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The Daily Carnage

This Ad is Sodium Cute

We’re a little salty we didn’t come up with it.

If you took our survey, you saw that one of our questions asked which time you’d like to receive the Carnage. The overwhelming majority voted for that 6-8am hustle, so expect your next Carnage bright ‘n’ early Monday morning.

How to Know Exactly What Content You Should Create

We know why we need to produce content. It’s the what and the how that often evades marketers. Today’s Listen rounds up several key insights about psychology, storytelling, and why and how you should map your buyer’s journey to achieve true progress and success.

It starts around 3:14 with a reference to the Heider-Himmel experiment from 1940. Here’s a link to the film Franz Heider and Marianne Himmer showed their audience. Without going into too much detail, the experiment became the initial basis of attribution theory, which “describes how people explain the behavior of others, themselves…and also, apparently, geometric shapes on the go.” It revealed just how dramatically people explain things in terms of stories.

Whether you’re consciously telling a story or not, prospective customers are telling themselves a story about you, your brand, your product, or your service. Beat ‘em to the punchline and tell your story in a way that resonates with these prospects. So, what kind of story should you tell? Well, a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away….

  • (6:12) How Star Wars can improve your content marketing strategy. (Think of your prospect as Luke and your brand as Obi-Wan Kenobi.) 
  • (7:55) Why you need to take your customer along a content marketing version of the mythic hero’s journey. Remember — you are not the hero, though. you are the guide.
  • (9:47) The 8 core steps in the buyer’s journey.
  • (15:03) How to map your journey, also known as the experience map, a visual representation of the path a consumer takes — from beginning to end — with your content, and then with your product or service.
  • (16:32) The 5 components of the experience map.
  • (18:23) Identifying the 7 key influence principles — the order of emphasis for things like reciprocity, social proof, authority, liking, commitment and consistency, unity, and scarcity.
  • (19:55) 4 different types of content to map the buyer’s journey —  attraction (top of the funnel information), authority (demonstrate it rather than claiming it), affinity (positions you as likable expert), and, finally, the action.

This podcast is only 27 minutes, but it’s packed with the good stuff. And, because we can’t lie to you, you can also read it the whole shebang here. Dang.

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20 Content Promotion Tactics (and 3 Winners)

You know what sucks? When you spend a ton of time writing a kickass blog post and then no one reads it. We’ve been there

Sometimes, you gotta do a little (or a lotta) promotion to get people to read your blog post. But here’s the thing — you don’t want to waste your time (and maybe money) promoting posts on platforms that won’t give you any views.

Today’s Read from Jacob McMillen, looks at 20 different content promotion tactics and what’s actually worth your time.

Some of the tactics that Jacob tried that aren’t worth it:

  • BlogEngage & BizSugar Submissions. They’re dead platforms. It’s like yelling into an empty room.
  • LinkedIn Group Shares. They’re all just spammy these days.
  • Inbound.org Submission. Same problem as LinkedIn Group Shares.
  • Medium re-publication. We’ve actually had success with this one, but it’s definitely a long-term strategy.
  • Outbrain Paid Promotion. Targeting options are limited and vague.

So, what did work?

  • GrowthHackers Submission. This platform is similar to Inbound but less spammy. Plus, it’s free.
  • Quuu Paid Promotion, which is essentially a distribution platform, but it works and it’s inexpensive.
  • Reddit Thread Submission. We use this one, but you need to be reallyyy careful promoting things here. The community doesn’t like shameless self-promotion. 

Read the post for Jacob’s full breakdown.

This Ad is Sodium Cute

Sometimes, when you don’t make an advertisement for 20 years, you come back with a real banger. Today’s Watch is as good as ads get. It’s got a touch of humor, hopeful, loving characters, a tender-hearted conclusion, and incredible animation. Like, we wish we could watch a whole movie with this story and animation.

And it’s about salt. SALT, you guys. Salt. If a salt brand can beautifully sell their product, so can you.

Audiences everywhere are tough. They don’t have time to be bored or brow beaten by orthodox, old-fashioned advertising.
Craig Davis

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