Wide-Awake, Rip Van Winkle Content Marketing

/0 Comments/in , , , /by

 

“Old-fashioned values can enhance your business.” Bruce Sanders tells wealth managers in Financial Advisor Magazine. “Suppose you were cryogenically frozen like the legendary Rip VanWinkle, and woke up in the financial services industry of 2024. Here’s what you’d see, Sanders says:

  1. face-to-face, in-person relationships between advisors and clients
  2. periodic reviews
  3. accountability
  4. advisors plainly explaining the benefits and risks
  5. availability to clients
  6. a relationship based on trust and transparency

“I strongly believe that using, depending on and promoting America’s Traditional Values is extremely important for our society and it’s going to boost sales for you and your business if you start or continue using them,” David Cross writes in Medium.com. Court Bishop agrees: Customer trust is key to driving loyalty and business success, Bishop says. To earn it, companies must understand and respect their customers and provide relevant, personalized experiences.

As content writers, we’ve learned at Say It For You, we can work to inspire three kinds of trust in readers, trust for the business providers and professional practitioner who hire us to convey their message: a) trust in their know-how  b) trust in their ethical standards of conduct c) trust in those professionals’ ability to understand and empathize with their needs.

Whatever the business or practice, those old-fashioned values need to inspire the content their web visitors are going to read:

  • transparency in explaining the benefits and the risks. Check!.
  • ongoing availability of service and help – to real people. Check!
  • periodic updates on new solutions as they become available. Check!

Providing updated, regularly published marketing content is one way business owners can keep their clients – and their business practices “alert” and up to date..

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

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

/0 Comments/in , , /by


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.

 

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

Stepping Out of Character in Your Content

/0 Comments/in , , , /by

W

 

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”!

 

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

The Best Way To Make It Personal

/0 Comments/in , , /by

 

“All the time I’m preparing my outlines,” John Maxwell teaches public speakers in his book, The 16 Undeniable Laws of Communication, “I’m asking myself three questions:

  1. How can I make it special?
  2. How can I make it personal?
  3. How can I make it practical?

The best way to “make it personal,” Maxwell advises, is “to pair what they do know with what they don’t know.” The first part involves “know-your-audience” preparation, the author cautions: the organizational culture of the group, their personal experiences, even their national origin..The “what they don’t know” part describes the insights you’re communicating about that already acquired knowledge.

Maxwell’s advising speakers, but in creating marketing content, the very same principles apply. The secret is knowing what your particular target audience already knows and how they (not the average person, but specifically “they*) will be likely to react or feel about your approach to the subject at hand.

For example, while you may point out that your product or service can do something your competitors can’t, that particular “advantage” may or may not be what your target readers are likely to value. For example, even if your readers are money-motivated, are they cost-conscious or might they prize luxury and exclusivity?  Yes, while building content, it’s important to consider not only age, gender, and nationality, but where those target readers “hang out”, what they read and watch, and what they’re saying on social media.

“Chunking refers to the strategy of breaking down information into bite-sized pieces so the brain can more easily digest new information,” explains e-learning coach Connie Malamed. “The reason the brain needs this assistance is because working memory, which is where we manipulate information, holds a limited amount of information at one time.”  Again, pairing information with which your audience is already familiar, then adding a different “spin” or new way to consider – and make use of – that information, offers a “pathway” for communication between the content creator and the consumers of that content.

 

Part of content marketing’s inherent challenge is that the information offered needs to be highly relevant to readers’ search queries.  How can we sustain content writing over long periods of time, yet avoid dishing up same-old, same-old? Maxwell’s two-part “make it personal” secret is the operative one:

  • Establish common ground, confirming to readers they’ve come to the right place to find the products, services, and information they need, and that the people in this company or practice are knowledgeable and passionate.
  • Offer lesser-known information, adding a layer of “new” to themes you covered in former posts, or perhaps a new insight you’ve gained about that existing information.

 

 

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

Content Marketing Must Make Readers the Winners

/0 Comments/in , , , , /by

“Shark Tank likely would not be the household name it has come to embody had it not been for Clay Newbill, Daymond John admits. “it was Newbill who pitched the idea and his choice of ideal cast members to a team of writers and editors”. In his book Powershift, Daymond John recalls a key change to the seating arrangements on the set that Newbill had made in the show, putting the Sharks at eye level with the entrepreneurs instead of on a raised stage. John’s advice to entrepreneurs is to “hone a win-win negotiating style”, striking a deal that works to the benefit of both parties.

In order to bring about a successful result in negotiating any deal, John elaborates, you need to do your homework, set the tone for the discussion, make the first move, and play to win-win. Understanding that people are people, just like you, bring value to the table without expecting anything in return, he advises. Always consider the needs of the buyers, not only those of the sellers.

Think like a buyer in your blog, I tell content writers. As Keith Rand, my late friend and co-member of Circle Business Network put it, achieving success in business means understanding – and focusing the conversation on – not what you have to offer, but on what the other party is seeking. Keith would explain that in a business transfer, the focus needs to be not on why the seller has decided to sell, but on what on what’s going on inside the buyer’s head as he or she pictures owning and running that business going forward. 

In advising professional speakers on ways to drive revenue, Aussie consultant Peter Sheahan advocated being buyer-centric, doing everything with buyers’ needs in mind. Your content marketing, I tell business owners and professional practitioners, will succeed only if two things are apparent to readers: 

  1. You understand their concerns and needs.
  2. You and your staff have the experience, the information, the products, and the services to solve exactly those problems and meet precisely those needs. 

The content  marketing principle emphasized ten years ago in a piece by socialmediatoday.com remains true: “Content marketing should be beneficial to your customer, reflective of your brand, and optimized for Google, in that order.

Content marketing must make readers the winners!

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail