Introduction to Content Marketing

Content Marketing raising awareness and interest within a product or service through the distribution of educational, entertaining or informative material. The most Successful content marketers provide materials that are of high quality and helpful in solving problems people may have.
Content Marketing, when done correctly, can be your leading source of lead generation. There are hundreds of businesses who make all their sales through distributing information. The main function of Content Marketing is to have their material shared and published in places that will reach their target markets eyes. Many businesses create anything from news, video, infographics, white papers, e-books, case studies and static repots, how-to guides, question and answer articles, photos, etc.
Wiki had a great way of summing the definition of Content Marketing up by writing:
“the technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire and engage a clearly defined target audience in order to drive profitable customer action”

Be sure to follow these steps to create material that will be successful :
1. You must fine tune your target market and
2. Study your market’s holes, know its flaws as well as missing knowledge and find solutions
for them
3. With those solutions create valuable and quality content
4. Research and build relationships with associations or site that are capable of distributing
your materials to the right audience.
5. Begin sharing your content. You can do so by submitting your material to sharing sites that
fit your content and type of business.
6. Analysts and measuring ROI and traffic

Here is another chart displaying a case study conducted by MarketingCharts displaying the success rate for each step when launching a content marketing campaign:


It shows the that the majority do have a generally positive experience when working with Content Marketing however the ”Business Results” shows that more than half were under preforming. These results are most likely due to lack of defining their own target market. People will not take interest in your product or services if your materials are complete irrelevant, your Content Marketing campaign will definitely fail for example: LIDER Marketing is currently working with Norn Pants on a content marketing project using an infographic. Norn Pants specialize in high-end male dress pants therefore the info-graphic we chose to do is on pants ONLY. Most info-graphics focused on an entire suit, however, if Norn were to create an infographic on a full suit anyone trailing back to their website through this infograpahic will be looking to buy full suits NOT just pants.

Keeping your content relevant and unique is key to creating brilliant sharable content for your business and projects. We hope you enjoyed this blog post and if you have any questions, comments or requests please leave them in the comment box below!

Sponsored by :Lider Marketing & The Sustainable Entrepreneur (TSE) Project

6 Tips When Starting Your Youtube Business:

Another reader of mine requested that I write a blog about how to start a Youtube Channel that would eventually turn into a business and salary. Starting a Youtube ChannelStarting a Youtube Channel is an easy process if you’re not looking to make any profit. When looking to start a profitable youtube channel that will become a business of it’s own there are many precautions you will need to take to ensure your channel’s success so here are 5 Tips When Starting Your Youtube Business:

1. Figure Out A Solid Subject or Theme For Your Channel’s Content:

Choosing the topic and theme of your channel is an extremely critical and important decision that will effect your success. If you choose a topic that already has a bunch of you tubers who already cover that topic and do a good job at it, It is unlikely you will be more successful than them or have any success at all. Unless you find a creative way to beat your competition, find a topic and theme that isn’t like all the other channels and Youtubers. Here are a few things to check:

Your idea is profitable – Do your research and see if your idea will or can be profitable:
– see if people need informations on a particular topic
– see if there is a flaw in what your competition is doing. ex: A channel that offers great information but lack in the creative sector. You could come in and do both thus winning over the audience.
– Make sure you have an interest in your theme or topic so that you can keep up to date with everything effortlessly and create content with a passion and ambition.
– Make sure you are knowledgeable in the information you share.

2. Film with or within the right settings and backgrounds:

 
Believe it or not this can make the biggest difference when viewers are passing by your channel for the first time. Having a pleasant or professional looking background will influence your viewers in believing that you are a quality blogger/Youtuber. They will be more likely to watch your video and perhaps even subscribe!
Examples of great backgrounds:
– Michael Phan
– Majestic

3. Get to know your targeted audience:

Getting the demographics of your audience is an extremely important thing. You need to understand your demographics interests and wants so that you can create content with the right reading materials, tone and creativity. Here are a few demographics to follow:
– Age -Gender -Hobby/interests – Cultures/Nationalities – Geographics -Personal Experiences

4. Make a few videos before marketing:

I cannot count how many times any in dependent, self employed individual makes this mistake. You need to have content before you start marketing your channel, product, service and general business. As a Youtuber, you should make the VERY MINIMUM five(5) videos before you begin promoting your channel.

5. Create a Facebook Fanpage:

Create a Facebook Fanpage so that your watchers have another account to watch you on. Be sure to add a personal touch to this Facebook page by showing off your personality and showing a bit more of your personal life/projects. For example if you’re blogging about beauty create a video of you going to get your nails/hair done. If you blog about information on the environment create something revolving around your personal projects that involve saving the environment. People love seeing new content about their favourite subscriptions on their Facebook time feed – so get creative!

6.Get in contact with other Youtubers and Channels:

Other than a Facebook Fanpage another great way to get more subscribers is to go to other Youtubers who are doing the same thing as you and ask them to check out your channel. Make sure to write them a personal message or even take a business approach and ask if they would be interested in exchanging promotional services.

I hope this helps you with the basics of starting a small Youtube Channel. Although the process seems quite simple it is time consuming and will become challenging to manage but in exchange you will have a fun and fulling job that will always have new projects awaiting to be developed.

Please let me know if you have any subjects you would like me to write about! Thank you Sarah for the blog request.

Sponsored by LIDER Marketing and The Sustainable Entrepreneur (TSE) Project

4 Reasons You Should Use Social Media To Market Your Business:

1. Our Generation:

Photo credit: us.gmocloud.com

We know all about our generation and that we are currently obsessed with our phones, apps, and social networks. Why not use this to your business’ advantage? Humans nowadays want to connect through the internet and get the latest updates on the brands that fit their personalities and interests. Most people have an account on a social media platform so you should be taking advantage of this opportunity as a small business owner.

2. You Connect and Build Better:

Photo Credit: executivefinancialenterprises.org

Social media is a great way to build a loyal fan base or even client base. Because social media taps deep into your brands personality. Individuals feel as if they’ve gained a personal insight into your business and tend to feel like they can truly connect with your business brand. Social Media allows users to identify whether or not your brand truly fits them and their needs/interests. It also allows you to engage with your followers/fans/clients in a much more personal and satisfying manner thus creating strong relationships with them.

3. Low Cost:

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Social media can be free but you have to have exceptional amounts of talent in content marketing or have an excellent sharing strategy. Social media marketing is one of the lowest costing marketing methods you could possibly invest in and use to market your business and brand. Learn how to promote your brand.

4. Scalability: 

Running campaigns can be a difficult task due to the worry of an ineffective campaign that will amount to a loss on investment. Measuring performance and ROI is much more easy when using social media. With the insights recording most of your pages activity you can easily optimize and change your strategy to perform better according to the detailed. You also have the option of stopping any ads or employees if the results are not what your team projected.

I hope these pointers give all of you some insight into the benefits of maintaining a social media page! If you have a social media page you would like to share please paste the link into the comment board as an example!

 Thanks for reading!

Katie Raspberry | Creative Business Blog 

– Follow us on Instagram: katierasp

Sponsored by:
LIDER Marketing |  Montreal Marketing Boutique

Avocat Sebastien Dube |  Avocat Montreal

5 Ways to Promote Your Business and Brand

1. Start a Blog:

Many businesses owners say their blog is one of their most important assets. Depending on your gender of business your blog can be your primary lead generator if given the right touch of creativity. Some examples are:

Products:

Lufa Farm is a Montreal based greenhouse. It is the first commercial rooftop green house that is ecologically and economically sustainable model for urban farming. They support local businesses that share the same green concepts as them which is green and urban foods.

In their blog they usually talk about other green stores, products and affairs that their buyers generally take great interest in. A lot of research is done in order to really find content that fits their readers  interests and get them to share the content. At the same time, they build relationships through creating this content with not just their readers but with the other businesses they support. As long as the content is creative people will fall in love with the brand and become loyal followers and sometimes buyers.

 Services: LIDER Marketing is a Montreal based Full-Service Marketing boutique that runs their blog quite differently than other marketing businesses. Most of them blog about their latest marketing projects and mostly about themselves and their updates whereas LIDER Marketing takes affairs to another level by blogging about small businesses who have unique concepts, Free Marketing Tips, Business Advice is a , and more.  Because they work with small businesses they created a small business community would really help build their network and help them prosper. Learn more about their project here: Business Advice “>Business Advice Sustainable entrepreneur

• Create social media accounts that are relevant to your brand:

Most businesses have their business social media accounts like Facebook Fan page, Twitter accounts tailored to their business’s feed. But why not create seperate social media accounts focusing on topics/images related to your brand or products? For example: A pet store creating an Instagram page with cute and funny animals or stories, or rustic furniture store creating a blog about how create rustic pieces and designs.The reason for starting a social media project such as this one is to attract your target market without them knowing you’re trying to attract them. And with time you can post about your own business perhaps once a month. It’s a great way to create backlinks. Back links will be created when your content or photos are shared and your website link is in the caption box.

Win an Award

When businesses win or even get nominated for an award they gain quite a bit of exposure. They also appear to be more accredited in comparison to the other businesses that did not win an award (even though it isn’t at all a reliable source to trust, considering they mostly consist of votes only – not stats or accurate business comparisons).

Exchange Promotional Services:

 Exchanging services is a great way to really promote your business. An exchange of service could be anything from placing each other’s logos or websites on each website or doing free materials or services for in exchange for some credits or promotions, examples:Videographers sometimes do celebrity music videos for credits at the beginning of the video. Sometimes music videos, movies and etc are sponsored and paid for by phone companies, alcohol companies and etc. In exchange their product or logo appears in the video/movie. Another example would be RBC + Apple: Apple supplies reduced costs for ipad to RBC and RBC promotes free ipad. Everyone wants an ipad, free or not so all existing member will not be able to get a free one but will want one after trying to get one for free and will eventually think about buying one- In which some do end up purchasing it – a good example of that is myself..Doing services like creating a flyer or going on a talk show to talk about cooking receipts, how to decorate your home, how to save money, etc  all for free in exchange for a mentioning your business and services/profession.

Do something helpful or heart warming with no expectation of getting anything back:

Photo Credit: startupfashion.com

We’ve all seen this method of marketing, some people are touched and others might be disgusted. When people first started promoting their brands through filming a positive stories filled with heart-felt emotional things it was really effective. Some example would be the ‘’Dove’’ commercial and how they told women who thought they were ugly that they were in fact beautiful or the Indian prankster who helped a homeless man get off the street, get a job, and rent his own apartment. Many people shared these videos thus creating back links, they also made them go viral.Dove Advertisement: http://goo.gl/Qm3T7bHomeless man is given $1000:  http://goo.gl/ImKzPRHomeless man gets an apartment and starts new life: http://goo.gl/o8nh2RHowever, there was a lot of controversy and debate about how this businesses or celebrities are using social issues, such as those in these videos, for promotional alone and they and it through some people off :  I hope you enjoyed my 5 tips on promoting your business for particularly free!

Small Business Concepts/Ideas

This post is dedicated to a friend of mine who has wondered what the next step in her life is.  She is 22, earns about $40 000 a year, drop dead gorgeous and yet something is missing. She loves her job but wonders if it’s for her. She thinks it lacks room for achieving current career goals she has set for herself. I told her keep your job if you love it; and then create a very small business. She responded she didn’t know what she would be good in so I told her not to worry I’ll help her out. Here are a few things you can do to enhance your professional life:

There are so many businesses you can start that can also be a hobby and that are not too demanding on your time. You can even use some of these to replace the work you have now if you’re not entirely happy where you are. Here we go:

1.The first thing you need to do is decide what your true hobbies are such as my friend, she loves to do story telling. So I suggested starting writing a blog. There are people in this world who make a lot of money just from having a blog. They use their blog as an advertisement tool. If you see a blog with a brand name advertising on the side; that company is paying for it, or the writer just really likes them. Either way, you can make a descent $300 off a blog that gets 300 views a day, and that isn’t a hard goal to make. John Chow earns $300 000 a year for spending 2 hours a day rambling about nothing. He got famous because he was apparently the go to blog if you wanted to learn about making money off of social media. Pretty cool hmm?

If you think blogging will take up too much time then perhaps opening a small e-commerce website! My sister is currently running one. Check out her website to get a better idea and understanding at minarinshop.com she also maintains a blog to increase her SEO minarin.livejournal.com she has hired an assistant to help her with the work while also attending school as well as working for a website company doing web development from home. She works perhaps 3-4hours a week on her business which is nice & relaxing while bringing in an extra yearly income of $7200.

2.Take that hobby and find out if you have enough knowledge to pursuit it. For example, my friend Tassia, does she have the right grammar and an extended vocabulary to write and appeal to readers? Does she know how blogs work? Does she know what to write about? She would need to research  and read many blogs then decided if she should register for a night course in English at a Montreal university such as  Concordia: http://english.concordia.ca/   OR she can teach herself. How? Over the internet! The internet as taught me so many things – there are so many professionals who blog about their work, why not take advance of the endless learning possibilities!

For the e-commerce find out what is required and learn what advantages come from being a business owner! For example: If your business is in your own name you DON’T need to register it. And if your business makes under $30 000 you DON’T need to charge taxes on your products!

Do enough research so that you can benefit. Also if you need my help in anything just send me an email and I’ll write a blog post about it katiesinare@icloud.com

Start researching.

3.Figure out what you’ll do with your business if you’re going to blog, what are you going to blog about? How far do you want it to go? Will your

blog end up in a magazine? Will you send it to the newspapers? Are you planning on making a profit off blog?

For e-commences which product will you sell? How will you stand out from others? Who will you target be?  What will your sales goals be? What will the store’s personality be? How will you sell it?

Other great stay at home fields are:

• Social Media Maintenance
• Photography or film
• Animator
• Recruiting ( A friend of mine runs a website development company and he constantly gets contacts for animation and social media. He charges (let’s assume) $400/month and then hires a sub-contractor and pays them $200 a month. He just made a profit by doing nothing at all.
• Marketing (in design)
• Sculpting
• Tax Return/Accounting

Start planning and good luck! Let me know how this blog helped you!

Katie

Sponsored by: Kontego Networks Inc  The coolest internet provider in Montreal :)