March 22, 2024

This Week's Top Marketing News

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20x Your Traffic Using Pinterest: 3 Strategies Jenna Kutcher Swears By

The first thing most people think about Pinterest is recipes, home decoration, and clothing/style ideas. Yes, these are the core things that put Pinterest on the map but you might be missing out on not using this tool to drive traffic to your website.

How can this be true? Influencer Jenna Kutcher shares her story about using Pinterest as the #1 driver of organic website traffic to generate over 3 million monthly views.

The trick is to think of Pinterest as more of a search engine than a social media tool. People go to Pinterest to find things which is very different than how most people use other social media tools like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Those traditional social media platforms are used as passive entertainment by users scrolling through a feed and clicking on the random post that stops them in their tracks.

Here are her 3 Ways to 20x Your Traffic Using Pinterest:

Don’t reinvent the Reel (get it?): You do not need to reinvent the wheel. Use content you already published and create pins that drive traffic to your website. Get the most out of the content you’ve already invested in.
Use Keywords to Exapnd Reach: Pinterest gives you clues about the words you should be using. Type your keywords into the Pinterest search bar and take note of the suggestions that auto-populate. Use those keywords in your pins. It’s so simple (in my best Jersey accent).
Let Your Pins Do the Heavy Lifting: Create multiple pins for the same piece of content and see which performs the best. How can you visually promote one piece of content in 10 different ways?

Fish Food: Using social media to drive organic traffic to your website can be a frustrating fight against the algorithm. Venture over to Pinterest and take a look at how others in your industry (or similar industries) are using the platform to promote their content in front of eyeballs looking for help with the very things you do. Also, be sure to check out the 12 Free Pinterest Templates for Business download inside this HubSpot article.

230 ChatGPT Prompts Marketers Should Use

ChatGPT can be such a powerful tool but, just like any tool, it’s pretty much useless if you don’t know how to use it. Prompts are the input (or instructions) you can enter into ChatGPT to generate specific results. The better the prompts, the better the output. This article shares 230 different ChatGPT prompts to help you with things like marketing, customer service, sales, writing resumes, email campaigns, social media posts, and content creation.

Here are some examples of prompts:

List [number] ideas for blog posts about [topic].
Generate five different YouTube descriptions for our video about [topic].
What are the top trends in [your industry] for 2024?
Generate different ways to use augmented reality to enhance our [product or service].

New Gmail Security Rules Go Into Effect April 1st - No Joke!

This is not the first time we’ve brought this to your attention. Gmail and Yahoo have both identified new rules for bulk email senders to abide by in 2024 to ensure a clear path to respective inboxes. Yahoo rules are already in place and Google announced the Gmail rules will begin on April 1st. No, this is not an April Fools joke. If you’ve put off authenticating your email and complying with these rules, you still have time. Make sure you do a check down with your email marketing partner to ensure you’re not caught sleeping on this one.

Raising the Bar: Strategies for Creative Content Creation

How do you become a rose in a field of daisies? Getting your content to stand out in an extremely competitive market for attention can seem like a challenge. Thankfully, Rock Content has some tips to help you raise the bar in your content creation strategy. Their tips include:

Embrace different content types
Leverage emerging trends
Balance information with fun
Use storytelling to connect
Show your personality

Dig into this article to uncover some additional insights to get the most out of your content creation efforts.

Image of person frustrated sitting at a desk.

15 Reasons Why Business Owners Shouldn’t Build Their Own Website

Business owners are DIYers by nature. They wear a lot of different hats well before they are comfortable doing so. Sometimes it's done to be resourceful. Other times, it's to understand a certain side of the business before passing it off to someone else to manage.

This is true when it comes time to build that first website. With plenty of DIY platforms like Wix and SquareSpace, what's the use of hiring a website designer when you can do it yourself? Besides saving time and money, here are some additional things to consider before you roll up your sleeves and get started.

Lack of Expertise: Of course, you don’t know how to build a website but you’re ready to figure it out just like you did everything else in your business. The website design game is a moving target which can be a full-time job just keeping up to date. A point-and-click WYSIWYG website builder can be a suitable tool for the weekend warrior but it’s only a starter site that most businesses will quickly outgrow.

Time-Consuming: Building a website is much more than pixel placement and alt tags. The value of your website comes from the content you create to help visitors understand how your solutions help them overcome their challenges. Then, the trick is making all these words look engaging to the site visitor. Even that takes a considerable amount of time for those with experience.

Professionalism: The first time you do anything will not be as polished and professional as the 5th, 10th, or 500th. That statement holds for all industries. Is website design rocket science? No… with enough time and energy, just about anyone who can send an email can figure out how to structure a group of pages together and connect them to a domain name. Just like you can paint your car with 10 cans of spray paint from Home Depot. Just because you can, does not mean you should.

Limited Features: A website can be so much more than a digital brochure for your business. It can be a functional tool for lead generation and/or assist in your daily business operations. This added functionality requires help from a skilled website developer who can integrate various methods for users to interact with your website in different ways.

Mobile Responsiveness: Most websites realize the majority of their visits from people using mobile devices. This makes it paramount that your website is optimized to be mobile responsive and properly rendered no matter what size screen it is being viewed with. Navigating mobile responsive design can produce challenges that can be difficult to maneuver for the inexperienced. This is where a professional website designer can save you time and money.

Be sure to check out this article which also includes an infographic that helps illustrate these points. Additional insights are provided in the text as well.

Fish Food: DIY site builders are fantastic tools for budget-minded business owners just getting started. They have come a long way in providing tools for getting a decent-looking website published to represent your new business. A professional website designer is a valuable player to add to your team as you begin to grow your business and your needs expand. There are lots of reputable website design companies that can give you a great website without breaking the marketing budget.

Google's March 2024 Core Update Impact: Hundreds Of Websites Deindexed

It’s been a little over one year since ChatGPT became a household name. Since then, millions of web pages have been published using this tool adding a lot of low-quality content to the internet. Google’s March 2024 Core Update has been successful in addressing a chunk of this low-quality content by deindexing hundreds of websites built using AI. This update removes AI-generated spam content and prioritizes high-quality, human-generated content. Ian Nuttall has been tracking nearly 50,000 websites for the March 2024 update and identified 837 websites that have been removed from Google’s index equating to 20+ million monthly organic visits and over $446k in lost display ad revenue. While someone is having a bad month, this is great news for all of us who have continued to publish high-quality content by humans.

The Getty Makes Nearly 88,000 Art Images Free to Use However You Like

“Free” and “Getty” are two words that usually never go together. Getty recently announced they have an open-content archive containing 88,000 art images that are free to download and use for both personal and commercial applications. While this might seem “too good to be true”, it’s worth taking advantage of. We suggest that you document (however you can) when and where you download these images just for best practices and justification in the event you are ever challenged for using these images.

Image of someone typing on a keyboard with icons of envelopes to represent emails.

10 Email Marketing Tips That Drive 80% of Email Revenue

Email marketing is the holy grail of marketing tactics. Well-planned email campaigns sent to an engaged email database can have a significant impact on revenue.

The challenge is how to build email campaigns that cut through the clutter and have the biggest impact. Building a great list of email subscribers takes time and effort. You want to make sure the emails you send to them bring value that will optimize opens and click thrus.

Copyblogger compiled a great list of 10 Email Marketing Tips that Drive 80% of Email Revenue. Follow these 10 tips to help get the most out of your email marketing efforts.

Use Proven Subject Lines: Bad subject lines get ignored. Great subject lines get opened. Your subject line should never be an afterthought. Just make sure it’s not deceiving.
Test Content Topics and Ideas: Not everything you publish will be a greatest hit. Evaluate your email metrics and see what type of content resonates with your audience. Give the people what they want.
Segment Your List: Email marketing can be extremely effective when different messages are crafted for different audiences. Segmenting your email database into different buckets will allow you to customize the message you send to different audiences making the messages more relevant to where that particular email contact is in the buyer's journey.
Evaluate Your Email Capture Strategy: Your email marketing strategy is only as good as the list you are sending to. A list of 100 highly engaged email contacts will produce more revenue than a list of 10,000 subscribers who signed up to win a free iPad at your last tradeshow. Much like your content, the quality of your subscribers is more important than the quantity.
Cross-Promote Your Email List: Look for opportunities to grow your email list through cross-promotions with partners in your industry. A local pet store would find value in partnering with a local veterinarian by cross-promoting each other to their email lists.
Follow Copywriting Best Practices: Once you craft a great subject line, you then need to deliver your message and clear call-to-action with great copywriting.
Leverage Automation and Scheduling: Fantastic tools like marketing automation can help you streamline the process of getting effective emails into inboxes.
Optimize for Mobile Devices: A lot of emails are read on phones. Make sure your email looks great no matter what size screen it is being read on.
Scrub Your List Regularly: A healthy email list is a good email list. Email subscribers have a shelf-life and email contacts that are unengaged with your content should be considered for removal. This helps with deliverability.
Double Down on What’s Working: Don’t overthink it. If you find something that works great, go all in on it. All you are trying to do is keep your message in front of the right people so they consider your business when it comes to making a purchase.

Fish Food: Don’t be confused or frustrated with mediocre email marketing results. It is important to remember that quality always trumps quantity. You want to produce the highest quantity of quality work but the focus should always be on quality first. This solid list of 10 tips is a great starting point to optimize your email marketing strategy and increase the returns of your email marketing efforts.