The Wax Blog

07 Dec

Posted at 12:15h in Content Marketing by
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Content marketers often use popular stories and news to create visual content for marketing purposes. Creating fresh topics is always a struggle whereas trending news presents an easy and effective way to engage users and bring more traffic to your site. Even though finding ideas for content is easier when you leverage trending news, it also presents a range of challenges. Firstly, news hijacking is not a new content marketing technique. A plethora of brands are using it on a regular basis, so consumers are well aware of the trick. Secondly, there is always a risk of being too late or undermining customers’ trust with content that isn’t consistent with the brand’s image. Despite the obvious drawbacks, news hijacking is a highly effective method when it comes to boosting traffic. Evergreen and long-form content form the core of the website, driving loyalty and trust, while content based on trending news can provide bursts of new traffic. The inspiration for visual content for marketing can come from many different places. This article explores how to create content that naturally incorporates trending news and stories into a brand’s own story. Of course, part of the success with creating content based on popular stories relies on design. You can use online tools to help you align content with the brand’s image and story.

Why visual content for marketing should be built on popular stories

We all love to learn new things and expect brands to provide new educational materials. But familiarity has its own place in content marketing and our brains. Here is why familiar stories work:

29 Nov

Posted at 17:39h in The New Entrepreneur, Uncategorized by
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[caption id="attachment_13722" align="alignright" width="300"] Great advice to protect your business from security threats.[/caption] Security threats are rampant these past few years, with global ransomware predicted to exceed $5 billion before 2017 ends. Just last year’s breaches is devastating itself — 95% of the breached records were from the government, retail, and technology sector. These three sectors have our information in store that can be used against us. They can easily create fake accounts, make fraudulent purchases in our name, and more. It doesn’t stop there; it’s alarming that among the thousands of global organizations, only 38% of them have handled cyber-attacks well. What happened to the 62%? It’s one of the biggest dilemma faced by businesses worldwide. There’s an insufficient amount of statistics proving that this problem can be dealt with accordingly; cyber-attacks are continuously happening around the globe as you read this article. Billions of dollars have already been lost; and billions of dollars more will be lost if we cannot at least hamper these hackers from infiltrating businesses and stealing private information. As the world becomes more tech-savvy, it’s proving to be more difficult to protect data from hackers who want nothing but to do no good. Businesses should learn how to defend and protect themselves from these increasing cyber-crimes, especially those that happen due to the lack of information on the basics of web security. It’s more than just a complicated password or a premium firewall subscription — here are 8 ideas to protect your organization from security threats brought to us by the team behind Local SEO Search Inc.:

1. Get to know what you need to protect: data

14 Nov

Posted at 16:07h in IMC by
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If you haven’t noticed the rise of influencer marketing campaigns, you haven’t been paying attention. Influencer marketing is the cousin of celebrity endorsement — updated for today’s consumer. With traditional celebrity endorsements, you’d have a well-known person appear in your TV commercial or ad. With influencer marketing, you’re playing more to authenticity by getting well-known figures to integrate your product into their daily lives and share the result on social media, YouTube, and in blog posts. The end goal of both is the same — selling through social proof. But the difference is palpable — 92 percent of people trust an influencer over an ad or traditional celebrity endorsement. As a result, influencer campaigns are going to become more and more important in the coming years. Savvy marketers need to strategize a plan of action. If you’re not sure where to start, take a page out of the book of these three successful influencer campaigns and the lessons they teach us.

Glossier

Glossier is a beauty brand that’s seen exponential growth since its launch in 2014. Four years prior to its launch, the brand’s founder, Emily Weiss, began building a content site — Into the Gloss — which is a destination for reviews and profiles on all things beauty. The brand has used the power of their content platform to turn everyday people into influencers. Using the hashtag #ITGtopshelfie, Into the Gloss asks its audience to share a glimpse into their beauty cabinet or bag via a photo on Instagram. The best shares are turned into blog posts that highlight the person’s story and beauty picks. Regular people are elevated to celebrity status and each of their individual networks are tapped as a sphere of influence. Glossier also has influencer marketing campaigns with well-known individuals and these two approaches in tandem have been the main driver of their growth thus far. Takeaway: You don’t have to have a Kardashian on speed dial to create a successful influencer campaign. Certainly, the bigger following an influencer has the bigger the impact, but marketers know that targeted is better than broad. Sometimes putting your own audience members in the influencer seat can drive authentic connection that yields results.

Blue Apron

Blue Apron is a meal-in-a-box delivery service in an increasingly saturated market. Most of these services offer similar pricing and models, so Blue Apron needed a way to stand out. They started as most influencer campaigns do — with blogs and social media (nearly half of marketers using influencer campaigns use blogs and 87 percent create content on Facebook and Instagram). Posts of everyone from former contestants from The Bachelor to Olympians such as Michael Phelps cooking Blue Apron meals became so ubiquitous, that brand awareness couldn’t help but grow. And by providing each influencer with a unique promo code, Blue Apron created a low barrier to entry and the ability to track each influencer’s impact. Most recently, Blue Apron has started turning to podcasts to find their influencers. They not only sponsor the content, but get the hosts excited about the product and talking about it in their own unique way.   Takeaway: Influencer marketing campaigns aren’t one and done. Repetition is the key to memory so plan your campaign to build upon a customer journey. The more they see your product, the less they’ll be able to ignore it. Covering multiple channels at the right intervals will require the power of a marketing automation tool, so be sure to have the right one in place before embarking on your campaign.

I Am a Witness by Ad Council

08 Nov

Posted at 16:28h in Content Marketing, The New Entrepreneur by
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How Hubspot began using Scrum to manage tasks...and everything got better Getting more done in less time. Those six words would make any manager brim with excitement. That’s also the key takeaway from Joel Traugott, a marketer at HubSpot, about his experience adopting Scrum into the software company’s work routine. He recently joined Ryn Melberg on The Guardian Podcast to discuss the many ways Scrum improved his workplace and how they used Scrum to manage tasks. Scrum is an “agile framework for completing complex projects.” Though originally intended to speed along software development projects, its creators quickly realized that it would be an effective tool for all sorts of team projects. There may be no industry for which that’s truer than content marketing. Joel would know. He’s a self-described data-driven digital marketing geek who has experience working for a number of agencies and SaaS companies. Joel had grown frustrated with the bloated editorial calendars that were bogging down team projects. The pre-Scrum workplace looked something like this: employees spent valuable time planning up to a year in advance just to see those plans fall apart down the line, multiple editors independently editing the same content, and unnecessarily long queue lines to get approval to write even simple blogs. It’s no surprise that projects were missing deadlines with this many inefficiencies. After three months of learning how to leverage Scrum, Joel became the “Scrum Master” — the leader of his HubSpot team’s renovated approach to content marketing. The changes they made may seem simple, but the benefits can’t be overstated. Using Scrum to manage tasks made a huge difference. The biggest change may have been the shortening of the editorial calendar to a more manageable and flexible 2-4 week time frame.

06 Nov

Posted at 16:26h in Management Mondays, Project Management, The New Entrepreneur by
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You manage a remote team and heard about how Agile increased productivity in the software industry. You've seen the fruits an Agile approach and are wondering how to make the magic happen with a remote team. Is it even possible? You bet it is! At DistantJob, we use it in all our teams, from recruiting to marketing. Agile enables our lean teams to tackle massive undertakings quickly. Not convinced? We've put together a free ebook with a primer to Agile as a remote solution and several case studies. It's a fast read, so grab it if you're not familiar with Agile in general. Our remote teams do Agile using a “Scrumban” method. "Scrumban" means that we take a bit from two popular Agile frameworks, “Scrum” and “Kanban.” Whoa, weird names already? Don't worry -  we're going to keep this light on theory and heavy on practical stuff.

It all starts with the daily standup

A daily meeting with all hands on deck - that's the heartbeat of our Agile process. Sounds weird for a remote company, right? After all, any of our teams might have people spread across five different time zones! But there is no denying the benefits of everyone knowing what everyone else is up to on any given day. The stand-up helps the team bond across a shared purpose.  This meeting helps everyone understand that they're not working in solitude. They're not waiting for, or handing off, work to faceless entities on the other side of the computer. The daily standup also helps people understand how their work impacts the rest of the team. Our daily stand-ups follow a simple formula. Each person tells the team: