What we’re about
Primary purpose
Connect the best digital marketers in the Greater Nashville area over real tactics and strategies.
This will be a safe "brags welcome" zone to share best-practices, tips, strategies, making us all better marketers as the rising tide will lift all ships.
If your wife/husband just doesn't appreciate your latest email open rate like you feel they should, then this is the place for you.
Quick note
This won't be designed around handing out business cards over cocktails (although both are welcome). Each week we'll be crash coursing into a single lens of digital marketing.
A few of our marketing (and business) heroes
Brendan Burchard, Jeff Walker, Frank Kern, Russell Brunson, Grant Cardone, Jon Loomer, Perry Marshall, Seth Godin, Verne Harnish, Ryan Deiss, Tim Ferriss, Jason Fried, Peter Diamandis, Steven Kotler, Jay Conrad Levinson, Vishen Lakhiani and many others.
Some tools that we love
Infusionsoft, Hubspot, Aweber (all marketing automation, really), Google Analytics, Adwords, Facebook Ads, Pinterest, Smartly, Nanigans, Click Funnels, Unbounce, LeadPages, GTM, Instagram, Stealth Seminar.
Possible Topics for the meetup
1. SEO Understanding of how to drive traffic to your site via targeted keywords, link building and on page optimizations.
2. Copywriting Know how to create compelling headlines, unique content and understand how people read and consume that content.
3. Paid Advertising Understand Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, and other content networks. Be able to write copy and generate media assets for the ads and test their performance over time.
4. Email Marketing Be able to harvest email addresses using permission marketing. Understand how to drive customer engagement and reconnect with customers using email. Be able to manage and segment lists over time.
5. Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn) Understand how to create a community and drive engagement around the biggest social networks. Understand how content goes viral. Know how to connect with influential people in these networks.
6. Positioning Know how to position products relative to other alternatives in the marketing. Understand how to attract the audience best suited for your product.
7. In Product Marketing Know how to build retention mechanics into your own product. Understand why people use your product and how to drive more usage of your product.
8. Public Relations Be able to get the attention of bloggers and journalists. Build relationships so that over time your product is consistently in the press.
9. Content Marketing Be able to create content that is relevant to your market and drives signups for your application. This could be blog posts, guest posting, infographics, podcasts or any form of content that drives links and traffic back to your blog or site.
10. Blogging Be able to write content that is both interesting and compelling to your target market consistently. Similar to copywriting and content marketing. You need to be able to write good headlines and interesting content.
11. Story Telling Stories are one of the oldest means of communication. Before the written and recorded word humans passed along information, traditions, and knowledge via stories. Being able to tell stories well will pull in people to your blog or product.
12. Lifecycle Marketing Lifecycle marketing is usually done via email. It’s a way to trigger messages to your leads and customers that match their current state in the marketing funnel. Sending the right email at the right time can increase sales by 10% and sometimes more.
13. App Store Marketing App Stores like the Apple App store or the Salesforce AppExchange provide a great opportunity to get your product out in front of a known audience. Being able to rank highly in these stores can send a steady stream of leads your direction.
14. Analytics As the saying goes, “50% of marketing works. We’re just not sure which 50%.” With the advent of internet marketing, though, we’ve gotten much better and figuring out how well our marketing efforts are working. A good understanding of web analytics will help you double down what is working and throw out what isn’t.
15. A/B Testing Another skill of a savvy marketer is being able to iterate towards optimal solutions. A/B testing lets marketers test two different variations of an offering and figure out which one converts the best. A/B tests can result in double digit percentage increases in conversions with relatively little effort.
16. Landing Page Optimization Similar to A/B Testing, landing page optimization lets you tweak headlines, keywords, layout, offering, colors, and whatever you can think of to increase the performance of your pages key metrics.
17. HTML/CSS/Javascript A marketer who can get their hands dirty will be much more effective than one that always has to lean on a developer. Being able to edit the copy directly via HTML reposition an element on the page via CSS will let a marketer iterate quicker without distracting the development team.
18. Customer Service Marketers have to constantly be communicating with customers. There isn’t a better way to do this than through customer service. A marketer who can’t communicate effectively with customers via email, phone, chat and in person is going to be a lot less effective than one that can.
19. Pitching Every marketer has to be pitching. Constantly. Pitching could be emailing a blogger about doing a guest post. It could be convincing a conference organizer to let you talk at a conference. It could be pitching a bigger company to partner up.
20. Distribution Being able to generate lots of content has been a theme of this post. But content that no one sees is pointless. A marketer needs to know how to find outlets for getting product and content out in front of an audience so people actually know about your content or product.
21. Biz Dev Business Development is the art of partnering with another company in a way that will help you both grow faster. Biz Dev is harder than making a sale of a product. Biz Dev is putting together a deal and being able to implement and coordinate the deal for start to finish with minimal distraction for both team.s
