Sure Oak: Digital Marketing, SEO, Online Business Strategy, & More

Ask Amanda About Marketing: When companies want to start doing content marketing, they often make one big mistake: Companies want one piece of content to do way too much. This expert advice comes from Amanda Milligan, Branded Content Manager at Fractl. In this episode, she sits down with Tom to dig into the most important emotion, common mistakes and we have real talk about the actual amount of work needed to produce successful content. The Biggest Mistake Amanda cautions that each piece of content needs a role. One content piece cannot speak to your current customers and appeal to everyone else and get you links. However, many companies will create content that tries to do everything while actually doing none of it well. The content idea needs to be communicated in a compelling and easy to understand. Content can get too complicated, killing online performance. If the viewer can’t figure out what’s going on immediately, they’ll click out. Amanda finds the root cause of this mistake is the starting point: “When you decide to start doing content marketing, you don’t just start making content.” She advises that companies have to put in the time investment upfront. Determining content goals and priorities is a crucial first step in producing good content. Once these goals are established, Amanda notes that you need to assign tactics to them. Emotional Research: The Surprising Result Everyone knows emotion is a huge component of marketing. Amanda shared the results of a fascinating promotional viability study which Fractl completed. Using the top 50 Imgur images, they surveyed people on their emotional experience when looking at each photo. Positive images ranked higher than negative ones. This result surprised Amanda as she was expecting negative images to provoke a stronger emotional reaction. And the most common positive reaction? “Surprise was the number one emotion that people identified while looking at these photos.” The result makes a lot of sense to Amanda. Successful content needs to be newsworthy. And surprising content provides something unexpected. This newsworthiness means that viewers will want to consume and share the content. This emotion is found in any piece of viral content. “Leaving [surprise] out of your content is a huge mistake.” Learn from Failures There will be failures; however, Amanda cautions that you can’t consider pieces that didn’t work as failures. You need to analyze what happened. Sometimes there’s a creative issue, and sometimes you just get scooped. Reflecting is also a crucial part of the creative process. So much of content marketing is risk-taking and testing. Even with the push to ‘produce, produce, produce’, it’s crucial to take time to understand and improve your work. Key questions: * This idea worked really well. Why? * This idea did not work well. Why? To succeed in content marketing: “You have to be a student of what has worked. Does Content Really Pay Off? Then, we got real about the work. Given how much work goes into content creation (research, design, outreach, etc.), why is it worth it? What’s the value compared to other marketing forms? Amanda notes that it’s all about the long-term strategy. “We tell our clients: it’s never going to be an amazing campaign over and over and over.” This work is a long-term investment.

How to reach out to Derric: How can you grow your business with social media? In this episode, Derric Haynie tells us the answer, plus we get to meet his dog, Dexter. Derric is the CEO and founder of Vulpine Interactive, a social media marketing agency, and he is very passionate about growth marketing. Derric lays out his team’s workflow. Leverage Your Social Media Accounts “Success starts with a cohesive growth strategy,” says Derric. How are you going to use social media to grow your company? You can use social media for customer support and to build a tribe of brand advocates. Before you start executing on social, you should ask yourself 2 questions: * Is this an action worth pursuing? * Do I have the budget? Ultimately, your ROI, which comes in different “flavors” according to Derric, will be a direct result of what you put into your social media budget: time, research, and money. To find what works for your business, you want to start by testing organic social media posts to see which posts get the most engagement. Start coming up with ideas and testing a lot of posts. Facebook will then show you how your posts are performing and you can use this feedback to choose which organic posts to put paid promotion behind. Derric encourages you to try out different styles of post to see what your customer responds to. What gets you the most engagement? Going Viral What about viral video marketing? You can get your video in front of thousands or millions of people, but how? For any video to have even a chance of going viral, it needs an attention-grabbing intro within the first few seconds. Facebook users scroll through their newsfeed at lightening speed, so if you don’t grab their attention in the first few seconds, your video will never get watched in the first place. No fade in intros, no branding. Grab attention and hook them. Once you have a great intro, what is going to drive people to share it and tell others to watch it? Target a niche group and share it with them. Derric says, “Every individual is an influencer.” What can you add to your video that will lead to someone sharing your video and ultimately making themselves look better? Contagious brands = Passionate fans Derric’s motto “Building contagious brands and passionate fans” is about being customer-centric, much like Jeff Bezos preaches. Put the customer first, and you will keep and acquire new customers. By investing in your social media, email copy, packaging, and app, you will lower your cost of customer acquisition and increase your revenue. Word of mouth is the best way to advertise and a huge opportunity for most companies. And, according to Derric, social media is word of mouth on steroids. How Derric Audits Social Strategy * Vulpine Interactive begins their social media marketing focus on their client’s customer engagement and interaction. They create quality content for the customers to share and repost (and possibly make viral). * Social media customer service and chatbots are next on their list.

How to reach out to Derric: How can you grow your business with social media? In this episode, Derric Haynie tells us the answer, plus we get to meet his dog, Dexter. Derric is the CEO and founder of Vulpine Interactive, a social media marketing agency, and he is very passionate about growth marketing. Derric lays out his team’s workflow. Leverage Your Social Media Accounts “Success starts with a cohesive growth strategy,” says Derric. How are you going to use social media to grow your company? You can use social media for customer support and to build a tribe of brand advocates. Before you start executing on social, you should ask yourself 2 questions: * Is this an action worth pursuing? * Do I have the budget? Ultimately, your ROI, which comes in different “flavors” according to Derric, will be a direct result of what you put into your social media budget: time, research, and money. To find what works for your business, you want to start by testing organic social media posts to see which posts get the most engagement. Start coming up with ideas and testing a lot of posts. Facebook will then show you how your posts are performing and you can use this feedback to choose which organic posts to put paid promotion behind. Derric encourages you to try out different styles of post to see what your customer responds to. What gets you the most engagement? Going Viral What about viral video marketing? You can get your video in front of thousands or millions of people, but how? For any video to have even a chance of going viral, it needs an attention-grabbing intro within the first few seconds. Facebook users scroll through their newsfeed at lightening speed, so if you don’t grab their attention in the first few seconds, your video will never get watched in the first place. No fade in intros, no branding. Grab attention and hook them. Once you have a great intro, what is going to drive people to share it and tell others to watch it? Target a niche group and share it with them. Derric says, “Every individual is an influencer.” What can you add to your video that will lead to someone sharing your video and ultimately making themselves look better? Contagious brands = Passionate fans Derric’s motto “Building contagious brands and passionate fans” is about being customer-centric, much like Jeff Bezos preaches. Put the customer first, and you will keep and acquire new customers. By investing in your social media, email copy, packaging, and app, you will lower your cost of customer acquisition and increase your revenue. Word of mouth is the best way to advertise and a huge opportunity for most companies. And, according to Derric, social media is word of mouth on steroids. How Derric Audits Social Strategy * Vulpine Interactive begins their social media marketing focus on their client’s customer engagement and interaction. They create quality content for the customers to share and repost (and possibly make viral). * Social media customer service and chatbots are next on their lis...

How to reach out to Tom: That’s our mission for the Sure Oak Podcast. If you’re a CMO, a digital marketer or someone with a keen interest in the field, this show is for you. We want to help grow your revenue based on where you are today and where you want to go. Each episode investigates the current trends in digital marketing. Whether it's SEO, PPC, UX, Video, content marketing or other areas, we hand-pick experts in their field. Our interviews dig into what’s new, what’s changing and how do these online areas relate to each other. Our goal is to bring as much value in as short a podcast as possible. Maybe it’s my New York speed, but I don’t have the patience for a one-hour episode. I want to dive right into the good stuff. I cut down on fluff by minimizing the intro and by having no sponsors or advertising. Each episode is simply 20 minutes of high-value content. The podcast will focus on three key guest questions: * What is their high-level strategy? * What are the actionable tactics that listeners can apply? * What are their past success stories and case studies? Who’s the Host? I’m Tom Casano, a digital marketer and SEO expert. I live in Manhattan with my wife and our adorable one-and-a-half year old daughter. I studied philosophy in college and then day-traded on the stock market. I got my feet wet in digital marketing at LifeCoachSpotter.com in 2013. There, I listened to experts and tried all the online advice but I still struggled. I learned plenty of things that do not work for digital marketing and SEO. The moment when I “finally figured it out”, I realized that there are only a few primary ranking factors for SEO: * Backlinks from trustworthy, authoritative and relevant domains * High-quality and high-value content * Optimizing that content so that it’s targeting multiple keywords * Great user experience I used this knowledge to establish Sure Oak, a digital marketing agency based in the US. Our team mostly focuses on SEO, using it to grow businesses. We are always learning, and this podcast will share the most valuable lessons with our listeners. Question, Comment or Idea? If you have a suggestion or improvement for the podcast, a question about digital marketing, or an idea to collaborate on a blog or podcast, let’s chat about it. If you’re looking for help with your business’s SEO, drop me a line because I’d love to help you rank higher. Subscribe, Rate, Review If you like the podcast, please subscribe, rate and review in iTunes or your favorite podcast platform.

How to reach out to Tom: That’s our mission for the Sure Oak Podcast. If you’re a CMO, a digital marketer or someone with a keen interest in the field, this show is for you. We want to help grow your revenue based on where you are today and where you want to go. Each episode investigates the current trends in digital marketing. Whether it's SEO, PPC, UX, Video, content marketing or other areas, we hand-pick experts in their field. Our interviews dig into what’s new, what’s changing and how do these online areas relate to each other. Our goal is to bring as much value in as short a podcast as possible. Maybe it’s my New York speed, but I don’t have the patience for a one-hour episode. I want to dive right into the good stuff. I cut down on fluff by minimizing the intro and by having no sponsors or advertising. Each episode is simply 20 minutes of high-value content. The podcast will focus on three key guest questions: * What is their high-level strategy? * What are the actionable tactics that listeners can apply? * What are their past success stories and case studies? Who’s the Host? I’m Tom Casano, a digital marketer and SEO expert. I live in Manhattan with my wife and our adorable one-and-a-half year old daughter. I studied philosophy in college and then day-traded on the stock market. I got my feet wet in digital marketing at LifeCoachSpotter.com in 2013. There, I listened to experts and tried all the online advice but I still struggled. I learned plenty of things that do not work for digital marketing and SEO. The moment when I “finally figured it out”, I realized that there are only a few primary ranking factors for SEO: * Backlinks from trustworthy, authoritative and relevant domains * High-quality and high-value content * Optimizing that content so that it’s targeting multiple keywords * Great user experience I used this knowledge to establish Sure Oak, a digital marketing agency based in the US. Our team mostly focuses on SEO, using it to grow businesses. We are always learning, and this podcast will share the most valuable lessons with our listeners. Question, Comment or Idea? If you have a suggestion or improvement for the podcast, a question about digital marketing, or an idea to collaborate on a blog or podcast, let’s chat about it. If you’re looking for help with your business’s SEO, drop me a line because I’d love to help you rank higher. Subscribe, Rate, Review If you like the podcast, please subscribe, rate and review in iTunes or your favorite podcast platform.