Actionable Marketing Guide Newsletter – How To Use Tax Season To Improve Your Marketing
Published: Mon, 04/09/18
actionable marketing guide
Dear , Since Tax Day in the US falls next week many individuals are finally attacking their piles of tax-related papers. Tax Day is officially April 15th but that falls on Sunday so we get a one day reprieve. Further, thanks to the revolutionary war battles of Concord and Lexington fought outside of Boston in 1775, a number of states will celebrate Patriots Day on Monday, April 16th pushing Tax Day to Tuesday, April 17th. Before electronic filing, I’d wait until April 15th to mail my tax returns. At the time, I worked across Third Avenue from the FDR Post Office in Manhattan. On Tax Day, the large cavernous post office was stuffed with people. Many taxpayers like me spent extra to get postal proof that they filed their returns. I did this despite the fact that my father, an accountant by training, believed that the extra postage and time spent in line were a waste.  That didn’t matter to me. It was a ritual symbolizing the end of the tax-related process of having to organize and file the stray documents. It’s like a mandatory spring cleaning for your records.  Long before Marie Konda’s The Life Changing Art of Tidying Up (Amazon Link), I knew that dealing with piles of paper were hard. They contain memories and aspirations inscribed into documents and images. Even worse, no matter how well organized you are, they accumulate in piles or find their way into the wrong files. This year, even though we filed our taxes early, I’ve continued cleaning out my old files including every tax return I ever filed. Amongst the papers I’ve found key documents of every marketing campaign I planned and implemented. While many made me smile, I realized that I no longer needed them. These campaigns would no longer help my clients or me with new challenges in the uncharted waters of the current marketing environment where prospects lack trust in media to report the truth and in business to protect their personal information. Instead I need to clear a space both physically and mentally to determine how to face this brave new marketing world given the upheavals in news and social media. As marketers, assess your first quarter results. Take stock of what’s works and what needs to be changed because it no longer yields results. Where possible use your past results as a point of comparison since budgets aren’t necessarily based on past reality. If you can, I strongly recommend that you communicate with or survey your customers, prospects and audience. Your objective: To determine what information they need when considering your content and your offering. Take care since you don’t want them to tell you what they think that you want to hear. Rather you want to be able to walk in their shoes and see the world through their eyes. While we create marketing personas to represent audiences, we often collapse them into 2-dimensional beings. This blindsides us to the unique quirks that appeals to our audience causing them to seek our content and products. Once you have this information, use it to inform your marketing content and communications and make your business the go-to source in your niche. Skip the corporate-speak to build trust over time. Here are 7 steps for using persona information in your marketing. As you assess your 2018 marketing plans, start to diversify your media platform use. Don’t put too much of your budget into a few key entities that can change their algorithms in ways that hurt your marketing. It happened to a Google-dependent client of mine and set them back for at least a fiscal quarter. Can that happen to your business? Please let me know if there are any specific questions that I can cover in future newsletters or articles. As a reminder, I’ll be in San Francisco (April 29th through May 3rd) as a Social Media Ambassador to Marketo's Marketing Nation Summit. If you want to join me, you can save $300 on your ticket by using Cohen300. Please note that I don’t make any affiliate revenues on these sales. Happy marketing, Heidi Cohen
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Enhanced Existing Content Marketing: How To Keep Your Content Healthy
With relatively low marketing investment, enhanced existing content marketing up-cycles published content to keep it up-to-date and visible. The Definitive Solopreneur Content Curation Guide
Don‘t sweat it! Use content curation to keep your brand visible on existing owned, social, and third party media even if your resources are limited. How To Build Content Marketing Trust: 3 Tactics [Research]
No surprise with fake news claims and diminished ability to assess media reliability. This reduces your ability to reach your audience and get them to pay attention to your message. 10x Marketing Formula – Book InterviewHeidi Cohen Interviews Garrett MoonNew book – 10x Marketing Formula: Your Blueprint for Creating ‘Competition-Free Content’ That Stands Out and Gets Results
Q: What’s your best piece of advice for readers looking to improve their marketing?A: At CoSchedule, we have a battle cry: “Results or Die!”. Content marketing is competitive, crowded, and cluttered. Everyone is clawing for the same people’s attention—and they’re doing the same things to get it. In the end, the marketers who find their competition-free content niche will win out. Competition-free content is about boiling the principle of differentiation into your content marketing strategy. My best advice is to look at your competition, research their content, and strategize your competition-free content.
AROUND THE INTERNET For those of you interested in content marketing, blogging and writing, I suggest that you sign up for Ann Handley’s email newsletter. It is chock full of her subtle New England wit and excellent writing. If nothing else, it’ll inspire you to be a better writer. Handley does a great job of curating high quality content that I needed to read but didn’t know it until Handley pointed it out to me. This week Handley took a story about her grandfather and transformed it into how to use writing tools. This is a prime example of how you use stories to make your content memorable. (Hat tip: Made To Stick by Chip and Dan Heath! (Amazon))  On a related note, if you’ve been
living under a rock and haven’t read Handley’s Everybody Writes (Amazon), use this opportunity to help her reach the 100,000 book milestone. Even better it makes a great gift for the graduate in your network, regardless if they’re going to high school, college or beyond.
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Feedspot’s Anuj Agarwal rounded up and ranked the