actionable marketing guide

​​​​​​​Businesses need funding to keep going, often before they have a revenue stream to support their costs. Beyond employee and product costs, marketing requires budget. It’s difficult to run your marketing without sufficient budget.

Even the most frugal solopreneur who is capable of creating amazing content and social media engagement needs to pay for tools, web hosting and email marketing to support on-going communications.

But don’t assume his marketing is free.

This solopreneur has traded off his valuable time and attention—his scarcest resources. As a result, the chances are that he doesn’t have slack in his schedule if something beyond his control happen to impact his business.

I make this point since Mark Zuckerberg recently announced changes to Facebook that has worried  marketers and businesses dependent on its organic and paid distribution.

And, in case you don’t remember, this isn’t the first time Facebook or Google has done this.

So ask yourself, what’s your backup plan? Have you even considered creating one?

As an experienced marketer who's worked for major global companies and small ones, I've learned it's not unusual to have a factor outside of your control force massive changes to your plans with no additional funding to support them.

What do you do?

Ideally you’ve planned ahead and hidden some budget where your financial team didn’t find it. But that doesn’t always work since budget cuts can be more severe than you ever thought possible. When I was at The Economist, my annual budget was cut by 50%!

In that case you get creative to figure out how to leverage the assets and resources you do have.

To this end, I strongly recommend ensuring that every piece of content and communications supports building your housefile and warming up leads to maximize marketing results over time.

At a minimum, diversify your digital marketing to avoid allowing any one element of your plans to dominate. While it’s alluring to focus your budget on Facebook or email since they’re cost effective, this approach can backfire. Allow visitors, prospects and customers to contact you with appropriate contact us and landing pages.

Here’s a chart to help you visualize how to accomplish this.

For those of you seeking to improve your social media and content creation, please join me at Social Media Marketing World in San Diego. I’m leading a session entitled, How To Generate Quality Ideas To Fuel Consistent Content Creation. I’m very excited about this year’s conference since there’s a special creator’s track. I’m presenting an action-packed session on “How To Generate Quality Ideas To Fuel Consistent Content Creation.”  

What you may not know is that, in addition to having an MBA in Marketing, I studied writing with The Hours author, Michael Cunningham.

Please let me know if you’re planning on attending Social Media Marketing World.

My husband and I are headed to Belize to get our fill of sunshine and warmth that’s sadly lacking in New York City this time of year. We’re also scratching Mayan ruins off of our bucket list.

I mention this because, while we’ve got the newsletter and blog posts scheduled, we may not have connectivity while we’re in the rainforest for part of our trip.

Please let me know if there are any topics you’d like me to cover related to digital marketing including social media and content marketing.

Facebook Algorithm Changes: Time To Diversify Your Digital Marketing Channels

4 Pillars of Digital Marketing

Practical Content Strategy & Marketing – Book Interview

Heidi Cohen Interviews Julia McCoy

New book: : Practical Content Strategy & Marketing​​​​​​​

Q: What’s your best piece of advice for readers looking to improve their marketing?

Get your writing skills down. Great, engaging copy is the core of great content marketing—I can’t stress that enough!

The basics of writing are critical, but easy to overlook and tough to learn. It takes discipline to learn content writing. But it’s worth it: your conversion rates, ranking, and content readability all get better if the copy is better.
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• There’s been a ton of advice regarding Facebook’s recent announcements. I suggest that you check Social Media Examiner’s Facebook Live and Jon Loomer’s post on the topic.

• Check out what Heidi Cohen and her fellow content creators predicted for 2018 via Social Media Examiner.

• Heidi Cohen was one of 65 entrepreneurs who contributed to Mike Allton’s Entrepreneurial Roundup. Using a baseball metaphor, Mike assembles experts' input on what to do when faced with the “Green Monster” of self-doubt.

• Actionable Marketing Guide joined SnapApp’s list of top content marketing blogs. Check out this list to fill your feeds and keep up on the latest information.

• My colleague Melonie Dodaro has put together a great post on digital marketing in 2018. It’s worth your time to see what’s coming and how to invest your budget
  
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