Category: Digital

20 Jun
DigitalMarketingpersonal brand

How to plan 1 Month worth of Content in 2 hours?

 

In the military, the general plan of attack or defence involves making extensive arrangements. Arrangements are made before actually engaging the enemy and intended to disadvantage that enemy. 

You might not be in the military, but you are in the middle of the war for content creation. With so much content out there, you need to plan to stand out in the crowd. 

Whether for content creation or the battlefield, a plan needs to have two fundamental aspects. You need to have a plan that defines a set of intended outcomes (ends) along with actions (means) by which those outcomes are to be achieved. 

Ask yourself the right questions to make a plan. What is your niche? What kind of content do you want to create? Where do you want to create content? Where do you want to be in 6 months? What do you expect as an outcome of your content creation? With the answers to all these questions, you can design the means to meet your ends.

 

You need to make an elaborate plan but not spend elaborate time on it. You need a well-structured plan to start with. Design it in 2 hours with these techniques:

1. Create Your Content Pillar

Time to Invest: 15 Mins

Also known as a content bucket, the content pillar is a specific topic or theme that can be subdivided into sections. Your pillar should focus on an expansive topic, leaving just enough room to dive more deeply into the concept with supporting materials. Every content pillar should have a topic cluster. 

A topic cluster is where you expand on what you’ve included in the content pillar. Linking your pillars with clusters will strengthen your plan and give it a structural flow.

2. Categorize Your Content

Time to Invest: 30 Mins

Being able to find particular content in your content plan is crucial. Many content creators categorize the content based on the genre the content belongs to. Lifestyle, Fashion, Books might have been the categories you are using so far. 

But with a content bucket, it is impossible to use such categories. Categorize the content based on the medium you want to post it on. Also, consider the format of content to categorize them.

3. Make Your Content Serve a Purpose

Time to Invest: 10 Mins

You should have a clear aim to create content. Ask yourself questions like, to whom should the content be relevant? What benefit does our audience receive from consuming our content? What kind of experience can you deliver to the audience through your content? Zero down the purpose of you creating the content. 

Brand awareness, audience engagement, website traffic, lead generation, increase in ROI are some things you should consider. Set the topic cluster of our content around that purpose. Events, holidays, product launches, contests and other such time-sensitive events should be included in the plan.  Based on the purpose you have decided upon, use formulae to create certain types of posts. 

4. Choose a Formula to Execute Your Strategy

Time to Invest: 10 Mins

Your audience understands that you are engaging with them to promote your brand. They are willing to see what you have got for them if you give them what they need.

Too much branding and you will seem to be salesy and marked as spam. Make a fair trade with your audience. Balance out the educational or informative content with promotional content.

How to do that, you ask? 

Use Joe Pullizi’s 4-1-1 formula (Content Marketing Institute):

  1. 4 pieces of curated content, shared from external sources.
  2. 1 piece of original content, produced by you.
  3. 1 piece of promotional content, aimed at marketing sales.

Or you can use the Golden Ratio by Rallyverse:

  1. 30 per cent Owned
  2. 60 per cent Curated
  3. 10 per cent Promotional

Or the Rule of  Thirds:

  1. 1/3 of your updates are about you and your content
  2. 1/3 of your updates are for sharing content from others and surfacing ideas
  3. 1/3 of your updates are based on personal interactions that build your brand

5. Streamline & Structure

Time to Invest: 25 Mins

Put all of these together in a planning tool that you are comfortable with. Set date and time for every stage of research, conceptualization, writing, and editing. Google spreadsheets, Google calendar, Basecamp, Trello, Todoist are a few of the tools you can use. 

 

Make sure to put up the SEO keywords you want to inculcate in your content in the structure of your content. Maintaining a calendar gives you a resource to refer to later. You can track back on the updates you posted and you can review your posting rhythm and consistency before you plan your next.

6. Schedule Your Posts

Time to Invest: 30 Mins

It is nearly impossible for you to manually plan, schedule and publish posts for each social channel at its peak times. But you don’t have to worry as the tech industry has come to your rescue. You can use automated tools to upload your content as per schedule. 

This will also ensure that you meet your deadlines as well. Buffer, Hootsuite, Zoho and Sprinklr are some of the tools that you can use.

We understand that this can sound intimidating! But, don’t worry, we can help you out! 

If you want to capitalise on LinkedIn and post impactful content there Click on the Button below:

Click here
READ MORE
18 Jun
DigitalMarketingpersonal brand

How to make your content go viral?

The traditional media would decide for consumers what was worth watching, what they would watch, and what would become popular. This circumstance has changed drastically, thanks to the internet and social media. The power shift has allowed people to interact, share and even create their content. There are 2400 tweets, 95 million photos and videos shared on Instagram every day. This has led to a rise of a new phenomenon: virality.

Jonah Berger, the author of Contagious: Why Things Catch On, used to read a page of the Wall Street Journal which included a list of five most read and five most shared articles of the day. He always wondered why what was read and what was shared were often different. It might seem to us that there was randomness as to which content would go viral.

 Making your content go viral might seem like an uncontrollable process to you. Do you feel that you need divine intervention to make your content go viral? Some researchers argue that this process is not just a fortunate combination of events. Rather, it’s a phenomenon that can be controlled. 

The process involves curating content, producing your content, distributing it to the social mechanism which is influenced by peer-to-peer sharing conduit. You might feel that you cannot control the working of the social mechanism. You need to tap into a certain distinctiveness of viral content that would stimulate people to watch and share.

The content has to be curated and produced before the social mechanism comes into play. This is the stage where you are in control, opposite to the social mechanism when it is already published when you might have limited control.

We know you have gone through Berger’s STEPPS and you already have a guideline ready on how to make your content go viral. We dug deeper into a little more research. This is what you should ensure to make your content go viral :

Be Findable:

You know that consumers won’t search for your content if you want them to make your content go viral. Then why do you think we are asking you to be findable? Most of the content that went viral was discovered by the ‘Consumer Zero’ while they were searching for some other content.

Hashtags and links are the carriers that will make your content go viral. Use frequently used and trending hashtags along with new, unique ones. Place your link in a spot that is accessible and easy to find. Keep your username simple and catchy so that the consumer doesn’t have to make an effort to remember you.

Having a standard display picture or a logo across all platforms of content creation will increase your findability. Incorporating value-added SEO keywords into your content will increase the visibility of your content. In the case of written content, your title will attract new viewers. Write a compelling title.

We love stories. Reading, hearing, and enacting a story is one of the favourite pastimes of the people. Do you know why? Stories are nothing but an emotional rollercoaster. Marketing Researcher Thales Texeira feels it is important to create maximum emotional excitement quickly. But don’t go all overboard with emotions.

Pulse the emotionally heavy-hitting points with gaps in your content as if cleansing the palate. Use simple language to communicate your ideas. Create a segway between parts of your content to ensure continuity. Make use of short and crisp sentences in your content. Make sure you display words for enough time for the consumers to read and understand your video content.

Be Digestible:

Understand the significance of the KISS principle- Keep it short and simple. You need to attract the attention of your consumer in the first 10 sec. Use fewer graphics and more infographics to convey your content in short.

A catchy song or a tune in the video will attract consumers to your content. Using a tune or a song already in trend or is being repeated by the other creators will create a sense of familiarity. Consumers will also be drawn to content that will have some resemblance to the content they already came across. Offer practical solutions that can be replicated, wherever possible. Consumers will find it more relatable. Berger suggests that the promise of practical value often leads to successful content.

Be Shareable:

Breaking through the noise and going viral is the direct result of having a viral coefficient above 1. A viral coefficient is the total number of new viewers generated by one existing viewer. A viral coefficient above 1 means the content has viral growth and is growing, and a coefficient below 1 means that sharing growth is diminishing.

Place your shareable link to your content at prominent places across the platform that you are sharing the content on. Upload contents in a format that can be shared through different operating systems. Consumers share content that fulfils two features: how positive the message is and how excited they feel by the message.

It has been observed that amusing and arousing content with a positive message has been shared more frequently than less amusing content. Curiosity, Amazement, Interest, Astonishment, Uncertainty are emotions that you should tap on.

Be Actionable:

Your content shouldn’t be just to consume and then forget about it. Make your consumer do something productive through your content. Create content that will make them respond to you. You can share a gist of your content on a micro-platform and apply a ‘CTA’ (call to action) feature at the end. We believe in leading by example. So, here is how we take action.

Do you like the content that we put up and need our expertise to help you with your content? Fill up the form given below and schedule a free consultation call with us!

READ MORE
14 Jun
DigitalMarketingpersonal brand

5 Types of Personal Brand Stories to Tell

 

“The world is shaped by two things — stories told and the memories they leave behind.” 

― Vera Nazarian

Don’t we all just love hearing stories, especially the ones that take our imagination to a whole new level, but can we all tell good stories? Probably not!

Storytelling is an art, an art that has been prevalent since the time humans started communicating. All of us have an undying need to tell our stories, share our experiences,  just let the world know what we have achieved. Social Media is the biggest validation to the fact that human beings have an internalised need to share their lives with others, even if they might be complete strangers.

As we have mentioned in previous blogs, what is personal branding but the telling of your story in your words, the control of your own narrative.

But how do you build your personal brand by telling stories? Sounds a bit dysfunctional but it really isn’t. Here are a few stories that you can share with your audience while building your personal brand.

Transformations

Share before and after stories, show your audience the journey you undertook to reach where you are. You can even showcase before and after stories of some clients that you closely worked with.

What this does is that it associates a sense of success to your personal brand. It gives your audience the much needed validation they require to stick around and keep following you. Now, they know you have done it in the past and have the capability to succeed much more in the future, this will give them a feeling that if they just stick around, try to do what you have done or are doing, even they have a chance to attain the heights you have reached.

Testimonials

What is the one thing that every human being in this world craves for? Regardless of what they have achieved or what they are even about to do, we are all hardwired to seek validation, be it in the form of a pat on the back from your parents, a nod of approval from your boss or even the appreciation of your colleagues. Validation is what we seek and validation is what we must have, in all walks of life.

By showcasing testimonials and telling the stories of your previous achievements, in essence you are showing to your audience that you have the much needed validation that they have been seeking and that by following you, even they can get the same if not a similar kind of validation.

Behind The Scenes (BTS)

Be your raw self in front of your audience, show them your process, show them who you are behind the camera. Make them see that despite the immense knowledge and stature you hold, you are a real human being going through everyday issues just like them.

What this does is, it makes your audience connect with you on a deeper level. It gives them a feeling of “ If he/she can do it, why can’t I”.

The kind of rush they feel when they have this realisation is unmatched, for now they realise that they have the capacity to achieve much more than what they previously thought possible. They will never forget you for getting them to this point and be your loyal followers for a long time.

Brand Values

Position yourself with a set of values from the very beginning. These values now become your holy gospel, never let them go, keep them in mind while making every single piece of content. For these values are now the pillars of your brand. 

Tell your audience the story of how you came to take these as your values and keep affirming them every now and again. Your audience will come to associate these basic life values with you as the face of your brand.  Do not ever let your audience believe that you are violating these.

Disruption

From time to time, break away from the norm of only sharing your successes, show your weaker side to your audience, tell them how you faced failure, your endurance in the face of adversity.

It is not always important to seem successful, you need to show your audience that you have gone through what they are going through right now and despite all failures, you endured and endured and reached the heights of today.

For it is not the success or the finale of your story that will make people connect with you, rather it is your journey, your failures, your never ending pursuit of that success that made you stand up every time you fell down.

Your journey is what defines you, not your destination. Come let’s write a few stories together and help you build your personal brand. Schedule a call with us on the form below!

READ MORE
10 Jun
DigitalMarketingpersonal brand

How to boost your engagement on Social Media?

                                                                     Picture Source: https://socialmediaweek.org/blog/2017/10/10-tips-increasing-social-media-engagement/

In the modern world, strong social media engagement is a sign that you’re making an impact in the market.
It’s not just about looking popular: it’s about making meaningful connections with current and future customers, which will serve to boost your brand both online and offline.

What is Social Media Engagement?

Social Media Engagement is any interaction a fan has with your social media content that shows they are interested in your post and may want to support your business.

A tool for social media analysis called the “engagement rate” can be calculated by dividing the engagement volume by the number of users that could have triggered the action. One way to calculate your engagement rate is by taking the average amount of likes or retweets + “comments” and divide it by your follower amount. If you have access to your social media analytics, it may also be calculated by those same metrics divided by people who saw the post.

After observing the percentage of engagement on your social media channels, it is important to pay special attention to the posts that are receiving the most engagement, so you can use that information to optimize future posts.

Why is it important?

Engagement is a way to measure your fans’ personal connections with your Personal Brand, which ultimately leads to more success on and off your social media channels.

While your follower count is not necessarily a good measure of social media success, engagement is a much better way to gauge the impact your Personal Brand is actually making in the social sphere.

If you’re not able to get a fan to “like” your post, how do you expect to get them to follow your content? After a fan “likes” one of your posts, they are more inclined to click on a link and end up on your website. Once a fan has reached your website, the likelihood of them being retained goes up. That “like” has the power to be the first step in their journey to a long term retention.

Here are a few options for you to try and boost your Personal Brand’s social media engagement –

Show up

Be active on the platforms of your choice, Be active on the platforms of your audience’s choice.

Show up at times when they are the most active. If you aren’t visible enough then how can you be expected to create a lasting impact in people’s minds. Show up, be regular, be relevant!

Relate to your Audience's problems

In today’s world, there is so much content out there that people move from one piece of content to another without a moment’s hesitation. Your audience will only connect with you and stay with you if they feel you are adding value to them.

Make sure you add value that is relevant to you or your field with every content piece that you create.

Post regularly

Be as active as you can. In today’s age of social media and micro content, regularity is often forgotten.

Get your audience to start expecting your posts at regular intervals, this can only be achieved through being extremely regular and adding immense value with each piece of content.

Create appealing visuals

Visuals are the best way to grab your audience’s attention. They add an edge to your content and get people to engage with your content faster and more intently than with a text based post.

Carousel posts are considered to gain higher traction than single image posts whereas short form video content is considered the highest at attention grabbing in today’s environment.

Talk to everyone, reply to every message/comment

Communication is an extremely important aspect of building your Personal Brand. Communicating with your audience, even more so. Take the time out to reply to everyone, make them feel connected with you. Give them a reason to stick around.

Remember, people stay where they feel valued, they leave when they feel you’re just another creator.

Use engaging tools and methods such as polls/AMA's

Polls or even AMA’s are new age tools and may seem a bit awkward using for your personal brand but they are by far, the best way to get your audience to directly engage with you.

More so, they offer you better insights as to what your audience is looking for, this helps you plan your future content better and give your audience exactly what they need, making them stick around even more.

Develop loyalty through Value Addition

Now, we have mentioned multiple times in the article that you need to add value to your followers, but how do you do that?

It’s very simple!

You need to understand what your audience is looking for online, what you can provide them and then it’s just about finding that common ground between these two.

Let’s say you have been working in the Finance sector for a few years now, there are people looking to invest, learn about personal finance and wanting to become financially independent. You’ve hit gold. You now know what your audience needs and that you can provide it to them.

All you need now is ways and means to get this information to them in the best way possible.

So, how do you do that?

Schedule a FREE consultation call with our brand consultants below and figure out exactly how to do this!

READ MORE
05 Jun
DigitalMarketingpersonal brand

How to start your Personal Brand on LinkedIn from scratch?

                                                   Picture Source: https://www.techprevue.com/personal-branding-linkedin/

Back in 2018, I was looking for a change of job. I was working as a Marketing associate at a Digital Marketing Agency in Delhi and while it was very exciting, I knew that I had a passion for organising events and I wanted to work in an events company. Around July of that year, I received a message from an HR on LinkedIn, a platform I wasn’t very active on, at the time.

The message was for an opportunity to lead the Events Team at Josh Talks, one of India’s leading startups. This was the first time I realised that even a very basic but active attempt at Personal Branding on LinkedIn is extremely important.

Here, I thought, if I know of the power of LinkedIn, and you know of the importance and capability of the same, then it is time we get to how you can start from scratch! 

Here are 5 steps to start your journey on LinkedIn and become an ALL STAR.

Create your account!

  1. Creating your account is very straightforward. 
  2. But, just signing up is not the end of starting on LinkedIn. You have to update your LinkedIn profile, which is very important.
  3. Start with your name, profile picture, add a detailed bio & fill in your about sections.

Pro Tip:  Remember that LinkedIn is a professional network. Treat every price of information that you update as per the interests and habits of how your industry professionals consume content.

Update your details properly!

  1. Once your account is ready, it’s time to work on detailing your profile. Details of your past experience, jobs, school, college, etc.
  2. Don’t just add the title and the time, really work on it. Add crucial information about your experience, your responsibilities, growth & achievements for each section.
  3. The world is running its course with 1 page resumes and LinkedIn provides you a brilliant opportunity to display your talent and skills in the most effective way possible.

We are coming up with another blog to take you through each of the above points in detail. We will take a deep dive into how to write your bio, your about section, job descriptions, education, volunteering etc.

Your Network is your net worth!

  1. Don’t just sit there and think that now since you have an ALL STAR looking profile that your job here is done. You need to start working on finding people to add to your network. Start with your 1st connections. Look at your friends and family.
  2. The second level of connections should be based on finding people who are from your industry. Use the search bar to search for your industry. I started with a basic search for “Event Management”. I started looking at the results. Went through profiles of people and if I thought they could teach me something, I sent them a connection request.
  3. While doing this, a basic trick to finding more relevant people is to look at the bottom of the profile you have just found. At the bottom it shows you other similar profiles of people your new connection is connected to. This web will get you 100’s if not 1000’s of relevant people to connect with.
  4. One thing to remember there is that when you send a connection request, don’t forget to send a note with your request. Your job is to convince people about why they should connect with you. This small note on why you are trying to connect with them can be the game changer.

Content is King!

                                                      Picture Source: https://www.sendiancreations.com/why-content-is-king/

  1. I know, you are going to say that everyone says content is the king but how do we get to creating content? You will have a million excuses. You are probably not a good writer, or maybe you are not good at creating videos or possibly you don’t have any ideas at all. But that is not true. Everyone is a content creator. You just haven’t tried enough.
  2. Let’s say you don’t have the time to do it or say, you really don’t know how to get started with this. Then, you can come to us and we can help you get started on an awesome personal brand on LinkedIn.
  3. Our Head of Marketing, writes all the content and creates all our social media material. This person, as of 15 May 2021 had no experience in content creation whatsoever. With time and practise with our consultants, he was able to get a grasp on things pretty quickly. You can look at our other blogs to see how it is going and share some feedback with us.
  4. This feedback that we have asked you for, is the only way to become better at creating content. It’s as simple as that, when you do write something, you just need to go and ask for feedback. Ask your friends, your family, or your network. They will all help when you ask for it.

Start Conversations!

  1. LinkedIn is a conversational platform. It helps you connect with people and this connection is not just with connecting like a friend request. It is about conversations.
  2. You should start conversations through your content. Ask people to share what they are thinking. Maybe in the beginning you won’t get a log of comments, but with time people will start loving the idea of conversation with you.
  3. Reply to people as soon as possible. Whenever someone asks you for anything, don’t let it sit there. Reply to them and add value to the best of your capabilities.

This was a small blog on the very basic things you need to keep in mind while starting from scratch. This may sound a little overwhelming. Sometimes because you don’t understand how social media works, or sometimes because content creation is not a very comfortable activity for you.

It could also be because you simply don’t have the time or resources to take care of this, “Extra Activity”. But my personal experiences have always made it very clear to me that this extra activity has always helped me grow in my career, in my learning and most recently in my entrepreneurial journey! I hope to see all of you starting with your own LinkedIn profiles very soon!

Don’t forget to share your story of how LinkedIn has helped you in life in the comments section! 

Abhisht Abhivyakti Pathak

Co-Founder & CEO, Konnct.me

LinkedIn

READ MORE
24 May
DigitalMarketing

What the hell is a Personal Brand?

Picture Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/rachelmontanez/2019/09/03/personal-branding-mistakes-you-must-avoid-when-making-a-career-change/?sh=6d17bb0a6aa2 

At one point or the other, we have all googled ourselves, haven’t we?

Do we all like the results, we see? Maybe or maybe not.

Huh, if only there was a way to control these results. Wouldn’t that be fun?

What if I were to tell you that there is a way and this blog is about exactly that. In this blog we are going to talk about the talk of the town. We are going to talk about what a personal brand is.

In short, a personal brand is a method to control your perception in the eyes of others, a chance to tell your story in your own way by controlling the narrative.

This may all sound a bit vague. So let’s break it down. Personal branding is a conscious exercise to build a narrative about yourself for your followers (or future followers). The aim can be to target your friends, family, colleagues, investors, or any one you wish to influence.

Your personal brand is how you promote yourself. It is the unique combination of skills, experience, and personality that you want the world to see you as. It is the telling of your story, and how it reflects on your conduct, behavior, spoken and unspoken words, as well as your attitude.

Personal branding is what shapes your perception in the eyes of the public, both your followers and otherwise. A personal brand is all about creating an image for the outside world and marketing yourself as an individual. 

Essentially, your personal brand is the story that’s told about you when you’re not in the room.

Your story is also being told online. What’s being said about you on digital platforms? Is it praise or critique? 

You can either ignore your personal brand, and let it develop organically,  beyond your control, or you can help build your personal brand to depict you as the person you want to be.

Building a personal brand intentionally will allow you to tell your story as you want it to be told, to establish yourself as an expert in your field and to connect with your customers and clients beyond your products and services alone.

Why is it important to build your personal brand?

                                                        Picture Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-choose-great-brand-name-didac-hormiga/

A good Personal Brand presence helps you stand out in the crowd! 

You saw how many people were there on your name’s search on Google. You need to be different. You deserve it.

Building a personal brand has never been more important. For many of our industries, we’re in a state of immense change, and how we communicate with our audience is changing as well.  We’ve had to learn how to communicate virtually with fewer in-person interactions and with more online  interactions over the past year.

With limited opportunities to build relationships with your followers and audience, the need for a strong personal brand has never been greater. Things you may have used to build your brand in 2019 no longer work to the same effect in 2021, but the doors are wide open for new possibilities when it comes to developing your personal brand.

Building a personal brand is much like building a bridge between you and your customer.  By revealing parts of yourself through your brand, your customer can start to relate to you and build trust with you.

They say we do business with “people we know, like and trust”, and our personal brand is the first step towards building that bridge. 

If you haven’t created a Personal Brand yet and are looking to create one, here are some questions to get you started (or you can schedule a consulting session with us) below :

 

  1. How will your brand make people feel?

  2. What makes you different?

  3. What are your core beliefs and values?

  4. What’s your message?

  5. Who is your ideal Target audience?

  6. How are you influential?

  7. What problem do you solve?

  8. What’s your niche?

READ MORE