Rebecca's Blog - Page 28 of 59 - Creative Agency Secrets

How to Get Subscribers to My Email Newsletter?

26 July, 2017/0 Comments/in B2B, Copywriting, Email, Marketing ideas /by Rebecca Caroe

I just started a curated newsletter about personal finance for millennials. Each issue includes 10 curated articles from various sources about investing, budgeting, paying off loans, and etc. I do not have any subscribers yet.

Well done – getting started.

Focus on Your Marketing Assets

Let’s help you work out the key answers you need: Start with answering these questions.

Do you have a website?
On your website how do you invite subscription?
Have you got social profiles?
On your social profiles, how do you invite subscriptions?

So you’ve guessed, you need to get people to visit a place on the web which you own (website / social profiles) and then invite them to join your newsletter. Consider what ‘offer’ you can make which is attractive to them in addition to getting the articles. Sumo.com has a good WordPress plugin for subscriptions. Also check out Push Notifications as many sites prefer this as subscribers won’t share their email address. I wrote this article about Notifications

Push Notifications: Is this the death of email newsletters?

Things for you to GrowthHack test

Once you have started the newsletter and finding subscribers, you need to work on continuously improving your offer and the means for people to join it. Growth hacking is the process of improvement and measurement.

Is 10 articles too few / too may / just right?
What offer can you make to subscribers?
How are you monetising your newsletter?
Which brands can you collaborate with to grow your list with theirs in a joint venture arrangement?
What are your key metrics and ideal customer profile?

Now grow your profile

Get known by answering questions in public which relate to your issue (Financial services) and your audience (millennials). By showing off your knowledge and linking back to your website or social profile, you can encourage people to remember your brand and respond – starting discussions, which further allow you to show off your expertise.

Good places to start are Reddit and Quora search for questions on your topics of interest e.g. student loans. Also find niche financial services websites and discussion forums
And also use Google Alerts to search and email you links to places where your key words are being added to the internet
Bookmark websites where these show up regularly. Approach them and ask if you can write a guest article with a link-back to your website

Good luck and keep up the good work.

This answer was originally posted on Clarity.fm

Become Social Media Savvy with the Social Media Conference 2017

20 July, 2017/0 Comments/in B2B, B2C, Marketing, Public Speaking, Social Media /by Creative Agency Secrets Team

This September, the Social Media Conference is happening again! We are big fans of the content, even more so this year because our very own Rebecca Caroe is a speaker!

Are you looking to use Social Media to benefit your business but just don’t know how?

Social Media isn’t just for kids these days. In fact, it’s one of the biggest platforms for a business to market in today’s environment. Whether it be Business to Consumer or Business to Business, the Social Media Conference 2017 provides insights on how to utilise these skills to your business benefit.

Expand your knowledge in this field through New Zealand’s biggest Social Media conference hosted by The Online Business Academy for its fourth year.

Rebecca Caroe (CEO of Creative Agency Secrets)

Marketing experts from all over the world come together to talk about their experiences with Social Media, how it helped them in their business ventures and how it can help you market to a larger audience through Social Media.

Listen

Wanita Z (Founder of the Online Business Academy)
John Kapos “Chocolate Johnny” (Chocolatier to Marketing Mogul)
Andrew Baird (Business Coach)
Our very own Rebecca Caroe on “The Art of Pre-suasion: Content, Keywords and Social.”

Discover

Omni channel Experience
Social Selling through Social Media
How to run Live Events

Learn

Be Seen, Heard and Found Online
Build and networking your brand through Social Media Outlets
Win your customers through Social Media
Deal with the difficult customers online

Master

Twitter
Facebook
Snapchat
Instagram
LinkedIn
Pinterest
YouTube
And much more

Seize the opportunity to network with business owners from all over the country and develop connections for your business. Gain information that can assist with expanding your business through Social Media platforms and understand how Social Media aids with keeping up to date with the evolving business world. If you’re serious about expanding your business, you wouldn’t want to miss Social Media Conference 2017.

SkyCity Auckland
September 15th and 16th 2017
8:00am – 5:00 pm

Use the code “REBECCA” at the checkout to get a $250 discount!

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Can you tell when you’ve found the right business in search?

18 July, 2017/0 Comments/in SEO /by Rebecca Caroe

I was searching for a music streaming service for classical music. But I got the name wrong.

I knew I had not found the right business in my search results when I clicked through to the best result, and found this website design (top image). Realising my mistake, I quickly revised my search (by spelling the business name correctly) and was directed to the second page – where I knew I’d arrived at the site I wanted.

You can see how I worked out my error, through the image design, layout and styling. It’s dated and not mobile responsive. Styled as 2000s versus 2017.

Now imagine if that actually WAS the correct result and it was the business I wanted. What first impression is your website giving to first time visitors?

NZ Entrepreneur Magazine features our article

6 July, 2017/0 Comments/in Local Marketing, Marketing ideas /by Rebecca Caroe

We are stoked that this month’s NZ Entrepreneur Magazine has published an article by Rebecca. Called

Marketing Strategies to Grow and Scale a local business, it sets out 12 top tactics for local marketing.

Subscribe to NZ Entrepreneur Magazine to get it monthly delivered to your inbox.

Ranking Factors 2017 report from SEMRush

What’s new in SEO? 5 actions to do today

5 July, 2017/0 Comments/in B2B, B2C, Content Marketing, Copywriting, Data, Digital media, Marketing, Marketing ideas, SEO /by Rebecca Caroe

Last week I got the latest research on SEO from trusted brand SEM Rush. You can download and read their report Ranking Factors 2017 in SEO.

Ranking Factors 2017 report from SEMRush

Creative Agency Secrets has read the whole report and below are 5 SEO tasks you can initiate immediately for your own website or ecommerce store.

The report has a number of chapters each of which is followed by “What this means to you as a marketer” Read these pages for the SEMRush interpretation of their research findings.

5 SEO actions for 2017

Check you have a secure (https) website. Get a SSL Certificate installed if your url begins http://. See Secure websites below
Find websites which can link back to you. Clients, Suppliers, News / Magazines, Directories. See Referring Domains below
Get ideas for your SEO and your content creation from Answer the Public research tool
Use more keywords on your “cornerstone” content pages. See Keywords below.
Plan the visitor pathway through your site especially with a view to reducing bounce rate.

The Detailed insights

Note these are paraphrased from the SEMRush report including some verbatim quotes. All the ACTION FOR YOU tasks are recommendations by us for your website or ecommerce store. The page numbers are the actual page number in the report NOT the number top RHS.

If you want help, Creative Agency Secrets offers 2 services – we can do it for you; we can teach you how to do it yourself.

Secure websites – page 6. The higher the page position in search, the higher the keyword search volume most sites are secure https domains. We interpret this that websites with SSL are trusted and are gaining over plain www and http sites.
Referring domains – page 10. The pages that rank higher have more backlinks from unique domains. Websites that appear on SERPs for high-volume keywords have significantly more backlinks than ones that appear for low-volume keywords — almost 10 times more. ACTION FOR YOU the competition for high-volume keywords is vicious, and those websites are invincible. But for low-volume keywords the competition is not so tough, so some link building could bring tremendous results.
Content length – page 18. What we saw first was that there is generally more content on the pages that rank higher for all search volume intervals. There is more content on the pages with long-tail keywords than on those with short-head keywords. ACTION FOR YOU pick your “cornerstone” content pages and work them HARD for SEO goodness. Content length is important for your page’s success as long as it is valuable, well-written, and optimised, especially if you target high volume keywords.
Keywords – page 23. In the high volume keyword group. the majority of the pages add a keyword to their title, meta and body copy but the occurrence of the keyword in the meta description does not influence the page rankings. Pages that rank for long-tail keywords repeat those keywords less often than pages that rank for short-head keywords. The pages on the first positions (for both longtails and short-heads) have noticeably more keywords than all other pages. ACTION FOR YOU If you plan to rank by long tail keywords, having an exact-match keyword in your on-page SEO elements is not crucial. In fact, it is more important to diversify the semantic core of your text and make it relevant to the target keyword rather than copying it. The presence of a video didn’t show a significant influence on page rankings, so we came to the conclusion that video itself is not a silver bullet. However, in certain niches clients expect video content, so it makes sense to provide it. Consider your audience’s demands, and if they include visual support, use video.
Volume of visitors – page 33. Not a strong correlation to page rank here especially if your search phrases are low(er) volume searches. For the low-volume keyword group, the trend is flat, indicating that a page’s position does not strongly correlate with its number of total monthly visits. For high-volume popular keywords, the number of page visits gets noticeably smaller for sites that rank below the 12th position. ACTION FOR YOU this means organic search is not the only thing you should be concentrating on. Drive a strong traffic from direct and social media linked visits by pushing brand awareness on these platforms and also through newsletters.
Bounce Rate – page 37. The higher a page’s position is, the lower its bounce rate. The user navigates through three to three-and-a-half pages per website, per visit. As your site moves towards the top of the SERP, there are more pages per session for every domain. ACTION FOR YOU firstly ensure you have strong internal page linking. Think about what you want the visitor to do next on every page. Connect with Cornerstone content discussed above. Also analyse your rivals (How to compare my site to a competitor’s) Inside Google Analytics, check your queries performance and lastly, find low ranking pages for Bounce and improve them to reduce bounce rate and page rank.

Marketing offer, SEMRush, creative agency secrets,

SEMRush custom offer at the end of the report

And a cunning end-point which is a marketing “trick” I’ve used a lot for clients – on the very, very last page is an offer. A really good one. SEMRush will do a niche study for your industry if you write to ask. We did (for a client) and they said they’d been overwhelmed and would put it on the list…. but still. This is a fabulous reward for the people who do read all the way to the end. #TopTip

Ready to rock with some improvements on your business SEO? Let’s get started together!

How to hire any expert e.g. a website developer

2 July, 2017/0 Comments/in B2B, B2C, Golden Question, Pitching /by Rebecca Caroe

It’s really easy to find a specialist supplier. It’s really difficult to find out if they are any good at that specialism. Especially when it is in an area that you know nothing about.

What is an Expert? Image Credit: Workcabincommunications.ca

Giving a keynote speech to an industry group recently I was stunned to find how many felt that they did not have the confidence to hire a website designer. This motivated me to write this short guide.

How to hire an expert (when you don’t know)

Are you a business owner who feels that they got mis-sold or ripped off by a website design project?

Did you pay a lot of money and find that the website you got did not deliver what was promised?

This is my tried and tested technique that will help you to find a supplier who is both an expert and will work well with your project situation.

Start with the outcome you want. Can you describe in plain English what you want to happen by the end of the project? Use this to explain what you want to buy. So you could say I need a website that will showcase my products to customers living in Australian cities who buy mens fashion. That is much clearer than “I want a website that will put me on page one of Google”. [By the way, that’s impossible to promise – so don’t trust anyone who says they can do this for you.] When we work with clients seeking websites, read the descriptions we write about their projects.
Ask good questions. By gaining detail from questions, you can discover the depth of expertise in each business you talk to. Let’s say you have a written quote from a web developer explaining how they’d achieve your outcome. You can ask them questions like “What’s the best way to achieve my outcome?” and “How will you go about doing that?”. So if they say that on-page SEO is the best way to achieve search results for customers living in Australian cities who buy mens fashion, ask them to show you HOW they’ll do it. Step. By. Step. Yes, I’d ask them to explain in this level of detail. If they can’t do it, or do not appear consistent, or are unwilling that’s a big red flag that they may not have a robust process methodology.
Know the language they use and understand it. Write down the words they use in written submissions and in conversation. Go away and look them up. What is on-page SEO? How do UTM Tags work? There is no shame in research and increasing YOUR knowledge. And afterwards, you can follow up and get them to explain more about the phrase they used once you understand what it is. So that’s back to Step 2 – ask good questions.
Run tests when you are face to face. Any skilled operator should be able to show you real live work jobs that they have done or are currently working on that will be using the same techniques as your project. So when you meet your expert – get them to SHOW you what they mean. Open up Google Analytics for YOUR website live in the meeting on your laptop. Ask them for their views on your recent traffic history. Watch how they browse inside Google Analytics – do they know the sub-menus, can they navigate confidently to the answer they’re talking about, do they explain something which you hadn’t noticed? Nobody who works in marketing should be ignorant of GA. Including YOU. So if they don’t or can’t use it. Run away fast. Another test you can run is to show them a problem you have and ask how they’d fix it. Then ask them “How will I know that this problem is fixed?” so that they show you the proof that they are an expert and good at their job and can prove it as well.
Think hard before hiring a friend. Many business people like to recommend other businesses. Nothing wrong with this. But in my experience, your friend or your friend’s friend is probably not the only person who can help you. Do interview the friend, but also go and look for other supplier experts and compare them fairly. You want the best value for your business, after all, don’t you?

Now you’ve got a good core set of skills to start your expert hiring process. Be courageous and keep good records – you won’t regret it.

And if you want a website built, or some direct response copywriting, or a video made and overall effective marketing done that brings in sales – get in touch with us. We will either teach you how to do it yourself or we can do it for you. Easy!

You are invited to… UNLOCKED: SEO and Video Secrets

24 June, 2017/0 Comments/in Marketing /by Creative Agency Secrets Team

Don’t be a Digital Caveman!

After the success of our last SEO event, Creative Agency Secrets has teamed with KOR Creative to bring you Unlocked: SEO and Video Secrets!

With more customers reaching for businesses that utilise digital channels, it pays to invest in a good online strategy. SEO can help your website gain more traffic and leads, whilst video provides a visual appeal. Video and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) are two key elements to increase your search engine ranking.

Rebecca Caroe and Steve Wallace have prepared a breakfast seminar where you can learn how to attract quality traffic to your website, through SEO and Video.

For one of our clients, we helped to boost their website from the second page of Google search to the second link on the first page! Click here to see how SEO helped Baucher Consulting get to the top of the search list!

You will also have the opportunity to network with local business owners while feasting on a breakfast of your choice at this exclusive CAS and KOR event!

There are a limited amount of seats, so be sure to get in quick.

Enter the code BIZDOJO2017 for a 50% discount at the checkout!

Reserve your space here!

Steve Wallace (KOR Creative)

Rebecca Caroe (Creative Agency Secrets)

The Event Promotion Playbook

21 June, 2017/0 Comments/in Marketing /by Rebecca Caroe

You want to run an event for your business promotion, but are unsure how to promote it and get attendees. This playbook of tips encourages cross-publicity from offline to online and helps to build up an email mailing list which will also help with future promotions.

Starting with a focus on Social Media

1 – Creating excellent content about your event speaker(s). This should be original so ask for an interview and video them as they talk to you.

2 – Edit their interview into 90 seconds long videos. Include a start and end “card” with the event logo and your business URL. Add sub-titles so the Facebook feed will play them and the watcher can understand. Start to publish on Facebook and LinkedIn and link to the video on other relevant channels (local newspapers, Neighbourly, Chamber of Commerce etc)

3 – Publish the video to your Website blog

4 – Make a picture of the presenter and include a quotation from their 2017 speech. Also share this on Facebook and on your blog. On the picture, always have your URL

5 – Follow the presenter’s personal blog / websites. This is so you can do curated content.

6 – Every Friday send an email to your mailing list with a link to the video you published that week. Also include links to the other articles written by the speaker(s) from your list in 5 above.

Here is a good example of a preview video from a conference

https://vimeo.com/156510830

7 – Encourage readers to add comments to the videos as you share them. What questions does this raise for you? How would you solve this? Does this match with your experience?

8 – On the website, add a prominent signup to news form either by lightbox or on the page header – explain what people get when they sign up (Fridaynews with new educational video content and links to expert articles)

9 – Also publish the newsletter on the blog every week

10 – As the event gets closer, add in more publicity for the speakers on the theme of the event itself – you can do this by asking the speaking team to allow you to interview them by Hangout or Skype video chat. Your interview should be 3 questions only.

11 – Get your video edited down to 90 seconds as in 2 above.

12 – Make a still image of the person with a quote from the video (just like above)

13 – Share on social, add to the newsletter, encourage people to comment or ask questions. Ask the speakers to also share the video onto their website and social channels.

14 – Continue weekly until you release the tickets for the event. By this time you should have a good mailing list of prospects and this will help early bird ticket sales.

The Webstock conference in Wellington each February is a very good example o this methodology – join their mailing list to see how it can be done. Note their newsletter also shares jobs and event listings which is a very nice way to enable them to stay relevant in the year between conferences.

Go rock your event… and don’t forget to video it and release the video afterwards so the people who didn’t come realise what they missed!

4 Points That Suggest Traditional and Digital Marketing Methods are Similar

14 June, 2017/0 Comments/in Marketing /by Rebecca Caroe

There will always be debate when it comes to marketing a business using digital and traditional marketing methods, and while there are no right or wrong ways when it comes to marketing a business, you’ll find a lot of business owners prefer one of the routes rather than both. Some marketers prefer traditional marketing because their target audience is local, whereas others prefer digital marketing because they’re trying to target an audience on a global scale.

Traditional and Digital Marketing ImageCredit: LinkedIn

However, both techniques are a lot more similar than people think and here are a few points that would suggest this.

Both Techniques Offer Cost-Effective Marketing Strategies

The great benefit of both techniques is that while the cost in marketing can vary a lot depending on the methods used, both techniques still offer free or very affordable marketing strategies. Take digital marketing, for example, where there are no costs involved when it comes to social media marketing unless a business wants to take advantage of one of the advertising platforms available. The same also goes for a traditional marketing method such as leaflet distribution – leaflets cost very little to print and paying someone to distribute them is affordable.

If you’re looking to market a business but you’re unsure of what route to take, consider obtaining a master in marketing online using an online MSM program, as that will give you the knowledge you need to take your business forward.

Each Marketing Strategy Can Target a Specific Demographic

With the help of social media platforms, it’s now very easy to get insight on demographics so you can target a specific age range or country, which makes digital marketing very easy. The same goes for traditional marketing methods such as leaflet distribution – you can easily target family homes or specific age ranges thanks to local/online records and user statistics.

Excellent Chance of Success

Whether you opt for the traditional marketing route, digital marketing, or even both, you can be sure that both techniques offer a brilliant chance of success if the correct marketing strategies are deployed. There is no higher chance of success rate for either technique as each offers different prospects depending on the type of business and audience you’re targeting – so taking advantage of both techniques could prove to be successful.

Techniques Can Be Used Together

The benefit of both marketing techniques is that they can be used together. If your business is new, you can always opt for a digital marketing strategy using social media to keep costs at a minimum, but there’s nothing wrong with using both techniques together as your business starts to grow. Most businesses will advertise locally using postcards and leaflets, but then they will also start a social media marketing campaign around the same time to get more exposure.

Both marketing techniques offer a variety of benefits depending on the business that implements them. However, even though they are completely different techniques in terms of the work involved in marketing, the above suggests that they are, in fact, quite similar after all.