Rick Sloboda Archives

October 26 2015

StudioThink – Fall 2015 Digital Marketing Conference

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Date: October 22, 2015

Name: StudioThink – Fall 2015 Digital Marketing Conference

Presenters: Todd Mumford, Rick Sloboda, Josh Loewen, Eric Reynolds, and Renee Neptune

There are many key elements in digital marketing that all entrepreneurs must understand. Moreover, all entrepreneurs must identify if they have the right ingredients to market their brand digitally. StudioThink invites the digital panelists to review the necessary components in digital marketing for all entrepreneurs. The panelist includes Todd Mumford, the Principle and Founder of Riverbed Marketing, Rick Sloboda, the Senior Web Copywriter and Content Strategist at Webcopyplus, Josh Loewen, the Co-Founder of The Status Bureau, Eric Reynolds, the Director of Marketing at Jelly Marketing, and Renee Neptune, the Director of Business Development at StudioThink. The panelists will cover the important digital marketing points for all entrepreneurs to prepare for the Fall of 2015. Nevertheless, all entrepreneurs will be able to take advantage of the digital market to promote their brand recognition.

How to set up and run in inbound marketing campaign

Todd Mumford believes any great marketing does not have to be difficult. Many entrepreneurs overthink about marketing and complicate the process. Instead, sometimes entrepreneurs must think simple. Entrepreneurs must know their goals. By understanding their growth goals, entrepreneurs will ensure they are approaching to the right direction.

Set the right targets is important for digital marketing. Entrepreneurs must specify their target audience and know their target audience intimately. This means entrepreneurs must recognize their situation, challenges and patterns. Mumford suggests entrepreneurs to document and interview their target audience at least twice a year. By knowing them is not enough, entrepreneurs must know where they can research their problems and solutions. Moreover, it is important to know where audience like to see their solutions.

The keyword usage by target audience is important. The keywords are categorized by awareness, consideration and decision. Mumford wants entrepreneurs to think about symptoms. Entrepreneurs must map their contents based on educate, inspire and inform. By building a content calendar, entrepreneurs can create group discussion with their teams to develop new ideas.

Entrepreneurs must build remarkable content for audience, not for themselves. They need to ensure they are sharing and promoting the content consistently, which will increase the scope, recycle the content, and increase the share content. Mumford recommends entrepreneurs to automate and connect the dots by measure, adjust and feedback.

“Stop thinking about getting started, and just get started”

Why you should get excited about emotional branding

Rick Sloboda believes the role of brands is changing. Instead of concentrating on production or needs, entrepreneurs must focus on consumption and wants. There are over 20,000 advertisements appear each day. In addition, entrepreneurs are competing with everyone, not just their industries.

People are emotional creatures. Consumers are buying based on how they feel about a company. Sloboda realizes emotions play a significant role in consumers. In average, it takes about 0.55 seconds to get first impression online. There is no right or wrong ways to market. In fact, each way is early valued. Therefore, the difference is the consumers feel good or feel right one over the other. Branding must aim for the heart with emotional story. Storytelling can help entrepreneurs to identify and understand the motivations behind consumers’ behaviours. They are the emotional triggers.

It is important to incorporate storytelling in branding because it helps entrepreneurs to connect information and emotions. Furthermore, they can get people to care, act and buy.

“Instead of saying what do you think, say how does it make you fail”

Listen to people, trust data

Loewen believes too many entrepreneurs are trying to do too many things at once, but most of them are forgetting the most important task, which is listening to people. Listening to people can capture trustful data. Entrepreneurs can retrieve these data from many digital tools, such as google analytics and webmaster tools.

It is important to set buzzwords for digital branding. Buzzwords can be created by the right optimization and ROI. However, people seems to set it and forget it. They never have the time to go back and review it. Marketing changes everyday and entrepreneurs must have the habit to go back and check it.

Success is not a straight line, yet it comes with obstacles. There is no template for success because it works for one but not others. Good news is that it is fail proof. Loewen wants entrepreneurs to continue working on it, receive feedbacks, and improve it the next time.

Loewen shares 6 simple steps for digital marketing. The first step is to set up tracking, which allows entrepreneurs to evaluate. The second step is to start on mobile when most consumers are on mobility. The third step is to throw a wide net, so entrepreneurs can try the possibilities and eliminate the unnecessary ones. The forth step is to reply more on start or stop channels by focusing on where the audience is. The fifth step is to optimize based on the data, not opinion. the last step is to rake in that dough.

MozCon 2015 event

Eric Reynolds had the opportunity to attend MozCon 2015 event. MozCon is one of the major digital conference where many major digital marketers united in one place to share their strategies. Reynolds will give some high level learning concepts will entrepreneurs.

Promise more than marketing
Content loyalty is more important then content virality
Make customers better version of themselves
Mirror the landing with advertisement
Coding is more easier than before
Interruption, accepting meetings, and emailing are critical pain for marketers
The power of personalization is in how they wield it
Capture list, drill down for personas, and get them to buy
Keywords might not matter in 2020
Many factors will affect mobile
90% of budget on people and 10% on software
If entrepreneurs want to sell a CEO, think CEO
If entrepreneurs are good at marketing, they are good at providing a service
Do not take short cut, understand human nature
Create global PR and the key to PR success is speed
Sometimes entrepreneurs need to be inefficient, make mistakes and then evolve
Rediscover who the audience is as often as possible
Google trends
Relationship on brands is created by values to give
Graph search allows users to search for people based on everything

9 ways to get visitors to stick

Renee Neptune will share 9 ways entrepreneurs can implement to retain their visitors on their websites

The obvious
Usability
Funnel
Landing pages
Call to action
Fresh
Rescue
Sharable
Maintain

Entrepreneurs need to create a website that is polished and professional. The navigation and layout must be easy to find things for visitors. Entrepreneurs need to ensure they have a clear avenue of information that funnel traffic to site. The landing page should be created to demonstrate the needs. Entrepreneurs must have a call to action. Call to action should be straightforward and simple and not vague. The webpage should always have fresh content to establish their expertise and show they are care to stay current. Webpage can be a hub for sourcing valuable content. This helps entrepreneurs to become the trusted expert. It is important to expose themselves to others networks by making the content on website easy to share. Lastly, entrepreneurs must maintain their websites. Broken links, outdated design and old information will create the image for entrepreneurs that they do not care.

“Think your website as your car, you need to maintain it”

February 23 2015

Studiothink – How to turn web visitors to customers

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Date: February 19, 2015

Name: Studiothink – How to turn web visitors to customers

Presenter: Rick Sloboda

Entrepreneurs need to understand that a majority of customers are from World Wide Web, and it is critical to understand the method to reach the target audience from the web. Studiothink invites Rick Sloboda, the Senior Web Copywriter and Content Strategist from Webcopyplus, to teach entrepreneurs the key concepts of converting web visitors to customers. Rick Sloboda focuses on helping business owners to promote their website contents, and he involves in committee advisor in many organizations. This presentation will benefit entrepreneurs to boost their online sales.

Rick Sloboda wants all entrepreneurs to identify their purposes, goals, and objectives. Entrepreneurs need to figure out their product leads and how they can use website to create awareness. All goals and objectives must associate with their desired audience’s needs and wants. In addition, entrepreneurs need to define their call to action. This will help entrepreneurs to lead their desired audience to the right location.

Sloboda believes building visitor-centric information architecture is significant for all entrepreneurs. In other words, entrepreneurs need to define what their visitors are looking for. A Bad example of information architecture is when visitors are lost on from the content and need to search where they want to see. Many entrepreneurs use organizational chart to categorize their website headings, but this will confuse visitors to determine where they want to go. Sloboda believes a simple two buttons, such as “buy a business” or “sell a business” can simplify audience’s search.

“People do not care about your business. They only care what the business bring to them”

Visitor-centric web content

The concept of website content is “writing to convert”. The content must be about the visitors.

Sloboda suggests all web content to be written in second person narrative. It is important to understand it is not what entrepreneurs want to say, yet it is what the audience wants to hear. Moreover, entrepreneurs need to be more objective and communicate at the lower denominator.

It will be beneficial if entrepreneurs can write in audience’s language. This will reduce the downtime, inconvenience and costs when entrepreneurs use the right language and the right word choices.

Sloboda believes the “features tell and benefits sell”. Benefits focus on growth, profitability, work/life balance, and succession. The strategy can be altering by depending on audience. Entrepreneurs need to identify the audience segment and find the trigger point.

It is important to be different. Sloboda emphasizes entrepreneurs should identify their strength and leverage on the audience. Entrepreneurs will know if they are on the right track when they cannot fit their web content onto their competitors’ website template. Sloboda provides many factors.

Selection	Technology
Example	Geography
Knowledge	Alliances
Credentials	Resources
Expediency	Tools
Style	Customer Services

Third party endorsements

Artificial enthusiasm comes across as spam and it will damage entrepreneurs’ trust. Sloboda believes third-party endorsement can be the best way to create credibility. Testimonials are weapons of influence; however, it will not be effective if audience will not able to read them. Sloboda suggests entrepreneurs to crunch down the long testimonials and distribute them out around the website.

Grammar and punctuation should be correct. Entrepreneurs should hire editor to avoid typical errors, including the incorrect use of language. Keep it short and simple is the key. Web page should use the relevant headlines, subheads, bullet points, short paragraphs, and descriptive links. If contents are long, Sloboda recommends people to use the drill down method.

Entrepreneurs need to ask for sales. However, they need to be direct and respectful. SEO will need 120 words minimum, so the right and precise content is very important.

“Connect, engage, and convert”

“Content comes first; design comes next; design should support the content”