Successful Blog

Are you missing out on this under-the-radar marketing resource?

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They’re everywhere.

Interviews, case studies, Q&As with your ideal client.

man being interviewed

They’re happening on competitor blogs, podcasts, marketing blogs, YouTube channels, magazines, and more.

Your ideal client (or her colleague) is spilling her guts all over the place.

Are you catching that inside information?

One example is the ChiefMarTec blog, run by Scott Brinker. He’s been interviewing CMOs over the last several months, and one question he usually asks is, “What does a day in your life look like? What are the toughest and most interesting parts?”

Well wow. If I’m someone who sells to CMOs, I’m reading that interview and taking notes.

It’s so important to be able to put yourself in your customers’ shoes. What better way than to listen to them talk about their daily challenges?

Here’s your actionable tip for today: think about your idea customer’s job description. Once you have it firmly in mind, go seek out media outlets where they might be giving interviews.

Even in more obscure industries, investigate the big trade show or conference for that industry (they all have them). Usually the keynote speaker will be interviewed, or there will be presenters giving interviews. Pay attention to the media buzz, and soak up those insider stories.

Look for the trade magazines. They are always doing profiles of key management. Whether it’s online or in print magazines, this is another good resource to find out about the daily life of your prospect.

Take it another step farther if you have your own business blog—interview your own existing clients. Ask them what their day-to-day work is like, what their key challenges are, and what solutions they’re seeking.

Armed with this information, you’ll be able to provide services that directly address those challenges.

Do you use interviews as a resource?

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

Photo Credit: www.audio-luci-store.it via Compfight cc

Is Healthcare a Healthy Career Choice?

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ahealtherrAre you looking for a fulfilling career that will help you to grow both personally and professionally?

Then healthcare could be just the career choice for you. The healthcare field is always growing and diversifying, offering ample opportunities for those who want to move into the field, and making it a choice worth considering if you’re looking to change career or start something new.

What are some of the reasons healthcare is a great career choice going into 2015? And what skills do you need to succeed in healthcare?

Healthcare Is a Growing Field

As the article “6 Growing Health Care Careers” points out, healthcare is a growing industry and a great choice if you’re looking for a career where you are almost guaranteed to be in demand.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, healthcare practitioner jobs are expected to grow by 21.5 percent, and support occupations by 28.1 percent, by 2022. That’s twice as fast as the average for any other occupation.

Healthcare Offers Many Benefits

As well as being in demand, a career in healthcare offers numerous other benefits:

  • Good pay and benefits – Healthcare careers typically come with an attractive salary, often featuring on lists of well-paying jobs, and usually offer great benefits such as dental, medical, insurance and paid vacation time to boot;
  • Variety – If there’s one thing that can be said for certain about healthcare, it’s that there’s never a dull moment. As well as offering exciting work, you’ll be able to choose from a wide range of working environments;
  • Career choices – Healthcare careers offer plenty of opportunities for moving upwards and growing your career and your salary. The number of distinct careers in the healthcare field is staggering, from doctors and nurses to transcriptionists, pharmacists, radiologists, medical billers and much more;
  • Free education – Many healthcare employers offer continuing professional development and even on the job training for new members of the field, meaning you can continue to learn, grow and expand your skills;
  • Fulfilling – A career in healthcare means meeting with and helping people from all walks of life. If you’re a people person who enjoys contributing something positive to others, healthcare is a good career choice for you.

Skills That Will Help You Succeed In Healthcare

Even before you start filling out your admissions form, you might find you have plenty of transferable skills that will help you build a good healthcare career, be it in family medicine or another area of medical practice.

Here are some skills that are an asset for anyone working in healthcare:

  • Time management – Many healthcare careers are fast paced – good time management will help you excel;
  • Customer service – You’ll be dealing with the public a lot, so the ability to make the people you meet feel valued and looked after is invaluable;
  • Compassion – From colleagues working under pressure to nervous patients or worried relatives, the ability to show compassion and empathy will make you an excellent healthcare practitioner;
  • Good communication – You’ll be working with people from all walks of life and communicating at all levels, so good communication skills will be a great strength;
  • Calmness under pressure – If you can stay calm and help others feel supported when things get busy or stressful, you’ll be appreciated by colleagues and patients alike.

If you’re ready for a career that is exciting, fulfilling and full of interesting opportunities, healthcare could just be a healthy choice for you.

Photo credit: Image courtesy of stockimages at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

About the Author: Tristan Anwyn writes on a wide variety of topics, including social media, SEO, healthcare careers and distance learning.

First Grade Jelly Donut Marketing

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By Lindsey Tolino

First grade jelly donut day was legendary. Our teacher put a jelly donut on each student’s desk. She explained how squeezing out a little jelly from the donut was similar to how we squeeze letters out of words to make contractions.

I have few memories from that age, but I will never forget sitting at my desk, in awe of the donut and my teacher’s wisdom.

jelly donuts

Every time I think of elementary school, unique teaching methods, contractions or jelly donuts, I think of my first grade teacher. I think of how she cared enough for us to buy us donuts and how she made a correlation to contractions that I will always remember. No other elementary school teacher is as memorable to me.

In grad school I learned that you need potential customers to see an ad a certain number of times before they retain it or it influences them in some way. After too many impressions, it essentially becomes white noise and makes no impact on them.

To have your customers truly remember your business, you don’t need to follow traditional advertising and bombard them with typical sales copy.

You simply need to create a personalized, memorable experience.

That seems impossible though, right? It sounds like you don’t have the time for that. But it actually can be more simple than you think.

I had a personalized, memorable experience at a business just the other day.

I don’t think I had talked to anyone that morning except via text. It was late afternoon when I parked at the cafe. I was going to do some work. I felt fixated, machine-like. I walked up to the counter.

“Hi, is that your white car out there?” the cashier asked.

Expecting her to say my lights were on, I replied “yes” and looked outside at my car. No lights on.

“Oh, are you from Pennsylvania?”

“Yeah.” Oh, she had seen the license plate.

“Me too…”

We talked about where we were from, why we moved to Raleigh and how we were liking it. Through that short conversation, she moved me out of my one-minded, lonely, mechanistic mentality into feeling like a human again.

I was so thankful for her initiating that conversation. It was such a simple thing she did and yet it felt profound and memorable to me.

Traditional marketing has value, but creating a personalized, memorable experience for your customer is incomparably better.

So what is the key to creating a personalized, memorable experience for your customers?

The simplest, and perhaps the best way — you treat them like people.

My first grade teacher didn’t see us as students that she was obligated to teach contractions to. She saw us as children with senses (taste!), emotions and abilities. She created an experience she knew would be memorable for us that fit with her teaching objective.

The cashier didn’t see me as simply a customer she was obligated to wait on. She saw me as a person, from Pennsylvania like her, with experiences and a story. She reached out and connected with me as a person, when she wasn’t obligated to.

We simply need to see that our customers are not obligations to serve in order to make money from them. They are people with senses, emotions, abilities, experiences and stories. They are people that desire connection, respect, relationships and love.

If you thoughtfully care for them as people, you will naturally create personalized experiences for them. When customers feel cared for by you, it will be memorable.

They will come back because they will remember you.

Jelly donuts changed my world in first grade. A simple conversation with a cashier changed my perspective that day. It may take a smaller action than you think to be memorable to your customers. The key is simply caring for them as people.

Author’s Bio: Lindsey Tolino is a young creative who helps make businesses better. She serves business owners with her words at ToBusinessOwners.com. Follow her on Twitter @LindseyTolino (https://twitter.com/LindseyTolino) or connect with her on Google+ (https://plus.google.com/108697943813402809826/posts).

Image credit: via Steve Campisi (http://www.freeimages.com/photo/758304).

Ways to Retain the Best Workers

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ahappyemployeeYour employees are the lifeblood of your business.

The right team is the difference between brilliant ideas and lackluster ones; excellent planning and management, and costly failures; great customer service and customer service that get you noticed for all the wrong reasons.

Finding the right employees can be time consuming and costly, so once you find the right people, you’ll want to hang on to them.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that workers in the U.S. stay in a job for around 4.6 years.

What can you do if you want to retain your best employees longer than that?

Start with these steps:

1. Offer Great Benefits

Let’s be blunt. If one of your best employees is offered a similar position with better pay, they’re likely to take it. By the time you make a counter offer it could well be too late. Instead, offer your employees a good remuneration package from the start, paying well for their type of role.

Benefits go beyond wages. From medical and dental to life insurance and pensions, or even small perks like free tickets or discounted gym membership, a good benefits package can make all the difference.

Don’t forget about flexi time, telecommuting or other flexible working to show your team that their work life balance matters to you.

2. Get Real Feedback – And Listen

Happy, fulfilled employees are more likely to stay with you. Set aside regular time to chat with your employees, or ask their direct manager or team leader to do so. Find out what they like about working with you, and what they don’t. Follow up with an action plan you both agree on.

To learn more about how your employees feel about their jobs, foster open communications between employees and management. Make it easy for your team to have a chat with someone, and have their concerns heard and valued.

Consider using “stay interviews”.

Talk to your longstanding employees about why they stay, what they love, what you’re doing right and anything you’re doing wrong,  to gain insight into what you’re doing that encourages people to stay.

3. Encourage Your People to Develop

Keep working life interesting by encouraging your employees to develop within their roles. Start by looking at their daily tasks and offering further training if appropriate to help them learn new skills.

You can also invest in your employees’ education.

By funding a course of study that’s related to their jobs you’ll be helping them to grow their skills, and encouraging loyalty by showing them that you value them enough to invest in them.

If you think one of your team is a great candidate for taking on new responsibilities, talk to them about it. Showing that you want to help your employees grow within your organization is an important part of retaining them.

4. Get Clear on Growth Pathways

As pointed out in the article “5 Ways to Retain Your Best Employees“, if your best people only see stagnation on the horizon, they’ll look elsewhere. Your employees want to know that they have a future with you. Make sure you plan for that future from the start.

Having a growth pathway is particularly important when it comes to retaining the best of the best. Talk to your employees regularly and agree on a growth path that suits you and them – and then stick to it.

Good employees have immeasurable value for your business, helping it to grow, to run effectively, and to increase profits.

Value your employees and support them to grow within your organization – show them that they matter to you and they’ll be more likely to stay loyal and use their skills to benefit your business.

Photo credit: Image courtesy of stockimages at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

About the Author: Tristan Anwyn writes on a wide variety of topics, including social media, SEO, benefits packages and employee retention.

The Secret to a Successful Marketing Strategy

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acres of farmland

The ambitious farmer, fresh out of agricultural college, wrote up a detailed plan for his farm.

He designated which crops he was going to grow, how he was going to rotate them, what equipment he would need, and how many farm hands he was going to hire.

After gathering all of his resources, he and his farm hands went out and planted acres of crops. It was laborious work, but when he looked out over his acres of fertile land, he was very proud.

Then he and his farm crew got into their shiny pickup trucks and drove away.

The young farmer took continuing education classes in pest control, irrigation, and hydroponics.

He went to some conferences.

He started writing an e-book about farming.

He and his farm hands finally returned to the fields the next year to find acres of weedy, rotting crops, half-eaten by wildlife. No corn. No potatoes. Nothing to harvest at all.

You will get no potatoes from your detailed marketing plan unless you have a system in place between January and December.

The secret to a successful marketing strategy is follow-through. Do it, measure it, adjust, and do it again.

Set Your 2015 Marketing Up For Success

Analytics and measurement – For tactics that support your key strategies, decide how you will measure success. This should be a number or a concrete result. Set up a spreadsheet and track the results from each tactic.

Did you send out a direct mail piece? Track how many people called the phone number or visited the special landing page. Did you create an infographic? How often was it shared? How many people downloaded it? Don’t include any activities in your marketing plan that can’t be measured in some way.

Decide in advance how often you will look at the numbers. Is it weekly? Monthly? Quarterly? Once you look at the numbers, be prepared to take action based on them.

After-action reports – At the end of every campaign, schedule time to review it. Not just the statistics and analytics, but also budget, resources, how the campaign resonated with customers. What could you have done better, more efficiently? Is it worth doing again? If it failed, why did it fail? Record this information and save it where you can refer back to it in the future (perhaps a Dropbox folder, shared with your team).

Budget updates – Hopefully you included budget projections with your plan. Those projections need to be tied to real-time numbers on a regular basis. The more you do this exercise, the smarter your estimates will be next year. You do have to spend money to make money, but you want to spend it intelligently. If you have your finger on the pulse of your budget routinely, you can reallocate funds if necessary. You will know whether you have the cash to invest in that sponsorship opportunity that pops up in April.

Focus your efforts – Unless you’re a Fortune 500 company, you probably can’t move forward on five big marketing campaigns at once. When you’re writing your marketing plan, don’t assume that you’re going to do it all in January. In fact, you may not want to plan out your entire year up-front. Consider going quarter by quarter. Plan your first quarter’s efforts in detail, and then have possible campaigns outlined and ready to be slotted into the next quarter.

There’s a sweet spot between completely unplanned and rigidly scheduled…you want to go there. Give yourself the gift of flexibility, but don’t wait until the last minute to prepare the next quarter’s actions.

Accountability and reporting – Even in a solo entrepreneurship, you need to have accountability to the business. It’s not a waste of time to put your marketing plan down in writing, even if you’re the only one reading it. It’s not a waste of time to do a weekly review of your numbers and prepare a written summary. When your business grows, you will be happy to have records! In a small shop, grab that extra set of eyeballs for your campaign reviews and budgeting. It doesn’t have to be an all-day event, just make sure you’re not stuck inside your own head. It’s important to relate your marketing activities with the sales person, the customer service person, and the rest of the team. You’re all working toward the same corporate strategic goals anyway, right?

So while you’re preparing your 2015 marketing plan, don’t forget the systems. And we’ll be harvesting lots of potatoes next year!

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for Social Strata — makers of the Hoop.la community platform. Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

Photo Credit: Ian Sane via Compfight cc

Avoiding Death by Cookie Cutter

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By Lisa D. Jenkins

Have you ever been doing one thing and found a correlation to another that sidetracks you? It happens to me all the time.

Cookie cutter man

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about doing what I love, it’s that sitting on my butt and working online for hours is all too easy. I’ve gone from running 5 to 7 miles a day to working 7 to 9 hours without ever getting out of my chair. It’s not good for me.

So two weeks ago, for the first time ever, I hired a personal trainer because I wanted some expertise and experience to help me avoid hurting myself while I got back in shape.

At our first meeting, I expected to be told how ‘the program’ worked and what I should be prepared for. Instead, we had an hour long conversation about what I wanted to achieve, any goals I was pursuing, how I ate and how much water I drank in a day. She was serious about food and water.

We talked about all the different nutritional plans out there – paleo, vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, raw, etc. Then she said, “I don’t want you to change how you eat, I do want you to keep a food diary. Write down everything you eat each day. Make a note on the days you feel great, get enough sleep and have a good workout, and make a note on the days where things aren’t feeling right for you. When you find the eating pattern that works best for you – stick with that. It’ll be the best Lisa Jenkins diet I can recommend.”

That’s where the correlation happened.

Most of us with online businesses look to others for support and inspiration to build stronger, more successful businesses. We seek out blogs like the one you’re reading now and conferences like SOBCon and Genius Shared to help us learn from people who’ve gone before us.

But that doesn’t mean we should blindly pattern our success on a cookie cutter version of theirs. We have to know what advice fits our needs and we need to know how to measure the effect of that advice against our unique goals. Here are a few simple ways to get started:

  • Create landing pages for each online campaign and track conversions using Google Analytics.
  • Collect email addresses instead of Likes, Follows and Connections and use them to segment customer markets for targeted campaigns you can track.
  • Use A/B testing.

Adapt the tactics of others, don’t copy their steps.

There’s nothing wrong with looking to others who’ve successfully built online businesses for inspiration and guidance to build your own business. It’s a smart move. Just make sure it IS your business you’re building and not a shadow of someone else’s.

Keep YOUR goals in mind. Track what works FOR YOU and what doesn’t. When you find what works best – stick with it. That’s the best strategy I can recommend.

Author’s Bio: Lisa D. Jenkins is a Public Relations professional specializing in Social and Digital Communications for businesses. She has over a decade of experience and work most often with destination organizations or businesses in the travel and tourism industry in the Pacific Northwest. Connect with her on Google+