Your Next Pitch: 5 Pitch Deck Slides To Hook Potential Investors [INFOGRAPHIC]

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Facebook’s New Podcast

It seems Facebook has its hands in a little bit of everything lately. From Facebook Portal, the Amazon Alexa enabled communication device to their new channel Facebook Watch, which houses videos from channels users follow as well as original content, there seems to be quite a move for Facebook to stay prominent in every channel, now including, podcasting.

A brand new podcast series focusing on entrepreneurship is the second podcast series to be released by the social media giant, and the first to be released in the US. The content is no surprise given the volume of businesses that use the platform (more than 90 million currently).

Called ‘Three And A Half Degrees: The Power of Connection,’ this show plays off of how technology has made it more convenient to connect (No longer six degrees of separation, but more like three and a half with the advances we have made).

Podcast host and VP of Business and Marketing Partnerships David Fischer says the podcast falls in line with the platform’s mission of helping businesses learn from one another.

Episode one includes an interview with Blake Mycoskie, the creator of TOMS shoes, and founders of fellow charitable business Two Blind Brothers, Bryan and Bradford Manning, and focuses on brands that prioritize a social mission over their growth or profit.

Season one will be seven episodes with fourteen guests, including Gary Vaynerchuck, Chris Kempczinski, Beth Comstock and more.

You can find episode one of ‘Three And A Half Degrees: The Power of Connection’ on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, TuneIn, and Stitcher.

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TED Talks for Sales Professionals

TED Talks are a great way to cultivate skills and knowledge from sources that you may have not had access to otherwise. Sales, however,  is a broad category, with sales professionals needing a range of emotional and intellectual intelligence and forethought into the future in order to really succeed. These speakers are insightful and interesting, and by implementing a few of their points, you could be on your way to improving your sales goals and strategies.

Eddie Obeng: Smart Failure for a Fast-Changing World

Ernesto Sirolli: Want to Help Someone? Shut Up and Listen!

Dan Pink: The Puzzle of Motivation

Shonda Rhimes: My Year of Saying Yes to Everything

Lera Boroditsky: How Language Shapes the Way We Think

Kelly McGonigal: How to Make Stress Your Friend

Sheena Iyengar: How to Make Choosing Easier

John Doerr: Why The Secret to Success is Setting the Right Goals

Leticia Gasca: Don’t Fail Fast– Fail Mindfully

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Engagement Insights For Facebook Business Pages

In January, Facebook announced a change to its news feed algorithm that would prioritize personal content from family and friends over content from Pages, which caused panic for many businesses that rely on Page engagement for growing their brand and generating new leads. Buffer and BuzzSumo collaborated to analyze 43 million posts from the pages of the top 20,000 brands on Facebook, and this is what they found.

Page Engagement has dropped

It was broadly assumed that with the algorithmic changes there would be a decrease in brand engagement, but the amount of decline was up in the air. Now, after the changes, Buffer’s study discovered that engagement on brand pages has dropped over 50%, with post engagement falling nearly two-thirds from where it had been previously.

Page types hit with a drop in engagement

The study ranked ten-page categories to determine which type of page was hit with the largest engagement drop. Artist Pages were found to be affected the most with a 70.6% drop in engagement, and retail Pages were affected the least with less than a 50% drop.

Pictures not video content

There has been a huge push for video content, and Facebook is leading the charge on that with a focus on live video and original content streaming (both live and pre-recorded) through Facebook (Watch, IGTV); but this study found that the content that received the highest engagement was not video, but images. Despite that, interaction for all content types is down, with an over 63% drop in average per post engagement.

Post volume to combat decreased engagement

In the last year, the analyzed Pages have posted more content with posts per quarter up to 8.1 million from 6.5 million, which is a 24% increase. Quantity vs quality is still a hot debate, but there is a sweet spot for getting noticed.

How many times to post in a day

In that same vein, there are findings related to how frequently pages post and the following per post engagement as well as overall page engagement. The study found that Pages posting less than one time a day have the highest per-post engagement, but also have the lowest overall engagement. The optimal number of posts for longterm overall Page engagement was found to be right around 5 posts per day. This is not an end all be all strategy, but might be a good thing to try if you are looking to boost long-term metrics.

Learn more about what the analysis uncovered and read the full study here.

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SEO vs Social Media Marketing

When you’re trying to increase your web traffic you may be wondering which is better for growing your traffic organically, social media marketing (SMM) or Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Is one better than the other? Both methods are continually changing and evolving, so the answer can’t really be gleaned simply.

Long story short, SEO and SMM are able to be successful on their own, but when used together have the potential to have the most influence on traffic. Essentially, by sharing content to your social media channels you should be driving traffic to your site.

Throughout the last few years, there has been an exponential growth of social media pages (Facebook and Twitter primarily) in the top 100 on Google.  An article by PrimeView states, “…SMM blogs should be receiving the majority of their visitors from social media channels, as it is their area of expertise …SMM-focused blogs perform better in organic search than SEO-focused blogs. The high levels of engagement SMM blogs receive from social media allow them to get more backlinks and referral traffic, which, in turn, helps them rank higher organically.”

This goes against Google’s stance that rank and social media presence are not correlated, showing that links with more social engagement can lead to a higher ranking. This does not mean, however, that more social activity is a way to “hack” your SEO, in fact, pushing too much low-value content on your followers can annoy them, leading to followers ignoring your posts or even unfollowing you.

So, as important as it is to post consistently, again we find that quality over quantity is key to adding value to the content you’re publishing, and key to getting post engagements and therefore improved SEO. With that, make a note that SEO should not be the focus of your social strategy and that content is still king for getting you ranked, as quality is the number one factor for Google rank.

When trying to grow your site traffic and developing content for SMM, it is crucial to put the work into placing keywords and links correctly so that your content will garner more backlinks and get more referral traffic from your social media followers. SEO appeals to an algorithm, but SMM appeals to people, so to really harness the power of both you must understand how these two key components to your marketing strategy are almost complete opposites, but yet interdependent. Content that is high ranking will bring in more search traffic, and by the nature of how the world of social media works, this search traffic will drive shares, comments and follows on your social channels.

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Marketing Tips: Keyword Research and Planning For Improved SEO

If you’re looking to improve your SEO and haven’t done much research into keyword planning, you might not realize how important it really is. Knowing how to use and find the right keywords is arguably the most important skill a marketer can hone when it comes to search effectiveness. The start of effective SEO comes from a well-built keyword map or keyword plan.

What is keyword mapping?

“Keyword mapping is the process of assigning or mapping keywords to specific pages on a website based on keyword research. Based on your mapping process you are able to then make specific on-page SEO recommendations to help make the page more relevant to the mapped keywords.” Says Adam Bate of SEO Brothers.

How to start keyword planning

Step One: Research

Put together a list of all of the words you might want your business to appear when someone searches that word. It would be nearly impossible to achieve getting your business to rank on the first page of search results for every word you choose but here you can shoot for the stars.

Tools like Moz, SEMrush and the Google keyword planner can help you expand your list and include faceted keywords you may not have initially thought of.

Step Two: Filter

Work on removing any duplicated words, as well as any that you know for a fact you won’t rank for (taking out branded terms from competitors is usually a good starting point).

Now set your keywords into sets: Priority, Secondary, and Other Terms.

1. Priority terms: Should be keywords you want to appear for right away. They need to imply that you have the answer to a question or the ability to fulfill a need; be a high volume keyword that is worth the investment, and need to be related to current and upcoming (near-future) business.
2. Secondary terms: These will come into play later on, once priority keywords are locked into optimized pages that are query-responsive. These should be keywords that relate to your site, have a decent volume and imply questions you don’t have the expertise to answer.
3. Other terms: You’ll ignore these for now, and note why you may or may not want to re-evaluate these keywords later on

Step Three: Map keywords to pages

The first thing to do when mapping is to scrape Google for your keywords and current rank. You don’t have to do this, but generally, it is useful to be able to keep things simple, rather than to manually map each page, regardless of how Google feels about scraping and rank tracking (the general consensus is not incredibly positive). Now you need to ensure that the content on the page that the clickthrough directs to actually answers what is being searched for. Sometimes your map will work perfectly, and other times, Google gets it totally wrong, so remapping is necessary to close the gap. You’ll go through this same process when you’re working with mapping URLs, starting new pages, as well as when optimizing content and existing pages.

Keyword planning is a big job, but when done right can get you noticed and moved up in the ranks of the SEO world. For a more in-depth walkthrough of keyword mapping for SEO and content creation, see this blog post from Moz that will give you a map to mapping.  

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How To Create a Business Plan

Starting a business is an exciting thing, and if done right, can be life-changing. But there are key steps that must be taken in order to give your potential business the best chance for success. At the top of this list is having a business plan.

What is a business plan?

Hubspot’s definition of a business plan is as follows: “A business plan is a living document that maps out the details of your business. It covers what your business will sell, how it will be structured, what the market looks like, how you plan to sell your product or service, what funding you’ll need, what your financial projections are, and which permits, leases, and other documentation will be required.”

Essentially, a business plan shows if your idea is worth putting in the continued effort to make it flourish. You are forced to look at the big picture and explain every detail that defines your holistic view.

Making a business plan

Building a  business plan may seem like an unwieldy task, but it doesn’t have to be. Keep it short and simple, as too much information or minute detail could confuse or distract anyone reading the plan such as shareholders, investors or any others involved in the inception of your business. The plan should also have a certain amount of flexibility built into it, and be able to grow and evolve as the vision for your business does. Finally, you’ll want to really dig into what makes your idea for a business unique within your space. Being able to stand out from a crown is a major prerequisite when starting a business.

Now you’re ready to put everything together and write your very own business plan. These templates organized by INC. are a great place to start and will help you organize all of the information you will need to present.

To fill out these templates, you’ll need to be ready with these sections of information:

1. An executive summary
2. A company description and business model
3. A market analysis
4. A description of your products and/or services
5. Outlines of operation and management roles
6. A basic sales and marketing strategy
7. A financial plan that includes costs, funding and profit/revenue projections
8. A summary of the above information

With that, you’re all set to start pitching your business and moving onto other tasks like choosing and registering a name, determining your legal structure and getting ready for a successful launch.

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Business Podcasts to Subscribe to in 2018

Continued education doesn’t have to come in the form of classrooms and textbooks, you can glean knowledge from many sources. One of the most popular ways to continue learning is listening to podcasts. Podcasts can cover a wide range of subjects from pop culture to politics to business practices. The following podcast recommendations cover topics from entrepreneurship, marketing, and business.

School of Greatness

Host Lewis Howes has overcome his share of adversity. This podcast launched in 2013 and has grown to be one of iTunes’ top-rated Business and Self-Development podcasts. The mission on ‘School of Greatness’ is to empowerer listeners to achieve success in the face of adversity, and he shares not only his story but the stories of the guests that come on the show.

Cool Things Entrepreneurs Do

Thom Singer started this podcast hoping to enable a new generation of leaders to use his knowledge of business relationships, sales, networking and more, including fitness, trends, and entrepreneurial spirit.

Product Hunt Radio

Product Hunt is great for the B2C business person, and those interested in current product trends. It focuses on physical products and how they’re created, the marketing behind them that turns them into global brands, and guests’ takes on productivity, management and investment.

Rocketship.fm

With big-name guests, this weekly podcast covers everything about building a startup from developing a product to finding and converting a customer base. This show is great for anyone in the B2B or B2C world.

The Influencer Podcast

Julie Solomon, marketing strategist, publisher and influencer hosts this show and brings in guests to talk about their experiences in the world of influencer marketing, as well as sharing insights into how to grow, engage with and persuade an audience.

Smart Passive Income

Learn how Pat Flynn author of The Smart Passive Income Blog uses all of his online blog and business strategies, as well as marketing tips and income sources which will help you take the next steps forward with your online businesses, blogs and more.

Copyblogger FM

In a world where content is king, it never hurts to strive for an improved approach to writing and content marketing. Host Sonia Simone and a rotating panel of experts discuss news, trends, and updates in copywriting, email marketing, conversion, content marketing and more.

The Science of Social Media

Buffer has a great blog, and the podcast they produce is just as influential. The content presented covers everything from the state of social media marketing, new algorithms, and third-party tools to maximize your social media management. This is a great podcast for everyone from beginners to the well seasoned social media practitioner.

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Bitcoin, Ethereum and More. An Introduction to Cryptocurrency

In 2008 a new currency was revealed to the world. Satoshi Nakamoto published a research paper that outlined a design for a digital currency called Bitcoin. The revelation solved one of the internet’s biggest questions, how to create digital money. Recently you may have seen that Bitcoin values are rising and falling at amazing rates, but why? And how do you take advantage of the madness and hype around cryptocurrency?

Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrency first and foremost are not the same as traditional currency, and perhaps the main difference is that it is not controlled by any central authority (banks, governments, etc.) Cryptocurrencies are “mined” by miners using computers and hardware to monitor and process transactions and the network the currency is based on. Miners receive the correlated digital currency in exchange for their work. Bitcoin maybe be one of the most well known of the available cryptocurrency types, but it isn’t the only one available, or the only one making the news. Litecoin, Ethereum, and Zcash are just some of the major contenders and each has its own privacy and trading capacities.

The buzz around cryptocurrency and specifically Bitcoin reached new heights last month as the price per “coin” surged to $19,500 USD. This made headlines as investors and other individuals raced to put money into the coins hoping to strike gold. However, last week, there was a sudden drop, with coins trading down to $9,200 USD (as of today the current value of one coin is $10,542.92 USD).  The drop was sudden and rattled those that had recently sunk money into the volatile market.

When the price surge occurred, Bitcoin’s electricity consumption hit a record high of 42.1 terawatt-hours. Energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions are a point of contention for many, as the rate of emissions rivals that of the entire country of New Zealand (roughly 20 million metric tons per year).

The process of grouping Bitcoin transactions and mining the transactions is to blame for the high use of electricity. Vox writer Umair Irfan says, “this process is like finding solutions to complicated math problems that become progressively more difficult. It’s a competitive process, with one miner receiving the award, currently 12.5 bitcoins, roughly every 10 minutes, so there’s a strong incentive to throw as much processor power — and thereby electricity — at the mining effort.” Or as Alex Hern of the Guardian says, the process is,  “a competition to waste the most electricity possible by doing pointless arithmetic quintillions of times a second.”

You do not have to mine your own cryptocurrency as it is relatively easy to purchase online, but buyer beware: the value does fluctuate, as discussed previously.  To get started investing in Bitcoin or Ethereum simply download the Coinbase app and create an account. Add an account to make payments from and tap ”Buy”. There are weekly purchasing limits based upon the type of payment account you set up, but you are now ready to start investing.

Once you purchase your chosen cryptocurrency you can either save it or spend it. Some of the things bitcoin is spent on include food delivery, socks, gaming, as well as being used as ante when placing online bets. The world of cryptocurrency is becoming much more accessible to the general public, and will thusly stay newsworthy as the interest in diversified finance and the community of cryptocurrency investors grows.

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Hacks For a More Productive 2018

Unlock your full potential today by using some of these productivity tricks. Put these hacks to good use so you can write more, learn more, and do more to succeed.

1. Pomodoro Technique

The Pomodoro technique was developed in the 1980s and uses a timer to break up your workday into 25-minute intervals (called Pomodoros), followed by a short break. After four Pomodoros you then take a longer break. There are apps, websites and even browser extensions that can help you track the process. This might not work for everyone, and creatives especially could struggle with the constant breaks in the creative process, but it could be worth a try to find a technique that works for you.

2. The two-minute rule

The two-minute rule is based on the mindset that if something takes two minutes or less to complete you should do it right away. This helps alleviate procrastination on small tasks and helps to prevent things from stacking up to become more of a chore.

3. Task batching

Rather than falling prey to multitasking, you can use task batching to focus your energy on specific tasks. This means allotting time for each type of work you have. For example, setting aside 15-minute increments for email, an hour for writing, 30 minutes for social media, whatever will work for you and your workday.

4.Two pizza rule

Jeff Bezos is credited with this next idea, the two pizza rule. This is a guideline that helps set limits on the number of attendees allowed in a meeting, with the idea that the number of attendees should not exceed the number of people that could eat two pizzas. This keeps the meeting focused on the task at hand.

5. Utilize your calendar

Your calendar can be the best tool for making the most of a day, simply because you can visualize everything that has to get done. You can use a calendar to schedule task batching, or simply plan and set aside days that will be meeting free and focused on doing the work you have to do uninterrupted.

6.Turn off alerts

It may not be possible to turn your phone completely off during the times you need to focus, but you can cut down on distractions by silencing it, or by completely disabling notifications. By doing this you are silencing outside “noise” so you can make finishing what you are working on your main priority.

7. Use tools to streamline your work

Hootsuite, Mailchimp, Trello, Buffer, the list goes on and on. There are tons of free and paid tools available online that can help streamline your workflow, focusing on everything from project management to digital marketing and social media.

8.Don’t drown in the shallow end

It’s easy to get bogged down stressing out about all the small things you have to do, and this can cause you to be distracted from the big meaningful items on your to-do list. Setting your priorities can make the small tasks seem less daunting, and therefore less stressful.

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Is Digital Marketing Destroying Marketing As A Whole?

Looking into the future of marketing many times forces us to look into the past. What has worked? What hasn’t? Is there something that was executed poorly that could be re-integrated into a more current strategy? But looking at the past faces of marketing might make marketers of today nervous, and for good reason. TechCrunch released an article on how the use of Google Analytics has changed marketing, and in their opinion, changed it for the worse.

Simply stated, Google Analytics has allowed marketers to focus solely on digital methods, sometimes getting poorer results than could be expected if strategies and channels were paid more attention to in the overall view of what marketing can be. Marketing has shifted completely from the advertising empire that was so renowned in the days of Madison Avenue. Gone are the days of a basic strategy and here are the days of separate and not usually equal use of marketing channels.  

This isn’t to say that digital marketing isn’t important. In fact, with the amount of people who own computers, cell phones and other devices, digital marketing (which includes social media, native advertising, influencer marketing and any mobile marketing or apps) and mobile marketing have rightfully become some of the top ways to generate more customers and revenue as well as increase public knowledge of brands.

The deceiving part of this is that at least in the United States, people are spending more and more time watching TV, with the daily time devoted to television almost equal with the amount of time spent working (According to this article from the Washington Post). But television marketing isn’t something that you hear many marketers discuss on a day to day basis, especially in the world of startups, where money is tight and marketing efforts need to do more for less.

The reasoning behind this may be that marketers of today don’t fully comprehend differences of what content, channel, and strategy are. Just like television is a channel for advertising, channels in digital marketing can be search results, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat a blog and any other platform you may think of. Content is what you post on these channels: videos, blogs, images, testimonials, the list goes on and on. And the backbone of it all: strategy. Strategy can be advertising, promotion, SEO, publicity, personal selling, direct marketing, essentially asking what the purpose of content on a specific channel is.

For marketing to work as it is supposed to, marketers need to go back to basics and relearn how they connect with their audience and for what purpose. Google Analytics does not deliver you the information you need to decide if the return on investment (ROI) you get from social media is from any specific strategy, which negates any ability to change or improve a strategy if all you see is that the ROI is there and often comes across as “good enough”.

Google Analytics is without a doubt useful and important to continue using, but the key to overall marketing success is remembering that it A) does not track all marketing efforts (only online campaigns) and B) does not always give you the details you need to make the strongest decisions for your overall marketing quality. Branch out and learn about other ways you can track your ROI and success, try new content and channels. You never know what strategies might work for you.

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Marketing Trend: Personalized Marketing

Consumers are not strangers to personalized content. People tend to love when they receive offers and content that really fit them and their needs. Think back to email marketing. As a consumer, you may receive emails that seem to know everything about what you are looking for from any number of stores. This is a big example of how personalized marketing can work, but there are also social media ads, banner ads, video ads and more, which can all be personalized to the consumer, either through data collection or extensive targeting.

The key to creating great personalization is having a strategy to create data-driven content. With the content you build using the data you have, your marketing options expand innumerably, and include personalized content.

Defining personalized marketing

Beyond email, personalized marketing may be something you are not familiar with as a consumer, but you will realize that you have been seeing it every day.

The Content Marketing Institute defines the concept of personalized content by saying the following: “content personalization is a strategy that exploits visitor or prospect data to deliver relevant content based on the interests and preferences of the target audience.” You can read more about the approach to content personalization here.

Want to learn more? These companies are doing personalized marketing right!

Amazon

Online retail giant Amazon’s product curation and product recommendations are not new features but are definitely some of the biggest examples of personalized marketing around right now. Each section on your Amazon homepage should harken back to not only your purchase history but also your browsing history and streaming history on Amazon Video.

Spotify

Recommendations for music, compiled playlists and the “Discover Weekly” feature are all built on a Spotify user’s “taste profile”. When you are listening to music, data is taken from each listening session to create stations that fit in with that profile.

Coca-Cola

As discussed in an earlier post about user-generated content, Coca Cola’s “Share a Coke” campaign has remained a staple for the brand since it’s 2011 beginnings, and one reason why is because the personalization factor of finding your own name (especially with the correct spelling or if you have an unusual name) keeps consumers purchasing and engaging with the brand as they find their names.

Facebook

Facebook is already a personalized experience just based on the nature of how it is used, but the addition of “Friendship History Videos” and other personalized options for photos as well as the obvious page, event and friend suggestions make Facebook not only a great platform for individual personalization but also great for marketers looking to target a very specific audience.

Netflix

Netflix is an essential part of many households today, and their rating system is a great way to sort through the amount of content that is available to stream. When you see a show or movie on Netflix you’ll see a rating amount out of five stars. Contrary to normal reviews and ratings, the stars appear based on how Netflix’s algorithm believes you will rate the content based on your past activity.

Personalized content and marketing are a great way to reach your audience even further and perhaps you’ve even seen some other great examples. Share your experiences with personalized marketing in the comments section.

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Marketing Trend: Data Driven Content

Looking to make your marketing efforts a little more streamlined? Or just trying to create content that is easy to scale, right for your audience and optimized for search purposes? Data-driven content is the way to go. The biggest hurdle for most marketers is leaving the creative brain behind and getting into a quantitative mindset that allows you to look at your metrics and analyze how to improve those numbers and statistics.

It may sound scary, but using data can really improve your content, SEO and more. Try these tips and tricks from JBH: The Content Agency to get started!

If you still aren’t convinced that data is changing the way marketers think and execute their strategies, take a look at these examples that prove that data-driven marketing and content can work in any industry.

Fitness Tracking: Jawbone

Because fitness tracker Jawbone’s purpose is to collect data for consumer use, it makes sense that their marketing efforts are also highly data-driven. By collecting the data from their customers, the content that is produced is much more relevant to the lifestyles of the entire user base.

Music: Spotify

Spotify users see curated playlists and song suggestions based on their listening history, and via this post from 2013, it’s clear to see that Spotify doesn’t take their analytics lightly. Spotify also has a “Found Them First” feature, that lets you know if you were an early listener of emerging artists that are now big.

Home Search: Trulia, Zillow

Zillow and Trulia are two giants when it comes to online house hunting, but also when it comes to using data to improve customer experience. From amassing crime data to pricing and neighborhood demographics, the data compiled on these sites and individually compiled from users’ browsing sessions can help homebuyers find the perfect place.

Ridesharing: Uber

Ridesharing app Uber does the typical promotional posts and company updates but also uses the data they compile to create great human interest pieces, like this article. The data Uber uses to create content used for both societal and human nature research.

Data drives the world. How will you use it to create better content?  

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