And for many agencies, the old way of soliciting content from clients worked. Put it in the RFP, client says, “Hmm! That looks good, let’s do that.” And voila! Content happens. But those days are over. Agencies and clients are getting savvier.

In order to position your agency as an efficient and strategic partner to clients, we recommend the following tactics on how to build a content team for your marketing agency that kills it.

Create a content team & find resources that can execute on client content needs.

The best strategy in the world goes nowhere without a team in place to execute.

What is the current makeup of your agency’s content team? Is there a content team?

Again, the old way of doing content was delegating roles to account managers and creative copywriters. But strategic content marketing means finding and hiring talent to create not just content, but valuable content.

Hire a content strategist/editor

Your content team starts with finding the right person responsible for guiding the strategy, understanding audiences, and selling content to your clients.

Some outlets might recommend separating the strategist and the editor. It’s not a bad idea, but being sensitive to head count and costs, finding someone that can straddle the strategist/editor role can definitely work.

The content strategist sets the agenda, but also would serve as the editor in charge of overseeing a content calendar, approving pieces for publication, and maintaining communication with your clients. Striking the balance between editorial integrity and marketing initiatives is the chief goal of a successful editor and/or strategist.

Think of the content strategist as a creative director of sorts. Yes, the creative director can design, if needed. But ultimately, their value is in the strategy, oversight, and direction of projects.

Hire one in-house writer

Freelance will never completely displace in-house writing talent. Having an in-house writer who can create client content and work with freelancers is important.

An ideal writer will have some experience in using data to tell interesting, compelling stories. Additionally, this writer should be able to deliver on tight deadlines, show an insatiable curiosity in your clients’ products or services, and be able to effectively communicate the tone and voice of your client(s).

Hire a social media strategist & community-builder

Content needs promotion and a community. Finding someone capable of building a community for your clients is key to raising awareness for your content efforts.

Hire someone that understands how to use social media, promote, and share content for clients. And if they aren’t going to be the ones executing the tactics, they should be able to articulate a vision that aligns with your client’s overall content goals.

Hire a second writer or start building your freelance network

If you’re in the fortunate position to accrue enough work for more than one person, you should consider either hiring another in-house writer or building a network of freelancers (even just one freelancer is a huge start).

Consider a freelance/vendor manager

This is a relatively new position in marketing, but many agencies are using networks like Verblio (formerly BlogMutt) to source content and 99designs to source graphic design and designers. As convenient as both solutions are, managing the volume of work and their respective networks can be a lot.

We’re starting to see more agencies and businesses hire a person that sits at the nexus of vendor and agency. This account manager oversees that vendor projects are delivered on time and on budget. If your agency uses a lot of vendors like Verblio, consider hiring for this position.

Enter Verblio for freelance & content scale

Verblio (formerly BlogMutt) is one of the best ways to scale your content capabilities beyond your core team. In fact, most agencies will hire in-house talent and use Verblio to scale as client content needs grow. If you want to see how Verblio works for agencies, sign up for an upcoming agency webinar.

The post How to Build a Content Team for Your Marketing Agency That Kills It appeared first on Verblio.

I read somewhere (can’t find it now, sorry) that productive people constantly try out new ways to be productive. It could be a new approach to a to-do list, putting everything on a calendar, planning their day the night before, whatever it takes. But one thing is for sure, productive people are constantly tweaking and optimizing their routines to stay as productive as possible.

Consider this one stupid-simple little hack that could make your day more productive and your life a lot less stressful.

This is the Ivy Lee Method:

1. At the end of each workday, write down the six most important things you need to accomplish tomorrow. Do not write down more than six tasks.

2. Prioritize those six items in order of their true importance.

3. When you arrive tomorrow, concentrate only on the first task. Work until the first task is finished before moving on to the second task.

4. Approach the rest of your list in the same fashion. At the end of the day, move any unfinished items to a new list of six tasks for the following day.

5. Repeat this process every working day.

That’s it. It’s that freaking simple. We’ve been using it for a little over a month now. Here’s what we like about this process:

How Marketing at Verblio Uses the Ivy Lee Method

First, we divide our projects into two buckets.

The Big 5: These are the big initiatives that we want to complete in two-week sprints. If there is an item on our Big 5 that will take longer than two weeks, we need to make it smaller (it’s, frankly, too big for our Big 5). You gotta set boundaries!

The purpose of the Big 5 was to ensure that at the end of the year, when management asks what we do, we don’t stand there going: “Crap, I felt busy all year, but I don’t remember one thing that we did.” This would be bad.

So we created the Big 5 to anticipate that question and highlight big wins for our department.

The Daily 6: The Daily 6 are the six items of importance that we borrowed from the Ivy Lee Method. The Daily 6 should be small enough that they can be reasonably accomplished in one day. If not, they are too big and we need to make the task(s) smaller. Daily tasks should contribute to the Big 5 (allowing for 1-2 tasks that fall outside the Big 5 scope).

Productive people are ruthless about what’s important and what’s not. So if there are tasks on our Daily 6 not contributing to our Big 5, something’s amiss and we need to recalibrate.

Our Productivity Benefits Using Ivy Lee Method & “Big 5”

It keeps us focused on the big picture.

It’s so easy to get mired in the day-to-day, that you lose sight of what’s important. We found that having a Big 5 makes us prioritize what’s truly important.

Getting 6 things done per day boosts morale & creates momentum.

The Ivy Lee Method is dead simple. It’s just six things that you should be able to get done in a day. Only 6? Yes! I would argue that most people don’t get through their to-do lists on a daily basis.

In fact:

Studies have shown that nearly two in three professionals write to-do lists, but just 41 percent of the items on there actually get done.

So start with six. There is no Trello board, no insanely complex Gantt chart. Six items. Keep it simple.

Do them. Gain confidence. Get momentum. Improve morale. Isn’t that a nice sentiment?

Six items leaves time for unexpected events & longer tasks.

By keeping your list manageable, you keep time open for last-second requests or tasks that take longer than expected.

It’s called the “planning fallacy” and it was coined by Daniel Kahnemann and Amos Tversky. Essentially, we have an optimism bias when it comes to estimating how long a task will take. Regardless of how long previous tasks take, we always think that this time it’s going to be faster. Sadly, it’s not.

The secret to happiness? Under-promise, over-deliver.

This should be on my gravestone. I love this mantra, but rarely follow it. I always think I can bite off more than I can chew and end up with my foot in my mouth.

The Ivy Lee Method forces me (and hopefully, you) to under-promise what you can deliver on. Lower your expectations and it’ll make your life a lot happier.

Barry Schwartz, in his TED Talk “The Paradox of Choice,” agrees:

The secret to happiness—this is what you all came for—the secret to happiness is low expectations.

By the way, that’s a great TED Talk. The whole thing. You should watch it.

Speaking of productivity…who’s doing your blogging?

If you’re a productivity wonk like we are, you should consider outsourcing the things that are on your Big 5 or Daily 6.

Is blogging on your to-do list? We can handle your business blogging so you can focus on other priorities. Hey, just something to think about.

The post The Only To-Do List You Need To Be Productive appeared first on Verblio.

And in the face of this suckitude, agencies encourage their clients to blog, create website content, get into content marketing, do social…And yet, so few agencies effectively practice what they preach.

Why is that?

We work with agencies all the time. Not only for their blogs, but assisting on the clients’ blogs. We’ve seen a theme across most of the agencies that wanted to improve their content presence.

4 Reasons Contributing to an Advertising Agency Blog Sucking

1. No buy-in: Your agency hasn’t spent the time getting everyone committed to creating content.
2. No leadership: No leadership? No buy-in. Someone needs to take responsibility for the performance of your agency’s blog.
3. No vision: Leadership and vision go hand in hand. A good leader will help the rest of the team envision what success looks like for the agency’s blog.
4. No time: The ultimate excuse for why nothing gets done: time. With client demands, last-second projects, and fire drills, of course there’s no time to focus on blogging, content, or social.

If one (or all) of these look like familiar hurdles to you and your agency’s struggle to get a blog going, we can help.

11 Ways to Improve Your Advertising Agency Blog

1. Give your agency blog focus and purpose

First things first. Ask: “Why?”

Why would your agency want to blog? What’s the goal? These are obvious questions, but bear repeating, because without a focus a blog becomes rudderless. Without a focus, contributors don’t know what to write about or why they’re even writing in the first place. Find a focus and the rest will follow.

Your focus can always change. At Verblio (formerly BlogMutt), our original focus was using the blog as an opportunity to showcase our sample work for customers. As we grew and added more expertise, we realized that the blog is a fantastic place for our customers and potential customers to educate themselves about the value of blogging at their business or agency.

If you don’t have a focus, consider your marketing plan…

2. Make it part of your agency’s marketing plan (& if you don’t have a marketing plan for your agency…see below)

This is a two-fer.

1. Your agency blog content efforts should align with your agency’s overall marketing plan/strategy.
2. If you don’t have a marketing plan or strategy for your agency, that’s an even bigger problem.

Let’s take the second item, first. Simply put:

YOUR AGENCY SHOULD HAVE A MARKETING STRATEGY!

Pardon the caps and the exclamation point. But if you’re a marketing agency and you don’t have a marketing plan for your agency…that’s like a doctor not going to the doctor. Take a moment to let that analogy sink in. But seriously, agencies that don’t have a marketing strategy aren’t going to compete or stay relevant. There are simply too many competitors out there, competing for the same business. Forget blogging. Get a marketing plan first. This should be your top priority. Then, we can talk about aligning content with your marketing plan. However, you address your marketing plan, content should support it.

If you’re an agency that wants to grow your influence in the markets you serve, that should inform your content strategy. If you’re focused on finding more business, that should inform your content strategy. The point is: start with a plan and create the content to support it.

3. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good

This doesn’t just apply to agencies. It applies to businesses as well. The biggest hurdle to hitting “Publish” on your blog post? Fear. Fear that it’s not good enough. Fear that it isn’t perfect. Fear that no one will like it.

The absolute best way to learn about content marketing and blogging is to do it. When you start publishing, you start getting a sense of what type of content your customers want (and frankly, don’t want). Momentum in blogging is critical. When one day passes, and then another, it sends a message to the rest of the agency that content and blogging isn’t a priority (more on this later).

At Verblio, not every blog post is a home run. Sad but true. The beauty is learning from the posts that perform well, the posts that underperform, and the adjustments we can make in the next month. There is no such thing as the perfect blog post. Even our best blog posts could stand for some improvement. The point is that we’re taking stock of the posts that we’ve published, tracking their performance and making informed adjustments based on our data. If you don’t have a blog post to measure in the first place, you’re not going to get far.

4. Make calls-to-action (CTAs) a priority

This should be a no-brainer, but it’s one of the most neglected components of a successful blog. If you’ve grabbed the attention of your reader and they’ve come to read a blog post, you should absolutely give them a reason to take action.

Here’s why.

Readers expect a CTA. We’ve primed online readers to anticipate an action when viewing content online. Whether they take action or not is based on other factors, like relevance and placement. But in the course of viewing web content, we’ve been conditioned to expect a CTA. When there isn’t one, it creates an awkward experience for the reader. You can read more about CTA psychology here. Your blog should attempt to elicit an action from your reader.

(Check out the form at the base of this post, for example.)

5. Infuse personality to differentiate your agency

Agencies sell professional services. The relationship between an agency and client should be personal. Without a blog that showcases your agency’s personality, you’re not giving potential clients a reason to want to work with you.

If you’ve visited enough agency sites, you’ll quickly realize that they all start to sound the same and offer the same services. Your agency’s personality and demonstrated expertise, two things a blog can communicate, are perfect opportunities to differentiate your agency.

6. Show, don’t tell. Add agency case studies.

This is perhaps the most compelling element of an advertising agency blog. The ability to demonstrate expertise and success with your clients will legitimize your service offerings.

The difference between an agency that says they do content marketing and an agency that shows examples of content marketing (and associated results) will win that new business any day.

7. Don’t be afraid to show off

This is your agency blog. This is your agency’s chance to show clients what your team is capable of when given the freedom to create. If clients are always cramping your style, use the blog as an opportunity to show off and publicize your creativity.

If you’re an agency that wants to get into the content marketing space, use your agency’s content marketing strategy as your first case study.

8. Force the boss’s hand

The power of a strong agency blog starts with buy-in from the top. Get your agency’s executive team to contribute to the blog. Having your most senior, experienced employees contributing to the blog not only showcases your agency’s leadership team, it creates a trickle-down effect, motivating the rest of the contributors. If the boss is blogging, there’s no excuse for others to slack off.

The best way for executives to show support of content marketing is to contribute.

9. Think beyond the blog

A blog is more than a blog. It’s a platform for social content, a clearinghouse of ideas, the seedlings of bigger projects, the foundation of a video, a brand play, a spotlight for personalities, an opportunity to repurpose that content across other mediums and channels, a testing lab, the beginning of a conversation, and on and on.

But if you look at it as just a blog…a blog is all it will be. This is the best adage of blogging: You get out what you put in.

When you consider the potential of a single blog post, the motivation to start blogging becomes a strategic imperative. What starts as a blog post can evolve into a multimedia experience or bigger project down the line.

10. Make it fun

When a blog becomes homework and stops becoming fun, that’s the quickest way to burn out.

We see a lot of companies and agencies burn out. When the agency blog stops becoming fun, blogging becomes a chore. And readers can sense those blogs that aren’t written with an element of fun. If it’s not fun for your agency, it’s not going to be fun for the writer (or reader!). Your agency’s enthusiasm on the blog will translate to the reader.

A fun blog influences every other communication channel. If your blog’s fun, your social interactions will be fun. Fun is contagious. As an agency, you should inspire your clients. Working with your agency should be the highlight of their day. Making a blog fun starts with a focus and purpose that everyone can get behind. A blog can’t succeed at an agency without buy-in. People are busy. Client deadlines are constant. Buy-in ensures blogging gets done, no matter the demands on everyone’s time.

11. Promote and celebrate your efforts

Because if you don’t, who will? Get started with this great post on 100+ ways to promote your blog content.

Half the blog struggle is just writing. The other half? Promotion.

Promotion serves two purposes:

1. Promotion legitimizes your blogging efforts and is an incredible litmus test for measuring quality content. When people ask: “What is quality content?” the answer is “Content people read, share, and promote”. If you start socializing your content and see activity, that’s a damn good indication that you’re creating quality content.
2. Promotion builds awareness and creates new business opportunities. Sharing your blog with clients and potential clients creates mindshare with your target audiences. A potential client may not need your resources today, but assuming they’re following your agency on social or via a newsletter it will remind them of your expertise the day they need your resources.

Getting an Agency Blog Started

Charity starts at home, right? If you want to get your clients to blog, you better start blogging yourself. Getting some momentum behind your advertising agency’s blog can start with your team, a freelancer, or using a blogging service like Verblio. Yes, we do blogging for advertising agency blogs too.

Photo credits (in order of appearance):

New Menu at Vicino’s featuring charred debris via photopin (license)

You will never reach Me via photopin (license)

Unsplash, Scott Webb

Unsplash, Tim Marshall

StockSnap.io

StockSnap.io

Unsplash, Alex Blajan

SaveSaveSave

The post 11 Ways to Improve an Advertising Agency Blog That Sucks appeared first on Verblio.

Finding a new business tactic for agencies shouldn’t be hard. In fact, a blog is a perfect place to start.

Every agency should be using content as a conduit to new business. Managing a client’s blog and content strategy is the most efficient way to jumpstart your agency’s new business.

1. Think of one blog post as a seedling.

Asking clients to sign up for a big project isn’t easy. Sales cycles can take a long time to germinate. But a blog post? Ah! That’s the sneaky side door to a big project down the road.

Getting client sign-off on a blog post is easy. If you already manage your client’s editorial calendar, every blog post should be an opportunity for a bigger project.

One blog post can turn into a video project, a microsite, or hell, the most successful blog posts could become campaigns unto themselves.

2. A blog post is a gateway to multimedia opportunities.

We’ve started doing this at BlogMutt by launching Snapchat. We realized that a blog post is great, but repurposing the content across other channels is even better. It doesn’t diminish the value of the blog. But as people migrate to consuming more video content, the blog is the script to a video or Snap.

When working with your clients, revisit a blog that would lend itself well to a video. It can be as simple as a whiteboarding video like the folks at Moz do.

(Whiteboarding video from Moz)

3. Blog posts are opportunities for thought leadership.

Clients are too busy to think of content ideas, that’s why they’ve hired you.

When you take ownership of your client’s content schedule, you have an opportunity to position your agency as thought leaders within your client’s space. The more ownership and results reported, the more apt a client is to trust your instincts when pitching new ideas.

4. Owning your client’s blog builds mindshare.

When clients don’t hear from their agencies, they get restless. With a blog, the regular check-ins are built in. Being top of mind with your client means more new business in the future and a blog is the perfect place to stay there.

In my experience at agencies, clients like to know that they’re being thought of by their agency. If agencies proactively communicate ideas or send interesting articles a client finds useful, it builds trust and a more successful working relationship.

With a blog, agencies have opportunities to schedule weekly or monthly blog meetings. It means more face time. More face time greases the new business wheels.

5. Find content opportunities in other departments.

If you’re already doing blog content with one client’s department, other departments may want your resources as well. When there are multiple product or marketing managers on hand during a meeting, tactfully use the opportunity to socialize your agency’s success within departments.

(Photo credit: Unsplash) 

6. Blogging remains a fundamental tactic and essential part of an integrated marketing program.

At the end of the day, a blog is still the foundation of a progressive marketing program. And yet, there are still tons of businesses without a blog presence. No blog presence means no opportunity to repurpose content, no social, and no chance of becoming a thought leader.

Reach out to companies without a blog presence—especially if your agency has experience launching a content strategy with other clients. This is one of the easiest ways to get a foothold on new business and growing your agency’s influence within an organization.

The post 6 Reasons Why Blogs Are An Ideal New Business Tactic For Agencies appeared first on Verblio.

But there’s a method to our madness.

You can follow us at: blogmutt

Or, if you’re really savvy, you can add us via Snapchat with the image above.

Why did we join Snapchat?

Snapchat is becoming impossible to ignore

Despite being one of the biggest Twitter apologists out there, even I’m enamored with the growth and prospects of Snapchat. Snapchat has outgrown Twitter and has become the fastest-growing social network alive today. We’ve put a ton of work in growing our reach on Twitter and Facebook that Snapchat seems like the next logical progression in challenging ourselves and repurposing the blog content we’ve created here.

Reinvention is a good thing

I was reading “The Ballad of Keith and Mick” in Vanity Fair and this jumped out at me:

Brands, like bands, have to reinvent themselves. To cling to legacy platforms, like Twitter, isn’t the mark of a progressive company.

The media landscape is shifting

Marketing and media continue to change. That’s such a tired, clichéd line, but it’s true. If we don’t change too, we’re going to lose relevancy. Even that word, relevant, makes me cringe.

But BlogMutt, at its core, wants to continue to trying new things. We do it with our service, and we do it with our marketing. It’s why we launched a new site, new blog, added marketing automation, and put a ton of work into growing our social reach.

Snapchat, like any new product we launch, could be a total bust. But to have not tried it at all? That’s just not in our DNA.

Video is here and people’s content conusmption habits change

The blog is not dead. Don’t worry. But repurposing your blog content into other mediums is critical.

Guess what: 60% of articles people share aren’t even read…BY THE PEOPLE WHO SHARE IT!

And content with relevant images get 94% more views that content without images.

Between April and November 2015 daily video views on Facebook doubled from 4 billion to 8 billion views.

And finally, some people are visual learners. It’s as simple as that. And to cater to just readers via text is short-sighted (heh, no pun intended).

To stand idly by, ignoring these statistics, is insane.

Snapchat is a cost-effective foray into video marketing for us

We don’t have a production studio. Hell, we don’t even have a videographer on staff. Snapchat is a quick and easy way to produce video content that will hopefully inform and add variety to the stuff we share.

The beauty of Snapchat is that it’s democratized video in a way where consumers don’t need highly produced pieces from brands to be engaged. Consumers as a whole value authenticity over gussied-up production. In fact, I’m skeptical of overly decorated marketing pieces—it’s as if the company’s trying to hide something.

Better to have tried and failed than to never have tried at all

There are brands out there struggling to figure out Snapchat. Just like there are brands out there trying to figure out blogging and content strategy. But God love them for trying. It says more about the company trying it out than a company not trying it at all (especially if it fits within an overall strategy).

What will we Snap?

When you consider everything mentioned above, we are going to make Snapchat videos that highlight our daily blog posts. The truth is, as much as we blog, not everyone in our company reads the blog. They should! We all promise to when we meet for our monthly blog meeting, but work gets in the way. And reading a blog is an investment of time that many people don’t have.

We write GREAT stuff. In general, there’s a lot of great stuff to read everywhere. My reading list grows every day. I can’t get to it all.

The most noteworthy takeaways from our blogs

Snapchat will hopefully give you an opportunity to hear the most salient points from each blog post we write–from the blog writer. If you don’t have the time to read a blog post, perhaps you have time to get a couple key takeaways that will make your content marketing smarter and more informed.

When we launched our new blog, one of the big things we wanted to do was personalize our brand more. One of the best things about BlogMutt is the people and the culture. It’s true! That’s why we added author bios and author pictures. But now, with video, you can actually see and hear from our team.

We’ll try out new things

That’s the other fun part of this experiment. We don’t know what we’ll snap. We have our original goal, which is to share our best takeaways from each blog post in video form, but it may grow from there. The unknown is the most exciting part.

If you don’t have Snapchat or don’t want to join Snapchat, don’t worry

Hey, I get it. Too many channels, too little time. That’s okay. We’re going to repost our Snapchat videos on Facebook and Twitter so that you can watch them without having to join Snapchat. If you decide to join later, great, we’ll be there for you.

Facebook continues to evolve and embrace more video. We’ve always wanted to do more video, and Facebook’s evolution toward more video forces our hand. For every “this is the end of the written word” column there’s a countervailing “the written word is not dead” take. Who knows where it goes…can’t we do both?

And besides, the blog content we write serves as the foundation for our video content. Without a blog post, we don’t have a video.

How the heck do I use Snapchat?

I didn’t want to turn this into a Snapchat tutorial as there are countless resources out there:

How to Use Snapchat via Wired

How to Use Snapchat via Hubspot

How to Use Snapchat (for dummies)

That should help you get a good start.

Wish us luck and please send your feedback, we’d love your thoughts on this experiment.

The post Follow BlogMutt On Snapchat: Here’s Why appeared first on Verblio.

The other byproduct of following all these channels is sifting through the feeds. OH, the FEEDS! There’s just so much on there I’m not interested in, seen before, or simply don’t want to ever see again. Everything starts to look the same.

So, I propose a more Zen-like approach to social media. A way to get your life back. These are suggestions. Not hard and fast rules. But the point is, take a step back and objectively look at your social media usage and determine if you should adjust how you use these channels.

Let’s tackle each major social media and find a more Zen-like approach to each. 

Today, we’re going to focus on the big poppa of social media. 

The Zen of Facebook

Stop and ask yourself: Why are you on Facebook? 

I imagine many of you started using Facebook to keep up with friends and family. And then Facebook turned into the second internet where brands, sponsored posts, video, suggested follows, trending stuff, and a bunch of other things started cropping up.

If you’re on Facebook to get stay in touch with friends and family that you actually want to stay in touch with…then why are you accepting friend requests from Julie who sat next to you in third grade? 

I use Facebook to follow specific groups that I belong to and keep up with friends and family. Many of my friends and family are monotheistic when it comes to social media, so I have no choice but to play along on Facebook. 

Clean ’Em Out

Are you seeing posts from people you don’t want to see posts from anymore? Unfriend them! I do an annual Facebook-friend spring clean and feel invigorated after I’ve unfollowed a bunch of folks. 

Hide Posts

Especially during this election cycle, Facebook has become a trash bin of people shouting their own polticial agendas and hot takes from their soapbox. 

Don’t want to see it anymore? Hide them. 

[I would NEVER unfollow my own mom. But I needed a post example to show you how easy it is to unfollow your mom.]

Turn Off Push Notifications

We’ve turned into Pavlov’s dogs with push notifications on our phones. End the insanity and shut those push notifications off. It’s distracting and 95% of those push notifications can wait. 

Familiarize Yourself with Facebook’s Privacy Settings

It’s almost impossible to figure out how to navigate Facebook’s byzantine privacy settings. That’s why it’s imperative to figure out what people should see and shouldn’t see. 

I can’t tell you how many times I can go to a complete stranger’s Facebook page and see EVERYTHING. 

For the lazy, at least learn the privacy basics of Facebook. You can always add more security later. 

And for real, even Mark Zuckerberg is paranoid about being spied on.

Every Post Doesn’t Need a Like or Comment

Ever since Facebook bought Instagram, I feel like I have to like photos on Instagram AND Facebook. This is madness. 

You don’t need to like everything. And you don’t need to express your opinion on every post you agree with or (especially) disagree with.

Moderation Never Hurt Anyone

Set a time block to check Facebook. You don’t need to be on it all day. It doesn’t need to be constantly open on a tab or running in the background. You have a life. You have a job. You might even have kids! 

Ferris said it best: 

Don’t Take Yourself Too Seriously

How did something so fun become so toxic sometimes? People take themselves WAAAY too seriously on Facebook and we all need to take a collective breather sometimes. 

Facebook is supposed to be fun. It’s like a digital smoke break during your day. If you feel like crap when you go to Facebook, what’s the point? 

Don’t Forget: Facebook Depresses You

It’s science! Facebook depresses you.

And There’s Always the Nuclear Option

I deleted my Facebook account (temporarily) a couple years ago. It was great. But like the mob, just when I thought I was out, Facebook pulled me back in again. 

Don’t forget, you don’t HAVE to be on Facebook. The nuclear option is always available. Detonate your account and call it a day.

The post The Zen of Social Media: Facebook appeared first on Verblio.

Have I created enough anxiety for you? Are you nodding your head, saying, “He totally gets me!”. Good. Because I’ve been there. We’ve all been there. The client blog post is the pit in your stomach. It’s that ceaseless feeling of doom. You leave the office knowing that you should’ve started writing it. You come to the office promising that it’s going to be the first thing you get to.

But you have plenty of other time-sensitive demands competing for your attention.

No one working at an agency comes to their desk in the morning without an immediate fire to put out. And you don’t get to that blog post. And guess what? That blog post isn’t going anywhere, people.

What happens when you sit on a client blog post?

The thing is, when your agency puts off a client blog post, everything else gets TOTALLY EFFED!

1. The blog post in question will be rushed (and probably suck).

When a post is overdue, you’ve already shifted your mindset from “write a good blog” to “get any blog out the door”.

Strategy? POOF! Gone.

2. Other work suffers.

Client blog posts are one of the top bottlenecks at an agency, especially if your team is doing all the writing. Blogging requires consistency and great blog content takes time. This means taking your high-priced, in-house talent off a big pitch and preventing work on more lucrative and strategic projects.

3. Your in-house agency copywriter burns out.

If you decide to keep piling work on your copy team despite the additional client blog work, they’re going to burn out. It’s that simple.

Copywriters I’ve worked with want to work on high value, strategic work. They don’t want to write yet another blog post around driveway repaving (which, no offense to driveway repavers, can be interesting…I just needed an example).

4. You need to rethink how your agency does client content.

• Agency copywriting the old way: Every piece of content needs to be created in-house.

• Agency copywriting the new way: Outsource the content grind.

There’s really no other way to put it. There are companies like us that have the scale to tackle the content needs of agencies without having to hire an entire copywriting department.

The new agency copywriter model is keeping your strategic copywriters and designers in-house but outsourcing the day-to-day needs, leaving them to more strategic, higher revenue projects. That may seem crazy or blasphemous, but it’s happening. We see it with our agency customers every day.

What happens to agencies who understand the value of outsourcing their content?

The most progressive agencies no longer see crowdsourcing as uncouth. They’re using the inherent economies of scale when it comes to crowdsourcing content, design—whatever the need is.

Agencies elevate their work quality

Once the grind of daily blog content is off their plate, agencies immediately start thinking more strategically. Many agencies use us to get their client’s blog post 80% of the way and then polish the last 20%. Now, an agency copywriter doesn’t have to think about getting a post done for to be done. Now, an agency copywriter has the time to make sure this blog is a strategic addition to their client’s content strategy.

A rising tide lifts all boats. With day-to-day blog content being outsourced, in-house copywriters can develop more in-depth, long-form pieces for their clients, as well as spend the time to create better work across the agency.

Agencies stop seeing content as a grind and start seeing it as a recurring revenue generator

Recurring revenue is one of the toughest things for agencies to maintain. Many clients are project-based. But consistent blog content not only ensures a more robust online presence for an agency’s client, it ensures recurring revenue for the agency.

Agencies keep talent

When you stop making your head agency copywriter hammer out blog post after blog post, she can work on other projects. She’ll be happier. She’ll stay.

Outsource the content and use your in-house talent for strategically reviewing, implementing content, and communicating the value of content to your client.

How to start outsourcing

If you’re looking to outsource or start creating ongoing blog content for your clients, let us know. We can set up a demo, walk you through our system, and give you more information about how Verblio (formerly BlogMutt) partners with agencies. Learn more on how Verblio works for agencies.

You can also sign up for our agency webinar to get a peek under the hood.

The post One Valuable Way an Agency Copywriter Can Avoid Burnout appeared first on Verblio.

We hope you’re as jazzed to read it as we are to show it off.

We worked with our friends at Kuno Creative to get this new blog design up and running on HubSpot and Alyssa Ash on the logo design.

If you’re thinking about redesigning your blog or simply starting a blog, here’s what we did.

Start With A Goal In Mind

On any project of this size, it helps to have a brief outlining objectives you want to address once the project ends. Since we already have an editorial calendar and regular blog meetings to address our content goals, we were able to use this redesign to focus on the functional goals within our blog.

Primary goal:

Build a better conversion tool for downloadable content, site interaction, form submissions and sharing with sacrificing readability.

How we accomplished it:

We HATE the big popups that everyone seems to use now. There’s so much mixed research on the efficacy of these, it came down to the experience we wanted to give our readers. We wanted to improve the reading experience for customers (especially on mobile) in addition to creating more conversion opportunities.

Adding featured content:

We wanted a place where the really in-depth, time- or research-intensive posts would live on and be prominently featured. We create so much blog content that a great post gets buried relatively quickly. We solved this with a place to highlight our three best/featured blog posts of late (in addition to our latest post).

Stronger social call-to-action:

“Your mom says you should follow us.” And we put it above the fold. Need we say more?

More prominent post sharing:

We made sharing a post more prominent and look prettier (subjectively speaking). After talking a survey of the office about whether people share articles in site or simply copy and paste the link into their social media channel of choice, the results were 50/50. So we didn’t push the “Share this” stuff super hard. Everyone shares their content differently and we didn’t want to get obnoxious with the “Hey! Share this on all your social channels!” If our content’s good, people will share it.

Writer CTA (that can be updated and edited):

Within our featured post panel is a smaller callout to writer to “Write for us.” We blog on grammar and writing, so we get a lot of writer traffic. We wanted to capture and convert those interested in grammar to consider writing for us. The beauty of the HubSpot CMS: we can change that for a seasonal promotion, incentive, whatever. The nice thing is that we have it and can use it at our descretion.

Popup CTA and related articles:

This is how far we were willing to push the envelope on this whole “popup CTA” thing. We didn’t want one to completely cover the screen disrupting your reading experience. This is a lot more subtle with helpful, related articles and a more promotional piece. What’s more, we didn’t include this functionality on mobile as that would’ve completely disrupted the reading experience. When it came down to our readers vs. ourselves, we erred on the side of readers.

Sharing icons via mobile:

We added an easier way for mobile readers to share content. Again, the research on best practices here was mixed. We decided that most people will use sharing icons more often in mobile instead of on a desktop. Mobile, for all its improvements, still makes the social sharing experience clumsy.

CTA form at the bottom:

We didn’t want our readers to have to go to another page to download content or submit their information. We added an inline form at the bottom of every post.

Better designed newsletter subscription module:

We’ve seen our newsletter subscriptions grow despite a really strong CTA to subscribe. We pretty much post every day. This needed more love and we’ve since made the design more eye-catching and easier for readers to sign up.

Secondary goal:

Use the blog to personalize BlogMutt.

How we accomplished it:

When we launched our new site, blogmutt.com, we emphasized our service over the BlogMutt employees creating the service. We wanted the new blog to showcase the great folks at BlogMutt and the personality each brings to our blog and our service.

That’s the BIGGEST different between BlogMutt and other services out there. The people. The blog is a place for our people to share their interests with you so you can get to know them a little bit better.

Author bios:

We added more in-depth author bios. You can read about the blog writer and follow them on their social channels if so inclined. We didn’t include blog comments, but if you want to comment on a blog post, you can always start the conversation on social or reach out to the author via social directly.

Evergreen goals:

Evergreen goals were things that we always wanted to keep an eye on in the development of the new blog. We wanted to update the look to something that aligns more with BlogMutt’s brand and personality. We wanted to make the reading experience better. We simplified navigation. And we built the blog for scale so that we didn’t paint ourselves in a corner programmatically.

We used our brand guide to inform the look and feel of the blog and came up with the blog name, “The Hydrant,” and the tagline “Leaving our mark on blogging and content marketing” as a team.

We hope you enjoy the new blog and find it a more pleasurable reading experience.

The post Our New Blog Design & Name: Introducing “The Hydrant” appeared first on Verblio.

Anyone can just create content. It’s what kind of content you’re creating that counts.

So many questions arise when you start really pushing yourself on the quality of the content you create. Questions like: 

• Who is my audience?
• What problem am I solving for these people? 
• Am I clearly communicating a solution?
• Is this content optimized for being found on organic search? 
• Is there a clear call to action within my content that’s relevant and useful to my reader?

I could just keep listing questions. There are, like, a million different questions content thought leaders have told us to consider. 

But you can’t possibly answer all these. 

So let’s go about it another way. 

The content funnel.

There are three components of a content creation funnel, not dissimilar to a sales funnel:

1. Awareness (Your Leads)

Content that lets your target audience know you exist. 

2. Consideration (Your Prospects)

Content that builds trust between your prospects and your brand. 

3. Conversion (Your Customers)

Content that retains your customers and keeps them coming back.

Let’s tackle each one with a couple examples, shall we?

1. Awareness

This is the first problem:

How to get people to become aware of your product or service. 

There is no quick fix anymore. Well, I guess you could blow through a pile of cash like DraftKings or FanDuel did. But those are outliers, and hey, you’re a smarter marketer than that. 

Types of Content for Awareness

This content should be attention grabbing. Consider the audience at this stage: #RealTalk — They don’t know you and they don’t care about you. You have no choice but to make sure your stuff grabs attention. 

Videos

The classic example is Dollar Shave Club. 

Videos will create more awareness for your brand than about any other type of content. Videos get more engagement. The commitment from your audience is low. And you can repurpose that content across social channels. 

Infographics

Like videos, the effort from your audience to view an infographic is low. If you don’t have the budget to create a video, consider an infographic instead. When you consider the attention-grabbing potential of an infographic that can be shared and promoted across social channels, there’s a lot of value for your brand and your reader.

Here’s a solid example from Fresh Perspective (dog-themed, natch).

Easily Digestible Content

If infographics are too much, you can simplify it. Use images. Use humor. Use images and humor together. The meme is not dead, despite its omnipotence. But if you find the right image and the right humor for the right, targeted audience, you have easily digestible content that isn’t as expensive or as time-intensive as a video or infographic. 

Blog Posts

Still the backbone of a sound content marketing strategy. A blog fuels your social presence, your newsletters, your ideas, and your search relevance.

At a minimum, creating a blog post is the most basic and essential component of a marketing strategy that wants to build awareness for its brand. We do it.

Guest Posts

Instead of bringing an audience to you, go to the audience.

Guest blog on industry sites where your potential customers are. We do it.

Newsjacking

If you need blog post ideas, newsjack. We do it. It’s another unique way to capitalize and piggyback on a hot topic or trend within your industry. If there’s a current event that you have a comment on, share it. Blog about it. 

2. Consideration

So you’ve captured someone’s attention. How do you capture their trust? How do you stay top of mind? The consideration phase of content creation is critical. 

This content should answer the common questions and pain points felt by your potential prospects. 

In addition, prospects are learning more about your brand. Does your company blog regularly? Are you responsive on social media? Do you listen? All of these answers are going to be answered, one way or another, in your consideration content. 

Types of Content for Consideration

Case Studies 

Does your product work? Does it actually solve what it purports to solve? Case studies are a fantastic way to showcase real-world problems and your company’s answer to those problems. We do it.

E-Books

Sometimes a blog post isn’t enough for those in the consideration phase. Creating robust e-books about common problems not only helps your prospects, it legitimizes your brand and your expertise. 

One company absolutely crushes the e-book game: HubSpot. They sprinkle them in emails, newsletters, blog posts, landing pages, everywhere. 

Fact Sheets / White Papers

Data is often the best way to differentiate your product from another’s. Fact sheets and whitepapers provide detailed, data-driven information that legitimize your product or service in another way: through numbers. 

Email

Prospects are in your CRM. You have their email. If you’re not reaching out to them via email, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity. 

Keeping prospective customers apprised of product updates, new data and insight within your industry strengthens the relationship between a brand and its customer. 

Social Media

If you can get prospects who are active on social media to follow your brand, that’s huge. Social media is a cost-effective way to stay top of mind with prospective customers. 

We follow lots of brands that we haven’t bought from or used. But should we have a need, the only way we’ll be reminded of that brand is from an update or a tweet. Seeing a brand promote interesting content relevant to our industry goes a long way in establishing trust and creating the perception that this is a brand that keeps us entertained or informed. 

We do it on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and yes, Google+.

Webinars

If someone is considering you, be helpful. Webinars are an excellent tool for personalizing and humanizing your brand. We use webinars to give interested prospects a peek under the hood to see how BlogMutt works.

When prospects attend our webinars, we not only want them to walk away with a better sense of what BlogMutt does, but also we want to give prospects a sense of who we are and that we’re here to help. 

3. Conversion

Conversion content is content that retains your customers once they’ve bought or subscribed to your product or service. This is content that should reinforce a customer’s decision to go with your company and brand. 

Types of Content for Conversion

Webinars

Just because they’re a customer now, doesn’t mean that you don’t have to do webinars anymore. Customer-centric webinars engage your users and reinforce the notion that your company wants to help and support customer needs. We do it.

Onboarding Emails

We’ve found that the first three months for customers at BlogMutt is a critical period to their love (or hate) of our service. So we make a huge push to onboard our customers with helpful tips and tricks for the best BlogMutt experience. 

We want to put our customers in the best position to succeed, so that they can put our writers in the best position to succeed, and everyone’s happy. 

Newsletters

We send out a customer-specific newsletter on a monthly basis. There are new updates and improvements with our service that we want to continue to educate our customers on (as well as plenty new blog posts to read), and a newsletter is an easy way to do that.

Help Videos

People learn in different ways. Some like to read, others like to watch. We want to supplement any help that we give our customers with a video. 

Using videos is yet another way to personalize your brand. When you give your customers different ways to get information about your product or service, you’re making their lives easier and better. And that’s the goal, isn’t it? 

The post Understanding The Content Creation Funnel appeared first on Verblio.

If you’re still wondering if blogging works… It does. Here’s why:

One Piece of Content. One Successful Blog Post.

I’m particularly proud of this editorial calendar blog post we developed that has already proven its ROI at BlogMutt.

This successful blog post wouldn’t have happened without our blog and our dedication to creating content every day (well, every weekday, but still). The post explains the backstory behind our editorial calendar, why we needed one, and the difference it’s made in our blogging efforts. If you haven’t read it, check it out.

Anyways, we created an editorial calendar template. We added tabs that we thought would make the calendar better and started using it.

Only later, I realized that this is a template that our customers could use as well. The cost of creating and sharing this template was next to nothing. We already had the template created for our own purposes. And we spent a lot of work nurturing and building promotional channels like our blog, obviously, but also our newsletter, social media, webinars, sales tools, the works! Now we just needed that special piece that was useful and relevant to customers and potential customers.

The Content Development Process:

Here are the steps I took to develop the content.

• I created the editorial calendar template in Google Sheets

• I created a shareable download link and hosted the document on Google

• Did some keyword research (more on this below)

• Wrote the blog post

• Created a main image and CTA using Canva

• Developed the landing page with HubSpot (I’m not a designer or a programmer, BTW)

• Started promoting it via the aforementioned channels

Keyword Research and Results

Keyword research is important at the start of any project like this. Before fingers hit keyboard, it’s important to get a sense of the competition this piece of content would face.

We optimized the post for “editorial calendar template 2016” because of its long-tail search potential and low competition. We’re ranked #5 on Google now for this keyword. But the beauty of creating content means that Google also ranks this post for another 133 keywords (per Google Search Console).

You can view all the keywords here.

Traffic

Even though we published it in December 2015, we have an average SERP position of 28.9. Which might not be great, considering few people get to the second or third page of Google. Despite our rank, we have received 144 views from organic traffic.

But the fact that we leverage the blog post across other channels helped drive additional interest.

That’s the beauty of one piece of blog content. You can repurpose and promote it through your other marketing channels.

Results

Of the 776 visitors we’ve driven to our landing page, we’ve had 296 submissions (38 percent conversion rate) and 112 new contacts (15 percent conversion).

Follow Up

We’ve already been able to identify sales from this piece of content through HubSpot (without any involvement from our team).

But that’s not enough.

We reached out to customers with additional information and have plans to supplement this piece of information with additional resources to assist those looking to organize their content efforts.

Blogging Makes Experimenting Easier, Cheaper, and More Efficient

The beauty of blogging is that you can do a lot of experimenting without risking a lot. For example, we’ll post a blog that I think is just ok content-wise, but find out that it’s a post that performed really well (good engagement, views, etc). If there was a high cost of entry to create and post that particular article, I would’ve quashed it. Too risky. But it’s not. And with blogging, you can experiment, take chances, and not feel like you’re going to bankrupt your marketing budget.

The takeaway, for me, is that the blog is an easy place for experimenting with different types of content, topics, keywords, and calls to action without investing a lot of time and money in design resources, SEO experts, and web developers.

The post How One Piece of Content Became Our Most Successful Blog Post appeared first on Verblio.