Amy Balliett

A 10-Minute Branding Exercise It’s hard to stumble into a market with 🚫 competition. So for most of us, we need to find a way to stand out. Here’s a fun stat for you: 82% of shoppers want a consumer brand’s values to align with their own. Think this just applies to retail companies? Nope! 43% of B2B buyers are likely to repurchase with companies who provide personal and purpose-driven value. Here are 5 questions you can ask yourself to determine your power values. ❓What belief is the most important to you in life? ❓❓What about your industry do you want to change or improve? ❓❓❓ Why are you building a business? ❓❓❓❓How do you help clients get from A to B? ❓❓❓❓❓What are at least 5 values that describe your business? Like transparency, fun, innovation, equality… Armed with these answers, you can build customer experiences, messaging, and stories that feel uniquely you. You’ll also connect with loyal customers who feel the same. These days, loyalty and trust = 🤑 ✨ Follow me for more simple marketing tips ❓Need a guide to set up your own marketing strategy? Message me!

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My quick guide on naming apps: I'm seeing a trend of using an actual word for a brand because it's available on an obscure TLD. Unless you have a $10 MM+ to spend on marketing efforts, and that word is seldom used (especially in your industry), I think it's a mistake to use a single actual word for a brand. Some factors to consider for naming. Suggestive meaning: Your name suggests a meaning, but doesn't box your app into a narrow featureset, e.g. Amazon. It's a judgment call as to where to draw the boundary. Google SEO dynamics: If your name is two distinct words, it will take time, effort, and money to make Google search recognize that two-word name as a distinct entity. Does your brand, or a distinct component of your brand, have a word with a high cost per click? That may be okay as long as you don't see yourself paying for ads for that word alone. Shorter names are better. But SurveyMonkey was still successful. Google explicitly says the TLD doesn't matter, but is that really so? Even if the TLD choice is not explicitly weighted, there may be other aspects of SEO boosting .com. Formality: In general, a name for selling to businesses should be more formal than a name for selling to consumers. If your business is based on credibility, like providing real estate data, have a more credible sounding name. Fun fact, CB Insights had to change their name from Chubby Brain because Goldman Sachs wouldn't list a business named Chubby Brain as a data source. The sound: If you need an international presence, you want a name that people around the world can say, hear, and type into Google Search. This is harder than it seems. My first employer, Appian, has a name that is not universally said and heard the same way. You want your name to be recognizable or at least inferrable by voice-to-text algorithms. This goes for TLDs as well. For example, .co sounds a lot like .com. The .world domain kind of sounds like "the world". Branding uniqueness: For example, one strategy, especially if you're selling to businesses, is to concatenate two words, like Datadog. Completely made up words need lots of marketing spend, e.g. Zillow. Actual words make it hard to find your community's content. For example, Neon dot tech has a great product, but it is very difficult to find sites talking about Neon the serverless Postgres service because you get flooded with results about the color neon. Legal stuff: No trademark collisions, especially in the US. The USPTO provides a free search experience, and it had a big update recently. Regarding worldwide trademarks, I haven't heavily researched it, but Madrid Protocol is for international multi-country trademark registration. Useful resources for naming: instantdomainsearch dot com for domain searching with refreshed results upon each keystroke The book: Hello, My Name is Awesome. Its main point is to prioritize memorability over shortness.

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Tired of the same cookie-cutter answers when interviewing agencies to work with your brand? Check out my article on 1-800-D2C, "Expert Insights: Get Real Answers From Your Agency," for questions that will equip you to find the best agency partner for your brand.

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A bad introduction can kill your content. Bad introductions don’t match users’ search intent. Writing a blog post on what a CMS is? Explain what it is and what it does. Users searching for this need basic information. Comparing two CMS platforms? Users interested in comparisons are already knowledgeable. Their intent is commercial, and they don’t need generic explanations. Mixing these up? You lose your audience, increase bounce rates, and hurt your SEO. Generic introductions might feel easy, but they harm your content.

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How do you write copy that you don't like but your prospects love? And how do you use AI to get it done? Except for a few A-level copywriters, it's impossible to write in a way that you don't like. AI has no such ego. I'm talking with VWO about the science of persusasive messaging using AI and A/B testing on April 30. We'll cover: * An effective model for segmenting your audience * How to target your ideal customer profiles with copy * How to design an A/B test of your messaging * How to lay out a landing page for multiple segments Bring your questions. https://lnkd.in/gWVKiEAv

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Blogging ain’t dead. The best blogs today bring together different types of content into one nice experience. And they don’t stand alone. They’re part of a bigger media and content experience. YouTube Shorts, clips, and audio snips, plus original imagery, make for a killer blog. It’s why Nick and I decided to start a blog on the TACK ⛵️ Network. The Moden Go-to-Market blog. Here’s a peek at the first article I just published. “Once upon a time, brands thrived using go-to-market (GTM) strategies like Inbound Marketing or Predictable Revenue while also gating every single piece of content they could. These playbooks were reliable, driving growth and success for many businesses. However, as the world continues to evolve, the efficacy of these strategies has begun to wane. The problem isn't the playbooks themselves; rather, they often focus more on the company's needs than the people they serve. Buyers' expectations and behaviors have changed, and brands must adapt to stay relevant and competitive. The solution lies in embracing a people-first approach to go-to-market strategies. By putting the customer at the center of every decision and interaction, brands can foster deeper connections, build trust, and ultimately drive more sustainable growth. In this post, we'll give you a go-to-market strategy framework that’ll help transform your organization's focus to be people-first” Check out the entire article here: https://lnkd.in/e-3xiimB Images and videos are coming this week. Head over to the TACK Network YouTube page if you want an early taste. p.s. It’s been just about six months since the launch of the TACK Network and Nick and I have learned a lot. We got some pretty sweet changes coming. This being one. The goal is more subscribers powered by an owned media strategy. Big shoutout and thanks to AudiencePlus. Pulling people into our free and paid memberships experiences in ClubPF presented by TACK. An owned community. A shoutout to Mighty Networks and Slack

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Hey California small businesses! We know you hustle hard, and your digital marketing campaigns are key to finding new customers and growing revenue. But guess what? The California legislature is messing with your money. They're trying to pass a new law – SB 1327 – that'll jack up the cost of digital advertising by 7%! That's right, 7% more expensive! This tax is supposed to target the big tech guys like Facebook, Google, and TikTok, but guess who really ends up paying? You guessed it – small businesses like yours! You're already facing enough competition from those big brands with their massive budgets. You don't need lawmakers making it even harder. Tell your legislators to oppose SB 1327 and stop this tax madness before it hits your bottom line. Click below to sign the letter and protect your marketing budget! Your voice matters – let's show them we won't take this lying down. #nonewtax #digitalmarketing https://lnkd.in/gZBGUeKC

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Be weary of CRO services marketing agencies offer. Often times, it’s not what they claim it is. They will lump CRO into channels and ROI-immediate tactics. The definition is building a growth function based on a comprehensive and strategic process that collects and activates insights through research and iterative testing to measurably drive growth. A great way for you to differentiate is to look at what activities are conducted and how they all fit in the puzzle. A lot of feedback that I hear is based on them doing individual activities and calling it a day - building a landing page in Unbounce, Instapage, etc. - a site audit that is not even backed with Heuristics - testing that is done with no supporting research and no articulated test plan They will skip the research in favor of speed to delivery and may not optimize that landing page once it goes live. You can recognize it’s incomplete by the fact it’s missing a continuous improvement cycle. It’s also not customer-focused and clearly all stems from an internal database they have, regardless of your audience and the issues that prevent your users from converting. Any testing that is not robustly structured around test plans and supported with research is probably the same template they apply to all their clients. Be weary of them, because regardless of price point, they are selling something tactical that is most likely to not drive significant impact for the business. Marketing agencies very rarely have the skillsets and competencies to build an optimization program. There are no silver bullets. There aren't any one time quick fixes for scaling a business. There are no universal truths for what works and there isn’t a single test that is always going to win. Most tests don’t even win even when they are backed with research. Be weary, be skeptical. I encourage you to trust agencies when their talk track focuses on their process involved for optimization, and their customer-focused approach. It’s easier to sell a promise of results than to sell a process.

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Most people think that a beautiful website is all it takes to convert visitors into customers. In reality, user experience and strategic design elements are what drive conversions. - Simplified Navigation - Trust Signals - Fast Load Times - Clear CTAs Don’t be fooled by appearances alone. Understanding and implementing these critical elements will transform your website’s effectiveness. Dive deeper and optimize smartly!

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Marketing agency owners have been telling me that it's getting harder & harder to secure, keep & grow client retainers. Whether it's global competition, the rise of fractional CMOs, martech mindshare or disruption from generative AI, agencies are feeling the squeeze on the sales of their services. Tomorrow Friday, June 28th at 2PM EST join me, 20+ agency owners & Max Traylor -- someone who has helped 100s of agencies overcome this resistance -- for a presentation on securing & retaining premium-priced consulting contracts. I met Max somewhere around 2012, while I was at HubSpot. The customer success team asked his agency (at the time), Inbound Marketing Resources, if they wanted wanted to take 20 calls with 20 customers who'd already said they were planning to cancel their accounts. Max said yes and got to work. He discovered that most of these customers were creating some content, but had no written plan to tie it all together. So he created a 25 page mad-lib workbook & ran a workshop with them to fill in the blanks. The workbook would spit out what he coined the "content marketer's blueprint." A bunch of those accounts were saved. Then, HubSpot invited him to speak at Inbound to agencies about selling "strategy," not just services. All of a sudden, he was training & licensing the process to ~100 HubSpot partners. Fast forward a few years, Max went out on his own as a consultant and has helped 100s more marketing agencies & consultants productize their services and consult at a higher level, regardless of their service offerings. The author of Agency's Survival Guide & the Consultant's Survival Guide, right now he's working on the second edition of the Agency's Survival Guide: Life after Inbound, that'll meld the best of both of these books. Tomorrow, he's going to talk about how agencies can charge for consulting services (and why they should for those that aren't convinced.) Attendees will walk away with action items and templates to: 1️⃣ Build stronger relationships with decision makers 2️⃣ Use consulting services to upsell & retain accounts 3️⃣ Sell strategic retainers, not just projects Max has seen too many agencies chasing new clients by launching service after service or even changing their service offerings to match what's trendy, when the real problem is that they need to build stronger relationships with their client's leadership teams -- and consulting services are the only way to gain access to them & influence their decisions. Over the last year, my team and I have been teaching agencies how to start strategic conversations with prospects using data & insights. (Free course: https://lnkd.in/eGH_8qpR) I've been a bit depressed about how so few agency owners know how to maintain this "strategic" standing. Whether you're just learning this stuff or a master at selling consulting, you're welcome to join us. Please comment if you're coming. Zoom link: https://lnkd.in/e4FqmBHS

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There are a lot of #ContentMarketing #DigitalMarketing & #InboundMarketing agencies peddling the current equivalent of Yellow Pages ads. Their methodology worked at one time. Amazingly well in '10. Reasonably well in '19. Poorly in '24. Yet that's their hammer. Sure, they tweak SEO tactics, change the blend of social, mix in some video. But it's the same playbook. And it's stale. Here's the money quote from Amanda Natividad "(When we look at where people spend their time online) fewer people are hanging out on Google; they’re mostly hanging out on social, news and productivity sites...What does that mean? That it takes a lot more than just SEO to win in content marketing today. Your content needs to be present before people start searching for the brands and websites they’ve learned about. Before they seek out answers to their problems. Before their journey to a solution even begins." Your content needs to be present, in the spaces where they're hanging out: - BEFORE they start searching - BEFORE they seek out answers to their problems - BEFORE their journey to a solution even begins That's means that your text content that they have to drop everything to concentrate on and read isn't working for pre-awareness and awareness. You need content that they can consume passively and/or as edutainment. For industrial companies that never fully embraced content marketing this is good and bad news. Good news because they can now catch up by leapfrogging approaches. Bad news because culturally this will be even harder. #SEO #IndustrialMarketing #ManufacturingMarketing

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Since releasing our April 2024 Public Policy SEO Rankings on Friday, a few people have asked me why a sitemap doesn't solve their indexing issues, so I thought I'd make a follow-up video tackling that subject. In short, a sitemap isn't a map, it's just a list of pages and when they were most recently updated. Google is actually making the map. As it crawls the web, it learns how things are connected, what's important, and how far apart things are from each other—the sort of things you'd expect from a map. Google needs those things to include something in its index because it relies on connections between pages to establish the importance of pages and their distance from other important pages. That means if your site can't be crawled, its pages can't become part of the map. They are disconnected, floating in space, content without context. So a sitemap's real value is found when you submit it to Google so you can use Search Console to diagnose indexation problems. It provides a list of what you think SHOULD be indexed so you can check that against what actual IS indexed. So don't think of Sitemaps as a solution to indexation problems. Think of them as a tool to diagnose those problems. https://lnkd.in/esyKAvFb

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🚫 Are you making these common Facebook ad headline writing mistakes? I don't know who needs to hear this today, but here are my TOP 3 PET PEEVES when it comes to writing headlines for Facebook ads... (Read all the way to the end to get the cheat code for headline writing.) #1: Not capitalizing "Is" in headlines I remember driving around LA 12 years ago and seeing a Samsung billboard that said "The New Galaxy is Here." Most people wouldn't care, but my wife (a professional editor) and I couldn't help but shake our heads. Why? Because "is," even though it's a short word should ALWAYS be capitalized when using title case for headlines. The includes Facebook ad headlines, email subject lines, homepage copy, etc. etc. On one hand, it's just a rule and not that big of a deal; on the other hand, it takes emphasis away when you don't capitalize such an important word. The solution? Make sure you ALWAYS capitalize "is" in headlines. #2: Capitalizing every word in the headline The next thing that bugs me is when people capitalize every single word in a headline. This also is a big mistake. So which words shouldn't be capitalized? The short list includes prepositions, conjunctions, and definite articles. When you capitalize every single word, it causes you to over-emphasize less important words which also takes away from the headline's impact. #3: Placing a period at the end of the headline I learned this point from an ad guy named David Ogilvy. He said something along the lines of, "Don’t put a period at the end of headlines – they’ll stop the reader from reading more." Have you ever thought about that before? A period at the end of the headline creates a hard stop that slows people down and can prevent them from reading more. They're also unnecessary. When you're writing in title case for a headline, you don't ever need to include a period, especially since most headlines are not complete sentences. Now for the Cheat Code... Are you ready for the cheat code? Ok, here it is... If you're ever confused about which words to capitalize in a headline, then you can always use a nifty title case converter like this one: https://lnkd.in/gAy6nXmP. You simply type in your headline, and it spits out the headline in title case, saving you from making mistakes like not capitalizing "is" or any of the other common mistakes you can make. It's easy to use and works every time. Now, what are your thoughts? Did you learn something new from this post? Do you have any pet peeves of your own? If so, leave a comment below to share. 👇

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Thanks to David Donnan for this share earlier today. What are your numbers? 👉🏻 Prospects needed 👉🏻 Clients needed Client growth rates 👉🏻 mql / sql 👉🏻 Number of different types of marketing activities. 👉🏻 Activity Rates 👉🏻 Qualification Scores 👉🏻 Pitch Win Ratio 👉🏻 Time to Win -- The best agencies I know, know their numbers. So it makes perfect sense that professional athletes know theirs too. Be more like a professional athlete, play the odds game and look for marginal gain. It doesn't matter if your number is: 1 percent or 99% you just need to know it. Be patient, persistent and consistent. Play the long game. Tomorrow is the start of H2 the road to recovery for all agencies struck hard over the past few months. It's a game of two half's..... You got this! A new set of numbers for a new bounce back! I gotcha....

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This is a really interesting piece about confirmation bias and why SEOs need to know about it 👇 Sarah takes issue with the 2-dimensional view of keywords (search intent can be broken down into informational, transactional, navigational, and commercial), and highlights “that people are actually looking for information that confirms their existing beliefs…confirmation bias” The best SEOs can and should borrow from other adjacent fields to enrich our own ways of viewing the audience and forming effective strategies.   https://buff.ly/3wqwqNs 

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Our favorite tools are so polished and stable. What if a marketing agency felt like that? UX—or the client experience—is as important as functionality. Listen to the full episode here: https://lnkd.in/gpXA737F

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Hot take: Agencies are failing bc they modeled the darkest side of capitalism. Agencies went rogue when they created hierarchical systems of power, cared more about processes than people, and made all the “green, junior level” staff do all the work — and then grossly marked it up to their enterprise clients calling it “creative”. So here’s what we’re going to do about it. We’re going to reclaim our own personal agency by becoming business owners (that can be a side hustle, a freelance business, an independent agency, or a startup). And then we’re going to collaborate together, so we can solve bigger problems - and move beyond systems and mindsets that keep us begging for or hoarding work. Yes, even platforms like Fiverr and Upwork middleman us, keeping us dependent on them instead of ourselves and each other. What we really need is help and wisdom in building scalable, sellable businesses so we can take a damn vacation or have way to get out of the grind someday. And then we’re going to scale the independent network, so big and so powerful, that we shift money and power dynamics. And the agency we find over our own schedules now will give us more capacity to heal. Entrepreneurship is a trauma response. And for us to live full lives that allow us to be present, compassionate, and connected, we’ve got to heal our nervous systems, rewrite our narratives, and move beyond self-awareness to self-actualization. The 9-5 doesn’t care about that. So, that’s what we’re doing. Assuming this resonates. I’ve built Jumpsuit (agency) and Jauntboards (tech), and you’re all welcome to be apart of them. Reach out. Sign up. We’re building fast and in flight. What are you doing? And how can we create strategic flow to one another? We‘ve got work to do. And not the normal kind. #freelance #agency #entrepreneurship

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“Generative AI reduces the cost of producing false news even further,” per Kevin Aslett, speaking today on NPR’s Here and Now. “Instead of factchecking individual claims, we should factcheck the sources we’re using.” ETA link to the segment in the comments. So, is your brand a source? If so, how are you holding up to factchecking and skepticism? Many brands embrace a broad content strategy that comprises content marketing, social content sourced from user-generated content or commissioned to influencers, and simple reviews. They operate with the goal of getting more content to inform consumers’ decisions. Third-party reviews are especially valuable earned media for influencing purchase decisions. But say it with me: 👏 more content means more exposure. 👏 more content means more vulnerability. 👏 more content means more oversight. I don’t mean “exposure” in the good way; I mean it in the potential threat way. Ditto for vulnerability. Content from outside sources can compromise a brand and undermine trust if it’s produced without close attention to messaging and execution. But it’s not a reason to avoid a broad content strategy that incorporates content from a variety of sources. Quite the opposite: the rise of generative AI and increased social content in marketing underscores the need for clear message architecture, accessible governance guidelines, and transparency in details that build trust. (The pillars of voice, volume, and vulnerability that I describe in Trustworthy!) If your org is gearing up to incorporate more content, especially from outside influencers, flag this post. Smart marketing should mean they invest in content strategy for guidance and building trust as well. (Alt text for image: excerpt from a vintage Coca-Cola print ad with the headline “Quality you can trust.”) #generativeAI #socialcontent #contentstrategy #contentmarketing #ugc #trustworthybook

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