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03Mar

How to Scale the Right Way

3 March 2021 MarketingScaleurs Strategy 252

The article below is just a small glimpse into our new book. If you want to learn a lot more about How to Scale the RIght Way, click here to check out the book now. 

If your business is ready to accommodate growth through scaling it is much more likely to survive. It will have the durability, flexibility, and longevity, to stay the course for success. Consistent growth that meets and then exceeds KPIs is the goal. Revenues going up and to the right, an inspired team, happy customers, and a clear plan. What could be better? But while scaling is obviously the goal, it’s important you do scale the right way. 

No matter what kind of business you’re in today, it’s always changing and evolving. This is especially true for digitally-oriented enterprises. The business you’re operating today will go through major changes as it scales and this process will involve a lot of trial and error. Ultimately, there are no shortcuts, just focus, determination, flexibility, and creativity. Embrace what works for you and your business and let go of what doesn’t. Be prepared to throw out bad ideas completely and expand upon good ideas. 

A scaling business has numerous benefits: 

  •  Improved efficiency.

    Scalable businesses are more efficient because they plan for all eventualities and ensure they can operate in different circumstances.

  • Consistency.

    Businesses that scale effectively are better at delivering expected results reliably, no matter what problems emerge.

  • Adaptability.

    Maintaining the flexibility to adapt to economic changes and pressures means knowing when to up-scale or down-scale as required.

  • Longevity.

    Businesses that carefully consider scalability are much more likely to survive far into the future.

  • Competition.

    It should go without saying that if you have a scalable business and are successful as a result, you are a strong competitor in your field.

For businesses, the path to success is not in simply growing but in scaling your business. To effectively scale your marketing in particular and your business in general, you must be achieving exponential growth while keeping your costs fairly low. But truth be told, scaling a marketing business requires a whole new level of skills and systems that many entrepreneurs can’t fully anticipate. 

As you begin scaling your marketing and your business, you may find yourself experiencing increased expenses, customer support issues, and miscommunication between staff members. An existing bad process will only be amplified once you begin trying to scale. 

So what can you do about these challenges that crop up? Maintain equanimity, fortitude, and open-mindedness. Remember, this is fun! Enjoy the ride and try to do the best by your team and customers. 

Become a Successful Scaleur and learn how to scale

Scaling is a strategy that can only be mastered by a scaleur who is a dedicated learner and considers real-time business priorities. I hope the article above has helped! Marketing Scaleurs is a scaling company that helps entrepreneurs scale their marketing efforts. We’re experts in growth marketing, product development, and more, creating custom growth plans for startups, entrepreneurs and scaleurs in order to help them gain traffic, generate leads and increase their revenue. 

If you want traffic, leads and sales, get in touch and you’ll start getting results in no time! 

Read more
24Feb

Scaler’s Toolkit Part 3: Design, Social Media, and Productivity tools

24 February 2021 MarketingScaleurs Scalable Systems 260

The article below is just a small glimpse into our new book. If you want to learn a lot more about productivity tools, click here to check out the book now. 

One common misconception around scaling marketing efforts is that in order to scale you need to do more marketing. However, it’s not actually about doing more, it’s about being more efficient with your productivity tools, skills, and knowledge. It’s about your team working in a coordinated dance of growing and connecting with audiences and meeting KPIs. 

In this Scaler’s Toolkit series, we’ll look at a number of resources you and your team can use to scale your marketing efficiently and effectively. For most of these tools, you don’t need a massive budget, team, or loads of time. Take a look at the different options and try out the ones that you think will benefit you most. 

In the first part of the series, we looked at Lead Generation and Analytics tools. The second part, we looked at Content and Email Marketing, Web, SEO, and PPC. Final week, we’ll look at Design, Social Media, and Productivity tools. 

We’ve used the tools below for both ourselves and clients with great results. So use the Scaler’s Toolkit as your shortcut to marketing success. Enjoy! 

 

Design Tools 

Posts that contain images and videos increase engagement because of the visual and esthetic appeal. With these productivity tools, you don’t have to be a design expert to make them work.

  • Visme — A simple online interface to generate images to accompany marketing campaigns. Whether you’re creating images for social media, printed brochures, websites, product mockups, business cards, or online display ads, anyone can use Visme use for marketing images. Alternatives are Canva, Gimp, Photoshop, and InDesign.
  • Photoshop — You can use Photoshop to create professional-grade product images to insert throughout your website. Customize and edit photos and graphics to establish a sense of consistency and branding that will differentiate you from competitors. Professional photo editing can also help build trust and legitimacy for your e-commerce business.
  • Lumen5 — Create engaging video ads and start publishing high-quality video content to social media. With a stock image gallery and more than 2,000 video templates, Lumen5 gives you the ability to create professional-looking videos through their drag-and-drop builder. You can also perform multivariate tests to see which videos connect best with your audience.

 

Social Media Tools

Some of the most-popular social media networks are Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Tumblr, which are used often in both paid and unpaid marketing. These specialized tools can enhance their value for your marketing efforts by helping you manage your various social media accounts from one spot.

  • Buffer — Coordinated social media marketing is one of the most-effective marketing tools available to companies of any size. Social media management platforms allow you to automate and batch the entire social media marketing process. Plan and curate your content calendar, compose and schedule your messages, and then spread them out over the course of a day or week. Alternatives are Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Crowdfire, and MeetEdgar
  • Livestorm — This webinar platform is GDPR-ready and delivers a HIPPA-compliant streaming technology as well. 
  • Facebook Ads — To connect with new customers and drive them to your ecommerce site, use Facebook Ads to launch campaigns that target specific users or types of users. This is a great option for e-commerce businesses because it is relatively inexpensive compared to other options. My favorite part of using Facebook Ads is that you can get incredibly specific when it comes to targeting your ideal customer.
  • Criteo — To create more-compelling ads for visitors, use Criteo to create and launch personalized retargeting ad campaigns. With Criteo, you can convert more shoppers by presenting them with dynamic ads that recommend the best offers and products from your catalog. The tool also allows you to optimize campaign performance by automatically selecting creative components that are likely to drive the most engagement.
  • AdEspresso — To optimize your Facebook Ads, use AdEspresso to create simple A/B tests to determine which ads perform better. With robust analytics, you can easily see how well your campaigns are faring. This tool will also provide suggestions for the best way to optimize your campaigns according to various metrics.

 

Productivity Tools

Managing your business often gets in the way of growing your business — and it just gets more annoying the larger you grow. These tools can help you manage your time, finances, people, and channels, and even conduct competitive analysis so you can stay ahead of the game.

  • Marketing Scaleurs — We’d be remiss if we didn’t include Marketing Scaleurs. It’s all about empowering businesses that are growing quickly to strengthen their team, increase efficiency, and build advanced skillsets. So take a look at the site and get in touch if you want to learn more! 
  • Sales Scaleur — After you scale your marketing, the logical next step is sales. That’s what Sales Scaleur is here for. From starting up your sales team to growth to full-on scaling sales, Sales Scaleur can help. 
  • Jelloow — Jelloow is another efficiency hack for any quickly growing business. They connect businesses with creative agencies and services so you can find the exact skillset you need easily, quickly, and within budget. It’s one of those ideas that’s so obviously helpful we’re surprised it wasn’t around earlier. 
  • Hiver — As your team grows, communication becomes vastly more important. With Hiver, you can maintain a cleaner, more-streamlined inbox by removing cc, bcc, and forwarding entirely. Shared mailboxes give your team the ability to assign tasks to one another and remove any difficulties that come along with multiple team members interacting with customers through the same email. 
  • ShipStation — This program lets you streamline, automate, and scale fulfillment and shipping for your business. You can also use it to import, manage, and ship product orders. ShipStation integrates with a number of e-commerce shopping carts, platforms, and tools, including Sellbrite. 

Keeping pace with all these new touchpoints and tactics is challenging for even the most-experienced marketer. That’s why building out your marketing tech stack in a strategic and scalable way is so important. With adaptable, scalable marketing tools working behind the scenes, all kinds of opportunities will open up, and you’ll have everything you need to stay one step ahead of the competition. 

 

Conclusion

In most situations, a combination of email and social media marketing is the most cost-effective way to reach the maximum number of people in your target audience. The trick is to engage the 20% of your customers who will drive 80% of your business. Then, expand your reach by investing time in social networks where the majority of your customers are most active. This strategy will drive repeat business and amplify the reach of your messages through social sharing and word of mouth.

Become a Successful Scaleur

Scaling is a strategy that can only be mastered by a scaleur who is a dedicated learner and considers real-time business priorities. I hope the article above has helped! Marketing Scaleurs is a scaling company that helps entrepreneurs scale their marketing efforts. We’re experts in growth marketing, product development, and more, creating custom growth plans for startups, entrepreneurs and scaleurs in order to help them gain traffic, generate leads and increase their revenue. 

If you want traffic, leads and sales, get in touch and you’ll start getting results in no time! 

Read more
17Feb

Scaler’s Toolkit Part 2: Content and Email Marketing, Web, SEO, and PPC

17 February 2021 MarketingScaleurs Scalable Systems 276

The article below is just a small glimpse into our new book. If you want to learn a lot more about Content and Email Marketing, Web, SEO, and PPC click here to check out the book now. 

One common misconception around scaling marketing efforts is that in order to scale you need to do more marketing. However, it’s not actually about doing more, it’s about being more efficient with your tools, skills, and knowledge. It’s about your team working in a coordinated dance of growing audiences, connecting with audiences, and meeting KPIs. 

In this Scaler’s Toolkit series, we’ll look at a number of resources you and your team can use to scale your marketing efficiently and effectively. For most of these tools, you don’t need a massive budget, team, or loads of time. Take a look at the different options and try out the ones that you think will benefit you most. 

In the first part of the series, we looked at Lead Generation and Analytics tools. 

This week, we’ll look at Content and Email Marketing, Web, SEO, and PPC. Next week, we’ll look at Design, Social Media, and Productivity tools. 

We’ve used the tools below for both ourselves and clients with great results. So use the Scaler’s Toolkit as your shortcut to marketing success. Enjoy! 

 

Content and Email Marketing Tools 

Email marketing isn’t new. As long as you’re using it correctly, email is one of the most valuable channels for reaching your audience. These tools will help you understand open rates, A/B testing, and email lead nurturing. 

  • Medium — A popular blogging platform and an effective tool for generating valuable inbound content and growing a community. Most importantly, you can have your own hosted blog.
  • HubSpot — A way to manage your leads pipeline. HubSpot also integrates with most lead generation and email marketing platforms, so your lead generation efforts can be amplified through serious automation and easy actioning. HubSpot’s free CRM platform is also the foundation for their Marketing, Sales, and Service hub product sets. Providing an end-to-end platform for lead generation, sales funnel management, and retention.
  • Mailchimp — An email marketing and automation platform that allows you to grow and manage your newsletter and product subscribers.
  • Verify Email — A simple service that verifies your email marketing lists. It connects to the email server and checks whether an email address exists or not, which is useful to ensure deliverability.
  • Good Email Copy — Provides a repository for time-tested, effective email copy for campaign inspiration. You can view email copy used for acquisition and onboarding campaigns from the most successful businesses in the world. 
  • Campaign Monitor — Sends personalized email to your customers so you can stay on top of your customer interactions. You can trigger messages to be sent based on a location in the customer journey and increase conversion with relevant content. Use Campaign Monitor’s to create targeted segments of your list and send emails with templates and content that inspire action.

 

Website Tools, SEO, PPC

SEO is foundational to any marketing strategy, but it’s tough to do effectively. Especially in a crowded market. Everyone jostles to rank among the top search results and stays one step ahead of Google’s periodically shifting algorithms. These tools can help you work around such headaches.

  • Unbounce— Build high-conversion landing pages for campaigns and events. Using a simple drag-and-drop editor, you can build landing pages optimized for data capture and lead generation. You can also run A/B tests landing-page copy and layout to ensure your pages are always optimized for lead capture.
  • Optimize — Part of the Google Marketing Platform, this is a comprehensive website testing tool that allows you to run tests on your website copy, layout, and calls to action so you can make sure your site runs at its best for each and every visitor. Optimize integrates natively with Google Analytics, so you can start to draw insights about your website immediately and run A/B, multivariate, and redirect tests to learn what works best for your site visitors.
  • Olark — Providing live chat applications for businesses, this offers a no-fuss approach to live chat software that has improved its design over the past couple of years. Olark also offers an extensive integration portfolio to ensure chat leads captured on your site are sent to the right tools in your marketing stack.

Analysis Tools

  • Keyword Tool — Find complementary keywords using Google’s autocomplete engine. Use this as an alternative to Google keyword research. The free version is capable of building 750+ long-tail keyword combinations. Alternatives are Google or Bing. 
  • SEMrush — An all-in-one digital marketing tool, a comprehensive workflow tool for SEO, this platform allows you to audit your SEO performance, track position for keywords, generate ideas for gaining traffic, and monitor competitors. Semrush also offers analytics for paid online campaigns and social media; however, their strongest offering is the organic analytics component.
  • Google AdWords — To increase brand and product exposure, you can use Google AdWords to create campaigns that drive more customers to your website. You can target specific audiences based on location or keywords, and you only pay for actual results. What makes Google AdWords extra special is that you don’t have to create the demand — you simply have to satisfy it, because your audience is already looking for your products and keywords. 

 

Conclusion

In most situations, a combination of email and social media marketing is the most cost-effective way to reach the maximum number of people in your target audience. The trick is to engage the 20% of your customers who will drive 80% of your business. Then, expand your reach by investing time in the one or two social networks where the majority of your customers are most active. This strategy will drive repeat business and amplify the reach of your messages through social sharing and word of mouth. 

Become a Successful Scaleur

Scaling is a strategy that can only be mastered by a scaleur who is a dedicated learner and considers real-time business priorities. I hope the article above has helped! Marketing Scaleurs is a scaling company that helps entrepreneurs scale their marketing efforts. We’re experts in growth marketing, product development, and more, creating custom growth plans for startups, entrepreneurs and scaleurs in order to help them gain traffic, generate leads and increase their revenue. 

If you want traffic, leads and sales, get in touch and you’ll start getting results in no time! 

Read more
12Feb

Scaleur’s Toolkit Part 1: Lead Generation and Analytics

12 February 2021 MarketingScaleurs Scalable Systems 252

The article below is just a small glimpse into our new book. If you want to learn a lot more, click here to check out the book now. 

One common misconception around scaling marketing efforts is that in order to scale you need to do more marketing. However, it’s not actually about doing more, it’s about being more efficient with your tools, skills, and knowledge. It’s about your team working in a coordinated dance of growing audiences, connecting with audiences, and meeting KPIs. 

We’ll look at a number of resources you and your team can use to scale your marketing efficiently and effectively. For most of these tools, you don’t need a massive budget, team, or loads of time. Take a look at the different options and try out the ones that you think will benefit you most. 

In this first part of the series, we will look at Lead Generation and Analytics tools. Next week, we’ll look at Content and Email Marketing, Web, SEO, and PPC. Next, we will look at Design, Social Media, and Productivity tools. 

We’ve used the tools below for both ourselves and clients with great results. So use the Scaleur’s Toolkit as your shortcut to marketing success. Enjoy! 

 

Lead Generation Tools 

Building a predictable lead generation machine to support scaling a business is challenging. Once you crack this challenge, though, it’s extremely rewarding because it helps you scale up faster. Also, it will allow affording to be more selective with whom you work with. In the B2B world, most customer relationships today begin with content offers, then continue with lead nurturing. You must understand the full nurturing model and have various types of content (from eBooks to webinars) to serve specific audience needs throughout your funnel. These tools will help you get there. 

  • Leadfeeder — a website visitor tracking tool that tells you which businesses are visiting your website. Even if the visitor does not fill out a form or download a resource. Using a website visitor tracking tool (which is similar to analytics, but with the ability to identify which individual companies visit your website). Is an effective method of lead capture. By identifying the businesses visiting your site and monitoring the pages they visit and the content they read. You can develop outreach and engagement opportunities based on their actual site engagement.
  • Product Hunt — A go-to launch platform for startups and enterprises that are putting new products in the market. It has a pre-existing community of testers and early adopters who are willing to try new products.
  • Sumo — A multi-app toolkit built to increase the ROI of your website. It offers a variety of pop-up tools designed to drive lead captures on every page of your website. Including newsletter sign-up, special offers, and lower cart-abandonment rates through timely pop-up reminders during checkout. Sumo integrates with email providers to ensure your leads go straight to your lists. Alternatives are Sleeknote or Hello Bar. 
  • Fomo — A way to leverage the power of social proof to increase conversions. While customers and prospects are browsing your website, Fomo displays small notifications alerting your prospects about other visitors on the site, as well as some of the purchases those other visitors have made. By showing prospects that other customers are viewing and purchasing, you instantly give your website credibility through social proof.
  • Snip.ly — Adds a call to action on every link you share. Even if you are sharing a non-branded website, lets you display a branded call to action on those sites. Meaning you can engage customers and prospects with every piece of content you share with them.
  • Drift — A way to capture more qualified leads based on who visits your site. Drift creates conversational bots that interact with your website visitors. By setting predetermined questions and answers to commonly asked questions and tailoring these questions to different pages on your site. You can help potential new leads find the information they’re looking for quickly and boost conversation on lead generation pages. Drift gives you the ability to connect your support team directly for any interactions that require a more “human” touch.

 

Analytics Tools

Data visualizers help reformat valuable, insightful data into visual graphs, charts, and graphics that make those numbers easier to digest. You have to know your numbers because if you don’t know how much it costs you to generate leads and sales, down to the penny, you will crash and burn.

  • Google Analytics — To keep a pulse on how users are interacting with your pages and products, take the time to set up Google Analytics on your e-commerce website. You’ll be able to track sessions, users, pageviews, conversion events, time on page, bounce rates, and more. You can also set up reports that help identify problems or opportunities in real-time.
  • Segment — Collect data points from every platform, aggregate them into Segment, and then send that data to hundreds of tools for marketing, analytics, and data warehousing. With more than 200 source and destination integrations, Segment makes it possible for your business to coordinate and draw insights across multiple business units and teams. Alternatives are Urban Airship, Keen, Snowplow, and Mapp.
  • MixPanel — A granular data collection tool that allows you to analyze each customer interaction across the entire user journey, MixPanel captures each user interaction, so you can start to build touchpoints and customer journeys based on actual customer interaction history, leading to a more-personalized customer experience and increased conversion rates. Alternatives include Amplitude, Woopra, and Localytics.
  • Bitly — Create short links that track every click, tap, or swipe as users make their way across the internet. Branded links allow you to make sure campaign links have brand consistency. You can integrate Bitly with most social media and campaign management tools to ensure all of your messaging is tracked effectively.
  • SharedCount — A simple application that lets you see where your site’s URLs have been shared online, this program calculates the number of shares for a given URL in Facebook, Pinterest, and StumbleUpon.
  • Autopilot — Capture new leads from your website, app, or blog and then nurture them with personalized messages. You can also use it to automate repetitive sales funnel tasks, such as lead assignation, appointment setting, and customer onboarding programs. Alternatives are Marketo or Pardot.
  • Zapier — This automation tool lets you move data between your web applications, so lead generation flows and alert notifications can be automated seamlessly between your marketing tools. 
  • Clearbit — Tracking sales interactions and lead generation is important as you start to scale up your business, and Clearbit’s Salesforce integration will automatically update any interactions with your leads based on a number of different sources. This tool will also help track leads through the entire sales funnel, helping you know exactly when to retarget or reach out and close the deal.

 

Conclusion

In most situations, a combination of email and social media marketing is the most cost-effective way to reach the maximum number of people in your target audience. But the trick is to engage the 20% of your customers who will drive 80% of your business. Then, expand your reach by investing time in the one or two social networks where the majority of your customers are most active. This strategy will drive repeat business and amplify the reach of your messages through social sharing and word of mouth. 

Become a Successful Scaleur

Scaling is a strategy that can only be mastered by a scaleur who is a dedicated learner and considers real-time business priorities. I hope the article above has helped! Marketing Scaleurs is a scaling company that helps entrepreneurs scale their marketing efforts. We’re experts in growth marketing, product development, and more, creating custom growth plans for startups, entrepreneurs and scaleurs in order to help them gain traffic, generate leads and increase their revenue. 

If you want traffic, leads and sales, get in touch and you’ll start getting results in no time! 

Read more
04Feb

How to Sustainably Scale A Business

4 February 2021 MarketingScaleurs Strategy 254

The article below is just a small glimpse into our new book. If you want to learn a lot more about How to Sustainably Scale A Business, click here to check out the book now. 

Ambition and drive are fundamental to success when scaling a business. But you also need a clear plan for growth. When growth isn’t managed or structured, it won’t last long or be sustainable, and you won’t reach all your goals. In fact, the clearer you are with your scaling objectives, the more successful you will be to scale a business. 

In my experience scaling my own and clients’ businesses, there are four techniques you can apply for maximum success. These four techniques are called the 4 S’s of Scaling. So use these time-tested techniques below to keep your business moving along. Even when you’re in over your head or just need to get clarity as you chart your path forward. 

And if you need some extra help, check out our FunnelIQ tool. It might be just what you need to scale a business!  

The 4 S’s to Scale a Business

Strategy

Make an annual timeline. It’s vital to have a roadmap for where you want to go, and when you want to arrive. Your annual plan can include how many clients or customers you want to have by the end of the year. As well as what kind of time commitment is required once there are 10, 20, or more. Your timeline should also include your goals for partners, employees, and sales funnels. The more you plan for, the better your chance of success.

Scoring Tool

Monitor your timeline. Once you have a plan in place, you should implement some kind of system to keep track of your progress. And how much time you spend on each client. If you can’t meet your timeline, or you get an influx of new clients all of a sudden. You have to figure out how to change your plan so you can still do a good job. This may require you to temporarily pay an agency to help you until you put a better system in place. The dashboard of scaleurs.com will also help you to define and track your timeline. Think about where you are now vs. where you want to go and why. Use that to define a SMART KPI, and that KPI is what you will track in your team or executive dashboard from Scaleurs. 

Scaleur Mindset

Be open to change and scaling up. Make sure you don’t have too much on your plate. If someone on your team feels overwhelmed, you have no choice but to help them. If you feel overwhelmed, you need a way to step back and assess so you can cope. Building a cohesive team means that everybody gets involved, and everyone owns a certain part of a project, so be proactive by asking your team how they’re doing and advocating for your people by seeing who can help pitch in to assist them. If there’s too much on your employee’s plate, you can hire outside help, ask someone else to contribute, or just do it yourself. Hiring outside help and asking others to step up can take some of the load off you.

Find people to outsource tasks to. It can be tempting to want to do everything yourself, but you don’t have enough time, energy, or know-how to do all that’s required to run your company. Know when it’s time to outsource, delegate, and get things off your plate. Rather than waste time on bolstering your weaknesses, focus your efforts on your strengths and the big picture of growing your company.

Find strategic partners; they make life easier for you, whether they provide you with data, exchange clients with you, or refer clients to your company. Say you don’t make websites, but your strategic partner does. You’d include them on projects that require building a site for your client (or even on improving your own site), and they’d refer clients to you — it’s a win-win. Mutually beneficial relationships help grow your business and allow you to focus more of your time on your core competency.

Build a deliberate environment. There’s a balance between making sure that your employees are happy and performing at a high level. A big part of building company morale is making sure every choice you make — whether it’s vacation policy, chain of command issues, or workflow processes — is clearly communicated and well-understood. Being a team member is a job in and of itself, so share in the stress and in the reward.

Systems

Have the right systems and processes in place. Remember, it’s more important to deliver on time than to pull in more clients. Most startups fail because of bad management. When you have lots of clients, you have to prioritize. Your first step is to deliver high-quality work on time, which is more important than landing additional leads or clients, so devise a plan for scaling in a smart, effective way. Make a budget, come up with a forecast, and prepare for how you’re going to grow while also maintaining quality.

Good communication solves almost any problem. As a marketing leader, the ability to communicate with your employees and your partners about an upcoming uptick in workload will help address anyone’s feelings of being overwhelmed. If your team feels inundated with work, you have to motivate them and offer to help or outsource tasks.

Don’t be afraid to move on. Some companies spend a huge amount of time and money on trying to please difficult clients. But there are millions of companies in the U.S. alone to work with, so there’s no need for your business to stand or fall on one client, or waste energy and resources on ones that are unpleasant, overly demanding, slow in paying, or otherwise problematic. If the terms aren’t working for you, negotiate them or drop the client.

Remember, failing to plan is planning to fail. If you scale a business smartly, you can deliver the best work to your clients while also growing as a company by scaling.

Remember to Enjoy the Ride and Have Fun

The arduous process of scaling might seem like it can’t be fun, and there is a common notion that scaleurs are fun-averse workaholics who spend all their time building their brands and scaling up their businesses or marketing efforts, but smart scaleurs understand that time should be set aside for fun and recreation. It should not be about work all the time. 

I have been a scaleur for quite a while, and I have had to learn from other smart scaleurs that work should not be the sole focus of your days. As a matter of fact, one of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs, Richard Branson, has said, “If you are spending most of your life at work, it should not be a chore, and it should be fun!”

Become a Successful Scaleur

Scaling is a strategy that can only be mastered by a scaleur who is a dedicated learner and considers real-time business priorities. I hope the article above has helped! Marketing Scaleurs is a scaling company that helps entrepreneurs scale their marketing efforts. We’re experts in growth marketing, product development, and more, creating custom growth plans for startups, entrepreneurs and scaleurs in order to help them gain traffic, generate leads and increase their revenue. 

If you want traffic, leads and sales, get in touch and you’ll start getting results in no time! 

Read more
28Jan

9 Key Marketing Metrics and How to Measure Them

28 January 2021 MarketingScaleurs Success Panel 266

The article below is just a small glimpse into our new book. If you want to learn a lot more about Marketing Metrics, click here to check out the book now. 

There are countless marketing metrics you and your marketing team could consider when it comes to planning and measuring marketing. Of course some are more important, relevant, and useful than others. Some depend on industry, or segment of industry, others depend on audience, others on channel, or current technology or trends. Yet some marketing metrics prove themselves to be most valuable, time and time again. Based on our extensive experience, those marketing metrics are the nine below. So take a look and see if you can apply them to your own business. We hope they are helpful! 

For even more insight, we recommend using the dashboard tool from scaleurs.com, which can help you define and tailor your business’s KPI’s. (They also have a “life dashboard” which we really like. Read more about it here.) 

And finally, take your metrics all the way with our FunnelIQ tool. It might be just what you need!  

 

1. Lead Volume: Lead to Customer Conversion Rate 

Obviously, it’s important to measure how many leads your marketing efforts are generating. But if you stop there, you’re missing a crucial piece of the puzzle: how many leads actually turn into customers. Knowing this figure can tell you whether your sales team needs a higher volume of leads, higher-quality leads, or additional supporting content to help close deals.

How to measure it: The benchmark for conversion rates will vary by industry, but a few minutes of Googling should give you a solid understanding of the number you should be aiming to outperform. It’s also important to consider conversion rates at each stage of the funnel: The middle and bottom of your funnel rates should be higher than your top-of-funnel numbers. 

The funnel you can create by using Google Data Studio can be one way to visualize each stage of the funnel, from first touch to lead conversion to opportunity creation, and gain a deeper understanding of the customer journey. Compare that number with the result you found with Google to see if you are on the right track. 

9

 2. Point of Conversion: Multi-Touch Attribution

Very few people research and buy during the same web browsing session. Most people will start their search for a product or stumble across a piece of content, click through to your website, and poke around your blog, but not necessarily buy your service or product. Days or even weeks later, they will search for your company name, click on a paid ad, and purchase. By only crediting the point of conversion, you’re not getting a full picture of the customer journey, and you’re undervaluing key aspects of your marketing efforts.

How to measure it: You can use many types of attribution models, depending on what you want to learn and how your marketing organization works. Google Data Studio’s Funnel can be one way to give credit to each stage of the funnel, from first touch to lead conversion to opportunity creation, and gain a deeper understanding of the customer journey. In this attribution model, 30% of the credit goes to the first click, 30% of the credit goes to the click that created the lead conversion, and 30% goes to the click that created the opportunity. 10% of the credit goes to all other touches. 

For both Unibake and CHD, I set up a dashboard to use to set and reach monthly objectives. I look at the dashboard to see if there have been any big changes in the past month and where we should adapt accordingly. Together with W2M, we draft a plan for the next month and adjust along the way. 

 

3. Blog Visitors: Engaged Time Spent 

It’s not enough to measure time spent on a page, because you don’t know if it’s active time or your content is just sitting open in an idle tab. Tracking engaged time lets you know how long users are actively paying attention to your content, and therefore how valuable that content is to your target audience. Are they even seeing your CTA? What can you leave out that people aren’t paying attention to, and what do you need to rework?

How to measure it: Content analytics software like Chartbeat or even WordPress plugins like Riveted can track user activity, including scrolling, clicking, using the keyboard, and page visibility, to determine whether the reader is actively engaging with your content or in an idle state. 

If you have a blog, it is important to understand what people do and don’t like about it. Which articles do they spend the most time on? You must deliver content that brings the most value to your customers. 

 

4. Number and Quality of Inbound Links

High-quality websites are judged by search engines as trustworthy and reputable resources. Low-quality websites can even penalize your website rankings, which is why it’s much more important to have a few high-quality links rather than dozens of low-quality ones. Instead of tracking the number of inbound links you’re getting, focus instead on these questions: How have certain inbound links helped you rank for certain keywords? Is your organic traffic increasing? 

How to measure it: To determine quality links, check whether the site is relevant to your site, authoritative/trustworthy, attracting a human audience or solely designed for web crawlers, or inking to other spammy sites (online gambling, payday loans, etc.). 

The Zapier tool lets you collect all of your leads in an Excel file after each campaign. It shows you the leads based on the company name, job titles, or other form fields (depending on your input) if leads are qualified based on your criteria. Sales development reps (SDRs) can then call on these leads daily because they are “warmer” leads.

 

5. Social Media Reach/Engagement

While it’s good to have a large number of followers of your social media platforms, it doesn’t help your business if they aren’t actually engaging with you. How many people are actually clicking on, responding to, and interacting with your posts? And who are they? Answering these questions will help ensure you’re delivering the right content to the right people in the right places.

How to measure it: Engagement types vary depending on the social media platform. Keep an eye on Facebook’s engagement score and number of clicks, likes, shares, and comments; Twitter retweets, replies, or favorites; Pinterest likes, comments, or re-pins; Google+ likes, comments, or shares, etc.

In general, I don’t waste a lot of time on organic postings. I post once or twice daily to keep current customers engaged. What matters is the engagement by consumers on paid media. How is one campaign performing vs. the budget? How many people completed an online form or request for information? These are much better indicators of a good lead. 

For example, your business might receive a lead through a form at your website. By tracking its history, you could see that this person had previously engaged with a paid post two times but hadn’t submitted the actual form. Two weeks later, the person visited the website again and filled in a form, so one of your sales team could contacted them and close the deal. 

 

6. Email Unsubscribes/Unengaged Subscribers 

Some people who subscribe to your list won’t stay engaged with your emails, which is why so many marketers keep an eye on how many recipients unsubscribe. But not everyone will go through the process of unsubscribing, especially when it takes fewer clicks to just trash emails that aren’t of interest. For the health of your subscriber list, it’s important to track unengaged subscribers.  

How to measure it: Decide on your marketing department’s definition of unengaged. Is it someone who hasn’t clicked on an email in three months? A year? Then, consider implementing an automatic unsubscribe that will remove these recipients from your list, and send an email notifying them that they’ve been unsubscribed. Keep in mind that some email services route “graymail” messages with low engagement to the junk folder.

At CHD, we had a lot of contacts in our system. During our first email campaign, we noticed that around 50 people unsubscribed immediately. The good thing about using a tool like Hubspot is that you can see who unsubscribed. Sometimes it’s better that less-relevant leads get removed so you can spend time and effort on resources elsewhere.

 

7. Website Traffic: Conversion Rate

A lot of your marketing efforts go into driving traffic to your website, so of course, you want to keep an eye on how many people you’re successfully attracting to your site and where they’re coming from — but if you only focus on visits without putting equal emphasis on conversion, you’re wasting your time and money. Plus, putting a little effort into bumping up conversion rates can have a big impact on your business: Imagine the difference that even a 1 or 2% boost in new customers could do for your bottom line. 

How to measure it: First, define what qualifies as a conversion. Is it a purchase? Booking a consultation or requesting additional information? Signing up for a free trial? Once you’ve figured out exactly what you want to measure, set up a landing page that visitors will only see after they’ve converted. Just make sure traffic can’t be sent to that page in any other way, or else you’ll get skewed figures. 

Before starting, make sure your tracking pixels are installed. Google Tag Manager (GTM), Google Analytics (GA), Google Console, and Social Media Pixels are critical for measuring web traffic for website conversion rates. If you get a lead, you want to know where it came from. 

 

8. Number of MQLs: MQL to SQL Ratio

Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) are generally defined as bottom-of-the-funnel prospects who have indicated they’re ready to purchase, or at least talk to a salesperson, by downloading buying guides, requesting a demo, or signing up for a free trial. Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) are those potential customers whom sales determines are ready for a direct follow-up. Looking at the percentage of MQLs that are accepted as SQLs is a good indicator of the health of your pipeline and your marketing team’s ability to qualify and screen leads. It’s also a great indication of how well your marketing and sales team are aligned and communicating with each other, since a low ratio raises a red flag that there’s a disconnect between marketing and sales. 

How to measure it: Divide the number of SQLs by the number of MQLs to calculate your MQL to SQL conversion rate. What’s a good benchmark? After analyzing hundreds of companies, Implicit found that the average conversion rate was 13%, and took an average of 84 days to convert. But keep in mind: That number varies greatly, depending on the source of the lead. For example, website leads converted at an average of 31.3%, referrals at 24.7%, and webinars at 17.8%, while email campaigns convert at just 0.9%, lead lists at 2.5%, and events at 4.2%. 

Check monthly to track the cost of acquisition and see if you have the right leads in-house.

 

9. External/Internal Metrics

Obviously, it’s important to keep an eye on external metrics like lead quantity, quality, and conversion. But if (when) any of these numbers start to slip, how will you know what you need to fix if you don’t pay attention to how the work gets done in the first place? When it comes to getting the most out of your internal resources, don’t just trust your gut. Keep your marketing team running effectively by tracking the number of hours wasted in status meetings, repeatable work that could be automated, dealing with unnecessary interruptions, and the efficiency of your review and approvals process. 

How to measure it: Hold frequent check-ins with your team to identify roadblocks and gather feedback about how processes can be improved.

 

I hope these metrics have been informative and helpful. Now get out there and start measuring and testing. Good luck! 

Become a Successful Scaleur

Scaling is a strategy that can only be mastered by a scaleur who is a dedicated learner and considers real-time business priorities. I hope the article above has helped! Marketing Scaleurs is a scaling company that helps entrepreneurs scale their marketing efforts. We’re experts in growth marketing, product development, and more, creating custom growth plans for startups, entrepreneurs and scaleurs in order to help them gain traffic, generate leads and increase their revenue. 

If you want traffic, leads and sales, get in touch and you’ll start getting results in no time! 

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22Jan

How To Track Your Team’s Performance: SMART Goals

22 January 2021 MarketingScaleurs Success Panel 256

The article below is just a small glimpse into our new book. If you want to learn a lot more about SMART goals, click here to check out the book now. 

Trying to wrap your mind around everything a marketing team does can be daunting. Of course we’d like to accomplish everything right now, but too often we experience what is known as “task overwhelm”. And nothing gets done. Common mistakes include going too granular or too wide and neither the smaller or the bigger projects gain enough momentum. Then we eventually get frustrated and give up. But giving up isn’t the answer, of course. The answer is to focus on one thing. 

One of my favorite focus tools is the life dashboard from scaleurs.com. Use it to scale your team by dedicating only one simple KPI per team member. This is the tool we used at CHD Expert: Every team member is responsible for reaching their personal goal each year, which is evaluated into a SMART goal weekly and monthly. 

What are SMART Goals? 

SMART goals must meet the following criteria and can be used to determine your KPI: 

  1. Simple – People need to know it and remember it easily.
  2. Measurable – There must be an objective way to determine whether or to what extent you have achieved your goal.
  3. Achievable – Don’t aim so high that the goal can’t be reached or so low that employees are left with nothing to do.
  4. Realistic/Relevant – Every goal must relate to your function or service. 
  5. Timewise – Deadlines should be short, realistic, and finite. 

SMART Goals for Marketing Teams

For example, a content writer’s goal is to attract the interest of consumers. Their KPI would be: Write five valuable content pieces per week, 20 pieces per month, or 240 pieces of content per year. Breaking the yearly goal into a smaller chunk (five per week) will still yield an impressive 240 pieces at the end of the year — writing five pieces of content per week seems a lot more manageable than 240 pieces per year. 

For a social media manager, the goal would be to target the right companies and business profiles using what the content writer produces. KPI: Win five MQLs (marketing-qualified leads) per week, 20 MQLs per month, or 240 MQLs per year. 

The PPC manager ensures that people find the company on Google and visit the website by fulfilling their goal of improving the company’s keyword ranking. Meanwhile, the goal of the website developer is to erase all the friction a customer might encounter when spending time on the website (e.g., incessant pop-up ads, buttons that are not clickable, links do not work, information is hard to find, etc.) so a customer can be converted into an MQL. 

Wouldn’t it be great if, as a company, you suddenly could gain 240 new customers in a year? 

Do you follow the logic? Everyone might have a different KPI, but together, they are striving for the same overarching marketing goal: getting more qualified demos to reduce the Customer Acquisition Cost. The content writer must write good content so the social media manager can target and capture the right leads, and so on. 

This snapshot of the dashboard for scaleurs.com could be helpful:

If your team is coordinated in what they have to do, then the right tools can take them even further. Check out our FunnelIQ tool here. It might be just what you need! 

Expanding Your Marketing Capacity

One of the challenges small companies might have is that the marketing department consists of only one team member or a small team. As discussed above, outsourcing is a good way to expand the talent pool. 

At CHD Expert, the marketing team comprised three people. I used a great Danish company called Web 2 Media (W2M) to supplement our compact team. W2M has different sub-departments to deal with all the above functions and account managers who serve as a go-to. At CHD, I worked with consultants from W2M’s social media team, their pay per click, and the analytics team. Together, they strongly supplemented and contributed to our in-house team. 

Staying lean doesn’t mean running your team (or yourself) into the ground. As your marketing business begins to scale, it can create an atmosphere of uneasiness and instability for everyone. Keep your top talent from looking elsewhere by holding regular check-ins and taking their feedback seriously. Recognize them for their hard work and celebrate the effort they’re putting in to help your business grow. Scaling is an opportunity to give employees more responsibility, and even expose them to new parts of the business they haven’t worked in before. Including them in product planning and projects like your strategic roadmap will help them discover new skills and prove that their input matters. They’ll have a sense of ownership — and be there when your business fully transforms from small to scaled.

Patience, Test, Grow

A  little bit of patience with your reps can go a long way. There is no magical “on” switch for scaling a marketing team. Just like adapting to a company is a learning experience for your new hires, scaling is a learning experience for budding businesses. Scaling doesn’t happen overnight. Don’t overextend yourself too much at the beginning of the process. Scaling a marketing team takes time.

Become a Successful Scaleur

Scaling is a strategy that can only be mastered by a scaleur who is a dedicated learner and considers real-time business priorities. I hope the article above has helped! Marketing Scaleurs is a scaling company that helps entrepreneurs scale their marketing efforts. We’re experts in growth marketing, product development, and more, creating custom growth plans for startups, entrepreneurs and scaleurs in order to help them gain traffic, generate leads and increase their revenue. 

If you want traffic, leads and sales, get in touch and you’ll start getting results in no time! 

Read more
13Jan

Maximize Your Conversion Rates

13 January 2021 MarketingScaleurs Success Panel 237

The article below is just a small glimpse into our new book. If you want to learn a lot more about how to increase conversion rates for your business, click here to check out the book now. 

When making your business processes more scalable, the ultimate goal is to increase conversion rate of your business. Your conversion rate represents the percentage of visitors (to your website, your great blog, social channels, ads, newsletters, et cetera). That actually takes an action by buying your product or service and becoming a customer. 

In other words. Your conversion rate represents how effective your messaging is and how strong your product or service behind the message is. 

Read on to learn what a good conversion rate is, how the landscape has changed. And what you can do to maximize your conversion rate. 

Setting the Scene

Let’s start by looking at an example: In the month of April, 100,000 people visit an e-commerce site. During that month, 2,000 users purchased something from the site. Thus, the site’s conversion rate (2,000/100,000) is 2%.

The broader your scope and the more marketing activities you use (webinar registrations, emails, landing page signups, etc.). The more you can increase your conversion rate.

What’s a good conversion rate? Frankly, a good conversion rate is one that is higher than it is now. In 2020, the average conversion rate for e-commerce websites is 2.86%. The average e-commerce website conversion rate in the U.S. is 2.63% compared to the global website conversion rate of 4.31%.

The Landscape

Today’s marketing and sales landscape looks vastly different from that of just a few decades ago. With the advent of the internet, blogging, social media, and a myriad of digital communications channels, the path to purchase is not a simple straight line, but a complex and varied web of twists and turns — and touchpoints.

Today’s consumers are also increasingly immune to traditional advertising and sales methodologies, meaning they conduct more independent research and take more convincing before they’re sold on making a purchase. That’s why the buyer’s journey may differ from one consumer to the next: They’re not all listening to the same radio spots to learn about your company. They’re not even being exposed to the same information about your brand from the same sources. Some may have discovered your company on the web, while others learned of your products or services through word-of-mouth recommendations. Some may read online reviews before engaging with your marketing team or filling out an online request for more information. Others will visit your website, read your blog, and evaluate your competition before engaging with your company. 

Better Targeting, Better Results 

In addition to leads finding and developing affinity for your brand through different channels, when leads are passed from marketing to sales, they’re expected to be “sales-ready,” or at the decision-making stage in the buying journey. The myriad paths to purchase makes it increasingly challenging to qualify leads effectively as sales-ready. 

Consider this: It takes 18 touches on average to generate a viable sales lead. That means it takes multiple touches for a consumer to make the choice to request information — and even more for marketing to gather the information needed to determine whether a lead is ready to be passed to sales. At the early stages in the buyer’s journey, consumers are often merely gathering information and building awareness about your products and services. Often, these interactions are not in-depth enough to provide the information necessary to qualify as leads. 

As you further structure and optimize your marketing and sales channels and tracking, keep these factors in mind. Not only is it part of creating a flexible and scalable roadmap, but if you can’t regularly improve your conversion rates across the board you’re throwing money out the window. 

Become a Successful Scaleur

Scaling is a strategy that can only be mastered by a scaleur who is a dedicated learner and considers real-time business priorities. I hope the article above has helped! Marketing Scaleurs is a scaling company that helps entrepreneurs scale their marketing efforts. We’re experts in growth marketing, product development, and more, creating custom growth plans for startups, entrepreneurs and scaleurs in order to help them gain traffic, generate leads and increase their revenue. 

If you want traffic, leads and sales, get in touch and you’ll start getting results in no time! 

Read more
06Jan

How to Scale Your Business With Automation

6 January 2021 MarketingScaleurs Scalable Systems 322

The article below is just a small glimpse into our new book. If you want to learn a lot more about how to scale your business with automation, click here to check out the book now. 

Scaling requires creating efficiencies in your business that did not previously exist. As your business grows, it needs to not only continue to handle incoming business. As it has before but get better at it over time. After all, a business is only truly scaling if it gets better as it grows. So how do you scale your business without losing the personalization that has resonated with your customers and fueled your current successes? 

Leveraging marketing automation tools allows you to send highly targeted messages to leads and shorten the marketing cycle. Automated lead nurturing helps you build relationships with customers through helpful emails, follow-ups, social media engagement, etc. To determine when they’re truly sales-ready.

Simply put, by automating your creative workflows, you streamline repetitive tasks, cut down on errors, and execute faster. And while I’m on the topic, check out our 15 tips for scaling here for more hacks. 

It’s the central puzzle of marketing: sending the right message to the right person at just the right time. As you ramp up your marketing machine by launching simultaneous, complex campaigns, it becomes more difficult to do so. To keep up with the complexity and volume of customer and campaign data. You need the right technologies and tools to track, analyze, and optimize your marketing efforts. 

Invest in Technology

Technology makes it easier and less-expensive to scale a marketing business. You can gain huge economies of scale and more throughput, with less labor, if you invest wisely in technology. 

Systems integration is a prime area for improvement in most businesses. Companies today don’t run on a single system — they may have a dozen or more, but if those systems don’t work together, they create silos, which in turn multiply communication and management problems as your company grows.

In my experience, systems work best when they are integrated with each other. As an example, Dine2Night uses three main tools for the nurturing process. 

  1. A lead scoring tool: This is a playbook that helps you follow up with your customers. It indicates when and what type of contact your customer needs next, whether that’s an email, a phone call, or a LinkedIn message. 
  2. A nurturing tool: Hubspot is helpful for inbound leads via paid social media and website conversion, as well as email marketing.
  3. An organizing tool: Zapier consolidates all the leads in an Excel spreadsheet so you can organize, categorize, and link your follow-ups. As a bonus, it is linked with the lead-generating tool. 

One of the most-effective ways to ensure consistency in business processes is to automate them, because that eliminates most of the human errors that can affect the scaling of operations. It also cuts down on the amount of time that your staff spends on processes that take them away from their core duties, which in turn can affect morale and lead to other issues when you need to scale operations. However, it’s worth paying attention to your marketing infrastructure as well as investing in new software. As you scale your marketing, you will bring in extra staff and ideally attract many more leads, so you have to make sure your processes cover the regular monitoring and upgrading of the infrastructure that supports these areas. 

Social media marketing and management tools

Social media marketing is the process of gaining traffic and attention through social media platforms. Your message is different for different audiences and different channels, so you should have accounts on multiple social media platforms. Some of the most popular networks that can be used in both paid and unpaid marketing are Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Tumblr. 

SEO tools

SEO is a measurable, repeatable optimization process that is used to send signals to search engines. Notifying them that your site is worth displaying higher up in search results. Thereby increasing the amount of organic traffic that your site receives. Search engines use complex algorithms to assess each site in relation to every search that users perform. To determine which site should rank best for what users are looking for. Some popular tools include Google Keyword Planner, Google Console, and Open Site Explorer. By automating your SEO process, you will receive regularly scheduled updates from Google Console that give you an overview of your ranking, including the top search words and conversion rates. 

Image, design, and video tools

People are more likely to engage with posts that contain photos and/or videos because the visual aspect makes posts more-interesting to read. Even when you are on a budget, you can do a lot by yourself. Preferred tools include Visme, Piktochart, SlideShare, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, Unsplash, and Lumen. These tools will help you share your message in a uniform and consistent way. Making standardized templates will free up your time, too. 

Email tools

Email marketing isn’t new. As long as you’re using it right, email still one of the most valuable channels for reaching your audience. Understand the open rates, A/B testing, and lead nurturing. Engage the 20% of your customers who will drive 80% of your business. Similarly, instead of creating a design for each and every campaign, your team can agree on a set number of pre-formatted layouts and standard content adaptation rules. Striking a balance between creativity and timely execution can make a huge difference in the number of messages that your limited marketing resources can support. 

Tokens

Another way to scale your campaigns is through dynamic content and program tokens. Tokens are system-referenced data points within an automation solution that adjust contact-presented information based on field values. For example, marketers in a certain industry may need personalized content to capture their audience’s attention to industry-specific trends. Instead of creating multiple emails, you can reference the data values connected to your marketing database. And customize content within the same email, landing page, or any other asset. Popular examples would be MailChimp or Hubspot. 

Lead-nurturing tools

Building a predictable lead-generation machine is challenging. Once you crack this challenge, though, it’s extremely rewarding because it can let you scale up faster. Also, it let you be more selective with who you work with. In the B2B world, most customer relationships begin with content offers, then continue with lead nurturing through the sales funnel. You must understand the full nurturing model and have various types of content (from eBooks to webinars). To serve specific audience needs throughout your funnel. Great tools for this are Hubspot and Marketo. 

Automate What You Can, Outsource What You Can’t

According to Forbes, 53% of employees believe they can save up to two work hours a day (240 hours per year) through automation, and 78% of business leaders believe that automation can free up to three work hours a day (360 hours per year). That’s anywhere from six to nine weeks! Automating saves valuable time, but also lets your employees focus their skills on what matters most instead of on repetitive, manual tasks. Activities like employee invoicing, payments, onboarding new clients, responding to new contact requests, and similar routine tasks can be fully automated to help your team focus on critical tasks deserving of their skillsets, without leaving potential customers behind or sacrificing customer service quality.

For what you can’t automate, consider outsourcing. Your team may not be able to design a logo or know the ins and outs of SEO, but that doesn’t mean you need to hire a full-time graphic designer or SEO marketer. Instead, look to colleagues for recommendations and professional organizations to find freelancers. You’ll be able to tap directly into freelancer expertise and skills on an as-needed basis, while saving time and scaling fast.

Similar to outsourcing, more business doesn’t necessarily mean more employees. In his book The Lean Startup, entrepreneur Eric Ries writes, “It’s a really paradoxical thing. We want to think big but start small. And then scale fast. People think about trying to build the next Facebook as trying to start where Facebook is today, as a major global presence.”

“More, more, more” isn’t the automatic answer to business success. After all, Facebook started in a dorm room. Staying “lean” goes hand-in-hand with learning how to scale a business — and it all comes down to doing more with less. Keep costs down, only hire people for the jobs you need done, keep work moving, and constantly listen to your customers.

Become a Successful Scaleur

Scaling is a strategy that can only be mastered by a scaleur who is a dedicated learner and considers real-time business priorities. I hope the article above has helped! Marketing Scaleurs is a scaling company that helps entrepreneurs scale their marketing efforts. We’re experts in growth marketing, product development, and more, creating custom growth plans for startups, entrepreneurs and scaleurs in order to help them gain traffic, generate leads and increase their revenue. 

If you want traffic, leads and sales, get in touch and you’ll start getting results in no time! 

Read more
04Jan

15 Ways to Create New Content with Old Content

4 January 2021 MarketingScaleurs Scaleurs Mindset 681

The article below is just a small glimpse into our new book. If you want to learn a lot more about how to create content with old content, click here to check out the book now. 

Leading marketers devote a portion of their practice to strategically defining best-practice programs, layouts, templates, and more so automation is not a laborious process. As the number of marketing solutions continues to grow, process and program sustainability will be an increasingly important consideration. At the same time, as a business scales, the marketing team will naturally be challenged to keep up. This is a good sign and as long as the team is organized and skilled, they’ll rise to the occasion. 

Take a critical look at the number of systems required to deliver your multi-channel marketing strategies and seek out platforms that can integrate scalability while delivering personalization throughout the buyer’s journey. 

If your team is feeling stress from campaign execution, ask for them which tasks are repetitive and don’t add value. And as the need for fresh content grows, try taking creative approaches to existing content for a quick solution rather than starting from scratch. 

You can do lot with words on a page. Here are 15 ideas for recycling your written content. 

 

1. Turn blog posts into podcasts.

One of the simplest ways to repurpose your content is to convert text to audio. Try giving some of your blog posts a second life in the form of podcasts. All you need is a device to record your voice.

Start by reworking your blog post into a script. You probably won’t need to change a lot — just make sure the piece flows smoothly and a listener will be able to follow it easily. If you tend to write in a formal tone, adapt the language in your script to be a little more casual.

Record yourself reading your script aloud, or hire someone to record it for you. Upload the finished podcast to SoundCloud, BlogTalkRadio, or another hosting site. Don’t forget to promote your podcast on social media! 

2. Turn blog posts into white papers.

White papers make great marketing materials, and you can build them out of blog posts. This is an especially good way to repurpose posts that go into detail about how you solved a problem.

Depending on how in-depth your blog post is, you may need to tweak its structure or add more details to convert it to a white paper. Write a summary for the beginning, and make sure to flesh out the middle with plenty of data to support your points. Once your white paper is done, you can use it as a lead magnet on your site.

You can also choose the best-performing posts on your blog and create a roundup white paper out of them. For instance, with Beacon, you can create a white paper or an eBook from any blog post. The company even claims to have a WordPress (WP) plugin that automatically creates eBooks out of your WP posts. Another great tool that allows you to turn a blog post into a white paper in a matter of minutes is PrintFriendly. It has a Chrome extension that allows you to create a PDF out of any blog post that you read to it.

3. Make an infographic from content from a blog post.

Do you have any blog posts that are full of shareable statistics and graphs? Pull out those visual-friendly tidbits, and make them do double duty as infographics.

You can make infographics on your own with online tools like Canva, Visme, or Animatron Studio for graphics or video. Another option is to hire a professional designer to do it for you. Keep in mind that whatever route you take, you may want to stick with a single designer so your visual content is consistent. 

4. Update old blog posts with new information.

Skim over your blog archives to look for posts that could benefit from some updates or additions. If you’ve been blogging for a while, some of your posts probably contain old, outdated information. Expanding old posts with new material is another way to add value without writing whole new posts. To avoid any confusion after you make your changes, add a note to the top of the post letting readers know it’s been revised.

You might have blog posts that are a bit dusty but still very valuable. Update those posts, change them according to the latest numbers and current situation, and you can use them to boost traffic on your blog again. You also could use concepts about national topics and change them to reflect local numbers and data — or vice-versa. 

5. Make a video based on a blog post.

Sometimes video is a better medium than text for explaining things. If some of your blog posts explain complex topics, consider turning them into videos for the visual learners in your audience.

It’s hard to go wrong with any type of video, as long as it’s well made. If you’re new to videos, though, consider creating a videographic, a whiteboard-style video, or an animated video. These videos are easy to make, and you won’t have to get in front of a camera yourself. A tool like wave.video or Lumen5 can help you get started easily.

Many people don’t like to read long texts anymore; they want to learn quickly. Videos can showcase complex ideas, products, or services using easily understandable models. For an example, go to Scaleurs.com for the how-to video “Scale in Less Than Two Minutes.”  

6. Hold a webinar based on your blog content.

Want to attract more leads and interact with your existing audience in real time? Holding a webinar is a good way to do that. If you have a back catalog of blog posts, it’s easy to come up with webinar content by turning blog content into presentation slides. Mix things up by combining information from a couple of posts that are related to each other and add a little brand-new content.

At CHD, we decided to hold a webinar for the European market during the COVID-19 pandemic. The market was changing and so was the industry. We wanted to inform our customers what they could expect from us in the future. By first conducting a survey in three countries, we asked for feedback on consumer habits — specifically, if and how they will change post-COVID when visiting restaurants. It should be easy to gather 150 to 200 people to chat about your industry — and delight them further by including them in a conversation. 

7. Publish your writing on LinkedIn and Medium.

Why confine your best writing to your blog when it could reach thousands more readers on big sites like LinkedIn and Medium? The more places people can discover your content, the better. There’s a catch, though. If Google thinks you’re posting your content in multiple places to game the SEO system, they could penalize you, so it’s important to republish your work the right way. Here’s how you can avoid incurring SEO penalties:

  • Be selective about which pieces you publish on sites other than your own blog. Broadcast the ones with the most mass appeal as widely as you can, and keep the more-niche pieces on your own site.
  • Publish only an excerpt from each post. Add a link to your own blog for people who want to read the whole thing.
  • Avoid posting the same content word-for-word. Make some changes to the text before republishing on Medium or LinkedIn.
  • Wait at least a couple of weeks before reposting any content, so Google has time to index the original version on your site.

At InnagrisMarketing Scaleurs, we decided to work with Medium as a reference point — a good source for being seen and getting information.

8. Answer questions on the web through live chat. 

On discussion boards like Quora and Reddit, your blog posts can double as answers to people’s questions. Keep an eye out for questions and conversations that are relevant to blog posts you’ve written, and publish excerpts of your work that address those topics — but only do this if your content is actually applicable. Whenever we publish a new blog post, we search Quora for related questions, submit a helpful answer, and add a link to our new blog post if it’s relevant and brings more value.

This tip works in reverse, too: If you’ve written any original, cogent answers to people’s questions on discussion boards, see if you can expand those pieces into full blog posts.

Both CHD and Lantmannen decided to implement chatboxes on their websites so visitors could get what they want: answers right away without having to wait. You can do the same.

9. Combine multiple blog posts into an eBook.

Have you written a lot of blog posts on related topics? Put some of those posts together, and you might find that you’ve got most of the material for an eBook.

Don’t run to Amazon to self-publish your book quite yet, though. Take the time to make your eBook truly high-quality. Sequence your posts in a way that makes sense, and edit them to improve the book’s flow. Add some fresh, exclusive content, so your current readers have an incentive to download the book. Add illustrations, photos, or original research. If you don’t know how to format an eBook, hire someone to do it for you. Services like Beacon are great for creating eBooks, even if you don’t have a designer.

As discussed previously, you want to nurture customers via a marketing funnel. One way to nurture your customers is to create eBooks to grab their interest. This can work as part of your ladder of value. 

10. Make an audio version of your eBook.

Like blog posts, eBooks are easily converted to audio. You’ll have to invest more of your time into recording the book (or spend more to hire a voice professional), but otherwise, the process is mostly the same. Audio content is popular because it lets people multi-task. If your average reader tends to be busy, it’s smart to provide an audio alternative to your text-based content. Just as with podcasts, head to sites like SoundCloud or BlogTalkRadio to host your audio eBook. It’s a great way to leverage your content. 

11. Fill out your email newsletter with content from your blog.

If you send out a weekly or monthly email newsletter, add some excerpts or highlights from your latest blog posts. Include links so people can read the full posts if they’re interested. You might see your blog traffic and your email open rate go up with this tactic. Moz is a great example of repurposing content in such a manner. Whenever they have a great new post to share, they post all of it in an email. So much for shorter emails!

You have already so much valuable content in the form of blog posts and your website. At the same time, email marketing is still one of the most-valuable tools for generating leads. Use valuable existing content you know is working. Just tweak your blog or web posts, and put the result in an email. It’s a great way to keep up the momentum of your contact with customers.

12. Put your presentations on SlideShare.

Have you given a presentation or hosted a webinar lately? Don’t just let your slides languish in a dark corner of your hard drive — they can keep working for you. Go over your deck and make sure all the information they contain is evergreen (timeless). Then upload the deck to SlideShare where anyone can find and view it.

13. Use visual content on Pinterest and/or Instagram.

To really extend the life of your images, put them on Pinterest. Most social media posts fade away within a few days or even a few hours, but “pins” can last for months. Infographics, image-based how-to guides, and photos that represent your brand are all good choices for Pinterest. Instagram is another visual social media platform where you can repost your images, although Instagram posts don’t last as long as pins.

A lot of end consumers are using Instagram, but if yours is a B2B company, I would recommend putting more effort and budget into your LinkedIn channel rather than your Instagram channel. Also, Instagram stories tend to be more successful than Instagram posts. Decide on the main channels where you want to be found, and make sure the content is relevant. 

14. Create an online course based on your old content.

If you’ve ever created a series of how-to articles, videos, or webinars, consider repackaging them into a course. Online courses are a perfect way to scale up your business. As with eBooks, you’ll probably want to sprinkle in some new content so longtime readers will want to sign up. Even a short, free course can help you get more email subscriptions. Platforms like Udemy allow you to host your courses for free. Other options include Stepik and Teachable. You can even host your course on YouTube! Just create a separate playlist for that, and get ready to grow your audience.

15. Use your data.

If you’ve done any kind of original research or testing, don’t discard the data when you’re finished. Turn the results into an infographic, a case study, or another type of content that highlights your findings. Gathering and making sense of original data is a fantastic way to provide real, unique value. 

Conclusion

You can decide to use all of these methods, mix and match a handful of options, or try only the strategies with the highest conversion rates. Give yourself deadlines for exploring each tool to determine what works best for you. 

You probably have more content than you think. With a little creativity, you can turn a single article, blog post, or video into several different pieces of content to use across the web. Repurposing your content isn’t effortless, since you may have to make some edits or add fresh content to what’s already there, but it’s a lot easier than starting from scratch.

Become a Successful Scaleur

Scaling is a strategy that can only be mastered by a scaleur who is a dedicated learner and considers real-time business priorities. I hope the article above has helped! Marketing Scaleurs is a scaling company that helps entrepreneurs scale their marketing efforts. We’re experts in growth marketing, product development, and more, creating custom growth plans for startups, entrepreneurs and scaleurs in order to help them gain traffic, generate leads and increase their revenue. 

If you want traffic, leads and sales, get in touch and you’ll start getting results in no time! 

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