6 Strategies for Syncing Your PR, Social, Blog & Paid Editorial Calendars

Creating a content strategy for various channels can be extremely complicated, with dozens of moving pieces. From finding content to curate on social media, to managing guest bloggers, to coordinating freelance or in-house writers to working with designers and video editors to create visual assets – it’s a lot to coordinate and manage!

Creating cohesive strategies that allow you to maximize your content creation efforts is essential. And of course, your editorial calendar is the cornerstone of these efforts. It serves as the centerpiece for content ideas, theme explorations, buyer personas, buyer funnels, and a way to keep writers and editors on the same page.

Your editorial calendar will sync your PR, social media campaigns, blogs, and paid outreach, among many other aspects of your weekly, monthly, and yearly content schedule.

“One of the best tools that traditional journalism lends content marketing and brand journalism is the editorial calendar,” says Jayson DeMers, Founder and CEO of AudienceBloom and Forbes contributor.

Syncing your editorial calendar for multiple marketing initiatives is essential. Here are five stellar strategies to sync your editorial calendar for the upcoming year.

1. STREAMLINE YOUR MARKETING AND DEVELOP A YEARLY EDITORIAL CALENDAR

Exploring themes for the upcoming year will streamline your marketing efforts. And developing a yearly editorial calendar will put these efforts into motion.

The idea of a yearly editorial calendar may seem daunting, but approaching it from a yearly, monthly, and even weekly perspective has value for you and your team. The idea of a yearly editorial calendar is like climbing a mountain, since the way down is much easier.

“Reporting on the spot news via social media is one way to get the word out,” suggests Search Engine Watch. “But having an organized 12-month editorial calendar that slices up the year into monthly, weekly, and daily snapshots can take your content to new levels of success.”

National and domestic holidays, important industry events, advertising campaigns, product launches, blogs, email campaigns, videos, offers, promotions, and months dedicated to entire themes can all quickly fill up your yearly editorial calendar.

In fact, yearly editorial calendars are so important to organization and productivity, Forbes posts theirs online for all to see.

Look at overreaching content when developing your yearly editorial calendar, and themes that will serve as pieces to the puzzle at specific times.

2. EDITORIAL CALENDARS WITH BUYER PERSONAS INCREASE YOUR MARKETING EFFORTS.

Once you begin developing your editorial calendar, considering buyer personas is an excellent next step. Because buyer personas simply result in strong, cost effective marketing.

A Forbes post by the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) compares the power of developing buyer personas with fishing. This may seem odd, but it truly emphasizes the need for buyer personas in your editorial calendar.

YEC points out that if you want to catch a fish, you wouldn’t just throw your line into any random waterhole and hope for the best.

You want to keep luck out of the equation. You want to determine what type of fish you want to catch and match that with a strategy that maximizes results. The same goes for buyer personas when it comes to your marketing strategy.

Buyer personas in your editorial calendar will allow you to know exactly who your target customer is. This keeps wasteful marketing efforts to a minimum, and also brings about helpful objections.

Gathering demographic details such as interests, gender, education, location, income, occupation, buying concerns, and buying motivation is a perfect place to start, according to Shopify. Finding out what your client wants and what they want to avoid is also buyer persona best practice.

3. MATCH BUYER PERSONAS TO BUYING FUNNELS 

After you have developed buyer personas for your editorial calendar, you can utilize buying funnels to mold potential customers into customers. You will map your content to each buyer persona, and at each stage of the buying cycle.

Matching buyer personas to buying funnels is one of the most compelling reasons to develop an editorial calendar.

Diversifying your marketing efforts to fit each client’s buyer persona is indeed important. However, the order in which you deliver your content is a key aspect, according to web design platform Lean Labs.

Buying funnels normally have at least three stages with a top to bottom approach. Awareness is at the top. Evaluation is your middle of the funnel (MOFU). And conversion is at the bottom, where you want to get potential customers to convert.

“The trick to designing a site that’s built to capture and convert visitors at all stages is a strategy that combines keyword-driven content with a technically-sound website,” according to Kissmetrics.

Match your buyer personas with premium content at the top of your buying funnel. This will peak interest at the awareness stage, thus leading them to evaluation, and then conversion.

A great example of this is Amazon Prime. Amazon Prime customers convert at 74 percent, compared to a 13 percent conversion rate for non-prime members, according to Internet Retailer, an e-commerce intelligence platform.

4. EXPLORE THEMES AND ASSIGN CONTENT TYPES 

Exploring themes and assigning content types within your editorial calendar will get you closer to specifics. Develop in-depth content that will serve as your content strategy foundation.

This allows you to begin assigning content types, building supporting data for the future content in your marketing strategy.

These foundational pieces will be used for email campaigns, ebooks, blog posts, infographics, videos, and spread throughout all social media channels, according to Social Media Examiner.

Building these in-depth pieces involves a bit of research. However, you already have your buyer personas developed, and these will be invaluable for this stage in your editorial calendar.

Use your target audience information and begin keyword searches that would reflect your buyer personas. These will begin to add up fast, so have keyword buckets in place for your buyer personas and buying funnel stages.

Exploring themes and mapping them out in your editorial calendar will keep everything organized for maximum marketing efficiency. It will also serve as a source for your foundational content, a place to develop sub-themes and assigning content types, among other benefits.

5. UTILIZE YOUR EDITORIAL CALENDAR TO REPURPOSE CONTENT ASSETS 

Your editorial calendar will come in handy when it comes time to repurpose your content assets. Since a single piece can blanket multiple initiatives, you want to have an effective way of keeping your marketing vision on track.

Those foundational pieces you developed and targeted to buyer personas can be expanded to a variety of content assets.

An ebook is a prime example. An ebook is a theme, and each chapter is simply a sub-theme. These subt-hemes can be repurposed content assets like blogs, videos, and social media campaigns.

John Rampton, online marketing guru and Forbes contributor suggests that, “Content can play a major role here, as publishers have amassed significant amounts of data to help understand what is more effective in terms of driving engagement, what is less successful in terms of messaging and ads.”

An infographic is another stellar example. Infographics contain a lot of data and information from several supporting sources. You can repurpose infographics into a breadth of content assets across multiple client campaigns in the same industry.

Once you have repurposed content assets effectively in your editorial calendar, you can then switch gears to an amplification strategy. The goal is to simply get potential customers to visit and engage in your buying funnel.

An amplification strategy can help you achieve this. Influencer outreach, email marketing, retargeting, and using partner channels are all essential to your amplification efforts.

6. SYNCING YOUR EFFORTS 

Once you’ve gotten to this stage, now you are ready to put it all together. Use your research into themes, seasonal events, newsjacking, etc to match your content and amplification initiatives. For example, can your Public Relations team pitch an infographic created for a specific campaign?   Can you use an article targeted at solving a pain point as a landing page for a Facebook ads sales funnel? What social media posts can be created to amplify a theme that you are exploring in your blog?

By adding all of these elements into your editorial calendar, you can guarantee that all of the different initiatives are best served from your content creation strategy. Accountability, commitment, accomplishment, planning, creativity, trends, and measurement, are all editorial calendar benefits. Once you adapt the content to each channel, you’ll have a wealth of content that can be used to guide visitors into every stage of your buying funnel

Buyer personas, buying funnels, and repurposing content assets are only a few ways to sync your PR, social media campaigns, blogs, and paid outreach. To increase your marketing efforts and ROI, employ an editorial calendar for powerful results in this upcoming year.

101 on Advertising Your Business on Social Media

Whether you’re starting a new business or you want to expand the one you’re already running, there’s no better way to do that than having a good representation on social media channels.

Image by Esther Vargas via Flickr

However, having a good and noticeable presence isn’t as easy as it was some years ago, and there’s a lot to know if you want to be good at social media advertising. Today we’ll talk about basics and what you need to know to launch a perspective marketing campaign on social media.

Choose Your Channels Based on What Makes the Most Sense for Your Brand and Your Audience

The policy “the more, the merrier” doesn’t always work on social media. Instead, it’s wise to begin with one account on a network that is one-size-fits-all, like Facebook. It is the largest social network on the planet with 1.5 billion users, so you’re sure to find your audience there.

Twitter and Instagram are more demanding because you have to post more regularly. Twitter is an excellent channel for keeping in touch with your customers and connecting quickly with them via hashtags and tagging. Instagram is used for posting pictures and telling a story through them, but you have to be very active to be noticed. The same goes for Pinterest, another highly visual media that won’t really help you unless you’ve got some amazing photos or pins to share. And, if you want to share your business successes and opportunities with other big company names, then LinkedIn is a good network to focus on.

Each of these networks should be handled differently, so you’ll have to do some research in order to decide which social media channels make the most sense for your brand.

Paying for Ads is Becoming a Necessity

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Advertising on social media is becoming more complex with each year, and not paying for ads won’t get you far. The biggest social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have made sure that in order for your updates and posts to appear in the newsfeed of your followers, you need to pay to boost them. In fact, when posting on Facebook without paying, about 10% of your followers will actually see it, and when it comes to Twitter, you have some fifteen minutes before you’re forever lost in the newsfeed.

When it comes to paying for ads, even though it’s not very expensive, you should know where every penny goes. Think about who you want to target with your ads – you can narrow down your targeted audience and then work your way toward the wider public. Also, it is quintessential for your ads to be eye-catching and compelling, so choose both your pictures and your words wisely.

Track Your Links to Know Your Course of Action

You need to know what posts and links generate the most traffic. Link tracking is the best way to accomplish this. Once you understand what your audience likes and clicks on the most, you’ll be able to adapt your content accordingly. There are some useful tools that you can use to track links like Google Analytics, Octopost and Clickmeter that provide each of the links you share with a tracking code, so that you’ll know exactly how well a certain link performs with your audience.

Don’t Shy Away From Influencers

Influencers are people across different social media channels that have a strong follower base thanks to their strategic use of social media and quality content. Once you make an agreement with influencers, they will promote your product/service to their followers, often for a fee. Determine the standards that partner influencers have to fulfill (don’t just pick them based on the number of followers they have) and make sure you have clear goals of what you want of them before you contact them. Their view of your product will make it more appealing to their followers that can quickly become your followers as well.

As you can see, everything starts with your goals when it comes to social media advertising and how imaginative you are in obtaining them. There are different strategies you can employ, but in the end, it all comes down to the quality of your content and knowledge of how to use it wisely.

Video Campaigns for Start-Ups: 5 Secrets to Get Your Brand Noticed and Your Revenue Up

If you want to get your brand noticed and increase your profitability, then you might be wondering what steps will help you reach your goal. When your potential customers have many distractions, it can be difficult to keep their attention. More and more these days, we are seeing business owners start to use video campaigns to engage their audience in unique ways to help keep their attention, with the primary goal of reaching their organization sales goals.

That means you must do the same if you want to stay ahead of the competition. Using videos in your marketing is a great way to educate your audience, entertain them and establish yourself as an expert in your market. But you must learn to create and post videos correctly if you want to enjoy the best possible results. You will need to test different methods if you want to find which one works best for you, but the following tips will help.

Offer Value

When you start a video marketing campaign, your No.1 goal should be to provide value to your audience. The value can come in the form of entertainment, knowledge or useful tips and tricks that will make people’s lives easier. If you start a video with the goal of trying to force people to buy from you, then you are going to turn a lot of potential customers away. But offering value first will help inspire trust and respect.

Natural Background

Many marketers fail to consider the effect that their background has on their audience. To get the most from your effort, try to use natural backgrounds as often as possible. Also, avoid using a background that has a lot of movement or action, which will distract your viewers from your message.

Use Captions

Not all of your viewers will watch your videos with their sound turned on, so it’s important you add captions to your video. Also, use captions in several languages so that you can reach an international audience. Getting started might be difficult, but subtitling services can help.

Captions can also be used to highlight key points of your videos to make it easier for your audience to take notes. Each caption, however, must be timed well with the content of the video if you don’t want to confuse anyone.

Video SEO

Although standard search engine optimization can take weeks or months to produce results, video SEO is much faster. You must first do some research and determine which keywords are relevant to your product get the best search volume. Next, focus your content around those terms and place them in the title. Once you have completed your videos, upload them to various social sites.

You might have to promote your content manually at first, but you will start getting more views once you start getting a higher level of engagement.

Call to Action

Each video you produce must have a goal in mind, inspiring your audience to take action. If you have a sales video, always encourage your audience to buy your product or service. Not every video that you create will be used directly for sales, but educational videos must compel your views to subscribe to your social sites or your email list.

You can repeatedly contact your leads and build relationships with them when you get them to sign up, which will increase their likelihood of making a purchase.

Final Thoughts

A powerful video marketing campaign will help you take your business to the next level, and you can keep the attention of your audience like never before. Although offering value plays a major role in your success, never be afraid to encourage your readers to buy from you or to join your mailing list.

When you upload videos to social sites, always keep keyword optimization in mind, and you will enjoy the benefits of SEO. You might not reach your desired outcome overnight, but remaining persistent will provide you with impressive results.

New Promotions from Spartan Race, Harley-Davidson and Rare ARTist

We know you love to see live examples of campaigns that are using Heyo’s technology, since they are the easiest way to understand how our platform works. They’re also great for inspiration as you start planning YOUR next campaign! So, as our Thanksgiving gift to you, here are some new campaigns from Spartan Race, Harley-Davidson and Rare ARTist that are using Heyo’s technology.

Spartan Race – Landing Page in French 

Harley-Davidson – Random-Draw Sweepstakes with Countdown Clock 

Rare ARTist – Photo Contest with Voting Functionality 

Want to learn more about our products and services, or brainstorm with a member of our team on your next promotion? Click here to schedule a live demo with an Account Representative.

Five Common Pitfalls of Promoting Your Business On Twitter (and how to avoid them!)

Social platforms are just a door from the brand to the client when it comes to business. Many companies make the faulty assumption that once you create a professional profile, all your other social strategies will follow. However, these platforms are not favoring any party, and all the success must be the responsibility of the owners of the profile.

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Twitter is one of the most successful social websites, where the essence of every message is captured in fewer than 140 characters. The character limit itself conducts a fair trial when it comes to messaging awareness. The brands that have nothing meaningful to say are sorted out from the ones who have a clear message. So, the use of Twitter can greatly improve your brand awareness.

However, if used without the proper strategy, Twitter can disclose your weaknesses. It’s frighteningly easy to step into some of these common pitfalls in your attempt to promote your business on the social platform.

FIVE COMMON PITFALLS OF PROMOTING YOUR BUSINESS ON TWITTER

1. PRODUCT, PRODUCT, PRODUCT

Twitter will display the history of your posts, and it will be ruthless when it happens to see an overuse of promotional content. The platform itself doesn’t have rules about the number of selling-heavy posts, but with just a one-second glimpse of a brand’s profile, a prospective client can feel the brand is not interested in a relationship with them, so they will be less inclined to stay on the page and engage with the brand.

People have no reason to follow a brand on social media unless they are given one. Here, everybody communicates with the world about the meaningful events in their life or cultural events they’re interested in. If they want products, they will go to the online marketplace, which is typically the official brand website. The website is full of product descriptions, professional pictures, reviews, promotions, and basically, all the client needs to do is research on the product they need. That’s what it’s there for.

So it then makes sense that you should question yourself on why people go on social media to follow a brand outside the website. Unless the profile has something extra besides the content on the site, it may not happen. Repeating the same content is a dangerous pitfall that most marketers step in.

Your goal with a Twitter account is to make clients remember the product. On the other hand, the interest of the client is to find something meaningful on your profile, so that they have a foundation on which to create a connection with the brand. Thus, the overuse of promotional content can greatly work against you on Twitter.

Solution: apply the 80/20 rule. Twenty percent of your content can cover posts promoting and distributing your product. The rest of the eighty percent should focus on connecting with clients. Create meaningful original content for them that still has something to do with the field of your brand. That way, you will promote your business without looking as if you’re selling it too aggressively.

2. LACK OF INTERACTION

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One thing that is certain about social media is that it’s never a one-way street of communication. Some companies might find their lack of interaction with their clients a good method to show that they are a serious culture that is busy working on their favorite products. Or they might just not have designated a person yet to take the responsibility to answer and interact with the clients.

Twitter users are interested in building an interconnected community. Even though your profile has made great use of the eighty percent content destined to engage the readers, it is not enough. Your brand should have a personality that is proactive.

However, the moment you created the Twitter profile, you entered the world of online interaction. Answering inquiries and even replying when not asked is not an option, but rather a responsibility to your brand.

Solution: Make a habit of daily replying and retweeting your clients’ posts to open up the two-way communication street. Make sure you always use the appropriate tone that is in tune with your brand. Usually, your reply should be a reflection of the original post.

Moreover, you should take the two-way communication to the ultimate level. This typically requires designating a qualified employee for this job. You can open a new customer care channel through Twitter chat. People are more open to communication on Twitter, so use it to your advantage to find what the issues of your product are and encourage clients to ask questions related to it on Twitter too.

3. TWITTER PROMOTIONS GOING WILD

The Twitter platform has 313 million active users which make it an open door to a large audience. So, it is no wonder that when Twitter opened up to the possibilities of advertising, the marketing teams had no second thoughts on using Twitter as a trampoline for their products. Or did they?

From the large community of Twitter, there are only 130,000 active advertisers. And that is a waste of easy resources when you come to think that offline sales show an increase of 29% when the tweets are promoted. Paying for exposure might seem a little daunting. However, Twitter is the fastest way to bring your brand in front of prospective clients that have no chances to reach you otherwise. Not even considering the option is a common pitfall in promotion because you might be missing out on vast resources.

Solution: Twitter promotions are suitable both for small and large companies. And there are two ways to do that:

1. Promoted Tweets: these are the same as usual tweets, but the only difference is that they appear as a promoted post. You can set the demographics of your audience, and also set the budget you want to use for a day. Twitter will do the rest, by selecting the users that have interacted with similar content and bringing your post in front of them. You only pay once a user interacts with your post or profile. So, no money will be wasted.
2. Promoted Account: by activating this paid option, your account will appear more prominently in the “Who to Follow” section. Your brand will be among the first recommended Twitter accounts, and it is an agile method to increase the number of followers. Moreover, your new followers won’t be unrelated to your domain, but they will actually have a genuine interest in your product. If used right, the advertising options can be non-intrusive and work just like organic marketing strategies.

4. HASHTAGS AS JUST WORDS

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Many industries underestimate the power of #hashtags. These keywords are designated to represent an entire marketing campaign, and they also prove to be some powerful trackers of the activity of your campaign.

Choosing the proper hashtag is vital for the success of any Twitter campaign. There are numerous examples of quality promotions that might offer inspiration. However, there’s one thing a business should remember: skipping research can empower the hashtag to ruin an entire Twitter activity. Entenmann’s, which sell divine bakery goods, had chosen the #notguilty keyword to play as an ambassador for their low-calorie products. At first sight, it seemed like the ideal choice for people who want to enjoy delicious food without worrying about the calorie intake. However, it proved to be a disaster. The same hashtag was previously used for a crime case featuring the controversial murder verdict of Case Anthony. The rest of the story was a nightmare for the bakery company.

Solution: Do your homework, and make sure your hashtag is original. It also should represent the brand itself, so if the tone of your tweet is funny and entertaining, the keywords need to send the same message. Moreover, use the power of hashtag at every step of the campaign, and even print them on the product’s brochures, posters, to include them in the real world also.

5. THE SPECIAL WEEKLY TWEET

Indeed, scarcity is one of Cialdini’s main principles that drive the success of a marketing strategy. You can tempt your followers with short, concise, yet inconclusive pieces of a story to make them want more. However, Twitter is the exception from the Cialdini’s rules. Under most circumstances, Twitter works best with minimum content.

As emphasized above, your interest with Twitter is to make your brand seen by as many people as possible. Sticking to your weekly creation of content and only tweet about this won’t do you much good. On the contrary, your followers will lose interest in a poorly organized official profile, and will move on to the next of your competitors in line that spoils their community with fascinating news about their field.

Solution: there is no such thing as “I have nothing to tweet about at this moment.” The online world is full of interesting articles, and there are new research studies or study cases on a daily basis. The only limitation could be the unfounded limitation of links that come only from your suite of websites. There is nothing wrong on sharing external online articles that have something of value to say to your Twitter community. It is actually recommended to share relevant content. Make it a habit of posting at least once a day with insightful new details that concern your field.

IN SUMMARY

All in all, these are the five pitfalls to avoid when promoting your business on Twitter. We’d love to hear about your insights too, and how you’ve found success with your Twitter account!

After having acquired an extensive background in market data analysis and corporate branding, Thea Millard decided to venture on her own. She now consults for several clients, helping them build their brands, while also co-developing one of her top projects, Happy Customers Review.

New Promotions from Primo Milk and Stine Home & Yard

This week, we’re excited to share some new promotions with you, from brands that are located all over the world who are using Heyo’s Promotions Platform. As you’re starting to plan your next campaign, take a look at these ones to get inspired!

Primo Milk – Enter-To-Win Sweepstakes (with a twist!)

New Zealand based Primo Milk is running a super creative sweepstakes in which they’re inviting fans to #expressyourtaste and help the brand rename their iconic milk flavors. Along with their basic registration details, participants can suggest new names for the brand’s flavored milk for a chance to have their name featured on the bottle and win a year’s supply of milk. This campaign is a great example of how a brand can use a simple enter-to-win sweepstakes to engage their audience in a meaningful brand conversation.

Stine Home & Yard – Enter-To-Win Sweepstakes 

To promote their Appliance Giveaway event, Stine Home & Yard is inviting fans to enter to win any number of prizes by simply filling out a quick registration form. They’ve chosen to include Heyo’s sweepstakes countdown clock in order to drive excitement and urgency around the promotion. This feature, in combination with the low barrier to entry of an enter-to-win sweepstakes, means engagement levels should be high for the campaign!

Want to learn more about our products and services, or brainstorm with a member of our team on your next promotion? Click here to schedule a live demo with an Account Representative.