CorrTek Marketing Mixer – #46

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Coming up in this weeks newsletter:

• What happened during my hiatus and the name change for the newsletter.
• Having a checklist before publishing.
• Feeding new customers into the sales pipeline with SEO.
• Step one to getting good at Twitter.
• Hell yes! Or no. – Get better Friday.

The official relaunch of the Marketing Mixer

The last time I published this newsletter it was known as the “DC Marketing Mixer” and I had announced that I was retiring. 

How things change in 2020, eh?

In the last 60 days or so I’ve had some time to reflect. For the last few years I’ve dreamed of leaving the corporate world and launching my own company. 

Having spent the last two decades supporting landscape contractors and cutting my teeth in digital marketing with this group, I feel like I have a lot to give. It is incredibly important to me to see small businesses succeed and what I really want is to work in my community, with small businesses, and work locally. 

So, what’s the future of this newsletter now that I’ve officially launched my marketing company and moved the entire back catalogue? 

More focus. 

This will still be a digital marketing resource and on the bleeding edge of trends, insights, and news in the space. Now that I know who the audience is for it, the content in the newsletter wil be much more focused on actional items to grow your business and handle digital marketing yourself. 

So stick around. This will always be ad-free and at no charge. 

No hidden agendas or purposefully confusing information. I just want you to succeed and in the process I’ll learn a lot about marketing. 

Before you hit publish

Some advice from the great Rand Fishkin at SparkToro in this piece. 

My biggest takeaway: Don’t publish until you’ve done all the work. 

This shouldn’t deter you from publishing. Just make yourself a pre-publish checklist and stick to it. Workshop the headline. Check your meta tags. Make sure that lead image pops.

Quality over quantity. Every. Time.

I Blogged Every Night for a Week. It Went Terribly. – Rand Fishkin

SEO research and the sales pipeline

This is good. This is really good. Save this entry and use it any time you are creating a campaign our outreach program. When you get ready to start that blog post or webpage, look through this piece and use it as a framework before publishing. 

The article highlights four possible stages the searcher could live. If we look at it from a sales perspective, I think it breaks down like this:

1. I want to know moments = I’m interested but not ready to buy anytime soon.
2. I want to go moments = I’m interested and might buy, just need to see an example.
3. I want to do moments = I’m pretty sure I’m going to buy, why are you unique?
4. I want to buy moments = I’ve made up my mind and want to buy now. How do I do that?

Definitely save this one.

Search Intent and SEO. A practical guide – Gianluca Fiorelli 

Email

The single most important email you send to your customers is a welcome email. This is also the first email(s) you should have automated. 

For contractors, retaining customers should be your priority. Although it might take a long time for the customer to re-purchase, a solid onboarding process will keep that customer you worked hard to win and enable them to more easily refer you to their friends, family, and neighbors. 

If you work on one thing this offseason, make it your welcome email.

17 Stellar Welcome Email Examples & How They Drive Engagement – Ayal Menaged

Learn how to tweet. That’s it. That’s the tweet.

I’ve run into several people recently that do not know how to tweet. Oh, they know the basics. They can find the button, they know its short and that the main feed moves fast. But they don’t know how to tweet.

I don’t think Twitter hates external links (like the headline in this blog), but I do think that creating a good tweet takes skill and that skill is rare. 

I’m super bullish on Twitter and their future built around communities. Twitter is where you build and engage your fans and I think it will soar even past inauguration. So get good at Twitter, cause its gonna be a lot more important in your future advertising.

Regardless of the headline, this is a good read about threads.

Your Articles Aren’t Getting RT’d Because Twitter Hates External Links – McKinley Valentine

Get Better Friday – Is what you’re doing exciting? If not, then stop.

I’ve been stuck on this idea:

“Hell yes, or no.”

I’ve been applying this in all aspects of my life with extra emphasis on launching my company, this newsletter, and diving headlong into creating content again. I don’t start anything unless it’s a “hell yeah”. Otherwise, I’m just wasting my time on something I’m not excited about and could be doing something better with my time. 

If it is not expansive, why do it? If I’m not into it, why dump a whole bunch of time and energy into it, knowing I’m not doing my best work?

One of the things I’ve seen with companies starting their marketing, especially with a digital transition, is this feeling that “you have to do it.” This means you are probably trying to fill in checkboxes, without any particular goal in mind. If that’s the case, how effective do you think just throwing things out there can be?

If you are managing your company’s marketing, is it a hell yeah? Are you truly doing something that you are excited to do and is expansive for the company? Or are you going through the motions? 

I’m not trying to talk you into doing more. I’m asking you to be honest with your time. 

“Refuse almost everything. Do almost nothing. But the things you do, do them all the way.”

If you’re not feeling “hell yeah!” then say no – Derek Sivers