Take it from a digital marketer: Be great and delegate. Pay attention to your brand’s North Star Idea, work from an editorial calendar and automate, automate, automate.
You can be the smartest person leading a company selling the best product, but that will be meaningless if you don’t have digital marketing that engages customers. Simply put: You need a content strategy that tells your brand story in a compelling way and compels your audience to take action. Or you can do something else and watch your business fail.
Recently, Stamford Partnership CEO Jon Winkel shared four critical insights that will assure your products and your brand story are heard by the people who you need to attract to your business. He shared these ideas with Publio CEO Keith Reynolds in the latest Publio Podcast’ on Spotify.
Jon Winkel, CEO Stamford Partnership
The Best Digital Marketers Are Great and Delegate
“Design an experience that motivates people to join your audience,” Winkel said. “Everything has to be great. If a post or podcast sends someone to your website, but it’s not compelling or optimized, then that person goes away. If a subscription results in infrequent or poorly designed messages, that’s another drop-off risk. Think through your digital experience from end to end.”
Every customer touchpoint must be great, he explained, and because your markets and customers change, you are constantly experimenting. Great as everything may be, you must constantly adjust and – as Winkel puts it – “squash the bugs” that can arise. As such, you must manage your priorities, keep your hands off and let your people do their jobs. That’s the rule, but sometimes you have to roll up your sleeves to fix things yourself.
Digital Marketers Pay Attention to Their North Star
Your messaging and the online experience you deliver should stick to your brand’s core promise.
Stamford Innovation Week, a Stamford Partnership event, does just that. Innovation Week is Stamford’s regional celebration of arts, innovation, entrepreneurship and technology, and it delivers on the brand’s North Star Idea. Its very name suggests a place, innovation, and an entire week of energetic conferences.
“The first event achieved better-than-expected success,” Winkel told Reynolds in the podcast, “but our team had to figure out how to keep the core brand promise of a popping, one-week event balanced with audience engagement throughout the year.”
That was great as things got started, but it became limiting as the programming expanded.
The team launched sub-brands and new programs such as FastFWD TechFWD, and TechHub. FastFWD is a celebration of thought leadership, technology, and entrepreneurship.TechFWD (“Tech Forward”) is Stamford Innovation Week’s technology pilot training component. TechHub is a suite of programs and services that the Stamford Partnership developed to support the greater Stamford area’s technology, data analytics, and cybersecurity sectors.
“Sometimes the ideas come to us from surveys and socializing. Sometimes they’re pure light bulb moments,” Winkel said, ”and they all align with your North Star Idea of innovation.”
Digital Marketers Work from an Editorial Calendar
Winkel pointed out that the social media era demands that all businesses and nonprofits must maintain a steady flow of content as if they were a media company or a news organization.
Your editorial calendar should show the next three to six months of content such as articles, videos, infographics, social posts. Your calendar displays a steady flow of content telling your brand’s story, and everyone on your team knows what they must do to keep the content flowing. Your team must be disciplined enough to follow the calendar, and flexible enough to respond to internal and external events that impact your marketing.
You can no longer publish only on predictable events like annual reports, quarterly earnings or product launches. A better model is to publish content like a news organization, except that the news are the stories and ideas that engage your particular customer audience.
Digital Marketers Report and Automate
What does data tell you about your content? Is a topic or post not performing as expected because your content is not optimized for SEO? Is it as relevant to your audience as you hoped? Each requires a different set of skills two uncover.
Winkel points out that low code/no-code automated platforms make this type of analysis possible. Which job titles are engaging with your content? Which industries? Geographically, where is traffic coming from? These answers influence your content as well as your business automation strategy. Now you can determine where you go from where you are. It’s how you build your content. Automation is how you make these decisions quickly.
Listen to the Publio Podcast
Jump in on the conversations and some serious real talk with executives and thought leaders on growing your business with digital media. Find us on Spotify, and follow your North Star.
We discuss innovation, marketing, business, events, books, successful must-see strategies, and anything that is positive and refreshing.
If you are responsible for your company’s success, pull up a chair, grab some coffee, or sit back, tune in and connect with your customer audience.
