Effective Marketing Content Makes It Achievable

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“To succeed with a decision-maker, the person proposing a change needs to demonstrate that the plan is achievable,” Garett Mintz writes in the Indianapolis Business Journal. If you’re in business development, you need to position yourself in a way that demonstrates you are the low-risk option, he explains – not necessarily in terms of costs, but in terms of the buyer’s time and reputation.  In “de-risking” the option you’re offering, Mintz suggests the following formula:

Proximity + Follow-through = Trust

Proximity through frequency

There’s a lot of wisdom here for online content marketers, I couldn’t help thinking. For example, in order to achieve “proximity”, Mintz says, the more time a business development professional can spend with a prospect, the more rapport and connection will be built. When it comes to online “pull marketing”, we know at Say It For You, proximity is achieved through frequency of posting new content.

The issue we find so often (and this has not changed in the seventeen years I’ve been the business of creating content) is that, even knowing that winning search and driving business to the website involves frequency of posting content, the majority of business and practice owners simply cannot spare the time – or maintain the discipline – of researching, creating and posting content frequently enough to make a substantial difference in their marketing results.

Proximity through recency

As we work with the owners of businesses or professional practices, we always stress how important it is to use the blog to provide information – especially new information – related to their field. Whatever the nature of their business or professional practice, we always advise using the blog to provide that kind of new information.

Couldn’t online searchers find more complete and authoritative sources of information, some ask?  Certainly, is my response. but readers need you to help them make sense of the information. And, the very fact that you’re posting new content frequently demonstrates that you’re maintaining “proximity” to what’s going on around you and in your profession or business area.

De-risking through content

Since, as Mintz so strongly emphasized, buyers are protective of their own time, content consisting of case studies, anecdotes, and testimonials (showing how your product or service saved valuable time) are important in building trust. In another sense, de-risking through content involves “de-bunking” of prospects’ unfounded fears and biases. By offering content in the form of “guiding principles”, you can allow prospects to move forward.

To succeed in our content marketing efforts, we need to demonstrate that the plan is achievable!

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How to Build a Great Sports Marketing Strategy for Your Softball/Baseball Brand

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In today’s highly competitive sports world, a solid marketing strategy is essential for any sports brand. An efficiently organized plan can make a difference, whether aiming to increase your brand’s visibility or increase sales. But… where do you begin? In this article, we will discuss some practical steps to help you build a robust marketing strategy that drives your brand forward and resonates with your audience.

Defining Your Brand’s Identity
A clear and consistent brand is essential to stand out in the crowded sports market. Your brand identity reflects your values, mission, and what makes your softball or baseball brand unique. It’s how your audience perceives you and what they do with your brand.

A strong personality helps build trust, fosters loyalty, and ensures your brand is easily recognizable across platforms.

  •  Sports brands must be recognizable and convey their values consistently, as the market is rather saturated.
  •  Brand image is a critical element of your operation as it sums up your corporate belief, purpose, and differentiation of your softball or baseball brand.
  • A powerful personality strengthens confidence, creates trust, and entails brand recognition and customer loyalty across the desired platforms.

Define your brand’s voice:

  •  Decide how you’re going to communicate: professional, passive or inspirational.
  • Choose a voice that would appeal to your target market.
  • Updates or changes should be applied consistently across all areas.

Set the viewing method:

  • Design different logos, colors, fonts and graphics.
  • Ensure that all physical items under the concept are integrated well.
  • You should evoke specific emotions and associations that align with your brand’s message.

Craft Clear Messages:

Craft a catchy, easily memorable key message. This concept should concentrate on what your brand does and provides. The messages reflect your brand value proposition, business’s key message, and vision.

Understand Your Target Audience
One must know about the target market. Understanding their needs, wants, and actions is essential to formulating your plan to address what they need or want. This insight, in a way, aids you in understanding your target group to a certain level, enabling your brand to be appealing and relevant.

How to do it:

  • You must segment your audience based on factors like Product Preferences, Buying Behaviors, or Location. This leads to highly targeted and personalized marketing efforts.
  • It can be a great approach to developing a comprehensive profile of your ideal customers, including their Age, Interests, Challenges and Buying Habits. These personas aid you in content creation and marketing decisions.
  • You can acquire information regarding your potential customers via Surveys and Market Research. This helps you identify key demographics and trends.Choosing the Marketing Channels

Leverage Social Media: Connect with your audience on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook to share updates and build community.

Do Content Marketing: Create articles, blogs, posts, and videos to drive traffic and build trust with your audience.

Email Marketing: Develop relationships with personal and professional emails.

Influential Commerce: Collaborate with influencers or athletes to increase visibility.

Events: Sponsoring events is also an excellent approach to establishing your brand in the community.

Meme Marketing: You can also leverage meme marketing by creating sports-related memes. This will boost social media engagement and audience engagement.

 

Some USA Brands Using Marketing Channels:

  • JustBats uses Instagram to build trust and establish baseball gear expertise.
  • Companies like MLB use email marketing to help fans offer new news and updates.
  • Personalized emails provide timely and needed offers and/or motivational content, thus contributing to sales.
  • Under Armour’s strategy for brand building; it partner with the best athletes in the current generation.
  • Brands like Adidas have applied meme marketing to reach young people, as their content is always shareable and fun. Creating Engaging and Compelling Content

Inspirational Stories: Individuals relate to stories of struggle and achievement. If possible, post interviews with athletes or other achievements of a specific team in videos or a blog displaying your brand’s principles.

Educational Tips and Drills:  Sharing more instructional material benefits your viewers by developing their competencies and positions your brand as authoritative.

Post videos or written blog entries on the right way to approach the batter, a good exercise for the pitcher or a player to do in between pitches.

Behind-the-Scenes Glimpses:  Sharing such moments increases your brand’s authenticity and engages your audience, making them trust it.

Post pictures or videos of your manufacturing or team’s daily activities so as to show your brand’s personality.

Product Reviews and Demos: A customer getting to see how your products work is a good approach as it assists him or her in seeing them being useful. Make demonstrations and ask for a review of the service.

Contests and Giveaways: Competition is always healthy for any business since it increases traffic and the number of bot and human followers.

Run promotional campaigns on such social networks, offer goods with the company’s logo to winners, and encourage using specific hashtags.

User-Generated Content:  Content by your audience is engaging and makes for good promotion without feeling like promotion.
Often, consumers share photos or videos of products they have bought; promoting this and using the content on popular channels with a branded hashtag is advisable.

Tracking and Analyzing Results: Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Quantitative measures include such things as website traffic, followers on social media, click-through rates on emails and actual sales as they relate to your marketing. Analytics Tools: One should always monitor the process and look for optimization spots by means of analytical tools such as Google Analytics or social media analytics.

A/B Testing: Explain how communication ideas can be experimented and why it is crucial to do so to find out what works for an audience most.

Final Words:
Creating a great sports marketing strategy requires a well-thought-out approach. You should must be familiar of your brand’s identity, and target audience, and most effective marketing channels.

Remember – To maintain a competitive edge, you should stay adaptable and continually refine your approach.

 

Today’s guest post was contributed by Henrii Joy, professional; guest blogger and content writer, specializing in product descriptions technical articles, and SEO content. The author may be reached at henriijoy@gmail.com.

 

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Are Errors Affecting the Effect of Your Content?

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“Six seconds is all it takes to catch a customer’s attention upon opening up your internet portal. Imagine if in that first six seconds, the first thing she notices are the spelling errors!” the Coggno Training Company cautions. When more than a thousand London social media users were surveyed, 42% of them reported that they would not buy goods and services from a business with misspellings in their ads.

“First impressions make or break a business,” JMK MarComm stresses,” and your written content is often the first impression potential customer have of your brand.”  “Quality grammar leads to quality writing,” Bryn Greenlhalgh, states in the Marriott Student Review at Brigham Young University.

As a content marketer at Say It For You, my favorite recommendation to both business owners and the content writers they hire to bring their message to customers is this: Marketing content in social media posts and blogs can be less formal  than website content, but they should never be sloppy. Unlike your sixth grade teacher, internet searchers won’t “correct your paper”. They may very well navigate away from your blog and find somewhere else to go!

In both romance and  content,, trouble often arises in “pairs”, such as the words “affect” and effect” which I used in the title of this post  Two other pairs I find are often confused  are  “who” and “that” (“Who” always refers to a person; “that”refers to a thing.) and “between” and “among” (“between” refers to the space or difference between two things or people, while: “among” refers to the difference among three or more things or people).

Sure, there’s always spell check software and now AI-generated content, but sometimes, the best remedy for bloopers is a “day away” from creating the content, so you can “see it with a fresh eye”. 

Don’t allow errors in  your content to affect the effect it has in winning over readers!

 

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Aiming Content at Aspirational Appeal

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“Leaders must foster empathy – a deep understanding f the customers’ needs, emotions, and aspirations,” Ali Safaraz, CEO of Pathway Group advises in Britain’s The Business Influencer  Magazine. Knowledge of those aspirations must drive your approach, he explains.

Joel Swenson, writing in the July/August issue of Success Magazine, echoes that advice when it comes to making decisions about incorporating AI. In “Choose Wisely”, Swanson says that not only is it important to decide what data will be used in the decision-making process and how results will be tested, but also to understand the “aspiration”. In other words, what will “success” look like?

“An aspirational goal imagines what could be possible for your organization if there were no limits,” hypergrowthmarketer.com explains. “Even if unmet, aspirational goals can result in incredible achievements.”

To reify is to make something abstract more concrete or real, and, as authors Chevette Alston and Lesley Chapel explain in study.com, reification can turn language abstractions into tangible understanding. One of the challenges we face as content marketers is explaining abstract concepts in the right way. In fact, doing just that makes the difference between business success and business failure.

Over the years of creating content for Say It For You clients, I’ve come to realize, while we’re writing about very real products and services, describing those, not in the abstract, but in a very real sense, we can go “further and deeper”, aiming for the aspirational, introducing possibilities for utility and wellness readers hadn’t ever considered.

What I believe content writing is really about, I explain to business and practice owners, is providing those who find your site with a taste of what it would be like to have you working alongside them to help with their challenges and issues. You want to broaden their field of vision for what can be accomplished, given the right tools and the right advice.

Content marketing can be more, much more, when content is aimed at aspirational appeal.

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Stepping Out of Character in Your Content

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When the characters in a story seem to act against their own nature, Tiffany Yates Martin advises fiction writes in Writers’ Digest, that can feel jarring to readers, but it can also create interest. The author needs to lay the groundwork so that the character’s later actions will seem plausible, perhaps describing external forces that compel unusual action later on. The concept, as Martin goes on to clarify, is that, properly handled, unexpected and complex twists to a narrative can surprise and delight readers.

While, as content writers for business owners and practitioners marketing their products and services, we deal in fact rather than fiction, I believe that the Writer’s Digest “stepping-out-of-character” model can prove highly effective in capturing blog readers’ interest.

There are a number of companies that exemplify the unexpected by having two totally unrelated business lines, such as:

  • Chemed (hospice care) and Roto Rooter (plumbing)
  • Elxsi (sewer equipment and family restaurants)
  • Guiness (beer and recordkeeping)
  • Yamaha (musical instruments and motorcycles)

Diversification like that can be used as a defense, the Corporate Finance Institute explains. “In the case of a cash cow in a slow-growing market, diversification allows the company to make use of surplus cash flows.”

More to my original point, though, as Julie Thompson explains in business.com, business and professional practice owners often have a variety of hobbies, and interests, and interests. Building content around those interests (perhaps unrelated to the business or practice itself can make for refreshingly unexpected reading for searchers who land on the blog.

Another kind of “unexpected”‘ content focus can be charitable causes favored by the owner’s favorite charitable and community activities. But “the way you go about marketing your charitable efforts can either boost or tarnish your company’s public relations,” Thompson cautions, because there needs to be real commitment, not just lip service on the part of the business owner or practitioner. Still, the more unrelated to the type of business or practice the charitable “cause” appears to be, the more that “unexpecteness” factor will come into play…

Just as some of the most successful businesses represent new twists on old ideas and products, as content writers, we sometimes need to step out of character. surprising and delighting readers with a “twist”!

 

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