Five incredible lessons I’ve learned since starting my business

Feb25
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December 31, 2015, was my last day as a regular 9-5 employee.

While I’d been working on marketing side-projects for years, 2016 was the first, official year of running my marketing business, Will Russell Marketing.

Last month, I reflected back on some of the incredible lessons I’d learned over the first twelve months in business – and Business Insider was kind enough to publish those reflections.

Whether a solopreneuer or CEO, these are lessons that all entrepreneurs experience, from the pressures of captaining your own ship to the personal growth essential for success.

Read the full article on Business Insider: A year ago, I quit my job to start a business — here’s what I wish someone had told me at the beginning.

Using rhetorical mirroring to successfully communicate with your audience

Jul20
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Have you heard of behavioral mirroring?

Often touted as an effective persuasion tactic used to provide an advantage in certain social situations, such as negotiations, mirroring is the behavior in which one person imitates another.

It’s commonly associated with forms of nonverbal communication, like postures, gestures, or facial expressions, but we also mirror back words and spoken language. By repeating back what people say, we often show empathy and understanding.

From a marketing perspective, mirroring can be a fantastic tactic in how we present and construct a message. It’s a way for us to build trust with our audience. We’re rarely our own target and often sitting behind a keyboard, though, so how can we know what messages or rhetoric we should be mirroring in the first place?

I use a simple method to ensure I’m mirroring my target demographic at all times in my marketing – and that’s what I’d like to share today (and yep – I used this exact process when writing this blog post).

Mirroring Study Data
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Crowdfunding

Jul09
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Our expertise in email marketing and paid advertising also allows us to help prepare crowdfunding campaigns for success.

Here are a few of the campaigns we’ve supported with digital marketing. Contact us today to see if we can help you crowdfund.

Five insanely powerful – yet simple – Facebook advertising audiences

May02
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Facebook’s advertising platform offers insane targeting, with thousands of possible ad targeting parameters. In order to properly test a particular audience you need a certain level of ad spend, though, and the average advertiser simply doesn’t have the budget to test a huge number of audiences right off the bat.

Fortunately, retargeting and remarketing tactics mean that there’s almost always low-hanging fruit, allowing you to generate ROI from day one. Once you get this solid foundation and consistent traction, it’s a lot easier to avoid wasted budget as you scale.

Just one glance at the Facebook ad audience dashboard can be overwhelming for new advertisers…

Facebook ad targeting

I’ll be the first to admit, I’ve experienced a lot of failed targeting. We all have. I’ve also identified, however, a few core audiences that I know are HIGHLY likely to provide ROI from day one.These audiences tap into retargeting (displaying ads to users who have visited your website) and remarketing (displaying ads to users whose email address you already have), which means that you’ll need an audience already – customers, email subscribers, Facebook fans, and/or website traffic – to make use of the methods below.

The following five audiences are ones I set up at the start of every advertising campaign I run, without fail. Data from these allow me to then scale the campaigns in an effective and affordable way.

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Automate your impact with this simple inbound growth funnel

Apr19
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Inbound growth refers to the use of content and paid campaigns to grow a user base, and driving the users to take action. Part of the same family as growth hacking and inbound marketing, this process uses a couple of specific marketing strategies to push users through a funnel to reach a particular goal.

Once advanced, this process can take place in an almost entirely automated system. You can automate, and therefore scale, your impact. That’s why all brands – nonprofit, for-profit, or somewhere in between – should consider how it can play a role in their marketing efforts.

Here’s the standard marketing process on which inbound growth is built:

Inbound Growth Process

In inbound growth, we prioritize email marketing and retargeting/remarketing (advertising served to people who have already visited your website or are a contact in your database) to build, segment, and message our target audience(s).

Essentially, the goal is to build a community of website visitors and email subscribers, and use email and retargeting/remarketing to convert these prospects. Let’s take a look at a basic funnel:

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