Welcome to 2022!
After reading all of those blog posts about social media and digital marketing trends for 2022, how are you going to invest your marketing budget this year?
This episode is focused on helping you find ROI from under-invested but important aspects of digital marketing in 2022, especially in consideration of recent trends.
Specifically, these 10 things that I discuss in detail on this podcast are:
Key Highlights
[02:55] First Thing To Invest Your Marketing Budget In 2022
[04:24] Ways To Be Resourceful On Your Blog
[05:08] Why Search Intent Is Critical
[06:13] Second Thing To Invest To
[07:45] Third Area: Email Marketing/Automation
[09:42] Email Marketing Tools
[10:11] Fourth Things To Invest Your Marketing Budget
[12:10] Should You Invest On Tiktok?
[14:27] The Benefit Of Collaborating With Content Creators
[16:29] Seventh Area: Employee Advocacy
[17:56] Investing On Customer Experience
[19:15] Ninth Item To Invest To
[20:13] Invest In Your Own Education
[21:55] Ways To Recreate Educational Experience
[22:16] Summary
Notable Quotes
Learn More:
Welcome to 2022!
After reading all of those blog posts about social media and digital marketing trends for 2022, how are you going to invest your marketing budget this year?
This episode is focused on helping you find ROI from under-invested but important aspects of digital marketing in 2022, especially in consideration of recent trends.
Specifically, these 10 things that I discuss in detail on this podcast are:
Key Highlights
[02:55] First Thing To Invest Your Marketing Budget In 2022
[04:24] Ways To Be Resourceful On Your Blog
[05:08] Why Search Intent Is Critical
[06:13] Second Thing To Invest To
[07:45] Third Area: Email Marketing/Automation
[09:42] Email Marketing Tools
[10:11] Fourth Things To Invest Your Marketing Budget
[12:10] Should You Invest On Tiktok?
[14:27] The Benefit Of Collaborating With Content Creators
[16:29] Seventh Area: Employee Advocacy
[17:56] Investing On Customer Experience
[19:15] Ninth Item To Invest To
[20:13] Invest In Your Own Education
[21:55] Ways To Recreate Educational Experience
[22:16] Summary
Notable Quotes
Learn More:
Welcome to 2022. As we begin another year, we ask ourselves, where should we invest our digital marketing budget this year? Well, this episode is all about the answers to this question. So stay tuned for this next episode of The your digital marketing coach, podcast. Digital social media content influencer marketing, blogging, podcasting, blogging, tick tocking, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, SEO, SEM, PPC, email marketing, whew. There's a lot to cover. Whether you're a marketing professional entrepreneur, or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got Neil, on your side, because Neal Schaffer is your digital digital marketing marketing coach, helping you grow your business with digital first marketing one episode at a time. This is your digital marketing coach. And this is Neal Schaffer. Hey, everybody, happy new year to wherever you are around the world. It's a new year, a new start. And as we spent the Christmas holidays, or whatever holiday that you celebrate, and into the new year, I was reminded of the traditions that we have in which we celebrate holidays. And I wanted to create a new tradition for this podcast. I think at the beginning of the year, we normally will, you know, talk about sort of our predictions or trends, what have you. But this is your I want to start a new tradition, a two part series, really, of number one, where to invest your budget this year? Or where to invest your resources? What have you. And the second one, which will be part two, which I plan to publish later this week, which is New Year New Digital Marketing 10 things to launch this year, looking at the recent trends, what channels you may be a little bit behind on just looking at the overall industry and what have you. So they're obviously related somewhat. But this episode is all about where should we invest our time, our resources, our budget this year. So it's time to regroup, ton to figure out how to best invest I'm all about every year, or even every quarter, sort of pushing that reset button just so that we're always in alignment. And we always understand the value of every dollar or yen or pound or euro, or whatever currency you spend is in your marketing. So let's get started 2022, New Year New Digital Marketing 10 things to invest your marketing budget and number one. And with Digital First, what's old is new again, what is boring is sexy. Again, number one, we begin with blog content. And really when I talk about blog content, I'm also talking about SEO. And here's the thing, do a Google search for keywords relevant to your company, not your brand name, but actual keywords about your products or services. Think about the keywords that your potential customer used to find out about you look at the top search results. Do you see old content appearing? Do you see irrelevant content? Do you see incorrect content? Do you see content from competitors that are smaller than you? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you have a window of opportunity to appear higher in Google search results by offering resourceful advice. There are too many companies out there who might blog, but they haven't blogged in a while. Maybe they you know, they're getting indexed for content. It's irrelevant for whatever reason, or the advice they're offering really isn't that resourceful because they're just really promoting their own brand, their own products and services. So what I want you to do is really offer something that's resourceful if they understand that information, they would naturally want to buy your product, your tool, which you can showcase as part of what you write about, obviously. And it's really interesting. I obviously blog a lot about influencer marketing. And so a lot of influencer marketing tools companies want to be found by the term influencer marketing tool. But guess what blog posts, Rank Above all those influencer marketing tools. It's the blog posts, which are which feature a number of influencer marketing tools to allow the reader to be able to choose the best one. I've seen some smart marketing tools companies create their own sort of best of posts. Obviously, they feature themselves at the top, but they also feature other tools that you might be interested in. I'll give you another example that that's one way of being resourceful. You could talk about your competitors or often these companies try to find companies that really aren't directly competing with them, if you know what I mean. Another example is influencer marketing. There are so many companies that want to rank for the keyword influencer marketing. But if we do a search in Google for search intent, we find that a lot of the things that rank at the top are articles about what is influencer marketing. So this is my search intent is really critical. But needless to say, when I do these searches for my own brand for my clients, I really do think there is still plenty of opportunity for you all to be found in the largest search engine of the mall. That is Google, you do that through offering resourceful blog content, this is the year to go up in the rankings. I want every listener of this podcast to be in that first page of rankings, maybe not for the most strategic keywords. But you can begin to appear there as you build your library of content. As you build your authority, it can happen, I'm going to publish a case study pretty soon about how I've been able to do it. But I believe that what I've achieved and what I've achieved for some of my clients, you can get the same. So number one blog content slash SEO, definitely continue if not increase investment there. Number two, long form lead generation content. Now this might be more appropriate for b2b companies, although there are ways that b2c companies can use this as well. But the lack of physical events, which is going to continue, we don't know until when, but obviously, it's going to continue. And also the lack of physical office gatherings just means that more people are looking for more information online to help them do their work better. It's the acceleration of this digital first society that we live in. So be the source of information by offering them something of value. It could be an eBook, a white paper, a webinar, a pre recorded demo, but exchange that value for a lead, ie giving them some sort of information in a live or recorded format, to help with your demand gen efforts. You know, lead magnets, whatever it is, these should always be part of your marketing. But every year, it's time to look back and go, What am I missing? Have we created new lead magnets have we created it in the different types of formats in which people like to consume content, look at your competitors see what they're doing, I believe there's always a chance to have new or better, long form lead generation content. And it's just more important than ever, with the times that we live in. So make sure you continue or if not increase investment in that area as well and measure how that does for your demand generation efforts. Alright, number three, is related to this lead generation because once you get a lead, what are you doing with it. And number three is email marketing, slash marketing automation. In digital for society, there's only three ways to digitally engage primarily, search, social and email already talked about search, we're going to talk about social shortly. Email, you have to get your email marketing going and engaging with your audience, ideally, on a weekly basis, either through newsletters, or creating what I like to call custom pathway sequences, something that I plan to be investing more on this year in 2022, to give a series of content pieces to help educate your customer or prospective client. So marketing automation gives us the ability to do so much. Yet, when I get a lot of email from a lot of different companies. I don't think they're using it the right way. They tend to overdo it right? So do it the right way. You don't need to be although some would argue, but I don't think you need to be emailing people on a daily basis. But you need to keep in touch. And every email has to have value. I'm actually just rethinking my entire marketing automation for 2022. And rethinking that are the words of Ann Handley, someone that I have the greatest respect for thunder marketing profs and author of a few books that content rights, make every email a love letter. And if you can have that philosophy with your emails, I do believe over time, they will get open more they will get read more, you'll build a deeper relationship, and it'll lead to more business for you. So let's invest more. Maybe we need to find the right technology if we feel limited by the technology we have. There's a number of great tools out there that depending on if you're an enterprise obviously you're probably using Enterprise enterprise grade tools. If you're at a small to medium sized business, there are plenty of tools that are very, very reasonable that offers some pretty sophisticated automation these days my to go twos would be active campaign, and ConvertKit ConvertKit being the one I currently use, but I've also used Active Campaign and have moved a few clients over to them as well, they either of them are going to give you some pretty robust functionality. So maybe it's time to do an email marketing to audits as we begin this new year. Number four, I talked about long form lead generation content. Number four is long form video content. So Google is a search engine. YouTube is a search engine, there are way more blogs out there, then there are YouTube channels, way more blog posts out there than there are YouTube videos. So similar to that blog content challenge I gave you go to YouTube, and do the same thing. I believe there are still tremendous opportunities to be found on YouTube. And the barrier to entry on YouTube is a little bit higher than a blog, I believe, because it requires you to create a video to put yourself out there to have some production value attached to whatever you do. But I would say these days, don't overdo it with the video, right? We see people that have YouTubers that have become very successful, beginning with their iPhones and iPhone has nothing to laugh about the technology that iPhones these days are equipped with is pretty incredible. So does not be fancy. But the thing is, you're going out there, you're teaching you're being resourceful could be entertaining, really depends on sort of the product you have, obviously, people use YouTube for a lot of how tos. So if there is a how to associated with your product or service, that's going to be great content for you to go out there and Publish. And once you have videos, obviously on YouTube, they can be embedded in your website embedded on your blog posts. The native version of that long form video can also be shared on the social media. In fact, you could record a live as a live stream, have a live stream going on social media, while also uploading the archived video to social media. So with video, there's just many, many ways we can repurpose that content as well another advantage of that, and that is long form video. Number five, since I'm talking about a video is going to be short form video, short form video content and I'm speaking specifically of Tik Tok, it was just announced at the end of 2021. And this is only one data point. But the Tick Tock actually had more website traffic than Google in 2021 for the first time. It's pretty incredible when you think about it, but there are that many people spending that much time consuming that much content on tick tock, and if you can create for tick tock, you can leverage that content on Instagram reels on YouTube shorts, even on Pinterest idea pins, their you know Google web stories and your website. But short form video content today takes on a certain format. If you are not very active on Tik Tok, or looking at Instagram, we'll start doing it. And I think you'll begin to see patterns, right, you begin to see different types of short form video content that might make sense for your business as well as always become a consumer first. But without a doubt. If you're not active there, you're not being found you're completely invisible to an audience. Now, I don't know if it's actually bigger than Google. But once again, that data point does exist, how huge the audience is. And I know everyone says tick tock just about high schoolers and dancing. It's not that at all more and more older people are on it. There's more and more educational content on it. It still is entertaining don't get me wrong. I think a lot of the entertaining shorter videos from YouTube, the attention that has on tick tock you know, YouTube is becoming more educational, and tick tock becoming more entertainment focus a lot of different ways look at it. But needless to say short form video content is a type of video content that you really need to be investing in this year and find your own way of doing it. Even b2b companies are starting to do reels and tic TOCs. So where are you? It's time to join in short form video content. That type of format is not going away. It's not that the boom is over. It's not that it's a trend that just existed during Coronavirus. It's there it's staying and that's where you need to be investing some of your budget in 2022 as well. Speaking of short form video content, and speaking of Tik Tok, if this is something that you do not feel, or your brand is not prepared to create that type of content, it might be a great way to start influencer collaborations. Tik Tok has an open marketplace where you can actually we'll link in the show notes, but it has a marketplace where you can actually directly engage with influencers and hire them and it doesn't have to cost a lot of money to do so. Well, I shouldn't say influences. Let's call them content creators. Some are more influential than others. But really, you know influencer marketing is not going away. There is an value in influencer collaborations at the least, of learning how to better do this type of content by actually collaborating with influencers, having them do it for you, having them post to their social networks, but also in the contract, make sure you do this, but get access to the content so that you can utilize it for your own social profiles or website or social ads. That is a huge benefit of influencer collaborations. I mean, it's something that even before Tik Tok you should have been doing. And it doesn't have to be short form video, it can be any type of content. But I think similar to how, with the emergence of Snapchat, we had a lot of big brands, just having takeovers by influencers, because they didn't really know how to manage Snapchat, I think we see something similar with tick tock, it'll pass over time. But if you lack short form video content, you don't know where to start. It's a great time to be collaborating with influencers. And obviously, even if you do know where to start, and you are publishing organic social media, you know that in order to have impact, you really need to collaborate with influencers as well. So influencer collaborations, it is the age of influence, we're still in the midst of it. And that is another area where your budget should be going. Now, on that note, for those of you that read the age of influence, you know that I talked about this brand affinity perspective on looking at influence people that have the most like know and trust for your brand. Self. Number six is influencer collaborations. Number seven, in terms of the 10 areas of where to invest your marketing budget in 2022, we look at the influence held by your employees, ie, employee advocacy, treating employees as influencers, and really getting them on board with your program, making them a part of your organic social media, training them, teaching them. And through the art of doing this, you are going to have a natural fan base that won't just amplify and support your own content. But they will talk about you naturally, as well. Over time employee advocacy has been around for some time. I think at the beginning, many companies just relied on a tool, they may not have done it right, it looked like spam. That is not when I talk about employee advocacy or an employee influencer program today. That is not what I'm talking about. And especially if you're a b2b company, I think this becomes even more critical, but even for b2c, right? If you have a younger demographic that is already very proficient at creating reels and tic TOCs, you begin to see that that is another layer of influence in terms of influencer collaboration, but now with an employee that you can tap into as well. Now, number eight, on the topic of the age of influence, we talked about influencer collaborations with with just general content creators. Number seven, we talked about influencer collaborations with employees. Well, number eight, we talked about, obviously influencer collaborations with customers, and that customer experience that they have, in the customer experience. Is there an Instagrammable? Is there some sort of experience that promotes or incentivizes them, or somehow activates them to talk publicly about your product or service? give that some thought? It's not an easy, you know, thing to answer. But it's something that I think you should be thinking of, with your packaging, with your onboarding experience with your user interface at every step of the way. What more can you do to incite natural word of mouth. And obviously, one of the benefits of doing that is you have more customers, talking about you in social media, once again, influencer collaborations with customers is really celebrating your customers is getting them to talk more about you and treating them as influencers. So if you were going to start a program of influencers, then include your employees include your customers, obviously, you know, reach out to people with like no interest, they may not be a customer, they may not be an employee, but they're following you or they've mentioned you right, begin to build this program. And this really leads me to Number Nine of where to invest your money. It's investing in people, right? It's investing in training, investing in experiences, and really bringing new people into your sphere of influence of reaching out to people that's may not be a customer may not follow you, but through gifting for instance, and hope you enjoyed that podcast episode I did ver was actually the previous episode with Mike badly a past year about just how you can build a business out of influencer gifting. That's part of investing in people is giving them product giving them service giving them experience giving them training, take some of that ad spend and invest that in people, not just anyone or everyone in content creators, in people that are active on social media, and you will reap the benefits of that collaboration just with the general public over time and finally, sort of related to investing in people and I talked about train them invest in their education number 10 is invest in your own education. As a marketer. It's been two years now since Coronavirus, first started, certain trends have accelerated, like Digital First, we've seen new things emerge like Tik Tok. People are consuming and engaging content a little bit differently than they did before Coronavirus. I think we all can understand that. So, it might be time, because in the past, we might have gotten to the same conferences every year to learn. Well, we can't really do that now. And I know some of them have virtual platforms, but it may not be the same, right? Invest in educating yourself through content, you know, buying courses, joining online events, hiring a coach hiring a consultant, becoming a part of a mastermind, like my digital first mastermind, but invest in yourself, to really keep abreast of what is happening out there to understand what the leaders in your industry, how they're handling the current environment, how they manage all these different channels, how they create content, whatever it might be. And obviously, that is something that will reap dividends. It's something that you're probably doing all the time. But I really think with this lack of these conferences, I know conferences, a lot of sought to have incredible networking opportunities where we were able to learn from our peers, not just from the speakers on stage, but through all those conversations we had out in the hallways over coffee or at the party is over whatever alcoholic beverage that you're doing. That is something that's missing right now. And the only way you are going to be able to recreate that educational experience is to immerse yourself in all these different programs, online events, or even hiring solo people are joining masterminds or other Online Communities. But really make sure that on a regular basis, you're educating yourself, and you're keeping up with the times. So to recap, the 10 places I recommend you invest your marketing budget in 2022. We have the blog content slash SEO or SEO, primarily through blog content, number one, number two long form lead generation content. I know that you've probably already been doing some of these, but I really want you to focus on these areas and measure them and I think these are the 10 areas are going to have the biggest impact fear digital in 2022. Number two long form lead generation content. Number three email marketing slash marketing automation might be time for an email marketing tool audit in addition to that, number four long form video content ie YouTube. Number five short form video content Tik Tok, however repurposed to be able to take advantage of all the other platforms that are supporting and promoting and paying creators to publish short form video content. Number six influencer collaborations with content creators. Number seven, employee advocacy or employee influencer programs. Number eight, invest in your customers and the customer experience to incite more word of mouth. Number nine people invest in people around you, including people that might not be customers or employees, people that mentioned you followers of your brand, or people out there that talk about some of their products or services, or that might have an interest in what you're doing. gift them product, reach out to them, like that previous episode that I did on that bamboo handlebar with Mike badly of Passier, episode number 242, in fact, and finally, invest in yourself, invest in your education, because that is really going to become the biggest asset, not only for your company, but for yourself and your future career as well. All right. Well, I'm psyched to start this new year, I'm going to be drinking my own medicine. Some of these things I talked about are part of my strategy as well, which is why I shared them with you. I hope this add value for you. As always, I really appreciate all of your reviews, all of your sharing my podcast and social media, as well as for those of you that subscribe, and if you haven't subscribed, make sure you do that you hear my next episode, New Year New Digital Marketing 10 things to launch in 2022. That's it for another episode. This is your digital marketing coach, signing off.
Unknown:You've been listening to your digital marketing coach, questions, comments, requests, links, go to podcast dot Neal schaffer.com get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes and Neal Schaffer calm to tap into the 400 Plus blog posts that Neil has published to support your business While you're there, check out Neil's Digital First group coaching membership community if you or your business needs a little helping hand, see you next time on your digital marketing coach.