7 Top Personal Branding Goals To Develop Your Social Brand Strategy

Would you like to have customers come to you organically because they know for a fact you can help them achieve their business and/or life goals? It's a wonderful thing when you don't have to sell to your customers, instead they contact you and are excited to business with you! They aren't thinking “should I do business with this person or brand.” Instead they are thinking “HOW can I do business with this person?”

Would you like to increase brand awareness, generate more leads? Even better, let's help you get more sales and even decrease the sales cycle and the time it takes you to close business or that big deal you have been working on for months!

It's not a new phenomenon that people buy from people. Long before Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and even blogs, people have been buying from people.

Yet, why do people still hide behind social media logos and contact forms? It seems they either don't understand or are afraid to come out from behind the social media corporate wall and show their true human side. They fear they must share what they ate for breakfast, lunch and dinner to build their personal brand. This couldn't be further from the truth.

Have you thought about your personal branding strategy? If not, you should.

Regardless if you have taken time to plan your personal brand or not, you have a personal brand.

Your personal brand is defined not only by what you want it to be, but also by perceptions. Your personal brand is impacted by what people think of you. It's what people say about you behind closed doors. It's what they say about you when you leave the room, what they think about you after they watch your Periscope or Facebook Live video. It's even how they giggle with or at you after watching you and your funny filter selfies on Snapchat.

The truth is everything you say, do, post, like, comment on and share is a representation of your brand. Your actions speak far more louder than words. Download our 105 Factors Impacting Your Digital Brand white paper.

Building the best brand of YOU, requires understanding and defining your goals. What do you want to achieve as you become more known in your industry? How do you want people to perceive you? What are the goals that will drive your actions? Have you ever thought about these things?

Take a listen to the 227th episode of the Social Zoom Factor podcast for 7 Top Goals of Personal Branding. These will help you better define your personal branding goals and also develop your personal brand strategy.

Building a personal brand is not just about creating a shiny social profile, but presenting yourself in the most authentic way possible to your community and audiences in a way that will attract them to you organically. When done right, personal branding not only builds the brand of you, but also will help you achieve many personal, life and business goals.

Business and life are about human connection. The social web is really one big fat social conversation and relationship, made up of many micro-conversations and relationships. It's about humans connecting with other humans as humans, not robots.  You might as well define how you as a human want to fit into it and not only give the most that you can to help others but also be able to benefit from it as well.

This episode is part of the “You Are the Media” series in which we are digging deep into how you can build an integrated social and digital platform that works when you are not working. A platform that helps you inspire, connect with and delight your audiences. Be sure to subscribe to the entire series on iTunes, Stitcher or SoundCloud!

In this 25 minute podcast you will learn: 

• 7 Top Personal Branding Goals


• How to define your own personal branding goals


• Why personal branding matters


• Tips to become the “go to” thought leader in your industry and local market or niche


• How to increase brand awareness of your business with your own personal brand


• How to generate more leads and sales by building your personal brand


• How to decrease the sales cycle with personal branding strategies


• How to tap into the power of influencer marketing more easily when you build your personal brand

Supporting Resources:

• Digital Body Language: 105 Factors Impacting Your Brand (white paper)


• 10 Reasons Personal Branding is a Requirement Not an Option (white paper)


• Know Your Audience! Audience Analysis Worksheet


• 7 Foundational Steps to Build Your Personal Brand


• Personal Branding: Zoom Your Brand with the YOU Factor 


• Brand Storytelling in a Nutshell


• Brand Strategy in a Nutshell


• 10 Tips to Zoom Your Brand with Social Media


• You Are the Media: 10 Reasons You Need a Blog (episode 111)


• 15 Characteristics of Human Brands (episode 55)

Free webinars: We are also launching a series of webinars and training opportunities to dig even deeper. Sign up here-> You are the Media – Building Your Media Foundation

How to Subscribe to Social Zoom Factor Podcast 

•  iTunes


• Stitcher


• SoundCloud

       

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3 Smart Resources That Help with Influencer Marketing

Image via Unsplash

Content marketing is hard, and it's getting harder, for three reasons:

1. More competition

With 70% of companies creating more content than ever in 2016, the glut of content inherently makes it more difficult to get noticed.

2. Organic reach is nearly gone

Most brands relied at least in part on organic social media posts to drive content consumption. With the free lunch just about over in social media, new avenues for awareness-generation must be embraced.

3. Watching instead of reading

Spurred on by social platforms who benefit if the standard “unit of content” becomes short video rather than a Web page (which benefits Google), everyone seems to be all-in on video, which requires retraining and reconfiguration of content marketing processes.

Amidst these content marketing trials and tribulations, many brands are turning to influencer marketing as the way forward. And for good reason. Done well, influencer marketing creates awareness, reach, and content consumption. It also has the benefit of being more trustworthy than most brand-produced marketing.

But it's still relatively early days in the field of influencer marketing. What works? What doesn't work? What are the rules? The best practices? The norms? The pitfalls?

The Source for Influencer Marketing How-To

To clarify some of the confusion around influencer marketing, software companies and agencies and consultants are creating educational resources in multiple channels. Here are three I recommend, two of which are produced by my team at Convince & Convert Media, and one boffo collection created by our partners at Insightpool (which I also use for influencer marketing myself-here's a post showing how I do it).

1. Influence Pros Podcast

We produce a funny, topical, informative and timely podcast every week called Influence Pros. The show is co-hosted by Heidi Sullivan from Cision and Juliana Vorhaus from TapInfluence.

They interview leading influencers, agencies, brands, and other people from the world of influencer marketing, shining a spotlight on successes. A great weekly listen to learn more about how influencer and advocate marketing works.

Here's a good episode to try: How to Use Micro-Influencers to Create Big Engagement

The home page for the show is at InfluenceProsPodcast.com and you can subscribe to all episodes on iTunes or similar.

2. Insightpool's Age of Influence collection

This is so smart. Insightpool partnered with several other marketing software companies to create The Age of Influence Series, an entire catalog of webinars, white papers, videos and Q&As about influencer marketing.

They've done a great job of creating content about all sides of the eco-system. For example, from the main landing page hub of the Age of Influence series you can find:

Webinar – “The Science Behind Influencer Marketing”

Q&A – “Throw the Right Punch with Influencer Marketing” (featuring #realtalk from Shanda Maloney, formerly head of social for UFC)

eBook – “Master Influencer Marketing Done Right”

AND, this library grows every week. Upcoming Q&A sessions with Hootsuite, video series on earned vs. paid influencer marketing, and a lot more. Thanks to Insightpool for creating this resource, and continuing to add to it.

3. Definitive Daily Digest archives

Four times each week, my team publishes our email update known as “Definitive”-it's been called by many subscribers “the most useful marketing email in the world.”

Why?

Because instead of covering the day's news in social/content/influencer marketing, we pick ONE topic each day and tell readers the three most useful resources about that topic from all corners of the Internet.

This year, we've covered influencer marketing topics several times. To catch up on the resources we've curated for Definitive readers, visit the archives:

Content Marketing archives

Digital Marketing archives

And if you don't subscribe to Definitive, let's get that fixed! Scroll down, provide your email, and you're all set. Or just visit this link.

We'll be producing more content about influencer marketing in 2017, as I fully expect it to continue to be a very important part of the content marketing amplification story. Until then, spend some time with Influence Pros, The Age of Influence series, and the Definitive archives.

Have some other ideas of great influencer marketing resources? Leave them in the comments, please!

       

3 Smart Resources That Help with Influencer Marketing

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5 Growth Hacking Case Studies From Amazing Startups

Startup marketing can be a challenging journey, especially if you are starting from scratch. With so many digital channels to invest in and thousands of experts offering you multiple strategies, it is hard to make an informed decision.

The difference between startups and established businesses is the fact that the former is highly concerned with customer acquisition and retention more than anything else.

An established business might have the budget to burn cash for awareness and branding, whereas a startup's major concern is more likely paying customers that can be generated without that cash burn.

A popular article in Huffington Post reads:

A lot of entrepreneurs get too excited or maybe they just don't have clarity of direction yet. On the other hand business owners that do have an overall plan and get all of their strategies pulling the same way, are thriving.

I couldn't agree more with the above statement.

Sean Ellis, the first marketer at Dropbox coined the term growth hacking, with an entire science behind it focused towards technical startup marketing.

This post talks about how popular startups understood the startup marketing funnel and applied successful hacks at every level to reach where they are today.

Understanding the startup marketing funnel

The marketing funnel for startups is based on the AARRR model. Here is what it stands for:

Image Source: Growth Rocks

Let's dive into them with some more details:

1. Acquisition: For startups, this would mean how you can gain the necessary awareness in order to see results from your marketing efforts.


2. Activation: Once people know about your business, why should they convert? This step talks about how to move people further from the awareness stage.


3. Retention: Why should someone keep using your product or service when there are multiple options available in the market? Retention explains how to keep your customers for life.


4. Referral: Nothing is better than word of mouth marketing. This stage talks about how to get more customers out of your existing customers.


5. Revenue: Finally, after executing all the above steps, understanding how your business will maintain a positive cash flow and growing profits is the key here.

Now that we are clear with the different steps of the startup marketing funnel, I am going to illustrate all these stages with examples from popular startups.

1. Acquisition: How Airbnb generated the right awareness for their product

After raising some initial funds for their business, the founders of Airbnb Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia, started to analyze better ways of scaling their business other than paid acquisition.

They narrowed down their market research to one question.

Where does the target audience that looks for something other than a standard hotel experience hang out digitally?

The answer was Craigslist.

In order to get more traction for their listings, Airbnb decided to give an option to their site visitors for sharing their listing on Craigslist as well.

With a smooth marketing message, they encouraged people to share listings on Craigslist as well.

The results?

Using this hack, Airbnb received the attention of thousands of users from Craigslist, and since their listings were much more attractive with better descriptions and photographs than Craigslist, this led to a viral growth cycle.

Image Source: Growth Hackers

2. Activation: How PayPal activated users

Paypal was one of the most successful startups of the late 90's.

Their phenomenal growth story involves going from 1 million users in March 2000 to 5 million users in summer 2000.

They started activating users by paying them to sign up. With every sign up, Paypal paid you $20 to sign up (and also $20 for a referral). As the value of their network grew, they reduced the bonus to $10, $5 and eventually nothing.

This was a classic example of activating users by giving an incentive.

Paypal tried a lot of advertising but this method achieved them the lowest CAC.

Image Source: Quora

3. Retention: How Groove reduced their churn rate by 71%

A major problem SaaS companies face is high churn rates.

Churn rate is the percentage of people exiting out of your subscription based business.

One such company that was struggling with churn rate was Groove.

Groove is a simple help desk software for businesses which comes at $15 per user.

Despite a healthy flow of new users, Groove's 4.5% churn rate was making the business model unsustainable.

The folks at Groove analyzed the difference between users who stayed for more than 30 days and the ones who quit before that.

They divided people in the following categories:

After a lot of analysis, Groove decided to send targeted emails to people who spent less time on the platform and were likely to opt out after 30 days.

People with sessions under 2 minutes were sent this message:

Image Source: Kissmetrics

Someone who logged in fewer than 2 times in the first 10 days was sent the following message:

Image Source: Kissmetrics

The results?

Using this conversion optimization strategy, Groove was able to reduce churn rate by 71%.

Key Takeaways

Understanding where people might be struggling with your product/service and addressing the same could get amazing results.

4. Referral: How Dropbox fueled their growth with referral marketing

Dropbox is probably one of the most popular tech startups. The success behind it's viral growth is referral marketing.

With paid marketing, Dropbox was spending $250 per customer for a product that was priced at $99.

“Dropbox went from 100,000 to 4,000,000 users in 15 months”

Here are the steps Dropbox used to boost their growth…

Every friend you referred to Dropbox will earn you 500 MB more storage. You can earn up to 16GB of free space using the strategy.

Image Source : Referral Candy

They also made sure that inviting friends was easy to do .

Image Source : Referral Candy

The key takeaway from this story is that word of mouth marketing is one of the most powerful strategies.

If you can incorporate referral signups/purchases in your business model with a valuable incentive for customers, it can be a strong driver for growth.

5. Revenue: The growth engine of PicMonkey

PicMonkey is a startup in one of the most competitive spaces – photo editing.

However, building a great product with a freemium model has done really well for them.

Millions of users join every month and billions of photos are edited.

People can access basic filters for free. For advanced filters and tools, people have to pay $4.99 on a monthly basis.

And hundreds of thousands of users pay that subscription price.

Image Source: Fortune

The company makes millions and the CEO mentioned that the growth is 40% year over year.

The major takeaway from this is about building freemium models.

If you offer a part of your service as free, users will learn how good your product is.

This will help them understand the value they could get once they purchased your product or service.

Going freemium with your products or services can do well for business growth.

Wrap

As a startup, you need to understand which part of the AARRR funnel does your business lie in.

Maybe you are at the initial stages and awareness is most important to you.

Maybe you need to improve customer retention and focus your energy there.

Whatever be the case, evaluation of your current scenario and taking action based on that is something that will drive substantial growth

Guest Author: Shivankit Arora is a growth hacker and the founder of a startup marketing agency, MarketingMasala.com. You can connect with him on Twitter  to know more about growth hacking and startup marketing.

The post 5 Growth Hacking Case Studies From Amazing Startups appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.

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Top Strategies for Taking Your Online Community Offline with Marketing Events – Stefanie Grieser [SSM019]

How do you go from having no conference - from almost having no marketing team, just you being the 9th employee and one of the very first marketers - to a marketing conference of 1,000 attendees, acclaimed in your industry, a must-attend destination on the annual events calendar?

How do you do all of that in just four years?

We had the pleasure of speaking with Stefanie Grieser, International Marketing Manager at Unbounce, about the multifaceted strategies that go into marketing and growing one of the most successful marketing conferences in the industry. And how marketing events help to engage your audience and create delighted customers for life.

A huge thank you to Stefanie for jam-packing this episode with actionable wisdom and takeaways for social media managers and marketers looking for the best ways to start, grow, and nurture successful marketing and social media events.

How to listen: iTunes | Google Play | SoundCloud | Stitcher | RSS

This episode is available on:

• iTunes


• Google Play


• Stitcher


• Sound Cloud

In this episode, here's what you'll learn:

Stefanie Grieser shares the fascinating story and strategy of how Unbounce went from small meetups to hosting one of the largest marketing events in the industry. You'll also learn other great things like:

• How social media can help you market and grow your offline community


• Why measuring the ROI of events is challenging, but important


• Key factors and strategies in promoting marketing events and conferences


• Where sales and acquiring new customers fits into the event marketing cycle

2 Key Takeaways for Successful Event Marketing from Stefanie

In Stefanie's words…

1.Keep in mind the backbone of any great event is great content

“Keep in mind the backbone of any great event is great content: deliver great value for your audience and an audience. If you keep those two things top of the priority list I think you'll succeed in event marketing. Again, I said this throughout the interview, you can have all the bells and whistles and you could be worried and stressed about catering, but at the end of the day that's lower on the priority list to make a great event.”

2. Keep it simple at the start

“I would also advise people that are thinking about doing event marketing, whether it's a conference or a smaller meetup, to keep it simple at the start. You don't need to over-complicate things. Again, keep those two things top of mind, an audience and great content. Really keep it simple. I think the first year you can get sidelined. We're going to have all these different tracks and all these people and it can get complicated really quickly.”

I think if you simplify things, especially if you're a one person team. I was by myself. I was doing this. I was spearheading things from the ground up and there's a lot of people around me would be like, “Oh, what about this? What about this?” I had to … It's so great to think about all these extras and think about all these different tracks or what we could do here, but at the end of the day I think keeping it simple and keeping those two things top of mind will really serve you well.”

 Mentionable Quotes and Shareable Snippets

In Stefanie's words…

“Really, event marketing is an extension of your content marketing. That's the backbone to a really successful event. You can have all the bells and whistles, and events oftentimes get overshadowed by all these bells and whistles and great AV and balloons and swag. But really the backbone of a great event is an audience, the people there. That makes an event: a community and great content, valuable content that people can learn from.”

Show Notes and Other Memorable Moments

Thanks a million for checking out this episode! Below are the websites and other tidbits that were mentioned in today's podcast about creating incredible Facebook communities using groups. If you have any questions for us, feel free to drop us a line in the comments and we'll respond right away!

Companies and Events Mentioned by Stefanie

• Unbounce


• Unbounce CTA Conference


• Buffer

Great Quotes

• “It's a very big word, but really like any project or startup or even marketing channel, you should think of it as an MVP. Start small. We didn't start by saying, 'We're going to do a conference. We're going to pull off a conference.' Yes, we kind of had the endgame in mind: It would be nice to do a conference. But why don't we take little steps to get there?”


• “These communities could really be strengthened through in-person encounters. Unbounce is a software company. We provide marketing and conversion software to marketers, and all of our interactions are done online. Building an in-person marketing strategy really actually strengthens some of the ties that we have to our community, to our customers, to people that could be customers - future customers I call them.”


• “It showed us that people want in-person experiences and events. They want in-person connections. That was one little thing on the road to a bigger event. We did five or six meetups in different cities, and we found that it was really valuable. People were learning a lot. They were a high touch opportunity.”


• “If you think of an event as a marketing campaign you are driving and you're using different levers to promote your event to get people to come. Social is one of those, social is something that we integrate into a marketing campaign. It's always an aspect. Okay, we have this campaign, you have this event. How are we going to tell people about it? We have an audience on social. We have a community on social so we'll tell them through social media.”

How to Say Hello to Stefanie (and us)

Stefanie “Stef” Grieser is a must-follow marketer on Twitter and she would love to say “Hello” at smgrieser.

Thanks for listening! We'd love to connect with you at @buffer on Twitter or with the hashtag #bufferpodcast.

Enjoy the show? It'd mean the world to us if you'd be up for giving us a rating and review on iTunes!

-

About the Show

The Science of Social Media is a podcast for marketers and social media managers looking for inspiration, ideas, and results for their social media strategies. Each week, we interview one of the very best in social media marketing from brands in every industry. You will learn the latest tactics on social media, the best tools to use, the smartest workflows, and the best goal-setting advice. It is our hope that each episode you'll find one or two gems to use with your social media marketing!

The Science of Social Media is proudly made by the Buffer team. Feel free to get in touch with us for any thoughts, ideas, or feedback.

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