It's Called Marketing. Look It Up

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How To Decide Which Marketing Budget To Increase

Picking one marketing budget to increase can be difficult if you do not have a process for deciding where to start. I am going to walk through the step-by-step process that we use at our agency.

First, look at your business and generate a list of all the marketing budgets that could possibly be cut or increased. This is the list that I use when trying to prioritize marketing budgets.

Product Marketing Budget - The budget that pays for product videos, webinars, demos, and all other types of marketing related to the product. This can include pre-sales support if it is in-house marketing.

Product Support / Post-Sales Technical Assistance - The budget that pays for technical assistance, training, consulting, and all other types of marketing related to the product. This can include public relations and social media if it is in-house marketing.

Marketing Automation - The budget that pays for marketing automation as a service. For example Hubspot or Marketo.

Marketing Software - The budget that pays for marketing software such as Adobe Creative Suite.

Telemarketing - The budget that pays for outbound telemarketing services.

Public Relations - The budget that pays for inbound and outbound public relations services.

Website Design and Development - The budget that pays for website design, development, and hosting services.

SEO Services - The budget that pays for search engine optimization services.

Advertising - This includes traditional and digital advertising such as Google Adwords, Bing Ads, Facebook Ads, and other traditional display ad networks.

Social Media Marketing - The budget that pays for social media services such as Facebook pages, groups, ads, etc.

Email Marketing - The budget that pays for email marketing services.

Event Marketing - The budget that pays for tradeshows, webinars, and other events.

Now that you have generated your list, it is time to prioritize it. There are a few different ways to do this:

1) Financial Impact

2) Strategic Impact

3) Manageable

4) Personal Impact

For each marketing budget, ask yourself which of the four categories it falls under. By doing this you can prioritize your list and decide which marketing budgets to increase or cut.

1) Financial Impact - For a lot of businesses, revenue is king and every dollar must be going towards increasing growth. This is why the financial impact is important when deciding which marketing budget to increase. Look at how each marketing budget impacts revenue and growth.

2) Strategic Impact - Not all marketing budgets have the same impact on revenue and growth. Some marketing budgets might be more important for strategic reasons even if they do not have a large impact on revenue.

3) Manageable - Some marketing budgets are more manageable than others. This means that they are easier to execute and have a higher chance of success.

4) Personal Impact - The last category is personal impact. This includes things such as job security, company culture, and other factors that are important to you but might not have a direct impact on revenue and growth.

After you have prioritized your list, it is time to make a decision. Look at the two or three marketing budgets that have the highest priority and decide which one to increase. If you are having a hard time deciding, then flip a coin. The important thing is that you make a decision and take action.

Further Reading:

- 5 Tips For Improving Marketing Budgets

- How To Calculate Your Marketing Budget

- When Should You Consider Increasing Marketing Budget

[itscalledmarketing]

5 Great Marketing Hacks

1. Use social media to create a buzz.

Social media is a great way to create a buzz about your product or service. By posting interesting and engaging content, you can attract attention to your brand and generate interest in what you have to offer. You can also use social media to connect with potential customers and build relationships with them. Social media is an effective way to drive sales, as long as you keep your customers engaged.

2. Hold giveaways for customers and prospects.

Gaining new customers can be expensive, so it's important to spend money on marketing that works. One of the most effective forms of marketing there is, is word-of-mouth recommendation from a trusted source. You can give new customers a reason to talk about your business by holding giveaways and contests. Give discounts, prizes, or whatever works with your product. It doesn't matter what you choose as long as it's relevant and incentivizes potential customers to follow through on their word-of-mouth recommendation.

3. Highlight customer testimonials on your website.

When it comes to selling a product or service, people are more likely to believe what other people have to say about it than what the business says about itself. This is why customer testimonials are so important. You can highlight customer testimonials on your website by featuring them prominently on your homepage.

4. Run a referral program.

A referral program is an effective way to get new customers because it incentivizes current customers to bring in more business. It's important to make the process of referring easy by having clear instructions on your website and rewarding your customers for their efforts. If you use social media, you can also pay to promote your referral program. This will create more awareness of the brand, which can lead to more customers.

5. Use online content to attract new customers.

By creating and distributing online content such as videos, eBooks, infographics, and blog posts, you can attract new customers. This is one of the best ways to get in front of a large audience without spending a lot on advertising. Plus, when you write about topics that relate to your business or offer something of value for free, you can gain the trust of your audience which makes them more likely to buy from you when they're ready.

Create a short video that explains what you do and upload it to YouTube. In the video, give viewers a compelling reason to follow you on social media or visit your website. Be sure to include a link in the description!

Offer an eBook that covers a topic related to your business. Write a blog post about a problem that your target market is experiencing and how you can help them solve it. Share infographics on social media that are relevant to your industry.

Keep Mixing It Up

By using these marketing hacks, you can attract more customers and increase sales. Try out a few of them, measure the results, and then try some more. You might find that one of these strategies works better than the others, or you might discover a new approach altogether.

FURTHER READING:

- How Data Helps With Marketing

- How Big Data Is Shaping The Future

- Getting Started With Content Marketing

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Getting Started With Content Marketing

If you’re new to content marketing, you may be wondering where to start. Content marketing can seem overwhelming at first, but it doesn’t have to be. Here are a few tips to help you get started:

1. Define your goals.

Before you start creating content, you need to define your goals. What do you hope to achieve with content marketing? Are you looking to increase website traffic, attract more leads, or boost sales? You might consider buying datasets to scope out your competitors or use some kind of proxy browser to see how things look from another geographic location. Once you know what you want to achieve, you can create content that aligns with those goals.

2. Choose the right channels.

Not all channels are created equal when it comes to content marketing. Some channels work better than others for reaching certain audiences. You need to choose the channels that will work best for you and your business.

3. Create high-quality content.

Quality content is key when it comes to content marketing. If your content isn’t good, people won’t bother reading it. Make sure you invest time and resources into creating high-quality content that will engage your audience.

4. Promote your content.

No one will see your content if you don’t promote it. You need to spread the word about your content on social media, in email newsletters, and elsewhere online.

5. Analyze your results.

Once you start publishing content, you need to track its performance. How many people are reading it? How many leads or sales is it generating? Use this data to help you improve your content marketing strategy.

Content marketing can be a great way to reach your target audience and achieve your business goals. By following these tips, you can get started with content marketing and see results.

Looking for more advice on content marketing? Check out our blog for more tips and tricks.

If you're just starting out in content marketing, it's important to set some goals and choose the right channels before you begin creating any content. Remember: quality content is key if you want people to actually read it! Make sure to promote your content widely, track its performance, and analyze the results so that you can continue improving your strategy.

What other advice would you give to someone who is new to content marketing? Let us know in the comments section.

Further Reading

- How Datasets Help Marketing

- 5-Steps In Getting Started To Market Your Business

- What Does A Marketing Director Actually Do?

- 20 Awesome Marketing Hacks

[itscalledmarketing]

6 Tips For Getting Started With Product Marketing

Here are six steps for getting started with product marketing.  It might be a new role or department in your company, or you're adding it to another responsibility. The important thing is that you never leave the customer's voice at the door.

Step 1: Know your customers

This is your first and most important step. You need to know who your target market is, what their needs and wants are, and how you can help them. This information will help you determine what products to develop and how to position them in the market.

Step 2: Understand your product

You also need to understand your product as deeply as you can. What does it do? How does it work? Why is it great and different from its competitors? You need to know all there is to know about your product, not only to communicate the features and benefits well but also because this understanding will allow you to anticipate problems and obstacles before they happen.

Step 3: Talk to customers

Find out what your customers think of the product, how they use it, and their experience with it. Some feedback might not be overwhelmingly positive, but you have to take the good with the bad. Make sure you are open to customer suggestions on how to improve your product or service. This will also help you understand why they might be choosing your product over the competition.

Step 4: Create a marketing strategy

This will include your overall messaging, how you plan to reach your target market, and what tactics you'll use. The strategy should be tailored to your specific product and customer base.

Step 5: Execute the marketing plan

Once you have the strategy in place, it's time to execute. Make sure you're staying on top of your message and relevant trends while being consistent with your brand messaging. Stay flexible so you can adapt if the market changes or if your product does.

Step 6: Repeat!

You can't expect to have all the answers right away, nor do you want to. You should constantly be looking for ways to improve and build upon what you've done in the past. Also, keep your eyes open to new trends and continue researching your customers so you can meet their needs as they evolve.

If you manage to follow these six steps, you'll be on your way to product marketing success!

Further Reading:

- 11 Tips For Better SEO

- 5 Tips For A Winning Product Marketing Strategy

- 8 Great Product Marketing Tips

- (not so) Secret SEO Tricks

[itscalledmarketing]

How Web Crawling Helps Marketing

Web crawling is one of the web analytics techniques that webmasters use to review the web pages on their site. Web crawling is important in web analytics because web pages can be visited multiple times by different web robots (web crawlers). A web browser can also be used to crawl web pages, but web browsers are not able to revisit web pages through the same web address.

Background Reading:

What Are The Differences Between Web Crawling and Scraping

The process for web crawling begins with indexing all websites available in web directories. When a new website comes online, it's usually not found by search engines until somebody has managed to visit the site and input the URL into a search engine so it can start being crawled. Web crawlers have been developed by companies like Google, MSN, Yahoo! and others to help webmasters and SEO professionals with their website marketing.

The web crawlers work by visiting websites, following all the links on the pages, and indexing the web pages they find. Crawlers can also extract text and data from web pages for further analysis. The purpose of web crawling is to create an index of all the web pages on the internet so that they can be found by search engines.

Web crawling is used in many aspects of online marketing including search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click advertising (PPC), and email marketing. Crawlers are used to find new web pages to index, determine how often a website has been updated, and gather information about the content of a website. Webmasters can track web crawling by web robots to see what web pages are visited most frequently and which web pages are visited the least.

Web crawlers are used to find websites that might be relevant to search terms, so they can be indexed for search engines. Search engine marketing (SEM) - an online marketing technique that includes SEO techniques like web crawling - is also used with web crawlers. Web crawlers can be purchased or rented for professional web crawling campaigns. They use many different types of web addresses including search strings, keywords, product names, hashes, and URLs.

Webmasters who want their website crawled typically submit a sitemap file to the web robots on the webserver that tells them where all the web pages are located on the webserver. This process is called web crawling. Web crawlers create a web crawl weblog that tells them what web pages they have visited and when they were last visited.

Web robots work by following links on web pages and gathering information about the page's content such as the title, description, URLs, keywords, alt text, meta tags, and other elements. Crawlers can be enhanced to follow all links within each web page and prioritize which website locations get crawled first based on the popularity or value of the link. Crawlers typically start with a base of websites listed in web directories for indexing before visiting additional web pages where links are followed from one webpage to another. Crawlers can be set up to visit websites related to web directories that would be relevant to web crawling, web pages determined by webmasters, or web pages where certain keywords are found on the page.

Crawlers use many techniques to find webpages and follow links including web address recognition (i.e. domain name), website map discovery, search engine results, meta tags, hidden text, URLs with question marks (?), URL query strings, direct navigation links in the HTML code of the web page(s) and other elements on each web page. Crawlers can also discover new websites using keywords discovered within the content of visited webpages. This is an important feature for professional web crawlers who need to update their databases of websites online frequently so they will not fall behind newer websites by spending

[itscalledmarketing]

What Is Marketing?

Marketing is about people's needs. You are always asking what they need and want.

Marketing is about finding out what people want, why they want it, and how much they are willing to pay for it.

Then you can offer those things to them.

Marketing is finding out what they need and then giving it to them. It's all about needs and wants, finding out what people really need and want and how much they are willing to pay for it.

This is the basic concept of marketing: find something that people think will make their lives better, either now or in the future (or both), and give it to them at a price they will pay rather than someone else charging more or less for it. It does not matter if you sell toothbrushes, houses, cars, cosmetics—it's always about providing something someone wants to buy at a price he'll be satisfied with paying versus going without or buying from someone else.

Your task is to find out what people think they need and want, how much they are willing to pay for the things that will make their lives better—and then give it to them or sell it to them. The trick is in doing this as efficiently as possible so your costs are not more than you can afford. This is where all business decisions ultimately lead: How do I price my goods or services so I have enough net margin after expenses to stay in business? Businesses that cannot answer this question won't be in business very long.

Doing marketing means getting out there and finding out what people need and want, how much they are willing to pay for it, who needs it most urgently (so you sell to them first), and who will be most satisfied with it (so you have a reputation as high quality).

It's all about finding out what people think they need or want that can be provided by other people or companies, then making sure the people buying from you are completely happy with your product. If they're not, find out why and fix those problems.

Marketing is an activity done to determine these things so you can provide exactly what customers want at a price they'll pay for it rather than giving them something else or nothing because you sold them something too expensive for their needs or didn't give them anything because no one listens to what customers say they want—and instead listened only to yourself.

Marketing allows a business to target a specific group of people with a specific need and satisfy that need with a high-quality product at a good price.

In the end, marketing is about giving people or companies what they want or need at prices they can afford to pay rather than ignoring them and going on your merry way because you decided you were the only one who knew what was best for them. And if you do this better than anyone else, you have a successful business—what everyone hopes to achieve in life.

Marketing is telling your company's story so well that people understand how it will help meet their needs as effectively as possible, even though some marketing is done without marketing messages—just letting customers see what you're doing and how it helps them through stories, testimonials, case studies, and videos.

Marketing is also telling your company's story so well to the employees working for you that everyone understands why what they do is important—the impact it has on customers' lives. Marketing at its best has this effect on employees who are doing work that truly matters, which makes them more productive because they're working toward a worthwhile goal instead of something pointless or empty.

Marketing is about finding out what people want, then finding out how much they are willing to pay for it versus other options available to them. You can do marketing by telling stories about how you help people solve their problems effectively.

This is the only way you can know if your prices are fair. If you do not know this, eventually someone will come along, offer the same product at a lesser price, and take away all your customers because he or she made it clear that was what they wanted. You cannot stay in business very long with anyone willing to pay for your products or services—and/or everyone leaving you because of them without telling you why they're unhappy.

Marketing is finding out whether people are satisfied with what they have now versus something else available to them—then providing exactly that so they buy from you instead of someone else offering something similar but at a better price after discovering how much people really think the things they need are worth.

The reason marketing is so important is that not everyone needs the same things.

Everybody has a different definition of what they want or need to be based on their own experience, knowledge, and values. So to stay in business you have to find out for yourself how much other people think your products are worth—and decide whether it's enough for them to buy from you rather than someone else who's willing to give them what they want at a lower price without charging too much because he or she knows no better.

Marketing is getting out there and talking to people so you can figure out exactly what they need and want—not just relying on guesswork about how much you think something is worth versus it being offered by someone else who doesn't do any marketing but offers lower prices or has free shipping.

Marketing is asking people what they think of the things you do, then making sure they understand why they should continue to support you and buy from you instead of someone else who's trying to take your business away from you with lower prices and/or better service.

This is especially important when it comes to customer-facing employees communicating with customers in person, online, over the phone, or anywhere else: try not to assume that because a customer does business with you he or she automatically knows everything there is to know about how it all works—and explain what every step of the process looks like from their point of view versus yours. Then do something positive for them without being asked so they feel really good about

Further Reading:

- How To Research Your (Target) Market

- 12 Tips For Better Market Research

- Building Your Marketing Funnel In 10 Steps