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Digital marketing, online marketing, internet advertising…whatever you call it, marketing your company online is a big deal these days. After all, internet usage has more than doubled over the past decade and this shift has massively affected how people purchase products and interact with businesses.

So, what is digital marketing? Digital marketing is like any other type of marketing—it’s a way to connect with and influence your potential customers. The real difference is, you connect with and influence those customers online.

What is Digital Marketing?

Basically, digital marketing refers to any online marketing efforts or assets. Email marketing, pay-per-click advertising, social media marketing and even blogging are all great examples of digital marketing—they help introduce people to your company and convince them to buy.

Here are some of the most common digital marketing assets and strategies businesses use to reach people online:

Digital Marketing Assets

Almost anything can be a digital marketing asset. It simply needs to be a marketing tool you use online. That being said, many people don’t realize how many digital marketing assets they have at their disposal. Here are just a few examples:

• Your website
• Branded assets (logos, icons, acronyms, etc)
• Video content (video ads, product demos, etc)
• Images (infographics, product shots, company photos, etc)
• Written content (blog posts, eBooks, product descriptions, testimonials, etc)
• Online products or tools (SaaS, calculators, interactive content, etc)
• Reviews
• Social media pages

As you can probably imagine, this list just scratches the surface. Most digital marketing assets will fall into one of these categories, but clever marketers are constantly coming up with new ways to reach customers online, so the list keeps growing!

Digital Marketing Strategies

The list of digital marketing strategies is also constantly evolving, but here are some of the strategies most businesses are using:

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is actually a broad term that covers any type of digital marketing where you pay for every user who clicks on an ad. For example, Google AdWords is a form of PPC advertising called “paid search advertising” (which we’ll go over in a second). Facebook Ads are another form of PPC advertising called “paid social media advertising” (again, we’ll get into that shortly).

Paid Search Advertising

Google, Bing and Yahoo all allow you to run text ads on their Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Paid search advertising is one of the best ways to target potential customers who are actively searching for a product or service like yours.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

If you don’t want to pay to show up in the SERPs, you can also use search engine optimization (SEO) to try and rank pages or blog posts on your site organically. You don’t have to pay directly for every click, but getting a page to rank usually takes quite a bit of time and effort.

Paid Social Media Advertising

Most social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Snapchat will allow you to run ads on their site. Paid social media advertising is great for building awareness with audiences that might not be aware that your business, product or service exists.

Social Media Marketing

Like SEO, social media marketing is the free, organic way to use social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter to market your business. And, just like SEO, organically marketing your business on social media takes a lot more time and effort, but in the long run, it can deliver much cheaper results.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the art and science of improving your online user experience. Most of the time, businesses use CRO to get more conversions (leads, chats, calls, sales, etc) out of their existing website traffic.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is another fairly broad digital marketing term. Content marketing covers any digital marketing effort that uses content assets (blog posts, infographics, eBooks, videos, etc) to build brand awareness or drive clicks, leads or sales.

Native Advertising

Ever get to the bottom of an article and see a list of suggested articles? That’s native advertising. Most native advertising falls under content marketing because it uses content to attract clicks (“you’ll never believe what happens next!”). Often, native advertising can be a bit hard to spot, since it is usually mixed in with non-paid content recommendations…but that’s kind of the point.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is the oldest form of online marketing and it’s still going strong. Most digital marketers use email marketing to advertise special deals, highlight content (often as part of content marketing) or promote an event.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is essentially paying someone else (a person or a business) to promote your products and services on their website.

As you can see from the list above, there are a lot of different ways to market your business online, which is why many businesses either hire an agency to manage their digital marketing efforts or pay for an in-house marketing team and marketing automation software to cover their marketing needs.

Does Digital Marketing Work?

Digital marketing is a great option for any business. At Disruptive, we’ve used digital marketing to help all kinds of businesses grow—from mom-and-pop shops to internationally recognized universities and beyond. That’s the beauty of advertising online. If you know who you want to target, you can use digital marketing to target anyone, anywhere.

However, that being said, certain types of businesses will benefit more from certain types of digital advertising. As a quick overview, let’s take a look at which strategies tend to work best for business-to-consumer (B2C) companies and business-to-business (B2B) companies:

B2C Companies

Generally speaking, B2C companies have much lower price points than their B2B counterparts. After all, it can be a little hard to sell a $150,000 drill bit (believe me, they exist) to a harried mom. But a $10 pair of kids pants? That’s a fairly straightforward sell.

The good news is, because B2C companies aren’t trying to sell incredibly expensive products or services, they don’t need big sales teams or complicated marketing funnels. All they have to do is get their products or services in front of the right audience with the right messaging and the rest should take care of itself.

As a result, the primary goal of most B2C companies is to get people into and through their marketing funnel. For example, if you can get that harried mom onto your kids clothing website and offer her an exciting deal, there’s a good chance that she’ll buy today. You don’t need to build a ton of brand awareness or trust before you can close a sale.

With that in mind, B2C companies often see great results from higher-funnel marketing channels like social media marketing or paid social advertising. These channels do a great job of getting your business in front of potential customers who might not otherwise know that you exist.

Now, supplementing with other digital marketing strategies like paid search or SEO is always a good idea, but if you have to pick one channel to start with, paid social advertising or social media marketing are great options for B2C.

B2B Companies

In contrast, paid search is a great option for B2B companies. Most B2B companies have very specific niche audiences that can be hard to target using social media. However, if you sell $150,000 drill bits and someone searches for “diamond-tipped oil drilling bit manufacturer”, you want to be the first result they see. Yes, you might pay more for your click than you would with paid social advertising, but with a $150,000 price tag, it’s money well spent.

In addition, most B2B companies have a much longer and more involved sales cycle than B2C companies. If you’re selling a $150,000 drill bit, most people probably don’t come to your site, give you a call and say “I want one.” As a result, longer-term strategies like content marketing or email marketing are often necessary to close a deal.

Of course, the right blend of digital marketing tactics will vary from industry-to-industry and business-to-business, but simply comparing B2C to B2B should help give you a sense for how different strategies can be better for certain businesses. Not every strategy is right for every business, but with a little trial and error, you should be able to identify the most profitable approach for your company.

How Do I Get Started?

The good news is, getting started with digital marketing is fairly easy. Most online advertising platforms make it easy to sign up and create your first campaign (it is how they make money, after all). Here are a few links to beginner guides for several different digital marketing strategies:

• Paid search advertising
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Paid social media advertising
• Social media marketing
• Conversion rate optimization
• Content marketing
• Email marketing

The core of every successful digital marketing campaign, however, isn’t a guide. Regardless of which strategies you choose to use, here are 4 questions you need to answer before you get started with digital marketing:

1. How Much Do You Need to Make?

To figure out what you need to spend on digital marketing, you first need to clarify what your goals are. How you approach digital marketing can vary quite a bit depending on whether your ultimate goal is to drive clicks, conversions or leads, sales, revenue or a certain return-on-investment (ROI).

When you get right down to it, the ultimate goal of any marketing effort should be ROI. After all, if your digital marketing spend isn’t driving profitable revenue for your business, why are you marketing online?

Clicks and even conversions are great, but your company doesn’t make money from clicks (in fact, you actually spend money on clicks) or conversions. It makes money from sales.

With that in mind, the first thing you need to determine before you decide what your digital marketing budget should be is to decide how much revenue you want to drive. Once you know that, you can use that information to determine how much ad spend it will take to reach that revenue goal.

2. Who Are You Marketing To?

Once you know how much money you want to make from digital marketing, you need to identify who you are marketing to. This is critical, because different buyer personas require different marketing tactics. And, even more importantly, different buyer personas turn into different types of buyers.

So guess what? If you don’t understand your buyer personas, you can’t create an effective digital marketing strategy!

If you’ve got a sales team, talking to sales can be one of the fastest ways to get a decent buyer persona together. After all, they’re the ones who talk to your customers the most, right?

However, even talking to your sales team and doing a little research isn’t enough to really get at the level of detail you need to put together an effective digital marketing plan. To do that, you need to get on the phone and call your actual customers.

Ask how they found you, why they converted and what convinced them to pay you. This information will give you a ton of insight into your marketing and sales process that you can use to both improve the performance of your advertising and choose your marketing budget.

Conclusion

Digital marketing is the marketing of the future. In addition to all of the benefits we’ve discussed throughout this article, you can track the results of your digital marketing efforts with incredible accuracy, which means it is easy to see which strategies are producing profitable results and which ones need some work.

Incidentally, if this article has convinced you that you need digital marketing (or need to up your digital marketing game), but you’d like some help identifying the right approach, let us know here or in the comments! We love helping businesses grow with digital marketing.

Let Us Boost Your Business, we are Border Digital Media.

How to Write Content For People and Optimize For Google

One of the biggest challenges that bloggers and content marketers face is writing content that’s optimized for search engines, yet will also appeal to people.

If you want to build your blog audience, you’re going to have to get smarter with your content. The principal way to accomplish this is SEO copywriting.

Though SEO may sound complicated, it’s easier than you think; especially if you understand that writing for people, and not search engines, is a best practice.

To thrive, your online business must go beyond simply “writing content.” Your content needs to accomplish two goals:

1. solve a particular problem
2. appeal to the end-user (customers, clients, prospects, readers, etc.),

How do you create content that meets those goals? How do you create content that ranks well with Google and also persuades people? That’s what SEO copywriting is all about. Don’t worry if you can’t afford an expensive SEO copywriter. You can do it on your own following simple rules.

What Is SEO?

We all know what happens when you type a search query into a search engine and hit “enter”: You get a list of search results that are relevant to your search term.

Those results pages appear as a result of search engine optimization (SEO).

In a nutshell, SEO is a method of optimizing the effectiveness of your content for the search engines, in order to help it rank higher than content from other sites that target the same search terms.

Step by step, then, SEO is when:

1. You research keywords …
2. Then select a particular keyword and …
3. Use that keyword to write content …
4. Which other people then read and share on Twitter, Facebook, their own blogs and other social media platforms.

 Google displays web pages in their search results based on the authority and relevance of the page to enhance the user experience. How does it measure authority and relevance?

• Google determines the relevance of your page by analyzing its content based on several factors, including where and how often you use certain words in that piece of content.
• Google measures authority by the number of links pointing to that page and how trustworthy those links are.

On the internet, links are like votes, with a slight difference. The winner of the election is determined solely by the number of votes, whereas your web page’s rank doesn’t depend so much on how many incoming links it has (quantity), but rather on the quality of those links. You and your marketing team need to understand this.

Understanding Copywriting

Copywriting is the art and science of creating content that prompts the reader/end-user to either buy a product, subscribe to a list, take a test drive, or take some other action that will improve your.appeal to the end-user (customers, clients, prospects, readers, etc.),

Copywriting is salesmanship, says Bruce Bendinger. His definition of copywriting will make you smile:

Who drives a user to take action? A copywriter does. A copywriter is a skilled professional who writes copy for advertisements, promotions, and customer engagement. In the marketing world, they’re often referred to as “creatives.” An SEO copywriter tailors this to online content.

A copywriter is someone who understands people, knows what his audience likes and chooses the words that will appeal to them. The headline, words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs used in the content have to persuade and cause readers to take a specific action. An SEO copywriter also understand how Google feels about certain words and phrases, especially long tail phrases.

If you’re a blogger, freelance writer, or online business entrepreneur, you can become a sought-after copywriter when you develop your creativity and perfect your writing skills.

If you want to build a thriving online business and survive in the everchanging world of SEO, your job is to create useful content that’s interesting, persuasive, and well-optimized for search engines; and you have to do it consistently. That is part of the user experience, getting new fresh content on demand.

What is SEO Copywriting?

SEO copywriting has evolved, since Google started rolling out their updates.

If you want to create highly useful content that ranks well in Google and simultaneously funnels paying clients or customers to your online business, you must think about the components of Google’s Ranking Algorithm.

SEO copywriting is all about creating useful, compelling, and valuable content that targets specific keywords so that other people will gladly promote it on social media platforms.

This increases the authority and relevance of your content and improves its ranking in Google for the selected keywords. So when you highly recommend something, Google sees it relevant and you will achieve greater SEO content results.

SEO copywriting helps you target your customers and solve their specific problems with well-crafted content.

Visit us on Social Media: Border Digital Media El Paso.

5 video marketing ideas for small businesses

#1. Know your audience

Like with any other form of marketing, before you actually get started creating video content, you really need to know who you’re talking to and where you’re talking to them. This will dictate how you present yourself.

For example, if you’re creating an Instagram Story targeted toward stay-at-home moms, you would talk to them completely differently than if you were creating a YouTube video targeted toward local auto repair shops.

For one, Instagram Stories are typically shot vertically and made to be short and sweet. YouTube videos can be a lot longer and are typically short horizontally.

These are two completely different messages and two completely different markets. Defining those is key to determining what kind of content you’re creating.

Bonus tip

Talking to the camera can often feel awkward, which can, in turn, make your videos feel awkward. Instead, pretend like you’re talking to a customer. Your video will be more conversational and natural, and you’ll feel more comfortable.

#2. Create video content regularly

To make the most of video marketing, it’s important to make sure that you’re publishing new video content on a regular basis — once or even twice a week is a good goal to shoot for.

The more content you put out, the more likely people are to see it, resonate with it and find the specific information that matches their needs.

There are lots of different kinds of videos you can make. Some of the easiest ones are tips and tricks, or videos explaining how your business functions and what you do.

People who are looking for businesses online are going to have questions. That’s why they’re online researching you in the first place. They want to know what to expect when they pick up the phone to call you or schedule an appointment.

If you can lay out those expectations (i.e. “we will sit down and talk, and I will provide you with a free quote”), you help to eliminate the fear of the unknown that can prevent someone from calling you or scheduling an appointment.

The more you can create videos that lift the veil and give people a preview of what to expect, the better.

It’s also smart to make videos that answer common questions your customers may have. For example, if you’re a roofer, what are the different types of shingles that your customers should look into? Do shingle colors affect anything besides the way the roof looks?

Think about the questions you hear from your customers most often, and answer those to start. You’ll likely get more questions in the comments that you can use to make new videos in the future!

Bonus tip:

If you wait until the time comes to shoot your video to figure out what the topic will be, you won’t have much success. Keep a notebook with you where you can jot down ideas for future videos as you get them.

#3. Keep it simple

You don’t necessarily need to hire a professional videographer or purchase any fancy equipment to start making videos for your business.

You can shoot your video with basic equipment, like a webcam or a smartphone. It doesn’t have to be anything crazy or complex.

There are a lot of things you can do to shoot better video with your smartphone. It’s all about getting the lighting and background right.

As your business grows and your videos get more views, think about making them a bit more polished by having them shot or edited by a video pro.

#4. Make your video go further

Once you have video content, you can use it for so many different things and in so many different places.

Including your video on your website is a great way to help your site rank organically in the SERP (search engine results pages). Plus, pages with video tend to convert better and have better bounce rates.

Video is also a powerful tool for your sales team. When your sales team gets questions or wants to set expectations, they can send your video to your customers.

YouTube is also a great place to publish your videos. It’s the second-largest search engine behind Google, and with a little bit of YouTube SEO, you can help your videos rank organically quickly. Plus, YouTube is underutilized by a lot of small businesses.

#5. Create evergreen video content

Evergreen content is content that you can use over and over and over again. It could be a video that you use repeatedly, but it can also include intros and outros that you throw in all of your videos to keep them consistent with your brand.

Having a professional help you design intros and outros that you can use on all of your videos is a great way to make them appear more professional without having to spend a lot of money.

If you do decide to have a professional shoot your video, using it again and again will help you make the most of your investment. You can use the whole video repeatedly, or you can crop out different clips to post on social media or use in other marketing efforts.

In Border Digital Media El Paso, we are experts in Video Marketing Production, give us a call right now, we are the best in the Border.

Food photography is arguably one of the most challenging types of photography out there. Like painting, you start with a blank canvas and build. Layer upon layer, you construct the photo until you reach the perfect balance of reality and art.

Everything in the photo is a decision. Every piece is perfectly placed by the photographer.

Starting out is frustrating, I know. You’re the chef, stylist, and the photographer. Once you reach technical proficiency with the camera, what’s next? I have been, and in a lot of ways still am, in that position. So, how do you improve your food photography beyond the basics? You work on the story.

Whether it is an after-party from the perfect cocktail, or the homemade roasted chicken recipe on the farm, like all photography, you’re telling stories.

Some shoots are more complicated stories than others, and it may sound like a lot of work, but it’s really not. Here are five quick tips you can use to seriously improve your food photography and tell better stories.

#1 – CHOOSE YOUR ANGLE

There are really only a few camera angles in food photography that you see again and again, but you need to make the one you choose, a conscious decision. Where you place the camera will affect the type of story you’re trying to tell.

Think of the food beforehand. Its size, shape, height and what is unique about it. Then place the camera where you think best highlights these qualities. Some dishes look great when you shoot from right in front of the food, and others are best suited when the you are looking down from directly above the table. Take a look at the cupcakes below; their spiralled and delicate toppings really stand out when shot from in front, yet the viewer doesn’t even see the size or shape when photographed from above.

On the other hand, it’s difficult to see all the ingredients and beautiful shape of these salmon tacos when shot from the front, so the shot from above was definitely the way to tell this story.

#2 – SURROUND YOUR HERO

When shooting from the front of the food try to keep a great foreground and background to play with. Use these empty spaces to tell more of a story. Surround your main dish with ingredients and props that relate to the food. Ingredients, sauces, oils, and cooking utensils could indicate how the dish was made.

Tins, jars, herbs, glasses, fabrics and linens could speak about the origin of the dish or the season in which it is served. Placing a few of these in the foreground and background will definitely elevate your story and give it depth.

#3 – NATURAL IS BEST MODIFIED

Light is king, and acquiring a few tools to help you control it will bring your food photography up to the next level. Poor use of light will ruin your story and immediately turn off your audience. So making sure light doesn’t distract will help out your food photos big time.

Placing a diffusor between the window and your table is first on the list. When working with direct sunlight, a diffusor (or even a thin white bed sheet) will greatly improve the quality of light. Softening those hard, dark shadows and bright highlights caused by direct sun light.

Next up are white and black cards. You can make these yourself using foam core boards, bought at any craft store. Size them to fit your needs, using white cards to bounce light into shadow areas, revealing important details, or black cards to make shadows stronger for more contrast.

Here is a little secret, when working with natural light. I call it, blocking (sometimes also called “gobos”). Sometimes that pesky natural light will fall on your background or props, causing them to be as bright or even brighter than your subject.

Since the viewer will always look at the brightest spot in your photo first, if it’s not your subject, it can harm your story. You can use your black cards to block light from hitting areas that will compete with your subject. This is also a very important technique for creating darker, low-key styled images.

#4 – OUR OLD FRIENDS LINES AND LAYERS

With all these props and ingredients in the frame, how will we ever get the audience to look at our subject? Well, bring on the trusty techniques of composing with lines and layers. You can use props or ingredients to create lines and layered effects in your images. This is a compositional technique used by photographers to lead their audience’s eyes to the main subject.

You can use various props to create lines. Like this spoon, which forms a nice line, directing the viewer straight to the bowl of baked peaches and ice cream.

Since shooting from above always gets you more graphic images, there are plenty of chances to create some great lines here as well. Some could be quite literal like this cutlery leading to the round of Brie – or more abstract, like how the knife and pomegranate seeds create lines, framing our subject.

Composing images with layers is always a winner. This Brie, shot from the front, is set in the middle of various props and two large out of focus areas. This creates a layered effect, sending your eyes straight to the star.

#5 – HOLD THE COLOR

This is my personal favorite. I love hunting for props, backgrounds and tableware to put in my images. This little tip was also the first big mistake I was making when I was starting out. It’s great to have props that are colorful, but if you’re not careful that colorful prop can easily upstage your food, and grab all the attention.

When placing items into your food images, try selecting neutral tones, something that makes the food really pop against it. Selecting a neutral background like this black metal tray and baking paper, amplifies the bright red strawberries and rhubarb inside these Crostatas, making them really steal the show.

Border Digital Media offers you Food Photography for your Restaurant, we are based in El Paso Texas, call us now.

The best marketing campaigns of the past year all have one thing in common — they did much more than just promote their brand. The campaigns we love and that make the biggest impact make us think about the industry, the world at large, and our place in it. Global and national companies can do this easily, but it’s important for smaller businesses to also think outside the box. Channeling your creative energy into your marketing campaigns can help your business attract more attention from customers and leads. Here are ten creative marketing ideas you can put to work in your marketing ideas for 2021.

1. Heat-mapping

There are very few things more powerful than knowing how your website visitors are using your website. By adding a heat-mapping software such as Hotjar, you can start to get aggregate insights into how far your visitors are scrolling down on each page (across device types), where they’re clicking, and also get a clearer picture of their journey on your website.

PRO TIP: Data is only useful if you act on it. Seeing that only 30% of visitors are viewing your form doesn’t do you any good. But, acting on that and adjusting your website to move that form up on the page so that 80% of visitors are seeing it can make a huge difference. Look at your data and make adjustments based on it. You’ll find patterns and themes of how people are using your website (or how they want to use your website). By changing your site to match your user’s preferred workflow, you can convert more leads, help them find what they’re looking for, and create a much better overall user experience.

2. Personalization

Consumers don’t care about you. They care about themselves and the problems that they’re trying to solve. They don’t care about what you do for others or what you’re doing for your business. They care about what you can do for them, their company, or their industry. That’s why personalization is more important than ever. 

Most businesses have started implementing personalization with outreach opportunities like email marketing, but what if you could take that further? Start personalizing the full experience for your prospects and customers. By fully embracing personalization, you can create the experience that each prospect wants to see. This can (and should) go further than just adding their first name.

Create smart content through your website

Give your website visitors a custom experience by delivering content that is specific to their industry, goals, or interests based on their previous interaction with your company or by making assumptions about their role, company, or industry. Even just a little reference to their industry or problems can go a long way.

Retargeting

By determining which pages someone visits on your website, you should start to gain insight into what that person cares about. By using that data, you can serve display advertising to get them to come back to your website based on their actual interests. If you personalize your advertising outreach, you can increase interest in a return visit.

Email

Of course, even though I said that it’s probably the most common place to use personalization, that doesn’t mean that it should be forgotten moving forward. Continue to personalize your email with things like company name, first name, and industry. And then take it even further! Pay attention to the content your contacts are consuming and deliver content to them that aligns with their interests. Personalization isn’t just about delivering something that says, «Hey Sarah», it’s also about serving relevant content to the right people at the right time.

3. Create Content People Want To Read

No one goes online to feel like they’re reading a textbook or a string of keywords stuck together. If you’re still stuffing keywords into your content, please, for all of our sakes, stop now. Today’s online audience responds to content that is engaging, creative, and valuable. This is especially true when it comes to your company blog.

The blog is the first place customers look when they have questions about what you do or how you can help them. The posts they find should have an authentic voice that respects the reader. Your content is what your leads are using to answer their questions, solve their problems, and do their own research. If you’re not providing them valuable, easy-to-read content, they’re going to look elsewhere to find it. 

4. Chatbots

The way that we as consumers use websites has changed dramatically. We no longer like to search around a website to find what we want. It takes too long and gets frustrating. That’s why we’ve turned to chat and chatbots. More and more consumers are turning to chat right away when visiting a website to find the answers that they’re looking for. 

While live chat is really only realistic during business hours, a chatbot is available 24/7/365. By developing a strong chatbot that gathers any information or input that you need while providing information, education, or direction to help the user find what they’re looking for can be extremely effective. 

PRO TIP: Don’t require a user to give up their contact information in your chatbot unless absolutely necessary, however, you can ask for an email address to respond to them later, but asking for their personal information creates a barrier. Your chatbot should be a helper, not a gatekeeper.

PRO TIP 2: You can start building your first chatbot for free using HubSpot! Check it out and start using AI to power the way your visitors use your website.

5. Let Your Graphic Design Inspire Your Creative Marketing

On a well-designed website, the user experience from start to finish will be seamless and easy. But what if that user’s experience with your website actually begins before they click to your homepage?

In order for mobile and online marketing to actually inspire users to click-through to your site, you need to prioritize the graphic design of your ads. If you want to be creative with your digital marketing projects, you can’t be afraid to use striking visuals that will grab the user’s attention. Your audience should be able to tell from one glance at a digital ad what your company is all about. Only creative graphics can tell a story in that way.

6. Pull Back the Curtain With Social Media

For several years, «authenticity» has been growing as a marketing buzzword, and businesses are paying attention. Everyone is trying to find new ways to show their customers who they really are.

Social media is one of the best ways to show your brand authenticity and to marketing ideas for 2021 because it removes the marketing middleman. Posting photos and sharing stories makes customers feel like they’re getting a real sense of what goes on behind the scenes. It also gives you a chance to respond to customer comments in real time, and it gives your business an opportunity to speak directly with customers and leads.

With an authentic approach, you’ll engage with your customers without ever making them feel like they’re being marketed to. People don’t buy from businesses, they buy from people. Pulling back the curtain on your business and showing your human side can help you develop trust.

7. Repurpose Content

One big opportunity any business has is to evaluate all the content that they own and start to find new and fun ways to use it. Have you written a blog post that got a lot of traction? Make it into a video! Break it up and share it in chunks through social media! Update it for the next year (like we’ve done for this post)! 

You likely have a gold mine of content that is just begging you to repurpose it into new formats. You don’t have to spend a ton of time recreating the wheel, just take some time to find new ways to get your current content into the hands of your target personas.

PRO TIP: Google LOVES fresh content and updating well-performing posts fairly regularly is viewed very positively.

8. 1:1 Video

We are so excited about the evolution of one to one video. There are a lot of very cool things coming from companies like HubSpot and VidYard around using video to attract target accounts and prospects to you through the use of personalized videos. We have started using them at HIVE for some account based marketing and it’s taking off like wildfire! We’re getting responses almost immediately and our prospects are loving them!

Video dominates our attention today anyway, but why stop there? By using personalization in your video, you can gain more attention to your videos and ensure that your prospects watch the whole video! 

9. Find Giveaway Opportunities That Align With Your Brand

Contests and giveaways are a great way to get attention online. Everyone loves winning something and by consistently running fun, low cost giveaways, we’ve been able to quadruple the following for one of our clients over the last two years.

Giveaways are an easy way to get engagement, but it takes more than that to convert that engagement into sales. Focus less on what it is you’re giving away and more on how you’re getting people to participate. For example, offer an entry in exchange for new customers liking your Facebook page or for existing customers to refer a friend. The more you can encourage (or require) leads to continue to follow your content or to pull from their network of friends and family, the better continued engagement you’ll see long after your giveaway is over. Creating engagement that will last beyond the run of the contest makes a free giveaway well worth it.

PRO TIP: When contests fail, it’s typically for one of two reasons — 1. you require your followers to do too much in order to qualify or 2. the prize that they win does not align with your target persona. You don’t have to give away a car in order to garner interest and create excitement around your giveaway, but the prize and the amount of effort required to qualify should be in alignment and should line up with your target personas.

10. Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is definitely not new, but a lot of businesses fail to see the potential here. There are two sides to guest blogging that can be beneficial for your business — accepting guest posts and submitting guest posts.

Accepting Guest Posts

First, we all know that content is driving so much of the marketing that we do online today. People are looking for answers, education, tips, tricks, and ways to solve their problems. They’re turning to Google and doing their own research to find what they’re looking for. This creates a huge opportunity to be the source for that information. It also creates the need to pump out a lot of content. By opening your blog up to guest posts, you are essentially getting free (they may even pay you) help in developing that content. Remember to always review the content before it goes live to ensure that guest posts are up to your blogging standards. 

PRO TIP: Ensure that all content stays educational.  A lot of people who are looking to submit guest blog posts are writing sales pitches. That’s not what this should be used for. Allow no more than one backlink to that person’s website and require that the content stay educational and helpful, not salesy.

PRO TIP 2: Require that all content is original and not posted anywhere else online. The last thing you want is to get dinged for duplicate content because you posted someone else’s content that already lives on their website.

Submitting Guest Posts

While it can be a full-time job just to create the content to come from your own website, it can be a huge benefit to your company and your website to start creating content on other websites as well. Reach out to well respected websites in your industry or even adjacent to your industry and ask if you can submit a blog post. Share potential titles with them and ensure them that it will be educational in nature. Many websites will welcome this contribution as it takes some stress of creating content off of their plates.

PRO TIP: Do a little bit of research on your website. Run it through a domain authority checker and even website traffic estimator to ensure that you’re putting out the effort for a website that is going to benefit you. We recommend looking for websites with a domain authority (DA) of at least 20 (the higher the better) and with solid monthly search volume. The higher the domain authority and website traffic, the more valuable that post will be for your business.

PRO TIP 2: Make sure that you include a backlink to your website using good anchor text. The word or phrase that links back to your website should be inline with your overall SEO strategy in order to get the biggest bang for that link.

Want To Improve Your Digital Strategy? Start with your website.

Depending on the nature of your company, creativity may not be in your wheelhouse, but there are always opportunities to improve your online presence. A revamped website is the foundation for any marketing campaign you’re creating in 2021, which means that if your website isn’t in top shape you’re missing out on attention from leads and customers.

These are the marketing ideas for 2021.

There are signs that our individualist culture of achievement and brand alignment has jumped the shark.

It’s hard to remember a time when scrolling through Instagram was anything but a thoroughly exhausting experience.

Where once the social network was basically lunch and sunsets, it’s now a parade of strategically-crafted life updates, career achievements, and public vows to spend less time online (usually made by people who earn money from social media)—all framed with the carefully selected language of a press release. Everyone is striving, so very hard.

And great for them, I guess. But sometimes one might pine for a less aspirational time, when the cool kids were smoking weed, eating junk food, and… you know, just chillin’.

Back in the 1990s, our heroes were slackers: the dudes and the clerks, the stick-it-to-the-man, stay-true-to-yourself burnouts we saw in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Slacker, and Reality Bites. In the latter, Winona Ryder’s character, Leilana, chooses the disillusioned musician (Ethan Hawke) over the TV exec (Ben Stiller), and it’s presented as an excellent choice. Nobody cool was trying to monetize their lifestyle back then, or rake in the brand endorsements. Selling out (remember that?) was whack.

But somewhere in the early 2000s, the slacker of popular culture lost ground to the striver. I am not immune to this thoroughly aspirational mindset, and you probably aren’t either. Whether we have side hustles, personal brands, gig economy jobs, or entrepreneurial leanings (I’ve had all four), to survive in the modern economy is to aspire to something much greater than what we are.

The internet influencer is the apotheosis of all this striving, this modern set of values taken to its grotesque extreme: Nothing is sacred, art has been replaced by “content,” and everything is for sale. This is true even when the message is swathed in the language of counter-culture: Eco-conscious influencers see no issue in flying long-haul on free trips from brands. Yoga gurus who traffic in anti-consumerist spirituality promote tea brands owned by Unilever. 

But as anyone who has lived a few decades knows, youth culture swings like a pendulum. The buttoned-up post-World War II period gave way to the countercultural Free Love generation (arguably the original slackers, as they were the first to have middle class comfort to rebel against). Similarly, the 1980s excess of Gordon Gecko’s Wall Street set the stage for the slackers amid the economic recession of the 1990s, with their flannel shirts, skater culture, Beastie Boys and Nirvana records.

Of course, it’s reductive to lump the experience of the billions of people living through those ages into one mostly American cultural trope. But there’s always something to glean from the dominant youth culture of an era. What was cool—what the kids were into—tells us something fundamental about what we valued. And seen through that lens, there’s a marked difference between today’s striving and the slacking of the 1990s.

And, in a modern aspirational marketplace so saturated that fake influencers are now posting advertising-like content that nobody even paid them for, there are signs that our individualist culture of achievement and brand alignment has jumped the shark. If the cycle of history is any guide, once our culture of striving flames out, it may well be time for the slacker to rise again.

The Neoliberal Self

For the internet influencer, everything from their morning sun salutation to their coffee enema (really) is a potential money-making opportunity. Forget paying your dues, or working your way up—in fact, forget jobs. Work is life, and getting paid to live your best life is the ultimate aspiration.

This existence is perfectly aligned with what Will Storr, in his 2017 book Selfie: How the West became self-obsessed, described as the defining person of our age, the neoliberal self: “an extroverted, slim, beautiful, individualistic, optimistic, hard-working, socially aware yet high-self-esteeming global citizen with entrepreneurial guile and a selfie camera.” And while the generation most associated with this archetype—millennials—gets flack for their entitlement and unwillingness to work toward a typical middle class life, there are plenty of reasons millennials have so thoroughly embraced and innovated upon this neoliberal ideal.

“You can see why that happens in terms of the shrinking of middle class industries and the economy,” says Laurence Scott, author of Picnic Comma Lightning: In Search of a New Reality, an exploration of the nature of reality in the digital age, and a lecturer at NYU’s London campus. “Neoliberalism has hollowed out so many ways of [making a] stable income that it’s not surprising that the influencer economy has risen up in this really precarious economic climate for millennials.”

That neoliberal sensibility—emphasizing the importance of markets above the intervention of the state, and typified by the attitude that the tide of growth and globalization will lift all boats—has also given rise to the thoroughly modern affliction that we now call “millennial burnout.” A coinage by Anne Helen Petersen in her memorable piece for BuzzFeed, the idea is that all this self-optimization in the digital age is taking a toll, and leaving us with multiple afflictions, including “errand paralysis.”

Petersen argues that we’re obsessed with self-optimization because—post-financial crisis, saddled with student debt, with little hope of a pension—we simply have to be: “We couldn’t just show up with a diploma and expect to get and keep a job that would allow us to retire at 55. In a marked shift from the generations before, millennials needed to optimize ourselves to be the very best workers possible.”

The result is an economy where it’s more possible than ever to be your own boss, and a lot less possible to buy your own home. And one where it’s literally unimaginable that we’ll ever be able to stop working—at the end of the workday, or in the later years of our lives.

It’s enough to make you want to throw up your hands and admit defeat, if only for a moment of respite. And it’s easy to see how this exhaustion could precipitate the next cycle of slackerdom.

Scott first raised that idea in an interview on Russell Brand’s podcast. “The generation after [this one] may just look and think, ‘I cant believe there was that kind of economy and that’s how people were presenting themselves,’” he said. “There may be a slight distaste to it and reemergence of a slacker 1990s pendulum swing, rather than this quite needy attention-seeking.”

Go Ahead and Sell Out

“Selling out” is not just perfectly OK in the influencer economy—it’s the raison d’etre. Influencers generally do not have a craft or discipline to stay loyal to in the first place, and by definition their income comes from selling a version of themselves. The phrase “famous for being famous” used to be a derisive slur for socialites; now it’s an entire category of global commerce that has landed the world’s youngest “self made” billionaire on the cover of Forbes: Kylie Jenner. 

And now, even public figures who do have a craft have followed suit. Hollywood actors used to worry about undermining their reputations, and would only take on cringe-y but lucrative advertisements that air in markets far removed from their core fanbases. But the internet means there is no such barrier today.

Look no further than Tom Hiddleston’s truly bizarre and memeified ad for Centrum. The talk show host and author Busy Phillips is a celebrity-turned-influencer-turned-celebrity—a transformation you can track from the promos for her network TV talk show, alongside sponsored content for Kate Spade featuring her daughters. And never forget that time when America’s most notable authors shilled for Chipotle.

That today’s celebrities and artists are no longer shy about displaying their endorsement deals with corporations—but rather, celebrate them—feels in stark opposition from the sensibility of the group of comics and actors known as “the posse” in the 1990s. The likes of Kathy Griffin, Ben Stiller, Janeane Garofalo, and Andy Dick typified the ethos of the slacker era.

“Posse members obsess about the idea of selling out,” A 1997 New York Times profile of the group of actors reads. “Stiller says: ‘A lot of us got disillusioned with hackdom. I remember when Janeane [Garofalo] was starting out, if something killed onstage at the Improv, she would intentionally not do it again. It’s almost like she was going too far the other way, because she didn’t want to be accepted.’”

It’s an attitude so antithetical to today’s ethos of engaging with your audience at all costs that it almost sounds precious. But back then, there was a reputational risk to selling out. Today we’re all too busy plotting our own ascents to notice. 

Influencer Schadenfreude

So what evidence do we have that slackers are making a comeback? Much has been written about the attitude Gen Z has towards the internet: arguably far more sophisticated, suspicious, and interested in ephemeral content that disappears, rather than more permanent content that helps establish a commercially valuable identity.

It’s why we’ve seen the gradual eclipsing of Instagram posts by Instagram Stories and why the “Instagram aesthetic” is now in decline. People who knew no life before social media are already exhibiting an “ironic distance,” as Scott put it, to the very idea of being covertly influenced by corporate interests online. Even Mark Zuckerberg now sees the limitations of the constantly-broadcasting newsfeed he created—and much to the alarm of influencers, Instagram is toying with eliminating likes. 

Fashion, which can also act like a pendulum, reflects this shift too, not just with its redux of grunge, but also with trends like normcore, and roomier pant-leg silhouettes (RIP skinny jeans). It’s all more reminiscent of the laid-back nineties than the mid-aughts striving of athleisure, where you’re always primed for a workout or Instagram picture. Even the once-unthinkable trend of face tattoos—which seems to be at once the ultimate personal branding ploy as well as a near-guaranteed opting out of traditional employment—seem to point to the idea that aspirational culture has reached its stylistic apotheosis.

What’s more, we’ve never been more skeptical of the very social media platforms that have quietly and powerfully shaped influencer culture. (Nor, it seems, have governments around the world.) We once saw these platforms as a frivolous, even fun place to post our memories and talk to our friends and family. Now, we understand them to be an often pernicious driving force behind societal, economic, and political shifts—supranational actors that, far from being the neutral platforms they frame themselves as, feed upon our striving as their sustenance. 

We need look no further than the collective cultural sneering provoked by Fyre Festival to see how much of an appetite there is for influencer schadenfreude, as Scott pointed out. Similarly, in Silicon Valley—where just a few years ago the nerds, strivers, and takers-of-moonshots were exalted as the new masters of the universe—there’s a certain glee in seeing all this hubris brought low. Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes’ spectacular demise has shown just how powerful a personal brand can be (the black turtleneck, the Stanford dropout story, the Yoda quotes) and simultaneously, just how much dysfunction it can conceal. And the slew of books, films, and TV shows about the collapse of her empire shows that we are more keen than ever to deride and mock those we have anointed as the striving geniuses of our era.

Is It Even Possible to be a Slacker Anymore?

But as we settle into our roomier trousers and perhaps take a toke of a legally sanctioned weed pen, there’s a less comfortable question to ask: Is it even possible to truly be a slacker anymore?

The neoliberal economic conditions that gave rise to the influencer—and all those side hustles and personal brands—simultaneously have made it harder to attain a normal middle class existence. Even if your goals are of the modest, slacker variety—an hourly wage job, a roof over your head, junk food to eat, and TV to watch—that’s all a hell of a lot harder to come by these days. 

“Thinking about Reality Bites, I feel like they were relatively privileged, but they were sort of lazing around and they could sort of consist on hardly any money at all,” Scott said. “It’s really impossible to live an urban life on very little money.”

But perhaps that realization will lead some to divest from the belief that hard work and self-optimization will lead us to some capitalist promised land. The neoliberal ideal has reached its peak and, well, it’s not as though we’ve solved income inequality with all our hard work. Quite the opposite. As Storr writes of our culture’s failed promise: “It wants us to buy the fiction that the self is open, free, nothing but pure, bright possibility … This seduces us into accepting the cultural lie that says we can do anything we set our minds to … This false idea is of immense value to our neoliberal economy.” 

Today, the evidence of that myth’s failure to deliver is all around us. We see it in the populist uprisings that conjured up Donald Trump and Brexit, and in the fact that one of America’s most visible Congress members, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, identifies herself as “democratic socialist”—a term that would have been entirely unpalatable in America just five years ago. The idea of socialism as a realistic alternative to individualistic capitalism is gaining currency in youth movements elsewhere, too. It may just be a rumbling, or it could be a sign of a less individualistic (and less aspirational) era to come. 

But even if it doesn’t happen at the economic level, Scott thinks the slacker revival may begin—as so many youth movements do—as a stylistic one. It simply will stop being cool to try so damn hard.

“It might be an aesthetic thing that drives this—just the style element,” Scott said. “A return to the idea that it’s slightly embarrassing to be in the pocket of all these corporations all the time, just for a little bit of money … an idea of artistry that isn’t linked to the corporate world.”

This is definetly The Age of the Influencer.

When, while the lovely valley teems with vapor around me, and the meridian sun strikes the upper surface of the impenetrable foliage of my trees, and but a few stray gleams steal into the inner sanctuary, I throw myself down among the tall grass by the trickling stream; and, as I lie close to the earth, a thousand unknown plants are noticed by me: when I hear the buzz of the little world among the stalks, and grow familiar with the countless indescribable forms of the insects and flies, then I feel the presence of the Almighty, who formed us in his own image, and the breath of that universal love which bears and sustains us, as it floats around us in an eternity of bliss; and then, my friend, when darkness overspreads my eyes, and heaven and earth seem to dwell in my soul and absorb its power, like the form of a beloved mistress, then I often think with longing, Oh, would I could describe these conceptions, could impress upon paper all that is living so full and warm within me, that it might be the mirror of my soul, as my soul is the mirror of the infinite God!

O my friend — but it is too much for my strength — I sink under the weight of the splendor of these visions! A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone, and feel the charm of existence in this spot, which was created for the bliss of souls like mine.

I am so happy, my dear friend, so absorbed in the exquisite sense of mere tranquil existence, that I neglect my talents. I should be incapable of drawing a single stroke at the present moment; and yet I feel that I never was a greater artist than now.

When, while the lovely valley teems with vapor around me, and the meridian sun strikes the upper surface of the impenetrable foliage of my trees, and but a few stray gleams steal into the inner sanctuary, I throw myself down among the tall grass by the trickling stream; and, as I lie close to the earth, a thousand unknown plants are noticed by me: when I hear the buzz of the little world among the stalks, and grow familiar with the countless indescribable forms of the insects and flies, then I feel the presence of the Almighty, who formed us in his own image, and the breath of that universal love which bears and sustains us, as it floats around us in an eternity of bliss; and then, my friend, when darkness overspreads my eyes, and heaven and earth seem to dwell in my soul and absorb its power, like the form of a beloved mistress, then I often think with longing, Oh, would I could describe these conceptions, could impress upon paper all that is living so full and warm within me.