Brandmerry Blog Archives
2022 Marketing Predictions from a Brand Strategist and Coach
BY MICHELLE KNIGHT
Marketing is always changing! Every single year it feels like there is a new focus on what we should be focused on to succeed.
As someone who studies this work on a regular basis, looking for trends, changes, and ways to excel, I can tell you it's exhausting! The way platforms change suddenly, right after it feels like you've gotten the hang of it, to new "must-know" platforms popping up regularly can be a real pain.
But, a few years ago I started to look at marketing differently. What if we didn't just focus on the fads and trends and what was working right at this moment, but more on longevity. The tried and true practices that had been working for years?!
My entire approach to marketing changed at that moment and so did my business. Over the past two years, I've experienced incredible growth in my business sales and leads, without sacrificing my time or spending an insane amount on a marketing budget.
So, as we enter another year of marketing, which is sure to be full of fun changes, I'm sharing my top predictions from the year ahead. What to see how my 2021 predictions played out? Check those out here.
In Episode 31, of the Brandmerry Podcast, tune in now to hear:
The biggest lesson we learned from 2021 when it comes to marketing our businesses and what every single entrepreneur will need to succeed in 2022.
How I really feel about video marketing in the new year and if every entrepreneur really needs it.
The tried and true approach to marketing that just hasn't changed and why it's more important than ever!
Tune in now on Spotify or Apple Podcasts to hear the full episode and all the tips.
P.S. Good news! All of the marketing predictions shared in this podcast episode are covered and taught in great detail inside of Brandmerry Academy. From storytelling to video marketing and even your brand foundations, The Academy helps you market without relying on social media! Learn more and join the waitlist at brandmerry.com/academy.
- FREE GIFTS YOU'LL LOVE -
DISCOVER YOUR BRAND STORY IN UNDER 5 MINUTES
LEARN HOW TO WRITE AN ‘ABOUT ME’ PAGE THAT CONVERTS
MAP OUT 30 DAYS OF CONTENT IN UNDER AN HOUR
- READ THE LATEST POSTS -
MEET MICHELLE
Hey there, I'm Michelle Knight and I an online branding and marketing consultant for female entrepreneurs.
I believe in the power of storytelling and using that superpower to brand and market yourself online...oh and to set yourself free.
I'm obsessed with living a life of freedom, so much so, that my family and I now travel full-time while running my business from the road.
This blog serves as a home base for all things branding, marketing, content creation and more.
The Truth About Running an Online Business - is It Really Supposed to be Easy in 2022?
BY MICHELLE KNIGHT
Has it ever felt like everyone around you is having such an easy time building their business and you can't seem to find the exit off the struggle bus?
You keep seeing all of these coaches and mentors talking about how easy it is to hit $10k months, and how clients miraculously find them and you're sitting there questing why that doesn't seem to be happening to you?
Well, you're definitely not alone in these feelings, BUT the good news is...a lot of that messaging online is a load of crap and it's becoming quite toxic to online business owners and entrepreneurs especially those just starting out.
So it brings up the question, "Should running an online business be easy?" and I'm answering that question today on The Brandmerry Podcast in episode 26.
Tune in now to hear:
The truth about running an online business and if it should be easy, hard, or somewhere in between.
How to break through the b.s. online and finally feel confident in the actions you're taking, even if right now they're not yielding crazy results.
If hustling as an entrepreneur is really as bad as they say or if it's kind of necessary.
Tune in now on Spotify or Apple Podcasts to hear the full episode and all the tips.
P.S. A great way to master your marketing and take the pressure off of social media is to join Brandmerry Academy. Inside, we're teaching a holistic and sustainable approach to marketing your business without relying on social media! Learn more at brandmerry.com/academy and get an entire year of marketing courses and support!
- FREE GIFTS YOU'LL LOVE -
DISCOVER YOUR BRAND STORY IN UNDER 5 MINUTES
LEARN HOW TO WRITE AN ‘ABOUT ME’ PAGE THAT CONVERTS
MAP OUT 30 DAYS OF CONTENT IN UNDER AN HOUR
- READ THE LATEST POSTS -
MEET MICHELLE
Hey there, I'm Michelle Knight and I an online branding and marketing consultant for female entrepreneurs.
I believe in the power of storytelling and using that superpower to brand and market yourself online...oh and to set yourself free.
I'm obsessed with living a life of freedom, so much so, that my family and I now travel full-time while running my business from the road.
This blog serves as a home base for all things branding, marketing, content creation and more.
3 Ways to Become a Better Marketer for Your Small Business
Social media just isn't sustainable and so many entrepreneurs find themselves burnt out and no further along trying to keep up with the hustle of social media. That's why today's episode is so important and if you're an entrepreneur, which I guess you are, you are going to want to tune in.
BY MICHELLE KNIGHT
Marketing is a non-negotiable for business owners. That is if you plan to make money!
In all seriousness we've got two big players: Branding and Marketing. While Branding, is typically done at the beginning of your business set up and revisited from time to time, the work behind the scenes is not ongoing.
Marketing is very different. Marketing requires consistency (whatever that looks like for you), creating valuable content and reaching your ideal customer to ultimately attract them to your paid offers and services.
It's like freaking magic.
And since, it's one of the most important parts of running your online business, I thought I'd share three of my must-have tips so you can become a better marketer!
In today's episode, of The Brandmerry Podcast, you'll learn:
Why consistency is so dang important and not just a buzz word!
How and why you should incorporate the power of storytelling into your marketing strategy to improve client attraction and connection.
Why after your customer buys is a continuation of your marketing work and how to take better care of your clients.
Tune in now on Spotify or Apple Podcasts to hear the full episode and all the tips.
P.S. A great way to master your marketing and take the pressure off of social media is to join Brandmerry Academy. Inside, we're teaching a holistic and sustainable approach to marketing your business! Learn more at brandmerry.com/academy and get an entire year of marketing courses and support!
- FREE GIFTS YOU'LL LOVE -
DISCOVER YOUR BRAND STORY IN UNDER 5 MINUTES
LEARN HOW TO WRITE AN ‘ABOUT ME’ PAGE THAT CONVERTS
MAP OUT 30 DAYS OF CONTENT IN UNDER AN HOUR
- READ THE LATEST POSTS -
MEET MICHELLE
Hey there, I'm Michelle Knight and I an online branding and marketing consultant for female entrepreneurs.
I believe in the power of storytelling and using that superpower to brand and market yourself online...oh and to set yourself free.
I'm obsessed with living a life of freedom, so much so, that my family and I now travel full-time while running my business from the road.
This blog serves as a home base for all things branding, marketing, content creation and more.
Why Marketers Should Stop Relying on Social Media
Social media just isn't sustainable and so many entrepreneurs find themselves burnt out and no further along trying to keep up with the hustle of social media. That's why today's episode is so important and if you're an entrepreneur, which I guess you are, you are going to want to tune in.
BY MICHELLE KNIGHT
Time and time again I see entrepreneurs believe that in order to market their business they MUST use social media.
Now don't get me wrong, I love spending my time on Instagram and with the addition of Instagram Reels I'm loving it.
But, the reality is most entrepreneurs don't have countless hours to spend on social media, not to mention enough brain power to create new content every single day.
Social media just isn't sustainable and so many entrepreneurs find themselves burnt out and no further along trying to keep up with the hustle of social media.
That's why today's episode is so important and if you're an entrepreneur, which I guess you are, you are going to want to tune in.
In today's episode you'll learn:
Why relying on social media at the top of your funnel, and ultimately how you create brand awareness, is not the best strategy.
The other platforms I recommend to not only evergreen your content (more in the episode) but to also bring in consistent leads to your business.
How to streamline your content, using other platforms, and still show up on social media for FUN! Yep, Instagram can be fun, I promise.
Tune in now on Spotify or Apple Podcasts to hear the full episode and all the tips.
P.S. A great way to learn all these amazing marketing platforms and take the pressure off of social media is to join Brandmerry Academy. Inside, we're teaching a holistic and sustainable approach to marketing your business! Learn more at brandmerry.com/academy and get an entire year of marketing courses and support!
- FREE GIFTS YOU'LL LOVE -
DISCOVER YOUR BRAND STORY IN UNDER 5 MINUTES
LEARN HOW TO WRITE AN ‘ABOUT ME’ PAGE THAT CONVERTS
MAP OUT 30 DAYS OF CONTENT IN UNDER AN HOUR
- READ THE LATEST POSTS -
MEET MICHELLE
Hey there, I'm Michelle Knight and I an online branding and marketing consultant for female entrepreneurs.
I believe in the power of storytelling and using that superpower to brand and market yourself online...oh and to set yourself free.
I'm obsessed with living a life of freedom, so much so, that my family and I now travel full-time while running my business from the road.
This blog serves as a home base for all things branding, marketing, content creation and more.
How to Increase Your Website Traffic Without Social Media
Social media strategies are outdated. Social Media is meant to be social and keep you on the platform. You have to get in in front of your audience in the right place. Today we're talking about using SEO, Pinterest, and Youtube as your primary strategy for increasing traffic to your website.
BY MICHELLE KNIGHT
What good is your website if nobody actually sees it? It's the number one struggle that entrepreneurs have when they come to me to help them with their marketing.
What I see is that entrepreneurs will build their website, they're doing it themselves, they're hiring a graphic designer, they're hiring a team to do it, and then it sits there. And they're like, well, I spent all this time, I spent all this energy, I spent some money building this website, but no one's actually finding it except for maybe a handful of people that saw it the day that you announced that you had a new website.
We've all been there.
I had a website for about two years before people started to find it because I didn’t know about the strategies I’m sharing with you today.
Now, more than 10,000 people land on my website every single month!
You're going to notice with these four tips, I’m sharing today, that I do not talk about social media.
Listen, social media is an asset. I am not saying there's anything wrong with marketing your business on social media. But when we are talking about consistent quality leads, there are other avenues that you want to have in place for your business.
Social media just isn't the top dog when it comes to marketing your business anymore. And many of my clients actually are overwhelmed with the process of using social media every single day.
I use the analogy that it feels like you're shooting a paper airplane into a sea of people and hoping it hits the right person. The strategies I'm about to share with you are very different and they focus on client attraction.
But, before we get into all of my favorite ways to drive consistent traffic and quality leads to your website, let us first talk about the importance of your website.
THE IMPORTANCE OF YOUR WEBSITE AS AN ENTREPRENEUR
Now, I know there's a lot of information floating around the internet on whether or not you need a website and how much energy and time should go into your website.
But I truly believe that one of the greatest assets to entrepreneurs and small business owners is their website. We actually refer to it as your home base over here at Brandmerry because that is essentially what it is.
If you needed to create one spot with all of the information for your ideal customer, whether they are coming in at the beginning of the buying process, just knowing they have a problem and not sure how to solve it, all the way to ready to pull out their credit card and purchase your products and your services, you can create your website.
Your website will serve as your home base.
It is where you get to share your story.
It's where you get to share strong language and connect with your audience.
It's where you get to share powerful resources in the form of a blog, a podcast, or a YouTube channel.
It is where you get to share full sales pages of your offers so people can get all of the information that they need.
It's truly one of my favorite things to support entrepreneurs in creating. But it also can take a really long time. It's one of the reasons that I created an entire training inside of my program, Brandmerry Academy and Roadmap to Freedom because I watched entrepreneurs spending months and months and months building a website.
Now, I am not recommending that this is the route that you go. In fact, many of my clients do it in 30 days or less.
You don't need to have some fancy, beautifully designed website if you don't have a) the budget or b) the time to take care of that.
You just want a central location with your info.
And in this video right here, I talk about the four-part framework for your homepage because your homepage is incredibly important and serves as a kind of launching off point or landing page for all the resources and things that you have on your website.
Now that we understand why your website is important and how it shouldn't take you forever, let's talk about how to get your website seen.
INCREASE WEBSITE TRAFFIC TIP #1
OPTIMIZE FOR SEARCH ENGINES (SEO)
One of the first things that you want to do when you create your new website is making sure that it's optimized for search engines, specifically for Google.
Now, there's a lot of different ways to handle this. I actually talk about SEO specifically in this video right here where I talk about the strategy for SEO, how to create site-wide SEO and some of my favorite ways to boost your overall rankings.
But so many people will create their website and they forget about the technical, very strategic backend that comes into play for site-wide SEO.
We also tend to gravitate a little bit more towards thinking of SEO in terms of blogging, and that is powerful, but what I want you to focus on first and foremost is making sure that your pages, your headings, your site descriptions are optimized.
Here’s an additional blog with some tips on this >>
INCREASE WEBSITE TRAFFIC TIP #2
PINTEREST
My second favorite way to drive traffic to my website and the website of my clients are using Pinterest.
Oh my gosh, I swear this is my love language. I used to use Pinterest as a consumer all the time. Maybe you're like me and you use it to look up recipes and home decor and clothes that you're going to pack for your next vacation and you never really thought about using it for business.
Well, back in 2017, I recognized that a lot of bloggers were using Pinterest and there had to be a way for us to use Pinterest to build our service-based business at the time. So I started exploring it.
I was already blogging, so I looked at ways that I could optimize that. I figured if my ideal customer was already there looking for lifestyle things, what are the odds that they would be there to look for business pieces as well?
We started to see that traffic was consistently coming to my blog. So rather than the one day a week when I shared my blog on social media or emailed my list, I was getting views every single day from Pinterest. That's when I fell in love with it and went all in.
And to this day, we have over a million viewers on Pinterest every single month. And one of my favorite ways to use Pinterest, obviously, is in connection with a blog.
Blogging is a great way for you to have valuable resources, high-value content on your website to support your ideal customer through the buying journey so that if someone's coming in at the very first stage and we're wanting to move them through to the purchase stage, we have great information and resources there to show our authority and our expertise.
Blogging is also a fantastic way to improve your SEO rankings because Google, as we mentioned in number one, wants to know that you have high-quality content on your website and that you are backing up what you say that you're doing within your industry with content.
So blogging tells Google, oh, this person is an expert in personal branding and they talk about it all the time on the blog. But then, in addition to that, we can use Pinterest to drive consistent traffic to our website so when we post a blog it doesn't just disappear or we cross our fingers and hope that it shows up in Google. We can make sure that it's showing up on Pinterest.
When you’re writing your blogs, it’s important to create content you know your audience is searching for so that you’re showing up in that way, while also providing value.
A blog can serve so many purposes.
Imagine someone who doesn’t know anything about your brand and finds your post on Pinterest, they now have brand awareness.
The same can happen on Google.
Now imagine someone follows you on Instagram or is on your email list and thinking about working with you. They can see the value you provide and your blog and it might be the turning point for moving your relationship to paying client.
Blogging is incredibly powerful and can also be used to repurpose your content on other platforms, just another way to drive traffic back to your website. Learn more about repurposing here >>
Now, Pinterest requires a lot of training, it’s something I teach my clients inside of my program Brandmerry Academy and is not something I can teach you in a blog, but here are some tips to get you started.
Consistent pinning is important, meaning you don’t just post one pin a week. We recommend at least three times a week with 10-15 pins each of those days. To do this we recommend using Tailwind.
You’ll want to create eye-catching images for the platform, and a few variations for each piece of content. To do this we recommend Canva and Tailwind Create.
Just like Google, Pinterest is a search engine which means your titles and keywords matter. Take the time to research those!
Pinterest advertising can be an amazing underrated asset and you can sometimes get started for just $2 a day. Check out this blog post for all the details >>
INCREASE WEBSITE TRAFFIC TIP #3
YOUTUBE
Speaking of search engines, we cannot miss an opportunity to talk about YouTube.
YouTube just like the other two that I've mentioned before, is a powerful platform because it again is a search engine, meaning that your ideal customer is coming to this platform to search for very specific topics.
Since it’s a search engine it brings in quality leads because people are searching for your resources. In addition, video is a great way to build a connection because your audience is able to see and hear you. It’s one of the reasons I post weekly videos on Youtube!
YouTube is also a great way to build that know, like, and trust factor, to expand brand awareness, brand attraction, and to again get people off of the platform.
If you watch any of my Youtube videos then you’ll notice that reference additional videos and blogs, as well as free resources to get viewers on my email list.
So there's a lot of creative ways that you can think about using YouTube. While I prefer camera face-to-face video, you could also explore repurposing your podcast onto the platform.
You could explore creating trainings (think slideshows) if you don't want your face on camera and putting those onto the platform.
Just as with all of these strategies, make sure that you're paying attention to search engine optimization, that you're paying attention to what you're naming your video, the tags, the description because that's going to play a role in how your videos are viewed.
INCREASE WEBSITE TRAFFIC TIP #4
PUBLIC RELATIONS
And finally, number four, this is a tip and a tool that is so dear to my heart because it's actually my background. I have my degree in public relations. It was actually the world that I lived in before I moved over to non-profit and ultimately became an entrepreneur. And I've carried so much of that knowledge into the business that I run today.
One of my favorite ways to drive traffic to my website, to build that know, like, and trust factor with my ideal customer, and ultimately expand the awareness of my brand is through features.
Now, by features I mean podcasts, interviews, guest speaking opportunities, featured in a publication. It is absolutely amazing what happens when you get in front of a new audience through one of these trusted platforms.
What I mean by that is if I pitch a podcast, something I teach in my programs, and I'm invited on as a guest, I'm getting invited in front of a new audience and I'm getting invited by someone who that audience already knows, likes, and trust, so immediately my trust meter, even though this are people who've never heard of me before, is already high because the host trusts me enough to bring me onto the platform.
So we always see that after I am on a podcast interview that gets released or part of an interview series or featured in an article, website traffic explodes.
In fact, just last year I was featured on CNBC for an article all about my digital nomad life and how I've built my business to six figures while living in an RV with my family for two years.
The amount of traffic that I got to my website was amazing. And I made sure that my website was optimized. We sold many of my branding programs, lots of inquiries because I was really, really deliberate with saying this is who this website is for.
So of course, we got a lot of traffic and some of those people weren't the right fit. They just wanted to see what my business is about. But a lot of that traffic did convert.
Even though, and I'm not recommending that you drive a bunch of non-relevant traffic to your website, but even though a lot of those individuals didn't convert, CNBC is such a strong platform, they have really high domain authority, that the link to my website provides a really strong backlink.
Now, I'm nerding out a little bit about SEO. I know, I know. I talk about it again in that bonus video. You can check that out below. And of course, I teach all of these strategies inside of my programs.
CONCLUSION
Those are four of my favorite ways and truly underrated ways to drive traffic to your website.
It's not enough to rely on social media. It just isn't going to work in your favor for consistent traffic, not to mention you've got to consistently be posting.
With the platforms that I shared with you, one piece of content can live for a really long time or one strategy that you implement can drive traffic to your website for years and years to come.
I recommend you check out my free class where I teach you additional ways to market your business without relying on social media.
I'm sharing with you my top favorite ways, some of which you heard about today. I'm also sharing with you the four pieces that you absolutely have to have in your marketing strategy and three mistakes that I see entrepreneurs making.
You can go to brandmerry.com/marketing. The link is also in the description below to sign up for that free training.
All right. Go forth, drive traffic to your website. I can't wait to see what these strategies do for your business.
P.S. Have you tuned in to The Brandmerry podcast? I release new episodes every Thursday on topics around branding and marketing! Check out past episodes and be sure to subscribe at brandmerry.com/podcast
- FREE GIFTS YOU'LL LOVE -
DISCOVER YOUR BRAND STORY IN UNDER 5 MINUTES
LEARN HOW TO WRITE AN ‘ABOUT ME’ PAGE THAT CONVERTS
MAP OUT 30 DAYS OF CONTENT IN UNDER AN HOUR
- READ THE LATEST POSTS -
MEET MICHELLE
Hey there, I'm Michelle Knight and I an online branding and marketing consultant for female entrepreneurs.
I believe in the power of storytelling and using that superpower to brand and market yourself online...oh and to set yourself free.
I'm obsessed with living a life of freedom, so much so, that my family and I now travel full-time while running my business from the road.
This blog serves as a home base for all things branding, marketing, content creation and more.