Best Nurture Marketing Blogs
We are going to be celebrating our fifth birthday soon, and in honor of the celebration thought this would be a good time to acknowledge some of the other people who blog about nurture marketing. It has become an increasingly popular topic and these blogs are all excellent – filled with useful tips, techniques, tools and advice.
Jim Cecil, as most of you know, is the father of nurture marketing. He has been creating nurture marketing programs for 30 years now, and his blog posts are always insightful.
Jim founded the Nurture Institute (now called Nurture Marketing) and also blogs here, along with other Nurture Marketing team members.
It’s not a huge surprise that the HubSpot blog offers a lot of nurture marketing tips and strategies – their software is designed specifically to help companies do lead nurturing.
Silverpop Blog: Email.Marketing.Automation
Silverpop is another marketing automation vendor that devotes a lot of time to talking about lead nurturing. Check out the case studies and specific nurturing tactics.
Nurture is a new marketing automation tool for B2B marketers. The software is cool and the blog is all about building long-term trusted relationships.
Also worth checking out…
There are a lot of marketing automation vendor blogs that cover lead nurturing from time to time. It’s worth keeping on eye on all them:
And it’s worth reading the perspective of social media marketers and virtual assistants who blog from time to time about nurture marketing:
Judy Lorenz, BarJD Communications
3 Best Questions to Ask Marketing Freelancers
If you are short on time, here are 3 questions that give you the fastest way to identify whether you are talking to someone who really knows what they are doing.
1. What process do you use when you work with clients?
In other words, what are the steps they are going to go through when they work with you?
Marketing freelancers who have a lot of experience typically have a pretty well-defined system. They are going to need certain information from you, they are going to go through specific steps, they are going to give you certain reports, etc.
The more clearly they can articulate the process, the better. Read more
Ready for PR?
Before you hire a PR agency or public relations consultant to help you get publicity for your company, you’ll want to do a little self-assessment ahead of time to determine what you have to work with.
Spend an hour or two going over these questions with your management team and prepare a short list of answers.
When you come to an initial meeting with this information, you will impress the PR people you talk to and have a much more useful conversation with them.
They’ll be able to give you a much better idea of what they can do for you, what kind of results will be reasonable, and how much it will cost.
I. What do you have to work with?
Company News
1. What new product announcements are planned over the next six months?
2. Any new services (consulting. training, etc.)?
3. Are you changing the way you deliver products or services (such as moving to online training)?
4. Anything new with pricing?
5. Any new hires to the management team?
6. Planning to move to a new location?
7. Any new partnerships?
8. Any new deals?
9. Have you won any awards recently?
Trends
10. What are the current trends in your market? How do you fit in?
11. What current business trends are affecting your business? Are you outsourcing? Feeling the effects of a market recovery or recession?
Experts
12. Is anyone in your company considered an industry expert? What is their area of expertise?
13. Who at your company is blogging?
14. Who is tweeting?
15. Who manages your Facebook page?
16. Who is responsible for your company’s presence on LinkedIn and other social networks?
17. Do you have anyone creating podcasts or videos?
Clients
18. Do you have any relatively new case studies? For what companies? What kind of results did they achieve with your software?
19. Do you have any users at large or well-known companies who are willing to be quoted?
20. Is there anything unusual about any of your users?
21. Is any user doing something different or unusual with your software?
22. Is there anything highly visual about the way people use your software? Or what they do before or after using the software?
23. If you analyzed the purchase patterns of your users, would that show anything interesting?
Education Strategy
24. Is there a topic about which you are trying to educate the market? Do you advocate a particular strategy or point of view?
Personalities
25. Is there anything unusual or quirky about your founder, president, or management team? This could include their background, hobbies, where they live, what kind of car they drive, their work style, etc.
26. Do you have any unusual employees (background, hobbies, etc.)?
27. If you have investors, are any well-known or unusual?
28. Is there anything unusual about the way you run the company? The perks you offer staff?
29. Do you do anything unusual for holidays?
30. Are there any topics (not software or business-related) about which you feel strongly?
Giving Back
31. Do you do anything to support the local community? Contribute to or volunteer at charities?
II. Where do you want to get publicity?
· What websites are most influential in your market?
· What blogs?
· What newspapers?
· What newsletters?
· What e-mail newsletters?
· What magazines?
· What online communities/social networks?
· What columnists?
· What radio or TV shows?
· What analysts?
· Who else matters in your market?
III. What are your goals for your PR effort?
· Are you looking for lead generation?
· Sales?
· Recruiting?
· Impress partners?
· Build a channel?
· Investors?
· Partners?
IV. In what time frame do you need to see results?
- As soon as possible
- 6-12 months
- 12-24 months
- Ongoing
How to Get Marketing Freelancers Up to Speed Fast – Part 2
In the last post, I said that we use a 2-part strategy to educate marketing freelancers effectively and inexpensively.
Here’s the second part…
Whenever we can, we choose the first project a new marketing freelancer works on so they can learn while they are doing productive work.
For us, that means we look for a customer-facing project. In marketing, a good first project is very often a case study or gathering testimonials.
That lets the marketing freelancer learn how people use the product or service, what it does for them, how they use it, and where the value is. Sure, you can tell them this yourself, but the information sinks in faster and more thoroughly when they hear it directly from the customers. Plus, they hear the language customers use, which is most likely different from what you say internally.
That information then provides a powerful foundation that informs everything else they do.
If the next project is designing a brochure, writing a sales letter, doing a press release, or updating the website – the result will be better because the freelancer now has a better understanding of how customers think and where they find value.
Even the best, smartest, most experienced marketing freelancers need to do this ramping up – they’ll do it better while working, and you’ll be getting useful work while they are learning. It’s a win-win.
So think about what kinds of projects do not require a lot of knowledge to do AND will let your marketing freelancers learn more about your business while they work.
Ideas For Educational Articles
Need ideas for articles that you can use in an email newsletter, a nurture program (email or regular mail), a blog, or just to add to your website to provide keyword fodder for search engines?
Here’s a list I came up with for clients:
- What concepts people need to understand before they fully appreciate the value you provide
- What steps you go through when you work with people
- What your customers or clients should prepare before they start working with you
- Why your company is better than competitors
- What kind of clients you want (or don’t want)
- What kind of results people should expect from working with you
- Common objections you run into during the sales cycle (and how you deal with them)
- Common misconceptions people have about the type of work you do
- How people can get more out of what you do for them
- Legal issues they need to be aware of
- Financial issues they need to be aware of
- Top 10 reasons to work with you
- Worksheet that helps people figure out how much money they will save by working with you
- What is different about the way your company does things
- What kinds of things can go wrong with the type of work you do (and how you keep that from happening)
- What people don’t know about your company (that you wish they did)
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