Carrie Gallagher

Certified HubSpot Consultant | HubSpot Solutions Partner

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Why You Need To Stop Selling In Your Content Marketing

From blog.newscred.com

We often get asked by our customers to help them create content that is more promotional, or that has a direct product tie-in.

Or as I’ve heard some executives huff: “we are in the business of selling stuff ya’ know.”

Stop promoting products in your content marketing for these reasons:

Content marketing must help the buyer. And in doing so, you help the business.

Brands need to think and act like publishers. This means creating content people actually want. Then promote your brand and product “on the edges.”

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Author : blog.newscred.com

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Why I’m Encouraging My 3rd Grader to Build a Personal Brand

(Update, March 2019: This post was written over four years ago, and I am no longer encouraging my son to develop an online brand.)

I’m not an overly warm and fuzzy mom, and sometimes I feel bad about that. I don’t put my son’s artwork on the fridge, or brag about his baskets scored, karate belts earned, soccer goals, grand slams, and perfectly played piano notes. (OK, maybe that was a brag – he’s an awesome kid.)

I just figure it’s my job to pay for the activities he wants to try, and encourage him when he feels like giving up in the middle. To say, “great, I can see you tried really hard at that (thank you, Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman). What else can you do?”

Or, “no, you can’t quit chess in the middle of the semester, because you committed to it and I paid for it already.”

The way I see it, if I do anything right as a parent, my kid will grow up with the same work ethic I did, and the tools to hustle and market himself for whatever life throws his way.

So when I received the following email from the grown child (24 years old?) of a colleague recently, I jumped at the chance to send her my two cents on personal branding:

Hi Carrie,

I hope all is well by you.  I was speaking with my dad earlier about my job and how I’m not being challenged enough and there’s no real room for me to grow with my current company.

He mentioned that you started your own company and you may be a good person to contact.  I would love to sit down with you sometime just to hear how you worked your way to this point.

I followed up with this:

Nice to hear from you. It took a long time to get to where I am, and like all humans, I still struggle with knowing what the next step is. I was in marketing for 16 years and hated it, until I found a reason to love it. A lot of that was a matter of the marketing world catching up to how people really want to be sold to, but that’s a longer story.

That’s when I decided to create a personal brand and set clear goals for the next phase. So my advice to anyone feeling “stuck” is to work on her personal brand: create a website, start blogging about what you know, and create consistent social media profiles that are relevant to that goal. Go to meet-ups that pertain to your goals so you can network with the right people.

Read this:  http://blog.hubspot.com/sales/personal-branding-from-a-to-z-infographic

And then sign up for the free trial on this site and go through the “picking an idea” course:  http://fizzle.co

Hope that helps!

She replied quickly and said thanks, but she isn’t ready to start a personal brand because she doesn’t know what she would write about.

Your Personal Branding SEO Will Replace Traditional Resumes

This January I quit my 16-year marketing job at a NYC IT staffing company, where every incoming resume looked exactly the same, and they’re all filtered through an applicant tracking system. Trust me: if you don’t know how to “SEO” your resume, you’re screwed and the recruiters don’t see it.

The future of recruiting belongs to smart job candidates – young and old! – who show real effort through online personal branding and community building: self-hosted blogs, code reviewed on sites like Github, active social media profiles relevant to their industries, content published on the right LinkedIn channels, etc.

Teach Your Kids About Personal Online Branding

When my son was 7 and started second grade, every day I picked him up from school the conversation home started with “mom, when can I have my own website?” or “mom, when can I have my own checking account?” He didn’t have enough money in his piggy bank to open a checking account, so we started brainstorming website domains.

I won’t know for many years if I’ve made good parenting decisions, but one thing I’m confident about is giving him online real estate (password protected for now) where he can blog about anything he thinks of. It’s not a “sharecropped” site on borrowed land like Facebook or Tumblr with evolving privacy policies — it’s his own domain that he can own for the rest of his life if he wants it.

My son’s first blog post was a retelling of “Little Red Riding Hood” from the wolf’s perspective. Yeah, my kid is pretty freaking awesome.

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The Best Marketing Lesson I Learned This Christmas

Just a month ago I was writing a scroogy blog post about how to do holiday cards the right way. I’m surprised every day by how many people find it organically, but perhaps I should have also written a post about holiday email SPAM, because this month I’ve been pelted with it.

It starts with the Black Friday deals and snowballs from there — I’ve unsubscribed from more email lists this month than I have all year. I even unsubscribed from one of my favorite bloggers, Erika Napolitano, because she just happened to pick a bad month to do a blog-a-day campaign. I’ll probably go back to her later, but that was a bad idea.

The worst offender was Western Digital. I bought one of their external hard drives four years ago, but never hear from them (and I don’t want to!). They had the nerve to send me a Happy Holidays email with a video in it. At first I didn’t know who they were. Not only did I unsubscribe without watching the video, I replied to their generic “survey@wdc.com” address and let them have a piece of my mind.

At the Office

It’s even worse when the business you work for wants you to push out these horrible holiday emails. Our just-out-of-college inside sales guy came to me this month and said our illustrious leader told him to get my help crafting a “happy holidays” email to his contact list. I asked, “are these the same people you emailed right before Thanksgiving — people that you don’t have a relationship with and didn’t opt into any list?”  He said yes. I asked, “how many replies did you get to that email blast?”  He got 6 replies from 400 emails sent. Soapbox time.

Here’s the thing about holiday emails: everyone is trying to clear their inboxes. They’re gunning for “inbox zero” so they can get to their kid’s winter show, get the air mattresses out of the basement for house guests, and pick up extra wrapping paper … you get the idea. When you send these pointless “happy holidays” emails to people who have no idea who you are, you are messing with their day — their HOLIDAY — and they will hate you. Would you like me to explain that to our illustrious leader?

Yes, please.

I very calmly walked into the president’s office and explained my Inbound marketing position on holiday spam campaigns. The response went something like this: “I appreciate your opinion, but I want his (inside sales guy’s) name to get out there. The more they see his name, the better. Doing it after the new year is no good because that’s when I want him cold calling while they have their new budgets.”

OK then. I also don’t agree with cold calling because I’m constantly on the receiving end of bad cold calls, and I’ve heard our really bad cold call script. Here’s where the subject of this blog post comes into play.

Time to Let Go

The best lesson I’ve learned this Christmas is something I just realized since entering my 40’s: how to let go of things that don’t match my values. The most recent example being the freelance client I broke up with because he’s the definition of marketing insanity (I love him, but he is insane).

So today I resigned from my Director of Marketing position after 16 years. There’s a lot more backstory of course, and all will be revealed here and on my LinkedIn profile in mid-January. But “letting go” is the best marketing and life lesson I learned this Christmas, and I’m happier than I’ve been in years.

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The Biggest Marketing Fail in Your Holiday Email Campaign

email-marketing-fail

I’m a sucker for Black Friday email deals, and this week I took advantage of two really good ones:

  • 40% off a one-year membership to a very cool online training site for entrepreneurs
  • 50% off a WordPress plugin that’s going to save me tons of time customizing themes for clients

Both deals won me over with clever emails — they each put a lot of thought into their design and copywriting, and I don’t know if it was on purpose, but the more expensive entrepreneur site emailed theirs later in the day. That’s smart considering some of us get a little grouchy during the holidays and might be having a glass of wine at the end of the work day … was I more inclined to pull out the credit card?

I spent $300 after the discounts, and I’m the type who loves to share deals like this on Twitter (I don’t do Facebook). Can you see the problem with the confirmation emails I received after my orders were placed?

Order Confirmations are a Missed Opportunity for Most Email Marketers

Transactional emails are undoubtedly the highest open rate you’ll ever get, because everyone wants to know their order was received correctly and their payment was processed. In the case of the second email example, there were files to download, so that’s an email I might need to come back to a few times. So where are the social sharing buttons? These emails should be encouraging me to tell everyone I know about the great Black Friday deals I just took advantage of.

The final stage of the Inbound marketing methodology is to delight customers and encourage social sharing. Let your customers help with your holiday email campaign, and send their friends into your sales funnel. Imagine how many more customers these two businesses could have gotten if they made it easy for me, a marketer, to spread their messages on Twitter or via email.

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Should Your Company Send Holiday Cards to Clients?

(Disclaimer: this was posted several years ago and I’m now my own boss. Not nearly as grouchy now, but I still stand by these tips for holiday card giving!)

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It seems I’ve developed a reputation for being the office Scrooge. In my defense, I’ve been managing our holiday gift giving and cards for so long that I never gave it much thought — it’s just another thing I put on the calendar and auto-pilot like every other December obligation.

When I started to wonder why this time of year makes me so grumpy, I realized it’s because the holidays are the most outboundy time of the year for marketers. Regressing to traditional, intrusive holiday marketing tactics, when Inbound works so well, makes me sick to my stomach.

E-cards are a topic all their own — I have a love/hate relationship with them because a few companies knock them out of the park, while most use them as a seasonal SPAM outlet.

But the paper cards you might consider ordering for your sales team to send to clients are another beast. As someone who’s been sending and receiving holiday cards at the same company for over a decade (not by choice), here are my thoughts on how to make client card giving more lovable.

Your Sales Team Must Hand-Write Them

Cards delivered to me at home or the office with a printed address label are usually tossed into the trash without being opened. A printed address label means one or more of the following to the person on the receiving end of your holiday card:

  • you were in a hurry to get cards out the door
  • you’re having an assistant do it for you
  • they’re just another contact in your CRM

Once you get sales to buy into the fact that they have to hand-write envelopes, they’ll pare down their list (next section).  They’re also responsible for writing a salutation inside the card and signing it (no signature stamps allowed!). Even better if they go the extra mile to include a longer personal message.

Only Send Cards to People You Know

Do you like getting mail from people you don’t know? Every year my husband and I get a card from the law firm that handled our mortgage closing five years ago. They clearly spend a lot of money on high quality cards, but it goes straight into the garbage because it means nothing to our family. The lawyer we dealt with doesn’t even bother to sign it, so why would I put it on our mantle?

Maybe if they had kept in touch and tried to nurture a relationship with us outside of Christmas I’d feel different about it, but now I think they’re lame (marketing snob, my husband says) and wouldn’t recommend them to anyone.

So before you put someone on your list, ask yourself a Seth Godin question: would this person miss my card if I didn’t send it?

Invest in Quality

Every year, marketing departments are inundated with stacks of uninspiring holiday card catalogues. The fact that those printing companies stay in business tells me that a lot of people are simply phoning it in and ordering crap. If you’re reading this, hopefully you want to be better than crap!

Here are some of my favorite places to order high-quality holiday cards online (I don’t have relationships with these companies, but I’ve ordered from each of them in the past):

Before you place an order from any of these retailers, make sure you Google coupon codes — I’ve gotten some great deals during the holidays that way.

For God’s Sake, Skip the God Stuff

Unless your company is a religious organization, you’re likely sending cards to people of many faiths (or none at all). You probably don’t put your religious beliefs all over your LinkedIn profile, so keep your holiday cards agnostic and “wintery,” especially if you want clients to proudly display your card at their desks.

Don’t Put Envelopes Through the Office Stamp Machine!

If you’re liking this advice so far, then I’m sure you’ll agree it just wouldn’t look cool to have a handwritten envelope accompanied by a big ugly machine stamp.  So mosey on down to the post office or your local Costco, and get some holiday “forever” stamps.

Bonus Points if You Lick the Envelopes

I’ve been known to lick my way through a stack of business envelopes. And then I saw that episode of Seinfeld where George’s fiance dies, so I don’t do that anymore. But those envelopes have to get closed somehow and you’re not putting them through the stamp machine, so get a sponge or something and close those suckers personally.