The Found Gen

Marketing That Works.

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Marketing Should Be for Humans. Not Algorithms.

One of the biggest mistakes we see in marketing today is changing a strategy solely to appease algorithms on social media.

While social media is a key component in any successful marketing strategy, the best strategies focus on the WHY behind social’s power and prominence.

What is that? It’s the humans behind the algorithms.

Real people, not algorithms, are what purchase your products and solicit your services. Those real people happen to be on social media – and that’s a great reason to leverage it into your existing marketing strategy.

Be Warned: Social Media Is Subject to Change

Here’s the thing, social media algorithms are dictated by one thing: how they can drive more revenue. The best way for them to do that is to sell more ads (purchased by businesses seeking to connect with their target audience).

As their ad revenue dips, the algorithms change. Suddenly, your reach is lessened, your engagement dwindles and sooner or later, you are forced to decide if you want to pay a monthly subscription fee (read: ads) to the social platform so your audience can see your content.

Who’s winning here?

Control Your Content, Control Your Narrative

When we play the Game of Algorithms (written by M.E. Zuckerberg), we all lose. Instead, it’s best to focus your content and marketing on your audience rather than hitting certain KPIs on social metrics.

We always tell our clients to focus their content on the two things they can completely control online: their website and email list. Everything after that is simply leveraging tools where you can share your content with your audience where they are at the beginning, middle or end of their day.

The best marketing campaigns stay devoted wholly to their audience day-in and day-out – they don’t bother with the whims of a platform – good marketing campaigns tell the company’s story of how they provide value to their customers. Want to see what that should look like for your company? Drop us a line.  

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Why an Annual Content Calendar Will Save Your Marketing Strategy

Seeing your content marketing strategy all in one place gives you a panoramic picture of what information you will share with your audience for the year. Planning ahead is the best way to avoid unnecessary repetition while also enabling you to capitalize on key promotions that you don’t want to forget about due to last-minute-marketing.

To be most effective with your content calendar, you’ll need to decide how often you want to post content, and how that content will make it to your target audience. A good mix of scheduled emails, blogs on your own site, and social media is the best way to reach your customers where they are.  

Getting Started is the Hardest Part

We get it – looking at a blank calendar can be intimidating. Take it from the content pros, putting your content strategy to the backburner will do far more harm than good.

Finding one event to mention or promote within your content for each month is an easy way to start building your content calendar. Holidays, local events, National Day of (Fill In the Blank) – it seems like every day is a national day of something – are great topics to get you started.

Next up? Think about some of the most commonly asked questions you get from either prospective or current clients. Write down twelve that you are really tired of answering. Boom. That’s another post per month.  And here we are chipping away at creating a boat load of quality content.

As you’re planning out topics don’t forget to take notes. Never assume that you’ll remember why you wanted to include specific content, or what you wanted to say about it. Make yourself as many notes as you can. Even if it’s just raw ideas, having notes to jog your mind down the road will make creating your content and sticking to your posting schedule go much smoother.

If the idea of drafting a content calendar is a bit too much, or downright stress-inducing, then drop us a line. We do this every single day. Literally. For all sorts of great businesses, just like yours.

At The Found Gen, we cater to businesses who want to maintain their online presence but need all their time to run their business. We work closely with our clients to craft the right combination of online content, email content, and social media activity for them. Part of that is creating a content calendar just for you – with all original content.

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Marketing for an Event or Conference: Plan WAY Ahead or Die Trying.

Marketing for a specific event requires a different approach from your regularly scheduled marketing plan.

You don’t need to abandon your everyday marketing to shift focus to market your event; it’s not one or the other. What you do need to do is plan ahead and give your team enough time to do it right.

The reality is you want your event to be a success. Rushing the marketing can permeate into myriad aspects of your event – from the sponsorship deliverables to the day-of show activities and even the follow-up strategy after the event.

Good Events Can Take Months to Plan & Market

The trick is to plan ahead, WAY ahead. If you’re hosting an annual event this means start talking about next year’s event as soon as this year’s event has ended. For a new event, you want to start planning your marketing as soon as you know it’s happening – even if you don’t have a date yet.

A good rule to live by – is aim for a 3-month minimum to market any live or virtual event. The more time you allot, the more opportunity you have for a streamlined program.

Starting early in the planning process gives you time to secure sponsorships, create dedicated marketing material including flyers, social accounts, email marketing and more.

It also gives attendees time to plan ahead too. Of course, this is even more important if it is a destination, in-person event that people will need to book travel for. But it is also true of virtual events. Even though there are fewer actual arrangements for your attendees to make, blocking out the time to attend a virtual event is more likely to happen if they know about it well in advance.

Pushing Hard Through the Finish

Once you are about two months away from any registration or reservation deadlines you should be reaching out regularly to your audience to make sure people don’t forget or lose track of the deadline dates.

Additionally, the closer to the actual date – the more comprehensive your marketing should become. Social posts should be shared daily with sponsors and speakers also posting about the event, sharing registration information, as well as key value-adds for your attendees.

Event reminders and communications chock full of details to build enthusiasm should go out to those who have registered as the event date rolls in.

Once your event date comes around, you should be ready to go with day-of engagement planned and ready to launch.

While it may all sound so simple, the truth is, there are a lot of moving parts when it comes to event marketing. We would be happy to talk to you more specifically about your upcoming event’s marketing timeline.

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What Everyone Gets Wrong About Marketing, Part One.

The truth is there are a good number of things that people get wrong about marketing – including marketers. We know, we may have just blown your mind.

For one, it’s not sales. It’s also not simple.

But one of the big things is that marketing is not stagnant. It’s constantly evolving and growing and changing. And then, what works for one – doesn’t work for everyone. Oof, we could seriously wax poetic on this topic – which is why we decided to break it into a series.

Marketing For You Versus Your Audience

One of the biggest and most common mistakes in marketing is when a business makes their marketing about themselves.

It’s never about you. It’s about your customer. Get that, and you’re already at the head of the class.

Your marketing copy should speak to the problem you help them solve – when they have the problem, they’re going to give you a call.

Your customers already know what they want, it’s your job to give it to them. You will always be disappointed in a marketing strategy that takes the reverse approach and tries to tell the customer what you think they should want. That’s not the way to gain or retain good clients or customers.  

Thinking that Marketing Works Quickly

Another thing people commonly get wrong is they look at immediate results to define the success of a marketing campaign or strategy. Good marketing looks months and years ahead – not at tomorrow or next week. Why, you ask? Put simply: good marketing compounds in value over time – if you can focus on the long term, you can build a stronger campaign than if you’re focused on driving sales this week.

Not Attributing Results Correctly

The truth of the matter is no one can attribute accurately. You can set up specific phone numbers per campaign (flyers, billboards, website, Google Ads etc) to see where people are calling you from. But what if they saw your flyer in the mail and then checked out your website. Your website would get credit even though the first they interacted with you was the flyer.

It’s why we always focus on your overall cost-per-lead and cost-per-client. Once you have a baseline there, you see if new actions take that cost down (just make sure to give the campaign enough time to work).

We can help you tailor a marketing strategy to the kind of content your customers respond to most. For some of you that will be lots of content – blogs, newsletters, and emails on trending topics related to your business. For others more image rich platforms and posts will get the most attention from your target audience. Every customer base is different. Through engagement with them across multiple platforms we can help you determine what your customers want to see from you.

Let’s talk about how we can help you make the most of your marketing budget!

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Marketing Terms You Think You Know

Pop quiz hot shots.

If you think you have what it takes to take our Buzzfeed-worthy marketing quiz, we won’t hold you back. It’s not for the faint of heart and it certainly is not for anyone who has lived under a rock for the past ten years. Although, listen, we’re truly impressed if you did that – so why not, give it a go.

Alright, alright – we’ll take it easy on you this time and instead share with you a few terms that we use daily in our own offices – while also tossing in some key terms that are always buzzing around the wide world of Marketing.

Go ahead and test your knowledge. We’ll let you grade yourself… this time.

Marketing Terms You Think You Know

Branding – As defined by HubSpot, branding is “the process of researching, developing, and applying a distinctive feature or set of features to your organization so that consumers can begin to associate your brand with your products or services.” This includes everything from your logo, colors and fonts to your brand tone and messaging.

CPL: Cost per Lead. This is a number that showcases how much a company is spending on each generated lead.

CPC: Cost per Client. This number showcases how much a company is spending to convert a generated lead into a client. 

Gated Content – This is when a business offer a piece of unique or exclusive content, like an eBook or a eCourse, in exchange for an opportunity to engage with said prospect in another way including email marketing or other.

Inbound marketing – Drawing customers to you and your brand through the distribution of exclusive and engaging content. Regular blog posts about topics related to your business are a good example of inbound marketing.

Outbound marketing – Reaching out directly to your customers to try to get them interested in a product or service you’re offering. TV commercials are an example of outbound marketing.

Engagement – This is the ways your clients interact with your brand, as well as the ways you interact with them. If you focus your marketing on social media platforms your clients’ engagement will be through their likes, shares, and comments. If you have a greater focus on your own site through blogs the clients’ engagement will be measured more in clicks or replies.

ROI: Probably the most well-known acronym of the marketing world, Return on Investment. This typically highlights what return you can see after spending a certain dollar amount on your marketing.

KPI: Growing in daily lingo is KPI, or Key Performance Indicator, which is typically a quantifiable measure of performance over time for a given objective. Key word is “quantifiable.”

So, how did you do? Let us know if you belong on the marketing honor roll this month! If not now is a great time to reach out to us to talk more about it and how you want to implement these things in your marketing plan.

Oh, and for those of you who really wanted a pop quiz. We’ve got you.

Question: How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?

A. 12

B. 42

C. I bite it

D. What’s a Tootsie Pop?

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Content is Still King. So, Why Are You Not Doing It?

We’ve said it many times before and we’ll say it again – content marketing is where it’s at. It’s withstood the test of time and has proven to be extremely effective. 

If you aren’t seeing results, chances are you may not be doing it right. Here’s some things you’ll want to consider when utilizing a successful content marketing strategy:

You Need Lots of Quality Content

Content marketing is all about getting your audience to like you, trust you, and relate to you – and all of this can be done through creating quality content such as blogs, emails, ebooks, presentations – you name it. And wait for it – utilizing storytelling to make it engaging.

Here are some general tips you can follow to help ensure that your content high-quality: 

Start with a clear strategy: Before you begin creating any content, it is important to have a clear understanding of your overall marketing strategy and goals. Once you’ve identified what you actually want to accomplish, you can develop a plan for creating content that will serve a purpose and provide valuable information for your readers. Which leads us to… 

Write for your audience: It is important to remember who your target audience is and what they are looking for when creating content. Write content that is interesting and relevant to your audience, and make sure to include calls to action that will encourage them to take the next step. 

You’ll Need to Know Your Target Audience

Creating great content is only half the battle. You also need to market it effectively if you want it to get readers to take a certain action after engaging with what you’ve created. Content marketing requires a deep understanding of your audience. What are their needs and wants? Are they strapped for time? Hungry for information? Do they prefer email or are they on social throughout the day? What are their habits and hobbies? What’s driving them to you in the first place? 

Try conducting surveys, focus groups, or interviews with those who may fit your target demographic. Take a moment to be a voyeur, if you will, and try and scope out any trends in online behavior from those who you believe to be your potential clients.

And perhaps most importantly, open your mind to being wrong about who your audience is. All too often, we’ve seen clients box their audience into a particular niche or demographic. The world is your oyster. Don’t be afraid to expand your horizons and realize that your audience may be a whole heck of a lot bigger than you thought. 

Good content marketing is hard work, and can get time-consuming – so if you’re ready to get a team of experts behind you –  give us a call anytime. We love this stuff.