly rising trend for several years now. How can you work with your colleagues to produce marketing initiatives that will benefit your culture, your customers, and your audience?

These days, when lots of teams have been moved to work from home, collaboration has become an even more important topic (maybe because we are forced to be more collaborative).

As we feel increasingly isolated from the rest of the world, let alone from the companies we work for, creating an effective collaboration routine can determine the likelihood of a brand’s survival.

1. Include Your Whole Company into Your Marketing

Despite popular belief, collaborative marketing doesn’t have to include external collaboration (working with outside influencers, other companies, or nonprofits).

A collaborative marketing strategy can be one that includes many in-company teams or departments.

In fact, the latter is one of my favorite types of collaborative marketing, and often it’s a missed opportunity. In most companies I’ve worked with, the marketing team is usually isolated from the rest of the organization. No one knows (or cares) what they are doing.

This organizational silo is more common than we think, even when it comes to startups where it’s often a one-person operation.

And yet, your marketing department would very much benefit from working in unison with other departments:

The customer support team would help you create more detailed marketing personas, collect online reviews and feedback for marketing copy, and suggest content ideas based on common questions.
The product team could highlight some of the hidden features that give your product a strong competitive edge.
The sales team would be able to point you to some of the most effective value propositions that help them close more sales. These should be the foundation of your brand’s marketing efforts.

I could go on but here’s the main point: Anyone inside your company can have bright ideas and suggestions that contribute to your marketing efforts.

Digital marketing is a highly creative process. If you are involved in it every workday, it is easy to face burnout on a regular basis. That’s exactly why fostering idea-sharing always works best as part of a successful marketing strategy.

How do you begin to implement collaborative marketing? What do you need to put in place? There are multiple tools that can help you foster cross-team collaboration. However mostly, it is about encouraging cross-team idea sharing on a regular basis.

2. Adopt a Culture of Transparency

Coined by Rand Fishkin, the TAGFEE acronym refers to:

Transparent
Authentic
Generous
Fun
Empathetic
Exceptional

While all of these words are self-evident, it’s the transparency I’d like to focus on.

Transparency is often cited as the main driving force behind a business’s growth.

Transparent businesses publicly share information about their success and struggles.

Transparency refers to both external and internal data sharing ( i.e. a transparent business keeps its employees updated on the current business KPIs and future roadmap.)

Being a transparent business comes with many benefits, but mainly:

Transparency builds trust
Transparency fosters open dialogue

Consequently, transparency is always the biggest force behind cross-team collaboration, because trust and open dialogue remove common barriers like fear and formality.

When every employee knows exactly what is going on with the company, they feel an integral part of the process. This is the foundation of great teamwork.

When a customer knows the company’s full story, they will likely stay with you forever.

Building a transparent business is not a marketing decision. It’s something that needs to be your genuine decision.

That is not to say that there are no tools to help.

Creating a data-sharing dashboard in Cyfe to share with your employees is a solid step to becoming a more transparent company. With a real-time dashboard, employees can check to see the business health of the org and better understand how their contributions help.

3. Foster Cross-Team Independent Learning

I am a huge advocate of independent learning. As someone who holds a degree in linguistics while making her living in digital marketing, I am living proof that degrees don’t matter as much as your own drive to self-educate.

Fostering self-education has a lot of benefits, including:

Let your team drive your brand’s innovation: When they learn new things, they will be eager to implement them.
Identify in-house talent: Those people who can effectively self-educate will likely become the most motivated managers.
Keep more marketing tasks in-house: As your teams learn new things, you will no longer need to outsource parts of your marketing strategy (like graphic design or link building).

Yes, it also comes with a few disadvantages, like possibly losing the most ambitious employees who may feel they have overgrown their roles as they learn more tactics. Another possible risk of in-company education is that there will always be employees who stop working and pretend to be learning all day long.

Yes, these things will happen but the pros far outweigh the cons, so self-education is an integral part of an effective marketing team.

Here are two important steps to fostering self-education:

Create an internal knowledge base to help your employees by creating a well-structured list of courses to take and resources to read. It is pretty doable with these plugins.
Empower your team with tools they can actively play with to better understand the process.

As to the latter, my educational toolkit always consists of:

1. Ahrefs

Ahrefs offers great usability, it is perfect for people who want to figure something out on their own. It’s easy to set up mini-tasks for your employees to see digital marketing in action:

“Identify our competitors’ most successful tactics to get backlinks”
“Find which keywords are driving search traffic to our competitors”
“Identify content gaps for our website”, etc.

2. Text Optimizer

Text Optimizer is a writing tool that offers a semantic analysis of any topic and helps you include more related concepts into your content. It grades any copy you create forcing you to do a better job. This makes it a perfect self-education tool:

3. Finteza

Finteza is a web analytics platform that is extremely easy to figure out. The tool lets you create funnels to better monitor your site users’ browsing and buying journeys. It’s a great way to self-learn analytics skills as well as identify SEO metrics that really matter:

4. InVideo

InVideo is another content creation tool on this list but it focuses on video content. InVideo helps to quickly create videos removing the need to outsource this daunting task. It comes in handy for giving your employees self-guided tasks to create engaging content for your social media channels.

There are also quite a few visual marketing tools we use for collaboration as well.

5. WordPress

While you may be surprised to see this one on the list of self-learning tools, WordPress can be a great way to learn digital marketing. Let your team create mini-sites and compete in marketing them. WordPress is perfect for that because it is extremely easy to set up while providing much flexibility, and hence a lot of self-learning opportunities.

Conclusion

Collaborative marketing will take lots of time. It comes with its own risks and challenges which you can read about in more detail here. But in the end, it will feel right and will help you and your team get more united in growing your company.

Innovation is more important than ever these days, and adopting collaboration is the fundamental step to innovation.

Good luck!

Ann Smarty

The post Three Ways to Create an Effective Collaborative Marketing Routine in 2021 and Beyond appeared first on Cyfe.

How to Keep Your Marketing Team Productive and Motivated When Working from Home

Ann Smarty — Wed, 15 Apr 2020 11:35:31 +0000

Digital marketing happens to be one of those areas that can be effectively handled from home, so managing your marketing team remotely during our uncertain times is quite achievable. But how do you keep your marketing team productive as they deal with the mental stress of self-isolation?

There’s no single working solution here, though. Every business may develop their unique way to handle remote employee management.

To help you out, here’s how we are making sure our remote team remains productive:

1. Video Meetings Are Essential

As someone painfully used to working from an office, I find it emotionally hard to work from home. It’s the feeling of isolation, being away from the team, which makes it particularly hard to get focused or motivated to work as hard as I used to.

I know my teammates are struggling with the same issues, and I am sure there are many people experiencing this problem.

I find regular video conferencing to be quite helpful, both for planning and lifting the feelings that come with self-isolation.

We have an internal blog which we are using to schedule daily virtual meetings:

To host virtual meetings, we ended up using UberConference which allows to create a virtual room for up to 100 participants, for only $10 a month,

The main reason why we chose the platform is its simplicity.

Once set-up, the virtual room is always there, very much like a real room. Whether the organizer (i.e. the host) is there or not, your team members can come in any time and chat. It gives that nice feeling of presence.

Every day, we have a set time slot for each team. Even if there’s nothing to discuss yet, it is important to come in for 5 minutes to see each other. It is just like coming to an office and seeing everyone’s faces.

We also have fun activities scheduled almost every day. These are not required to attend, but if you feel isolated or miserable, they can prove very helpful. There’s a dedicated room for streaming live music (performed by one of the employees). There’s another room where our employees’ kids can join and chat with one another.

For internal communication, we use emails, but I know that Slack comes highly recommended (and it integrates with WordPress too). So this is something we may consider going forward.

We are still exploring these new territories. This is just our initial set-up which has already proved to be helping improve our team morale.

2. Calendars Are Lifesavers

We were using calendars prior to working-from-home, but they have proved real lifesavers for managing the remote team.

We have tried and evaluated many calendar and project management apps. We are currently using Outlook Calendar, because it integrates well with our mailing system. But there are a few other solutions I have been on and can recommend.

For smaller teams, there’s a variety of solutions that integrate with WordPress. We considered picking one for our internal blog to include the fun committee’s calendar. For bigger teams, smart scheduling solutions from Deputy provide great features for managing large teams and organizing multi-level responsibilities.

3. Give Collaborative Tools a Try

Finally, I’ve always been a huge advocate of collaborative tools, both for in-house and remote teams. They keep teams accountable and self-driven, improve employee morale, and help with motivation.

Collaboration gives that satisfying feeling of everyone working towards a common goal. Regardless of the type of business you are running, your marketing team handles a lot of scattered tasks which are also often associated with other teams, outside of your marketing department. That requires more organization and communication for cross team collaboration.

For example, more often than not, your marketing team:

- Promotes content other people wrote
- Uses visuals that your design team put together
- Relies on sales materials your sales team has created

On top of that, all of your marketing team’s micro-activities cannot always be easily scheduled or accounted for. Creating a daily list of these activities or putting them into a report would steal half of your team’s time.

Collaborative dashboards solve both of these problems:

- They include other teams into your marketing activities
- They get all the micro-tasks done through employees pushing one another and picking up each other’s tasks

Sadly, I am not aware of a single collaborative solution which fit all marketing needs, but here a few I am currently using:

Venngage for Visual Content Co-Creation

Venngage offers a handy “My Brand Kit” feature that ensures visual content consistency, even if many (remote or new) employees are involved in creating it. It saves color schemes, logos, and fonts for your team to use when working on any new infographic or social media graphic.

ContentCal or Traject Social for Content Co-Sharing

ContentCal allows your whole company to create social media updates to go live on your branded channels.

ContentCall keeps a library of your past updates and hashtags allowing your team to easily re-use your top-performing content.

It also offers powerful communication tools allowing team members to post and respond to each other’s comments and collaborative social media inbox feature which enables your whole company to quickly respond to your customers online. This collaborative approach to social media management improves productivity and saves sales.

Traject Social offers one of the most comprehensive social media schedulers and is more ideal for digital marketing agencies.

Easily set up social media posts, get approval from clients, and share on multiple channels that appeal to your company’s audience.

One of the best features of Traject Social is how affordable it is compared to other social media management tools.

Xtensio is one of the easiest and simplest ways for teams to create and share live documents with ease. It’s a strategy and communication platform that lets you create, collaborate, share, and present with ease. It lets you exchange ideas to help you turn your business goals into reality. From marketing teams to promoting brands, it lets users turn vision into reality. You can use smart, beautiful documents, presentations, and web pages with ease.

SE Ranking, AuthorityLabs, and Cyfe for SEO Monitoring

As an SEO agency, we have built our own tools we are using to keep an eye on our clients’ organic visibility, so I don’t have any recent experience with third-party solutions. But here’s one I had a positive experience in the past:

SE Ranking is a multi-feature SEO analytics and management platform that includes ranking and backlink monitoring. You can create projects and add users, as well as manage their permissions. The platform makes SEO much easier to organize, especially if you are running several websites scattered across multiple teams or team members:

The tool offers one access to multiple SEO tools and numbers, as well as offers access to SEO to-do lists which you can delegate to co-workers.

AuthorityLabs provides a simple keyword rank tracker which can follow SEO performance based on location and device. It’s great for SEO agencies, since it can be white labeled easily.

Obviously, you should also use Cyfe to create sharable dashboards and keep your whole remote and scattered team updated. Cyfe allows you to connect your Google Analytics, Search Console, and Moz Data into one beautiful white label dashboard for SEO monitoring. With Cyfe, you can easily tie your successes back to business impacting conversions.

Conclusion

Finally, if you need more one-on-one help, pick a coach to help you out. Our SEO community is donating time to providing business-oriented remote working training which can be accessed here.

This year’s pandemic is predicted to be a major disruptor to the global workspace. Many remote workers may not want to go back to work from the office any more. Remote teams will become a new normal.

We all do remain hopeful that these changes are temporary and we will soon move back to our office. But we are confident that going through this will make us a more powerful and flexible company. Coming back we will be more confidently facing any workflow changes the future may bring.

Ann Smarty

The post How to Keep Your Marketing Team Productive and Motivated When Working from Home appeared first on Cyfe.

Ann Smarty – Cyfe

4 Steps To Create A Stress-Free Pre-Launch Marketing Strategy

1. Set up a lead generation landing page

2. Plan your content strategy

First, write your core content

Then, start working on putting your product in natural context

Lastly, start looking for your content collaborators

3. Plan your product announcement campaign

4. Bring everything together using a pre-launch marketing dashboard

Ann Smarty

Three Ways to Create an Effective Collaborative Marketing Routine in 2021 and Beyond

Table of Contents

What is Collaborative Marketing and Why Does it Matter?

1. Include Your Whole Company into Your Marketing

2. Adopt a Culture of Transparency

3. Foster Cross-Team Independent Learning

1. Ahrefs

2. Text Optimizer

3. Finteza

4. InVideo

5. WordPress

Conclusion

Ann Smarty

How to Keep Your Marketing Team Productive and Motivated When Working from Home

Table of Contents

1. Video Meetings Are Essential

2. Calendars Are Lifesavers

3. Give Collaborative Tools a Try

Venngage for Visual Content Co-Creation

ContentCal or Traject Social for Content Co-Sharing

SE Ranking, AuthorityLabs, and Cyfe for SEO Monitoring

Conclusion

Ann Smarty