Secret Marketing Weapons of 8 Thought Leaders- Business.com eBook
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You don't have to be a marketing guru to achieve small business success. With the right tools, marketing can be made easy. To help you cut through the clutter, we examined EIGHT of the most credible thought leaders in the social media and marketing universe. In this new white paper, you'll discover all the must-have resources suggested by the industry's leading experts. Download today and find out what exists in the toolboxes of Seth Godin, Jeff Bullas, Danny Sullivan, and more.
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Secret Marketing Weapons of 8 Thought Leaders- Business.com eBook
- 1. © Business.com Media, Inc. All rights reserved. | 888.441.4466!
- 2. © Business.com Media, Inc. All rights reserved. | 888.441.4466! 8 Thought Leaders and Their Secret Weapons! 1 Jim Kukral! @JimKukral! Seth Godin! @ThisIsSethsBlog! Jeff Bullas! @JeffBullas! Jay Baer! @jaybaer! Chris Voss! @CHRISVOSS! Danny Sullivan! @dannysullivan! Christopher Penn! @cspenn! Robert Scoble! @Scobleizer! Page 3! Page 4! Page 5! Page 6! Page 7! Page 8! Page 9! Page 10!
- 3. © Business.com Media, Inc. All rights reserved. | 888.441.4466! 8 Thought Leaders and Their Secret Weapons! One of the biggest challenges for businesses is staying on top of the rapidly changing marketing and media landscape. Countless apps, websites, and blogs compete for our attention – there's something new, it seems, every day.! ! To help you cut through the clutter, we examined EIGHT of the most credible and dynamic thought leaders in the social media and marketing universe.! ! We asked ourselves the following questions:! • What are their go-to marketing resources? ! • What tools do they recommend to their legions of followers? ! • What applications helped them get to where they are now?! • What tips and tricks could any small business use to immediately boost their marketing campaigns?! ! ! ! ! In the pages that follow, you will find a number of gems; if just one inspires you to take your marketing to the next level, then we are doing our job.! ! We challenge you to utilize these invaluable marketing resources to immediately improve your marketing campaigns.! 2
- 4. © Business.com Media, Inc. All rights reserved. | 888.441.4466! Jim Kukral! Jim Kukral, a columnist with The Huffington Post, is smart and goes out of his way to be helpful. Dun & Bradstreet named him one of “The Most Influential Small Business People on Twitter,” and he serves as an Online Instructor for the University of San Francisco’s Internet Marketing Program.! ! ! ! ! ! ! Not to worry – the company says implementation takes about 15 seconds, “even for newbies.” LeadPlayer claims to be “the easiest way to attract an audience, build a list, and generate revenue.” A pretty bold claim, right? Reading the reviews, it appears they can walk the talk.! ! For landing pages, Kukral suggests Unbounce, which enables users to build, publish and pre-test landing pages – all without an IT department. ! ! ! ! “Love this tool for building fantastic, awesome looking landing pages,” he says.! ! Users can build a landing page and publish it to the web in a single click and without any knowledge of HTML.! ! Businesses that count on Unbounce to facilitate conversions include Canon, Intuit, Greenpeace, Amazon, and LinkedIn.! ! ! ! ! ! Kukral is a big fan of the LeadPlayer WordPress Plugin, which provides easy opt-in boxes that appear at the beginning of a video. It also offers the ability to insert call-to-actions into videos. Think it's beyond your technical aptitude?! Jim Kukral! @JimKukral! 3
- 5. © Business.com Media, Inc. All rights reserved. | 888.441.4466! Seth Godin! Seth Godin is the author of 17 books that have been best sellers around the world and have been translated into more than 35 languages. His blog is one of the most popular in the world. Godin was Vice President of Direct Marketing at Yahoo! and in 2013, he was inducted into the Direct Marketing Hall of Fame.! ! Recently, Godin shared his favorite online tools, some of which are well known and others that may surprise you. Have you heard, for example, of duckduckgo.com? If you care about your privacy, maybe you should. ! ! Godin describes it as “a smart, fast, private search engine with a silly name.” It prides itself not only on protecting searchers' privacy, but in providing the highest quality search results culled from key crowd-sourced sites.! ! Searching for a blog post image is one of the most frustrating and time-consuming parts of blogging. Godin regards Compfight, an image search engine, as “a secret weapon in the search for useful Creative Commons-licensed photos.” The search engine also includes photos available for commercial use. Godin reminds users to donate if they use the service. ! ! Then there’s FeedBlitz, an email and social media marketing automation service. It manages subscriptions, circulation tracking, testing, and is compatible with all major blogging platforms and services.! ! ! Godin describes FeedBlitz as “a reliable, handmade alternative to Feedburner and other corporate solutions.” FeedBlitz handles the email and RSS feeds for his highly regarded blog.! ! ! Seth Godin! @ThisIsSethsBlog! 4
- 6. © Business.com Media, Inc. All rights reserved. | 888.441.4466! Jeff Bullas! Jeff Bullas was listed by Forbes as one of the "Top 50 Social Media Power Influencers" in 2013, and has been cited as a social media expert in the New York Times and the Huffington Post. He is a fan of Aweber, an email marketing software designed to be efficient and easy to use. ! ! Bullas, who uses AWeber for his blog, says he is impressed by its “large range of features that can be used by affiliate marketers, bloggers and website owners.” ! ! Key features include email newsletters, autoresponders, and converting RSS to email. ! A dizzying number of marketing blogs beckon us. What is on Bullas' reading list? The one constant over the years, he says, has been Copyblogger, which started as a copywriting blog but has evolved.! ! “It is a great portal for content marketing, SEO copywriting, email marketing, keyword research and internet marketing in general,” says Bullas. For SEO, he has two rulebooks he consults on a regular basis: Search Engine Journal and Search Engine Land.! ! ! ! For lead generation and inbound marketing, he, along with nearly 10,000 other marketers, counts on Hubspot, which Bullas credits with inspiring him to start his highly rated social media marketing blog.! ! New social media tools and platforms are launched every year. Bullas reminds us that the old kid on the block, Facebook, remains the largest social network on the planet. He recommends ShortStack, an app that allows non-programmer types to customize their Facebook pages.! ! Want another recommendation? Try MailChimp, which, according to Bullas, is “an easy to use email marketing platform that is cost effective and easy to get up and running fast.” ! ! ! ! ! Jeff Bullas! @JeffBullas! 5
- 7. © Business.com Media, Inc. All rights reserved. | 888.441.4466! Jay Baer! Baer has worked with hundreds of brands including Nike, Cold Stone Creamery, and Sony. He is the co-author of, “The NOW Revolution: 7 Shifts to Make Your Business Faster, Smarter, and More Social.”! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! Baer uses the All In One SEO Pack plug-in, calling it ‘a must’ to optimize posts for search engine rankings. “This nifty piece of software,” says Baer, “allows you to specify page title, description, and keywords for each post.” Seems to be working for Baer's blog, Convince & Convert, which was named the number-three social media blog in the world by Social Media Examiner. ! ! One of Baer's newest obsessions is Topsy, a real-time search engine that he describes as “one part virality tool, one part tracking mechanism, one part social listening post.” ! ! ! Topsy indexes and ranks search results based on what influencers are saying about a given topic, at a given time. “I’ve moved from TweetMeme to Topsy on my embedded tweeting, due to improved metrics, and Topsy’s competitive intelligence capabilities are impressive,” he says.! ! And what is Baer's recommendation for your business? Find a tweet your competitor sent, then use Topsy to see how many times it was retweeted, by whom, and their degree of influence. “It works like bit.ly, but incorporates all URL shorteners into the data mix. ! ! ! ! Enter Tweetdeck, a web tool that helps you stay on top of it all. Jay Baer primarily uses it for more serious Twitter sessions and regards it as “an especially valuable and hassle-free” way to update Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn simultaneously.! ! He also relies on the Twitter app, Objective Marketer, for in-advance Tweets and test- marketing headlines.! Jay Baer! @jaybaer! 6
- 8. © Business.com Media, Inc. All rights reserved. | 888.441.4466! Chris Voss! A top business consultant in marketing and social media, Chris Voss was ranked 18th by Forbes in its survey of Social Media Influencers. He has been a CEO and entrepreneur for over 25 years, building and managing a multitude of corporations. Chris Voss currently acts as consultant, speaker, blogger, and technology evangelist.! ! While Jay Baer aligns with TweetDeck, Voss gives some love to HootSuite, its chief competitor in the social media dashboard marketplace. HootSuite can be integrated with all major social media platforms.! ! ! This social media management system allows you to post, monitor, and analyze all your social posts in one centralized web dashboard. ! ! ! ! ! ! ! HootSuite allows companies to:! • Schedule posts across Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and a treasure trove of other social media apps! • Analyze performance with custom reports! • Reach targeted audiences! • Discover and grow your current audience! • Collaborate and streamline team assignments! ! Seesmic was the other big player, but HootSuite bought them out in late 2012. Voss also uses Tweetdeck. “On my iPad I use Twitterific and on my iPhone I use Twittelator. Love them both and I’ve tried all the major Apps,” he says. ! Chris Voss! @CHRISVOSS! 7
- 9. © Business.com Media, Inc. All rights reserved. | 888.441.4466! Danny Sullivan! Widely considered a leading "search engine guru“, Danny Sullivan has been helping webmasters, marketers, and consumers understand how search engines work for nearly 20 years. Top-tier media, including the Wall St. Journal, USA Today, Forbes, the New Yorker and Newsweek, regularly quote his take on the art and science of SEO.! ! In Sullivan's toolkit you will find the slick and ever thinner Lenovo Yoga, an Ultrabook-class convertible device that can be used as both a tablet and laptop computer. The most recent version, launched in 2013, is the Yoga 2 Pro, thinner and lighter than its predecessors and with a backlit keyboard.! ! ! ! ! ! Dan Ackerman of CNET wrote, "I'm pleased to see a backlit keyboard, and in our brief hands-on time with the Yoga 2, it felt like a nice upgrade from the previous version, and it's still one of the slickest- looking ultrabooks out there.”! ! Another part of Sullivan's social media arsenal is a pocket video camera, the Sony Bloggie. ! ! ! Most pocket video cameras resemble mobile phones in shape and size, and enable businesses to digitally record anything at a moment's notice. ! ! Video quality is typically higher than multimedia phones, which is a crucial feature to meet the demands of content marketers. According to comScore, 8.2 million people in the U.S. watched 52.4 billion online content videos in December 2013. And in response, marketers are quickly devoting more and more time to high-quality video content.! ! In the age of YouTube, blogging, and podcasting, a pocket video camera is a must for any business engaged in social media and public relations.! ! ! Danny Sullivan! @dannysullivan! 8
- 10. © Business.com Media, Inc. All rights reserved. | 888.441.4466! Christopher Penn! Penn has been featured in many books and in publications such as the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, BusinessWeek, and on television networks such as PBS, CNN, and FOX. In 2012, Forbes Magazine recognized him as one of the Top 50 Most Influential People in Social Media.! ! According to Penn, one of the greatest gaps he's seen in small and large businesses alike is the absence of CRM, or customer relationship management systems. ! ! CRM benefits include: connecting with customers, managing existing clients, seeking new business opportunities, and support and service issues.! ! When it is so easy and affordable to capture customer data, there is no excuse not to deploy a CRM system. Price isn’t an issue, says Penn. “There are free and low cost systems out there with 80 to 90 percent of the functionality of the top end systems.”! ! ! ! Penn has used the following CRM systems:! ! Salesforce.com! “Salesforce offers an incredible amount of power, but that power comes at a price,” he says. For starters, it's not cheap. And once you set it up, “it requires extensive configuration and expertise to make it sing.” Once it's singing, Penn says, you will find that “Salesforce can make a huge improvement on your business profitability.”! ! ! Zoho! Zoho is a good mid-range CRM option. Penn speculates that users get 80 percent of Salesforce's capabilities at 5 percent of the price. Zoho requires configuration time too, but integration with other services is tolerable. His conclusion? “For the small business, Zoho is probably the best choice.” ! ! Sugar CRM! Penn describes Sugar as “an open-source Salesforce clone that is usually about 1-2 releases behind Salesforce.” Not quite a raving endorsement, yet the price is right. It's free, but Penn cautions users that, just to have it installed, they'll need a very competent developer and systems administrator. “If you lack the skills, pay the money for a hosted service like Salesforce or Zoho,” he says.! ! ! ! ! Christopher Penn! @cspenn! 9
- 11. © Business.com Media, Inc. All rights reserved. | 888.441.4466! Robert Scoble! Robert Scoble is a technology evangelist and blogger best known for his blog, Scobleizer, which came to prominence during his time at Microsoft. The Economist once described him as “a minor celebrity among geeks worldwide, who read his blog religiously.” He previously worked for Fast Company as a video blogger. He is well-qualified, then, to undertake his most recent inquiry – testing out Google Glass, to which he's devoted hundreds of hours.! ! “I continue to be amazed with the camera,” says Scoble. “It totally changes photography and video...This is the most interesting new product since the iPhone and I don't say that lightly.”! ! The heightened media interest in Google Glass, a wearable computer with a head- mounted display, has focused on the consumer market, but there are business applications, too.! ! Angela McIntyre, research director at Gartner, says mobile workers are among those who will benefit from Glass. She points out that hands- free communication with a camera can be very powerful, especially “for busy people on their feet that need to make things come together.”! Field service technicians in industries such as oil and gas, healthcare and manufacturing could use Glass to diagnose an equipment problem. "Instead of paying experts and flying them all over the world, you have staff that connects with remote experts," says Brent Blum, manager of digital experiences at Accenture Technology Labs.! ! Fads come and go. Scoble insists Google Glass is a game changer. ! ! ! “I have been telling people that this reminds me of the Apple II,” he says, recalling the day back in 1977, that he unboxed it with his dad. The fact that it was expensive and didn't actually do much didn't seem to matter. “I knew my life had changed in a big way and would just get better and better,” he says.! ! Robert Scoble! @Scobleizer! 10
- 12. © Business.com Media, Inc. All rights reserved. | 888.441.4466! Summation! You don’t need to be a marketing specialist to achieve small business success. Simply do as the experts do. If you’re looking to revive your marketing strategy or effectively reach new customers, use these tools recommended by marketing’s finest. They’ve done the research and fieldwork so you don’t have to. ! ! Before you leave, be sure to check out the secret marketing weapons recommended by the team here at Business.com.! 11 ! Social Media Management Systems ! ! Social Monitoring Tools ! ! Blogging ! Tools ! ! Buffer App! ! Topsy! ! Hubspot’s Blog Templates! ! Hootsuite! ! Mention! ! ProBlogger! ! SocialBro! ! Crowdbooster! ! Tweak Your Biz Title Generator! ! SocialOomph! ! Click to Tweet! Business.com’s Secret Marketing Weapons!
- 13. © Business.com Media, Inc. All rights reserved. | 888.441.4466! Tools and Apps from Marketing’s Best! Thanks and come back soon.!