What's your career end game?
Working out what your larger life vision is, how SEO basics now apply to Instagram š” plus great reads & marketing ideas from some of the best.
Do you know what youāll be working on 10 years from now?
Itās a pretty open-ended question isnāt it? For most of us planning a year, or even three years, ahead in business can feel hard. Particularly in this seismic year of 2020.
Yet recently, Iāve been working hard to define what my career end game is. If you too have been obsessed with The Queenās Gambit on Netflix, you may know that an end game is the final goal a player is working towards. Itās often obscured until the last moment, preceded by a series of seemingly unrelated moves. But these moves arenāt unrelated, theyāre actually all taking small steps towards the playerās end game: the final goal.
The reason Iāve been thinking about my end game is two fold: firstly, Iām having my website redesigned which is always a good time to be thinking beyond just what youāre doing right now.
Secondly the majority of my work, as you may know, takes place for technology startups. While this is a world I love, for its forward-thinking approach and its desire to work smarter and more flexibly than perhaps any other industry, at times it can also feel a bit icky.
Itās an industry that has pretty much seen COVID out unscathed and in most cases has even thrived because of it (you only have to look at Microsoft Teams and Zoom user growth this year to see how tech is now out front).
Also, it just isnāt an inclusive or diverse industry. Even though Iām now able to prioritise working with clients who have a female Founder, or at least a proportionate number of women in the leadership team, this isnāt the norm. Thereās also a huge lack of people of colour at any level within the majority of tech startups.
So while I love my work, I genuinely believe the companies I work for today have good intentions and I hope to continue using my voice to create change from the inside out, it makes me think often about my own values and mission.
Namely, a future plan.
For me the end game is clear. At the heart of my work I believe in the power of content. This might be a blogpost that helps someone do something that they couldnāt before work out, it might be an online community which helps someone meet like-minded individuals, or it might be a film or a book which lets someone escape a tough day for a while.
This means that my work right now is SEO, content and marketing strategy for technology startups.
My mission is to help the owners of startups build successful and sustainable content marketing engines. So that every piece of effort they put into content reaps rewards, and they donāt have to unnecessarily waste time or energy. This also comes into the mentorship aspect of my work, helping a new generation of marketers be better at content. To feel confident in their ability to create resources that help the end user as much as they do the companyās bottom line.
Yet my lifeās vision is wider. Itās a vision to help people have more moments where they feel inspired and connected to something bigger, to escape lifeās troubles and find the answer to their questions.
Which might mean an end game of an online community, a training school or what my school year book predicted and I always ignored, to write books. That let people escape, feel seen or less alone.
So while I may be spending 90% of my time right now doing work that isnāt directly related to the end game, I still have this clear vision. And as long as Iām slowly taking steps towards it, thatās good enough for me.
Do you have an end game in your business or work? Iād love to hear about it.
Yours, with empathy,
Beth
Marketing Disciplines: Explained š
A Guide to Instagram SEO
A big Instagram update last week was the roll out of Instagram Guides (furthering the feel that Instagram is really five individual channels within one). But what was less reported on was that Instagram SEO is about to become a thing. The latest update, as reported by TechCrunch, suggests that Instagram is adding a search algorithm that will enable users to search, and find new content, by keyword and key term.
Previously, Instagram search worked on names, usernames, hashtags and location search only. With the new search function (now live for users in Canada, the U.S., U.K., Australia, New Zealand and Ireland) youāll be able to search for a key term such as āinterior designā and surface posts that contain this term in the image, caption, hashtag and so on (see the āsearchā entries here surfaced above the usual account and hashtag-led results).
So far Iāve only found a handful of terms it works with. These were mostly classic āInstagrammableā forms of content - baking, interiors, fashion and so on (for example āmarketing tipsā or āsocial media marketingā didnāt return any keyword-led results).
Once this becomes more of a fully-fledged feature I imagine weāll see brands and influencers:
Conducting keyword research before writing captions or image descriptions
Understanding user intent and how (or even if) users search using keywords, and what those keywords are
Working out the magic formula of how Instagram Search surfaces content dependent on keyword, but also type of content and when it was posted
Iāll be keeping an eye to see how things develop š
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For marketing, growth and industry ideas on where to focus your time and marketing budget in 2021 I recommend this quick read by friend of the newsletter Danny
Learn from the top male execs at Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft on ways theyāre supporting their female colleagues at work
Serious reasons why adopting a four-day week could be a good move post COVID
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P.s Iāve sworn off Twitter but the one thing I do miss is the great meme culture it creates around TV shows. I logged back in and immediately found this gem of Alma Wheatley, who is an absolute mood.