SBM 070 : Newsjacking and Choosing The Right Marketing Channel with George B Thomas

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Choosing the Right Marketing Channel

The essence of marketing has always been reaching the right kind of people with the right kind of message. However, before any of that could happen, there is the challenge of finding out which people to reach and how.

This is quite a problem especially if you have an expansive marketing campaign as you don’t want to spread yourself out too thin. If you are still starting, then there is the risk that you will try too many things at once and still not reach your target audience.

In order to save time, money, and effort, you need to find that to find out which channels are the best for you and your brand. Read on and find out how you can choose the best marketing channel for the business.

What is Hubspot?

There are several effective marketing platforms that you can use to get to the right kind of audience but one name that you might have run across is Hubspot. For the uninitiated, Hubspot is a marketing automation software that is quite effective with inbound marketing especially as it helps marketers streamline their work in several different ways such as:

• 1. Content Planning
  Keeping in touch with the most recent marketing strategies can be a hassle if you do not have a lot of time to devote to it, The tool solves this through a calendar feature of sorts which helps marketing teams keep track of their promotions and plan for months in advance. Combined with your other marketing tools, the calendar feature can make sure that you and your target audience as well as your marketing team are always on the same page.
• 2. Lead Collection
  of the simpler marketing concepts to have a grasp on. With Hubspot, you should be able to have an idea as to what your prospective leads want and how long they have been looking for a solution to any issue or problem that they might have.This strategy is great for those companies offer products and services that that are meant for the long-term use. This also includes higher-end products, professional services, and other major investments.

There are still a number of benefits that Hubspot can offer to users but, for the interest of first-time marketers, the ones above should suffice. If you opt to use Hubspot for your marketing efforts, you should try to experiment with what it offers and see in what other ways it can also be made compatible with your existing strategies.

Mastering the tool is also not that difficult. Channelss like this (source: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCT5E1GJlfF4fnGbWlV8AdsA) should allow you to get the hang of the tool and, eventually, easily incorporate its various features to your marketing companies.

Of course, you are not supposed to be limited with just one marketing tool in order to be effective marketer online but think of it this way: would you be more effective if you have to use multiple tools at once to complete a single task or use one that does multiple things at once?

What is Quality Content?

Of course, there is the fact that you can’t do proper online marketing without quality content. Keep in mind that content plays a major role in various online activities like SEO and providing subpar ones means that you won’t get noticed that much by search engines like Google.

Let’s take a look at one of the more recent examples. In 2014, Google introduced an algorithm updated named Panda which effectively changed what types of content are deemed to be of good quality (source: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/panda-update/) As a matter of fact, entire, swaths of articles, videos, blogs, and other online content were de-ranked by the new Algorithm during the mid-2010s, resulting in one of the biggest shakeups in the history of Google.

So, with that said, what is quality content? The algorithms might have their own standards for such but marketers do agree on several such as:

• No Bias – Content that leans heavily (and favorably) to the image one company tends to be held in less regard than content that let’s viewers see the pros and cons for that product or service. If everything is a bit too leaning on one side, most viewers tend to see it as a blatant marketing spin.
• Entertaining/Educational – In these days, being informative is no longer enough. You need to be able to present your ideas in a manner that engages the viewer so as much that they want more content of the same type to solve problems that might be related to the issue at hand. This is where the entertainment part comes in as you must be able to convince the viewer that solving this problem through this solution is not only effective, it’s also fun.
• Made in the Viewer’s Perspective – Basically speaking, the content must be laid out I such a way that it solves a question that the person is looking for a solution to. This is why list-type articles became a huge thing in recent years as it allows viewers to see multiple viable options for their problems instead of being convinced that there is only one solution for their problems.

If any kind of content was made with these in mind, then it should be ranking at least in the first pages of the search engine results, if not the top..

You have to remember that there is always new niches being introduced every year in the online world, many of them being untested areas. For example, <strong>cryptocurrency was one of the biggest niches to boom in 2017 (source: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/308714) and many would like to know more about this field before they venture into.

This can prove to be an opportunity for content creators to market their services as there is still not a lot of good cryptocurrency-based content out there. Remember: those who can provide for what the market currently wants which is something that has yet to be tapped will win at whatever goal they have set for their venture.

NewsJacking: What is It?

Despite how technical this strategy might be, Newsjacking is actually quite a simple process to follow,. When you break it down to its base components, newsjacking is basically just about paying attention to the changes in the market and then adapting to such in order to provide for the new need that has arose in them market.

If you are familiar with the term “carpe diem”, newsjacking is basically that! It’s about finding out which new trends are going to be the big deal and then reorganizing your offers in anticipate for the need that these trends are going to bring.

This blog details more on how you can perform newsjacking (source: https://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/32983/the-inbound-marketer-s-complete-guide-to-newsjacking.aspx) but, for simplicity’s sake, let’s have an example.

Let’s say that Google just announced their newest algorithm update which is about to take effect in, say, 30 days. Of course, a lot of website owners, content creators, and anyone else worth a thing in the internet is going to have some concerns about the new changes and what these could bring to their content.

This is where you and newsjacking comes in by researching the algorithm update and then providing an article that has the most comprehensive list of changes brought by the update and how this could affect content creators and markets.

Since this article of yours is the first out of many to come, it has the best chances of being the most shared content based on that topic for days to come. Of course, that number of shares is going to bring in more traffic to your site and, in turn, allow you to reach out to a lot of people in an instant.

So, newsjacking is all about taking advantage of changes brought about by the market and then leveraging yourself in the market by offering something that will satisfy a yet-to-be-realized need. By newsjacking, you are effectively setting the pace or standard for other similar content to come.

When Should You Do it?

One of the trickier parts of newsjacking is the timing. Do it too early and many people would suspect you of having insider information, do it too late and you would be, well, late for the party.

The best time to newsjack is always immediately when news breaks out. A few hours to day after the breakout occurs should be ideal as this gives you optimum time to take advantage of the new demand before everybody can recover from the shock and offer their take on the issue.

The best way to do this is through video as the effect could be a more believable and rawer. If you done a bit of research beforehand, you can always say that this is based on your initial findings and can offer more insight to your viewers as the situation progresses.

Distributing Content the Right Way

Aside from knowing where you should market your content, you should also know how. There are quite a number of platforms that you can use out there and each of them can be effective under the right conditions.

So what’s the best channels to distribute your content? That’s truly up to you but, to make things easier for you, this is how you should distribute your content on any of the known platforms and websites.

• 1. FacebookThis should be your primary content distribution channel (if it is still not so, of course) especially if you are new to marketing as you can easily form communities in the site. If you have an existing Facebook profile, you can have your content posted there or at least shared through their. Facebook’s level of interconnectivity with multiple sites and compatibility with a number of different formats should make the site your hub of sorts for all your content to go through.
• 2. Youtube
  Although Youtube has its own community, it is not as impactful as what other social media sites have. What it does have, however, is an easy-to-understand platform that allows you upload videos with ease. If you love to create videos for your website, you can have them uploaded here and then linked to all of your websites and social media accounts.
• 3. Twitter
  This site has a reputation of being the more “impulsive” social media platform as it focuses on events that are happening at the very moment. This is a great tool for your newsjacking efforts as you can actually be the one to break the news ahead of your peers in the market if you time it right. Also, Twitter encourages the sharing of status updates which means that engagement here with your audience is quite high.

There are still other platforms out there that you can use to distribute your content but these 3 tend to be where people gather the most. If you can keep a strong link between all your marketing channels, consolidating your online presence should be easy.

The Call to Action

Since you’re effectively running a business, it goes without saying that you should entice your viewers to do something on their part. This is where the call to action comes into play and this is quite vital for ensuring optimum user engagement with those that consume your content.

Adding one into your content should not be that difficult. A call to action is as simple as directing your viewers to check out other articles on your site for more information or head on to a new site to do something else related to the topic they just gone through with your content.

The point is to make an actionable statement in your content that will entice your viewers to do something that could benefit them and, of course, you.

If you haven’t made a single call to action in your life, you can also draw inspiration from a number of samples online. (source: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/great-call-to-action-examples)

To Wrap Thing Up…

Choosing the right channels to distribute your content at can look daunting but it should not be so. The right channel is always right around the corner and it is up to you to utilize them in a way that optimizes the effects that your content should inflict in the market.

Have you used any other channel to market your content in? What other strategies have you used in order to reach your target market? Let me know in the comments below!

GEORGE IN ACTION

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