Lisa Shares Her Wisdom: February 2017

Sunday, February 26, 2017

Get the Marketing Budget You Need in 2 Steps

The end of the fiscal year is fast approaching, and for us marketers, it’s more than holiday parties and eggnog; that means it’s time to stake our claim of 2017 budgets.

In the review of any digital marketing budget proposal, executives are going to look for the answer to these two questions:

What did you do drive business this year?
How do you plan to drive business next year?

Your budget proposal presentation should hand these answers on a shiny silver platter to those responsible for approval. I have had the opportunity to work with hundreds of marketing professionals as they prepare for this big moment, and there are two important elements that prove to be most effective at earning budgets year after year: proving your ROI, and mapping potential to dollars.

Prove Your ROI

The first step in creating any marketing budget is to show that your marketing efforts are capable of achieving results – last year, this year, and of course, next year. To effectively be able to reflect how your digital marketing efforts contributed to the growth of the company, there are several metrics that you should keep close tabs on throughout the year.

Tuesday, February 21, 2017

7 Steps to Documenting Your Content Marketing Strategy

There is one thing that nearly 2/3rds of top-performing content marketers do, but only 13% of the least successful do. It’s a clear driver of content marketing excellence. Yet only 37% of all B2B content marketers are doing it.

That one thing is to developing a documented content marketing strategy. It’s that simple. Lay out your strategy, write it down, and you’ve drastically increased your odds of running a successful content marketing enterprise.

Documenting your strategy prevents random acts of content. It helps get buy-in from your whole team. Most importantly, it starts your content initiative with measurable goals and a plan to achieve them. It just makes every aspect of creating content and distributing it easier and more effective.

If your team wants to join the top tier of content marketers, it’s time to get that strategy written down. Here’s how to get started.

#1: Start with the Why

Why is content marketing a good fit for your company? Is there an audience hungry for the content you plan on producing? You can answer these questions with customer research—find the unmet needs that your content will meet.

Interesting Facts

According to David Leonhardt, median family incomes have fallen substantially over a decade for the first time since the Great Depression. “By [2011], family income was 8 percent lower than it had been 11 years earlier, at its peak in 2000.”
According to Vanguard founder John Bogle, the average equity mutual fund gained 173% from 1997 to 2011, but the average equity mutual fund investor earned only 110%, thanks to the tendency to buy high and sell low.
We are used to hearing how much faster the earnings of the top 1% grow compared with everyone else’s, but we often forget that it used to be the other way around. From 1943 to 1980, the annual incomes of the bottom 90% of Americans doubled in real terms, while the average income of the top 1% grew just 23%, according to Robert Frank.
According to David Wessel of The Wall Street Journal, Americans “spend about half of their food budgets at restaurants now, compared to a third in the 1970s.”
According to Wired magazine, “In a 2006 survey, 30 percent of people without a high school degree said that playing the lottery was a wealth-building strategy. ... On average, households that make less than $12,400 a year spend 5 percent of their income on lotteries.”
The U.S. birthrate declined 8% from 2007 to 2010, according to Pew. At 63.2 per 1,000 women of childbearing age, the 2011 U.S. birthrate was the lowest since records began in 1920.
Of the 3.1 million students who graduated high school in 2010, 78.2% received their diplomas on time, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. That was the highest percentage since 1974.
“By 2050, workers’ median age in China and Japan will be about 50, a decade higher than in America,” writes Robert Samuelson.
With bond yields near all-time lows, Richard Barley of The Wall Street Journal writes, “For a one-percentage point rise in yields, 10-year U.S. Treasury holders now face a drop in price of nearly nine percentage points.”
According to New York Times writer Binyamin Appelbaum: “Average months between US recessions since 1854: 42. Months since last recession: 42.”