Week 16 - MKTG 348 - Content Marketing

First of all, what is content marketing and how do you start a campaign? Content marketing comes from creating some valuable free content in hopes of attracting consumers and turning them into repeat buyers. The content you create should be closely related to what you sell. Content marketing can deal with blogs, videos, and social media. Content marketing is used by many firms today. However, it has to be effective. Something important to think of when creating content is to not make it seem like an ad. Consumers are smart. They want valuable information or something to take away from the content, not a traditional advertisement clogging up their time.

Arguably the best company to look at in terms of content marketing is Red Bull. They created content to differentiate themselves from the competition. They sponsor and create events that supports why the brand exists. In the case of Red Bull, it is literally "to give you wings." From sponsoring extreme sports and athletes to creating their own crazy events, they know how to attract people to their brand.

Week 16 - MKTG 348 - Facebook Likes

Last fall I created my own Facebook page for digital marketing. This was done for one of my classes as I used the page to try to drive viewership to my blog. After the course, I pretty much forgot about it. However, in the past week or so, I have been getting more and more likes on my page and it led me to do some research.

Recent Insight

Gain in Likes

Somehow, without me doing any additional promotion or advertising, I have been gaining a substantial amount of likes. One theory I have is perhaps people are trying to network within digital marketing. Another thought is that these individuals think my page is a real company that they want to be in contact with. Since I set it up to seem like it is an actual company, that is my best guess as to why I'm getting these likes. It'll be interesting to see where this goes the next few weeks.

Week 16 - MKTG 348 - Tips For Passing Hubspot

As we know, Hubspot can aid your inbound marketing. This is a way for marketers to draw consumers to their product or service with content marketing, social media marketing, and SEO. In order to become certified, you have to be able to pass the test. There are 11 sections of the Hubspot Inbound Certification program. Each section contains about 45 minutes of video. Some are even broken down into smaller segments.

Here are some of my tips:

Do not binge watch the videos - it is important to take your time with each section. Even though all sections tie in together, each concept must be closely watched. Also, watch them at your easiest convenience. These videos are made for you to watch on your own time, so make sure they have your full attention

Download the study guide - for individuals who are not visual learners and prefer to read the material, there is a study guide for you! Additionally, this study guide provides certification seekers the ability to study wherever they want. The study guide can be found here: Hubspot Study Guide

Stay calm! - the exam closely follows the format of the videos. The test contains 60 true/false and multiple choice questions which you have 75 minutes to complete. Once the test is over, you will have access to see how you did in each section. This is beneficial because if you do not pass the test, you will know what sections you need to focus on more.

Week 16 - MKTG 348 - YouTube Tagging

During the last couple of months, my band has written and recorded our debut EP that will release in June of this year. Along with that, we recently had a lyric video made to support our first single off the EP. This video really got us thinking. We previously released 2 other songs on YouTube and we gained a decent amount of views on those videos. However, we thought it was more important than ever to try to get as many views as we can on our first single. This is because if people like our first single, they will be more likely to listen to our full EP when it releases and the even purchase our music. One way we tried to generate views was by using tags on our video. We are a hard-rock band based out of Chicago so we wanted to build viewership in that area. To target rock fans, we used some tags such as "new rock," "top 40 rock," and "top 40 metal" since our music can cater to those fans as well. To reach the Chicago area audience, we use tags such as "Chicago rock," "local rock," and "local music." We even used tags to try to gain notice from record labels and those fans by using "unsigned bands," and "Rise Records."

This video was released on April 27th and we have already generated over 3,000 views and 26 likes on the video. When it comes to YouTube tagging, I would recommend to not only look at what you are trying to achieve with your video, but think about what viewers are searching for to find content like yours. 

Week 15 - MKTG 348 - Value of Hubspot

First of all, what is Hubspot? Hubspot is a tool that marketers can use to help with inbound marketing. Inbound marketing is a strategy for drawing consumers to products and services via content marketing, social media marketing, and search engine optimization (SEO). Hubspot offers many tools that can aid your campaigns. Some of the tools are email marketing, form submissions, landing page generator, reporting and statistics. 

What is Hubspot?

Hubspot also has smart CTAs. These can adapt and change to fit a consumer's interests. Basically, if someone downloads an ebook on content marketing, future CTAs can be set up to offer other books on that topic to that consumer. Over time, website CTAs and content will become more personalized for this type of lead to stay relevant. This strategy has increased conversion rates up to 70% compared to traditional strategies. 

Week 13 - MKTG 348 - Is AI Good For Us?

All information and articles taken from Dr. Todd Kelsey’s LinkedIn blog: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/dont-delay-one-can-say-how-soon-ai-take-away-jobs-todd-kelsey

Artificial intelligence will not only change the job structure in the United States, but the world as well. We all know that driverless cars are on the verge of entering the market within the next decade or so. But as the articles suggest, has anyone began thinking of what this can do to the postal and shipping industry? Several millions of drivers may be out of work due to the implementation of driverless cars. Technology can make tasks easier, but at what cost? Who is paying for these advancements? I’m not sure about you, but as of right now, I’d rather trust a trained surgeon to operate on me rather than a robot. Put it this way, if something goes wrong with the robot, who is liable? Good luck getting through all that red tape. Scenarios like that entitle a deep sense of trust, and right now, I would not trust a robot to complete that task.

There is an article that brings up what jobs will not be as affected by AI. These are jobs in education, health care, and social work. Jon Andrews is quoted saying that “Creative and critical thinking will be highly valued, as will emotional intelligence.” Really? Tell me something I don’t know. A computer does not have emotion. A computer cannot be taught emotion. In 10 seconds think of different types of emotions we have as humans. Then weigh the positives and negatives of each emotion. Think about how this specific emotion has helped you through a tough time or helped you solve a problem. A computer does not learn through emotions. It operates on odds and percentages. A computer does not care because it cannot feel.

There may be jobs out there at risk of being taken over by robots, but there are some jobs that should be left to human beings. We must recognize that we need jobs. What will the world come to if 30, 40, 50 percent of jobs were taken over by robots? Will riots break out? Will the loss of human jobs at a point influence the world population? How will we supplement the jobs lost to AI? These are all questions we need to think about before we are quick to jump on the AI bandwagon. 

Week 10 - MKTG 348 - SEO Audit

For the audit, I chose to look at the National Tiger Sanctuary. This organization is a non-profit, rescue organization that provides permanent homes to both exotic and domestic animals. I ran some AdWord campaigns with this site so I thought it would be beneficial to conduct a site audit. The first thing I looked at was the indexing status. I searched site:nationaltigersanctuary.org in Google.

Here are those results:

I am not sure how many pages are on the website, but the result can be a good or bad thing. The page results found can be fine if 252 is about how many pages are on the site. However, if the site has a couple thousand pages but only 252 show up, then there is a duplicate content problem.

The next thing to do was to run a crawler on the website. I looked at the crawl depth which shows how many clicks it took for a crawler to reach a page from the home page. Any number over 4 is considered a problem. Of the 100 pages scanned by the crawler, the highest crawl depth was just 2. There are some issues concerning Robots.txt files. Issues with this can lead to pages on the website being blocked by search engine crawlers. Whoever is running the site should go into those files manually and make sure they are not restricting access to important sections of the website.

There are also some pages that contain duplicate content. Upon looking at them, I believe it is not a huge deal considering that the pages are just tagged with “National Tiger Sanctuary” at the end.

Here is the overview section of the audit for the National Tiger Sanctuary: