Your customers are dropping out of your funnel. Engagement is down. The CEO is on you to get results… today.
Where can you find more efficient ways to get the job done?
A better MarTech stack.
If you aren’t using a diverse set of tools, you’re likely falling behind.
Marketing departments around the world are scrambling to find the best ways to identify and engage their customers.
Are you wondering why your team can’t find more customers? Or better satisfy your existing profit centers?
It’s because your MarTech stack needs a facelift. An upgrade to help you better serve customer needs and enable easy onboarding.
Like a valley girl without botox, a business in 2018 without a proper stack is showing its true age.
But with over 5,000 MarTech options available, finding the right tools for the job can be daunting.
Luckily, I’ve got your back.
Get your MarTech stack ready for the future with the hottest apps on the block.
Managing customer relations is key to growing your business.
It’s 5x less expensive to keep an existing customer than to sell to a new one.
But upselling and reselling to existing customers presents a big challenge.
Just because someone bought from you once doesn’t mean they’ll do it again or stick around forever.
You need to manage and nurture the customer relationship.
When it comes to that, Salesforce continues to steal the CRM “best in show” — and with good reason.
It recently topped Fortune’s list of 100 best companies to work for in 2018 and has been able to retain consistent growth behind its experienced leadership.
What’s their secret to being the biggest SaaS shark in the ocean?
It’s one of the most customizable CRMs out there and has been battle-tested for nearly two decades.
It has integrations for just about every use case with it’s AppExchange being second to none.
With AppExchange, you can find, locate and utilize different applications like you would plugins on WordPress.
Businesses of all sizes use it and love it.
Whether you are a mom-and-pop shop getting started or a large enterprise org, Salesforce has seen your use case before and has a solution.
Dashboards are full of comprehensive data that you can use to build customers from small lifetime values to high lifetime values.
Salesforce is king when it comes to customer relationship management.
When it comes to social media, today’s consumer is everywhere.
In fact, the average consumer has seven different social media accounts spread across multiple platforms.
While that presents an opportunity in the form of reaching new customers with multi-channel strategies, it also creates an internal nightmare when it comes to managing it.
Posting, liking, commenting and engaging on seven platforms? That’s a full-time job.
But not when you take advantage of platforms like Hootsuite.
Hootsuite is a necessity for managing your social media presence.
While Facebook Advertising is primarily about “speaking” to your customers, Hootsuite should be used to “listen” and engage.
Of course, finding a way to listen to multiple channels at the same time is difficult. Hootsuite solves the problem by managing all your social channels in one place.
By using a unique dashboard to monitor unlimited streams from all the social media channels your team uses, you can schedule, optimize and interact with consumers in just minutes on any platform.
With integrated analytics dashboards, pulling up reports for your marketing and sales teams is easy.
Connecting to diverse content systems beyond social, you can pull up free stock images to aid your social campaigns:
The platform is decked to the fullest, helping you manage social media with one tool in a sector that normally requires multiple.
Reaching new customers is key to scaling your business.
And there’s possibly no better place to do that than advertising with AdWords.
Despite Facebook’s massive growth, Google AdWords is still the most widely used advertising platform in the world.
In fact, getting certified in AdWords is seen as a necessity for most entry-level digital marketing professionals.
While most people are interested in Facebook, here’s why you should keep AdWords in your toolbox:
AdWords packs a punch in the form of intent.
If cleanliness is next to godliness, then intent is next to customer acquisition.
On platforms like Facebook, people aren’t there to see ads or find products. They are engaging with friends, family, and funny videos.
But on AdWords, people are actively searching via keywords to find solutions to their problems:
They want help ASAP. So you can virtually skip the typical funnel process and get down to selling.
On top of intent, AdWords packs reach. Google handles over 40,000 searches every second.
Not to mention over 3.5 billion each day and 1.2 trillion each year.
With AdWords, you can also advertise on YouTube, a platform with 1.5 billion monthly active users who watch more than an hour of content daily.
In terms of support, you have access to dedicated account managers that will help run and optimize your campaigns.
The dashboard is extremely easy to use, too.
With diverse demographic targeting and custom audiences, you can reach users with Facebook-like specificity.
AdWords is the bread-and-butter of PPC advertising and will continue to dominate with its massive user base.
Add it to your stack and get your piece of the pie today.
Running tests is critical to finding success. Whether in product creation, marketing development or sales.
Test and test again.
But when most A/B tests fail, you often can’t rely on your own, basic marketing tests to provide statistically significant data.
Let Optimizely take your experiments by the horns to stay ahead of the competition.
Test against your assumptions to build better campaigns that capture more users and increase retention.
People will think you became a guru overnight.
There are a number of ways you can impress your team with Optimizely.
Use Optimizely X, and you can experiment across “every device, every channel, and every customer touchpoint.”
With unlimited users, you can easily collaborate with anyone to build dashboards that will make your executive team happy.
Show the world your technical prowess by empowering developers to support your optimization marketing tech.
Optimizely powers optimization and testing for some of the largest companies on the planet for a reason:
It simplifies testing and provides accurate, effective results.
Every marketer thinks they understand their customers. Their pain points, wants and needs.
But when it comes to driving sales, do you know how the user experienced your site? What they loved or hated?
Unless you are using a heat mapping tool like Crazy Egg, you likely don’t.
Crazy Egg is known as a heatmapping tool that provides an X-ray of how visitors are interacting with your site.
They were one of the first in the space, and remain the top player for a few main reasons.
With Crazy Egg, you can see which part of your pages users click on the most, where they are spending the most time (on a per-page basis), and what areas are being completely ignored.
They offer four different views, but Heatmap and Scrollmap are where it’s at.
Heatmap allows you to see where users are clicking and Scrollmap allows you to see where users are spending the most time (especially helpful for those of you producing long-form content).
Crazy Egg allows you to A/B test different variations of pages so you can continue to make iterations.
Getting insights on how your users interact with you is invaluable for optimization. Quit your slacking and start using heatmaps.
Speaking of slacking…
Collaborating and communicating across teams and departments shouldn’t be a boring, tedious or annoying process.
And, it shouldn’t be an afterthought, either.
According to HubSpot, the more aligned your sales and marketing team is, the better overall growth you’ll achieve.
And that’s where Slack comes into play.
With Slack, all of your team communication exists in one place. You can message individuals directly, create a group, and create Slack channels to keep conversations topical and organized.
Plus, they have integrations with EVERYTHING. GitHub, Trello, Dropbox, Google Drive, Heroku and countless other MarTech tools. The list doesn’t end.
Slack is where work gets done, and team communication stays fluid.
Latest data shows that 91% of companies using marketing automation find it to be an integral piece of their marketing strategy.
The fact of the matter is, with so many channels and platforms available to marketers today, automation is necessary to thrive.
And Marketo is a powerhouse of automation designed for marketers by marketers.
If you’re in B2B and want to get an idea of how your prospects are interacting with all your marketing channels, Marketo is the wingman you’ve always wanted.
Built on the same core platform as Salesforce, Marketo is a necessity for any team running multiple channels for customer acquisition.
With an easy-to-use modular system featuring marketing automation, consumer engagement marketing, real-time personalization, and marketing management, you can customize everything for your specific business needs.
Marketo is designed for scaling businesses.
The platform allows you to clone entire programs such as landing pages and email marketing, so you don’t have to create new ones as your grow.
Using advanced reporting to pull detailed customer analytics and then compare across channels, Marketo can integrate with just about any other MarTech tool you use.
Marketo is built for the power-user. For the marketing team that attacks multiple channels and needs heavy equipment to get the job done.
AdRoll arrived on the MarTech scene as a retargeting platform but has since transitioned into a full-funnel DSP (demand-side platform).
What does this mean? AdRoll allows you to attract new customers to your site, convert site visitors at scale, and continue to maintain a relationship with your existing customers.
Programmatic marketing has gotten some flack recently, but the numbers don’t lie:
There is a reason AdRoll has over 30,000 customers (well, there’s at least 30,000 reasons).
And what AdRoll is working on in the future is even more interesting.
AdRoll plans to focus more on incrementality utilizing big data and machine learning to get a complete sense of which ads are actually causing customers to make a purchase.
They are building out an account-based marketing solution and are poised to become a market leader in the space.
Take their access to over 300 ad networks and exchanges, add an advanced bidding tool, and layer in very specific customer data from Bombora.
That’s a recipe for potential success and more money in your company war chest.
Their account management is second to none. For mid-market companies, you will not get the same level of customer service from Google or Facebook.
Want a platform to help grow and nurture customers? Look no further.
CXM, or customer experience management, is the audience engagement need for your MarTech stack in 2018.
Have you heard the maxim, “People don’t care what you know until they know that you care”?
With CXM, that core idea rings true. Engaging with your audience is an absolute must-have for creating a dialogue about your brand.
Sprinklr makes this easier than ever to put into practice.
Their CXM platform gives you complete control over the customer experience.
Pull over 25 social channels into a unified platform. Reach and listen to all your customers in one place.
Add context to data pulled from other platforms, like your Salesforce CRM.
Schedule your campaigns and monitor results with ease.
Leverage Sprinklr’s app marketplace to make the most of your CXM data.
With diverse integrations, you’ll be able to connect Sprinklr to any other tool in your stack.
When it comes to email marketing, there are countless platforms available.
But starting out with your first platform can make or break your success.
Some cost a fortune, and others are meant for top-level companies.
Thankfully, MailChimp exists, allowing any company of any size to start an email marketing campaign in just minutes.
With powerful analytics dashboards, you get clear data on your campaigns without vanity metrics:
Using a drag-and-drop email building system, you can get campaigns established fast with the look and appeal of a high-tech, high-cost platform:
The fact is, email still reigns supreme in 2018.
Email is still one of the most influential information sources for B2B audiences.
On the B2C side of things, welcome emails generate 320% more revenue than general promotional messages.
If you aren’t capitalizing on the opportunities to maximize revenue from your email marketing… well, then what are you doing?
MailChimp makes it easier than ever to build automated campaigns for drip funnels and promotional marketing, with templates that make the process a breeze for you and your team.
You can quickly split your audiences into lists for optimal campaign performance.
As with most MarTech tools, it integrates with just about every app on the planet.
My personal favorite tactic is using Gleam to build a competition, then leveraging automation in MailChimp to convert those participants into customers.
All that’s left to do is sit back and watch yourself win.
Keeping everyone on the same page is just as vital as getting your MarTech stack working overtime.
Ensuring that every team is interconnected, working together and sharing information isn’t easy.
Especially when teams are hard at work.
And that’s where Wrike comes into play.
Wrike has an advantage as one of the leading productivity management platforms in the world.
When your MarTech needs to stay on track, count on Wrike to keep all your campaign tasks organized.
Wrike helps you to test workflows before launching them into campaigns and manage communications across members of your team.
In addition to a robust free trial and extensive documentation to get you started, Wrike boasts a library of integrations — including some of the market-leading MarTech tools.
Wrike is perfect for businesses that get work done and need to share that work across various departments and teams.
Integrate it into your marketing stack for streamlined communications and efficiency.
Say you need to connect your Kissmetrics campaigns to reports to Crazy Egg, and then email those reports to your supervisor at 4:00 PM on the dot?
Diverse, detailed and seriously precise marketing automation like that is hard to come by.
And that’s why Zapier is dominating the competition.
Connecting anything to well, anything, is as easy as selecting a few dropdowns. Choose the apps you want to connect, create a hook, and voila — instant MarTech magic.
Zapier is the Muhammad Ali of automation. Using easy, customizable triggers and actions, you can connect any app in your stack to run highly specific tasks.
Once you’ve set it up, you simply let it run in the background, automating most of your daily tasks that kill your time.
SEO has changed dramatically in the past ten years. In fact, Google makes updates to their algorithm nearly 600 times each year.
That’s more than once a day.
Staying up-to-date with SEO is crucial, and there is perhaps no better way to know who is outranking you on specific keywords than SERPs.
SERPs is the one-stop shop for competitive SEO insights. Your SEO is never good enough in today’s algorithm-shifting world.
Until you hit #1 ranking for every targeted keyword, there is always opportunity to improve.
SERPs helps you go above and beyond plain old research to deliver actionable insights about your competition.
When researching their Google ranking index or keyword research database, you can gather insights on which keywords competitors are targeting, campaign costs against those keywords, and SEO rankings for specific landing pages or blog content.
Stop doing keyword research with sub-par platforms or directly on Google.
Integrate SERPs to get the benefit of keyword research and competitor research in one.
Building a MarTech stack is a complex problem.
You have over 5,000 options to choose from with a very specific budget and a list of requirements.
Want to hear some good news? You’ve already done the hard work. Finding the right resources is half the battle.
The other half of the battle is getting your knowledge to align with actions.
You are the glue holding your MarTech stack together. Without your decisions, there is no marketing ROI for you and your team.
You still need to bring everything together to ensure your team can make the most of this powerful MarTech tool stack.
First, ask yourself these two key questions.
What are my immediate goals?
Your initial answers to this question led you here, so it may be time to really look into what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.
In my first marketing role at a SaaS company, we spent about $10,000 on LinkedIn Ads that only converted 0.1% of users who clicked through.
In some companies, this is a campaign that can put you out on the street.
You know what our team did instead of stressing about the results? We doubled down with a clearer objective.
Our initial goal was too broad. “Convert 1% of user click-throughs” only works if you’re offering real value and understand why your content is valuable.
We were trying to sell ourselves without telling a story, and our prospective customers could see right through it. So what did our new goal become?
“Convert 1% of user click-throughs and increase total ad clicks by 5,000.” Then we were prioritizing context as well as optimization.
Bringing this back around to the finish line, your goals are the hidden driver for your MarTech stack.
Understand your why and be clear about how each MarTech tool guides you toward success.
Where are you going to achieve a greater ROI?
The trick is actually more simple than it may seem.
You’ll generate ROI when you test assumptions and land in the right place at the right time.
With measurable and actionable results, you tell a more informed story about your customers.
A better story leads to better experiments. Before you know it, your marketing machine does all the heavy lifting for you.
For example, your life is easier when you put the majority of the load on your MarTech stack.
With Kissmetrics, for instance, it’s easy to analyze, segment, and connect your marketing automation in a single platform.
Your MarTech tool stack is the key to achieving successful ROI in your marketing efforts. Without it, you’re Captain Ahab in the ocean minus a paddle and spear.
Marketing stacks are key to streamlining your marketing campaigns in the modern world.
With so many options to choose from, it can often be overwhelming.
For your average mid-market company, a combination of Kissmetrics (below) + Crazy Egg + HubSpot + Google + Facebook may be all you need.
Even startups can benefit from this stack.
Enterprises can combine these tools and more to achieve even more growth.
With the addition of Sprinklr and other CXM tools, every channel becomes a potential revenue stream.
You’ve shown an appetite for winning in the marketing game by getting this far.
Go forth, build your MarTech tool stack, and show the world what you can do.
What completes your MarTech tool stack?
About the Author: Neil Patel is the cofounder of Neil Patel Digital.
]]>The post Content Definition: What Are We Even Talking About? appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
]]>How do you define content? Does everyone on your team agree with your definition? Do the people on other teams define content the same way?
Sure, there’s a dictionary definition for content (in fact, multiple definitions for multiple usages). A Wikipedia entry offers two slightly different definitions in its first two sentences.
This question of how to define content came up in the Content Marketing Institute LinkedIn group a few weeks ago. It pops up in Twitter chats and conversations fairly regularly. And there’s a healthy search volume around related phrases.
If definitions exist, why does this question keep coming up?
Plenty of people have explored what’s meant when people talk about content as it’s used in businesses and other organizations.
Michael Brenner teased out the differences between content and content marketing in an article so popular we’ve run it a few times. To paraphrase, Michael says “content” is typically produced because someone in the organization asked for it, while “content” paired with “marketing” is what the audience wants.
#Content paired w/ #marketing is what the audience wants, says @BrennerMichael. Read more>>
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It’s an important distinction, but it’s not quite a definition.
In 2013, the TopRank Marketing community offered definitions. In its resulting post, CMI founder Joe Pulizzi said content is “compelling information that informs, engages, or amuses.”
Simple enough. Content is information that provides a benefit to the person who consumes it.
Other definitions in the round-up article echoed Joe’s with nuances.
A few felt a definition isn’t even possible, as Olivier Blanchard suggests:
The thing about the term ‘content’ is that it’s just vague enough to mean everything and anything, which is to say it doesn’t mean anything at all. It’s essentially a word that means “stuff to fill an empty space with.” It could be photos, video, marketing copy, thorough analysis, poetry, farts, vacuous nonsense, cat hair, or cheese cubes. The only thing it hints at is that there is a finite volume of the space it must fill. Ironically, the word itself is a vessel for more content: Here’s an empty word. Now fill it with meaning.
The word #content is an empty vessel. Fill it with meaning. @OABlanchard Read more>>
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Take a spin through TopRank’s post to notice the range of responses and how often “stuff” and “things” show up in the definitions. Those are more indications of how strangely hard content is to define.
#Content is strangely hard to define, says @Kmoutsos.
Click To Tweet
Dictionary definitions don’t completely satisfy. Here’s how Merriam-Webster breaks down “content”:
If you want to go off on a slight tangent, check out the Yarrr! Content episode of PBS Idea Channel, which explored the term (and why some people hate it) and settles on a similar definition.
But the content many of us work on isn’t limited to websites, apps, or any digital form.
Merriam-Webster offers a few more entries for content:
Notice how option c goes back to content as information. Still, as talented as the content community is, works of art might be a bit of a stretch for our definition.
Where does that leave us? I like the definition Rahel Anne Bailie offered recently on Twitter. Content is “contextual, human-usable data.”
#Content is contextual, human-usable data, says @rahelab. Read more>>
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Given that my definition of content is “contextual, human-usable data,” this fits nicely.
— Rahel Anne Bailie (@rahelab) February 12, 2018
Information is data in context, and content is contextual data created for people.
I’d like that explanation even better if it borrows from that great Dr. Brené Brown quote about stories. What if we defined content as information with a soul? When I imagine what exactly that might be, my definition of content is “compelling information that informs, engages, or amuses.”
If you thought of content as useful, helpful, engaging, and even soulful information, would that change how you approach your job?
That definition, with its built-in aspiration, serves as a reminder to aim high and think of the value to the audience first.
A definition for #content that incl built-in aspiration reminds us to aim high & value audience. @Kmoutsos
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Would it change how others perceive your team and the work it does? Let’s say you evangelize the “helpful information” definition of content across your organization.
When your colleagues hear the phrase “sales content,” they would immediately think “helpful information for people who are ready to buy.” Note how nicely this notion of sales content aligns with Marcus Sheridan’s advice to rally sales and content teams around a shared mission to be the best teachers in your niche.
A shared, inspirational content definition could even go a long way to unite teams that are typically siloed. In a recent article on SpinSucks, Public Relations vs. Marketing: Is This Still a Thing? (spoiler alert: it is), Mike Connell wrote about content as the great uniter between those disciplines:
The truth is, there’s no arguing that marketing and PR are different, but ultimately their goals should align, and practices can converge under a common component: content.
#Marketing and PR are different, but their goals should align under #content, says @themuna.
Click To Tweet
If marketing and PR practices converge through content (read: helpful information), why can’t sales and marketing, customer service and marketing, and so on and so on. A shared definition can only help.
Once your team agrees on what content means, don’t keep it to yourself. Explain your definition in your meetings with other teams. Post it in your organization’s intranet. Keep it visible and accessible.
How much does the name we give a thing matter? Perhaps the name matters less than its shared definition.
Some people dislike the term content. Some are simply confused by it. Still, content as a label won’t likely go away soon – in part because no other name has popped up to replace it.
Sure, instead of CMI, Joe could have called it the Engaging Information Marketing Institute, the Helpful Information Marketing Institute, or the Information With a Soul Marketing Institute. But he led with content.
I’m content with that choice. How about you?
Gather with other like-minded folks who realize the value of shared definitions, structures, frameworks, etc., for more successful content marketing. There’s still time to register for Intelligent Content Conference March 20-22 in Las Vegas. Use code BLOG100 to save $100.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
The post Content Definition: What Are We Even Talking About? appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
]]>You probably don’t need me to tell you that though, because you’re looking at them every day.
You’re also making the same changes on a monthly, weekly, and even a daily basis.
And it’s not like you can just quit AdWords either.
Google has reported that businesses make an average of $2 in revenue for every $1 they spend on AdWords.
That makes it a vital part of your digital toolkit, and an even bigger part of your ROI.
The problem is that the work is never done. And it never will be either.
Luckily, you have options just below the surface of default settings in AdWords that can help lessen the amount of time you spend tinkering with your campaigns.
Adwords gives you the option to automate some of the more tedious elements of your campaign.
Because your only option shouldn’t be to hire the work out.
Many small businesses simply can’t afford to do that.
They also can’t afford to go take a marketing class to learn “secrets” they’ll never use.
The good news is that you can save time in the future by automating the processes you’re already doing manually.
I’m going to show you how to optimize your automated AdWords campaigns.
Let’s start with the basics.
I already mentioned that the average AdWords spend doubles your revenue, but what else should you be looking for?
The trouble with traditional PPC campaigns is that the effective ones often require constant babysitting to see results.
And the repetitive process of adjusting, activating, or deactivating ads can take up too much of your time.
That’s why automation is so important.
It kicks in when the time is right, which means you don’t have to constantly monitor the ad to get the result you want.
So your biggest objective, quantitatively, is to create an ad with an amazing landing page that maximizes your click-through rate, or CTR.
Depending on your niche, a “good” CTR can be anywhere from 2 percent – 25 percent, or even higher.
More to the point, failing to optimize your ads means your competitors are edging you out.
In fact, Smart Insights found that being at the top of SERPs increases your CTR by 31.52%.
Which means if you can get a search results page that looks like this:
You’re not only cashing in on SEO; you’re doubling down with your ad campaign.
You stand a better chance of getting a higher CTR, which means more leads and more sales.
And this is where automated rules can save the day.
Automated rules are actions you can have AdWords perform automatically across your campaigns.
Running these rules requires you to set which conditions have to be met for the rule to trigger.
Keep in mind that automation is just a process that allows you to take the campaigns you’re already running and spend less time on them.
If you don’t have the right practices already in place, you’ll just be automating bad habits.
Lack of routine, not knowing what to look for, when to look for it, and why to look for it means you’re unable to fix problems when they arise.
You’re throwing your (or your client’s) money away.
And since you’re reading a blog article about PPC, it’s pretty obvious you want different results.
With these automations, you’ll have the ability to skip the routine tasks to focus on strategy and growth instead.
So let’s get started with the backend and move down to individual ads.
One of the fundamental concepts of PPC is setting the right overarching parameters for your ads.
Missing the mark on a technical detail can sink your campaign before it even starts, leaving you with the assumption that tasks are automated when nothing is happening.
For example, the effectiveness of segmentation and targeting of your ad are directly tied to basic elements like copy and coloring.
That doesn’t even touch on the landing page you use.
All this means your automation starts well before you ever log into your AdWords accounts.
You have to begin by knowing your targets and the results you want, and then constructing compelling copy, images, and link your ad to a useful landing page.
So let’s walk through what this looks.
Let’s say we want to run a display campaign via AdWords.
You’ll fire up your dashboard, go to your campaign, and be met with a page that looks like this:
As you can see, I’ve highlighted the options to select.
This will run a display campaign with the goal of acquiring leads.
You also want to make sure you select a standard display campaign so that you can choose your settings and targeting.
You’ll also need to input your website URL.
Then input your campaign name and targeting information.
For this example, I’ll call it Business Owners and target Seattle, WA.
Next, you’ll need to decide on bidding.
What you choose for this depends on your objective, but since we’re talking about automation, I’m going to opt for the “Automatically maximize clicks” option.
This will automatically set your ad to bid for the lowest possible cost-per-click (CPC).
If you choose to select a different bid strategy, here are your options:
As you can see, there are four automated options or a manual bid setting. Leave that be for now.
You’ve successfully set up automation for your campaign now. Next on the list is your ad groups.
At this point, you’re ready to set the targeting parameters for your ad.
Koozai recommends breaking down and targeting your ads to these general categories before you start to make changes in AdWords:
Once you’ve determined where to target your ads, it’s time to set them up.
Start with audiences, which provides a breakdown of online actions and interests. You can see here I’m keeping with the business owner theme.
Next, move on to demographics.
For this particular ad group, let’s say I want to target male and female business owners who are between the ages of 20 and 35.
They’ll be in the top 30% of household income with no children.
Now select your keywords, topical targeting, and the last big piece: automated targeting.
Automated targeting a great tool for letting Google AdWords display your ad to customers similar to the ones you’ve targeted.
You can either opt out of automated targeting, which limits your audience to only the parameters you’ve selected.
Or, you can choose between conservative and aggressive automation strategies.
Conservative automation will keep your audience very narrow, but will still put your add in front of similar demographics.
This a great option for businesses that want more conversions and are okay with getting clicks that are a bit outside their optimal audience.
Aggressive automation widens your audience even more and places your ad in front of a wider but still similar group of people.
Use this setting when you want way more conversions and are okay picking through some potentially low-quality leads.
But if you’d rather keep the ad group tight, then select no automated targeting.
Whichever one you pick is determined by your goals and how prepared your sales team is to handle less-than-ideal leads.
Now that you’ve set up your campaign and ad group, it’s time to dive into some individual automation elements.
Google’s default setting is to prefer your best performing ads.
While this might sound like a good thing, it can skew your A/B testing results and will favor one ad over others.
To combat this, you want to ensure that your ads are set to “rotate indefinitely” so that each has an equal chance to perform.
This makes sure that one ad doesn’t get shown more often than others, which could skew your conversion rates.
Normally, you’d be forced to go into your AdWords dashboard and manually stop an over-shown ad, and that will affect the results of your A/B testing.
You’ll find this option under your settings tab in the individual ad group. It will look like this:
Once you’ve selected and saved the settings to rotate indefinitely, you won’t be saddled with the repetitive task of deactivating overperformers to get the results you want.
There are so many devices to choose from these days it can make your head spin. Contrary to what you might think, advertising universally across all devices isn’t always a good idea.
I worked with a client once who was advertising on mobile, desktop, and tablets at first.
After a month, we sat down and parsed through the data. Tablets only had three clicks.
Compared to the 244 clicks from desktop, it was clear that tablets were a waste of time.
But don’t just take that advice and run with it.
It’s also worth considering that 33% of all Google search clicks are generated through mobile.
So just because one company isn’t met with success on a mobile platform doesn’t mean you’ll have the same results.
The same is true for the opposite sentiment as well.
Which means if you’re opting out of advertising on mobile, you should probably reconsider.
One former Google employee who’s now working as an SEO specialist recommends deciding whether you want to be viewed in apps or not.
You may be spending money advertising to kids who use mobile apps but wouldn’t ever touch your product.
The only way you’ll know for certain is if you try, but if your age demographic isn’t on the lower end of the spectrum, then an in-app ad might not suit you.
Another automation miracle at the ad group level revolves around timing.
Wordstream recommends doing some hardcore data analysis before you get to the business of setting up times though.
For example, they found that they weren’t getting many clicks on the weekend, but the CTR was higher, and the cost per click was lower:
They used this information to take action accordingly.
Namely, optimizing ad budget and the timing allotment so that these ads could perform even better.
Don’t just rely on the default settings.
They’ll have your ads running 24/7, and you’ll burn through your budget.
The more specific you are, the better your results will be.
You can see here that I’ve set an example ad for certain times on Monday and Tuesday only:
And consider the types of ads you’re running.
You don’t need a Thanksgiving-themed advertisement to be running in the middle of summer.
Or a late-night all-nighter themed ad in the middle of the afternoon.
That’s just a waste of money and will spread confusion around your brand.
Time your ads appropriately.
Analytics is everything in PPC.
Every action you take is based on data. Whether it’s increasing a bid or narrowing your audience, you want to know the analytics that back up your decision making.
Which means you need to make sure you’re actually connected to your tracking system before you miss out on valuable insight.
Make sure AdWords is connected to your Analytics.
Failing to do so would result in being unable to gather any reliable and usable feedback on your ads.
Finally, you want to make sure your ads are approved.
To keep front page content appropriate for everyone, Google reviews every ad to ensure it complies with the AdWords advertising policies.
It usually takes less than a business day.
The review starts automatically when you create your ad.
Once it passes, you’ll be able to see the status change from “Under Review” to “Eligible.”
Sometimes an ad will come back “Disapproved” which means it won’t be shown to anyone.
Google will typically flag these and notify you.
Usually, this isn’t too much of a problem, but you may run across the status “With Issues.”
That typically means you’ve put content in the ad that can run, but only under certain instances.
You’ll probably find that ad performing less effectively if you’re not catering to an adult-only audience.
Even though you’ve automated your ads, that doesn’t mean your work is done.
So let’s focus on optimizing all these moving parts you’ve automated.
Refinement is an ongoing process that usually falls into two key categories: Keywords and A/B testing.
I want to start with keywords.
While keywords are usually the first step that most people think of, having this as a final check will help you make sure you’ve truly found the right keywords.
Then you can further optimize AdWords.
Your goal here is to find and remove (or replace) your low-quality keywords and even dial in your negative keywords (words you don’t want your ad to appear under).
This ensures that only people who will truly benefit from your ad see it and click on it.
As you can see here, I’ve decided that I don’t want any search terms related to retail service, food service, or multi-level marketing to display my ad.
This is just an example, but you can see the implications for not having your ad display for something you wouldn’t want to be associated with.
You’ll also want to take time to prune keywords by quality score.
Quality score is, as it implies, more of a qualitative analysis than the typical quantitative analytics you see in PPC.
It attempts to analyze the behavior of your ads and the people who click on them.
You can find your keyword quality score under the Keywords section of your Google AdWords dashboard.
You’ll have to select the Modify Columns tab that looks like this:
Scroll down until you see the Quality Score tab.
Click on it, and then select for your Quality Score to appear.
You’ll now be able to go back to your Keywords dashboard and scroll over until you see your Quality Score for each ad.
A low-quality score could mean that your ad isn’t effective. And that means Google will show it less and you’ll get fewer conversions.
High scores get better conversions at a lower cost-per-click.
You should always aim to improve this metric, and I recommend finding out what a good quality score for your industry is.
Anything less is likely a waste of time and money.
Once you fine-tune your keywords, you also want to conduct some serious A/B testing to help refine your ad’s performance.
A/B testing helps you narrow down the elements of your ads that perform better than others, which lets you find more ways to optimize your conversions.
You can test the copy, the image, the headline, and even the keywords.
As you can see in the example below, there can be two versions of the same ad that look vastly different:
This video from QuickSprout gives a quick rundown on how you can effectively split test in Google AdWords.
For example, if you want to test a headline, you’ll need to start by creating multiple variations to test their performance.
CrazyEgg shared 11 different ways this was accomplished by different brands.
Here’s one from a company called Logo Design:
They used numbers, ASCII characters, had a great offer and used a powerful CTA all in one little ad.
And their keyword, “logo design,” is strategically inserted to help generate more clicks.
It’s even bolded within the headline.
The possibilities for optimization and testing are endless.
Klientboost recommends building regular routines to help with checking and optimizing automation.
Your goal here is to make sure that you’re spending your time and your client’s money wisely, which will always require close attention to detail.
Falling behind or mismanaging your automation can still get you into trouble.
So how does it work? Follow this schedule:
Is anything broken? Are your ads running, and are the analytics looking in good health?
How are your budget trends?
Are any of your ads overspending, or only spending at certain times of day? That could point to an error.
Are your bids correct?
Are you paying too much for one ad? This could be removing budget from other areas that need it.
Check if your overall trends are on-target. Are you getting good click-through rates and ROI for your ads?
Review A/B testing. Make sure you’re not spending money blindly and are A/B testing like I mentioned.
Using a tool like my A/B test significance calculator will help you know if you have statistically-significant data. Just put in the data for each variant and my calculator will tell you if you have enough data to draw conclusions.
Review the data you’ve collected to see if there are any necessary changes.
Make changes as needed.
In general, are you getting results?
If not, look for ways to improve your ads or get results with other mediums.
Make these checks a part of your routine.
It’s not nearly as time-consuming as manually setting ads is, so this shouldn’t be too difficult a transition for you.
Schedule it in your phone, planner, email, or whatever you use to stay on track.
If you’re spending all of your time setting budgets and fiddling with bidding in your AdWords campaigns, you’re doing it wrong.
You have the power to automate the most tedious parts of your tasks and focus on the elements that yield results instead.
And it doesn’t have to be difficult. You already have all the tools you need.
Optimize your ads methodically.
Start with the campaign itself by setting the right approach from the start. Maximize for clicks, conversions, or whatever suits your goals.
Then work through your ad groups.
Set the target audience with laser accuracy by choosing the proper demographics, optimizing for specific devices, and pinpointing the right location.
Round out your approach by setting the right rules for individual ads. Make sure each is getting the right amount of exposure for accurate A/B testing.
Set appropriate time limits and ensure your ads haven’t been disqualified.
Then take time at the end of setting up your automation to fine-tune your keywords and conduct A/B tests to optimize ad performance.
Neglecting this step is like buying a supercar and putting standard fuel in it.
Finally, implement good habits to help you check your results.
You may not succeed on the first attempt, but with patience and diligence you’ll start to see your PPC campaigns begin to flourish.
And at the very least, you’ll have more time on your hands.
What strategies do you use to optimize your automated AdWord campaigns?
About the Author: Neil Patel is the cofounder of Neil Patel Digital.
]]>As we all know, in early January, Facebook announced some sweeping changes in the News Feed to prioritize content from friends and family and fewer updates from brands and news. The intent as described by Zuckerberg was to encourage meaningful interaction and ensure that time on Facebook was well spent.… Read More
]]>As we all know, in early January, Facebook announced some sweeping changes in the News Feed to prioritize content from friends and family and fewer updates from brands and news. The intent as described by Zuckerberg was to encourage meaningful interaction and ensure that time on Facebook was well spent.
The changes have also prompted nonprofits to reevaluate their digital strategies and make changes in strategies and tactics. But one thing I’ve been noticing about my friends on Facebook, particularly nonprofit professionals, is that they are signaling that they are spending less time on Facebook. For example, my one colleague replaced her profile photo with a black and white image that states “Away.” Another announced that they were taking a few months off from Facebook.
What does the research say over Facebook usage after the News Feed changes?
When Facebook announced it fourth-quarter earnings at the end of January, it also mentioned that users were spending...
]]>The post What One Brand Did After It Created a Top 10 Blog appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
]]>What would you do with a blog that averaged 150,000 monthly views?
Do tons more to drive leads, our team decided unanimously back in 2016.
Up until that point, we merely invited readers to consume our blog content, which focused on the latest social media trends. Readers were free to enter and leave the premises at any time. We didn’t ask for visitors’ email addresses in return for access. Even if we wanted to use in-your-face dropdowns begging for an address, we had no special content to offer.
Resolved to do better, in 2016 we began creating premium content monthly. We published lengthier e-books, practical templates, and how-to guides; we also posted blog content pointing to those premium assets. And we hired a full-time inbound marketing expert to generate leads through landing pages and nurture those leads through an evolving set of email sequences.
The results came quickly. Our premium content brought thousands of downloads and our email campaigns turned into a sizeable amount of free trial activations and subscriptions.
Still, we were restless. Was this the best we could do? Within a year, we knew we were ready for something more … something bigger. Yet instead of going deeper into the funnel to garner more sales, we chose to focus on the top of the funnel. We came up with a content initiative that would establish us as thought leaders. And rather than build out our current content site – which had thousands of daily readers – we launched a new blog with zero traffic.
While our existing blog had just won a coveted spot on Social Media Examiner’s Top 10 Social Media Blog list (and was a great conversion engine), it lacked that “oooh, let’s see what Agorapulse says about topic X” factor. Our writing was solid, well curated, and helpful for social media managers, but it wasn’t definitive.
Our writing was solid, well curated, and helpful, but it wasn't definitive. @kalnerwilliams. Read more>>
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In our space of social media marketing, we felt being definitive wasn’t merely pontificating about a new announcement from Google or commenting on how to use a new feature on Instagram. Becoming a definitive source meant taking the time to see if an original idea holds up in practice. That sounds a lot like the scientific method, doesn’t it? It only made sense that we called the project Social Media Lab.
We hired one full-time and one part-time “social media scientist” to test long-held social media myths that we were antsy to see proven right or revealed to be completely off base. These scientists spent months setting up and running the tests. During this time, we had nothing to show the public so it was a matter of waiting until we had posts about the experiment to push live.
On one fateful week in August 2017, after months of sweating, we published our findings on three tests. Within two months, two of those three posts ranked on the first page of Google for their chosen keywords. And during that time, our lab experiments got social media shout-outs from some of the biggest names in the industry.
We’re still evolving the model, but we’re confident we’ve hit a rich seam of original, data-driven insights.
A sprint in Agile methodology represents the period of time you allocate to complete a finite number of tasks. In the development world, it’s common to have weekly sprints. In fact, it’s what our internal development team uses. In marketing, we set monthly sprints.
At the beginning of each month, we decide which activities we’d like to take on (or have been asked to take on). Each activity is given a level of effort (LoE) using the Fibonacci numerical sequence – called “story points” in the Agile world. At the beginning of the monthly sprint, we all get on a call to count the points and assess whether we’ve over- or under-extended ourselves for the month. If necessary, we adjust to ensure we can reasonably complete each activity.
We hold ourselves accountable for these tasks by hopping on a daily scrum call with our team. Each of us has about two minutes to share what sprint tasks we’ve completed since we last spoke and what we plan to do for the rest of the day. We also share what blockers – whether personal or work-related – are in the way of moving tasks forward. At the end of the month, we review each assigned task and explain the success or failure of getting it done.
With Social Media Lab, we are so keen on getting the word out about our experiments that content creation and content promotion get separate tasks and story points. Our lead scientist is responsible for the content from each experiment and I’m responsible for the promotion of each of those experiments.
HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:
Asana is our home base for all sprint activities. Our monthly sprint boards hold the LoE, tags, assignee, and latest status of each activity. As a team, we run through our Asana tasks at each month’s sprint kickoff meeting and retrospective. And each of us checks Asana a few times a week to make sure that we (and our direct reports) are on track to meet our goals.
Use a tech tool like @asana as a home base for all sprint activities, says @kalnerwilliams. #Agile
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We use Google Hangouts to conduct our daily scrums (our marketing team is spread across seven countries) and a Slack channel called “scrum” to log our daily tasks and blockers. Slack is particularly helpful if one of us can’t join the daily Hangout or if we’re running late to scrum. Since Slack is more of a “push” tool than Asana, I’ve integrated the two, meaning whenever a status is changed on a key Asana project, a message goes out to the team on a linked Slack channel.
HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:
Please note: All tools included in our blog posts are suggested by authors, not the CMI editorial team. No one post can provide all relevant tools in the space. Feel free to include additional tools in the comments (from your company or ones that you have used).
A version of this article originally appeared in the February issue of Chief Content Officer. Sign up to receive your free subscription to our bimonthly, print magazine.
Be inspired and learn the inside story from successful marketing leaders from the main stage and dozens of breakout rooms at Content Marketing World 2018 this September in Cleveland, Ohio. Register today.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
The post What One Brand Did After It Created a Top 10 Blog appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
]]>Do you think your customers feel that way about the beginning of their relationship with you?
Because if they do, that’s bad. It’s a severe threat to your business!
It’s kind of like being on time for a party. Everyone’s feeling things out, sizing up the room, and trying to find a cozy place to gel while the party gets going. At least, that’s if things go smoothly.
Other times it’s more like those middle school dance parties where there are too many chaperones, and no one knows what to do.
So you stand around awkwardly until your mom picks you up.
As the saying goes, the “seeds of churn are planted early.“ Your customer onboarding experience will determine the overall quality and longevity of your business relationship.
But how do you create the perfect onboarding experience?
And better yet, how do you make it seem like you’re not overly market-ey?
Because a relationship should feel natural. It should be guidance and friendship instead of skywriting that says BUY NOW.
I know you get what I’m saying because you’ve probably been on both sides of that coin.
So I want to knuckle down in this post and show you how to avoid the early missteps and build bridges that will last a lifetime.
Your brand will flourish, your business will grow, and you might even feel a little more fulfillment in the connections you make.
I’m going to show you how to build the perfect onboard messaging sequence.
But first, let’s talk about why you should even pay attention to your onboarding in the first place.
Onboarding is a broad term.
It’s not a single instance you can point to and say “this is onboarding,” because it’s describing an entire process.
It’s the journey a customer takes from the first click to their first success.
GrooveHQ conveys it well with a simple graph:
They’ve turned “first click” into “acquisition,” but the point is the same.
We’re specifically focusing on the beginning of the customer relationship, and we’re not just doing to call it a “sales thing.”
Anyone can do this and do it well.
One of the other terms you’ll hear thrown around when talking about onboarding is the concept of “churn.”
You’ve already heard me mention it, but I want to dig a little deeper before we progress.
Churn is synonymous with problems.
Let’s compare it to noticing one week into a new relationship that your girlfriend is hiding her phone.
The seeds of doubt – or of churn – are planted early.
Churn seeds are usually planted early – often during the sales process, especially when trickery is used – but they may take time to sprout
— Lincoln Murphy (@lincolnmurphy) March 15, 2013
This isn’t a new concept either.
The most significant problems usually start early in the process, and the same is true for customer relationships.
Where onboarding plays such a vital role is that the opposite of everything I just said is also true.
Seeds of churn can be planted early, but so are the seeds of success, as this anecdote from Kahuna Accounting conveys.
In just 12 months, they went from $0 to $480k annually.
How did they accomplish that?
They focused on their onboarding experience!
I’ll talk a little more about the specifics of what they did in a minute, but I want to wrap up our discussion about onboarding first.
According to Tallyfy, your onboarding experience should seek to answer two questions:
Let’s unwrap these two thoughts by looking at what AppCues did with their client Canva’s onboarding sequence.
How do they go about introducing themselves and addressing concerns?
For starters, they looked for growth opportunities and provided the organization with a way to gather data.
As you’ll see in the image below, there’s a link to a quick two-minute survey that they send in the welcome email.
I want to repeat that: they put it in the welcome email.
Why? Because they wanted to know if they were doing everything they could to satisfy their new customers.
Once their data confirmed that Canva knew their user base and provided for their needs, they decided to start forming hypotheses and experimenting.
They revamped their onboarding sequence so that customers would see this upon arrival:
What were the results? They had a 10% increase in activation for this particular project type.
So you see that finding the right approach to take your client from acquisition to success is the onboarding sequence.
You’ll address their concerns and find new ways to benefit them.
I want to make one final point about customer onboarding, in case there’s any doubt in your mind about its importance.
Way back in 2000, Harvard Business School published a fascinating study that revealed one very telling fact:
In the long term, it’s more profitable to retain old customers than win new ones.
This is old-school knowledge, but it’s relevant nonetheless.
Retention has been proven time and again to be a cheaper and more profitable route than acquiring new customers.
And if the future of your relationships starts at its’ inception, then I hope you’re paying attention to what comes next.
To send the right message, you have to know what your audience wants to hear.
And you need to be able to do it across any industry, no matter the pain points.
I want to go back to our example from Kahuna Accounting for a moment, because what they did stands out as an excellent example of this approach.
Sixteen Ventures shared their story in a podcast, but here’s the gist of it:
They started with the assumption that their customers knew more than they did.
So to test that assumption, they interviewed anyone and everyone who was in their targeted niche.
They interviewed the ideal clients.
They questioned the clients you wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole.
They even found thought leaders and bloggers to talk to who would share their experiences.
By going incredibly narrow and capitalizing on their niche, they found that the world seemed to get smaller.
However, the interviews gave them direction. All of their marketing was poured into their findings.
They learned to speak their language and built a customer landing page to push their campaign.
They even wrote a whitepaper based on the information from the interviews.
Strategic ads, guest blogs, and collaborations abounded.
One year later, they’d gone from $0 to $480k. All because of some interviews.
You don’t always have the opportunity to ask questions in person though, and it’s not always about setting up interviews anyways.
Some services, like Shopify, re-engage with their target audience by reminding them of their pocketbook:
You may have set up a store with them, but they know the reason you’re using their platform is that you want to make money.
You can’t make money if your card isn’t connected.
So they use messaging like this to draw you back in.
They build a trust-oriented relationship that is beneficial for you and them, but they don’t lead with that.
They simply remind you that you can make more money. Cool idea, right?
Here’s another example from fashion designer Paul Smith’s brand:
This is a really simple approach, but it falls in line with getting to know your customer better.
By asking newcomers or recent purchasers to set up a profile, they’re not only learning more about who they sell to, but they’re also deepening the impact of their brand.
Interview or no interview, these processes fall under the umbrella of a process called Customer Development.
Customer Development is a method of finding and qualifying the right market for your business. That’s essentially what Kahuna Accounting did.
The idea is to build a product around elements that solve your customers’ needs, then find the right ways to convert customers.
All of this is ideally accomplished while organizing your methods so that your business is scalable, too.
And this is a critical issue too because it’s a process by which you can answer the question “Is what I’m doing truly needed?” before you invest your time and money into an endeavor that will ultimately fail.
But that’s ultimately why interviews are so important, even when we get interview anxiety or feel awkward about it.
It’s a make-or-break situation, not an optional convenience.
I absolutely love CustomerDevLab’s advice for interviews:
It’s a little tongue-in-cheek, but it’s also spot on.
The process of escalating your interviews from partners to family and friends and then finally on to customers makes sense.
It provides a gradual and honest understanding of the environment around your businesses.
I highly recommend it.
If you want more guides and resources for Customer Development, I highly recommend you check out this compilation of 26 resources we put together.
After you’ve done your interviews, it’s time to take a look inside your boat. Metaphorically speaking, that is.
What I mean is that you need to take a long, hard look at your sales funnel and find where people are falling out.
It doesn’t matter if it’s shortly after acquisition or just before the sale, knowing where and why your leads are dropping out will give you the knowledge to fix it.
Do you see the drop off between the first and second stages in the image above?
That shouldn’t happen!
It’s quite apparent that this part of the funnel has the most significant pain points, which means it deserves the most attention.
And before you get carried away and think that a massive drop like that is a failure, it’s not.
That’s an opportunity.
So how can you cash in on an opportunity like this?
It could be a number of things, but I’ll start with the issue we’ve been addressing all along: relationships.
It’s entirely plausible that a drop like this could mean you’re either asking for something too soon or not building enough trust.
Instapage gave some great advice on how you can also focus on relationships to increase conversion rates in your funnel. They recommend:
If you’re human, that probably sounds a bit scary.
I know the first time I heard it I was a bit concerned.
You want me to tell people they have a problem but let them decide what success looks like?
I get that reaction! You’re putting so much power into your customer’s hands, but it pays to remember the Trust Equation here:
You’re attempting to build credibility, reliability, and intimacy to gain the unwavering trust of your customer.
Trust is what leads to relationships, and relationships lead to sales and retention. It’s all one big cycle that you have to trust.
Ironic, I know.
So focus on relationships first. And keep in mind that it’s also possible your problems have nothing to do with relationships.
Now, wait.
I just told you that you’re losing leads because of relationships, but then backed off and said you might not be losing leads because of relationships?
I know, it’s confusing. But I’m allowing for the possibility that you’re doing a great job and still have a leaky funnel. That’s entirely possible!
For example, you could be losing up to 53% of your landing page’s visitors just because of long load times.
Instapage recently shared that even a seven-second difference doubles the likelihood that a visitor won’t even stay around long enough to view your offer.
That means your onboarding is dead before it starts!
So the point here is though that ultimately you’ll only know where the holes in your funnel are if you’re paying attention.
And the even bigger truth is that you’ll only ever fix them if you are in tune with your customer relationships.
Once you’ve patched up your funnel, you need to look a little deeper into the regularity of your messaging.
It’s the perfect opportunity to use all those tips on email onboarding you’ve been reading.
You’ll see a lot of elements from SparkPage’s Anatomy of a Perfect Email Onboarding Flow here.
Communication with proper timing and perfect messaging will help push customers through your onboarding experience to their first success.
But that communication is a delicate balancing act that asks one all-important question:
How do you strike the perfect chord of helpful contact without providing too much or too little?
You don’t want to go ghost go on your new client while they’re trying to figure out your service.
You also don’t want to be spammy.
It’s the problem of copywriters and email marketers everywhere.
To help you get an idea of what timely and helpful content looks like, I want to take a leaf out of Grammarly’s book.
If you’re not familiar with Grammarly, it’s an online editorial tool used by millions of writers to help double check for errors before they get called out by Reddit.
I recently started a free trial with them. I then upgraded because I was impressed with the product and the onboarding experience.
Shortly after signing up, I got this friendly and helpful welcome:
They just wanted to let me know what I could immediately expect from their service. I poked around and enjoyed the interface, and even plugged in an article I’d written to test it out.
After a few days of trying their product religiously (I admit I was in love), Grammarly then provided some subtle nudging about the perks of their paid product.
I could get added features that would improve my writing even more?
Uh, yes.
The next day, the conversation continued with them telling me about some of the improvements they had made since they began their editorial journey.
As a member of their target market, they had me. I was enthralled.
Better yet, I was excited when seven days after starting I received a gamified report card of my weekly writing.
I was more productive than 97% of Grammarly writers?
You’ve no idea how proud that made me, even though I didn’t have any inclination about the size of their user base.
They showed me my first success, and it felt great.
So I kept using the free service, and Grammarly kept hitting me up.
They checked in from time to time to make sure I was doing okay.
Of course with a subtle push toward the heightened capabilities of their paid product.
They even sent me an email asking for a review:
Pretty soon I couldn’t help it.
The service was excellent, and I wanted more capabilities to help me improve my writing style, so I pulled out my credit card.
As soon as I signed up for their service, I was ushered to their service team to make sure there were zero issues with my transition.
It was a dream come true.
By staying in touch, anticipating my needs, and following through on the fulfillment, Grammarly created an onboarding experience that I just couldn’t resist.
I still use their services and have even recommended it to some of my other writer friends.
But just think of all the elements that kept me engaged in their brand.
The weekly progress reports kept me excited to write.
Asking for feedback kept them honest.
And immediately hooking me up with support made sure that my movement to a more powerful service went perfectly.
The power of knowing your audience and appropriately timing your messages can take any user from acquisition to success.
If your onboarding sequence isn’t regular and exciting enough to cause a stir around your brand, it’s time to go back to the drawing board.
I want to stay on the topic of communication for one more moment because it doesn’t have to just be via email or in person.
You have the option to engage in real time communication with your leads and customers that can boost retention and keep people happy with your services.
According to Sonar, you can make a strong first impression by utilizing SMS onboarding as a creative way to connect with new clients.
Look at how a service like DrinkEasy does it:
You see how they take the opportunity to get to know their customer and explain their service.
They ask what drinks the client likes, lay out the process, and even ask for a way to personalize the process.
If the customer has any questions or requests, they’re invited to ask.
Once they start to push their product, the conversation continues on the same text chain.
Everything works in context, and it’s a beautiful sight to behold.
They use SMS to share their product findings and a few interesting facts.
You then have the option to buy, pass, or request something else. All via text. No email, no phone calls, and no in-person awkwardness.
Another option that will let you streamline your communication and decrease the number of man hours involved is a Chatbot.
Early versions, like Cleverbot, made people doubt the validity of using tools like this at first.
I didn’t screencap this on Christmas.
But Chatbots aren’t quite the same. Cleverbot actually “learns” from people.
A good Chatbot can provide resources and quick answers in an onboarding process that don’t end up like the example above.
Take Facebook’s bots. They can do some amazing work on their platform.
For example, you can now have a bot crawl for relevant content and actually post it to a Group or Page:
Those same bots can also recommend pieces to your audience by directly tagging them in a comment below the post.
It’s exactly like when you want to share content with a friend, but automated.
And you can also set up pre-scripted bot-to-user messaging like this:
The possibilities are endless, and you can always make updates as you innovate and implement new ideas.
How you would use a tool like SMS or Chatbots in your business is up to you.
The ultimate application is that finding innovative ways to communicate with your customer can yield positive results.
You just have to do the innovating yourself.
So whether you’re in middle school dance mode or are already into the beat, finding ways to sidle into a relationship and optimize your customer onboarding is just a good idea.
Remember that the seeds of churn or success are planted early. Whichever one grows is up to you.
Finding methods to create the perfect onboarding sequence varies greatly by industry and even client to client.
Just because it works for your buddy in Silicon Valley doesn’t mean it will work in your NYC startup.
Speak to knowledgeable people in your industry and bite the customer development bullet.
Search for flexible ways to adapt your onboarding experience.
It’s the best way to keep it productive and stop your funnel from leaking. Plus, it will keep your sales team busy.
Lastly, optimize the way you communicate.
Make your new customer feel valued but not overwhelmed.
You can even consider a new approach like SMS or live chat to create a new spin on your product or service.
Whatever you do, just make sure you get your onboarding right.
How do you create the perfect client onboarding experience?
About the Author: Neil Patel is the cofounder of Neil Patel Digital.
]]>Online collaboration tools and platforms give nonprofits the opportunity for connectivity and collaboration internally as well as with external stakeholders like volunteers and board members. And, that’s a good thing. But it can lead to being overwhelmed or what has been dubbed “Collaborative Overload” or “Collaboration Tech Tool Overload.… Read More
Online collaboration tools and platforms give nonprofits the opportunity for connectivity and collaboration internally as well as with external stakeholders like volunteers and board members. And, that’s a good thing. But it can lead to being overwhelmed or what has been dubbed “Collaborative Overload” or “Collaboration Tech Tool Overload.” This is the burnout from too many emails, meetings, and collaborative tech tools that limits our organization’s ability to get stuff done.
The worse part is that can lead to overwork because we end up working evenings and weekends to do that important focus and strategic thinking work. Or to catch up on all those emails that were sent while we were in back-to-back meetings all day. And, as more and more nonprofits offer workplace flexibility and remote working opportunities for staff, they are relying more on online collaboration platforms to get work done – including tools like Zoom, Slack, Box, Google...
The post How a Winery Crushed Its Content Marketing With Video appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
]]>Do you wish your videos made more of a difference for your business? Do you find yourself running out of ideas for videos your audience will love? Ever wonder what it takes to make a video so good that news outlets can’t wait to get their hands on it?
Enter, 20-year marketing veteran Lisa Mattson. With the help of her team, Lisa has reinvigorated Jordan Winery’s brand through videos. This post shares some ideas from her Content Marketing World talk, How Jordan Winery Crushed Content Marketing With a Video-Centered Strategy – ideas that you can steal to reinvigorate your brand.
Many established businesses face the conundrum Jordan Winery found itself facing a decade ago. The almost 40-year-old brand had not kept up with the times. The winery competed with only 225 businesses in 1972. Over the next four decades, its competition increased by over 2,000%.
During most of those years, “we hadn’t changed the way we told our story,” Lisa says. “We were a faceless brand. Faceless brands are the next dinosaur.”
Faceless brands are the next dinosaur, says @LisaMattsonWine. Read more>>
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In 2007, Lisa joined this family-owned California winery because her colleagues were ready to update the way this luxury brand spoke and behaved. It was time to stop coming across as stuffy.
Take this bottle shot from the 1990s. “There’s a hunk of cheese on a barrel,” Lisa says. “I don’t know how the wine got in the glass. There’s no plate, no fork. Where are the people? This kind of marketing makes wine intimidating.”
Lisa’s challenge was to make old-school cool. In those days, Jordan Winery was known for its food, hospitality, and elegant wines, not for its people. No one knew the Jordan family. The company image was “just a bottle shot in a magazine.” Lisa set out to capture the personalities behind the wine.
.@LisaMattsonWine set out to capture the personalities behind @jordanwinery. Read more>>
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The winery aimed to accomplish business goals familiar to marketers:
Video was a natural medium to help this business differentiate itself from the competition in part because few wineries were making videos a decade ago. Besides, video is a natural medium for telling stories about people. “Bringing our people to life was important to us,” Lisa says. “Motion is important to message.”
Motion is important to message, says @LisaMattsonWine. #video
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The videos are available on the company’s YouTube channel – Jordan Vineyard & Winery – as well as on its two video-centric blogs – The Journey of Jordan and Wine Country Table – which are helping Jordan build segmented subscriber bases.
Rather than pay to advertise its content, the marketing team focuses on creating videos captivating enough to earn coverage on the news and in industry media. For example, Jordan’s popular parody videos, Despacito Embotellado (“bottling slowly”) and Shape of Cab, were featured on Bay Area news stations and covered in several internationally known wine magazines.
The team at @jordanwinery created captivating #videos to earn media coverage, says @LisaMattsonWine.
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While it’s impossible to trace the exact impact of the videos, CEO and second-generation vintner John Jordan sees the marketing payoff when all the indicators rise together: sales, visits, social media interactions, earned media, direct sales, and per-person spending.
The best way to get a sense of how far Jordan Winery has come from its bottle-shot-in-a-magazine days is to sample its videos. People who view these videos post comments like this one (from someone who goes by the name Red Agent): “Way to go, Jordan! Super fun video. Very nicely done …”
Disclaimer: CMI bears no responsibility for any of our blog readers, fans, contributors, staff, or other humans associated therewith quitting their jobs and applying to work at Jordan Winery after watching the following videos.
What stories could you tell about your business – and bring to life on video – that would surprise your audience?
What stories could you tell about your business that would surprise your audience, asks @marciarjohnston.
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Jordan Winery uses egg whites to soften the tannins in red wine, an Old-World practice that surprises visitors. Rather than create a blog post explaining the process, Lisa’s video crew followed the Jordan staff to the farm where they get the eggs. “We basically walk people through what we do and why. And we make it fun,” she says. “You get to see what we do with all the egg whites. As for the yolks, you see us making ice cream when we’re done.”
You want videos to address topics related to your expertise that hit home with audiences. For Jordan Winery, one such topic is kitchen gadgets. In this video, Jordan Winery executive chef Todd Knoll recommends gifts for cooks – the best and affordable kitchen tools for home cooks, chefs, and foodies. This video is posted on the Jordan YouTube channel as well as featured in a blog post.
Create #videos that address your expertise and hit home with audiences, says @MarciaRJohnston.
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What goes on behind the scenes at your business that your audience would find fascinating? Build your brand’s following by engaging them in videos that reveal your unique expertise.
Lisa suggests filming people doing work they have to do anyway. That’s an efficient way to create interesting footage without requiring people to take much time away from their jobs.
“Turn your everyday work into content,” Lisa says.” People on camera don’t even have to talk a lot. Make a montage with text overlays. A lot of us watch videos on silent anyhow.”
Go behind the scenes at your business. Turn your everyday work into #content, says @LisaMattsonWine. #video
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In this video, Jordan Winery cellar master Patrick Fallon gives a peek into the making of oak barrels that will be used to age wine. Here, you see the barrel makers (coopers) in action, from bending the wood staves to toasting the barrels. Yes, toasting the barrels. As in setting them over a fire like so many giant hollowed-out marshmallows. It’s a thing. Who knew?
Nothing draws people like humor. Imagine what might happen if your team were to indulge its inner Weird Al and spin off a true-to-your-brand version of a hit music video. You might discover what Jordan Winery has discovered: People love a good parody.
“Since parody is a protected class,” Lisa explains, “the video team can take other people’s content and create something new around it without having to worry about legal implications.”
Here’s the winery’s parody, Despacito Embotellado (bottling slowly) of Despacito, one of the biggest hit songs of summer 2017. If you can translate the Jordan lyrics into English, please share in a comment; I’d love to know what this creative crew is singing.
Who doesn’t love a blooper or a chance to check out fun footage that didn’t make the primary cut? Share your lighter side with the world. Here’s a compilation of snippets Jordan Winery left out of its official videos in 2017.
When it comes to digital media, nothing conveys your brand’s personality like video. Next time you’re looking for a killer video idea for your brand, consider things that have helped Jordan Winery crush content marketing:
Then come back and leave a comment. Share your success stories with your fellow marketers. We all love a good video.
Here’s an excerpt from Lisa’s talk:
Get inspired and get practical advice on how to create brand videos that garner an engaged following and much more at Content Marketing World 2018, Sept. 4-7 in Cleveland, Ohio. Register using code BLOG100 to save $100.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
The post How a Winery Crushed Its Content Marketing With Video appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
]]>And now we’re making it even better.
With our latest iteration, you can connect a Population to a Facebook Custom Audience for even greater targeting and tracking in Kissmetrics.
Let’s see how it works.
Facebook Audiences is an advertising product from Facebook that lets marketers advertise to existing customers. As long as you have email addresses, you can advertise to that group on Facebook through Audiences.
Here’s where Kissmetrics Populations comes in.
If you’re using Kissmetrics and identifying your users by their email, you can turn a Population into an Audience on Facebook that you can then advertise to.
Let’s say you’re an eCommerce company and have created a Population for the one and done buyers – the people that made their first purchase 6 months ago but haven’t made one since. Here’s how that Population may look:
We see that there are 2,983 people in this Population. If we scroll down, we’ll see the users email addresses:
These customers are ripe for a new advertising campaign. We’ll create an advertisement on Facebook that offers them 10% back off their next purchase.
So, with this Population in our hand, we’ll move over in Kissmetrics and click on the Connections tab and Authorize the Facebook connection:
And just like that, you have your new Custom Audience in Facebook. And the best part is that it will automatically update when new people enter the Population, or people leave the Population. So if you get a user who was in this Population and advertise to them and they come back and make a purchase, they’ll automatically be removed from the Population in Kissmetrics, which will update the Custom Audience in Facebook.
Populations are a great fit for eCommerce stores. Here’s 3 Populations you can create right now:
These are the groups of people who continually visit your eCommerce store, but never actually make a purchase. Keeping track of this Population will help you know how well your site is converting prospects, as well as how many people are just browsing without buying. In many cases, this may indicate how many people are price shopping your store.
Keep in mind that you will have to have that person’s email address before you can move them to a custom audience in Facebook. In many cases, a person will give you their email address for signing up for an email newsletter. You can promote something like “10% off your first purchase when you sign up for our newsletter” and you’ll probably get a barrage of new emails to your list. Once you have that, you can then track the browsers and advertise to them on Facebook.
Since most eCommerce stores don’t have a recurring revenue model, they need customers coming back to purchase. Many stores incentivize this through loyalty programs. With Populations, you can track how many customers haven’t purchased from you after a certain amount of time. Then you’ll connect that Population to Facebook and advertise to those customers to win them back and earn a repurchase.
Loyal customers are great. They keep your business alive and thriving. So needless to say, you don’t want to lose them. But, it’s inevitable that some of your loyal customers will be moving some of their purchases to other stores. That’s why you’ll want to keep track of how many of these “lost loyalists” you’ve had over the months.
If you’re a Kissmetrics customer, you can login and start using the new Populations Facebook integration. If you have any questions, you can reach out to our support team and we’ll be more than happy to help you.
If you aren’t a Kissmetrics customer but would like to learn more, you can request a demo.
Want to see Populations in action? Click Play below:
Connections go beyond Facebook.
If you use Slack, you can use our Populations connection to stay on top of all your Populations without having to log into Kissmetrics.
Our HubSpot connection will enrich any customer profile in Hubspot with data from Kissmetrics.
And we have many more connections coming. Stay tuned to this blog for future product announcements.
]]>The post Slow Your Content Marketing Down appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
]]>More than 86 million blog posts are published on WordPress every month.
86 million. Every month.
Even the most digital literate, attentive, and committed customer probably only has the bandwidth to scan about 10 headlines and read one to two articles a day – and that’s being generous.
Where does that leave the millions and millions of other “content opportunities”? Floating limply in random distribution channels and woven throughout thousands of lackluster company tweets?
Innovative marketers are embracing a solution – the slow content marketing movement. Much as the slow food movement argues less-but-better food will deliver improved health results, the slow content marketing movement insists less-but-better content will deliver improved marketing results.
“When I first came into content marketing, fast content marketing was the way to go,” says Margaret Magnarelli, senior director of marketing at Monster and Content Marketing World speaker. “But over time, it’s struck me that there’s more value in doing fewer things. A longer piece might get fewer finishes because of its length, but it might have a greater impact on someone who ends up spending more time with it and builds greater affinity with your brand.
“If you’re working in a B2B business where your aim is to drive leads, you don’t need to make more content – instead you need to make more effective content.”
If your aim is to drive leads, you don't need to make more #content, just more effective content. @mmagnarelli
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The argument for slow content marketing isn’t just anecdotal. The concept of quality over quantity is a long-held business truth as proven with research:
Over 90% of its blog leads came from old blog posts via @HubSpot.
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Brand marketers increased publishing by 800% over 5 years. Engagement per post declined by 89%. @AMA_Marketing
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Content creators who spend longer on each post see stronger results via @orbiteers. #research
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It’s only a matter of time before every content marketing strategy goes slow to ensure that the quality of its content going out in the world is high.
#Contentmarketing strategies should go slow to ensure the quality of content going out is high. @AwYeahSarah
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Slowing your content marketing doesn’t mean just pulling back on the publishing schedule. Invest the time and resources you otherwise would have put into high-frequency writing into making each article the best possible version. Though how you do that will vary depending on market conditions, here are five ways to do slow aka quality content marketing.
Treat your audience like the humans they are – humans who want to read clear thinking. Push the upper limits of your budget to hire the best writer you can afford – one who specializes in your industry niche and speaks keenly to your target customer.
“The quality of your ideas gives you the right to produce less,” says Mary Ellen Slayter, CEO of Rep Cap Media and founder of ManagingEditor.com.
The quality of your ideas gives you the right to produce less, says @MESlayter.
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Talented writers can generate and execute quality ideas. But better writers don’t just make for better text, they also:
Talented writers know best format, length, schedule, & outreach for content & audience. @AwYeahSarah
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HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:
Clickbait is a negative term, and rightfully so. Headlines that use tricks or lies to manipulate people into clicking are wrong. But the term “bait” applies to all titles by their nature – a little taste of what the content offers to entice a potential reader. If you don’t put time into creating the most accurate and alluring title, you compromise the reach of the article.
If you don't put time into creating accurate & alluring titles, you compromise article reach. @AwYeahSarah
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“We’re playing a game of headlines,” Margaret says. “Display copy is the only way you can get your content to register with someone, so you almost have to create a wolf in sheep’s clothing and do what everyone else is doing title-wise. But when a reader finally gets to the piece, it’s got to be good.”
Treat your titles with interest-grabbing, “I-have-to-read-this-now” bait by making them as robust as they can be:
Don’t underestimate the power of your previously published content. As the HubSpot example shows, old content can be a powerful driving force for customers seeking to educate themselves about your product, service, or industry. Look at your archives and update content to make sure it’s working for your brand 24-7.
“For B2B customers, it’s not just, ‘I came to your site, I clicked, and now I’m going to buy real quick,’” says Mary Ellen. “The decisions they make require thought and money, and the customers need to know who they’re dealing with. It’s important to think of your content as what Jimmy Daly calls a library of information – one you can go back and update to build that trust rather than a paper of record where content that was published three years ago must stay where it is.”
HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:
One outreach method you may not have fully investigated is customizing outreach with your audience based on unique segmentations such as:
You also can customize your content outreach while still staying within your established distribution frequency such as:
Customize your #content outreach for audience segments following same distribution frequency. @AwYeahSarah
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One of the biggest benefits of putting more resources into a single article is that it increases your odds of creating the kind of original and editorially sound content that opens the doors to content syndication, potentially introducing your blog (and site and product) to flows of traffic from sites like MSN, USA Today, Yahoo, AOL/The Huffington Post, LinkedIn, and more.
“There’s a sea of terrible content out there because sometimes we content marketers have just had to feed the distribution beast,” Margaret says. “Investing in one piece of content and making something special that you can publish everywhere is a higher ROI strategy because when an editor or customer sees your name in their feed they’ll know it’s worth reading.”
Like every other part of your marketing strategy, the decision to embrace slow content marketing or keep up last year’s pace will depend on your sales goals, your customers, your industry, your niche, and a million other details. But every marketing manager will find it’s worth stopping to ask, “What if we slowed our content marketing this year?”
What do you think? Let me know in the comments.
Discover how a “slow” approach also includes knowing how to develop a structured framework for your content. Make plans today to attend Intelligent Content Conference March 20-22 in Las Vegas. Register using code BLOG100 to save $100.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
The post Slow Your Content Marketing Down appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
]]>If you’re like me, it’s probably been a while.
Everyone you’ve ever met is just naturally inclined to seek the opinion of others before trying something new.
On your own, you don’t know if that new ramen house down the street is any good, but your brother says he took a date there and had a great time.
That carries weight in your decision making as a consumer.
A staggering 97% of customers read online reviews before they buy. And almost half of those interviewed will only trust 4-stars or better.
So you should pay attention the quality of your business’s reviews.
The issue for you is that winning five-star reviews takes time.
To make matters worse, many businesses see social proof as being largely out of their control. Consumers “feel the way they feel” about your business, even if you do everything right.
But I don’t think we should accept that.
Everything you do as a business should be calculated and purposeful, so leaving such a vital element to chance is crazy.
There are methods that allow you to win more good reviews, faster, and with better results.
You just have to know where to look.
Where do you start? By knowing just how reviews work and how much they do impact your bottom line.
I’ve worked with business owners that didn’t care about online reviews, and it always bugged me.
You put so much money, sweat, and grit into something just to “not care” that someone says you can do better? No!
But even if you’re one of those that “doesn’t care,” there are data-driven conclusions that undeniably prove why reviews are important.
One of the best examples I’ve seen comes from a study published in the Wall Street Journal by some environmental researchers:
They were attempting to convince consumers to save money by using fans in the summer instead of air conditioning.
The most convincing argument? Social proof that their neighbors were already doing it.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There so much more to consider.
Invesp found that consumers will actually spend more if your business is well-reviewed:
What else in your business provides a 31% increase in revenue that you can do today?
You could probably fire someone, but that’s not adding revenue, it’s just cutting cost. And you’ll probably regret it.
My point is: you don’t have many other avenues to see a hike in spending like that for your business other than 5-star reviews.
Or you can think of it in the negative.
Bad reviews are hurting your business and affecting your online performance. That dip you’ve seen in earnings over the last few years might be tied to how poorly you’re being reviewed.
A single negative review from a user could immediately drop your sales anywhere from 5-8%.
I’m not sure about you, but there have been plenty of times when I don’t think I could afford a dip like that.
Even if you don’t think it’s a big deal, a stall that big can severely dampen momentum and morale.
And what about your existing customers? Do they read reviews?
Actually, yes.
Positive rankings actually drive 18% higher loyalty and 21% higher purchase satisfaction from customers.
And when you’re spending 5 – 25 times more to win a new customer as opposed to retaining one, that 18% loyalty rate looks pretty good.
Plus higher satisfaction improves your odds of getting more positive reviews. That’s just simple math.
So at this point, I hope you’re convinced about the importance of online reviews. Because now we’re going to talk about how to make sure yours are in the top 1%.
There are plenty of reviewing sites on the web these days. But not all of them are created equal.
For example, Yellow Pages was the giant of directory listings in the last century.
But most people don’t look to them now as a trusted source when they’re researching an unknown business.
Focusing all of your efforts on an underserved source is just a waste of time.
You need to aim for reviews on the review sites that are going to convert. These sites should be well-known and make it easy to leave reviews.
So where do the most influential reviews occur?
In most cases, the Big 3 are Google, Facebook, and Yelp.
As you can see, these sites have a combined average just shy of 300 million visitors each month.
They’re also suitable for any business, which makes them one of the digital lifelines of many local businesses.
And while the statistics will always vary from business to business, a combined 83% of patrons of service-related industries relied on Google, Yelp, and Facebook.
If you’re not getting reviews on one of these sites, it’s most likely for one of two reasons. You’re either:
The good news is that both of those issues are very easy to fix. Let’s start with Facebook.
Facebook is an insanely popular site with over 2.2 billion users. Being well-liked on this platform isn’t something that’s optional for most businesses.
The catch is, no one is going to leave reviews if you make it hard to find.
Just like friction in a sales funnel, the momentum will die if your customer has to go on a long search for your reviews.
So don’t make it too difficult for your visitor to progress to the next step. Otherwise, by the time they get there, their enthusiasm is gone.
If they can click once, write a review, and then submit, the experience is relatively frictionless. But if they have to hunt through a page to find where to go, the misdirection will curb momentum.
That’s why the First Law of Sales Funnel Friction is visibility.
So here’s how to make sure your Facebook review options are easily accessible.
If you’re opting to allow reviews on Facebook, you’ll want to start by making sure your Review tab is activated and visible for your visitors.
You can opt out of getting Facebook reviews, but I highly recommend you allow it.
Many business owners don’t even know this feature can be turned on, or that it’s off in the first place. So you’ll want to double check.
Setting it up correctly provides a subtle proposition to anyone who visits your Facebook profile.
Go to your Page’s Settings tab, scroll down to the Edit Page section to where it says “Reviews,” and turn them on.
Once you’ve turned reviews on, you want to make sure that they’re visible to your Page’s visitors.
Not all of Facebook’s Pages are set up to display reviews, so you’ll need to look at your Template options.
Just above where you turned on your reviews, you’ll see an option to select your Template.
Look through the options to find one that suits the type of business you have. Or, just opt to go with the default “Business” version.
When you’ve picked a template, scroll down to make sure that reviews are supported:
You’re now set up to receive and display reviews on Facebook.
Now that you’re set up on Facebook let’s take a trip over to your Yelp page.
Failing to be on Yelp means you won’t be successful, especially if you’re a locally-based business.
If you want proof of Yelp’s success with local businesses, look no further than the laundry list of Case Studies on their website.
Yelp does require a little more of a hands-on approach than Facebook, though.
That’s because it weighs some reviews above others. Yelp is unique as it tries to always display the reviews that it deems “most helpful.”
While you may not agree that a one or two-star review could be helpful, Yelp has a fair process in place.
They weigh the overall history of the reviewer, the feedback left on each review (e.g., a like on a review) as well as the quality of the reviews you already have to determine how to incorporate each new review.
How does this work for you?
The simple answer is that you need to get as many high-quality reviews as possible. Doing so will bring all of those well-reviewed benefits we discussed earlier.
While you can’t directly ask for reviews on Yelp, as that breaks their terms of service agreement, you can ask people to “check you out on Yelp.” Any format of that works just so long as you don’t ask for a review.
So your best bet for positioning on Yelp is actually just personal pushing.
Set up your Yelp profile, claim your business, and display the sticker they send you in a prominent location.
Then when you’re interacting with customers and receive positive feedback, direct them toward Yelp.
You can even include the Yelp badge on your website or email signature. It will encourage new visitors to check out your reviews and possibly even remind them to review you themselves.
It’s one of the ways Yelp stands out as a useful reviewing and recommendation source against their competition.
Advertising doesn’t give you any extra benefits.
So instead, incentivize frequent reviewers to visit your business and leave favorable reviews.
Google offers a free business listing for all businesses known as Google My Business.
It complements your existing web presence by giving your business a home on Google while allowing customers to find you, read reviews, or leave them once they’ve visited.
To claim your business, you simply have to verify that you are the owner with Google.
Once you’re set up, you’ll start appearing in Google’s listings for your business category. Viewers will then be able to find you and leave reviews, just like with Facebook and Yelp.
Now that you’re everywhere you need to be to get reviews, let’s look at a few techniques that you can start implementing to win high-quality social proof quickly.
Many think it’s awkward to ask, but it’s really not.
Think about it like you’re asking a friend if you can borrow their toolbox for a project.
You wouldn’t just beat around the bush and hope that your friend understands subtle hints that you need to borrow their stuff. You’d just come right out and say it!
The same thing works for reviews. Any one-on-one format is an opportunity to find a way to ask for feedback.
Like email. Check out how Aaron’s Auto does it:
They send a personalized email that directly asks for feedback and provides the links. This makes it easy for the receiver to leave a review.
You can use a service like BirdEye that will make it easy for customers to submit their reviews. They’ll simply get an email asking how their experience was, and they’ll click a link to make it easy to review your product or service.
Of course, asking in person is just as good.
I see customers approach a business owner to let them know how good their product or service is all the time. Take those opportunities to ask if they’d be willing to leave feedback!
And it’s easy for them if your business is set up properly.
Take this example shared by Socially Sorted:
When Facebook prompted her to write a review, this was the response. Otherwise, she probably would have neglected leaving a review altogether.
But if you’re not set up as we mentioned earlier, then you’ll be missing out on positive reviews.
Bonus tip: Make sure you direct your customer to the most important reviewing sites.
Sometimes your payment processor or point-of-sale will allow you to receive feedback as well.
Use this information to improve, but then use it as an opportunity to piggyback on your positive experiences and push them to a more visible location.
Here’s an example from the popular POS Square:
All three provide good feedback but aren’t visible to the outside world. Thank your customer, and then push them toward a more visible platform.
One of the worst things you could ever do as a business owner is attack a bad review.
It’s easy to get caught up in the emotions of a bad review. But don’t let them run your response.
If you respond negatively – or not at all, future customers and prospects will see your response and make a decision about your business off of it.
So always made sure to create a positive spin on a less-than-stellar review. Take this one for example:
Many shop owners would see that and immediately go to the barista, tell them what they did wrong, and then leave no response.
Instead, this business took the opportunity to explain their policy on sub-par beverages!
Now anyone who reads that review will know that if their drink isn’t what they wanted, they can get a new one.
The best part about this particular instance?
This review was initially a one-star review. Now it’s a two star.
Simply keeping your cool and responding with professional courtesy can raise a bad review to a not so bad one.
Plus, you can always use the opportunity to further explain your company policies and attention to customer service.
You may have noticed that many sites these days are putting customer testimonials right on their homepage. There’s a good reason for that.
Social proof has long been used as a way to ease the minds of new customers. And that’s why it’s starting to pop up on more than just review sites.
These short statements on your site‘ from satisfied customers are a proven method to help your conversion rates.
Here’s an example from HubSpot of how you can leverage reviews on a landing page:
As you can see, they use a variety of clients that give feedback in their unique voice. It builds trust and pushes the reader to dig a little deeper into their product.
I highly recommend finding a way to take some of your reviews and sprinkle online testimonials throughout your website to help improve your conversion results and prompt further reviews.
It’s tempting as a business owner to provide a discount or a free item in exchange for a review.
That’s not always a good idea though.
There have been instances of businesses incentivizing customers that resulted in the FTC stepping in and laying down some hefty punishments for buying or falsifying reviews.
It’s also against a site like Yelp’s terms of service agreement, so you could lose your hard-earned reviews if you get caught.
But finding a way to incentivize your employees to ask is a good way to get more positive reviews.
Many employees take pride in their work but don’t always ask for a positive review. Training your team to ask, especially after a good experience, can give your business and employees valuable feedback.
Offer a prize or special perk to the employee with the most reviews and then watch the magic happen.
You might also notice that you can buy 5-star reviews from sites like Fiverr or Upwork.
While that may sound like a good idea, it can backfire in more ways than a government crackdown.
Buying all those reviews will likely make your real customers suspicious. And when an out-of-place detail gets noticed, you can say goodbye to your reputation.
Online reviews are a vital method of winning new business in every industry. They’re seen by almost everyone and play heavily into your success both offline and online.
In the ebb and flow of business, it can be difficult to always do everything that’s needed. But failing to prioritize online reviews is more costly than many realize.
Doing everything you can to win good reviews is in many ways just good business sense because the majority of consumers look to reviews before making their decision.
Prioritize your customer’s reviews on platforms like Facebook, Yelp, and Google. And take some time to make sure they’re set up so that it’s easy to review your business.
Then be active in your approach to winning more positive reviews. Get out there and ask when you interact with customers. Find the opportunity in negative feedback. Leverage your existing social proof to drive more customers to leave positive reviews. And make sure you’re training your team to help you acquire reviews on a daily basis.
Successful reviews may not happen overnight. Think of it like any other process in your business. It takes work to be in the top 1% of anything, but it sure feels good when you finally get there and start seeing the customers roll in from it.
What hacks do you use to get positive reviews for your business?
About the Author: Neil Patel is the cofounder of Neil Patel Digital.
]]>The post The One Thing That Can Make a Big Difference in Your Infographics appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
]]>Countless studies tell us infographics are highly engaging and that incorporating them into our content marketing strategy makes sense. But if the process for creating them is chaotic, the content is random, and the design guidelines are unclear, then each attempted infographic just eats up time and resources, and rarely delivers.
To successfully create memorable infographics that drive engagement, you need to stick to deadlines and keep up the momentum throughout their development. That requires a system to streamline the creation from start to finish.
That’s why you need to use infographic outlines.
Infographic outlines organize your content and optimize the design process. Good outlines ensure content quality, design quality, and improved turnaround. Effective outlines are the culmination of thorough research, organization, and planning.
Good outlines ensure better #infographics and improved turnaround time, says @jbear36.
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Your outline process will differ slightly depending on whether you’re using existing content or starting from scratch. I’ll walk through both approaches.
HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:
You want to put together an infographic to publish in the next week or two. It needs to be original, informative, and entertaining. How you kick off this process directly impacts how the final product eventually performs. When starting from scratch, follow these five simple steps:
When deciding on a topic, think about your audience first. What can you create that is insightful, solves a problem, answers a question, or entertains your audience members?
In this example, NeoMam Studios created an infographic about why people like infographics (clever). It’s a great example of what a stunning infographic looks like, and the content itself is relevant to its audience of marketers, designers, content creators, etc.
To create an example for this post, I settled on an internal audience and something smaller scale but engaging in any workplace setting – the Netflix habits of our employees. It’s the kind of topic that really impacts office chemistry.
To gather the data about your topic, pick a research method, such as:
For the Netflix behavior topic, conducting research was necessary. I sent a survey to employees. It was easy to put together and took only a few days to get the results.
With your research complete, it’s time to pull together the data you gathered.
I exported my Netflix survey data into a spreadsheet:
In a separate document, I listed each question and the volume of responses for each answer. I also included a tally of the qualitative responses to determine the most frequent answers.
With all the responses tallied, the body to the infographic outline was ready. Now it needed context.
An infographic isn’t a group of random statistics, it must tell a story – to explain what is being shared and why it’s relevant. All that should be detailed in your outline clear as day.
An #infographic isn't a group of random statistics. It must tell a story, says @jbear36.
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This example of one of the worst infographics ever shared by Mammoth Infographics demonstrates the need for context.
It looks like an informative chart, but closer scrutiny offers no context, no insights, and no key takeaways. Not to mention, the percentages don’t add up, which is confusing and could have been clarified with a brief explanation.
Coming back to my Netflix survey infographics outline, I document clear titles, headers, and explanations so the audience understands the story I intended to tell:
I summarized the findings in words to reinforce the story that the data told, focusing on the most relevant facts.
While the outline is complete, there’s a final essential step – a few notes for the designer.
Design notes are critical because they help the artist better understand the intent of the infographic and get it done right the first time. These instructions help reduce (if not eliminate) the back-and-forth emails to figure out what’s needed, or worse, a final product you can’t use.
TIP: To avoid confusion between the notes and the infographic content, make the notes in the headers and footers of the outline.
Some standard design notes include:
For the Netflix survey infographic outline, those notes looked like this:
With clear notes, the designer can always come back to the outline to recall important points and details. After all, it might not be the only infographic that they’re working on.
Here’s how the Netflix outline and notes were translated into the infographic:
You might have a great slide deck, an old blog post, or a section of a flyer that would look great as an infographic. The research is done. It’s quality information and it performed well so converting it into an infographic to get more out of it is a no-brainer.
It’s still important to create an outline specific to an infographic by following these steps:
What do you need your audience to remember? Even if they forget the awesome intro and all the anecdotes in the content, what should they leave with?
I transformed this blog post itself into an infographic outline.
Obviously, cramming all the text into an infographic would be a bad idea. However, with the right headers and bullet points, I can still get across the essential points of this post.
Once I reduce the existing content to the most important bits of information, I’m left with what will become my headers, key takeaways, and supporting points. Now I can arrange them accordingly.
Reduce original lengthy #content into the most important bits for a great infographic, says @jbear36.
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At this stage, finalize the content for the infographic. Once the outline goes to design, you shouldn’t need to add or delete anything for the infographic.
In my example, each header in the blog post became a major point in the infographic outline followed by a one- or two-sentence takeaway.
It may seem straightforward to summarize content, but this step allows you to drill down to the most essential points.
The role of notes for the design is the same whether you’re creating original content or working with existing content.
Don’t create infographics just because studies show they’re popular and effective. Create infographics because they are essential to your content marketing strategy and your team is well prepared to create highly effective infographics in an efficient manner. That requires a systematic approach. By creating clear and organized infographic outlines, you ensure content quality, a great design, and faster turnarounds, and get the most for your team’s time and effort.
Want to improve your content marketing programs with structured processes to create better efficiencies and more effective ROI? Make plans today to attend Intelligent Content Conference March 20-22 in Las Vegas. Register using code BLOG100 to save $100.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
The post The One Thing That Can Make a Big Difference in Your Infographics appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
]]>The market is flooded with blog articles. So how does your content have a chance of standing out?
Successful content marketing has always been about standing out in the crowd by producing the best content. Now that there’s more (great) content than ever.. how are you leveling up?
— Hiten Shah (@hnshah) 2 January 2018
And while blog competition increases, click-throughs on display ads have continued to decrease. In fact, the average click-through rate of display ads is a staggeringly low 0.05%. Yikes.
Video marketing may be the solution to let your content shine.
By 2021, video traffic will account for 82% of all consumer Internet traffic.
The increasing importance of video marketing is clear. But, is it the right time to add video marketing to your content marketing strategy?
Here’s a list of three reasons why you need to invest in video marketing and three reasons why video marketing might not be the best fit for you.
If someone lands on your page and can’t figure out what it is that you do, that’s when bounces happen.
When Dropbox first launched, the concept was fairly foreign to most.
Since Dropbox’s UI wasn’t a familiar idea, they decided to add a video to their landing page that explained what Dropbox is, and how it works.
After adding the video, Dropbox saw their conversion rate go up 10%.
Adding a video to a landing page can actually boost your conversions as much as 80%.
Users need to not only understand what your brand, product or service is, but also how to use it.
If someone can’t connect to your product, then why would they stick around to read more about it?
The problem and the solution need to be clear, concise and obvious.
A landing page with crowded text will go unread.
So do away with long, drawn-out explanations of a service. Instead, insert a video.
Poo-Pourri is a great example of this. It’s a novel product in a newer product category. At the time of its launch, there weren’t many other products like it.
A video on the landing page visually explains what could be a confusing concept. It details how the product works and also demonstrates where to use Poo-Pourri.
Video is a useful medium for easily deconstructing a complicated theory, concept or idea.
In fact, Forrester Research estimates that one minute of video equates to approximately 1.8 million written words.
It visually or audibly explains the benefits of a service and lets a viewer fully comprehend in a digestible way.
90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000 times faster in the brain than text.
Videos can also enforce a strong CTA. Take the landing page for Prezi, for example:
The introductory video plays on the landing page, below the CTA button.
The animated video demonstrates how easy Prezi is to use and how users can create dynamic presentations. The CTA button invites users to click through to ‘see how it works.’
Many companies think of video marketing as a ‘nice to have,’ not necessarily a ‘need to have.’ And I can understand why. Video marketing is a big investment of time, effort, and money.
Your competitors will all have a social media presence, email marketing, and a blog but they may not have video marketing.
So, why bother?
As the market becomes more and more saturated, it’ll be important to separate from the pack.
Video content continues to grow, as does the appetite for it. 53% of people want to see more video content from marketers.
On YouTube, almost 5 billion videos are watched every day. The average mobile-viewing session on YouTube lasts more than 40 minutes.
If you don’t embrace video marketing, you’re missing out on establishing yourself as a leader and authority on your service or industry. And you’re also missing out on a large potential audience.
If you aren’t capitalizing on that traffic, you won’t be generating those leads.
Remember Dollar Shave Club?
Before that viral video, had you heard of the company?
Probably not. An effective video, like the one Dollar Shave Club produced, can define a brand.
80% of users can recall a video ad they viewed in the last 30 days.
And enjoyment of video advertising increases purchase intent by 97% and brand association by 139%.
More than a third of all online activity involves watching videos.
The virality of Dollar Shave Club’s video took the startup to a multi-million dollar company. Capitalize on consumer behavior like Dollar Shave Club did.
As consumers gather their information through video, let them discover your brand with an entertaining and informative video.
85% of the U.S. audience watches videos online. And in 2019, video is forecasted to make up 80% of all Internet traffic.
If you’re not working to capture a slice of this pie, you’ll end up hungry for leads.
LSA surveyed 2,000 consumers and found that 44% of buyers viewed an online video while searching for products and services.
53% of viewers actually contacted the business after watching a video, and 51% visited the business’s website.
As users search for your products, services or business online, make sure they‘re finding your video.
Adding a video to your post can increase your chances of making it to the top of Google’s search results by 53%.
Video content opens you up to an entirely new audience that can find you and buy your product or service.
After watching a product video, viewers are 85% more likely to purchase, and they spend 100% more time on pages with videos.
As Google puts more emphasis on videos and we consume more and more videos, without a strong strategy you’re left with a serious case of FOMO.
Get ahead of your competitors and put together a video marketing plan.
Video is a great way to disperse a message and convert viewers, but if the message isn’t compelling in the first place, it can fall flat.
Refilling a Brita isn’t a topic you would usually rap about. However, when Clorox brand Brita partnered with influencer King Bach and NBA player Stephen Curry, the outcome was a funny rap video about just that.
Consumers are bored by sales-focused messages. I mean, would you want to watch a commercial just about how great something is?
Content that strictly pushes a commercial agenda doesn’t engage with an audience.
You can have video content posted, but if it doesn’t resonate, no one will watch it.
Provide video content for your viewers that gives them something of value.
Whether it’s information on how something works, what a product does, or just pure entertainment like the Brita video above.
A viewer becomes engaged and will stay to watch your video if it’s of interest to them.
The Brita spot led to over 2 million views and a 2,000% mobile search lift.
According to Invodo, 52% of consumers say that watching a product video makes them feel more confident about making a purchase.
Viewers who watch product videos are almost two times more likely to purchase a product.
Clinique tested three, six-second bumper ads on YouTube. Results showed a relative ad recall lift of 69.4% and a product awareness lift of 26.1%.
It’s clear how effective video can be. However, before initiating your video marketing efforts, put together a well-constructed strategy for your specific audience.
You should be able to answer the following questions before you develop a video marketing strategy:
So let’s dive into those.
Car parts retailer Advance Auto Parts included instructional and how-to videos on its website and on its Facebook page.
They found that visitors who watched a video stayed on the site twice as long and visited twice as many pages compared to those who did not watch a video.
Knowing their audience played a big part in this success story. Those purchasing car parts should have tutorial videos at their fingertips as they are most likely DIYers.
The videos show how consumers can make the most out of the items they have purchased. They know their audience wants this information because they engage with it through social media and on-site.
Once you have an understanding of your audience, consider where they will be searching for this information or where they would want this information.
Retailer Zappos added product videos to their product pages and saw an increase anywhere from 6% – 30% in sales.
In this instance, a product video, wouldn’t work on a channel like YouTube.
They’re in the purchasing funnel, looking to buy. And that’s why they’re on the product page.
Give them the info they need to complete their purchase.
Your strategy should differ for landing pages, YouTube, product pages or other areas.
Do they need an intro to the company? Or a detailed tutorial on a specific product feature?
Use your analytics, consumer insights, and customer feedback to determine your video content.
A SaaS company might find hosting videos on how to get the most out of their product on their site successful.
However, on YouTube, they may want to think about entertainment value and explore interviews with thought leaders.
An e-commerce site might take advantage of product videos to increase sales but on YouTube, could consider partnerships with content creators that use products in new and innovative ways.
Take this World Market makeover, for instance:
Your strategy should differ whether it’s a landing page, product page, social channel (Facebook or YouTube) or an FAQ section.
Video content should match what the consumer is after, when they’re after it.
Lands’ End makes use of video marketing in a unique way: by having customer service agents ready to video chat within the Customer Service section.
Customers can get instant access to representatives, ask questions and get the answers they need.
Don’t ask: “What video should I make?” but instead, “What problem am I trying to solve?” That’s the key to effective video marketing when done right.
Emphasis on the ‘done right.’ Your video content needs to be a smart strategy but also needs to be executed properly.
With that said, here are three reasons why video marketing may not be right for you.
When Pinterest first came onto the scene, every brand immediately jumped onto it.
I had clients asking me to develop Pinterest strategies for them. I mean, “had I heard how much traffic Pinterest drives?”
Which is totally valid. But also, not so valid.
Pinterest, like YouTube and video content, is all visual. Indie furniture brand 57st. Design knew that Pinterest was a visual platform where the audience would be searching for inspiration.
With this in mind, they built their channel which resulted in 50% – 60% of their website traffic coming in through Pinterest.
This goes to show that successful channels are quality channels. Not just in what you’re showing, but how you’re showing it.
If you can’t produce consistent, quality content on an ongoing and timely basis, then just like Pinterest, video marketing might not be for you. At least, not right now.
Along with being consistent, your video content needs to provide valuable information for your users. A profitable video marketing strategy marries together good ideas with good execution.
Video content with bad sound or visual quality is unprofessional and doesn’t indicate that you’re a thought leader in your industry.
Growing your video channel also requires consistency, not just in your posting frequency but also your presentation. Check out how I do this on my channel.
My YouTube channel uses consistent branding across all videos and on my channel homepage.
Plus, I make sure it’s regularly updated with videos uploaded every 2 – 3 days.
My channel features attractive video thumbnails, high-quality video, and enriching information.
It brings in new traffic, retains returning traffic and establishes thought leadership. And that lets me stand out above other channels.
If your business doesn’t have the manpower, time or money to invest in quality video content, consider waiting until you do to launch your video marketing.
Otherwise, it’s just hard work with a low return on effort.
How will you get eyeballs on your videos?
Without views, great videos are just that, a great video.
The ultimate goal isn’t views though, it’s most likely conversions, generating new leads or driving traffic. But none of this happens without viewers.
If you don’t have a plan set in place to promote and leverage your content to drive traffic to gain views, then it’s probably time to rethink why you’re even producing videos in the first place.
Once your video is complete, devise how you will leverage the content by cross-promoting it.
Keep in mind that not all content is fit for all channels.
Resolve how you can use your existing network to share your content. And pay attention to not just the video but all copy that goes along with it.
Is your video going to be posted on YouTube or on your site? Can it be posted to both?
Dollar Shave Club’s video was posted to both their landing page and their YouTube channel.
Not all content is created equal, and different content is best suited for different channels.
But there is nothing wrong with cross-promoting your content as long as it works for all channels.
Cross-promoting content, or having shareable content, can help to amplify your content and raise brand awareness.
As an introductory video on the landing page, the video explains the concept of the company. The entertainment value makes it shareable, so it does well on Facebook or other social media.
Use your existing audience to promote your video.
One easy way of doing this is with email marketing.
Videos get the point across easily and can enforce an email’s CTA. Use ‘video’ in the subject line to increase click-throughs.
In fact, inserting ‘video’ into the subject can increase conversions by up to 20%.
Take these pointers into consideration so you can meet KPIs with your video marketing:
Ensure you’re using copy to your advantage.
For business-related videos, you may want to have a transcription available in the video’s description box so that viewers can read along as they watch.
Your transcription should contain keywords so your video can be found by searchers looking for relevant material.
YouTube automatically transcribes your video and uses it to rank your video.
Though the transcription doesn’t always match your actual content so be sure to review and revise your transcription. You can also use a transcription service.
You may also want to add links to social media accounts, blog posts or an outline of the presentation.
Social media videos should have subtitles included since videos on Facebook autoplay without audio.
As more viewers watch on-the-go, playing audio while you commute isn’t always convenient.
Keep it mobile-friendly
How long is your video? This is especially important for mobile. Videos under 90 seconds see better engagement and an average retention rate of 53%.
According to YouTube, mobile video consumption grows by 100% every year.
If your content is more entertainment than instructional, you’ll want shareable content for social media channels, so keep timing in mind.
But currently, viewers watch 86% of business-related videos on desktop browsers and only 14% on mobile devices.
This gives you the option of extending the video a little longer so you can add in more useful information.
Capture SEO
When using video, you have 53 times higher likelihood of ranking on the first page of Google.
But don’t forget that while social media channels (like YouTube) rank on Google search results, YouTube itself is a search engine and owned by Google.
‘How-to’ searches were up 70% year-over-year on YouTube. Your video content needs to focus on SEO so that you’re capturing organic traffic.
If you aren’t using the right keywords, your video will be irrelevant and hard to find. When strategizing your video content, think about user needs and keyword intent.
Then utilize your metadata. Metadata is made up of your title, description, and tags.
These are optimal locations to optimize your chosen keywords.
You can also group similar videos into playlists on YouTube. These playlists should consist of relevant videos and can feature a description and keyword-focused title.
Playlists rank in Google and YouTube search results. By defining the subject matter, it helps to facilitate more views to your content.
You know the old saying, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”
That’s kind of like marketing without measuring. How can you tell it’s actually worth your time and effort? How can you know how to grow your channel or business even more?
52% of marketers believe that video is effective for brand awareness. And 73% of marketers say that video gets the best ROI.
Consider the product videos above. These bottom-of-the-funnel videos speed up the sales cycle so you see a higher ROI.
But 29% cited a lack of effective strategy as the reason that they didn’t see a larger return.
A well-constructed roadmap should examine the following:
Set up and track your KPIs and course correct continually. Replace a ‘ready, aim, fire!’ approach with a more structured, ‘hypothesis, experimentation, results’ approach.
If you can’t do that, then video marketing isn’t for you right now.
Video marketing can be powerful.
It can help you increase conversions, aid in reaching a new audience and separate you from competitors.
Or, it can be used to provide your consumers with valuable information to help gain sales.
Nevertheless, it’s essential to share and promote your content, leverage your existing audience, produce high-quality videos on a consistent basis, and track and measure your results.
If you can do those things, then it’s time to jump into video marketing. But if you aren’t prepared to put the work into being consistent with quality videos and then tracking the results, then you might want to hold off.
When did you know it was time to invest in video marketing?
About the Author: Neil Patel is the cofounder of Neil Patel Digital.
]]>Not the scary kind, where you can’t move your eyebrows anymore — but the kind where you look well-rested and ten years younger, and no one can put their finger on the reason why.
Smart organizations recognize the need to change how they spend their time and money to increase brand exposure and cement their footprint in the market.
Every strategy and every dollar spent should point toward one goal: growth.
Digital consumption of information by consumers is on the rise. With that comes a prolific increase in competition for organizations of all ages and sizes.
Consumers are drowning in choices.
So how do companies like Slack knock it out of the park in today’s competitive SaaS market?
We’ve all witnessed their Cinderella stories and wished we were in on their secret.
The truth is, it’s not a secret.
It’s a combination of hard work and knowing where and how to meet your audience.
Here are 12 growth hacking techniques you can start doing right now to see immediate results and leave the competition in your rear view.
Customers can’t love you if they can’t find you.
If you haven’t already started a blog, fire one up and start writing today.
Blogging is one of the least expensive, simplest ways to get in front of an audience and connect with influencers.
Today’s consumer goes straight to the Internet for information at the outset of the buying process before they ever consider talking to a human.
Meet them there.
Just do everyone a favor, please: don’t launch a great blog with a few weeks’ worth of mindblowing content and then neglect to write another word.
Once you hook your readers, they’ll want to hear from you on a regular basis.
The more content they read about your brand, the more likely they are to trust you, choose you and recommend you to their friends.
If you disappear, so will your readers.
Now that you’ve got a blogging strategy and your website is up and running, it’s time to take a close look at how consumers are responding (or not responding) to you.
So dust off that Bunsen burner, growth hacker — it’s time to experiment. You’ll be glad you did.
Whether it’s A/B testing your homepage content or seeing which email subject lines resonate with readers, experimentation can uncover quick fixes that lead to big results.
Here’s a real-world example: InsightSquared recently evaluated their long forms and the data they asked for from readers.
After removing one measly field (phone number), they saw an uptake in conversions of 112%.
Simple tweak. Huge impact.
Need some help getting started with your first experiment? Check out HubSpot’s marketing growth experimentation template for some ideas.
Vince Lombardi said “Confidence is contagious. So is lack of confidence.”
Ask for guest posting opportunities and backlinks. And be gracious with linking back and cross promotion to other like-minded experts in return.
It’s intimidating to pitch your content to the people and brands you look up to, but remember that you are the foremost expert on your products and services.
No one knows what you do like you do.
Your confidence will not go unnoticed by influencers, and your pervasiveness will catch the attention of prospects.
Be everywhere.
It’s free publicity for your brand with the added “halo effect” that comes from being in the same club with established influencers.
Check out online communities and forums that relate to your business and start actively posting helpful information in them. No gratuitous selling, though. You’re just there to be helpful.
Trust comes first. Pitches come later.
And remember, once you’ve made it big in the world of “digital somebodies,” don’t neglect to pay it forward with others who are just getting their start. Throw them some backlinks and guest posting opportunities.
Relationships are one of the most valuable currencies in growth hacking.
Periodically, it’s wise to take a step back from your marketing strategy to check out the big picture.
What areas are falling a little flat?
Where could you improve engagement?
Buffer recently ran a test to see which variant of a blog headline would create the most interest.
By adding one data point to their original headline, they increased click-through rates by over 40%.
But as you uncover tactics that aren’t performing the way you’d like, don’t panic. No need to torch them and start from scratch.
With some incremental adjustments and a little A/B testing, you can turn those naughty little underperformers into shining stars.
The key is to dig deep into the nooks and crannies of your data and use it to take action.
Start by taking a look at your lead funnel.
Search for the holes in your process and start plugging them with fresh tactics.
Now stop, test your results and watch for a lift in growth.
Funnel hacking isn’t an exact science, but the basic equation tends to follow an “identify, adjust, repeat” model.
While funnel hacking and A/B testing alone may not supercharge growth immediately, they will shine a light on your weak spots to make your strategy better over time.
Email marketing is the growth hacker’s secret weapon, and still one of the fastest-growing marketing channels.
Over 91% of consumers check their email at least once a day, and over two-thirds of those consumers will purchase as a direct result of an email they receive.
Email marketing actually has an average ROI of almost $44 for each $1 spent.
Crazy, right?
From a revenue generation perspective, email is the monster truck of purchasing vehicles. And best of all, it’s relatively simple and inexpensive to use.
Here’s the key: your email marketing strategy is only as good as your email list.
Don’t know where to start?
First, are you asking for email addresses?
Start asking. No one is going to offer that information.
Consumers are flooded with emails they didn’t ask for and won’t read.
They hang on to their contact information like a Kardashian clinging to youth. Your job is to coax them into giving it to you.
If you don’t have a clear, visible opt-in form on your website and blog, add one today.
For extra “notice me” power, add a polite pop-up or exit intent form with an offer they can’t refuse (like a free piece of content or a discount).
This is also an easy way to test conversion points.
Are you getting sign-ups on certain web pages and not others?
Losing readers as soon as they hit your homepage?
Dig around in the data to find out where you’re weak, and then entice your audience to give you a chance.
Play around with different types of content.
Do your readers prefer infographics? Do they like a little more text?
Have you tried embedding video? According to Hootsuite, over 72% of businesses who use video say that it has increased their website conversion rates.
Again, don’t be afraid to experiment a little to find your secret sauce.
Another email hoarding goldmine is social media.
Make it easy for readers to sign up to your subscriber list with one click. Ask for an email address in every unique place that you interact with your audience.
Once you’ve gotten your ambitious little hands on this beautiful pile of email addresses, use them wisely.
Every email you send should provide value and leave your readers wanting to hear from you again.
Studies have shown that when readers are asked a question, they almost feel obligated to answer. Why is that? (See what we did there?)
The human brain is stimulated by questions and the desire to provide answers to them.
Gamification has always been an effective marketing channel, thanks to a basic human desire to be right and to win.
Use this to your advantage by pulling your audience in with quizzes and polls to spark engagement and camaraderie with your brand.
Make the content entertaining, but make sure you keep the mantra of providing value in mind.
This is your chance to let your particular brand freak flag fly. Show your personality. Be an actual human being with an actual sense of humor. Be memorable.
And once you’ve hooked your audience and gathered their information, make sure your quiz or poll is shareable with others in one click.
Good quizzes offer immediate gratification to your audience and give them a chance to stroke their own egos a bit.
More exposure for you, fun for your readers, and a simple way to create buzz about your brand.
Sure, you know your product is the best thing since sliced bread.
But what if you took that awesome-sauce to the next level by partnering with a company that complements yours?
You get access to a new customer base, and your integration partner gets to extend what their solution can do to solve problems and draw in new buyers.
More value for customers, more cross-marketing for your brand and more doors opening to potential new markets.
Bonus points if you can integrate with a social platform.
It not only makes your product way easier for consumers to access and use, but it opens the door for shared content, audience engagement, and faster growth.
Check out this example of sleek social media integration from RevNGo.
They have a strong call to action, clearly stated benefits, and a simple sign-up process:
You don’t need a massive marketing budget to leverage social media.
Its accessibility levels the marketing budget playing field. Even the smallest of businesses have the potential to go viral with one well-timed, shareable post.
If you can integrate your email marketing efforts with your social media outreach, you’ll get even more bang for your marketing buck. Double the exposure and content reach.
And don’t forget to flaunt your social proof with inline social widgets that prove your social media popularity and point users to the friends who already love your brand.
What’s the predominant feature of a loop? It never ends.
Viral loops work much the same way.
One user recommends or “loops” in another; they loop in a few more people and before you know it, your user base has exploded into exponential growth.
To get the ball rolling (or the loop…looping?), you might offer users an incentive to get friends or co-workers to join.
For SaaS companies, a great place to start is pitching the value of your solution to decision makers within organizations.
Offer a free trial to get a few teams using your solution, and then ask to be the solution of choice for the entire business.
On average, six out of ten free trials convert to paid subscriptions.
IT leaders and administrators are sick and tired of disparate, rogue business tools that are hard to keep track of and don’t connect their employees.
Your job is to become the one, “official” solution and create that viral loop of growth as new employees and business units come on board.
For social or individual consumer solutions, add a layer of gamification where users “win” by inviting new users and earn online badges or free services.
Take it even further by appealing to social consciences.
Offer to donate to charity or some other good deed in exchange for users sharing your solution with others who sign up.
It creates goodwill with your audience, and it literally makes the world a better place.
Full disclosure: viral loops are hard to pull off.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try, though. Especially if you’re a SaaS company with an easy sign-up process and the right incentives and referrals in place.
It may take a bit of testing to see what your audience responds to, but once you get the momentum going, the sky is the limit.
It might sound basic, but each bad consumer experience is a nail in your business growth coffin.
Don’t let a sloppy foundation topple your growth hacking strategy.
Walk each step of your prospect and customer experience as if you’re seeing the information for the first time, and take a long, hard look at the impression you’re making.
After you make some honest adjustments, ask an objective third party (or a helpful customer) to walk through the experience and offer candid insight.
Target a few users and ask them for interviews using a tool like Survey Monkey’s Website Feedback template.
And thicken up that skin. You can take it. You’re a growth hacker.
You’re socially and environmentally responsible. You are aware of your carbon footprint. You reduce, reuse and recycle.
Hats off to you, green friend, but there is another type of recycling that leads to quick growth: content recycling.
69% of marketers say they don’t have enough time to create enough great content.
Time to repurpose.
Take a look at the content you’ve produced.
What has the most engagement? What consistently gets shared and quoted and adored by the masses?
Take that little piece of marketing brilliance and multiply it.
Look at how Copyblogger used a great piece of content in three different ways:
If it’s a blog, create an infographic out of it. If it’s a customer testimonial, ask the customer if they would write a guest blog or sit for a video interview.
Great content can be molded in many different ways to appeal to many types of consumers.
Don’t limit your great ideas to one marketing bucket. See how many times you can flavor the same great idea to keep it fresh and working hard for your brand.
One of the most overlooked growth hacking techniques is the simple value of letting your customers promote your brand for you.
Social communities are an easy way to help your users engage with your brand and each other.
The trick to fostering a successful community is to stay engaged without being intrusive.
You’ll need to initiate conversations (especially at the outset) and respond quickly to questions, but try to stay out of the way and let your community feed itself. Take Buffer, for example. They are huge proponents of community with loyal advocates to show for it.
Your job is to offer support, show community members love with periodic discounts or swag and to point new users to your thriving tribe of users.
As tempting as it may be to lead the group in a certain direction, don’t.
When your users are invested in your brand, they will willingly engage with other users. Give them ample reason to remain invested and then back off.
Delighted customers tell your story better than you ever could.
Organizations can talk all day about the magnificence of their own products and services. But after a point (and very quickly), it’s just noise.
Instead, the savviest growth hackers know the fastest way to a prospect’s heart is a good customer testimonial.
Here’s the catch — while you want happy customers to provide these endorsements, you absolutely cannot incentivize them, bribe them, coerce them or guilt them into saying nice things they don’t mean.
Don’t be that company.
It’s miserably obvious when a customer is being strong-armed into a positive review (not to mention incredibly off-putting).
Instead, find the customers that you’ve done a great job with.
The ones whose implementations and user experiences have been smooth. The ones who are comfortable coming to you when there is a bump in the road because they know you’ll fix it.
And then let them tell their story their way.
The legitimacy will speak for itself, and the credibility you’ll build with prospects will pay off far more than a cheesy infomercial testimonial ever would.
In the words of the great Bob Dylan, “the times, they are a-changin’.”
Growth hacking isn’t just a fancy buzzword you can ignore while you shake your fist at the heavens and pull your pants up higher.
Competition, especially among SaaS companies, is everywhere, and consumers have more choices than ever before. You can’t afford to write a few whitepapers and sit back on your laurels.
Make everything you do about solving problems, growing your audience and extending your brand.
Great products and services certainly help sell themselves, but you need to set that growth plan in motion.
Recruit customer evangelists. Partner with like-minded companies. Create content with wild abandon. Set yourself apart with world-class customer support.
With so many simple ways to launch growth, there has never been a more exciting time to see what your brand can really do.
What growth hacking techniques have worked for your business?
About the Author: Neil Patel is the cofounder of Neil Patel Digital.
]]>The post The Business Story Argument: A Working Framework to Pressure Test Your Story appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
]]>Storytelling.
It’s got a bit of a buzz these days doesn’t it?
It seems every technology provider, agency, and consultant promises to help you tell a better story. But what does “telling a better story” even mean?
To tell a better story, do marketers need to be edgier and differentiate themselves to an audience numb to everything except the completely outrageous? Maybe. But that ultimately seems like a zero-sum game. How many more over-the-top content ideas do you produce before you jump the proverbial shark? Is BuzzFeed, with all its cat-video and which-Game-of-Thrones-character-are-you-quiz “trending buzz,” a huge success? Or, is it failing to differentiate?
And, the way things are going lately, today’s mainstream news headlines are probably going to be more outrageous than your brand ever will anyway.
Does “telling a better story” mean you just need to put more and more detail into your content? Give away all the thinking and bombard your audience with so much quality and detailed facts that they must appreciate the sheer amount of content (#AllTheEducation)?
No.
Neither of these approaches is at the root of getting to a better story. As so many of my mentors in storytelling drilled into my head – the heart of a great story is an argument for the truth. And, the truth has little to do with the number of facts or what happens, no matter how outrageous. As one of my mentors – the great storytelling coach Robert McKee – has written, “What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens.”
If the last 24 months of the daily news cycle haven’t illustrated this “truth” in spades, I’m not sure what will.
Put simply: A great story is a well-crafted, entertaining, engaging, and (ultimately) convincing argument. With a fulfilling story, if I’m successful as an author, I’ve taken you on a journey and you believe (or are at least open to believing) something different at the end of it.
A great story takes you on a journey where you believe something different at the end, says @Robert_Rose.
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This is something you as a marketer can test as you create your content.
I’ve worked with hundreds of marketing professionals and storytellers over the last 10 years. I’ve employed and customized a number of borrowed “tools” to help them get to better stories. If you read my first book, Managing Content Marketing, written with my colleague Joe Pulizzi, you might remember how we used a modified version of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey to help structure what we called the Brand Hero’s Journey.
If you read my book with Carla Johnson, Experiences: The 7th Era of Marketing, you might remember we’ve used the classic “5 why’s” as a means of helping content marketers get to a deeper, more meaningful story.
While I still use both approaches in coaching and in the content creation process, I recently found another approach that helps marketers pressure test a story to see if it has all the components that make it a good one rather than just an outrageous situation or a collection of facts. With a huge hat tip to my friend and writers’ coach Jeff Lyons and his Anatomy of a Premise Line, I customized a framework that I call the Business Story Argument Framework.
Now, the key utility of this framework is to know that it doesn’t write your story nor serve as a template. Its usefulness is in how it can help you pressure test an idea for a story you already have.
Getting to a satisfying story can be truly difficult. Add to that the fact that marketers are often pressed for time, and it’s just near impossible to truly settle in and think about how to create a meaningful, engaging, and convincing story that illuminates some greater truth about the world.
But if you can pressure test your ideas more quickly, perhaps you can at least improve the chances of focusing only on the best ideas or provide clearer direction for your existing content marketing initiative. Are you ready for the adventure? OK, let’s do it.
We all know creative ideas come from random places. I love the quote from Nicholas Negroponte who asked, “Where do new ideas come from? The answer is simple: differences. Creativity comes from unlikely juxtapositions.”
You may come to an idea for a content marketing story from any number of places. The lightning of an idea may strike you in the shower or while you’re walking the dog. Or you might be inspired by an idea that comes out of your team’s latest brainstorming standup. Or you may inherit a story because your company just acquired a brand that has a digital magazine.
However an idea comes into your possession, know that every great story has four distinct parts:
Every great story has 4 parts: human hero, a goal, resistance, and the truth, says @Robert_Rose. #storytelling
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Now, if you are a fan of Joe’s book Content Inc., you can roughly map these four attributes to what he calls the anatomy of a content mission.
That brings us to Act 2 – the tests and challenges.
To get to the four parts of a great story, break down this framework further and pressure test the component elements of your story. I created seven questions to which satisfying answers should be present in your story.
When you’ve created a great story, you should be able to provide satisfying answers to these questions:
The answers to these questions can be combined to get to your content mission or to pressure test the story you have in mind.
Once you have identified answers to the seven components, you can combine them into the four parts of the great story to get to the anatomy of your content mission. To help put this into context, let’s look at an example.
Recently, I was privileged to work with an institutional financial services company on a new content mission. It was looking for a new and clearer focus for its digital magazine. The publication was working, but the articles from different parts of the business were becoming broader and less valuable. The team wanted a clearly defined – and differentiating – story for the magazine that they could communicate.
We worked through the answers to the seven components and combined them into the four parts of their new story. As you’ll see below, the components are well detailed but certainly not perfect. The team is still working on using this to polish the mission for internal and external audiences.
Can’t you see better stories, better posts, and overall a differentiated value coming from that framework? Remember, the framework and how you construct it isn’t itself meant to be the mission. It’s meant to help you convey the mission. You can use the four parts of your great story as the anatomy of a wonderful and differentiated argument, the heart of a great business story.
A wonderful and differentiated argument is the heart of a great business story. @Robert_Rose #storytelling
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To be clear, it’s not a template. I very much see this as Christopher Vogler, author of The Writer’s Journey, described Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. As he writes, the Hero’s Journey “is not an invention, but an observation … a set of principles that govern the conduct of life and the world of storytelling the way physics and chemistry govern the physical world.”
In other words, not every great story will have some earth-shattering, differentiating answer to every question. But the better the answers, the better chance you have something truly worth exploring. So, the framework can be a tool of expedience; getting to a better story more quickly. Or over a longer time, the framework might help you develop a bigger and better story where none existed.
Overall, I just hope it becomes another tool in your skill box, helping you to become an amazing storyteller in a world that will increasingly value that talent.
HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:
Discover more systematic frameworks and processes to help your content marketing program’s success at Intelligent Content Conference. Reserve your spot for the March 20-22 event in Las Vegas. Use code BLOG100 to save $100.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
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]]>You spend time and money creating short-and-sweet content for your targeted audience; you drink copious cups of coffee and push out all other daily noise to give it your all.
When your gem is complete, you click “publish.”
But your content doesn’t seem to generate any leads. Even worse, it goes unnoticed.
In short, “Winter is Coming” …but not for the House of Stark: for your business.
The solution? Longer content. Research shows that 3,000+ word blog posts get more traffic.
But if you’re anything like me, you often find yourself skimming through longer articles for the next header, either due to lack of time or to a short attention span.
So where’s the happy medium between in-depth content and increased audience attention?
The tendency is to think that audiences have a short attention span and don’t want to be overwhelmed with information.
Ironically, in the age of misinformation we live in, more information isn’t just necessary, it is reputable.
If your content isn’t attracting the visitors your business deserves, you’re probably missing some vital growth-hacks.
Perhaps you don’t know exactly which topics to expand on or how to rise above the humdrum of essentially rehashing what your company offers over and over and over again ad nauseum.
That’s why we’ve compiled this six-step cheat sheet to creating content that is proven to bring in traffic.
Let’s get clear for a second. Your short content might not have gotten you where you want to be, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have its benefits.
Shorter content is a great way to provide a taste of what your business can provide. Just think about how well short social media posts like tweets or Instagram videos perform.
It’s kind of like serving an appetizer. We all love them. They’re delicious. Imagine a gorgeous 7-layer dip with corn chips. Who doesn’t want to get to the bottom of that bowl?
And that brings us to the pitfall.
Sometimes, short content is best, like when used on a homepage.
But in other cases, like blog posts, it can leave visitors wanting more.
That’s probably why longer blog posts get more social shares.
Readers aren’t left with any questions and want to share the valuable information with friends and followers.
That’s where more informational and data-driven content fits the bill.
It gives your visitors that educational delicious full-flavored bite they’re really looking for.
It shows that you know what you’re talking about, and most importantly, you’re willing to share it so they can really enjoy that deliciously deep 7-layer bite.
Ready for the down low? Let’s get down to that cheat sheet.
On the pyramid of things to pay attention to when striving to optimize and maximize visitors who read your content, having an accurate survey of customer motivation is the foundation.
Not knowing what your audience is clicking on, will pretty much make any other marketing endeavor absolutely futile.
Analytics makes it simple by giving you control of what activity you want to track and providing results within just a couple of hours.
There are two approaches to understanding consumer interest and behavior effectively.
One is through aggregate data, like a current customer’s name or order information.
The other is a people-based analytics platform.
Both of these are key to understanding how your business ranks and how to give audiences more of what they are looking for.
If you’re paying less for a more aggregate-oriented analytics solution, it will definitely help you attract visitors to your website.
But eventually, this bird’s eye view can only take you so far.
If your goal is to create content that doesn’t just attract, but also educates and retains, then getting down-and-dirty with the individual peeps.
This is how you ensure that your business doesn’t hit a ceiling on how high it can go.
More on analytics in a bit…
People are looking for verifiable information delivered in an original way. This is not fast food.
You won’t retain customers by delivering the same information the same way every time.
Knowing what makes your services or products tick to your audience is a growth hack made up of several parts.
Among these are the use of SEO tools like Moz’s Open Site Explorer, backlinks, infographics, videos, and effective CTAs.
Think of backlinks as portals into various parts of your industry’s multiverse.
Except instead of Rick’s portal gun (Rick and Morty reference; yes I am a dork), you’re wielding what we will call the “reputable gun.”
Backlinks show that you’re not just blowing smoke to get the sale (like the Shamwow guy… whatever happened to that dude anyway?)
You’re informed, you’re the expert on the product or service, and you’re taking the time to educate your potential customer/client base to make an empowered decision.
This speaks volumes. It’s no surprise that 73% of advanced SEOs build 1 to 20 links per month. You need to do the same.
The longer the content, the more backlink portals you can include to open your readership to the wondrous world of high-absorbency washrags.
Or whatever product or service you’re selling.
“The eagle has landed,” some guy said once somewhere…
Make sure your eaglet lands on an invitation to engage further with your company.
This applies to downloading a free guide, signing up for the company newsletter, leading them to an exciting case study, or even an invitation to a networking event.
The point is diversification.
Let’s take a pretty easy example to understand.
If you are selling essential oils, your audience might include clients who are interested in natural healing for themselves or natural healing for their loved ones.
They might even be interested in learning how to become a certified aromatherapist themselves.
Create a variety of landing pages to cater to these needs through more content along with corresponding CTAs.
The type of landing page you need will depend on your industry.
A good rule of thumb is to add high-quality images, an eye-catching CTA, and some kind of contact form.
Run A/B tests on a few different versions to see which ones perform best.
Analytics can be scary.
It feels like waiting to find out how you did on that dreaded Statistics test in college.
Okay, so maybe you weren’t a Statistics apasionado, but I would be willing to bet that the subjects you did enjoy, you pursued in greater depth.
It works the same way with potential leads who need to learn more about your product before taking the leap.
You can think of analytics as the barometer for what to pursue in greater depth, through longer content.
Based on a recent article in Forbes, “marketers who invest more than 10% of their working media budgets in marketing performance measurement (MPM) are three times more likely to exceed their growth plans by 25%.”
Companies like Kissmetrics or CrazyEgg provide the tools you need to measure ROIs for you so you can finally throw out your great-grandma’s abacus.
You might not be able to count your chickens before they hatch, but with the right tool, you can more accurately predict which eggs have better chances of hatching over others.
Once you have analyzed specific user behavior and narrowed down the topics that attract more views and the content that gets the most clicks, you can take them and expand them into longer content pieces.
For example, compile several short articles you’ve already written and create an e-book, like HubSpot.
Combine content to get from this…
To this:
Once you’ve written these other pieces of content, include hyperlinks in the text to your main content piece.
This shows search engines that all your content is interrelated.
Hubspot also offers a perfect analogy of this games.
It dubs the website’s main subject content as the Pillar of your entire content enterprize and other related content as the Clusters.
Your pillar is like the sun around which fun and educational planet clusters of content rotate, linked by gravity.
Gravity attracts and keeps things together.
Similarly, your hyperlinks let search engines like Google find your cluster content and related back to your pillar, so you’re more easily found in web searches.
If only MMA champion Conor McGregor could have been a fly on the wall during Floyd Mayweather’s training!
But if you want to be the best at what you do, it helps to leverage what already exists and works while keeping watch for any gaps you may be able to uniquely fill with your service.
Competitor analysis tools like SimilarWeb allow you to compare the traffic analytics for businesses like yours so you can find that edge.
Let’s say you own a burger shop, and a competing business has set up shop right across the street.
They have a much cooler logo than yours, and their approach is young and hip.
This competition can seriously hinder your sales; everyone is looking for the fresh and new.
If you’re not careful, you’ll end up with a cash register full of tears and not dollars.
See the issue here? How are you going to stand out against your way cooler competitor?
Well, imagine that after you’re done crying about it, you take a peek and see what’s on their menu.
To your utter surprise, you notice that their mustard comes in packets, while yours is homemade…
…see where I’m going with this?
Run back to your store and put out a big neon sign immediately! Market the living seeds out of that mustard!
You just found your leverage.
(Ex: The only burger in town serving REAL mustard!” or “Farm-to-Table Mustard. It’s just how Momma made it” or “Buy Local, not imported,” etc… You get the gist.)
So how does this translate into the online marketing content scene?
Well, if you had a website for your burger shop, this would be the time to add a blog or an article chock-full of educated content on the value of fresh ingredients, promoting local business, and how his burger shop is saving the planet, one burger at a time.
Blogging, interviews, guides, and case studies are just a few of the ways to deliver meaningful content.
Here are some other ways to jump-start your content creation process, courtesy of Hubspot:
Since longer content is on the rise, it benefits to find trending topics in your industry and expand on them in a way that highlights what your business can provide over other similar businesses.
Once you have a hook on the right topic, it’s time to write, write, write and promote it like there’s no tomorrow. And if neon signs help, go for it.
Creating effective content is not just a one-time thing.
The attention attracted by your long-form blog or article will likely diminish in a few weeks, if not days (as I addresses in this article).
Additionally, there will always be changes or simple variations in trends to take advantage of.
So based on these oscillations and the knowledge you derive from your analytical platform, your content will continue to grow and build on itself until you attract those 361,494 visitors.
Does writing drawn-out content sound daunting?
Well, there is good news! You can keep that content fresh by updating it!
Fear not, padawan! There are so many guides on how to make that long-form content effective to yield greater ROIs through promotion and social media.
That person-oriented analytics strategy will ensure you remain relevant.
Remember that you’re writing to help people stay informed on the aspects of your industry that benefits them on a personal level.
Another great benefit of person-oriented analytics is the opportunity to send out targeted surveys based on user activity (or inactivity).
Basically, if you notice that a user has not been engaging in your posts and activities, ask them why.
Find out what’s working for them and what isn’t. Based on the results, tailor content to optimize what is working while making sure to address what isn’t.
Who doesn’t love surveys, right?
Feeling a bit overwhelmed? Let’s wrap a lasso around all this.
First, take a look at your landing pages and find out what is and what isn’t getting the attention it deserves.
Several companies provide in-depth step-by-step guides to creating more effective landing pages, content, and promotional strategies.
If you are not already attracting those 361,494 visitors, it is probably going to take a little extra work.
That work involves writing more educational and more targeted copy based on the results from aggregated and person-focused analytics through tools that companies are already providing for your the benefit of your business.
Ask yourself, what is it that my website visitors clearly want to learn more about?
Armed with the results of your new analytics tool, you can empower your potential customers and clients with the educated information they need to make a leap into what your company offers.
And don’t forget to have fun!
Trend analytics, landing pages with CTAs, providing a space to collect email on every single page of your website, and scattering those backlinks like dandelions in the wind are just some of the ways that you can keep ahead of the 2018 trend curve.
What content creation shortcuts do you use to attract visitors?
About the Author: Neil Patel is the cofounder of Neil Patel Digital.
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]]>You’ve just been hired. Your boss comes to you and says, “We want millions of people regularly viewing our content within the next five years. Go.”
You make it happen.
Riiiiight.
Well, Jay Lauf, co-president and publisher of Quartz, made this happen with his team. He told the story of how they did it in his Content Marketing World talk, Deconstructing Quartz (QZ.com): How One of the Most Popular Mobile Destinations Grows Audience, Extends Reach in Digital, and Creates a Superior Content Experience.
If your brand is trying to build an audience for your content, you can learn from the Quartz team’s experience. Think of your content team as a media company within your company.
A news company owned by Atlantic Media, Quartz launched in September 2012 with the website qz.com. The founding team members came from news organizations, including Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and The New York Times. These folks create content people want.
Also contributing to Quartz’s audience-building success:
While it’s impossible to pinpoint the number of people who regularly consume Quartz news via all these channels, Jay estimates the company accrued 100 million regular viewers in its first four and a half years.
To give you a sense of the magnitude of that reach, here are some metrics as of January 2018 – five and a half years after the company got its start:
More important than how many people they reach is whom they reach, Jay says. The audience is business decision-makers. “We’re at parity with all the bellwethers – The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The Economist, Bloomberg, Fortune, Forbes – but with a younger audience: median age around 40 and majority female. We’re attracting the right kind of audience for what we’re trying to do both journalistically and as a business.”
To what does Jay attribute this kind of success? What did Quartz do that the rest of us might want to copy?
For starters, it tells stories that people “freaking love,” as expressed in comments like this tweet (raving about how the random motions of a lava lamp can be used to encrypt digital data and other things you never realized you wanted to know about lava lamps):
How many exclamation-point-packed tweets does your content get?
How many exclamation-point-packed tweets does your #content get? @MarciaRJohnston
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There’s so much to say about the quality of Quartz content that I’m working on another post on that topic alone – stay tuned!
Meanwhile, here are some other tips from Jay, which the rest of this post details:
Since Quartz researchers found that executives throughout the world (its audience) consume news more on phones than on desktops, Quartz designs for mobile devices first and desktop second. “These are deeply intimate devices on which people are now consuming content, so there’s a great opportunity to engage them,” Jay says.
Design for #mobile devices first and desktop second, says @jlauf of @qz.
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Because Quartz launched in “the age of acceleration,” Jay says, quoting Thomas Friedman, it owes some of its success to being “unshackled” from a lot of the considerations traditional publishers have had. “A lot of publishers have to wrestle with how to port their print content into a digital environment, never mind trying to figure out how to take the desktop expression of what you’ve done and fit that into a mobile environment. We had the luxury of starting from scratch,” Jay says.
He goes on to say that mobile is “scary to a lot of people because (they) don’t know how to port what we’ve been doing on other platforms into this smaller, more intimate screen.” Still, he says, the opportunity – if we embrace it and think deeply with the human element – is tremendous.
For Quartz readers, content needs to be either long or short – a classic smile curve. On the y-axis is traffic or impact, such as the number of people who have read a piece, tweeted it, or otherwise indicated that they found it engaging. On the x-axis is the length of the piece.
Quartz publishes content on either side of that curve – “not in that middle trough” like the 500- to 800-word articles that news operations have cranked out as the common unit of production for over a century and that often die on the social web.
Go long or short - avoid medium length #content, says @jlauf of @qz.
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Average-length content typically does nothing distinctive. As Jay says, “It is not rewarded with the thing we’re all after with content marketing, which is word-of-mouth writ large, the attempt to share and engage with that content in a meaningful way.”
Quartz goes left or right on the curve. “That’s where the content sings,” Jay says.
Long form #content is most likely shared by the executive audience, says @jlauf of @qz.
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Naturally, in-depth pieces take time to develop. If a writer sends Quartz an 800-word piece, the editors may kick it back and say, ‘Why don’t you spend another couple of weeks – or months – on this piece and say something definitive?”
When’s the last time your company insisted that a writer spend another couple of months on a piece of content?
Of course, your audiences’ sweet spots for content length may not line up with the sweet spots for Quartz readers. Sow your research and see what you discover.
Quartz has learned to go where its audience is.
Zach Seward, one of the co-founders of Quartz, early on thought about Quartz as an API (application programming interface). “Quartz can go anywhere our readers are, in whatever form is appropriate,” he says.
In fact, news stories are blobs of content that can live on any platform – wherever the target readers can be found. “We’re not precious about trying to pull you back to qz.com,” Jay says. “We’ve embraced from the beginning that our users are going to be out there in the ecosystem and in the world, so we go out and try to be in those places.”
In the beginning, out of necessity, Quartz launched with a website, qz.com, and a daily newsletter. Today the product portfolio looks like this:
Today, Quartz has many elements in its network:
While Jay understands that some marketers feel a need to keep people on their owned channels, these other channels can serve as on-ramps to the brand. “Millions of people are on those platforms, so I encourage you – in whatever capacity fits your business – to think beyond your owned channels. I know that’s hard sometimes when you’ve got people you’re answering to who are fixated on that. But try to get them comfortable with the fact that marketers need to go with where the readers are.”
Think beyond your owned channels - marketers need to go where the readers are, says @jlauf of @qz.
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For example, in 2016 Quartz published a series of videos to Facebook, doubling the number of Facebook followers and driving people to qz.com.
Jay’s takeaway: Use third-party platforms to your advantage, “but don’t overoptimize and become dependent on a single one.”
“Quartz” has become an adjective or a verb. People have said to Jay, “OK, I want to Quartzify this” or “That’s very Quartzy.” The Quartz tone, design approach, subject matter, and story angles are that distinctive.
How did it achieve this distinctiveness? “We make big decisions with our gut,” Jay says, “and little decisions with data.”
People on the content team use their intuition to create stories they think their audience will find engaging, interesting, and unique. “We’re writing for humans,” says Co-President and Editor-in-Chief Kevin Delaney. “If all you’re doing is optimizing for algorithms and robots, you lose the magic.”
If all you're doing is optimizing #content for algorithms & robots, you lose the magic. @delaney @qz.
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Intuition also inspired the company to launch the app last year that does something that other news apps weren’t doing: It makes news stories literally engaging. You must interact with the interface to get from one story to the next. The stories float up from the bottom of the screen in chat-style bubbles sprinkled with gifs, emojis, and quizzes.
Here’s a screenshot I took while writing this post:
Which blue button would you click here: Next? Or the banana button?
Seriously. A banana button. In a news app. News = grimness. Bananas = things people slip on in cartoons.
“All of that was intuition,” Jay says. “We didn’t grind the science on that.”
But the Quartz team doesn’t go by gut alone. After it published the app, the team “got really interested in the data,” Jay says. “Were people downloading it? What were the interaction rates like? What were the open rates like? Were people spending time with it? All of that reinforced that, yeah, wow, we’ve created something special.”
HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:
What would your boss say if you grew your audience by millions of people in the next five years? You could do worse than mimic what worked for the news team at Quartz:
Has your team done some of these things? What has worked for you?
Here’s an excerpt from Jay’s talk:
Learn firsthand how companies are successfully growing their audiences at Content Marketing World Sept. 4-7 in Cleveland. Register today and use code BLOG100 to save $100.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
The post How to Grow Your Audience From Zero to Millions in Less Than 5 Years appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
]]>The post Instagram Marketing: 4 Features You Should Be Using [Examples] appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
]]>It’s obviously not enough to create an account on Instagram and start shooting photos to share. Successful content marketers on this social platform tailor their content to take advantage of the channel’s strengths, from hashtags and Stories to advertising and live video.
Let’s explore how to use these features to maximize your content marketing strategy.
You can use two types of hashtags in your Instagram campaigns – branded or community.
Branded hashtags make your post easier to find for people who already know your company and are looking to find out more about it. Branded hashtag examples from Bullet Journal, which has over 260,000 followers, include #bulletjournal #bulletjournaling, and #bulletjournalcollection.
Branded hashtags make your @Instagram post easier to find for people who already know your company. @katairobi
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Community hashtags are commonly used or created by Instagram users to follow a topic, interest, or other unifying theme. In the Bullet Journal example, community hashtags include #writing, #stationery, #plannermom.
TIP: Instagram limits users to 30 hashtags per post.
This Instagram post shows how Mercedes Benz uses hashtags.
Observe the hashtags Mercedes uses besides the branded ones: #GTfamily, #DreamCar, #Cartastic, #InstaCar, #Luxury, #Lifestyle, #Performance. The community following those hashtags is interested in vehicles or products fitting in those categories. This is how prospects can find your brand and how they relate to your products in a quick and easy way.
Find the most relevant community hashtags to get discovered on @Instagram, says @katairobi.
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In The Ultimate Guide to Best Instagram Hashtags for Likes, Andrew Roach offers several tools to help generate effective community hashtags, including:
I like Display Purposes because I simply enter my topic and it generates a list of the most relevant existing hashtags.
Don’t want to spend time coming up with the perfect hashtags? Oberlo reports the 10 best hashtags for Instagram:
The Stories feature allows you to interact more directly and transparently with your audience, but these Stories are deleted after 24 hours from the top of the feed. Nobody expects you to invest significant time and money to create content for such a short time. However, last year Instagram added a way for Stories to last forever. It now automatically saves your Stories in your archives. You can choose to share them again through Instagram’s Stories Highlights feature.
Instagram Stories help you grow your audience and keep it engaged with your brand because it allows you to keep your profile in their feeds not once but several times during each day. More Stories mean more chances to attract the audience’s attention.
Posting multiple @Instagram Stories lets your profile appear in feeds several times a day, says @katairobi.
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Vogue Magazine uses Stories, such as this one from the presidential inauguration last year, to drive traffic to its website.
The approach is simple. Post a series of pictures and integrate a call to action inviting people to view more on Vogue’s website.
TIP: The swipe-up feature is available to those who have at least 10,000 followers – another great reason to concentrate on building your community first.
Cheerios uses Instagram Stories to keep people engaged with the brand through a series of personal messages. They are intended to make people feel good about themselves and the brand by triggering positive emotions.
Eighty percent of people prefer to watch live video from a brand than to read a blog, and 82% prefer live video from a brand to social posts, according to research cited by Livestream.
82% of people prefer live #video from a brand to #socialmedia posts, according to @livestream #research.
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Instagram allows you to do live video, but you must take an extra step and share it to ensure that it shows up – and stands out – in Stories feeds. Live videos also can be featured in the Explore section, which expands your audience to possible new followers.
A great example comes from Tim Coppens, creative director and founder of the fashion brand that carries his name. He is one of the first designers to use Instagram Live to stream his show of menswear at Pitti Uomo in Florence, giving his followers a chance to see the show without traveling to Italy.
.@TIMCOPPENS is one of first designers to use @Instagram Live to stream his fashion show, says @katairobi.
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On a more personal level, you can do live video with a follower or group of followers, giving you the ability to deliver your content one on one or one to a few.
Ads offer a flexible opportunity to achieve your brand’s objective. Not only can they be used to market a product or service, they can also be used for calls to action such as:
Instagram Ads are not intrusive because they look similar to other posts. And, unlike other social media platforms, they allow you to deliver full-screen ads.
Instagram Ads deliver full-screen ads, unlike other #socialmedia platforms, says @katairobi.
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A great example of an Instagram advertising success is Russia’s S7 Airline campaign, which delivered ads on Instagram Stories through a series of videos showcasing new features of the planes.
As Instagram reports, “It reached 60% of the target audience and saw a 20-point lift in ad recall, which rose to 24 points among 25- to 34-year-olds.”
On the other hand, Vitaly earned success with more traditional ads on Instagram. As a lifestyle and fashion brand, Vitaly knows the power of visual imagery. To re-engage people who visited its website but didn’t make a purchase, Vitaly invested in dynamic ads on Instagram.
Instagram Business reports the retargeting campaign reached more than 243,000 people and achieved a 3.9 multiple return on the ad spend.
Instagram is a perfect channel for brands to deliver visual content customized for its followers and delivered in the best ways to attract their interest. Whether it’s a branded or community hashtag, a Story shared from your archives, live video, or inconspicuous ads, you can select the formats most relevant to your audience and your messaging.
What are your experiences with Instagram? What tips do you have?
Please note: All tools included in our blog posts are suggested by authors, not the CMI editorial team. No one post can provide all relevant tools in the space. Feel free to include additional tools in the comments (from your company or ones that you have used).
Get expert insight into maximizing your social media content experiences at Content Marketing World Sept. 4-7 in Cleveland, Ohio. Register today for the best rates. Use code BLOG100 to save $100.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
The post Instagram Marketing: 4 Features You Should Be Using [Examples] appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
]]>It accounts for more traffic than paid and social put together!
What does that tell us?
SEO is as relevant as ever.
If you work in marketing, write a blog, or have your own business, it is vital that you at least know the basics of SEO.
But here’s where you might hit a stumbling block.
Successful SEO requires extensive knowledge of how search engines work. It takes time and practice to get right.
Plus, it’s like a moving target. SEO best practices are ever-changing and developing. That’s because the search engine algorithms are updated all the time.
I’m talking 500 to 600 times a year.
Cheers Google.
And there may be 200+ ranking factors that Google looks at when analyzing your site (though it feels like 1,000 sometimes).
If you get the basics down, though, you’ll be off to a winning start. You can look at the more mind-boggling metrics later.
Without links, your search result is going to remain at the bottom of the pack.
The thing is, links have been one of Google’s key ranking factors for years. And they’re still hanging on at the top of the list.
They’re like that old friend who has stuck with you through thick-and-thin. They’re so reliable, you really can’t forget about them.
If it’s proof you want…
Not too long ago, Brian Dean and his team at Backlinko analyzed one million Google search results to see which factors correlate with first-page rankings.
Here’s what they found out about backlinks:
Evidently, they found that as the number of links a site has decreases so does their rank.
But, why are links so important?
Links from high-authority sites send a trust signal to Google. It’s like having somebody vouch for you. The more people that vouch for you, the more trustworthy you are.
Now the question is:
How do you go about getting these magical seals of trust that Google holds in such high esteem?
Links can be difficult to come by, especially if you aren’t well-versed in link building tactics.
At times you might feel like Gretchen Wieners in Mean Girls, waiting for a candy cane while Glen Coco gets four.
But there are proactive methods you can use to get backlinks. And you don’t need any special technical skills to use them either.
This is one of the most natural ways to get people to link back to your site. All you need to do is publish an interesting set of data from an original study carried out by your company.
If it’s something that makes others in your industry go ‘Wow!’ then they won’t be able to help themselves.
They’ll actually want to mention your study or results in their own blog posts and link to you as the source.
If you don’t have data or the resources to work with, then a case study will also attract links. A case study might focus on one fantastic result (and how you came by it).
Take a look at this nice example from Lean Labs:
Now, tell me you wouldn’t want to link to that case study in your own article about increasing leads.
This is a simple yet underrated technique for gaining links.
You’ve probably seen testimonials all over the place and may even have them on your own site. In many cases, you’ll also see an image, name, position and a link to their site with the testimonial.
This could be you!
Simply compile a list of companies you have worked with over the last year. Then send each of them an email, thanking them for their outstanding services.
Mention that you would like to offer a testimonial for their site if they’d like one.
There’s a strong chance they’ll accept. Because who wouldn’t want a glowing reference for their company?
Oh, and don’t forget to politely ask for a link if they don’t give you one automatically.
Follow these tips and… Links for you. You GO Glen Coco!
If you neglect content on your site, then you’re doing it wrong.
Content is another ranking factor that’s way up there at the top of the list. It’s just chillin’ with its pal backlinks and it’s not going anywhere.
The reason why content is so vital to SEO is common sense really…
Google wants you to produce fresh content consistently so it knows that you’re still active.
Content keeps people on your site. This is a signal to the search engines that you’re providing relevant and useful information.
And let’s just go ahead and state the obvious here… It’s where your keywords go!
Google’s updates obviously changed the way we use keywords in content.
What was it again? Something about keywords and stuffed Pandas?
But that doesn’t mean that sites don’t still rank for keywords. In fact, sites rank for a lot of keywords.
Ahrefs analyzed three million random search terms to see how many other keywords the top 20 pages also rank for.
Take a look:
The number one page ranks for 1,000 other keywords, too.
You just can’t miss out on an opportunity like that.
So, here are some top tips for producing SEO-friendly content.
According to Brian Dean’s research, the average first-page result on Google is 1890 words. If that sounds like a lot of work…
That’s because it is.
Your content needs to be as long as possible to give it depth. Longer content provides more utility to your site’s visitors.
It also gives you space to target as many keywords as possible – whether intentionally or unintentionally.
Variety is the spice of content marketing. Different types of content or blog posts can serve different purposes.
A great idea is to produce your own video content.
If you’re in a blog-post rut, video tutorials are a great way to provide value for your audience and spice up your content.
For example, take this video on how to track your marketing campaigns:
Videos are highly shareable and linkable content, which makes them beneficial for traffic and SEO.
And you can still get the benefits of written blog posts (keywords etc.) Simply post the video on your blog with a transcription.
It’s your content, and you can do what you want.
That’s not the only reason to repurpose content though.
Sometimes, content needs repurposing to keep it fresh. In the SEO world, for instance, trends and developments move swiftly.
This means content on SEO topics made a few years ago don’t contain the most up-to-date advice.
Or you could repurpose it by turning it into a different medium like an infographic, e-book or slideshare.
Check out how Copyblogger adapted one of their strongest pieces of content to Slideshare:
Repurposing content lets you unbury old content and get more eyes on it.
Plus, Google likes fresh and up-to-date content.
The headline and meta description of your post or page is displayed in the search results. It’s probably the first thing a person sees.
It looks like this:
This is your first impression. So you want to make it a good one.
And while the meta description isn’t a direct ranking signal for search engines, it does carry some importance.
Because it helps people decide whether to click on your result or not.
The way people engage at this point is called the click-through rate (CTR). It compares the number of people who click on a result and how many people see it.
And CTR is an important ranking factor. So you can and should optimize your headline and meta description to improve the click-through rate.
Because if people aren’t clicking on your link, Google will notice and drop your ranking.
And your headline is a big factor in your CTR.
For instance, a study by Contently (see how we’re linking to them for their original research?) showed that longer titles (up to 90-99 characters) have a better click-through rate.
Make sure your headline contains your focus keyword.
If Google wants to know what your article is about, your headline is the answer.
But keep in mind:
A headline optimized for SEO isn’t necessarily going to be the most appealing.
So you need to find the sweet spot where your headline is good for the search engines and your audience. (People want to click on it and share it.)
Here are some tips to do just that.
Place them in a natural position, but as close to the beginning as possible. That way Google will receive your signal loud and clear.
You’ve probably seen a viral headline.
You know the Buzzfeed-type headlines, “This Avocado Stone Will Change Your Life” and “What Happens When You Balance an Avocado Stone on Your Forehead (The Results May Surprise You).”
Although, these types of headlines may seem a little intense. It turns out there’s a formula for producing a successful headline in this way.
Buzzsumo analyzed 100 million headlines to work out what makes a popular headline.
They found that headlines containing certain phrases got more engagement on Facebook.
And there was more. Emotional headlines also make for more engagement. Curiosity, too.
There are even phrases to end your headlines with so that they perform better.
So your best bet is to pop your keyword into a headline formula.
Take this LinkedIn post for example:
The keyword is ‘blogging mistakes,’ and it contains the number one popular phrase ‘will make you.’
So you may want to use a viral-style headline.
But be warned…
It’s important that your title and meta description genuinely represent the content you have created.
Otherwise, you’ll create a pogo-sticking effect.
That’s when somebody searches for something, clicks the first result, and it doesn’t contain the information they’re looking for they go back and click on the next result.
It isn’t what they’re looking for, so they go back and click on the next result and so on until they find what they’re actually looking for and stay on that page.
The page they stay on will go up in the rankings, and if your page is part of the pogo-sticking effect, it will go down.
Search engines value user experience (UX). Google collects data on the way users behave when they get to your site.
If the user experience of your site is not up to par, then it will negatively affect SEO.
Which makes sense because it’s Google’s job to supply the searcher with the best result they can.
And that’s all well and good if you have an outstanding piece of content that’s relevant to the search term and provides value to the visitor.
But if your page doesn’t load quickly enough, a user is going to smash up their laptop in frustration.
Or more likely they’ll just bounce.
As more people up and leave, it’s going to send a signal to Google that your user experience is not good enough.
People expect your site to load quicker than The Flash.
Maile Ohye, former Developer Programs Tech Lead at Google, explained:
“2 seconds is the threshold for e-commerce website acceptability. At Google, we aim for under a half second.”
Half a second!
But the time it takes for your site to load is just one of many metrics that Google analyzes to assess user experience. UX is such an intricate discipline with many aspects that it has its own field of experts.
So how do you, someone with little technical experience, especially in UX, improve your site for SEO?
User experience is simply working with the user in mind.
There are things people care about, and things they don’t.
The design of your website may be the Sistine Chapel of websites. But let’s be honest…
A user is coming to your site to find a product or information. They don’t care about your cutting-edge design.
They just want the whole experience to be easy.
I mean, we’re all basically sloths these days. We may be cute, but we’re lazy.
Hubspot proved this. Not that we’re actually sloths in human clothing, of course.
They found that what consumers value the most about web design is the level of ease:
So what can you do to give users an easy experience?
I’ve mentioned site speed and its impact. But how do you actually go about improving it?
Well, there are some methods that require tech skills and some that don’t.
One thing you can do easily is crop images so they’re the right size and compress them using a tool like Tiny JPG or ImageOptim (Mac only). This means they don’t take ages to load on your site.
You can also delete plugins that you don’t use because those might be slowing your site down.
Users don’t want to visit a site and be confronted with an image slider or every single one of your services.
It’s overwhelming.
You need a simple message and clear sections so users can find what they’re looking for.
Users shouldn’t need the Marauder’s Map to find secret passageways to different areas of your site.
Too many ads are going to put users off, too. Particularly on mobile.
According to The Coalition for Better Ads, ads should not take up more than 30 percent of the vertical space based on user experience.
Pop-ups are particularly terrible for mobile UX and should be avoided like the plague. Often they don’t resize correctly to fit mobile.
And it’s not as easy to get rid of them as it is on a desktop. You have to locate and jab the little x with your fat finger.
Mobile SEO is actually more important than ever.
Google will soon be using page speed as a mobile ranking factor, which they announced on their Webmaster Central Blog:
“The “Speed Update,” as we’re calling it, will only affect pages that deliver the slowest experience to users and will only affect a small percentage of queries. It applies the same standard to all pages, regardless of the technology used to build the page. The intent of the search query is still a very strong signal, so a slow page may still rank highly if it has great, relevant content.”
Currently, Google’s algorithms analyze the desktop version of your site first.
But mobile-first indexing is here.
And you need to get ready.
Most people search on mobile these days and the change is coming.
Google has stated in the past that over 50 percent of searches come from mobile.
Hitwise estimates the figure to be around 58 percent, based on analysis of hundreds of millions of search queries in key categories across PCs, tablets, and smartphones.
Here’s what they found:
If your niche is in one of the higher percentage categories, you need to pay extra attention to mobile SEO.
So how do you optimize for mobile?
The simplest way is to check if your site is mobile-friendly with Google’s mobile-friendly test.
All you need to do is copy and paste your URL. It takes seconds to come up with the results.
It will tell you if your site is mobile-friendly or not on a screen like this:
If your site fails the test, Google will tell you where the errors are on your mobile site. For example, it might say ‘Text is too small to read’ or ‘Content is wider than screen.’
To fix those errors, you’ll need to create a responsive website. This is Google’s preferred design.
So basically, you’d be silly if you didn’t choose their preferred design option.
Here are some additional tips for mobile SEO.
Think about how you search on your smartphone.
I bet a lot of the time, you’re out and about and need to find a local shop or restaurant, for instance.
You’re not alone. 89% of people search for a local business on their phone once a week and 58 percent do it daily.
That means it’s time to improve your local SEO to get the best results on mobile.
Lots of people use voice search on their mobile now.
In fact, 20% of mobile queries are voice search.
The importance of voice search is growing.
So you need to start thinking about the kind of natural language people will use when performing a voice search. And add your discoveries to your keyword list.
Because even though you might type “weather Seattle,” you’re not going to use that with Siri or Alexa.
You’re probably just going to ask, “Hey, what’s the weather like in Seattle?”
Your content will need to reflect that.
Don’t play hide-and-seek or display content differently on the mobile version of your site.
In other words, there should be no content hidden behind expandable sections, menus, or buttons.
If Google is going to look at mobile first in the near future, then it needs to be able to see all of your content on mobile.
Yes, SEO is like trying to hit a moving target.
But putting the skills behind these basics into practice will ensure you make several hits.
A key takeaway from this article is that there are proactive methods you can use to improve SEO, even if you have no technical skills.
Go after the important metrics such as links or content with simple methods and tricks.
Think of your audience as well as the search engines when working on your site.
And don’t forget to get ahead of the trends by optimizing for mobile.
Anyone can do these things.
What are your go-to SEO basics?
About the Author: Neil Patel is the cofounder of Neil Patel Digital.
]]>The post Road Map to Success: Content Marketing Strategy Essentials appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
]]>Anyone who has learned about the fundamentals of content marketing knows the concept isn’t all that complicated – consistently provide something of relevant value to your target audience in the hope it will ultimately return the favor in kind.
Serving the needs of your audience with valuable, high-quality content in this way is an admirable goal for any company. But of course, all your efforts will amount to little if your hopes go unfulfilled – if your content doesn’t trigger the audience behaviors that help your company reach its business goals. And that, my friends, is where the complications start to set in.
To give your content marketing program the best chance of driving your desired results, every content marketing leader should be prepared to answer a few questions:
You’ll uncover the answers to these questions – and plenty of others – through the process of developing your content marketing strategy.
If you are new to content marketing – or to Content Marketing Institute – you may want to start your strategic journey by viewing our comprehensive Essentials of a Documented Content Marketing Strategy e-book, our Q&A guide on the topic, or our complete archive of strategy-related insights.
For anyone looking for a refresher on the essentials or some help filling a knowledge gap, read on for a handy tutorial – and helpful resources – on the subject.
While your company should certainly have a content strategy – a strategic plan for all its content usage across the enterprise – content marketers benefit from having a strategic road map that focuses exclusively on using content to attract, acquire, and engage prospects and customers.
Marketers benefit from a strategic road map focused exclusively on #contentmarketing, says @joderama.
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Why is it so critical to develop (and document) a separate strategy? For starters, consider that CMI’s annual Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends research has consistently found a content marketing strategy to be the one thing that separates successful content marketers from their less successful peers.
In fact, according to our latest B2B findings:
62% of most successful content marketers have a documented strategy vs. 16% of least successful. @cmicontent
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72% marketers who increased level of success over past year credit strategy as major contributor. @cmicontent
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Furthermore, once you have a documented content marketing strategy, its insights can make all your tactical decisions easier to plan and manage.
Your strategy should define your key business and customer needs, as well as how your content efforts address them. Though no two strategies are exactly alike, they all should detail a few essential components:
Since these are complex considerations, I’ll unpack each one in more detail.
Take a shortcut: If you’re strapped for time or resources but still want to put a more strategic content marketing framework in place for your organization, get a head start with this streamlined, one-page content marketing plan.
As I mentioned in my last post, you’ll never reach your content marketing goals if you don’t know what you are looking to achieve. Since different types of content work better in pursuit of some goals than others, it’s important to clearly define success from your organization’s perspective first, so you don’t end up wasting time on efforts that don’t line up with what you want to accomplish.
You'll never reach #contentmarketing goals if you don't know what you're looking to achieve, says @joderama.
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One of the simplest ways to home in on a unique and worthwhile purpose is to examine the key area where your business has been struggling the most. For example:
Once you’ve identified your primary purpose for creating content, outline the goals you expect your content to help you achieve in that area.
In CMI’s Content Marketing Framework, Robert Rose explains that common content marketing goals typically fall into one of three main categories:
While each category offers different benefits, each is built on a common foundation of value – subscribed audiences. Why focus your goals around subscribers? As Robert points out, the deeper level of ongoing engagement that characterizes the subscriber experience makes this audience more likely to exhibit desirable behaviors – like a greater willingness to share personal data, a greater interest in upselling opportunities, or greater brand loyalty and evangelism – than non-subscribers. Learn more about setting your content goals.
Focus your #contentmarketing goals on subscribers because they exhibit desirable behaviors, says @Robert_Rose.
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With your purpose and goals documented, you can move on to the next step in your strategy – finding the right audience to consume the content you create.
While every business hopes its content has universal appeal, content marketing typically works best when it is targeted to serve one audience above all others. When you publish broad-reaching content that aims to be all things to all people, it never gets specific enough to provide much value to anybody.
When you publish #content that aims to be all things to all people, it's not useful. @joderama
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To uncover the primary audience to target, look for the one type of customer you can help the most with your content. These questions should help:
Consider how your audience's content needs may evolve, says @joderama. Read more >>
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Once you’ve identified your core customer, you’ll want to develop a clear picture of who they are so everyone on your team can get to know them as real people – with unique interests, goals, and challenges – and keep them top of mind when planning and creating your content.
This is where your content marketing personas come in – composite character sketches of a type of customer based on validated commonalities. Personas help you understand how certain ideas, content formats, and approaches to the subject matter might make your audience more receptive to the content you share. Learn more about creating actionable content marketing personas.
Take a shortcut: Don’t have time to gather the detailed information to develop a comprehensive audience profile? Hit the ground running with this process for hacking your buyer personas.
You should also consider how your audience’s needs and behaviors may shift as your content does its job. Creating a map of your buyer’s journey helps you better anticipate and adapt to your persona’s content needs as they evolve.
Once you know your audience, your purpose, and your goals, you have the information to develop the final component of your strategy: your content marketing mission statement. This is a brief declaration of your company’s unique content vision, the value that content provides, and the specific audience it benefits, along with the priorities and principles it upholds.
As you craft your mission, CMI founder Joe Pulizzi recommends all content marketers ask themselves, “In what subject area can we become the leading informational provider?” If you don’t believe you can own the relevant conversations around the content niche you have chosen, you may need to narrow your focus to an area of content where you can have a bigger impact on the audience. Learn more about crafting your mission statement.
For example, take a look at Content Marketing Institute’s mission statement, which focuses on helping a specific sub-segment of the broad content marketing audience:
Content Marketing Institute leads the industry in advancing the practice of content marketing for enterprise marketing professionals. We educate our audience through real-world and how-to advice through in-person events, online training, a print magazine, daily blog posts, and original research.
Your content marketing mission statement should help your entire organization better understand what distinguishes your brand’s content experience from all the other content competing for your audience’s attention. Defining the core features of your brand’s differentiated story also helps your content team make more informed content creation decisions, as it is easier for them to see which ideas are well-aligned with your goals, and which ones may not serve your unique purpose. Learn more about finding the right differentiated story, or content tilt, for your brand.
In my next post, I’ll dive into the steps you can take to activate your strategy, including your editorial planning processes, the roles and skills you will need to account for, and how to ensure that your team’s efforts will align with your strategy.
Whether you’re getting started in content marketing or are an experienced practitioner, Content Marketing World offers something for you with over 100 presentations and speakers in multiple tracks on a wide variety of topics. Register today and use code BLOG100 to save $100.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
The post Road Map to Success: Content Marketing Strategy Essentials appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
]]>And content marketing in 2018 remains a brilliant and cost-effective method for engaging with leads and customers, spreading brand awareness, and getting around the increasing use of ad-blockers.
Whether it’s an email newsletter, social media post, or blog on your own or someone else’s website, people want to see your stuff. They accept it. Approve it. Whitelist it. Because it’s the user him or herself clicking on it, there are no concerns of spam complaints, or annoying the recipient, or ending up in the junk folder.
It’s popular, powerful, and for all intents and purposes, perfect. If you’re online in any professional capacity, you’re already using it.
Google “content marketing” and you’ll uncover millions (78,200,000 when I did it just now) of results, everything from definitions to how-to guides to case studies. You can quickly and easily pick up the how, why, when, what, and where of content marketing. Every online marketing personality and business has their own advanced guide or step-by-step guide, allowing anyone to grasp, experiment, and eventually master the subtle art of content marketing.
“Content Marketing is all the Marketing that’s left.” ~ Seth Godin
Strikingly, the only thing you won’t see much of in those millions upon millions of links is how to know when your content marketing isn’t working.
Because there’s a lot more to successful content marketing than just traffic and clicks, and a hell of a lot more than just likes, shares, and retweets. Those are simply vanity metrics that don’t tell you anything of importance by themselves…although it sure does feel nice to see people are loving your stuff.
Now, vanity metrics can be used to find actionable insight, but that’s the subject of another post on another day. Suffice to say, if you’re gauging the success of your content campaigns on likes and shares alone, you’re doing it wrong and wasting your time and energy.
Instead of focusing on the vanity metric, use it to inform your marketing decisions. Dig deeper. Find the corresponding actionable metric.
Content marketing is an active endeavor, and most of the hard work starts after you hit publish. It’s not about reaching people; it’s about reaching the right people.
How do you know when you’re not doing that?
Look for these five red flags before and during the push.
But before we get to that, let’s review some basics.
If you remember only one thing about content marketing, make it this: write your strategy down. Be explicit, detailed, and clear about goals (use SMART goals and stretch goals if applicable), tactics, channels, and how you’re going to measure success.
What will “success” look like? How will you measure return-on-investment? Make sure you and everyone on your team knows and understands.
How often will your marketing team meet? The most successful meet regularly to evaluate, tweak, and manage as necessary. Your content marketing should not be set-it-and-forget-it.
Target your ideal customers. Segment your audience. A/B test. Monitor your efforts. Create evergreen content. Measure the return-on-investment to maximize your budget. Look at your competitors and industry to see what’s working, what’s not, and what others are and are not doing.
In their 2018 annual report on content marketing, CMI discovered that only 38% of B2C businesses have a documented strategy. That’s appallingly low.
Document your strategy. Do that, and you’re ahead of 62% of the competition.
Diversify your tactics and channels. The same report found that B2C marketers:
The tricks and tips and hacks for better content marketing are many. Read some. Read many.
“We need to stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in.” ~ Craig Davis, former Chief Creative Officer at J. Walter Thompson
And that brings us back full-circle. Knowing when your content marketing isn’t working is as important as knowing when it is…if not more so.
How can you tell if you’re on the wrong track and heading in the wrong direction?
Watch for (and respond!) to these five signposts along the way.
Consider this hypothetical scenario: you launch an aggressive content campaign, complete with blog and social media posts, videos, and infographics, to promote your new SaaS product launch.
Everything has a rock-solid call-to-action inviting people to a free 7-day trial. They click the CTA button, are transported to a well-crafted landing page, and sign up.
That’s an undeniable content marketing win, right?
Wrong. It could be a win…depending on who is signing up. Numbers alone don’t answer that question. Even if you’re looking at an insane 60% conversion rate, it’s meaningless if those signing up are the wrong people.
So who are the “wrong” people? Anyone that’s not within your target market. They may be interested in your content for a wide variety of reasons – research, curiosity, education – but they’re not necessarily interested in your product or service.
Now, far be it for me to suggest that you shouldn’t ever target outside your market. I’m not, and you should. Sometimes your best customers down the road are the ones you’re not even considering at the moment.
A portion of signups outside your target audience is not only nothing to worry about, but a positive and worthwhile goal.
That said, if 50%, 60%, or 70%+ of your leads are falling outside of those you were targeting – wrong geographic location, industry, background, profession, income level, interests, or whatever – something’s wrong. If the majority of those signing up for your email newsletters, gated content, or free trials are nowhere near your ideal fit, your content marketing isn’t working.
Before you write a single line of blog post or send a single tweet, you need to be crystal-clear on your ideal customer. Get to know him or her. You’ve no doubt heard about the importance of buyer or customer personas. Build and use them to guide your content efforts. Do that, and the likelihood of the “wrong” people coming to your content goes down exponentially.
Why? Because a detailed persona allows you to reverse engineer your content specifically for them: their wants, needs, pain points, values, and more. That’s more than half the battle.
If you’re just starting out, this is a bit more difficult, but not impossible. If you have existing customers and sales data to work with, though, you can zero in on the best of the best. According to Duct Tape Marketing:
That’s your ideal, most profitable customer. Create content for him or her. Share it on the platforms he or she uses and spends the most time on.
Social platforms typically have built-in capabilities, such as Twitter Analytics audience insights dashboard.
If you’re targeting English-speaking men over the age of 50, and your Analytics report shows most of your visitors are females under the age of 25 and from Italy, all those conversions – sign-ups, downloads, or otherwise – probably aren’t going to amount to much with your bottom line.
The sooner you know that, the sooner you can fix it. If the wrong people are signing up or downloading your lead magnets, you have to change direction. And fast.
Know exactly who you’re targeting, and give them exactly what they want and where they want it. Then monitor to make sure it’s drawing them in.
Backlinks are still important for your search engine optimization. In fact, many would argue that they’re the key to your overall SEO success. Quality backlinks from respected sites is a surefire indicator to Google and the rest of the search engine overlords that your content is valuable, useful, and worth a read. It’s a vote of confidence.
And that can translate into a big jump on the SERPs. The closer you are to that coveted top spot, the better the chance someone will click on your link. Increased traffic means increased leads, which means increased revenue. Google is happy, the users are happy, and you’re happy.
Backlinks and SEO go hand-in-hand. But backlinks can also tell you if there’s something amiss with your content marketing.
Imagine if your backlink profile – a report on which external sites are linking to your stuff – is populated with websites you wouldn’t expect your target market to visit. Good? Bad?
It depends on your criteria. If those sites are quality sites, those backlinks are still going to give you a healthy SEO boost. That’s good.
However, it may be evidence that your content is not resonating with your ideal customers. And that’s very, very bad. Your content, after all, is how you introduce yourself to them, educated them on your products and services, and persuade them to open their wallets. If it’s missing that mark, you’re failing at the marketing game. It’s the difference between leaving a flyer on hundreds of windshields in a mall parking lot, and hand-delivering to prospects you know would benefit from what you have to offer.
Luckily, generating a backlink profile and conducting a link audit is fast and easy, and there are many tools to assist with it.
To get a basic list, log in to Google Search Console. Click “Search Traffic” on the left-hand menu, and then select “Links to Your Site”. You’ll get a quick n’ dirty report with the total number of links, and the sites who link the most.
Now, you can determine if the sites linking back to your content are within your “demographic”. Some you might recognize by name, others you may have to visit and evaluate.
For a more detailed analysis, you can try a dedicated backlink tool. Some of the best include:
If your target is recent university graduates, and you’re receiving backlinks from retirement agencies, there’s a mismatch. You’re not producing the right content to connect with those just entering the workforce.
If you’ve done your homework, you should have detailed customer personas. You should know not only who they are, but also what they need, and where they are. Too many people outside those parameters linking to your content is not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s not going to generate massive sales and revenue.
The sites linking to you are an indicator of who your content is reaching. If you’re targeting professionals, but most of your links are coming from gossip sites, stop. If you’re after grandparents, but Millennial Now is your biggest external source, halt.
Check your link profile. Ensure most of them are coming from sites your target audience would frequent to increase your exposure with them.
If not, re-evaluate. Switch tracks. Create more of what they want, need, and desire. Align your content with your customer.
Yes, I did tell you at the beginning of this post that shares and likes are a vanity metric. That’s still true. But do you know what else is true?
Great content gets shared.
If people are reading your content but not sharing it, then you’re not producing quality content and your marketing is failing. Period.
This is especially true with influencers in your niche. If you create enough fantastic content, eventually some influencers in your market will share that content. If they aren’t, that’s trouble.
Think about your own online behavior. When you read or encounter a great blog post, infographic, or video, you share it with your own fans, followers, friends, and family. It’s almost automatic. Every platform has the ability built-in, and third-party tools like Hootsuite and sharing plugins make it effortless and convenient.
We read or watch it, we instinctively share it. You want your content to be shared. You need your content to be shared.
Every time you create something, you want it to go viral. That kind of reach and exposure is the dream. While it may not happen for you, consistent social sharing increases your exposure exponentially. One retweet puts your content in front of a whole new set of eyes. It gets people talking about you and your brand. And the cycle repeats if only one person from that new group shares it again, and so on.
First, you need to track how many shares you’re getting with your existing content.
Tools like Hootsuite can monitor your mentions across social media, Google Alerts can notify you when your tracked keywords and phrases are used, Likealyzer analyzes your Facebook Page, Snaplytics provides data on both Snapchat and Instagram Stories, BuzzSumo shows you how content on your site is doing on social media, Google Analytics can report on how much traffic to your site is coming from social channels (under Acquisition > Social > Overview), SharesCount displays social shares based on individual URLs, and all-in-one management platforms like Sprout Social can monitor most of the major platforms from one dashboard.
If you have no shares, you have some serious work to do. If you have some shares, more is always better. If you’re happy with the shares you’re seeing, you’re selling yourself and your content short.
“It’s not the best content that wins. It’s the best promoted content that wins.” ~Andy Crestodina
More shares, more exposure. More exposure, more leads. More leads, more conversions. So, do everything you can to increase the amount of social sharing you’re already seeing:
Increasing your social shares should be part of your content marketing strategy regardless of how many you’re currently seeing. Step 1: monitor your shares. Step 2: increase your shares.
None, few, or lots, more are better.
This one is reactive. You won’t know until you start generating some quality leads. It requires asking or surveying them about where and how they heard about you, your brand, and your products.
It might be a simple question in your email series or while talking to them on the phone, or a follow-up online survey, or a fill-in field on an opt-in form. “How did you hear about us?” is profitable and relevant data to collect.
The answers should be varied if you’ve diversified your marketing efforts. Some might say it was a referral from a friend, another might mention an online review or recommendation, while others may have clicked a PPC ad, or read a newspaper feature, or googled your targeted keyword.
But some of them will hopefully talk about your content. In a perfect world, they’ll bring it up without any solicitation from you, choosing to mention how much they loved your blog post on X, or how helpful they found your infographic on Y. That’s when you know your content marketing is crushing it.
Great content with great promotion should elicit great (and unsolicited) feedback.
“What you do after you create your content is what truly counts.” ~Gary Vaynerchuk
If none of your leads are talking about your content, that’s a major red flag. If none of them mention “content” when you ask, that’s a neon signpost. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.
Ask. And if the answer is anything and everything but content, you know you need to head back to the drawing board. Don’t stop whatever is working, of course, but tidy up your content efforts at the same time. It’s just too lucrative a tactic to allow it to fail so miserably.
Ask yourself: what do my ideal customers most need? What do they struggle with? How can I better/simplify/improve their lives?
Answer those questions and more with the content you create, and tongues will be wagging.
Lead generation is a major part of any business plan. A steady stream of leads going in at the top of your sales funnel means a steady – albeit smaller – stream of customers and advocates exiting at the bottom.
But all leads are not created equal.
Picture this: the leads that are reaching out to you are asking about things you can’t or don’t do. Once or twice is an anomaly. But if it happens on a regular basis then your content is likely at fault.
Leads asking for something other than what you do is often a symptom of creating content that is not directly tied to the business.
If you’re in the analytics business, you should write about analytics. If you produce quality content on SEO as an extension of that, don’t be surprised if people contact you asking for SEO advice and solutions.
If leads are asking about things you can’t, don’t, or won’t do, you aren’t creating the right content for your business. Content marketing is supposed to introduce you as an expert and authority in your field. It’s supposed to initiate a discussion between you and those in need of what you have or do.
In your content efforts, stick to only those topics and sub-topics that are directly related to your product or service. Write only about those subjects. Talk, share, comment, and engage only in those areas.
Everything else is just noise.
“Traditional marketing talks at people. Content marketing talks with them.” ~Doug Kessler
No traffic. No clicks. No leads. No ROI. Those are a few common reasons your content marketing isn’t working for you. Those are easy to recognize and relatively easy to correct. Jay Baer suggests four categories to fix a broken campaign:
But content marketing can fail in many less obvious ways. It’s your job to watch, monitor, and manage those silent killers.
The five discussed here are far from exhaustive. The list of potential content assassins is long. You’ve got to stay vigilant.
It is possible to get and stay on the right track heading in the right direction.
Over to you. What other ways have you found your content marketing falling short? What hiccups have you stumbled upon in your marketing? What red flags are you always on the look for?
About the Author: Neil Patel is the cofounder of Neil Patel Digital.
]]>The post Personal vs. Corporate Branding: Is It Me or We? appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
]]>Sitting in a staff meeting, my boss asked if there were any questions. I mentioned seeing a job posting online for the marketing department and wondered if the team was expanding.
Several co-workers quickly interjected, “Why were you reading that? Are you looking for a new job?”
“No,” I replied. “I just like to keep tabs on what’s happening in the marketplace.”
That was 15 years ago. I doubt that conversation would go the same way today because most people have an online presence through social media and use the internet for information gathering.
As the rise of social media and influencer marketing has led to exponential opportunities for content marketing for corporate brands, it also has presented countless opportunities for content marketing for personal brands.
But how do the two work in harmony? Should they? Should people closely connect their brand to their employers? Should companies actively encourage their employees to use content marketing, including social media, to talk about the company?
Eight years ago, Christian Crumlish, then director of consumer experience at AOL, outlined the concerns of the employer – they don’t want to make star employees visible and expose them to poaching from competitors, and they are concerned those star employees will outshine the corporate brand.
Given the billion-plus active on social media now, the option to discourage or ban employees from talking about their employers publicly isn’t realistic.
Discouraging or banning employees from talking about their employers publicly isn't realistic, says @AnnGynn.
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“It’s not only possible – but highly advantageous – to leverage the power of personal brands in conjunction with (or instead of) the central corporate brand,” writes Jayson DeMers, a Forbes contributor.
It's advantageous to leverage power of personal brands in conjunction w/ central corporate brand. @jaysondemers
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As Jayson explains, telling your corporate brand stories through a personal brand (i.e., your employee) allows for more trust with the audience, a distinct voice, a difference from your competitors, an extended reach, and lasting power.
Nurturing employees’ personal brands also is an attractive selling component in the recruiting component as it indicates the company cares about developing the people who work for it.
And employers still worried their employees will take off for greener pastures should turn their focus to the positives. Sure, employees may leave the company, but they will do that with or without your support. If the company helped nurture their personal brand, they may attain positions at other brands that could benefit their previous employer or, at a minimum, they will speak well of the company.
Consider the example of Hallie Warner. She spent years developing her personal brand around her professional identity as chief of staff at Adam Hergenrother Companies. “I use the corporate brand and story to share my own,” she says.
About 18 months ago, she launched her own blog, Lead and Assist, and was invited, along with her boss, to speak at the Behind Every Leader conference. “These branding efforts have put me on the map as an expert for executive assistants and other chiefs of staff, and administrative professionals,” Hallie explains.
In addition to her chief-of-staff position, Hallie is now working as a coach and trainer for executive assistants through Adam Hergenrother Training.
Overall, supporting employees to develop their digital profiles is good for the bottom line. Research from Weber Shandwick shows employees with socially encouraging employers are significantly more likely to help boost sales (72%) than those with employers who are not socially encouraging (48%).
Employees who have socially encouraging employers help sales more than those who don't. @WeberShandwick
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If you want your employees (and their personal brands) to boost your corporate brand, you must be strategic. Here are a few essential steps.
Sure, you must protect the brand, especially if it’s a publicly traded company, from employees disclosing proprietary or confidential information. Just don’t use that as a reason to go overboard with restrictions in your social media policy.
Check out this employee social media policy from Intel:
“What do our policies mean? They mean we trust you … You are both the person in the best position to tell the world why Intel is such an amazing place to be and the person best suited to protect Intel from harm. Don’t slam Intel or our competitors … When you are online, you are representing Intel: our peoples, our values. There is no room for bigotry, prejudice, misogyny, or hatred in our company or on our associated social media feeds.”
TIP: Post your employee social media guidelines online to be transparent internally and externally. If a problem arises, you can easily reference and link to it when you address the issue.
Post your employee #socialmedia guidelines online to be transparent internally and externally, says @AnnGynn.
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HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:
In some workplaces, employees are unable to access Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., because of restrictions enforced by IT-related controls. But if you want your employees to grow their personal brand in concert with your corporate brand, you must trust them enough to give them access to social media during their workday. Otherwise, they will build their personal brands without your corporate brand (or worse, with negativity toward their employer).
You must trust employees enough to give them access to #socialmedia during their workday, says @AnnGynn.
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TIP: Apply this principle to all employees. If you cherry-pick only those who you want to elevate your brand, you’ll alienate the other employees (who also are on social media and now more likely to talk negatively about their employer).
TIP: As a marketer, you likely don’t have the ability to set company-wide policy. Get your HR leaders involved in the process. Persuade them using credible resources they’re familiar with, such as this comprehensive toolkit on workplace use of social media from the Society for Human Resource Management.
Allowing your employees to talk about your brand on social is a first step. Encouraging them to tell your brand story is the next step. Offer your employees an opportunity to suggest ideas or get involved in other ways in the content you’re creating and sharing. Tell the stories they think should be told.
Share your editorial calendar with employees so they can know what you’re writing about and when. Send a weekly update with suggested tweets or posts referencing your content to all employees and ask them to share.
Send weekly updates w/ suggested tweets & posts to employees and ask them to share, says @AnnGynn.
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Monitor those people who choose to be active supporters of the brand’s storytelling. Recognize those individuals whose contributions lead to the most shares, most retweets, most conversions (whatever measurement you choose). Acknowledge their work in a company email or newsletter. Send a handwritten note thanking them for their contributions.
“If you want to succeed in the workplace, you need a well-defined personal brand that supports the company’s mission,” says Dan Schawbel, a Monster contributor.
Though some jobs may not require a well-developed personal brand, many do. Jake Solyst is a content specialist for a 40-person marketing agency, idfive, that focuses on mission-based clients such as universities, nonprofits, and advocacy organizations.
He actively connects his personal branding efforts to industries of the agency’s clients. His personal Twitter profile is focused on his employer, including a link to the company blog – which features many of Jake’s articles.
Jake says he participates in a weekly Twitter chat for higher-education marketers, and tweets from industry-related events and volunteer opportunities. He also reads books about higher education and social issues, then shares his thoughts about them on his social media channels.
“It’s important to be more than a marketer, but a marketer with a passion for and an understanding of the ideas, services, and people we’re promoting,” he says.
It's important to be a marketer w/ a passion for the ideas, services, & people we're promoting. @JakeSolyst
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How can you build your personal brand that also works for your employer’s brand? Here are some steps to accomplish that.
Dan’s advice about a well-defined personal brand being essential for workplace success is good, but to do that you need to know your company’s mission. You also need to understand your personal mission or purpose. What are the goals for your personal branding effort? How do those goals fit with your company’s purpose?
Don’t become a shill for your employer, hawking every product or even every piece of news or story from the company. That won’t win you anything. And don’t ignore your employer in your content – that won’t win you any fans at your company. Strike a balance, incorporating relevant company content when appropriate and ensuring that you share your personal and others’ content too.
Create or share content around topics and interests specific to your industry and your role or department. Investigate speaking engagements at industry-related or community-based events.
Check regularly with key stakeholders to learn about what’s happening within the company, what they’re hearing about in the industry, and to discover new research being conducted. Consider this group an invaluable editorial advisory board for potential ideas to write about or share.
Inform your supervisors and executives of your personal branding efforts that they may not be aware of. For example, tell them about a speaking opportunity you’re doing at a community meeting or let them know about your blog.
Though you likely have opinions on politics, religion, etc., resist sharing them in the professional setting. You don’t need to spark a debate that detracts from the focus of your intended personal brand.
Resist sharing opinions on politics or religion in the professional setting, says @AnnGynn. Read more >>
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TIP: Even references to political or religious figures meant to be humorous can be harmful. An off-handed description in place of the words “U.S. president,” for example, can elicit reader comments and criticism.
The question of personal brand vs. corporate brand can’t be an either-or option. A personal brand is intrinsically tied to the employer brand and vice versa. Both are critical to each other’s success. Understanding that is the first step, embracing it through proactive policies and promotion is the next. Then both employees and employers have a better one-two branding punch.
Grow your personal content marketing skills and strengthen your company’s content marketing at the same time. Attend Content Marketing World Sept. 4-7 and register today using code BLOG100 to save $100.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
The post Personal vs. Corporate Branding: Is It Me or We? appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
]]>The issue may be a lack of external sites linking to you, also known as backlinks. While SEO has evolved over the years, backlinks still remain as one of the most important SEO ranking factors.
What you shouldn’t do is get involved in shady link schemes. This is known as black hat SEO, and it is unethical and ineffective over the long run.
The key to getting backlinks in a sustainable way, without begging for them, is to continually produce high-quality content that people want to link to and share.
So, when you’re thinking of your link building strategies, keep these 14 in mind and try any or all of them. Give each a lot of effort and measure the results appropriately.
Click here if you’d prefer to skip this list and just go straight to the infographic.
Conducting research and surveys isn’t cheap in time or cost, but outlets like Hubspot and ConversionXL routinely conduct and publish research findings because they generate backlinks.
My friend Brian Dean has also published research-based blog posts:
And has seen a lot of backlinks from the blog post:
If you prefer to not do research yourself or hire a researcher, you can reach out to other companies that conduct research and publish it in PDFs. Ask them for the PDF and if you can write a short blog post that summarizes the findings, or summarizes parts of it, in exchange for a link to their landing page to download the full report. You’ll still get a lot of links and social traffic, even if the data isn’t yours. You’re simply reporting on it.
After all, that’s what all science publications (i.e. ScienceDaily) do everyday. They write reports and summarizations of the latest scientific research, and cite the study in their article.
When your article is ready to go, it may help to put something like this in the headline:
This way, people browsing on Google or social will see that it’s research-based, and they’ll want to check out your article.
Finally, when you release original data, reach out to some companies you have relationships with that may be interested in sharing your research. You can write to them with a simple request – here’s the research we did, here’s the article of the research, maybe it would come in handy for you at some point in the future.
Bonus points if you create an infographic based on your original research.
More and more publishers are cutting their word counts short and producing content with few words. You can stand out and get backlinks by creating 10x content and giving it away for free.
This involves finding something useful that people will want to read, examining the competition, and creating something 10x better. You (or a writer you hire) will write about 15,000 words, and split the organization up into different chapters.
I’ve created many of these guides and published them Quick Sprout.
Ramit Sethi produced a guide to personal finance and now he ranks #1 on Google for the query personal finance guide.
Brian Dean wrote a keyword research guide:
I’d recommend you take a look at some of these guides so you can get an idea of the breadth of undertaking for producing a 10x guide.
These 10x guides are expensive (writing and design time) and time-consuming, but they can pay off in the form of backlinks to your site.
Influencer marketing is all the rage right now. Most brands want to figure out how to get a big celebrity or athlete to endorse their product. Or better yet, be business partners with them.
But there’s another strategy you can take if you’re interested in getting backlinks. This involves interviewing an influencer to get their knowledge that would help your audience. If you don’t have connections, you’ll have to be good at email outreach and be a skilled people-person.
If you are granted an interview, it’s important to come prepared with thoughtful questions, and have respect for their time. Most influencers probably won’t want to chat for more than 15 minutes, but if you’re a skilled interviewer who asks good questions that should be more than enough time to get valuable information from them.
You can publish your interview either in a video format or via a transcript. If you can, I’d opt for a video if you can make sure it’s high quality. If not, stick with a transcript of the interview.
Kissmetrics has produced lots of infographics that have brought us a ton of backlinks. We had our own in-house designer create the infographic, but if you don’t have your own designer you can hire one through Upwork.
The most difficult part of the infographic process is brainstorming a topic that’s a good fit for the infographic, then creating the copy and graphs to go in the infographic. A great designer will take a lot of the weight off your shoulders. Just come up with a topic, produce the content, and let the designer work their magic.
Don’t forget to add an embed code at the bottom to make it easy for people to put it on their website. A lot of other sites may just download your infographic and put it on their site. This is why it’s useful to have your logo on the infographic – so even if you don’t get the backlink, you still get your brand some exposure around the web.
If you’re looking to rank well for a particular term, you can add that keyword to the embed code. See what Copyblogger did with this infographic:
Much like infographics, quizzes are popular and get a lot of shares. If you create on your site, you can add an embed code and get backlinks just like you would do with an infographic.
Your quizzes should be enjoyable for people to take. They don’t have to be a knowledge test. It’s best if you create something that encourages people to look inward and think about themselves. The end result then makes something that’s shareable with others.
This is what Buzzfeed does so well. They create quizzes like, “What Kind of [fill in the blank] Are You?”. People love taking the quizzes and sharing them because it’s about each person.
Try adding quizzes to your marketing strategy and see what results you get!
This is known as the Moving Man Method, courtesy of Brian Dean. I’d recommend you check out his full video for a breakdown of this. It’s pretty brilliant and I have to give him the proper credit.
The important thing to keep in mind is to only reach out to high quality sites. Remember that crappy sites that link to you are your problem. You are responsible for who links to you. Remove the crappy sites that are linking to you and you’ll improve your overall backlink profile.
Offering a free testimonial is a win-win relationship. The business gets a testimonial and you get your name and company name on their website, along with a link back to your site.
Obviously, when you reach out to these companies, you need to be a customer of their product or service. Don’t contact companies you don’t use and offer a testimonial.
I’ve done this on a lot of different sites and it’s helped to increase my exposure.
Here I am on the homepage of Backlinko:
And here I am with Brian Dean on the Ahrefs homepage:
And on Viewership.com:
I have many more around the web, but how many visits do you think these three sites receive? That’s how much free exposure I’m getting, because I endorse their product and wrote a testimonial.
This is one of my favorite methods for gaining links and exposure. Guest blogging can be free (if you’re a good writer) or paid if you prefer to hire a ghostwriter. If you haven’t written for other blogs before, I’d recommend hiring a ghostwriter. It will cost between $250-$500 for a quality article with at least 2,000 words.
In the article, you can link to your own content. I’ve done this with my articles in Entrepreneur:
Don’t go overboard and put a dozen links back to your site. Keep it reasonable (maybe 1-3 for every 2000 words) and make sure the owner of the blog is okay with it. If they’re not, you may want to take your content somewhere else. I think it’s a fair tradeoff considering that you’re giving them great free content in exchange for some links and exposure.
Be sure to also use your byline wisely. Keep it sharp and to the point. Tell readers who you are, what you do, and what value you bring. Link to your site. Bonus points if you can link to other parts of your site, like Bnonn does on the Kissmetrics blog:
In his byline, he’s advertising his free course (which brings him leads) and has a link back to his website.
If you’re well known, you’ll have hundreds or even thousands of sites that mention your company or name but don’t link to you. Using this method, you find those high-quality sites that aren’t linking.
For example, if I write about Copyblogger or mention one of their blog posts but don’t link to it, they can reach out to me in a helpful way and suggest I add in a link to their site or blog post. I’m already mentioning them; so adding the link is only helpful to readers.
Credit to Brian Dean for this tactic – he calls it link reclamation.
Having good relationships with journalists and news outlets is great for public relations and backlinks. But you shouldn’t cold email a journalist and ask them to promote your company. That won’t work and will only make you look bad.
Use Help a Reporter Out, but don’t rely on it. You need to make an active effort to make relationships with journalists and help them out when they need it. All good relationships rely on reciprocity.
Some of you may have a unique story or angle that a news outlet would like to cover. That’s how I got coverage on CNN:
I knew they wouldn’t want to hear about my business, but rather that I live in hotels. I did get links to my businesses from this article, and it brought a lot of referral traffic.
So as you build those relationships, you’ll eventually start getting mentions in outlets and publications. This can do wonders for your exposure and your “link juice”.
When you write a blog post, you’ll probably be linking to other companies and articles. When you do that, you should make an effort to contact the people that run those companies or write those articles and tell that them that you mentioned them on your blog post. They may share it social media or mention you in a future article. Remember – trust the laws of reciprocity.
When you reach out, it’s important to not ask for a backlink. That will make you look desperate, and no one wants to look desperate. Just simply reach out and tell them that you liked their article/post or company so much that you wanted to share it on your blog post. Then share the link to your blog post. That’s all you have to do.
Finally, don’t write a blog post that has hundreds of links. If you do that and reach out to each one you linked to, it will make you look bad because you’re giving out a bunch of links in order to ask for a link back. Keep the number of links on your blog posts reasonable, and tell bloggers and companies when you write about them. Then, trust the laws of reciprocity.
This can be one of the best ways to gain exposure. You’ll also get backlinks if the comments are not a nofollow.
The priority when writing a comment is to make sure it’s thoughtful, relevant, and adds to the discussion. Writing, “great post, keep it up” isn’t thoughtful or relevant and it doesn’t add to the discussion. When someone reads your comment, it should be clear that you actually read the blog post or article and have something unique to add to it. Your comments should be like the blog posts you write – high quality, thoughtful, and useful.
The WordPress commenting plugin Commentluv uses dofollow comment URLs by default. I’d recommend searching for these blogs, subscribing to them, reading them as they come out, and making comments shortly after they’re published.
You can also link to your blog in the comment:
It’s important to only do this if you really think that what you want to link to would improve the article. I get a lot of requests from bloggers asking for links. I ignore all of them because none of them make sense for my blog. I can see that they don’t want to make any of my articles better, they just a backlink.
Check out the script Brian Dean has for you in his mega-guide.
Love ‘em or hate ‘em, list-based posts get a lot of traffic.
Unfortunately, I think that a lot of marketers and content creators view them as a shortcut. They’ve been brainwashed by viewing the listicles that are in slideshow form, thinking that if they just brainstorm a few things to put on their list, and add a sentence or two to each one, that their job is done. You shouldn’t make it that easy on yourself.
Other marketers will go overboard and make their list so long (i.e. 150+ items) that no one will read it all. There isn’t necessarily anything wrong with this if you can make manage to make each item useful. Don’t add things to your list that don’t make sense just so you can have a bigger number.
Keep in mind, as with everything, quality over quantity. (Ideally you have both quality and quantity). You’re better off keeping your list at the right amount and making more quality list-based posts instead of putting all your energy into one post.
Simply copy and paste the code below into the html of your website to display the infographic presented above:
Getting backlinks doesn’t involve begging. It involves hard work. It takes creativity, hustle, and good people skills.
Your best competition, the ones consistently at the top of Google, aren’t cold emailing companies and bloggers asking for backlinks. They’re hard at work producing great content that people want to share and link to.
All the work is worth it. I’ve been in content marketing for years and I still find that backlinks are crucial to ranking higher in Google.
I hope you’ll examine these 14 tactics, find some that work for you, put in meaningful effort in each, and measure the results. Then let me know how they work for you.
What methods have you found useful and effective to get backlinks without begging for them?
About the Author: Neil Patel is the cofounder of Neil Patel Digital.
]]>Yeah, that’s the meta description. And every website should have one.
If you have a website, then meta descriptions should matter to you.
Even if you don’t personally have a website and simply browse online, meta descriptions should still matter to you.
A meta description is a website’s final attempt to get your attention and seal the deal with a click-through.
Not only is a meta description a link’s last-ditch effort to gain a visit or two, but it is also a factor in search engine optimization that many digital marketers ignore.
But a neglected meta description could mean lost viewers, forgotten leads, and less traffic.
What?
Thankfully, adding meta descriptions is simple. Writing good meta descriptions that help SEO is the tougher part — but it can get easier with help and a little practice.
I’ll explain exactly how.
A meta description is the snippet of text displayed below each link in the search results. It is the HTML element that provides more information about a website to search engines and searchers.
Why do meta descriptions exist?
Well, they serve a couple purposes. They describe the contents of a web page to the searcher while simultaneously convincing and persuading the searcher to click the link.
Meta descriptions play a big role in search results.
Any words that match the search query are made bold in the description.
They also serve as a sort of advertisement for that specific website, providing the searcher with a brief glimpse into what they could gain or see by clicking.
See the below example of search results for “simple SEO guide.”
The meta descriptions above are the few lines of text below the link title and URL.
You will see that some included the bold words from the search query, and others are simply the first few words of the website or blog post.
But meta descriptions aren’t reserved for search engine results pages (SERPs).
They also appear when people share content on websites and social media channels. While search results and SEO aren’t relevant in this particular instance, well-written meta content will still encourage opens on social media and external sites.
And click-throughs on social media, while not technically recorded by Google or Bing, will still contribute to a site’s overall traffic, relevance, and publicity.
All in all, meta descriptions can contribute a ton to your website’s success.
A meta description is your website’s last sales pitch to a searcher. It is the most important feature to improving click-through rates from an organic search.
Meta descriptions are a major tool that searchers use to decide which search results will be the most helpful, relevant, and authoritative.
They are also super important for search engine optimization–but not in the way that you may think.
It is important to point out that meta description content is not factored into search results. So it’s not necessary to put keywords into your meta description.
But let’s take a step back and consider not just search engine behavior, but human behavior. Meta description content may not influence the search engine algorithm, but click-through rate does.
That’s right. Google is actively measuring — and factoring in — user behavior when it comes to search results.
There are so many factors that go into ranking a website; it’s easy to forget that human activity is constantly being analyzed and considered.
Kind of makes you think about the way you conduct searches, doesn’t it?
Knowing this, think about the way that your meta descriptions look to an average searcher.
Do they appeal to a computer or a person? Is the content arranged to grab an algorithm’s attention or the human eye?
Meta descriptions may not directly benefit SEO, but click-through rates do, and meta descriptions help get clicks.
And the more people that click on your link, the better the content will perform in search results.
Now, for any search engine results page, it is not a given that every searcher will scroll all the way to the bottom — not to mention clicking over to a second or third page.
In fact, click-through percentages taper off as you move down the results page because, logically, the more relevant and reliable links are already situated at the top.
At least, that’s what the average searcher assumes.
If your website is located further down the first page, or even on the second, you are already working with less than your competitors.
This makes a concise, persuasive meta description all the more crucial to that link’s success.
But those results that fall at the top don’t necessarily have their work cut out for them, either. Ranking in the first few results doesn’t always guarantee a click-through.
Providing a high-quality meta description will ensure that a searcher doesn’t go scrolling for another result.
Relevant results encourage clicks. Meta descriptions help searchers understand why your link is the most relevant, helpful, trustworthy option.
And the more searchers click on your website, the better your site will perform overall.
Here’s how to add — and write — killer meta descriptions that convert search queries to surefire clicks.
For now, head over to your website’s HTML and take a look at the <head> section. It’ll look similar to this.
<head>
<meta name=”description” content=”Insert meta description here!”>
</head>
To add a meta description to the site, insert the content next to (you guessed it) where the HTML code says “content=”.
Regardless of what content management system you use, you should have complete control over what your meta descriptions say.
The especially goes for WordPress, whose backend platform makes it easy to alter this information.
If you use an SEO plugin like Yoast, you can add the meta description to the section labeled “meta description”. You can even preview how it will look in the SERPs.
Now that we have the technical how-to out of the way, let’s review some tips for writing meta descriptions that grab a searcher’s attention, wrangle a click-through, and boost your SEO.
At its core, writing a great meta description isn’t all that different from writing great sales copy. It is an exercise in concise persuasion designed to sell whatever lies beyond the link.
You have a few sentences to grab someone’s attention and garner a click-through.
Every single word you add to that meta description should be dedicated to producing a click, while still maintaining factual accuracy to meet expectations.
This may take practice, but it is worth it for the overall health of your website. Thankfully, changing out your website’s meta description is pretty easy.
If you test one meta description and don’t love how it performs, you can simply head back to the HTML and try a new one.
If you’re overwhelmed about where to start, prioritize your homepage and most important pages, like your product pages, top blog posts, or About page.
Get a feel for writing meta descriptions, and then take the time to fill them out for the rest of your website.
Now, let’s dive into how to write up meta descriptions that are clear, helpful, and persuasive.
Be specific and relevant, including the focus keyword.
Within your meta description, you essentially have two to three sentences to persuade people to click. So every word in your meta description matters.
Nowadays, the average searcher will recognize a generic, fluffed-up meta description from a mile away.
They will also most likely ignore that sort of description for one that better suits their search query.
Use your meta description to further connect with the target audience of your website or blog post link. Use relevant language that will appeal to them and be specific about what your website offers.
Layer your focus keyword into your meta description authentically. (That means don’t repeat it multiple times or throw in a few different variations for the sake of better SEO.)
Search engines will often bold the words in your meta description that correspond to a searcher’s query. This makes it easier for a searcher to see exactly how your website aligns with what they have searched.
Use action-oriented language, with a call-to-action.
Great sales copy always includes present-tense, actionable language. Your meta description should read no differently.
Use the meta description to describe exactly what you want the searcher to do or what exactly will happen when they click on your link.
Give the searcher a clear picture of what lies beyond the link.
Consider starting with words like “Learn,” “Discover,” “Experience,” or “Read” so the searcher has a clear idea of what your website provides. This may also inspire new actions beyond the searcher’s original query.
Provide a solution or benefit.
Think about why people make searches online. Most likely, they want to research, buy, learn, or read something, right?
Your meta description should serve as the “Ah-ha — found it!” moment for a searcher.
How can your website give them what they’re looking for? How do they benefit by clicking on your link? What lies beyond your search result that can benefit or help them in some way?
Use your meta description to answer these questions. This information is especially valuable when competing with other blogs or websites.
Nowadays, most search queries result in multiple sites offering similar content. What makes your website different, and how can you use this information to entice a click-through?
Keep it short and sweet.
Good digital marketers recognize that, as humans, we have the attention span of a goldfish — eight seconds, to be exact.
You should remember this in any circumstance that involves writing content to persuade or sell, especially when crafting your meta descriptions.
Don’t assume that searchers will take the time to review all meta descriptions on the search engine results page.
Choose each word wisely, knowing that people most likely skim your description before continuing down the page.
Another important thing to recognize is that Google cuts off meta descriptions that are too long. There have been reports of Google testing snippets of longer length, but about 150 characters is a safe length.
Case in point — Do not get caught with your most valuable information at the end!
Don’t deceive, but inspire curiosity.
You might think it a good idea to embellish your meta description solely to get a click. Who cares if a searcher stays on your website as long as they click-through first?
Not a stellar strategy.
If you’re not truthful about what a searcher can expect from your link, he or she probably won’t hesitate to hit that “back” button.
And too many quick exits can hurt your site’s bounce rate — and, more importantly, the searcher’s trust in your content.
Be honest and clear about the content of your website.
Don’t stuff your meta description full of keywords, either. Instead, consider asking a question that contains a couple of keywords.
Provide just enough (true) information about your link without giving it away. Inspire a click-through with curiosity — not deception.
Need real examples of the above criteria? Below we’ll cover some good and not-so-good meta descriptions based on a few popular search queries.
Let’s review the results from some popular search queries relevant to online marketing, starting with good examples.
“How to build backlinks”
This meta description is short, but includes the focus keyword (“backlinks”) and utilizes words like “little-known” and “never seen” to inspire curiosity.
This meta description is strong because it mentions the benefit of building backlinks. It also explains exactly what a searcher will see when he or she clicks the link.
“What is white hat SEO”
This meta description not only employs an actionable word (“learn”) but also explains the benefit of learning white hat techniques and how they can help your website.
This meta description uses a question to grab the searcher’s attention and then provides a clear solution that outlines the contents of the website, including action words like “teach” and “execute.”
“Content marketing best practices”
This meta description spreads out the focus keywords so that more of the content is made bold, increasing its chances of being noticed. It also mentions both B2B and B2C, which increases the number of audience members who will benefit from a click-through.
This meta description, although short and cut off at the end, provides a concise benefit of content marketing and explains what the webpage contains.
Sometimes, an ellipses at the end of a meta description can help inspire curiosity and garner a click-through.
Now, for the not-so-great meta description examples, using the same keywords.
“How to build backlinks”
It’s clear that this website doesn’t have a meta description because it simply repeats the headline and dives right into the first line of the content, providing no preview or enticing language.
Forgetting to include a meta description leaves your website open to random and irrelevant meta content. Searchers will recognize when you’ve neglected it.
“What is white hat SEO”
Although this meta description is interesting and personable, it lacks relevance and focus keywords. In fact, it’s more likely to appear in results for “black hat SEO” given that keyword is mentioned twice.
Meta descriptions could be compared to email subject lines in this case. Using something unique and fun can help grab attention, but going too far outside the line can just be plain confusing.
“Content marketing best practices”
This meta description does not include any information relevant to the site title, nor does it feature any focus keywords.
This may be another case of a neglected meta description, leaving it open to capturing the first few lines of content.
In this case, that was a bad move for the website, especially since it’s featured on the third page of search results.
While your meta descriptions may not have a direct effect on your SEO, they play a huge role in explaining your web page content and garnering click-throughs.
Adding them is easy — it’s writing them well that’s a little more difficult. Treat them as you would your ad or website copy, and your website traffic numbers will thank you.
In what ways have you improved your meta descriptions to help SEO?
About the Author: Neil Patel is the cofounder of Neil Patel Digital.
]]>The post How to Train a Journalist in Content Marketing appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
]]>You’ve decided to hire a journalist for your content marketing team – congratulations!
All the evidence says you’ve got yourself a hard-working individual used to delivering high-quality editorial on tight deadlines. Those are some darned useful qualities.
But not all journos will hit the ground running. Making the switch to content marketing can take a bit of adjustment. And reporters who can’t get their head around the differences are going to struggle.
Journalists switching to #contentmarketing can require some adjustment time, says @daniel_hatch.
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I know because I spent 17 years as a newspaper and radio reporter before being wooed to content marketing. I know because, as a managing editor for a content agency, I’ve employed and then unemployed several members of my old profession.
What follows is my list of areas where reporters can struggle when they make the switch and my suggestions for helping them adjust. Or, as I like to call it: How to Train Your Journalist.
Journalism is a vocation. From the first day of university through to the last day of a newsroom career, it is relentlessly competitive. To succeed, a journalist must really want it. It’s also a profession that has a special place in democracy – holding governments, corporations, and individuals accountable.
Gosh, but that can give you an ego. For some reporters, that can be hard to let go. And what you, as the person employing them, end up with are writers who think they’re too good to be writing the content you’re commissioning.
The first sign they’re not effectively making the gear switch to content marketing is turning in what feels like lazy copy. When you read it, you can tell they’ve not really made an effort. This is a problem of attitude and I’ve reluctantly had to let writers go because they couldn’t get past it. (It’s one reason to try reporters on a freelance basis before you bring them on staff.)
Before they start writing, get them excited about your product and services, and what you’re trying to achieve (or what your client is trying to achieve). Get them out of the office. Send them into the factory, onto the shop floor, or out in the trucks. Get them talking to your most passionate employees. Put them through the more entertaining elements of your staff training. Let them soak up the enthusiasm you and your team have for what you do.
If, after all that, they won’t “get with the program,” consider letting them go.
There are certain things reporters freak out about. Not providing balance (getting two or more sides of a story) is one. Allowing people you’re writing about to see what you’re writing before you publish is another. And – heaven forbid – letting sources change their quotes so they sound better.
For obvious reasons, some of these first principles of journalism don’t really translate to content marketing. Hey, if you’re writing content for Burger King you don’t give Ronald McDonald the right of reply.
If you're writing content for @BurgerKing, you don't give Ronald McDonald the right of reply. @daniel_hatch
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The key mental gear-shift is to help former journalists understand that their job isn’t to write news in the traditional sense but to write excellent, engaging, and – importantly – truthful and accurate copy. (After all, you don’t want to give your audience bad information.)
Writing copy that sells without bludgeoning the reader over the head with a hard-sell message is an art. It’s not generally one in journalists’ arsenal because they mostly have spent their careers deliberately avoiding and removing anything that looks like a plug.
Writing copy that sells w/o bludgeoning reader over the head with a hard-sell message is an art. @daniel_hatch
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Provide them with examples of articles that have achieved the subtle sell well. It’s easier to pick up good technique from example. And show them what a call to action is because if they’re anything like me when I first started they’ll have no idea.
Journalists are used to being the ones in the power seat. They call sources and demand answers to their questions – and then publish whether that person answers or not. Journalists say jump, and people ask, “how high?” I’m exaggerating, but you get my meaning. And this really is the single biggest adjustment that I had to make when I made the switch.
Think about it. The person journalists are writing about is now more than likely the person paying their wages (or paying a big retainer to the person paying their wages). It feels like the subjects of the article are now calling the shots; that they will be telling the reporter what to write. That’s not necessarily the case – not if the relationship is set up right. Ideally, journalists-turned-content marketers should feel like the client values their expertise and integrity, and wants them to get on with the job of writing high-quality copy.
However, tricky clients and requests will happen from time to time. When I think back to my days in the newsroom there were plenty of times when I didn’t agree with the angle an editor asked me to take or I thought the story didn’t warrant coverage. And I did what everyone does: I said “aye, aye” to the boss, had a little grumble to myself, and got on with it – because it was my job. If your journalists are struggling with a difficult client, encourage them to think about things through this prism.
Further, clients often have to approve the former journalists’ work before it’s published. Sometimes they insist on changes. Sometimes you really won’t like those changes. Sometimes you want to bang your head against the desk while shouting, “These people are idiots.” Well, these people are in charge now.
After years of copy subs, layout subs, and editors slicing and dicing their work, no journalist should ever be precious about their copy. They will adjust, I promise. But they might find this uncomfortable to start with – after all, someone who likely isn’t a writer is telling them how to write.
Your journos come preloaded with writing skills. That’s what’s so great about them. But don’t forget to give them a style guide. If you’re an agency, this could be different for every client. But journalists are used to learning them and following them. Supply them at the outset and you’ll make life easier for all concerned.
Supply your journalist with a style guide at the outset & you'll make their life easier. @daniel_hatch
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Most journalists who have been around the traps are used to writing for different audiences and in different tones. Writing for the arts pages is different than for the news pages, a court report reads differently than a sports report, and so on.
Journalists are good at adapting style for audience and tone. But if you don’t tell them, they’re likely to pitch for whatever style they are most familiar with – which may not suit your purpose.
Journalists can suffer terribly with boredom. If they’ve come from a busy newsroom they can find the pace elsewhere (especially anywhere bureaucratic, like government departments and agencies) incredibly slow.
Journalists-turned-content marketers can suffer from boredom. Challenge them, says @daniel_hatch.
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Do not let your journalists get bored. Challenge them. Keep them interested with a variety of assignments. Give them extra responsibilities. Train them in new skills. Above all, keep them busy.
A version of this article originally appeared in the February issue of Chief Content Officer. Sign up to receive your free subscription to our bimonthly, print magazine.
Want to expand and strengthen your content strategy? Attend the Intelligent Content Conference March 20-22 in Las Vegas. Register today and use code BLOG100 to save $100.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
The post How to Train a Journalist in Content Marketing appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
]]>The post How to Do a Content Audit in a Few Hours appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
]]>Content audits are about as popular as colonoscopies but they’re just as necessary to health – in this case, the health of your content marketing strategy.
But you likely dread the tedious, time-consuming annual content audit, and reliably and predictably put it off (and sometimes never get it done.)
What if you could do a content audit in only a few hours? Impossible, you say.
Consider a condensed content audit. It’s a fresh approach that allows you to more regularly provide actionable insights into what type of content is performing best to inform your upcoming activities.
Condensed #content audit provides more regular actionable insights, says @arash31.
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Condensed content audits are not meant to replace the comprehensive content audits you should do every year.
The condensed content audit is a shortened form of the traditional content audit. It forces you to narrow your most important goals and determine whether they are being achieved – and how to improve what you’re doing.
Condensed content audits are designed to be done more frequently, preferably monthly or as often as you have the time.
Condensed #content audits are designed to be done monthly or as often as you have the time, says @arash31.
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Monthly condensed content audits allow you to:
With this in mind, here is how to do a content audit in three steps and in just a few hours – maybe even less.
Before I delve further, let’s get one thing out of the way – the condensed content audit is flexible. The point is to set in motion the opportunity to evaluate your content more regularly.
Now, let’s begin.
Narrow your attention to the most important metrics that connect to your goals at the time. By looking only at a handful of metrics at a given time, you can draw insights more easily.
Perhaps you want to measure conversion data. Maybe you want to measure traffic. Maybe you want to measure engagement (such as time spent on site or social shares). You could even assess aspects of your SEO strategy.
TIP: When regularly conducting condensed content audits, you can pick the same metrics each time or pick new ones depending on your goals at the time.
Create a spreadsheet just as you might for a traditional content audit. Label each column with the data point, including:
Screaming Frog can do the inventory legwork by automatically crawling your website to collect URLs (along with title tags and title tag length, which you may or may not need).
If your site is large, select 30 or 40 URLs, as that’s typically enough to draw trends. Pick the URLs connected to a category you’re most interested in learning about. For example, perhaps you want to start with your oldest content.
Condensed content audit: Pick 3 metrics and 30 URLs to analyze. Make it manageable, says @arash31.
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With the content identified, you can consult whatever analytics tools you need to gather the necessary data and add it to the condensed audit spreadsheet. As always, Google Analytics can provide data on page visits, bounce rate, and many other metrics.
TIP: In Google Analytics, export your data by clicking Export then CSV under the report title so the data can easily marry onto your condensed audit spreadsheet.
HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:
The next step is to assess your data – to look for trends. For example, do you notice that people tend to spend the most time on your pages with a certain subject? Can you see what content receives the most search traffic?
At this point, document your evaluation. For example, create a grading system for your content from A (top-performing) to F (poorly performing). Use the score column on the spreadsheet to track each grade.
How you pick the letter grade will be based on your choice of metrics.
In some cases, it may be based on objective data. For example, this content performed poorly across all three metrics and therefore receives an F rating. Or this content performed adequately in two of three categories so it receives a C. In other cases, your choice of letter may be subjective.
TIP: As best as possible, detail in a couple sentences what each grade means before you begin the evaluation. That’s also helpful if multiple people are involved in the audit review. Then, use the notes column to detail possible action steps. After all, that’s the point of the content audit in the first place.
In condensed #content audit, use notes column to document actionable next steps, says @arash31.
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For example, perhaps underperforming content leads you to conclude that some content should be updated to reflect more current information or to improve its quality. Perhaps your top-performing content should be promoted more or included as links in more related content.
With the condensed audit complete, you have a road map with a few actionable steps that you can implement to improve your content marketing.
In other words, keep it manageable.
The condensed content audit looks much like a typical content audit, but the pared version is designed to improve the results of your content marketing strategy more frequently. It’s flexible to your needs. Think of it as a framework instead of something set in stone.
Lastly, what’s great about the condensed content audit is that it gets you and your team in the habit of doing audits more often so when it’s time to do your annual audit, it will be like second nature.
Gain valuable insight into creating more effective content strategy processes and much more at Intelligent Content Conference March 20-22 in Las Vegas. Use code BLOG100 to save $100 and register today.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
Please note: All tools included in our blog posts are suggested by authors, not the CMI editorial team. No one post can provide all relevant tools in the space. Feel free to include additional tools in the comments (from your company or ones that you have used).
The post How to Do a Content Audit in a Few Hours appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
]]>… Read More]]>Note from Beth: Is Facebook Live or posting videos part of your nonprofit’s strategy for 2018? It should be. Using a tool like Animoto can make it easy for your nonprofit to create DYI videos, but to be successful you need to develop a strategy and use compelling storytelling.
Note from Beth: Is Facebook Live or posting videos part of your nonprofit’s strategy for 2018? It should be. Using a tool like Animoto can make it easy for your nonprofit to create DYI videos, but to be successful you need to develop a strategy and use compelling storytelling. This article shares insights from nonprofit marketers.
Facebook Video Tips from Non-Profit Marketers – Guest Post by Rebecca Brooks, Animoto
Mark Zuckerberg’s recently announced that Facebook’s News Feed will be veering away from branded content to prioritize content posted by personal accounts. In the wake of that proclamation, many non-profits are understandably bewildered, wondering what this will mean for their Facebook marketing strategy.
To get perspective on how to handle the changes to Facebook, I consulted with some of the non-profits who use Animoto, asking them how they’re adapting to the new Facebook landscape and how it’ll inform their 2018 social video marketing...
]]>You have probably registered for at least a few webinars in the past, right?
Even if you registered, it didn’t mean you’d attend.
And, if you attended or watched a replay, chances are you didn’t purchase the products or services promoted.
Here’s the cold hard truth: most webinar conversion rates aren’t high.
You may only get 5% to 15% conversion on your webinar registration page.
From there, you may have a 35% to 45% registrant to attendee conversion rate.
Next, you’d cross your fingers that you have the right audience attending the webinar so they’ll actually make a purchase.
Most people expect a single-digit conversion rate.
There are many hoops to jump through before you can generate substantial income from a webinar.
You’ll need a lot of people entering the top of your funnel. You’ll need to promote your webinar and make sure you’re getting the right people to register.
Then, optimize your funnel for conversion by getting those who have registered to attend the webinar or watch the replay in hopes they make a purchase.
Sound complicated?
Let’s make it simple.
Here’s the key to getting the most out of your webinar: you need to generate as many high-quality leads as possible.
So what’s the secret sauce to generating leads and turning them into sales?
Here’s what you need to know:
To generate leads and increase ROI, you need to focus on boosting the conversion rate. Here is how you can do that:
Let’s do a bit of reverse engineering here…
If the goal of your webinar is to sell a product or a service, then you need to first determine who’s going to buy the offer.
That means you have to know exactly who you want to be attending your webinar.
To clearly define your audience, create a buyer persona map like this:
A buyer persona map will help you hone in on their demographics and psychographics.
Your buyer persona should cover the pain points, frustrations, and desired outcomes of your target market in relation to the product or service you’re promoting in the webinar.
There are a few ways to gather this information:
Start by collecting additional information on your registration page.
With the information you have gathered in the buyer persona, you can now create a webinar registration landing page.
Use content that targets your ideal customers’ challenges, pain points, needs, and wants.
The one and only goal of this registration landing page is to get potential attendees to sign up for the event.
Make it simple for them by entering their information, such as name and email address.
The copy and images on the page need to communicate to the visitors why they should register for your webinar within seconds of seeing it.
Here are some essential components of a high-converting webinar registration page:
If you’re using webinars for lead generation, chances are you’re offering it for free.
Don’t forget to highlight that it’s a no-cost event so you can get more people to sign up. I know that this sounds obvious, but lots of companies actually have to remind prospects that it’s free. If you don’t make it clear, you’ll definitely get questions asking about the cost. Or worse, they won’t ask and instead assume there’s a free and won’t sign up.
In 2017, one-third of all webinar attendees only watch an on-demand event.
People want to consume content when and where they want it.
In particular, mobile access has shifted media consumption pattern to on-demand formats that put the viewer in control of their viewing schedules.
Offering a replay or allowing prospects to access your webinar on-demand can entice more people to sign up for your event.
On-demand access also gives you the opportunity to continue promoting the event after the live date and keep generating leads.
Co-hosting a webinar with a joint-venture partner can give you the opportunity to access a new audience and generate more leads.
Your webinar partner should share a similar audience with your business and offer complementary products or services instead of being direct competition.
To maximize the lead generation potential of the webinar, you need to co-market the event to your respective lists.
And do some research on potential partners to make sure they offer high-quality content that’s a good fit for your followers.
If you build it… they won’t come. (Sorry!)
To get the right audience to attend the event, you need to promote your webinar through multiple channels actively:
Sharing your webinar with your existing followers is a great starting point to get the word out.
They already know about you, so it’s often much easier for them to say “yes” to registering for your event.
This also gives you a great opportunity to nurture relationships with them and build the trust you need for conversion.
Here are a few ways to promote a webinar to your existing audience:
Don't miss my 🦄 webinar with @hatchbuck and @JonathanHerrick to learn about the 10 loopholes to keep your Facebook reach and impressions alive
Sign up now https://t.co/dkSdOVvdyW #facebooknews #facebooknewsfeed #Facebookstrategy pic.twitter.com/YbBiJzs5D6
— Larry Kim (@larrykim) February 9, 2018
Paid advertising is an effective way to reach new audiences quickly and in a targeted manner.
Most online advertising platforms allow you to segment the audience granularly.
This allows you to get a targeted message in front of the right people to maximize click-through and conversion rate.
Google AdWords is ideal for targeting people who are already looking for solutions to their problems.
You can optimize your landing page with search terms used by your ideal audience as related to the challenges your webinar solves and the solutions you deliver.
Make sure to write a compelling headline and description that matches the search terms you’re ranking for.
Additionally, you can use ad customizers, such as the Countdown feature, to dynamically enhance the ad copy.
LinkedIn is great for B2B marketing.
You can effectively segment the target audience based on company size, title/role, skills, groups, or geographic location, etc.
In fact, 46% of B2B social media traffic comes from LinkedIn, making it a platform you can’t afford to ignore if you’re targeting a B2B audience.
Besides sharing the event through content, group, and updates, you can also use paid advertising on LinkedIn to reach a larger audience:
Facebook has over two billion monthly users on the platform, making it an effective channel for promoting a webinar to almost any kind of audience.
However, the approach needs to be more nuanced.
People use Facebook to unwind, relax, and socialize.
They don’t go there seeking a solution, thinking about how to do their job better, or looking for a webinar to attend.
Consider Facebook Ads as a series of interactions with your target audience that tells a story and builds relationships that’ll ultimately lead to registering for your event:
No matter how you promote your webinar, don’t forget to track the effectiveness of each source.
That way, you can invest more resources on what works best.
To track the effectiveness of your webinar, create a unique link for each of ad using Google URL Builder.
By adding a UTM code to each source, you will see how each ad performs in Google Analytics.
You don’t generate revenue just by getting a lot of people to sign up or attend your webinar. You make money by getting them to buy from you.
If you have registered for any webinar before, you know you didn’t attend every single event you signed up for. Nor will your audience, if you don’t stay on their radar.
After you have put in the work to generate leads, you need to make sure that they’re excited to attend your event.
To make your attendees excited, take them through a series of content after they have registered for the event:
This is one of the most overlooked steps in the registration process.
Many marketers simply direct participants to a web page or send out an email with a generic message without a clear next step or CTA.
However, there are a few things you can do to maximize the “real estate” of your thank-you page and/or email:
If you offer coaching, consulting or professional services, add a strategy session sign up to this workflow — before, after, or as part of the registration thank you page.
On the strategy session registration page, state clearly who this offer is for and the value it offers.
You may want to ask the prospects a few questions.
You can gain more insights into how they talk about their problems and challenges to better position your offering.
After prospects sign up for the strategy session, take them to a thank you page where you’ll give them a “homework” assignment.
Ask them to complete prior to the webinar.
Your homework will help you further frame the conversation. And, position you as the authority.
This will get the prospects to become more invested in your process, and weed out those who aren’t serious about having the conversation.
When you’re hosting a live webinar, there could be up to a week or two between the time someone signs up and attending the event.
A series of emails — an indoctrination series — will help sustain the anticipation. And, build rapport with your audience.
Here is how Mention does it:
This series allows you to position your products or services within the right context.
An indoctrination email series should cover the following:
Your audience is busy, and most people won’t make a point of remembering the date and time of your webinar.
That’s why you need to keep reminding them multiple times.
After all, your leads won’t do any good if they don’t watch your webinar and make a purchase.
Schedule a series of reminder emails or text messages.
Play around with the timeframe.
Try testing a day before, a few hours before, an hour before, and at the start of the event — to get more people to attend your webinar.
Reiterate the benefits of attending the webinar and make sure to include the link to attend in these emails.
Remember one-third of people prefer to watch webinar on-demand?
Sending out a replay link will help you capture this audience who prefers to consume the content when and where they want to.
You should also craft a series of follow-up emails to remind participants about the offer.
Even for those who attend the event live, they may not be ready to purchase right away, or they didn’t stay until the end to hear about your offer.
Don’t take your audience’s interest for granted.
There are many moving parts when it comes to generating leads for your webinars, as well as maximizing the chances of them attending the webinar and making a purchase.
These best practices are great starting points but by no means the be-all-end-all.
You need to dial in all the components along the customer journey.
Test your approaches. And, track your metrics to see what works for your business model, product category, and audience.
When you’re able to maximize the number of prospects and the quality of leads, you’re pulling into your funnel while putting in the effort to nurture the relationships.
You’ll then be able to optimize your webinar conversion rate and make more sales.
What’s your go-to strategy for promoting your webinars?
About the Author: Neil Patel is the cofounder of Neil Patel Digital.
]]>The post For the Love of Libraries: How Libraries Use Content to Tell New Stories appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
]]>While my personal interest is book-centric, libraries offer much more to the local community, of course. At the library you can learn a new language, get help with your income taxes, or use a 3-D printer. Parents can bring their kids for story time. Teens have a safe, comfortable space in which to do their homework. Senior citizens can take computer classes.
This is one of the biggest challenges for libraries today: updating people’s perceptions of libraries as merely buildings full of books. Perhaps even more thorny for their efforts is that it’s not clear exactly what libraries should aim for as they evolve to meet changing community needs.
Pew Research Center shows that Americans are divided on the question of how books should be treated at the library: 24% support the idea of moving books and stacks to make way for more community- and tech-oriented spaces, while 31% say libraries should not move the books.
As marketers, we live by the mantra “you can’t be all things to all people.” But that’s really what a library does, says Hursh. Modern libraries are book repositories, resource centers, and gathering spaces – doing everything from carving maker spaces for hobbyists and hosting equipment rental programs so that community members can “borrow” items like sewing machines or hand tools, to setting up co-working spaces for virtual workers.
When it comes to promoting this vast variety of library activities and resources on social media, the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County has experimented with content for each platform, from Instagram to Pinterest to Snapchat, setting goals for each one and choosing to focus on those that prove to be most effective. “We have to be on all the platforms,” Hursh says, “but we don’t want to burn ourselves out.”
Set goals for each #socialmedia platform & focus on the one most effective. @webmastergirl @CincyLibrary
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When Hursh joined the team, the library used some social media platforms but had no overarching content marketing strategy for them. Now, the team is constantly evaluating and evolving how it uses social media to reach the local public.
“Pinterest surprised me,” says Hursh. After adding the platform into the mix, the team saw Pinterest drive 15 to 25% of web traffic, mostly from posts about new books and movies. LinkedIn was also surprisingly popular as a channel; audiences there look for career and higher education resources from the library.
“We work in a building full of stories,” says Hursh. Therefore, content marketing makes a lot of sense for libraries that want to attract patrons. But marketing library collections and services is much more nuanced than letting people know about the great books and fun events at the library.
When Hursh talks about telling stories, she means stories about the history of the library, stories about the librarians, and stories about the patrons themselves. All locations have their own personality shaped by their neighborhoods and demographics, Hursh explains. Her team creates content specific to the audience of each branch, as well as more global content for the library system. Social listening helps the team come up with stories, such as the one about a father and son who made it their mission to visit all 41 locations of the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County.
Social listening helps @CincyLibrary #content team come up with audience specific stories, says @hejhejnatalya.
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In addition to targeting its content marketing by location, the Cincinnati-area library sometimes works with more specific targets. Book Hookup is a service through which the library staff provides personalized reading recommendations to customers based on their reading interests. Hursh’s team was responsible for naming and promoting the program to the public. Working with OrangeBoy, an Ohio-based company that developed marketing personas based on library card usage data, Hursh and her team create email marketing messages based on those behavior-based user personas. The targeted email marketing has been wildly successful, she says. The response from customers was so overwhelming that the team was asked to pause marketing activities to make sure the library staff had time to respond to the requests in a timely manner.
.@CincyLibrary uses personas based on library card usage to create targeted #email marketing. @hejhejnatalya
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A book-focused library-goer may be surprised to see the jam-packed events calendar at their local library. At the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, events and classes happen almost every day, from toddler play dates to karaoke for teens to a book club for seniors. While the programming department is responsible for the events, Hursh and her team create content to market them to the community.
Partnerships are important when planning and promoting events, says Hursh. A good example is the library’s recent attempt to set a Guinness World Record for the largest story time. The library director pitched the concept to The Cincinnati Enquirer, which was celebrating its 175th anniversary. Together, the newspaper and library organized the event to raise awareness and resources to help tackle the early literacy gap. The newspaper’s broad reach helped attract over 300 attendees. (The Guinness certification is pending.)
In addition to social media, the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County has an active email marketing program, a quarterly publication, and a podcast recorded by the library’s writer-in-residence who also authors a blog. With limited resources, Hursh says, the library has been cutting back to create fewer but more engaging programs. For the content team, that has meant focusing on more targeted promotion and creating less content overall.
While her team focuses on creating the most effective content driven by performance metrics, as a team leader and content evangelist, Hursh says she and her team make sure to leave room for creativity. From brainstorming sessions in the reading garden to attending Creative Mornings, a breakfast lecture series for the creative community, she looks for ways to balance process and efficiency with creativity. The Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County is on a mission to connect people with the world of ideas and information, and Hursh and her team are helping achieve that mission one story at a time.
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The Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County is not the only library system robustly using content marketing. You don’t have to live in New York City to enjoy the content produced by the New York Public Library’s (NYPL) team to market its collection and services on social media. Here are a few of my favorite hashtags, promotions, and events:
NYPL is a regular participant in this Instagram hashtag for which readers pose with book covers replacing their faces in clever and often humorous ways. The library not only posts its own #bookfacefriday contributions but reposts from other libraries across the country.
Readers pose with book covers replacing their faces in Instagram #BookFaceFriday from @NYPL
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Before there was Google, there were librarians. After finding a box of information requests written and filed by former NYPL librarians in the decades before the internet, the NYPL team decided to share those questions on the library’s Instagram account with a hashtag that’s a play on “let me Google that for you.”
The Subway Library, created as a partnership between NYPL and MTA, provides New York City subway riders with free access to e-books, excerpts, and short stories to read on the train. Riders on the E and F lines also had the opportunity to ride the Library Train, the interior of which was designed to look like the NYPL’s famous Rose Main Reading Room.
It’s no surprise that the public library system in one of the fashion capitals of the world has an impressive collection of fashion illustrations and photography. These stylish images from the NYPL digital collection are on display every Sunday, joining thousands of others showing off their #sundaystyle looks on Instagram.
One of two podcasts from NYPL, The Librarian Is In is a weekly discussion about books and culture. In the producer’s words, the hosts “interview guests from the world of libraries and beyond, discuss the books they’re reading, and recommend their favorite titles.” Readers looking for more recommendations can follow the NYPL Recommends accounts on Facebook and Twitter. On Friday mornings, the librarians respond to #fridayreads requests on Facebook Live and Twitter with recommendations.
In Washington, D.C., the Library of Congress is the main research arm of the U.S. Congress and home of the U.S. Copyright Office. That’s serious business but, in 2017, the Library of Congress threw one of the district’s largest, loudest, and most sparkly events when its Bibliodiscotheque program series culminated in a disco dance party featuring a performance by legendary “I Will Survive” singer Gloria Gaynor. The month-long celebration of disco included lectures, film screenings, and a symposium, all while highlighting disco-era materials from the Library of Congress collections.
Gloria Gaynor concert at the @librarycongress @LibnOfCongress
Awesome!#Bibliodiscotheque #LCDisco pic.twitter.com/3St6pzFB2Q— Michael Hong (@PotomacFan) May 9, 2017
While the Library of Congress collections, exhibitions, and events are open to the public, being a research library headquartered on Capitol Hill means the District’s bookworms are more inclined to associate it with academia and politics than with programming for the locals. To promote Bibliodiscotheque, the Library of Congress partnered with D.C.-based organizations including events agency Brightest Young Things, the District of Columbia Library Association, and Capital Pride.
Bibliodiscotheque was the first time the Library of Congress dedicated extensive programming to a music genre – and the first time its Great Hall was home to a late-night dance party. Local bibliophiles and disco fans snapped up the 1,500 party tickets in under a minute. I think it’s safe to say that the Bibliodiscotheque disco party was also the first time that many people stood in line to get into a library.
What have you seen or experienced from your local library? Share in the comments.
A version of this article originally appeared in the February issue of Chief Content Officer. Sign up to receive your free subscription to our bimonthly, print magazine.
Get insight on how to be a content librarian and much more about the strategy of content at the Intelligent Content Conference March 20-22 in Las Vegas. Register today and use code BLOG100 to save $100.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
The post For the Love of Libraries: How Libraries Use Content to Tell New Stories appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
]]>The post What B2B Brands Need to Know to Succeed on LinkedIn appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
]]>On entering the office, we don’t stuff our B2C brains into the desk drawer, replacing them with pin-striped B2B versions allocated to us by HR. If that deathly dull and overly formal white paper would put me to sleep as a B2C reader, it’s not suddenly going to find me more attentive because the clock is somewhere between 9 and 5.
We don't stuff our B2C brains into a drawer & replace them with pin-striped B2B versions, says @kimota.
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Of course, there are some differences between B2C and B2B marketing – multiple stakeholders for one – but on an individual level, the two have far more in common than not. Social media has broadened the scope of so-called professional conversations, allowing people to discuss topics and share content once confined to the personal realm.
“We talk about so many more things,” says Claire Austin, content marketing evangelist for LinkedIn Australia. “There’s no way my parents would’ve discussed things like mindfulness, the psychological effects of working, or the challenge of going back to work after childbirth. These were just things you just got on with and no one spoke about (in the workplace). Whereas now, these are things that we do need to speak about and we’re happy to speak about them.
“People want to share their experiences. They want to be able to help others – help inform and inspire.”
LinkedIn has long been seen as the formal pinstripe suit to Facebook’s Hawaiian shirt. According to the Content Marketing Institute’s latest B2B benchmark report for North America, 92% of B2B marketers use social media for content distribution, a rate just below email usage (93%). And LinkedIn commands a massive 97% of B2B marketers who take social media action, almost double the number reported in 2010.
97% of B2B marketers use @LinkedIn for #contentmarketing via @cmicontent. #research
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But it has changed a great deal since first launching as a careers-focused networking platform in – wait for it – 2003. (Yes, LinkedIn is older than Twitter, Facebook, and even Myspace. Crikey, most of us probably hadn’t even heard of social media back then.)
LinkedIn may have started as a way to find career opportunities via job listings and networking, but that’s not why people return regularly these days. Today, visitors view content on LinkedIn seven times more often than job listings. It’s not hard to see why. LinkedIn has steadily evolved into a content platform, acquiring and integrating other content services such as news aggregator Pulse, presentation platform SlideShare, and online learning company Lynda.
“Just seeing the amount of work that’s going into developing the platform and, especially since the Microsoft acquisition, the amount of product innovation that’s happening, it’s really, really interesting,” says Austin. “LinkedIn is growing and building that reputation to be that one place for professionals to stay informed, stay connected, and learn.”
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The 2017 Edelman Trust Barometer report reveals that 62% of people trust a brand’s social media more than its advertising. And Business Insider’s Digital Trust Report found LinkedIn is far more trusted by users than either Facebook or Twitter.
#LinkedIn is more trusted by users than either #Facebook or #Twitter via @businessinsider Digital Trust Report.
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“LinkedIn is up there as the number one amongst social and is also (comparable) to publications like The Wall Street Journal and Forbes,” says Austin. “That says a lot about how people are using the platform and how they see it. For brands, that’s a massive opportunity.”
But not every person speaking on behalf of a brand is equally trusted, even on LinkedIn. According to the Edelman report, people trust information and advice given to them by an employee of a company significantly more than they do from the CEO. And people trust people who are “like them” even more than company people. It is the individual rather than the faceless brand who carries more authority, particularly if people can relate to them.
Readers trust info given by an employee of company significantly more than the CEO. @EdelmanPR Trust Barometer
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Yet Austin believes many brands don’t take full advantage of that authority and trust. “Only 3% of employees share company-relevant content, so there’s still a massive opportunity for marketers to look at their employee base and say, ‘Well why aren’t they sharing? How can we help them? What do they want to be talking about?’” she says. “Direction needs to be given from the company as well. ‘This is for you to be able to build up your personal brand,’ and, ‘Here’s some content to help you do that, and here are some topics you might be interested in sharing.’”
Only 3% of employees share company-relevant #content, says Claire Austin @LinkedIn.
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While most B2B marketers are using LinkedIn, some still use it as an occasional strategy when time, budget, and resources allow, or when there is a big campaign or product launch.
“It’s more crucial than ever to be ‘always on.’ Pretty much any B2B buyer (will consume) 10 pieces of content during that purchase process,” says Austin. “So, if you want to be in that consideration set and you want to be part of the 10 pieces of content, you need to be visible at all times. The brands that are flourishing and doing really well – getting the best return on investment and the best performance from their campaigns – are those that have this ‘always-on’ strategy.
“It’s really helping to build trust in their brand and to have that thought leadership and to have focus and to start owning keywords or key subjects and being known for certain topics and themes. Then they can layer campaign work on top of that.”
While B2B marketers spend a lot of time publishing and sharing content on LinkedIn to build a following, most eventually want the audience to follow a link to the website or wherever the lead might be captured or conversion might happen.
“It’s about having an equal balance of understanding what they will consume in their (social media) feed and when it’s right to drive them off platform,” says Austin. “Marketers often think too much about one piece of content. This content has to go there, and then they’re going to take this next step and then they’re going to do that, and it’s so linear.”
Austin explains that people typically consume at least three to four pieces of content before clicking to engage with a brand on its platform. She continues, “Expecting people to immediately go and sign up to your newsletter and then download something is quite narrow-minded. This is where we need to get more creative with the content that we’re doing on LinkedIn.
People consume at least 3 to 4 pieces of content before engaging w/ a brand on its platform. @LinkedIn
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“If you’ve created a white paper and you’re thinking, ‘OK, I’m going to host this on my website and I’m going to drive people there,’ that’s not how people behave. What is in that white paper? How can we use it more effectively? That’s when it becomes about creating content for the platforms. It’s about taking some of the stats out of that, making it into really great creative that sits on the LinkedIn platform.”
Every new piece of related content reinforces the idea in the person’s mind, says Austin; “It’s like seeing an ad for a blockbuster movie. You might see it once and think it looks interesting. You see it again and then the third time you see it and now you really want to go and see that movie.”
A version of this article originally appeared in the February issue of Chief Content Officer. Sign up to receive your free subscription to our bimonthly, print magazine.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
The post What B2B Brands Need to Know to Succeed on LinkedIn appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
]]>Communication has changed. This may sound like a trendy thing to say at a cocktail party for a lot of people, but for marketers, it should be a wakeup call.
We cannot afford to be left behind. We must keep up with our audiences. Over the last 10 years “keeping up” has led to the universal adoption of email marketing, search engine marketing, and social media marketing.
Now?
Your audience has already adopted messaging platforms and your business must make the leap. Those that do so early will reap huge rewards. Think email marketing a decade ago. The cost to acquire a qualified subscriber was only a few cents, and email engagement was astronomically higher than it is today. Fast forward to present, and this very same opportunity has presented itself. It’s time to take the leap and cross the chasm. Those that don’t will soon resemble the person STILL buying ads in the classifieds section of your local newspaper.
Facebook Messenger is the fastest growing channel in the world. With 1.3B users, it is already larger than Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest combined. It’s also the only channel of this magnitude that isn’t saturated with marketers (yet).
Even if you already understand the opportunities presented by messaging platforms, we will get to this in a bit, hold your horses, it can be a bit confusing. How can businesses engage with customers in this new place where meaningful conversation is held?
Chatbots are the answer. While great for customer service, they are exceptional for marketing. With a little forward thinking, Chatbots and messaging platforms can become a huge sales channel for any business.
You might be wondering why we’re so jazzed about Messenger & Chatbots for businesses? The short answer is that people love Messenger and they prefer to interact with both friends and brands on the platform.
We occasionally speak with people who say things like “no one uses Messenger”, or “I actually prefer my Gmail Promotions Tab”. Listen, these people are not the early majority. Heck they might not even be the late majority. According to Simon Sinek, “the only reason these people buy touch tone phones is because you can’t buy rotary phones anymore.”
Take Facebook Messenger for example. It’s growing like crazy!
If you throw in WeChat, WhatsApp, and other popular platforms, you have a massive market of potential customers.
But wait, there’s more! You still have an opportunity to become an early adopter, considering far fewer than 13.5% of businesses have made the discovery. While most other channels face declining engagement and rising advertising costs due to saturation, Facebook Messenger is just getting started.
Not sold yet? Here’s a few more benefits:
We have built Chatbots to solve many different problems. From helping customers pick the right size electric skateboard to capturing leads using webinars as a lead magnet.
Our Chatbots are great for delivering content! Say goodbye to heavy reliance on email marketing.
That said, there are three main types of messenger bots we like to build for clients:
Here’s an example of method #2 above. It’s a coupon bot we built for bottom of funnel retargeting. The user clicks a Facebook ad and is taken directly to Messenger, initiating the bot experience. Here’s where things get interesting. This took a 5.6x lifetime ROAS up to 48.2x in less than a month!
We’ve seen some mind-blowing results from Chatbots.
Join Samir ElKamouny, Co-Founder of Fetch & Funnel, next Thursday 2/15 at 1:00 PM EST for a webinar that will show you exactly how modern marketers are using Facebook Messenger & Chatbots to increase sales and leads at a fraction of the cost.
He’ll Be Covering:
You do not want to miss this! Sign up here.
About the Author: Matt Morin is a Senior Account Manager at Fetch & Funnel.
]]>The post 16 Apps and Tools to Keep You Productive and Sane appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
]]>A few months ago, I committed to evaluating my personal tech stack (yeah, I know that’s an odd collection of words, but you’ll see what I mean). My workload felt out of control. My goal was to be more intentional about finding worthwhile shortcuts and work-arounds, as well as trying to make life simpler – an undertaking I jokingly call Clare 2.0.
How do super-creative and productive people get through the daily grind of meetings, deadlines, and emails, yet still manage to preserve their creative energy? They, in part, optimize technology. This post focuses on the tools I’ve tested on my journey toward a more productive life.
AirTable has proved amazingly useful for editorial calendar planning, mostly because it’s an insanely elegant combination of spreadsheet and database. While on the surface it seems like a spreadsheet, you can program columns/cells to hold pre-defined tags, checklists, and even files. (Free and paid versions; I use free)
Mixmax is a Gmail extension that automates many of the tasks I did manually. For example, I can send a dozen possible meeting times to someone via email, and when the recipient chooses one of the times presented, it automatically sends us both an invitation. I also use Mixmax to set up email triggers, embed surveys and polls into an email, and write editorial due date reminders to be sent in the future. (Free and paid versions; I use paid)
FollowUp.CC is a Chrome extension in the same category of tools as Mixmax, but with a singular focus: setting reminders. Use it to set a reminder-bookmark on a webpage you want to revisit over the weekend, to remind yourself to follow up on an email, or even to snooze an email in your inbox for hours or days.
The FollowUp.CC app sits in a pane at the right of your screen, always ready to record reminders, and even using artificial intelligence to guess when an email merits a reminder. It’s a useful tool but given the decent amount of overlap with Mixmax features (e.g., email tracking & scheduling), I’m not sure I’ll stick with it. (Paid version only)
Asana helps me manage tasks and deadlines across projects and teams – my single source of truth for what I need to do on any given day. (Paid version only)
.@asana helps me manage tasks & deadlines across projects & teams, says @clare_mcd
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Evernote is an oldie but goodie. On a tip from journalist-turned-marketer, Cameron Conaway, I’ve started using it to keep track of articles and links useful for upcoming content or projects. Setting up a reasonable folder system is essential to make Evernote work well. (Free and paid; I use paid)
Emergent Task Planner is my favorite low-tech tool from the suite put together by my friend Dave Seah that I absolutely love and cannot live without. I order the ETP pads, which are made with a nice, thick paper and custom inks, from Amazon and use one page per day to organize myself when I arrive at my desk. The ETP forces you to think clearly about what is realistically possible in one day and to map out how you plan to accomplish each task. (The ETP isn’t a new tool for me. I’ve been using it for years.) (Free and paid; I use paid.)
I use @daveseah's Emergent Task Planner to organize myself when I arrive at my desk. @clare_mcd #productivity
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TIP: Writing my daily plan before I open email helps me focus on what is realistic and necessary. I like to start with a blank sheet of paper (ETP) rather than staring at a cluttered online to-do list. Each day you begin fresh.
Auto Text Expander is one of those tools I never knew I needed until I got into the swing of it. Use it to auto-populate text you write repeatedly. Examples? Typing out dial-in instructions. Writing the company boilerplate. Describing what I’m looking for in a freelance writer. Each blurb of text has a matching abbreviation you choose; type that abbreviation into Gmail and the app auto-populates your pre-packaged text. (For example, when I type “#FCC,” it auto-populates dial-in instructions, and when I type #Yo, it drops in a short paragraph about the details of my business.) (Free)
IFTTT or If This Then That helps you align different apps to automate key tasks. For example, I use it to save the receipts received via Gmail into a folder without having to manually tag them. And you don’t have to be a programming whiz to figure it out. Browse the IFTTT library to use applets others have already made. (Free)
Contact Sync for Gmail is a tool with which I have a love-hate relationship. Yes, Contact Sync for Gmail does merge all your contacts across multiple platforms and devices so that you can see them all in G-contacts. The problem is it somehow linked me to a bunch of people on Messenger that I don’t need to connect with. (Paid)
Focus@Will offers “scientifically engineered music proven to increase focus and reduce distractions.” It’s a tool written about in Chief Content Officer magazine years ago. (I wish I could remember who recommended it.) I stopped paying the monthly subscription about 18 months ago when I thought I had found a few similar channels on Pandora. Not so. In January I re-subscribed after missing the flow state Focus@Will helps me achieve. And I’ve noticed the difference in the intervening time. (Paid)
RescueTime has a lot of features I don’t use because they overlap with other apps I prefer. But the one saving quality of this app is my weekly email that tells me how well I behaved while sitting at my computer. (And it can get ugly.) Look at my screencap and you’ll see that the week in question was much more productive than the one before it. (To be fair, I took some vacation time the week prior.) Even better, you can dive into analytics and see where you’re blowing your time. (I spent nearly 11 hours on email. Wow.) (Paid and free; I use free)
.@rescuetime tells me how well I behaved while sitting at my computer, says @clare_mcd.
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TIP: Always add apps one at a time to your toolkit, particularly plug-ins or add-ons designed to function as an appendage to existing apps like Chrome, Google Drive, or Gmail. The reason? Some apps have a way of interfering negatively with existing apps, and if you add more than one at a time, you may not understand which one is giving you the problem. I have found Gmail plug-ins to be the buggiest of all, including those sanctioned by Google and accessible in your Gmail settings menu.
The following apps aren’t exactly professional tools, but they help me to keep my head clear and focused by supporting good habits and keeping the less productive ones at bay.
Insight Timer is a daily meditation that helps me to focus my energy and let go of stress. I’ve tried a lot of meditation apps, including the wildly popular app called Headspace, but my favorite is Insight Timer. It has a vast collection of guided meditations, as well as meditative music to put you in the zone. (Free + in-app purchases)
Stitcher is a great resource for podcasts. Have a mindless task you’re putting off? Plug into a great podcast and crank that dreaded chore out. Listening to podcasts helps me to complete the stuff I hate to do most (paying bills, washing dishes, folding laundry). My recent favorites are: Criminal, Ear Hustle and Endless Thread. (Free or paid)
Alarmed is an app for GPS-based reminders. Set up Alarmed so that your phone reminds you to complete a specific task when you reach a designated location. (For what it’s worth, I’ve heard that Google Keep does something similar, but I’ve never used it.) Alarmed also has all the basic features of a to-do list and reminder app. (Free and paid)
Block Site forces you to have self-control in ignoring distractions. Perhaps you have a Reddit problem, or you mindlessly check in on Facebook during the day? Block Site lets you block URLs, whether permanently or during certain hours. On busy days I shut down all social media using Block Site. (What you’ll find mildly shocking when you do this is the extent to which your fingers will type a URL — almost as a tic — before your simian brain has registered it.) (Free + in-app purchases)
Apple Watch has saved me on a number of occasions. I have a problem of hyper-focus. I fall so deep down the hole of concentration that I forget everything around me. (I have on multiple occasions forgotten to pick up my young children from school — a badge of shame.) The watch buzzes my wrist when an important meeting or event is upcoming. And when I lose my phone inside my home/office (not an unusual event), the watch helps me locate it. (Paid)
Am I really Clare 2.0? Actually, yes, even if modestly so. Some apps and tools offer small improvements, while others are significant. The tools that have made the biggest difference since adoption are: AirTable, Mixmax, Asana, Emergent Task Planner from David Seah, and the Apple Watch.
And if you’re really not into improving productivity, there’s always Boss Detector. It uses a motion detector on your computer camera to automatically minimize all time-wasting activities on your screen when someone walks up behind you and to push your real work to the foreground.
Carry on.
Editor’s note: No one post can provide all relevant tools in the space. Feel free to include additional tools in the comments (from your company or ones that you have used).
Gain skills and how-to advice to make you more productive – and your content marketing program more successful – at Content Marketing World this September in Cleveland, Ohio. Register today using code BLOG100 to save $100.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
The post 16 Apps and Tools to Keep You Productive and Sane appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
]]>They willingly lower prices to get people in the door.
Each monthly charge is only a tiny fraction of their costs.
That means it could take months for them to breakeven on each customer.
Unfortunately, most people that sign up don’t stick around that long.
People who sign up for a new desktop app or install a new mobile one often leave just as fast as they sign-up.
If apps can’t keep people around, they’ll slip into negative cash flow. They pay out more than they bring in on a per-user basis.
So it almost doesn’t matter how their Series A was or how much of their angel round is still in the bank.
Because they’re going to blow through it pretty quickly.
There are a few ways to fix this.
But one of my favorite over the years is remarketing.
It scales better than most online marketing tactics.
You can create the audiences and campaigns once. And then they’ll automatically run based on actions people do, or don’t, take with your app.
Thankfully, Google has recently introduced a few new features to make this tactic even more powerful.
I’m going to show you how to use those to increase retention and lower churn once and for all.
But first, you need to understand why remarketing or retargeting is a powerful churn antidote.
An old study came out years ago that shed light on the problems most apps face.
One of the most surprising findings was that up to 70% of free trial signups are “accidental.” Meaning, they never actually consider becoming a lead or customer.
In other words, most apps are already behind right out of the gate.
Despite this example’s age, you know the behavior to be true.
Think about the last time you signed up for a free trial.
If you were interested in a new task management app, for example, you probably signed up for a few different ones.
And then you maybe chose one.
The depressing part for product people is that these numbers continue to fall of a cliff after each day.
Apps only have a 21% retention rate on the very first day. It falls to only 1.89% by the end of three months.
Think about that for a second.
You probably have to hang on to a customer for at least 90 days to break even. Except, only about 1-2% of the people signing up will stick around.
There are similar stats across the board. It doesn’t matter where you look.
Localytics found that mobile app retention is a little closer to 20% after 90 days.
Again, still not good. Retaining 20% of your customers is no way to build a thriving, profitable business.
But you know what?
This shouldn’t be a surprise.
This is similar to other companies when you think about it.
Ecommerce companies routinely see 2% conversion rates. Meaning, the vast majority of site visitors they get will leave without purchasing a single thing.
Ecommerce companies are also similar because they need to sell a TON of products to become profitable.
Average one-off sales around ~$15 bucks isn’t going to cut it.
They either need to drastically increase that average order value. Or, they need to keep people around for the long haul so they continue buying.
All of that means they need to use scalable marketing tactics. They can’t pick up the phone and call each person.
Which brings us back to remarketing and retargeting.
I’ll come right out and say it:
Most ads suck today.
There’s a reason why nobody pays attention ads anymore.
Just look at the number of people now using ad blocking technology. The numbers have literally exploded in the past few years.
That’s over 300 million people, up from 54 million only three years ago!
Why are people blocking ads in record numbers? Because most of them are completely irrelevant.
People hate ads because they offer nothing. And they’re completely overwhelmed by the sheer number of ads coming at them on a daily basis.
Remarketing and retargeting ads are the exception to the rule, though.
It’s typical to see the conversion rate for a marketing campaign fall over time.
People get used to seeing your ad on Facebook, for instance, so they start ignoring it.
And over time, those numbers keep getting worse and worse.
However, the conversion rates for remarketing ones actually improve.
A lot of it comes down to the ‘rule of seven.’ People need to interact with your brand several times before they’re ready to purchase.
Remarketing can do that at scale. You set it up once, then just tweak the results.
You can literally set-and-forget campaigns.
So reaching 100 users doesn’t require any extra work than reaching 100,000. Except, of course, a bigger ad budget.
First, let’s discuss a quick primer on AdWords retargeting options. Then, we’ll get into the new fun stuff you can do with them.
Retargeting ads are pretty simple on the surface.
Each new visitor that comes to your site or downloads your app gets tracked.
That tracking pixel allows you to then serve them ads.
The best part is that today’s pixels give you all kinds of control over what you send them.
So you can serve new ads based on actions or inactions within your app.
Most of the time, these retargeting ads will be display-based.
That means they’re banner ads shown across Google’s Display network that reaches over two million websites and apps.
Google’s remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA) audiences can personalize text-based search ads, too. We’ll dive into these in the next section.
The first step to setting up retargeting campaigns is to create different audiences.
These audience lists are dynamic. Meaning, people will join or leave depending on the criteria you set up.
Then, you’ll can tailor ad campaigns or different creative based on the specific audience you’re targeting.
Login to AdWords and navigate over to the settings. Inside, you’ll see “Shared Library.” And under that, you’ll see the “Audience manager.”
Here is where you can create or edit all the different dynamic audience lists you’ll use.
After you get up and running, you’ll probably want to have a bunch of different audience lists.
The best approach is think about your sales funnel.
Ad campaigns should target each stage.
That way, people at the top see one offer. While people in the middle or bottom see a completely different one.
Apps need to actually go even further. Because as we’ve seen, free trial signups or app installs doesn’t count for much.
So you’ll want to create more for people who’ve started a free trial but not converted. Or, people who’ve installed the app but haven’t visited within a certain number of days.
Inside the Audience manager, look for “Remarketing” and then “Audience lists.”
Right off the bat, the second option down is “App users.” Let’s look at a few ways to set these up.
The “List Members” option is how you control the audience criteria. These settings dictate whether someone gets added here or not.
Profitable retargeting campaigns comes down to good segmentation.
The tighter the segmentation, typically the higher the conversion rate.
So you wouldn’t want to choose “All users of an app” for your first retargeting list.
Why? Because it’s too generic!
You wouldn’t be able to create personalized, relevant ads for each person on that list.
Instead, you’ll want to dig deeper into the other options on the “List members” selection.
For example, start with “Took specific actions within an app.”
Personally, I would tie these into your specific onboarding milestones.
Did someone upload their first image, yes or no? Did they send their first email campaign, yes or no?
Lincoln Murphy calls these ‘success milestones.’
They’re essentially micro-conversions that lead people from one tiny commitment to the next.
If someone progresses through all of these steps within a certain number of days, your chances of retaining them shoots up dramatically.
Which brings us to the second app option.
You can also create a retargeting list based on user recency.
In other words, has this person visited your app within the past X number of days?
Treat these like you would a drip email sequence.
It’s almost like an autoresponder.
If people visit more often, you can send them upsell notifications faster.
But if people don’t visit, you can send them re-engagement campaigns about interesting features to get them back into your app.
You can also set up retargeting audiences inside Google Analytics if you want to use website behavior. Head over to the admin panel and look for “Audience Definitions”:
Underneath, you’ll be able to create new audiences from site interactions, like pages visited.
Here, you can create new segments of people who visit your Pricing page, for example, but don’t convert.
Pretty cool, right?
All of these audiences can be created around the most common objections.
That way, you can test different ad creatives to overcome pricing questions vs. feature ones.
The sky really is the limit.
But there are a few new features that can put your ads on a whole new level.
Google’s search network ads are among the best converting channels, period.
Nothing else comes close.
A big reason is because you can target ads based on intent.
You can use the mirror the exact words someone typed in.
Google’s RLSA audiences can help you retarget search network ads.
That way, you can cue off recent interactions they’ve had with your brand.
Why is this so powerful?
People routinely buy from brands they recognize.
RSLA audiences pack two punches:
So RLSA audiences are like gold for people who’ve signed up, installed, and then neglected to do anything else.
But it gets even better.
Last year, Google released IF functions for AdWords.
These allow you to take personalization one step further.
You can create an ad template that will switch words based on someone’s condition.
For example, you can tell if they’re using a mobile device instead of a desktop one.
Then, you can change the ad text from “Get our mobile app” to “Download now.”
It provides an extra layer of detail that most other advertisers can’t match.
You can customize these further based on your previous interactions.
So ad text can be personalized based on if someone’s previously downloaded your app vs. if they’re a loyal customer vs. if they’re a new potential impulse purchase.
And best of all, it’s like dynamic text replacement. You don’t need to create a hundred different ad variations.
You just need a few. Then, you can use IF functions to do all the customization for you — automatically.
They’re also pretty easy to use once you learn the ‘language.’
You can customize based on devices or all of these retargeting audiences you just created.
And here’s where the fun starts.
Remember we discussed funnel stages?
Now, you can create search ads that can cycle through offers based on where someone is in your funnel.
Sequential retargeting can be used to start with basic offers for top-of-the-funnel people, like an ebook or guide. Then, you can get more direct the further down your funnel they get.
Now, let’s say you get someone to download or sign up for your app.
Maybe they interact with five times over the course of five days. You know you have them on the hook.
Why not try to increase the discount percentage to get them to buy before it’s too late?
Or vice versa. Someone who’s interacting more often than others will probably convert anyway.
So why not pull back on your conversion offer to save a few bucks.
Either way, you’re boosting app retention and increasing profitability across the board.
And if you’re still struggling to get people into your funnel in the first, this next tip is for you.
Retargeting ads have one great weakness.
If you want to segment each audience as much as possible, you’re going to require A LOT of people in your initial sample.
Think about it.
The number of people who have downloaded your app, gone through the first two success milestones, but haven’t been back for 10 days is going to be pretty small.
That means you constantly need to fill the top of your funnel.
You need to continually get new people to interact with your brand.
That way, you’ll get enough people down to the bottom to make these campaigns worth it.
But you’re not just going to rush off and blow your whole budget on new search ads.
CPCs might not matter in the grand scheme of things.
However, they do when you overspend on clicks that don’t go anywhere.
Instead, we want to build up these retargeting audiences for as little as possible. The cheaper per person, the better.
That’s why video views come into play.
Video views offer one of the cheapest ways to quickly build up your audiences.
Seriously, you can pay a few cents per view and pixel every person.
Head back to your “Audience manager” from earlier.
Look for the YouTube option to unlock a plethora of new targeting criteria:
You can add people to these lists based on almost any interaction they do on YouTube.
Not only is YouTube the second largest search engine on the internet.
But they get a billion views per day from mobile devices.
Beyond YouTube, you can also hook into your SDK analytics, too.
That means you can unlock new audiences based on if they’ve interacted in both places: Mobile videos and then mobile interactions.
Think about a typical marketing automation sequence.
If you can use multiple triggers like mobile video views and mobile download to know exactly where someone is in your funnel at any given time.
And that means you should know exactly which ad to serve them to get them to stick around, too.
I’ve saved the best for last.
So far we’ve been focused on just getting people into your app and sticking around for the first few days.
But that’s not enough.
Not when a huge chunk of your users will bounce within the first month.
Subscription economics mean you need customers to stay for months and months and months.
Otherwise, you don’t break even.
Any money spent so far has been a complete waste.
Well, say hello to customer match retargeting.
These audiences are created around people you know intimately.
You already have some history with them.
They’ve give you their email addresses, phone numbers, or more.
Maybe they’ve even purchased from you in the past.
The point is you have specific customer data that can now be used to continue retargeting them.
Take email addresses for example.
Now, you can combine messaging in multiple channels to keep them around.
Best case scenario, someone whips out their credit card and signs up for your app.
Awesome! Don’t stop messaging them.
You want to continue following up to make sure they know they made the right decision.
You don’t want them to get cold feet and visit a competitor’s site to check for a cheaper price.
Social ad platforms across Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn all offer some sort of ‘email match’ feature like this.
They will take the email addresses you upload, scan them against their massive library, and align as many as possible.
But Google’s email match rate far exceeds those other options.
That means they’ll be able to successfully match a greater percentage of your app users
Google also just released the ability to target addresses and phone numbers. This is perfect for mobile apps.
Many times, you can get their mobile phone number but not an email address.
So now, you have another workaround to still build up your retargeting audiences.
At the end of the day, marketing is a numbers game.
You need to get a ton of people into your funnel.
And then you make little iterative tweaks to increase the number of people moving along each step.
Boosting retention is the same way.
You should still test new product onboarding techniques, on-site messaging, and email campaigns.
But you should also use retargeting campaigns that virtually run themselves.
The trick is to make sure you’re properly segmenting people based on their interactions with your app.
Because that’s the hard part.
If you can successfully create new audiences based on user interactions, serving them the right ads at the right time becomes a breeze.
Unfortunately, most people who sign up for a new app won’t stick around.
That’s true for desktop apps and it’s even more true for mobile ones.
Retention numbers across most studies are grim.
Some might be as high as 20% of users stick around. While others go as low as ~2%.
That means your job switches at a certain point.
You need to go from just worrying about acquisition-based channels, to retention-based ones.
Getting people to look at your app might not be the problem.
The issue that’s undercutting your profitability is your churn rate.
I love using retargeting campaigns because you don’t have to manually run them.
I won’t lie:
There is a lot of work up front to get everything set up. You have to invest a lot of time and energy planning out your audiences.
But from there, it’s all downhill.
Lining up your ad creatives becomes easy because you know exactly what each audience wants.
And then once you start them, you just have to monitor performance.
You never have to manually fuss with adding or removing people from each audience.
The ad campaigns run themselves.
That means you can get back to improving the product.
And you can be confident knowing that you already have campaigns on autopilot that are doing the work for you.
What are your most successful retargeting campaigns to date?
About the Author: Neil Patel is the cofounder of Neil Patel Digital.
]]>A billboard here. A radio or television commercial there. Perhaps a print ad or two thrown in for good measure. That was your marketing strategy, and it worked.
Want to watch the latest episode of The Dukes of Hazzard? You had to sit through that commercial for cereal. Enjoying an article in the new issue of HBR? You at least glanced at the ad for the new Volkswagen as you flipped the pages.
Marketing messages were everywhere as they are today, but one thing has fundamentally shifted in favor of the consumer: they now have the ability to tune them out, skip them entirely, or block them completely.
DVR allows viewers to fast-forward through commercials. Podcast and YouTube ads can be skipped immediately or after a few seconds. Streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime are commercial-free. Good old-fashioned terrestrial radio is on life support.
And let’s not forget about AdBlock and similar services. A tiny extension or a standalone browser dedicated to better user experience like Brave lets you stop them in their tracks. These tools either block or filter advertising content from websites, pages, and apps. Consider:
We’ve entered the Age of Ad Blocking. And banner blindness. And instant gratification. Patience may be a virtue, but it seems to be in dwindling supply. Ain’t nobody got time for commercials and ads. (Unless it’s the Super Bowl).
And if you think the solution is using an adblock wall – restricting or prohibiting access to content until users turn it off – think again: 74% will simply leave your site.
It might seem a catch-22. You need ads to market your products and/or monetize your website. You need to attract visitors to click those ads. But those same visitors claim to despise ads.
Look at the reasons why people use ad blockers for some quick insight. According to PageFair:
And according to MarketingSherpa:
And according to Hubspot:
You’ll notice quite a bit of overlap. People don’t like sketchy ads, intrusive ads, ads that negatively affect page performance, ads that are irrelevant, ads that are annoying, and more.
What takeaways can you glean from that? It’s a straightforward list of what not to do with your advertising and messaging.
So, is marketing dead? Far from it.
Despite the seemingly overwhelming odds, marketers are still able to get their message across in an ad-blocking world. How? By adapting to the changing landscape. If the old ways don’t work, you have to find innovative new ways. Intrusive ads that interrupt the user experience are out. Honest, timely, and relevant “ads” are in.
Say hello the rise of Digital Advertising 3.0.
In the simplest terms, an influencer is a content creator or personality with a relatively large following on a given platform. Their popularity or expertise gives them a great deal of clout with their fans.
But they need not be celebrities in the traditional sense of the word. Individuals like Kim Kardashian, Katy Perry, and Justin Bieber have tens of millions of followers, but that doesn’t automatically make them a good fit for you and your brand.
In fact, research has shown that influencers with fewer than 1000 followers – often called micro-influencers – saw likes 8% of the time, and comments 0.5% of the time on their posts and shares. Celebrities with 10+ million fans? Those numbers plummet to 1.6% and 0.04% respectively.
Influencer marketing is a partnership with an influencer to review, promote, or link to your content, brand, and products. It’s widely used and considered one of the most cost-effective and powerful strategies used today. Interest in it grew 90x between 2013 and 2016, and doubled again in the first nine months of 2017. 2018 looks to be no different.
And because there is no “ad” in a sense, nothing is blocked or filtered. This puts your message in front of as many eyes as possible, and if you’ve done your homework beforehand in finding the right influencer, it’s a targeted audience.
If you haven’t tried it yet, there’s no time like the present. A few things to remember:
Done right, influencer marketing bypasses ad-blockers and delivers marketing that people actually want to see. Teenagers on YouTube, for example, trust the opinion and recommendations of influencers more than celebrities. They relate better to them, and believe the influencer understands them as well or better than their friends.
Traditional online ads try and stand out from the background. They might use a different font or color. They might flash, or wiggle, or bounce. They might autoplay a video or audio clip.
They want you to notice them. And that’s their downfall: traditional display ads are very easy for blockers to identify and filter.
That’s where native advertising comes in.
Native ads mimic the digital environment in which they appear. They try and blend in. They don’t want to interrupt the user experience in any way, and ideally, they don’t even want you to notice it’s an ad at all. In fact, they might only be discernible as an ad by the Sponsored or Promoted tag most sites place on them.
Click a native ad, and it usually leads to a page that looks and feels like a regular blog post or article. It can easily be shared.
But it still has a message. The post includes or features the brand, product, or service being promoted in some way. It often has a call-to-action such as signing up to receive a special report or newsletter.
You’ve encountered native ads in your daily web browsing, even if you don’t realize it. They’re very popular on news and aggregate sites:
Scroll down the top stories on Yahoo, and you might not even notice the “Sponsored” tag on the post about an investment opportunity. It looks like any other article (with perhaps a bit of a clickbait headline).
Click on it, and you’re taken to a landing page that looks like a blog post. It mentions that Jeff Bezos – the richest man in the world – is pouring millions into a new tech innovation. Others are following his lead.
What is it? Just enter your email and download the free report.
The post is a native ad for The Motley Fool to collect leads for their financial services. And it works because there’s nothing to block. Users choose to click it.
Google search ads are another powerful example of native ads at work. For any given search query, you’ll be presented with thousands of organic results…and a few paid ones, too. These are identified by the Ad tag, but otherwise look exactly like a regular search result.
Facebook in-feed ads are considered the most lucrative type. As you’re scrolling through your account feed, you’ll encounter them all the time, but they blend in with posts from your friends, family, and pages you follow.
Some are a bit more obvious, like this ad for ChinesePod, an online platform to learn Mandarin. It’s definitely an ad, but because it appears in your feed rather than your sidebar – and includes like, shares, and comments – it takes on the appearance of a regular post.
Others appear decidedly un-ad like, like this one promoting the new Netflix film The Cloverfield Paradox. You’ll notice the Sponsored tag if you look for it, otherwise it just seems like someone posted the trailer for a cool new sci-fi movie. From the stats at the bottom, we can see hundreds of thousands have watched it, thousands have liked it, and hundreds have shared and commented on it.
In essence, it’s an ad that’s not an ad. And that’s the most powerful and effective type of ad you can create.
With this “ad”, Netflix has generated interest, excitement, and buzz for its latest big budget release.
Yahoo’s recent Perception Study found 4 key components to a native ad that produces a positive impression:
Native ads can generate a click-through rate (CTR) 4x higher than non-native display ads, and they’re predicted to generate 74% of ad revenue by 2021.
Want to experiment with Google search ads? Go through Google. Facebook in-feed ads? Contact Facebook. For various news and aggregate sites, you’ll need to work with a native ads network such as Native Ads, Outbrain, Taboola, or Nativo.
And if you want some inspiration, check out a few spectacular native ad examples.
Native ads are not a fix-all. You still need to find the right platform(s) for your target market, and deliver relevant and timely “ads”.
You don’t need me to tell you just how popular social media is today. We spend more time on social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Twitter, and others than we do on any other type. It’s our favorite online activity.
There are over 2 billion monthly active users on Facebook, 800 million on Instagram, 500 million on LinkedIn, 330 million on Twitter, and 178 million on Snapchat. Worldwide, there are 3.03 billion active social media users (compared to 3.82 billion internet users). That’s a massive potential reach and audience.
So it makes sense that social ads are taking over.
Everyone spends time there. And it’s relatively easy to blend in and make your ads appear less like ads and more like shares, posts, and tweets.
Every social media platform now offers the ability to advertise and market in some way. Facebook makes the majority of its revenue – the vast majority – via selling ads space to businesses. In 2017, it earned $39.94 billion in ad revenue, up 49% from the $26.85 billion it made in 2016.
The story is the same for Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others. Ad revenue is big, big bucks. But as an SMB, you don’t have to spend millions, or even thousands, to get in on that action.
On Facebook, you can work with sponsored posts, in-feed video or image ads, or more traditional banner ads. Instagram? Sponsored posts, Stories, or video ads. Twitter? Promoted tweets and hashtags. YouTube? Video and banner ads. LinkedIn ads? The #1 rated platform by marketers for B2B leads. You’re spoiled for choice. Where does your market hang out online?
And let’s not forget Snapchat. Its growth may have slowed recently, but it’s still a tremendously popular platform for tweens, teens, and millennials. It provides traditional ads, Stories, geofilters, and lenses to spread awareness, increase engagement, and have fun. It may not seem so at first glance, but Snapchat and business can be a match made in heaven.
Social ads don’t strike social users as ads at all. They’re part of the experience. It’s marketing in a more organic, natural, and unobtrusive way. The hardest part is choosing the right platform and the right ad type to reach and resonate with your customers, not deciding whether you should try it in the first place.
Global social ad spend doubled from $16 billion in 2014 to $31 billion in 2016, and is expected to have grown another 26% in 2017. Big bucks. Big results. And nary an ad-blocker to be seen, because the ads are part of the platform experience itself.
That’s winning the advertising game the 2018 way.
You’ve no doubt noticed the proliferation of in-app ads over the past few years. Any time you download and install a free app, you’re most likely going to be subjected to at least a few ads. It’s only fair, right?
Apps are big business. As the saying goes, there’s an app for that. Gaming, entertainment, finance, travel, reviews, meditation, exercise, and on and on. You need something, anything? An app exists to help you with it.
And in 2018, in-app ads are the fuel that drives the mobile app engine.
As you can see in the graphic above, video ads, display ads, and native ads account for 56% of app revenue sources. Developers need to make a living, too.
But it is a very fine line. If you’ve ever encountered an in-app ad, you’ve also likely been annoyed by one. There’s only so much space on a smartphone or tablet screen. Losing any to an ad can be irritating and frustrating.
So what’s the secret sauce? Many marketers and developers are seeing positive results with rewarded video ads.
App users are offered a choice: watch a brief video ad in exchange for an in-app reward (a free upgrade, additional life, downloadable template, exclusive content, etc), or skip it. No coercion. No aggressive sell. It’s entirely up to the individual whether they watch or not.
But those that do agree are actually seeing your ad. Typically 30 seconds or less, the videos play while the user patiently waits and watches. It’s a captive and willing audience for marketers.
Services like AdColony and Unity can connect advertisers and publishers in the app world to the benefit of both…and the app users themselves. That’s a triple win. Everyone’s happy.
As with any type of advertising, actively work to improve it over time. Monitor. Tweak. Manage. Improve.
Perhaps the original ad-blocker killer, content marketing is still going strong. Even without the existence of blockers, it would still be a crucial cog in your digital marketing efforts.
Providing valuable, targeted, and useful content for free is a great way to spread awareness of your brand, increase engagement, build authority and expertise, and generate both goodwill and leads. Creating and sharing blog posts, infographics, videos, podcasts, and more is the ultimate method for winning in the digital arena.
It’s not salesy. It’s not pushy, or aggressive, or in-your-face. But pound for pound, content marketing delivers like no other. According to the Content Marketing Institute:
Content marketing is a long game. It’s not based on clicks or conversions, per se. Use it to engage, connect, and build relationships that you can leverage into sales and revenue down the road. When it comes to business in 2018, just getting known is more than half the battle.
And because the ad is the content itself, blockers won’t block, filters won’t filter, and your audience is being advertised to without realizing it. They get something valuable from you, and you get to deliver your message to them.
If you market online at all, content marketing should be a cornerstone of your strategy whether you’re concerned about ad-blockers or not.
I could go on in great detail about other methods to slay the ad-blocker beast, but I’m sure what we’ve already covered is more than enough to get you started. Suffice to say, there are other channels to explore:
Keep looking, and you’ll find plenty of additional tips, tricks, and channels to beat the blockers.
If you’re only pushing ads the traditional ways – popups, banners, sidebars – you’re doing it wrong.
Advertising is changing. Evolving. Understand why people are blocking to better understand how to win them back. The idea isn’t to sneak past the blockers anymore, but rather to make them unnecessary.
People are using them because of performance – some studies suggest ad-blockers can reclaim 24 hours annually by making sites load faster – privacy, and security concerns. Keep that in mind when designing and launching your ad campaigns.
They don’t like repetitive display ads. They don’t like retargeting ads that follow them around.
They don’t like popups, before-content ads, and banners.
In the United States, 54% of ad-blocker users feel ads are annoying and/or irrelevant, 48% believe there are just too many ads, and 47% feel that they take up too much screen space.
The good news? 83% of respondents in a Hubspot survey agreed that not all ads are bad, but they want the ability to block the obnoxious ones.
The solution? Make sure your ads are not the obnoxious ones. Pay attention to what they hate, and create accordingly.
How have you adapted to the ad-blocking age? What methods have you used to get your message across?
About the Author: Neil Patel is the cofounder of Neil Patel Digital.
]]>The post Go Behind the Scenes of Coca-Cola’s Storytelling appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
]]>Kate Santore took the stage at Content Marketing World to share Coca-Cola’s storytelling ethos – and in the process inspired marketers to ask, “What if?”
“Sharing our strategies and approach to marketing has been a tradition at Coca-Cola to open the door for other brands to learn from our 130 years of marketing experience,” Kate says. “Sharing this ‘thought-ware’ collectively raises the bar for every brand and therefore makes us strive for bigger, better, bolder.”
Read on for the Chief Content Officer magazine interview with the senior integrated marketing content manager at The Coca-Cola Company.
Santore: At Coca-Cola, we want to create Coca-Cola stories and not stories by Coca-Cola. That holds true when our product is a character in the story with a credible role to play. There are four typical archetypes that we look to: object of desire, embodiment of an attitude, social connector, and functional offering or benefit. If you read a script or even partner-created content and say to yourself, “Can I tell this story without Coca-Cola?” and the answer is yes, then it’s a not a Coca-Cola story.
If the story can be told without @CocaCola, then it's not a Coca-Cola story, says @Kate_McLaughlin.
Click To Tweet
Santore: Walking a tightrope is a great way to describe it, but I don’t think it’s a balancing act reserved only for large iconic brands, but for every brand. I’m challenged every day to think about how we drive relevance and reconsideration for our brands today, tomorrow, and for the next 100 years. We must balance managing today while inventing tomorrow, constantly weighing what our brands stand for against the current conversation to see how/if we can add value to the narrative.
Santore: We begin every brief with a storytelling thought-starter question “what if?” This gives us a jumping-off point to push ourselves to ask daring questions. “What if we could bridge divides?” “What if we wanted to buy the world a Coke?” “What if we wanted to change perceptions?” I love starting every brief with this discussion. It gives us the permission to dream, innovate, and reimagine.
.@CocaCola begins every creative brief w/ a #storytelling thought-starter question: What if? @Kate_McLaughlin
Click To Tweet
Santore: At Coca-Cola, we developed a strategic approach to every campaign we call our Liquid & Linked Marketing and Communications agenda. This is an idea so fertile and contagious that it can spread across every consumer story, every conversation, every experience, but the idea must always be deeply linked to our strategy and our business. All teams hold themselves to the campaign’s Liquid and Linked idea.
Santore: Oohh, I wish I could tell you I knew all the answers to stay super productive. Two habits I try really hard to practice: First, I block time on my calendar to eat lunch and think. This blows in the face of “never eat alone,” but I’m an introvert living in an extroverted world and I need that 30 minutes to recharge, look at interesting content to inspire me, and think about marketing challenges in front of me. We can so easily get lost in reaction mode; this habit forces me to think proactively.
#Productivity tip from @Kate_McLaughlin: I block time on my calendar to eat lunch and think.
Click To Tweet
Second, when I leave the office for the evening, I like to leave the work there. Now, that’s not to say that I’m not on the phone with my agency partners at 11 p.m. some nights, but most evenings I try to close the email. You need to recharge in order to come in ready to kick butt the next morning.
Santore: I’m inspired by my competition – every other brand vying for consumers’ attention. I look at the work of other brands each week and distribute it to my team in an email with the subject line “Work That Makes Me Jealous.” I am by nature very competitive and this exercise keeps pushing the bar higher and higher.
Here’s an excerpt from Kate’s talk:
A version of this article originally appeared in the February issue of Chief Content Officer. Sign up to receive your free subscription to our bimonthly, print magazine.
Be inspired and learn the inside story from successful marketing leaders from the main stage and dozens of breakout rooms at Content Marketing World 2018 this September in Cleveland, Ohio. Register today.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
The post Go Behind the Scenes of Coca-Cola’s Storytelling appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
]]>I shoot for over 3,000 words in almost all of them. Sometimes, I’ll even go over 10,000 words.
Because over the years, I’ve seen that those bring in the most traffic.
This isn’t new or unique. Many people have found success in going long.
But here’s the thing that most people miss:
Just because something is long doesn’t mean it’s going to rank well.
Length is often a correlation, not a causation.
Many times, there are other factors that you need to get right, first.
Without those, it doesn’t matter how long you’ll go. You’ll always struggle.
Especially when you apply this to Skyscraper content.
These are often tens of thousands of words long. They take weeks to plan, publish, and promote.
And unfortunately, they’re not foolproof.
Skyscraper content can and will fail. I’ll show you why in this article, along with a few tips to help your next one avoid the same fate.
I’ve been doing SEO for over a decade now.
Republishing old content has always been around in one form or another.
You’d analyze SERP competition for different keywords, spot some weaknesses, and then launch new resources that were better, longer, and more in-depth.
However, Brian Dean gets the credit for revamping and formalizing this process into Skyscraper content.
The process is pretty straightforward, really.
Here are the three official steps:
Brian then shows a few examples of where this has worked beautifully.
His Ranking Factors post, for example, saw massive success in only a few weeks:
Organic traffic from search engines also doubled within a few weeks:
Now, I have used this tons of time since its debut to great effect.
I can vouch for its validity.
But I also have something most people don’t.
There are reasons that almost all of my Skyscraper guides work. While many others struggle or fail.
Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as one, two, three.
There is some context missing from this equation that I’ll share with you.
And the first is your brand.
I’ve launched several multi-million dollar businesses.
The blog has been a large part of the success for each.
But do you want to know a secret?
None of them has been an overnight success.
Blogs, like businesses, take a long time to build up. That’s especially true if you’re in a competitive niche.
That’s why I tell people it takes two years for content marketing to pay off.
Most people don’t have that kind of time to wait. I totally get it.
But in that case, they’re just better off using AdWords to instantly drive leads.
Because content marketing is only getting harder and harder.
Search engines have evolved a lot over the past two decades.
However, the underlying principles haven’t really changed all that much.
Skyscrapers often fail because people are neglecting to take all of this into account.
That’s why I love this tweet from Ross Hudgens:
10x content is great, but if searcher satisfaction happens at 1x, you won't beat the big brand who commands the first click.
— Ross Hudgens (@RossHudgens) December 20, 2016
Basically, he’s saying that content isn’t ranked based on quality alone.
Instead, it often comes down to who’s publishing it.
Unfortunately, the website’s brand and authority often takes precedence over an individual post.
That means you could make the best resource in the world on your subject. But if you go up against even mediocre stuff from Walmart or Starbucks, you’re toast.
A large company’s underlying brand strength and domain authority will almost always outperform your site. No matter how good your Skyscraper is.
That’s why I say it takes two years for content marketing to work.
Not because you can’t publish or get content indexed quickly. That can happen within a few hours.
However, it’s realistically going to take years to build up enough recognition and authority for you to start competing for queries that matter.
Keywords in your industry follow the 80/20 rule. There are a handful that often send the most leads and sales.
The problem is that they’re also probably really competitive. So you’re not going to rank for them within a few years.
You can’t just rank for those terms, though, to succeed. You also need to get people to click.
That means you have to give them a reason to select you over all those other brands they already recognize.
And that’s not easy.
The Halo Effect is a bias that clouds people’s judgment. If someone is attractive, for example, people think they’re also more knowledgeable.
This same bias plays out online as brand bias.
People naturally gravitate towards brands they recognize in the search engines. They think their content is better or more trustworthy. Even when it isn’t.
Larry Kim ran an experiment last year that showed how brand bias affects conversion rates.
Repeat visitors to a website “convert 2-3x higher than first-time visitors.”
That’s why you build a sales funnel with your ad campaigns.
Trying to get people to convert immediately, when they don’t know you, is a losing proposition.
It would be incredibly expensive based on those conversion rates above.
Instead, your first goal is simply to develop recognition. Then, you rely on remarketing campaigns to ultimately convert them when ready.
Only after they’ve developed that brand recognition.
If you wanted to compare your website against another, you’d pull up their link profile.
This will show you different off-site authority metrics. So you can quickly see whether you’re in the same ballpark or not.
“Domain authority” is a good, high-level measurement to simplify things. But you’d want to dig into the details, like the number of unique root domains, to get a full picture.
Let’s compare three random tire companies to see how this works:
All else being equal, Tire Rack is the dominant competitor here.
They have almost twice as many followed linking root domains and linking C blocks as the next competitor.
That means if you’re thinking about building a Skyscraper for something related to “discount tire costs,” you better watch out for them!
Because there’s no way you’re probably going to outrank them. No matter how good your “discount tire cost” calculator is.
So what do you do in this situation?
Don’t keep doubling-down on Skyscrapers, according to Ross. Instead, tells you to go back to building up domain authority, first.
“The answer in this situation is not to create the most amazing tool post ever: it’s likely that you should build domain authority elsewhere and come back to fight another day.”
Let’s take this back to Brian Dean’s original post.
Again, this method works and I have a ton of respect for Brian.
But what he left out of that three-step sequence was a critical factor: Authority.
The Backlinko website has over 100,000 backlinks from 10,000+ different websites!
That means Brian can do things you can’t.
He can get away with stuff you can’t.
It might take you weeks or months of work to scratch the surface of a search query. Meanwhile, Brian can publish a post and have it above yours within hours.
The same applies to a lot of my domains.
We can publish something on Kissmetrics, NeilPatel.com, or Crazy Egg, and have it dominate the SERPs within days.
Not just because it’s the best resource on that topic. Don’t worry, it will be. ;)
But also because the overall brand recognition and authority of these websites has been built up over years and years and years.
That’s the first hurdle to clear when executing a Skyscraper.
Unfortunately, there are still a few others.
Starting with the page-level targeting that you’re going after now.
Authority scores aren’t just applied to your domain and entire website.
They can also apply to your individual pages, too.
It works almost exactly like the process we just saw.
However, now it’s focused on your page vs. a competitor’s page.
Let’s take a look at two page’s trying to rank for the same term:
Generally speaking, the website with the stronger domain and page authority will win. Not always, of course. But most of the time.
So let’s see how these two compare:
See?
Again, it’s not even close. Brian’s page authority is just too much for Searchmetrics.
So right out of the gates, it doesn’t look good for them.
It’s going to take a ton of work to try and double the sites linking to their page, for example.
But that’s not the only issue at play when you analyze individual webpages.
All along, Google wants to give users the best answer to their query.
Now, what does that mean? How do you define ‘best’?
Typically, it’s based on search intent.
In other words, Google is trying to figure out what you’re looking for. They’re trying to interpret the query — even if you don’t use the exact words.
And many cases, companies trying to compete for those keywords miss the mark.
So the content they’re producing doesn’t actually line up with what people are searching for.
Let me show you a perfect example.
Here are the first few results you get after searching for “best analytics software.”
The first three are paid ads. So they’re paying to show up there.
The last one is actually the first organic result.
Now, here’s the problem:
The first three paid ads are all getting it wrong!
If someone searches for “best” anything, chances are, they’re looking for a comparison.
They’re trying to weigh up alternatives between different choices.
What they don’t want to see is just a bunch of tools calling themselves the best.
That’s why those companies are paying to show up on this query, while G2 Crowd is getting the exposure for free.
They’re the only one who’s actually answering the search query correctly.
You don’t just want to rank for a certain keyword. You want to get clicks!
And if your page content is targeting the wrong keyword, your chances of both ranking or getting clicks falls off a cliff.
There is also recent data that suggests your SERP click-through rate (CTR) can influence rankings.
SEOs will always show you a SERP click distribution graph like this, that displays how most clicks go towards the first few positions on a SERP.
However, as you can tell, that’s an old example.
Consumer behavior has changed. We’re more willing to scroll or hunt for the right result.
So the distribution from the first position to the tenth is more balanced today.
Recently, we’ve started picking up details that Google is watching CTR as a quality measure.
Google confirms watching clicks to evaluate results quality. FYI Google still won't say if clicks used as rank signal pic.twitter.com/jzNGc5reQk
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) March 25, 2015
In other words, they’re using click rates as a form of feedback.
If your result does a better job answering search intent, it will get more clicks.
And now we’re seeing that if you get more clicks, you might also get a better ranking.
It’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Larry Kim ran another test and found that there is a correlation between CTR and rankings:
The data suggests both good and bad news.
The good news is that you might be able to compete against the big boys on a SERP if you do a better job answering search intent and getting clicks.
The bads news is that if your content doesn’t do a good job targeting search queries from the start, it’s going to be an uphill battle from here on out.
So first and foremost, make sure you’re answering that search query!
Start by understanding what people are really searching for, and why.
Sort your search queries by funnel stage to make sure you understand what they want.
That means if someone searches for “best analytics software,” you shouldn’t send them to a landing page bragging about yourself.
If they wanted to see that, they would have searched for you by name!
In this scenario, they want to see a comparison of different tools:
G2 Crowd does this beautifully.
First, they show you a helpful grid that instantly organizes different options by a few select criteria.
Next on the page, they offer to give you a personalized recommendation for the exact option you’re looking for:
Last but not least, they’re going to give you in-depth comparisons across a bunch of different tools. You can even read real reviews from other customers to see if each meets your demands.
Not only do you need page authority that will compete with the others around you.
But you also need to make sure that the content you have will actually line up with what searchers want.
Otherwise, they won’t click. And if they don’t click, you won’t rank.
Two hurdles down, with one last one to go.
Your website strength and page-level targeting need to be on point.
But if you have any hopes of getting that new Skyscraper to rank, you need to do this one thing.
Most people are so focused on content creation that they neglect content promotion.
They spend weeks on creating the content or designing the image assets.
They hit publish, and then nothing.
Sure, they might send out a few tweets. But the content marketing world is too saturated.
So nobody sees them.
This last step is absolutely critical.
Especially if you’re struggling at all on the first two issues.
If you’re going up against big brands who’re doing a good job targeting the search query, you’re going to need to put promotion on steroids.
Where to start?
The first trick I like to use is content syndication.
Let’s say your Skyscraper has text, images, and even video.
There are websites out there starving for awesome content. You can repurpose some of yours and send it off to these sites.
Business2Community, for example, has a regular contributor platform. When accepted, you can submit new content and get it live often within 24 hours.
Sites like this sometimes even let you submit an RSS feed directly. So no need to manually upload your post each time it’s ready to promote.
You can also summarize key findings on LinkedIn, hoping to take advantage of the Pulse network effects.
They’ll often pick up the most viewed content and show it to a much broader audience.
So you can drive views to LinkedIn from assets you own, like an email list. Or you can even use ads to help raise awareness.
Then, you’ll get the added bonus when that content ‘goes viral’ and gets shared out to the broader Pulse network.
Just like a blog post, you drop in CTAs to the original Skyscraper content to drive people back to your site.
You can also take those image or video assets and re-purpose them, too.
For example, Visual.ly will allow you to submit new infographics into their directory.
Once again, you’re playing the angles.
Get featured or trend on the homepage and your views will shoot up dramatically. It can also help you drive visitors back to your site.
The next step is to look for high-authority sites to promote your work.
My favorite technique is to start using search operators to get a quick lay of the land.
For example, let’s say you want to writing guest posts. Simply plug in your niche, like “marketing,” along with the following queries:
Here’s what that should look like:
Easy, right?
You know what makes this even more powerful?
Look for lists of lists.
Smart people out there have already done all the hard work for you. They’ve already compiled the “best marketing blogs” or whatever niche you might be in.
This time, just add “blogs” to your query to start finding the appropriate lists of lists.
There’s only one caveat, though. Check out the date stamps on the highlighted results below:
Lists of lists are awesome because all of the information has been compiled for you. The problem is that they’re often out of date.
Some of the results above are from 2013 or 2014.
Unfortunately, a lot has changed since then. That’s like a decade in online marketing time.
So you need to make one final tweak before you can rely on this data. Click on “Tools” over on the far right-hand side. Then, click “Past Year”:
Now the results or rankings should be up-to-date.
Of course, not every website that accepts guest content will have a “write for us” page.
Their editor might be open to the idea if your resource is good enough.
So it’s going to take a little extra leg work to get your asset in their hands.
This is where scaled outreach comes into play.
First, you need to gather email addresses.
Finding emails can be incredibly frustrating and time consuming. That’s why I like to use a web scraper to do the work for me.
For example, the Email Extractor is a simple Chrome extension. Once installed, you can go to a website and click on the extension to start pulling data:
It will automatically scan the website’s pages, looking for anything that resembles an email address.
Even better, you can submit a list of domains up to 1000.
So perform a ‘list of lists’ search from earlier. Then, copy the data into a spreadsheet and submit to the Email Extractor.
All of the emails they find can be added back to your cloud account.
This process used to take days when doing it manually. Now, it takes a few minutes.
When ready, you’ll upload those emails into an outreach tool like Mailshake.
This tool will let you run several different campaigns at one time. That means you can have one going for guest posts, another for infographic submissions, and so on.
Scaling outreach like this is tricky.
It’s tempting to use the same copy-and-paste template for every single site.
However, even a little customization can go a long way.
I like to segment out those sites under each campaign.
For example, under your Guest Post campaign, you can create an “A,” “B,” and “C” segments.
I’ll often use the Domain Authority to help group related sites.
You might be able to use a copy-and-paste template for your “B” or “C” sites. But then you’d use a more personalized approach for the “A” ones.
Then, Mailshake will give you reply data after each send.
That way, you can see if your approach is working.
You can even A/B test different email templates, sending times, and more.
The point is that success isn’t an accident or a fluke. You continually test and refine new ideas until you hit the targets you want.
Long content tends to perform better in the search engines.
But that doesn’t mean longer content, like Skyscrapers, will always succeed.
In fact, many times they’ll fail. And you’ll have no idea why.
First and foremost, work to develop the necessary brand recognition and authority.
This alone will make everything else much easier.
Next, double-check your keyword targeting to make sure your page content answers the query it’s going after.
Finally, make promotion a habit.
You should have a systematic way to repurpose on different sites. And for conducting outreach to get access to new sites, too.
Unfortunately, Skyscraper success isn’t as a simple one, two, three-step program.
It is possible, however, if you follow these steps.
Have you ever had a Skyscraper fail? Why do you think it fell short, and what did you learn from it?
About the Author: Neil Patel is the cofounder of Neil Patel Digital.
]]>For the past five years, I’ve been an adjunct professor at Middlebury College in Monterey teaching a graduate course called “Networked International Organizations” for students pursuing an advanced degree in International Development. As part of the class, we look at different examples of networked strategies and digital platforms and tools and how they can be used to advance civil society goals.… Read More
For the past five years, I’ve been an adjunct professor at Middlebury College in Monterey teaching a graduate course called “Networked International Organizations” for students pursuing an advanced degree in International Development. As part of the class, we look at different examples of networked strategies and digital platforms and tools and how they can be used to advance civil society goals. Going beyond content delivery, I also use a lot of participatory and hands-on learning techniques to help students gain a deeper understanding.
As a long-time trainer, professor, and teacher, I feel strongly that interactive learning activities – going beyond the death by Powerpoint Lecture – is the key to retention and application for participants. Your room set up can support your instructional activities that engage participants or get in the way.
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand how the feng shui of a classroom impacts learning. ...
The post How to Rock Mobile Native Advertising appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
]]>When Melanie Deziel’s New York Times colleagues tweeted “impressively produced” and “can’t believe I’m sharing a paid post … even mobile-friendly” about a native ad that she and her team had created, she knew T Brand Studio had gotten some things right.
What things, exactly? She shared her answers at Content Marketing World, How Innovative Brands Are Getting More out of Their Mobile Native Advertising Campaigns. Read on for highlights from Melanie’s talk.
I confess, as a word nerd, I fell in love with Melanie when she declared marketers have forgotten that “native” is an adjective and it describes advertising.
Native advertising goes by many names, including sponsored content, promoted content, paid posts, and branded content. (Some marketers avoid – even loathe – the term “branded content” because it “gives agencies permission to keep talking about themselves, adding a bit of storytelling to product pitches.”)
To get clear about what she’s talking about when she talks about native advertising, let’s look at each word.
As CMI founder Joe Pulizzi sums it up, “If you pay for placement of … content in a format similar to the third-party site, it’s native advertising.”
If you pay for placement of content in a format similar to 3rd-party site, it's #nativeadvertising. @joepulizzi
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While native advertising and content marketing are sometimes handled by separate teams with separate strategies, consider developing a strategy that covers both. Native advertising can help you achieve the same goals for your other content such as increasing brand awareness, driving people to your website, and building your subscriber base. You may discover new opportunities when you think of native advertising as simply another set of distribution channels for your valuable, relevant content – channels you happen to pay for.
You couldn’t find a person better equipped to talk about native advertising than Melanie, the founder of an industry newsletter on the topic, The Overlap League. Her journalism background has prepared her to create riveting, deeply researched stories, such as the 2014 piece that had her New York Times colleagues raving on Twitter. Her native advertising rivals the quality of the best editorial content in the world.
The piece, which explored the reality of life for women inmates, was part of The New York Times series sponsored by Netflix, the distributor of Orange Is The New Black. It was published before Season 2 was released. For a time, Melanie says, her article “appeared in the most-emailed module on the home page of The New York Times.”
Uh huh. A piece of sponsored content won over more readers than anything else in this prestigious purveyor of “all the news that’s fit to print.”
A piece of sponsored #content won over more @nytimes readers than its editorial content, says @MarciaRJohnston.
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While native advertising isn’t a strictly mobile phenomenon, Melanie urges marketers to focus on the mobile experience of native ads. It’s easy to get the mobile experience wrong and important to get it right.
Marketers: Focus on the #mobile experience of native ads, says @mdeziel.
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First things first: Ads (native or not) must stop hijacking our small screens. Melanie describes an experience we’ve all had: You’re reading on a smartphone when an ad takes over, and you can’t close it. Sometimes you get the ad to go away only to discover that your article has disappeared with it. Or closing it merely reveals another ad.
If we want people to welcome native advertising, Melanie says, we must present it in the flow of the content people came for.
Fellow presenter Jay Lauf made the same point in his Content Marketing World talk, Deconstructing Quartz (QZ.com): How One of the Most Popular Mobile Destinations Grows Audience, Extends Reach in Digital, and Creates a Superior Content Experience. Jay gives this sampling of tweets in which people let loose about intrusive ads on mobile websites:
Jay’s favorite is the bottom middle tweet: This “mobile site captures that nostalgia for when you’d be trying to read the paper but someone kept slapping it out of your hand.”
Instead of irritating our audiences, why not create native ads they’re likely to welcome, like this one (in the middle of the screen):
In this example, Jay, co-president and publisher of Quartz (“a new kind of global business news outlet”), shows its daily newsletter, which smoothly incorporates a “sponsored content” item. This native advertising is straightforward, interesting, and easy to read on a smartphone. Jay quotes one customer who calls Quartz native ads “friendly and unobtrusive.”
When’s the last time someone complimented your native ads?
“We don’t do pop-overs,” Jay says. “You’ll never see a push-down. You’ll never see a pre-roll ad on Quartz.” People encounter native ads only as they scroll from article to article. “It’s the only place I’ve worked where I get unsolicited love letters on Twitter about the ad product itself.”
HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:
Melanie says, “Mobile friendly means that you can access the content from a mobile device. That isn’t enough anymore,” she says, pointing out that more than 50% of Google searches have come from mobile devices for several years.
“We need to create content, including ads, for mobile-first,” says Melanie.
“Mobile first” means more than matching the ad format to the look and feel of a site or app. It means matching the ad’s form, function, quality, and style to the content around it, creating a seamless user experience. A mobile-first approach takes advantage of the unique things that mobile devices make possible. Melanie urges marketers to “capitalize on the fact that mobile is a completely different environment.”
Consider the travel toothbrush, Melanie says. Yes, it may need to be smaller, but smart designers consider other factors. Should it have fewer bristles or just as many as a full-size toothbrush? Should it have a folding handle? How about a cap or case? What else would the mobile toothbrush user appreciate? If you simply downsize a standard toothbrush, you miss opportunities to add value.
Same goes for native advertising. “When we look just at screen size, we miss out on a huge opportunity,” Melanie says. “The best mobile native ads take advantage of things we can do with phones that we can’t do on desktops, on TV, or anywhere else.”
Native ads must take advantage of the uniqueness of #mobile devices - not just fit a small screen. @mdeziel
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To take advantage of the uniqueness of mobile devices, Melanie suggests aligning our native advertising with these three things (as explored in the following sections):
Does your brand align its native advertising with user intent? Granted, the methods are limited. “A lot of times the options that we have for targeting are not as discreet as our users’ intents,” Melanie admits.
Still, we want to anticipate, as much as possible, why people come to a page or channel and deliver content accordingly.
Take Pinterest (which Melanie describes memorably as “the place for the recipes I’ll never make, the clothes I’ll never wear, and the crafts I’ll never do”). As a soon-to-be bride flipping through Pinterest boards one day, Melanie was delighted to find many pins aligned perfectly with her intent: She wanted to look at beautiful white gowns.
Suddenly, a pin sponsored by Dick’s Sporting Goods appeared. It was a native ad in the sense that it copied the format of the pins around it. Unfortunately for the brand, the content of the ad – hot-pink running shorts – clashed with Melanie’s intent that day. “It left a bad taste in my mouth,” she says.
Besides the inappropriateness of the shorts in that moment, the photo treatment stood out. The ads surrounding the invader were all high-quality images of dresses worn in a natural environment while the shorts were a typical product shot.
“This ad wasn’t going to fit my intent, even if it was well targeted,” she says.
People’s experiences vary from one channel to another in predictable ways. On Instagram, for example, “we look for pictures from people we know,” Melanie says. “We expect a human experience. If I’m looking for some product inspiration, it would be something like which hair products my friends are using or where they’re going for vacation.”
What we’re not looking for on Instagram is a duplication on a company website. Take this Instagram post from Reed Fashion. While Melanie loves the shoe brand, she doesn’t love seeing screen after screen of product shots throughout the Instagram feed.
“They post these images three or four times a day. Shoes, shoes, shoes. On Instagram, if you’re going to show shoes, show feet in them. Show them on a floor. Pair them with a purse,” she says.
On Instagram, to fit the expected experience, take Melanie’s advice: “Ask yourself: If your brand were a human, what would we see? It’s probably not a product shot on a white background.”
Finally (and most fun, Melanie says), look for ways to acknowledge the physicality of mobile devices. When you deliver content to someone’s mobile device, “your brand is in their hand,” she says. So is a camera, an accelerometer, and a gizmo that knows exactly where that hand is in the world.
Some of the most engaging native ads take advantage of the unique capabilities of mobile devices.
Some of the most engaging native ads use the unique capabilities of mobile devices, says @MarciaRJohnston.
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For example, when Melanie was with the New York Times’ T Brand Studio, she worked with IBM and the team behind the movie Hidden Figures to create a piece of sponsored content in the form of an app. People who downloaded the app could go on a scavenger hunt throughout the country, discovering landmarks that gave tribute to famous women in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. Whenever app users were near one of these landmarks, their phone prompted them. They could visit the statue or whatever the landmark might be. They also got an augmented-reality experience of that thing coming to life and giving facts about it.
HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:
If you’re creating native advertising – sponsored content – you have a lot to take into account. For one thing, you must design with the mobile experience in mind, which means more than just making your content accessible and legible on mobile devices. Melanie suggests that you ask yourself three questions:
What are you doing to rock your brand’s mobile native advertising?
Here’s an excerpt from Melanie’s talk:
Devote a few days this year to intensive learning, practical tips, and inspiring ideas to improve your content marketing. Register today for Content Marketing World this September. Use code BLOG100 to save $100.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
The post How to Rock Mobile Native Advertising appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
]]>“What’s a ‘good’ cost per click?”
And my response back to them is always the same:
“Why do you care?”
See, most people have AdWords wrong. They obsess over the costs.
They know that more and more competitors are advertising on the platform, which drives up prices.
So they’re zeroed-in on how much they’re going to have to spend.
But that’s the wrong approach. They shouldn’t be asking that question.
Instead, they should be concerned with what they’re going to get back in return.
I know this sounds counterintuitive. However, I almost never worry about the Cost Per Click for keywords.
In fact, I almost ignore them.
I’m going to show you why CPC’s don’t matter in many cases. I’ll show you how worrying about keyword costs can mislead you time and time again.
And then I’ll also unveil what you should be analyzing to make sure you’re not leaving tons of money on the table.
Each year, companies analyze the most expensive keywords in the country.
These are typically competitive phrases in law or insurance. They might top $50 for just a single click.
The insane thing to remember is that almost none of those clicks will turn into customers immediately.
Instead, they’ll usually opt-into a form, first.
That means you might have to front the bill for 50 or 100 clicks before someone ever converts.
So already, we’re talking thousands of dollars for a single customer.
Almost all of these studies focus on AdWords’ Cost Per Click.
It makes sense when you think about it. That’s the primary unit of measurement they use.
It’s what ultimately determines how much you need to spend.
WordStream, for example, always releases an annual update on Cost Per Click benchmarks across industries.
The businesses I own are all software-related. But we work with clients across different industries. So it’s always interesting to look at these cost breakdowns.
Average ecommerce CPC’s might only be around a dollar, while law might run up to around six dollars.
To be honest, though, I don’t obsess over costs, alone.
The first reason comes down to what the study says at the top: Averages.
Average CPCs don’t really mean all that much.
Popular, generic terms aren’t usually all that expensive.
Only a tiny percentage of the people who ever click on those will convert. Whereas, a more commercial long-tail keyword will be incredibly expensive.
Just compare the difference in costs between “tax” and “file back taxes”:
See? It’s not even close.
That makes it hard to use a standard, “industry average benchmark” for any in-depth analysis.
However, there’s another reason why I don’t like to just look at costs.
And the reason is because you’re often forgetting the other side of the equation.
Conversions can ultimately have a much bigger impact than costs.
Now, let’s check out those industry average conversions from the same study:
Ok, now we’re getting a little closer.
If you remember, the industry average CPC for ecommerce was only around a dollar. In fact, it was one of cheapest CPC’s on the entire list.
But if you now look at the average conversion rates, you’ll see why.
Their conversion rates are also among the lowest at only around a percent or two.
Already, you can see part of the issue.
What does it matter if CPCs are ‘inexpensive’ if the conversions are equally low?
That’s why you often want to look at the Cost Per Action (or Acquisition) when putting together advertising estimates.
This is the effective price you pay to generate a lead, for instance.
It’s a performance ratio. It starts to take into account things like costs vs. conversions to help you determine a much better figure: ROI.
The industry average Cost Per Action for ecommerce lines up with education on the search network.
So from an ROI standpoint, there’s almost no difference.
This is why CPC becomes almost meaningless.
Yes, it’s important to a point because it drives things like your Cost Per Action.
However, what’s ultimately more important is the revenue you can generate.
It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about Google AdWords, Facebook, or even Twitter ads. The message is still the same.
Digital Marketer once ran a Twitter Lead Gen campaign, testing the effective Cost Per Action (or Lead).
One campaign was able to see a $7.81 cost per lead.
They then ran the same study with the same ad and audience targeting. But this time, they optimized the campaigns to increase conversions.
It generated a $1.38 Cost Per Lead, which came out to a five time lead increase on the same ad budget.
They were able to 5X conversions simply by focusing on conversions and Cost Per Lead. They didn’t even have to touch the CPC.
You can see this time and time again.
Jacob Baadsgaard of Disruptive Advertising confirms that the best PPC metrics are revenue-focused. They track lead data all the way through to closed sales.
Then, and only then, will they make a decision about which ad campaign is best.
It’s not that costs don’t matter. They do, of course. But they only matter in context to how much revenue you can generate from it.
Here’s a very simple example to illustrate.
Let’s say you run two ad campaigns side-by-side.
The Cost Per Click for the second campaign is twice as much as the first. But because the conversion rate is 2% instead of 1%, you’re able to double revenue.
Would you pay twice as high a Cost Per Click to generate twice as much revenue? Of course you would!
And this is after reducing revenue by your ad costs. So it’s already accounting for the higher ad budget.
At the end of the day, you’re still doubling revenue. It’s totally worth it!
Obsessing over CPC doesn’t just leave money on the table. It can also make you waste a ton of what you’re already spending.
Here are a few examples.
There are many things that separate big companies from small ones.
But here’s one of the biggest:
Big companies spend more on advertising than small ones do.
Gartner Research study found that bigger companies spend around 13% of revenue on advertising and marketing, while smaller ones only spend around 10%.
Sarah Brady found that those numbers leap dramatically in some industries, like tech. Salesforce, the world’s biggest CRM company, spends up to 49% on marketing and advertising!
Crazy, right?
Not only do bigger companies spend a bigger percentage of revenue on ads. But that also amounts to a much bigger number at the end of the day.
The question is why?
Why don’t small companies spend more on advertising?
In my experience, I find that they’re often too risk averse.
They don’t have the same access to capital. So they tend to obsess over costs, as opposed to revenues.
The classic scenario is when a business owner spends a few hundred bucks on new Facebook ads, only to conclude that they “don’t work” five days later.
They see that ad spend number continue to rise. And they don’t see the number of leads start to flow to justify it.
So they pull the plug too early.
In almost all cases, they just need to let the campaigns run longer.
Jennifer Shaheen found that campaigns should run at least 45 days before stopping. And that makes sense when you think about it.
Look at it this way.
How many sales do you need to break even? Let’s hypothetically say two or three.
So what are the chances that those two or three sales land in the first few days?
Pretty slim!
It’s the law of averages at work. You need a big sample size before numbers start to meet projections.
It’s going to take a few weeks, at least, to get statistically significant numbers. Otherwise, you’re just guessing.
And all of this assumes that you know the ‘right’ ad campaign variables ahead of time. Which, in all likelihood, you don’t.
Not because you’re not smart. But because it takes awhile to figure these things out!
Here’s the other thing that’s happening.
Many times, they actually need to increase ad spend.
Yes, you heard me right.
Listen:
The only reason to advertise in the first place is to make money.
It’s not to save money on advertising.
That means you need to get to statistical significance as quickly as possible.
For example, go check out a few CPC ranges for keywords you’re about to bid on.
I like to use SpyFu to get a lot of this data:
The average CPC for “analytics software” is estimated to be around $11. Ok, not bad I guess.
Let’s use that as the upper limit. We can create automated rules in the Facebook Business Manager.
If you’re having a hard time hitting those numbers, you can set a rule to actually increase CPCs.
That will make sure I get better placement over the competition and as many conversions as possible.
Here’s how that might look inside AdEspresso:
But of course, this approach isn’t ideal.
Because you still might leave a lot of money on the table.
If your CPCs start edging up, the campaigns will back off or stop.
And then your lead flow will stop, too.
That’s why I like using CPAs as targets if possible, instead of CPCs.
Cost Per Action is a better performance than Cost Per Click.
It’s not as good as Revenue, though. And therein lies the problem.
CPAs can still be subjective.
Is a ‘high’ CPA bad? Maybe, maybe not.
If your CPA is over $100 in ecommerce, that might be bad.
But almost every single campaign CPA will be over $100 in law, for example. So it’s not bad at all.
It still gives us a much better metric to control ad campaign performance, though.
You can still figure out an upper range that starts to make ad campaigns unprofitable. You’ll base this on your average sale per customer. (More on this later.)
For starters, you can set automated rules to increase or decrease the total budget based on your CPA.
Inside AdWords, you can go to “Bulk Actions” and create new “Rules” for these ranges:
Under “Change budgets,” you can set an automated rule to either increase or decrease budgets based on cost per conversion numbers.
This is telling AdWords to automatically increase your daily budget 25% if the CPA is within a certain dollar range.
You can do this same exact strategy inside Facebook, too.
You’ll set a rule to increase, decrease, or stop a campaign if the CPA hits a certain threshold.
Managing ad campaigns by CPA can net you more customers and revenue.
But there’s still one big section we’re forgetting.
Keyword pricing or competitive pressure aren’t the only factors to worry about.
Many times, your customer base could be going through their own issues.
And you can’t often do anything directly to change it.
That’s why focusing on revenue is always the best approach.
Spearmint Love was one of my favorite success stories over the past year.
They went from a baby blog to growing revenue over 991% year over year.
And they did it almost exclusively through Facebook and Instagram ads.
The craziest part is that it almost didn’t happen.
They were growing like a weed, until… everything just stopped.
Results were declining across the board and they couldn’t figure out why.
Until, one day while on a walk, it dawned on one of the co-founders.
Parents will buy baby clothes until that baby grows up. In other words, their customers were kind of ‘moving on’ from the company.
The ad campaign decline had nothing to do with costs or his ad campaigns per se.
It had everything to do with their customer base.
How on Earth do you solve this problem?
By focusing on increasing revenue — not touching costs.
If the CPA is ‘too high’ to make your numbers work, start by increasing average order values.
Upsells are easy, for example, when you bundle similar products.
Think about the last time you flew somewhere. Chances are, you bought a travel-sized product at a store before going through TSA.
That way, they wouldn’t throw your good stuff away at the Security line.
But that product probably only cost a few bucks, right?
Check out what Jack Black does here, bundling several travel products together.
You arguably need all of these products if you’re flying somewhere.
But instead of only charging you a few bucks each, they’re charging you $35 for the whole pack!
Simply bundling similar products allows them to charge 10x more. Which means you can afford a much higher initial advertising cost now, too.
You can also cross-sell products to try and raise the average order value.
For example, right underneath this travel bundle, Jack Black offers a few related products to take with you:
One interesting thing to note is the price of all three items. They’re all slightly less than the initial $35 purchase.
Why?
They’re using price anchoring effect to make these additional products seem less expensive.
In Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely showed how price anchoring can get people to pay more for similar products.
The Economist included a middle pricing tier for a print-only subscription. It was the same exact price as the ‘big’ plan for both the print and web editions.
In this scenario, most people chose the combined third option because it seemed like the best deal.
Removing the middle plan on a subsequent test, however, led people to overwhelmingly pick the cheap option, instead.
Price anchoring changes someone’s perception of cost vs. value.
That’s why you should lead with the more expensive option. Then, showcase a few related products to cross-sell that are slightly less expensive.
Spearmint Love also expanded their product line to increase average order values.
They came out with decor piece, like hundred-dollar baby lamps.
The age of a child mattered less in this type of purchase. So it kept the company relevant longer in their eyes of their customers.
After increasing average order values, you should increase the lifetime value of each customer.
One technique is a vintage analysis, which shows you which customer cohorts are worth the most already.
This way, you can identify trends or patterns.
You can see what the most lucrative customers are doing. And then take those lessons to apply across everyone else.
Getting customers to repurchase down the line can have a massive impact on your ad campaigns.
Constantly acquiring new customers is expensive. You have to spend a lot more to get them to buy.
Increasing repurchases from your existing customers has a massive impact on your bottom line.
Let’s revisit that initial ad model to see why.
Keep in mind this is a simplistic example. But I think it still does a decent job showing how this works.
The first campaign has a higher initial cost. So you’re barely breaking even.
This is what most companies are scared of. They worry about spending more money on keywords.
And as a result, they put blinders on. They completely neglect optimizing conversions, average order values, or repurchases.
So yes, they might bring in a few sales. But the higher costs deplete their ad budget before long.
The end result is a wash.
The second campaign has a higher average order value.
In this case, you’re not even getting more conversions. All you’re doing is bundling a product, for example.
And already, you’re back in the black. Not bad.
However, the third campaign?
Not only are the average order values higher, but you’re getting more repeat purchases, too.
You’re basically generating more purchases from the same number of customers. Many times, you don’t even have to spend a single dollar to get them.
All you have to do is send out an email campaign. These loyal customers don’t take a lot of extra persuading.
More sales, without increasing ad costs, skyrockets revenue.
You make several times the other few campaigns.
And best of all, you didn’t sweat a single CPC. You willingly paid at the top-end of the budget range to maximize your opportunities.
Then, you doubled-down on the other side of the equation.
Increasing conversions and revenue spent can act like a lever to double or triple ad campaign ROI.
There’s only one reason to spend money on ads at the end of the day.
Your goal is to make money.
You want to bring in more money than you spend.
That changes everything.
Because you shouldn’t be out for the best deal. Chasing the keywords with the lowest CPC is a losing proposition.
If anything, you should be spending more money. You should actually search out the highest CPC’s there are in your industry.
Why?
Many times, they offer the most potential. You want to maximize the most sales per dollar spent.
So you know all those “industry benchmark CPC” numbers? Don’t worry about them.
Instead, start by focusing on the CPA. That’s the number it costs for you to acquire each new customer.
It’s not perfect by any stretch. But it’s a better number to optimize around than CPC.
From there, try to dig into revenue numbers.
Can you bundle a few products to raise the average order value? Can you cross-sell recommended products and use price anchoring to lower their perceived cost?
Then, figure out how you can keep customers around longer.
That might mean introducing new, related product lines. Or it might mean introducing ‘consumable’ products that people need to repurchase again and again and again.
The point is to drive up the lifetime value of each customer as high as possible.
Because if you can do that, almost any costs will do.
There will be so much revenue generated per customer that you can afford to spend almost anything to get them in the first place.
How have you boosted ad campaign performance by focusing on conversions instead of costs?
About the Author: Neil Patel is the cofounder of Neil Patel Digital.
]]>The post 4 Case Studies Show How to Crush It With Out-of-the-Box Content Marketing appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
]]>This post was co-written by Shopify’s Casandra Campbell.
Content marketing can be a valuable tool for nearly any company, in nearly any industry, at nearly any point in the sales funnel. But with the glut of content available, how does a brand create and distribute content that allows the company (and the audience) to experience that value?
We sent out a request for examples of awesome content marketing via HARO and other channels. In this article, we highlight four out-of-the-box case studies that show how content marketing can be used to create true value.
Shutterstock is one of the largest online marketplaces for licensing royalty-free images, videos, and music. For its annual Creative Trends report, Shutterstock analyzes its customers’ search and download data to predict the styles and trends that will dominate the coming year and distributes results in the form of an infographic hosted on its site.
Shutterstock uses its proprietary data to create something genuinely useful for its two audiences – customers and contributors.
Shutterstock reports its 2017 Creative Trends infographic earned:
Creating one piece of content to serve multiple audiences is usually a bad idea. By trying to serve too many types of reader, you typically end up making your content too broad and readers lose interest.
Creating one piece of #content to serve multiple audiences is usually a bad idea. @TheSearchGuru @Casandra_Camp
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However, Shutterstock makes it work by using its proprietary data, which is already useful internally for predicting and serving consumer trends, to create something genuinely useful to two vital Shutterstock audiences:
Contributors get paid when their content is downloaded. Being on trend allows them to make more money. For Shutterstock customers, staying ahead of trends helps them ensure that the print materials, videos, and websites they are creating look fresh.
And, rather than cutting its data 1,000 ways to produce a lengthy downloadable report, Shutterstock stays true to its brand and delivers the information in a succinct, visually impactful format.
Use internal data rather than spending time & money building a survey. @TheSearchGuru @Casandra_Camp
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SEMrush is a leading competitive research toolkit for online marketing. It has more than 20 research tools for SEO, PPC, and content marketing, and an expanding list of features.
Although coming up with those new features hasn’t been a problem, telling its users about those new features has. SEMrush gamified its educational process with a virtual Easter egg hunt, challenging users to find 15 “Easter eggs” by completing desired actions within various SEMrush tools.
SEMrush scored a big social media win by making it easy for users to tweet their accomplishments.
SEMrush reports its Easter egg hunt, launched in April 2017, earned:
This is an awesome example of how companies can apply content marketing outside of customer acquisition. It was probably a hard sell to spend more money and development time building a sitewide scavenger hunt after SEMrush presumably spent a decent chunk of money developing new features.
Many of the best SaaS companies are using content marketing to drive customer success by creating user academies and certification programs. Gamification of the tool set guided users through adopting new features. It’s a novel, entertaining approach.
Finally, by making it easy for users to tweet their accomplishments, the SEMrush team scored a social media victory on top of driving user engagement.
In gamification #content make it easy for users to tweet their accomplishments. @TheSearchGuru @Casandra_Camp
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PureVPN is a paid virtual private network service that uses end-to-end encryption to provide online privacy and security to its users. Pure’s simplified user experience is geared toward females who want to reduce their cyber footprint with private, secure web browsing. The advantages of using a VPN are well understood within the tech community. But communicating that value to non-tech female consumers is a challenge.
PureVPN created a campaign that appeals to a group of consumers who could directly benefit from use of a VPN: past and potential victims of cyberstalking. Pure created a campaign page with striking visual images and a knowledge base of information on cyberstalking, including interviews with security experts and high-profile victims (Kris Degioia, a former vice president of marketing at Google and past victim of cyberstalking, among them).
PureVPN used stunning imagery to evoke emotion and engagement around the topic of cyberstalking.
PureVPN reports its Let’s Stop Cyberstalking campaign earned:
This is an example of what can happen when companies get out of their swim lane and do it well. It works here for two reasons.
First, PureVPN treated this emotionally charged subject with the utmost care. Other brands have tried to leverage sensitive topics in the past only to watch it blow up in their faces like Pepsi’s ham-handed combining of Kendall Jenner and imagery from the Black Lives Matter movement.
Second, PureVPN offers a product that directly addresses some of the factors that put one of their key demographics at risk.
Pure also made sure to put adequate effort behind promoting the content. It implemented an optimal social media strategy to push the content and contributed to discussions within online communities to start the campaign awareness – a terrific example of guerilla PR tactics that took a lot of sweat, but likely minimal budget.
Finally, Pure made it easy for consumers to contribute to the conversation. According to its marketing department, within days of launching the campaign, PureVPN received submissions from users sharing their cyberstalking stories and providing tips on how to fight and prevent cyberstalking.
Just b/c you make a tech product doesn't mean you only market to a tech audience. @TheSearchGuru @Casandra_Camp
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24Slides is a team of 65-plus of the world’s best – as the company claims – PowerPoint designers based between Copenhagen and Indonesia. They design presentations for companies with high volume demands. To build its email list, 24Slides created a fully editable, 20-slide corporate PowerPoint template, and gave it away. To access the template, customers enter their name and email on a home page popup, comment “yes,” or share it as a LinkedIn Pulse article.
24Slides requires users to comment or share its LinkedIn post in exchange for a download link to ensure that the campaign has maximum reach.
According to the folks at 24Slides, this strategy earned:
24Slides has replicated the campaign three times, with similar results each time, growing its email list to 130,000 subscribers.
Offering a downloadable piece of content in exchange for contact information is a classic top-of-funnel tactic for gathering large volumes of unqualified leads. But there are three things of note about this campaign.
First, this is a great way to build a fast email list. Rented lists are the worst. With this campaign, 24Slides is giving away one of its core services. That’s a risky-feeling move that many companies don’t make. But 24Slides wasn’t focused on the potential cost of the campaign. It was focused on building a monster email list quickly.
Second, by requiring users to comment on or share a LinkedIn Pulse article, 24Slides effectively gamed the algorithm and ensured some level of virality. The more people interact with a LinkedIn article, the more likely the platform’s algorithm will designate it a useful piece of content and serve it to more people.
Finally, once 24Slides had a template for a winning campaign, it was able to replicate it several times with equal success.
Rented email lists are the worst. Make list-building a priority for #content. @TheSearchGuru @Casandra_Camp
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Content marketing isn’t always an obvious choice for your company. But, these four case studies are excellent examples of how content marketing can be useful in nearly any industry, at nearly any stage of the sales funnel.
Gather more out-of-the-box ideas and inspiration at Content Marketing World this September in Cleveland, Ohio. Register today and use the code BLOG100 to save $100.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
The post 4 Case Studies Show How to Crush It With Out-of-the-Box Content Marketing appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
]]>New trends gain steam, so they want to be more ‘contemporary’ or ‘flat.’
Or new color schemes are en vogue. So every site you visit looks Asana-bright.
Everyone now wants to update their site on the same regular basis.
I love experimenting with new color schemes and trends, too.
Except for one tiny thing.
I hate redesigns.
Design updates are good. They allow you to incrementally make improvements to make sure your site is up-to-date.
But full-scale redesigns?
Where you completely overhaul the site architecture and page content?
You should avoid those like the plague.
I know that sounds surprising. But I’m going to share a few examples of how and where website redesigns go bad.
Especially when it comes to destroying all of the hard-earned SEO rankings you’ve built up over time.
Here’s how to avoid sabotaging your own SEO rankings with your redesign.
There are hundreds of rankings factors for SEO.
But backlinks still reign supreme.
External links have been considered ‘votes’ since the beginning of (internet) time. Their quantity, diversity, and authority pass the most influence to raise your position in the SERPs.
Internal links don’t count for as much value. However, they do have a direct influence over someone’s website experience.
I’ll explain.
In 2011, Google Panda was released. It was one of the first reported cases where Google confirmed the use of qualitative factors.
They used a survey with questions like:
And they had people individually rate different websites.
Fast forward a few years, and Google also started taking user behavior into account.
They don’t just want to rank websites based on links or content length. They also want to look at the overall experience of that website.
They want to make sure that people find what they’re looking for.
So the better experience visitors have, the more credit the site will get.
What’s one way to ruin an otherwise nice experience?
Broken links that derail someone’s path through your site.
When most companies redesign websites, they start messing with the site architecture.
They create new pages and ditch old ones. Or they take content from one page and add it to another.
Then, they switch up their menus and navigation schemes.
It seems harmless on the surface. The new experience might even be superior to the old one.
But what they don’t realize is that they’re often creating a TON of problems for SEO.
For starters, site architecture changes can ruin hub pages you’ve worked hard to build.
These are like clusters of related pages on your site. And they can help increase your perceived authority on those topics.
Page-level changes also create broken internal links throughout the site.
You know the drill. You try to click on a new page to find related information, only to be met by a 404 error.
One or two isn’t a big issue. Redesigns, however, often create a ton of them all at one time.
For example, let’s say you’re redesigning a hotel or ecommerce website.
Chances are, you’re using a detailed parent-child structure to organize pages.
That means you might have “Rooms” at the top, followed by the individual types of rooms underneath.
The problem is that these structures often change over time.
Maybe you come out with new products or services. Maybe you migrate old rooms into new ones.
One seemingly small change can often create a ripple effect throughout your site.
It might make perfect sense to move your featured rooms up a level or two.
However, any changes to your URL structures don’’t create one or two broken links.
It can literally create hundreds to thousands.
Take blogs for example.
Let’s say you’ve worked hard over the years to create hundreds or thousands of blog posts.
But when it comes time to move over to a new CMS during a site redesign, someone wants to remove the date strings from the URLs.
Heck, all it takes is literally a single click inside WordPress to update Permalink Settings.
So yes, it seems harmless.
I’ve actually seen this mistake time and time again.
Poor, unsuspecting business owners who have their entire websites practically break.
Tens of thousands of page URLs break overnight.
And you know what happens to their rankings?
They drop like a rock.
Fortunately, Google Search Console can help you spot broken links under the Crawl Report.
My favorite tool for technical SEO audits is Screaming Frog.
It will crawl every page on your site, uncovering tons of on-site SEO issues.
For example, you can start by looking for the “Client Error (4XX)” report under Response Codes.
Most of these will be 404 errors, when the status is reported as “Not Found.”
So far, we’ve been focusing almost exclusively on broken internal links.
But that’s not the only way redesign changes can affect your site links.
Think about it this way.
Older, high-authority pages or posts tend to acquire the most backlinks.
The highest value links are also the hardest to get. These include editorial links, for example, that come from journalists or other influencers.
That also means you can’t control them.
So when your page or post URL changes, you will lose all of those external links, too.
This, again, happens all the time.
Permalink updates, moving the blog from a subfolder to subdomain, or even just new product pages replacing old ones can force you to lose all those backlinks.
The best solution? Don’t change old page URLs!
At least, not if you can help it.
Otherwise, another way to side-step this problem is through setting up 301 redirects.
These are ‘permanent’ redirects, telling search engines that the new page has now replaced the old one.
The Quick Page/Post Redirect Plugin for WordPress is one of the most popular options.
It’s also incredibly easy to use. All you have to do is drop in the old “Request” URL and then direct it to the new “Destination” one. The only caveat is that redirects like these should be used sparingly.
What you don’t want to see, is something like this:
Loading up on too many 301 redirects can cause other unintended consequences.
And they’re usually a sign that there’s a bigger, underlying issue at play.
It means the site architecture has changed dramatically.
Here’s why too many redirects can also affect your SEO rankings.
“301” redirects have long been considered the best for SEO.
They indicate a ‘permanent’ change, as opposed to a ‘temporary’ one like a 302 gives off.
Either way, SEOs still feared that redirects would somehow limit the amount of PageRank that flowed through to the site.
Even Google’s own Matt Cutts once indicated some loss.
But in 2016, Google webmaster analyst, Gary Illyes, confirmed that all 3XX links pass full value:
Another Googler, John Mueller, confirmed the same findings.
Why does this all matter?
Because redirects are often now used to update websites to HTTPS. So some SEOs think this is Google’s way to help make sure people adopt it.
Last year, Google Chrome users started seeing new security warnings.
Previously, up to 70% of users would ignore website security warnings. So Google rolled out new ‘Not Secure’ messages for sites that don’t set-up SSL certificates.
Moving from HTTP to HTTPS isn’t as simple as you might think, though.
For example, you can just flip a switch inside Google Search Console to pick the ‘preferred domain’ of your site.
That way, you avoid potential canonicalization issues of your site recognized as two: a “www” and “non-www” option.
As discussed, any URL changes can cause you to lose links.
Architecture changes can break internal links. But you can also lose out on ‘link equity’ if sites link to HTTP and not the new HTTPS-version of your site.
Again, why are we harping on redirects?
Because too many can slow down your site’s performance.
And page speed has been officially confirmed as a ranking factor.
Kinsta ran a test on WordPress to see how redirects affect page speed.
First, they used Pingdom to run a page speed report with no redirect.
The page loaded in around 1.06 seconds. That’s a good score!
Next, they ran the test again. But this time, through a redirected URL.
And check out how it affected page load time:
Crazy, right?!
A redirect increased page load time by 58%.
That’s just a single page redirect, too.
Multiply this across dozens of redirects and you can see the problem.
Even worse, is when multiple redirects occur right after another.
This often happens if you’ve updated a page more than once. As in, multiple redesigns over the years.
One URL redirects to another, which redirects to another. And page speed slows to a crawl.
My favorite tool for diagnosing redirects is the redirect mapper tool from Patrick Sexton.
All you have to do is drop in your URL:
Hit “Go,” and you’ll instantly get feedback on different 301 redirects set up over the years:
Again, fewer is better. Google, themselves, literally says to eliminate as many as possible.
Which could be a problem if you’ve updated content during redesigns.
Here’s why.
Why would you ever setup two redirects for a single page?
That doesn’t make sense, right?
Of course not. At least, not intentionally.
Yet, it still happens all the time.
Here’s why.
Five years ago, you sold one product or service. Three years ago, it changed. And this year, it’s changing again.
In other words, the purpose behind the page evolves over time. So all of the content on the page changes, too.
It even happens with Skyscraper content. You take a lot of old posts that are underperforming, and redirect them to a new one.
Instead of relying too much on redirects, they should simply ‘refresh’ those old posts. Adding new content and images can boost SEO traffic by 111%.
Multiple redirects in a row cause performance issues.
However, continually changing page content also messes with your keyword targeting and on-site optimization.
Here’s how.
Let’s go back to a hotel example.
Initially, maybe they only have one two room types. But after a renovation, those are expanded.
The original website architecture might just list those first few rooms on the same page. But now, there’s too many.
So you change the “Rooms” page to a category page, which lists out ones underneath it.
The problem is that now your “Rooms” page also has zero content. It just serves as a drop-down now:
If that “Rooms” page was ranking previously, it isn’t anymore.
Now, you have thin content issues, for starters. This is when there’s less than ~300 words on individual pages of your site:
Page length matters because Backlinko’s analysis showed that “the average first-page result on Google contains 1,890 words.”
50% of search queries also contain four words. That means someone is typing in a long-tail keyword to find something specific on that page.
It’s hard to give people the information they’re craving if you’ve literally removed all (or most) of the content.
Content changes during site redesigns also wreck havoc on page metadata.
One of three things usually happens in this case:
Once again, Screaming Frog can help you diagnose these issues.
Drop in your URL and search for the meta description option. I like to start here, because it usually indicates a bigger problem at play.
For example, check out the following example. I’ve blurred the site’s name to protect the innocent.
Two problems are happening here.
First, the same keyword is being repeated on multiple pages. This could lead to duplicate content issues and reduce their ability to get one main page to rank for that term.
Second, there’s a ton of pages missing a meta description entirely.
Meta descriptions technically don’t help you rank. They do, however, help you increase your SERP click-through rates (CTR). And new data suggests that CTR can often affect rankings directly.
If a page doesn’t have a meta description, search engines will often pull content directly from the page.
But in most cases, it’s random text that gets truncated because it exceeds length requirements.
So it’s not ideal. And people won’t click.
Here’s another common problem to look for:
We’re looking at different restaurant pages on one website. However, they all share the same exact meta description.
Once again, this is a red flag.
The duplicate metadata cannibalizes the chances of your primary page ranking well for this term.
And these inconsistencies typically indicate a larger problem at play.
Most firms that specialize in design will not touch the page’s metadata.
SEO isn’t a high priority for them. They might not have the specialists on staff.
So this is what happens. You get websites shipped that look fantastic, but don’t perform.
Pages have the same copied metadata. Or worse, title tags and descriptions are missing completely.
And at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is how your website performs — not how it looks.
My biggest problem with website redesigns is that they often screw up what’s already working.
If your business is up-and-running, chances are you already have purchases rolling in each day.
Redesigns that change site architecture or page content often screw this up.
You’re completely jeopardizing revenue.
And ultimately, your website’s ability to generate revenue is its most important aspect.
Changing all of that, without knowing if the new design is going to convert as well as the old design, is a huge gamble.
Results might increase. But you don’t know for sure. That’s exactly the problem.
Think about it this way.
A website’s macro-conversion, like a purchase, is made up of micro-conversions.
To get a sale, you first have to get people to your site. Then get them to visit certain pages. Then possibly opt-into something before they had over payment.
These ‘user flows’ are already playing out across your website.
Changing the sequence of these steps can have massive ramifications on the end goal.
This is the point behind conversion optimization that most people miss.
They think ‘conversion optimization’ means to change a button color or headline.
But in reality, changing how people flow through your site can often have a bigger impact on purchases.
One study, for example, found that optimizing an ecommerce checkout flow could result in an additional $87,175/month. That ~3% conversion increase could add another 23.94% to their top line.
Micro-conversions also extend to the internal links on your pages. These are like the beginning to a new path through your site.
Changing these links doesn’t seem like that big of a deal. However, now you can see, that it could have a big impact on how people purchase your products or services.
How do you avoid this?
Again, updating your site design is a good thing. But do it incrementally so you can test the effects on each page.
For example, here’s how my Quick Sprout blog looked a few days ago:
Now, compare that to how it looked a few years ago. You can do this yourself using the Wayback Machine.
Pretty similar, right?
Sure, it looks more ‘clean’ and ‘polished’ now. The design is still relevant for today.
However, I did not want to change what was already working. That’s how I like to run website redesigns. I’ll tweak element-by-element or page-by-page.
Then, I’ll use something like Crazy Egg to run tests after each change.
If numbers go down, I’ll revert back to the old design. Even if it seems a little ‘outdated.’
But if numbers go up, I’ll start carrying those new design updates over to my other pages.
That way, you should never, ever lose SEO rankings as a result of a website redesign.
Or, more importantly, you won’t lose revenue, either.
Website design updates should happen regularly.
Design trends change pretty frequently. And you want to make sure your website properly reflects your brand.
What you don’t want to do, however, is sabotaging everything else that’s working.
Large-scale site redesigns can often create tons of problems.
Site architecture changes can lead to performance issues. Content changes ruin your keyword targeting. And changing micro-conversions can drag down your macro-conversions.
The way your website looks is important. But only to a certain point.
The more important issue at play is whether revenue is increasing or decreasing.
Website redesigns can easily screw up your SEO. That causes rankings to fluctuate and traffic to decrease.
Declining traffic, then, brings down revenue with it.
Avoid this trickle-down issue by not changing what’s already working. If you’re going to update something, do it on small elements, first.
That way, you can test the impact in isolation. You can see if it’s going to increase or decrease results on a small scale.
Then, you can pull back to the old design if it’s not working without losing too much traffic or revenue.
And if it is working, you can start applying those proven updates to the rest of your site.
Websites aren’t just fashion statements. More often than not, functionality and performance should outweigh the appearance.
Have you ever experienced traffic drops right after a new website redesign?
About the Author: Neil Patel is the cofounder of Neil Patel Digital.
]]>Having trouble getting that mobile phone out of your hands and checking it when you need to focus on work? There’s an app that can help you break your mobile phone addiction and it makes it fun. The app is called Forest that turns putting down your phone into a game.… Read More
]]>Having trouble getting that mobile phone out of your hands and checking it when you need to focus on work? There’s an app that can help you break your mobile phone addiction and it makes it fun. The app is called Forest that turns putting down your phone into a game.
Here’s how it works. You open the app, you plant a digital tree and it will thrive for as long as you stay in the app. Once you start tapping other apps, the tree start to die. The longer you get the mobile phone out of your hands and not check email or social media or open other apps, the longer this tree will grow. It is a little bit more fun locking your phone in your desk drawer or closet. The app even partnered with Trees for the Future to help plant real trees.
If gaming and a higher purpose doesn’t work in curbing your addiction, then maybe try adding apps on your phone that can enrich your life versus wasting time. Or maybe you should become more aware of how often you pick up and how many...
]]>The post Road Map to Success: Resources to Refresh Your Content Marketing Program appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
]]>No matter how far you’ve come in your content marketing career – and how much you continue to progress – there are always a few things you wish you were better at, understood more deeply, or had known about earlier.
On my career path, I traveled from print journalism to public relations to digital publishing before arriving at the content marketing crossroads. At that point, I needed to get up to speed on some fundamentals that hadn’t factored into my previous roles; so I turned to informational resources like CMI to power my journey of discovery. (Yep, I relied on content marketing to strengthen my ability to be a content marketer.)
There’s always more to learn; but my self-education efforts have helped me to bridge some knowledge gaps, develop new skills and techniques, and produce better results for my clients and content partners.
I thought I would return the favor by revisiting the fundamentals of successful content marketing from top to bottom. Think of this post as a road map to CMI’s best resources on topics where you or your team might benefit from a refresher course or an expanded view.
Like most things in life, you can’t reach your full potential for success with content marketing until you understand exactly what it is (and what it isn’t) – including how it’s defined, what business goals it can help you achieve, and what roles it should play in relation to your other marketing disciplines and techniques.
#Contentmarketing success starts with knowing what it is AND what it isn't, says @joderama.
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While some circles of the digital industry have yet to agree on a definitive characterization of the technique, the definition we use at CMI represents the consensus:
Content marketing is the strategic marketing approach of creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.
In short, instead of pitching your products or services, content marketing works by capturing the attention of your target audience members and helping them address their informational and task-oriented needs. The belief is that your audience over time will come to trust and rely on your guidance, recognize your company’s unique value proposition, and ultimately reward you with business and loyalty.
Let’s unpack the definition further to hone in on its three most essential components:
You can accomplish a lot with a consistent, relevant, and valuable content marketing program. But you’ll never be able to attain the results you want if you haven’t first identified your goals.
You can't get results if you haven't identified your #content marketing goals, says @joderama.
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Some of the most common goals marketers pursue through their content programs include:
Content marketing can’t function at its best in a vacuum nor is it meant to be a replacement for other promotional techniques. Content works best when it operates in a cooperative capacity – when it is used to fuel and complement your other marketing efforts in alignment with your overarching business goals.
#Contentmarketing can't function at its best in vacuum, says @joderama.
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For example, content marketing works well with:
Now that you can clearly characterize content marketing’s value proposition, you’ll be better able to communicate its benefits in terms that others – including your internal and external teams, the C-suite, and other key stakeholders – will understand and appreciate.
The value proposition is a must if you want to secure buy-in and ongoing support: If executive management does not believe in the value of content marketing, it will be incredibly difficult to get the budget, resources, and approvals to keep your content engine running at peak performance over the long term.
Executive buy-in is a must to keep the #contentmarketing engine running long-term, says @joderama.
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While every buy-in conversation is unique to the organization’s priorities and marketing goals, at a minimum be prepared to address common questions and objections, such as:
The following checklist can take your buy-in preparation process further, giving you the tools to assure stakeholders that your content program will be well positioned to achieve success. You may not be able to get every element in place before you ask executives for their support, but the more boxes you can check, the more effective your content marketing program buy-in pitch is likely to be.
With buy-in secured, you can get down to the business of planning, creating, and sharing the high-quality content your audience craves.
While no single technique for developing and managing content suits every organization, we recommend following this content marketing framework. Think of it as a syllabus of sorts, covering the five core elements necessary to run a successful, scalable, and highly strategic content marketing operation:
In upcoming posts, I’ll dive more deeply into each of these building blocks and explore best practices for applying them within your organization. Stay tuned.
Don’t miss future posts helping your content marketing become more mature (and more successful). Subscribe to the weekday e-newsletter.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
The post Road Map to Success: Resources to Refresh Your Content Marketing Program appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
]]>Breaking through the Noise on Social Media: How to run a Twitter Chat That Spotlights Your Nonprofit’s Impact – guest post by Neil Parekh
Every second, on average, around 6,000 tweets are posted to Twitter.
How do you break through the noise on Twitter to highlight your nonprofit’s impact and gain visibility for the good work your organization is doing?… Read More
]]>Breaking through the Noise on Social Media: How to run a Twitter Chat That Spotlights Your Nonprofit’s Impact – guest post by Neil Parekh
Every second, on average, around 6,000 tweets are posted to Twitter.
How do you break through the noise on Twitter to highlight your nonprofit’s impact and gain visibility for the good work your organization is doing? Throw a party – with a purpose.
No, not a cocktail party…a Twitter party. More specifically, a “Twitter Chat.” In many ways, a Twitter Chat is like a party. You invite guests to a specific place at a specific time, introduce them to each other, encourage conversation around a specific topic (although there might be tangents) and hope people have a good time. If you’re lucky, your guests will leave having learned something.
For the past 20 years, United Ways across the U.S. have managed and supported their local 2-1-1, a vital service that connects callers to a range of human and social services.
]]>The post 4 Unconventional Ways to Promote Blog Content on Social Media appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
]]>Remember when you could write an amazing blog post, paste the link with a featured image, and hit share on social to see your web traffic grow?
The same old content promotion tactics don’t work anymore. With organic reach rapidly declining on social media, you need new ways to effectively promote blog content without paying for it.
In this post, I’ll walk you through four effective and unconventional ways to promote your blog content on social media without paying for it.
Let’s jump right in.
It’s no secret reaching people with content (organically) on Facebook is tough. In fact, it’s almost futile.
Reaching people with #content organically on @Facebook is almost futile, says @Nansida.
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Unless you’ve got millions of fans, your organic reach is going to be tiny. Boosting posts is an option but likely not a sustainable plan for all your content.
But what else is there?
Well, one of the most underused forms of content promotion on Facebook is live video.
Daily watch time for Facebook Live content has grown by more than four times since its launch in 2016. On top of that, users comment on Facebook Live videos at 10 times the rate of standard content. Even Facebook has dumped millions into paying influencers to use Facebook Live.
Daily watch time for Facebook Live broadcasts has grown by more than 4x since 2016 via @Facebook.
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How do you use Facebook Live to promote your latest blog post? Go live and announce it. When you do, a notification is sent to all your followers and fans even if the video is only a few minutes long.
Use @Facebook Live to promote your latest #blog post. Notification is sent to all your followers. @Nansida
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Buffer has done a great job of using live broadcasts to share new posts:
To execute the content promotion video through Facebook Live, show a featured image and talk about the key points of the post. Ask viewers to head to your site to finish reading it or to implement the tactics you talked about.
Even if you capture only a small percentage of your audience in the live session, your other audience members can click on the notification to watch the recorded version.
If producing live video content isn’t your cup of tea, don’t fret. Standard Facebook videos are still effective in capturing more organic traffic than a text or text-with-image post. Most content consumed on Facebook is video. That format generates the highest engagement rates of any post type.
Video #content on @Facebook generates the highest engagement rates of any post type via @locowise.
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Brands like HubSpot are taking full advantage of this strategy:
Using short video clips based on the latest blog post has helped drive tons of engagement. The 43-second Facebook video post – How to Write a Killer Email Signature – has over 423,000 views, 2,500 reactions, 1,600 shares, and 273 comments.
Post short video clips based on a latest blog post on @Facebook to drive engagement, says @Nansida.
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That’s massive organic reach even on a dying organic platform.
Take your next blog post and turn it into a short video by outlining your article tips. For example, if your article is “5 Tips for XX,” show each tip in quick succession with a new video clip. Pique viewers’ curiosity then let them know your site has a full tutorial for each tip.
TIP: Don’t give away the entire premise of the post. Use the video only to encourage users to click to your site and read the entire post.
HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:
Instagram is often thought of as a joke when it comes to blog promotion.
“It’s only meant for photos.”
“People just want to see cool travel pics.”
“Nobody goes on Instagram for blog content.”
Those are a few of the commonly held sentiments among marketers today.
But they’re not true and Instagram’s user base (800 million monthly users, including 500 million daily active users) alone should be enough to convince you the platform is an incredible place to promote your content.
One of the best ways to promote your content on Instagram for maximum engagement is by using its Stories feature. But since Instagram isn’t a link-friendly platform, you’ve got to get creative.
Promote your #blog content on @Instagram using its Stories feature, says @Nansida.
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With the standard Instagram format, you can only include a link in your bio:
But with Stories, you can link within an individual story, bringing people directly to your content without leaving the app.
With your next piece of content, share it on your Instagram feed as a new post first:
Then, turn your post into an Instagram Story and link to your newest blog post with the “See More” feature:
When users swipe up, they land on your latest post without leaving the application, which encourages them to stay rather than bounce:
This natural integration of content is a big win when it comes to promoting on Instagram. Instead of having to tell people to click your link in the bio, they can access it directly from Stories.
TIP: Always promote your latest post as a natural post on Instagram, then follow it up with a Story post that links to your content.
Snapchat? Didn’t Instagram kill Snapchat?
Yes and no. While more users are active on Instagram, Snapchat remains king in terms of daily usage and engagement. Time spent on Snapchat in the last six months has grown almost 20%. Users spend an average of 32.8 minutes per day on the app.
Time spent on @Snapchat in the last six months has grown almost 20% via @recode.
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Even though it only has 300 million monthly active users, Snapchat is five times more effective than Twitter and 10 times more effective than LinkedIn at getting users to engage. Snapchat users also spend equal time browsing content from friends, live stories, and brands.
One of the best ways to promote a new article on Snapchat is by using the story feature where you can tease your latest content.
Use the @Snapchat story feature to give viewers a sneak peek of your latest post, says @Nansida.
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Mashable is perfectly executing this content promotion strategy by creating fun, sneak peeks of its latest posts:
When you swipe to the next slide on the story, it prompts you with a call to action to see the full post:
Using Snapchat to promote your content can help you drive organic traffic directly within the app. If your promotional content gets high engagement, it could even land you on the featured Discover page:
Simply sharing your blog content via a social media blast isn’t going to cut it. You won’t drive the traffic that you need or deserve.
With an ever-expanding tool set on social media, you need to get creative with your sharing strategy. Experiment with Facebook Live, standard videos, Instagram Stories, and Snapchat, and bring those social visits back to your site.
Promotional tactics lose their effectiveness over time. Use these new unconventional yet effective ways to promote your next blog post for maximum engagement.
Get more innovative ways to make your content marketing even more successful at Content Marketing World this September in Cleveland, Ohio. Register today and use code BLOG100 to save $100.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
The post 4 Unconventional Ways to Promote Blog Content on Social Media appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
]]>But it becomes technical because so many marketers and content creators are using the latest “hack” to increase their rankings. The more information there is, the more differing opinions you hear, the more complicated it becomes.
But at the end of the day, it boils down to a couple things:
The more quality sites you have pointing to yours, the more credible Google will view your site. Backlinks maybe aren’t as important as they once were, but they’re still valuable.
This blog post will cover #2. You need to satisfy users. That covers a lot of things, but there’s one that’s often overlooked.
So here’s the best, most overlooked SEO factor that I can give you.
Drumroll please…
What do I mean by that? Here it is in practice:
When a person lands on your page from a search engine, you don’t want them to go back to the search page and click on a different result.
While you will likely have to stay on the first website for a few moments, if Google notices that you go back to the SERP and click on another site and don’t go back, that means that that site was more useful for you.
People search Google for a reason. They either want to find a website (i.e. branded searches) or they have a question that needs to be answered. That’s Google’s job. They answer questions for people.
People are becoming increasingly used to asking a machine a question and getting an answer. Siri, Alexa, and Google Home provide answers for people. They don’t even need to search to find answers.
You know why Wikipedia ranks so well? Because each article has thousands of words, and it answers the question that the searcher was looking for. And it’s continuously updated with new information.
It continues to rank well because people know that Wikipedia has lots of great information, so it becomes a preferred result of many searchers. They’ll seek out Wikipedia over other sites.
This comes down to answering questions and satisfying users.
That’s your goal. To make sure a user who visits your site from a search never thinks about clicking the back button.
So, how do you do that?
Well, for branded searches it’s pretty easy. If someone searches for your company name, your company will be the 1st result and they’ll visit your site. The question is answered; there isn’t a worry about them clicking the back button.
If you have a blog or any online publication it becomes much more difficult. Those 9 other sites on the SERP are your competition, and they think that they can deliver a better answer to users.
Here are some examples of well-ranked sites that answer users questions without getting in the way.
If you want to know if critics and an audience liked a movie, you go to Rotten Tomatoes. There isn’t any other place that can consistently answer that question.
I’ve heard the movie Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri is good. So, I Googled it:
Was Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri Good?
Rotten Tomatoes was the first result. I clicked and they gave me an answer:
My question is answered – looks like it’s a good movie!
Putting this information at the top of the page with the yellow background helps visitors find the information they need quickly. There no need to scroll through a long page to find the answer.
Is Yahoo Answers a bit stale?
Yes.
But it continues to ranks well because it answers users questions.
Let’s try a query. Recently I had a “knocking” noise coming from my refrigerator. So, hesitant to call a repairman, I decided to Google it:
what is causing knocking noise in my refrigerator?
Yahoo Answers was one of the first results. I clicked on the result, and they delivered the answer:
A simple answer that makes sense. Thanks, Yahoo Answers.
Check out when that question was answered. A decade ago! Yet it’s still a favorite result from searchers.
You can remember hundreds or thousands of times where you’ve searched for something and wound up finding your answer on Yahoo Answers.
The only issue Yahoo! Answers has is that it isn’t authoritative. For example, an unqualified person can answer a medical question and if it’s rated as the answer then that is what users will see. It becomes Google’s job to put these results much lower than they would have been and place a site like Mayo Clinic higher, which they (usually) do.
Just think of how many times you’ve had to Google something that starts with…”how to…”
The brillance of wikiHow is that they set out to answer every question that begins with “how to…” and they do a good job of it.
I recently had to put a suit on that came with cufflinks. In a moment of embarrassment, I didn’t know exactly how to put cufflinks on. I didn’t want to look like a fool and ask one of my buddies to help me put my cufflinks on.
So I Googled it and landed on Wikihow. And they provided me with this wonderful answer (with pictures):
Think about how much time that took someone to write that article. They started with a blank page and wrote detailed step-by-step instructions that were crisp and to the point. Then they added pictures and gifs to help the visual learners. It probably took at least a few hours, but now they outrank everyone, including YouTube.
So how do you create content that satisfies users? Here are a few of my tips:
Most people won’t read your entire article when they are looking for an answer to a simple question. They’ll scan and find their answer and move on. You need to help these “scanners” find their answer. It starts with putting the answers and important parts in the headers.
KISSmetrics has a blog post that discusses the best time to send a newsletter. People that are coming to that page are looking for an answer. So the answers are placed in the headers:
Take a look at the blog post to see the full list of tips. If you were coming from google looking for the best time to send a newsletter, you’d quickly find your answer. Why would you hit the back button?
If you have a blog post like this, then you should put the answers in the headers.
You can also bold words and use large font to highlight the parts you want to get across.
This blog post from CoSchedule uses an unobtrusive box to show readers their tips:
Dummies.com puts tips in a box as well, making it easy to find the most important information:
Quora is a great Q&A platform, but sometimes people don’t want to search through dozens of answers on Quora in order to get their answer.
So Quora has an “Answer Wiki”:
Here are all the answers from the Quora community, organized into one section. Is there a better travel hacks page on the web? All the information you’ll need is on one page.
Often times people searching just want a quick answer. They don’t want to read a 3000-word article to answer their question. This is why summaries placed at the top of your article can be helpful.
Examine.com answers a common question at the top of the page:
There’s your answer. No searching a web page or hitting Command + F to find an answer. It sits right at the top, immediately below the question. If I wanted more information, I’d scroll and read the entire article.
In a similar fashion, ScienceDaily puts a summary at the top of each article:
Business Insider is reducing news stories to bullet points:
It’s important to remember that word count and detailed articles still matter. Yes, Business Insider uses bullet points, but they also have an entire news article.
Don’t skimp on quality or use bullet points because it’s easier for you. It’s about making it easier for visitors. Again, it’s about satisfying users. They won’t click pogo-stick (hit the back button) and they’ll be sure to visit your site again.
If your content contains a lot of how-tos and tactical information, it may be useful to spend some time creating videos. I’ve done that with Quicksprout University:
The university has hundreds of videos, along with the transcript of each video.
When a visitor lands on this page, they know what to do. Watch the video, read the description, and the transcript can help them reference certain parts of the video.
Mechanics of Sport contains great how-to content for learning how to ski and snowboard. Just check out their page and video for instructions on putting skis on:
There are four sections to this page:
Take a look at that page and ask yourself, “if I wanted to know how to put skis on, is there a page that could answer the question better than this?”
You should be asking yourself the same question when you’re creating how-to content. Look at the entire body of work and ask yourself if there’s any site that answered the question or gave the instructions better. If there is, you still have work to do.
Sometimes marketers will get in the way. They’ll shoot themselves in the foot by adding too much to a page, and it ends up making visitors click the back button and never coming back.
That’s why it’s important to not add things that make visitors leave. Here are some things you’ll want to avoid:
Overlays work based on mouse movement. If the software detects that your mouse is moving up towards the top of the screen, with the intention of closing the tab or clicking the back button, the overlay will appear. Here it is in action:
These are becoming more common around the web, and yes they are annoying, but they are also very effective.
Your goal is to get something from each visitor; the most common first step is the visitor’s name and email address. And overlays can deliver that. They’re great for building your email list.
My thinking is this: if visitors are going to leave my site, I at least want some information from them. The overlay is the best tool for that.
I’d recommend experimenting with an overlay. Over the long term, the best option is to hire a developer to create one for you. That way you aren’t paying hundreds (or thousands) of dollars every month to keep it running.
If you can’t start with a developer, or prefer to use a tool, I’d recommend Hello Bar or Sleeknote.
Just remember not to use interstitials or popups on mobile devices – or you’ll get an SEO penalty.
Want more SEO tips? I’ve got 3 more in this video:
SEO can get complicated pretty quickly.
There are so-called experts around the web promising easy ways to increasing rankings using a simple hack. Or worse, trying to sell you their service and promising you the first spot on Google.
Yet through all this noise, we often forget the fundamentals – satisfying users.
As content creators, we need to provide users with great content that helps people find what they’re looking for. That’s an answer, a how-to, or something thought provoking.
The goal is to get users to stay and consume our content. To make sure they don’t click the back button.
About the Author: Neil Patel is the cofounder of Neil Patel Digital.
]]>Why? Because trends often become the norm, and getting in early allows you to harness its power without too much competition or noise. Write something off as “just” a trend, and you may be late to the party of the year.
Remember when Facebook was a “trend”? Or Twitter? Instagram? Now, those are a key component to your digital marketing plan (and if not, they should be).
You’ve got to reach and engage with your audience where they spend time online. And where is that? Say it with me: social media.
The statistics paint a very clear picture: social media must be an integral part of your marketing mix in 2018 and beyond. Ignore it at your peril.
That said, social media is an evolving beast, with new features popping up all the time.
Some are destined for the trash heap of history – remember how much “fun” poking was on Facebook? – while others become cornerstones of the platform that we can’t remember living without.
So what to do, which platforms to use, and what trends to try?
Here are seven for the new year:
This may not be completely new, but it’ll take on increased importance in 2018 and the years to come. Social media in all its forms is only getting bigger and more popular, and by extension you’ll have to start paying more attention to it.
But that goes beyond just having a few accounts on a few different platforms. You’ll even have to do more than “just” having an active presence on those platforms. You need to listen to what people are saying about you, your competition, your brand, and your products, and respond accordingly. The good, the bad, and the ugly.
People are talking about you more often than just when they’re engaging directly with you. People are making complaints, lavishing praise, and showing off your stuff on many different platforms and networks. Some you belong to, and some you don’t.
But that’s beside the point: if they’re talking to or about you, they expect a response from you.
In fact, 60% of consumers that post a complaint on social media expect a response in less than 60 minutes. You’ve got one hour to notice and respond. And if you don’t, 88% of them are unlikely to buy from you again or recommend you to friends and family.
Enter social listening.
You need systems in place to monitor many different channels for your particular keywords and phrases, and to bring those mentions to your attention so you can examine them for both insight and opportunities.
What are people saying about your brand? How do they feel about your latest product? What problems or complaints do they have? An active social listening strategy can provide those answers and more.
And as we increasingly use social media for everything, there’s a lot of insight you could harvest, to say nothing of the improved customer experience you can provide by responding to issues and complaints in a timely and convenient manner.
The bigger you get, the more important it is to be aware of what others are saying about you on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, review sites, and more.
A simple way to get started is Google Alerts. You can quickly set up email notifications for the words and phrases you want to monitor by entering them into the search bar, setting your preferences on frequency, sources, region, and more, and clicking the “Create Alert” button. It’s just that easy.
But to truly get the most out of social listening, you need a service or tool that specializes in it. A few of the best include Brandwatch, Hootsuite Insights, Mention, ReviewTrackers, Talkwalker, and TrackReddit.
Respond quickly to complaints. Collect valuable data on your customers. Manage a crisis. Find influencers. Generate reports. Analyze your competition. Understand your audience and industry better. Measure impact. Gauge brand sentiment. Enhance customer service and engagement.
The list of what social listening can’t do is much shorter than what it can do. If you’re not already using it, I highly recommend you start. Sign up and start listening today.
Being aware of public opinion and sentiment towards your brand are as important as the product or service itself. Social listening gives that to you.
Video – whether recorded or live – is becoming the social media tactic you can’t afford to ignore. That’ll only get more apparent in 2018.
According to a recent post by Hubspot, 43% of social media users want to see more video content from marketers, businesses now publish an average of 18 videos each month, the average video retains a little over one-third of its viewers (37%) to the very end, and 85% of businesses have in-house personnel and resources for video creation.
Do you? Are you using video and its younger-but-equally-popular brother, live streaming, as part of your social media efforts? You should. Consider:
Viewers respond positively to live video streaming because of the immediacy and engagement it creates with their favorite brands and personalities.
Brands and personalities can quickly deliver an enhanced customer experience with live video. The four most popular types are explainers, product demos, how-tos, and testimonials, but you can do so much more: live events, announcements, product reveals, interviews, behind-the-scenes, Q&A sessions, demonstrations, and on and on.
Most social media platforms now have native live streaming capabilities or easy integration, so you can pick and choose where and when to do it. Facebook Live, YouTube Live, Periscope, Twitter, Snapchat, Twitch, and Instagram Live are all great platforms to try depending on where your customers and audience are hanging out.
To set yourself up for success, let your followers and fans know you’ll be live streaming beforehand. Post about it, send a reminder, create a daily or weekly or monthly schedule, be consistent, get the word out to generate as big an audience as possible.
Then click that “Go Live” button. Be authentic, informative, and remember to breath. Connect and build a relationship with your audience, and they’ll become not only loyal, but vocal advocates on your behalf.
Some have called this one dead and done, but influencer marketing is not only still alive, it’s growing. That’s not to say it hasn’t evolved, though.
In 2018, it’s less about riding the coattails of whomever is most popular at any given moment, and more about building meaningful relationships and finding the influencers that reflect your brand ethos.
Many companies have found themselves in defense mode after partnering with an influencer based solely on numbers, only to discover later that they’ve shared sexist, racist, grossly inappropriate, or bigoted content on their channels. 73% of marketers list “finding the right influencer” as the biggest challenge.
YouTuber PewDiePie, for example, has over 60 million subscribers and makes millions of dollars each year on the platform. In February of 2017, he had lucrative partnerships with Google and Disney…that is until he was fired from both after he posted objectionable and anti-Semitic material. Not the kind of exposure Google and Disney were trying to get.
Don’t make that mistake. Launching a successful influencer marketing campaign should never be based on the number of followers or fans. You need to look for relevancy to your industry, products, and target audience – Kim Kardashian to promote your new robo-advisor might not be the best fit – their average amount of comments and other engagement metrics, and the overall sentiment towards them (you can find that with social listening).
Choose wisely, as your designated influencer is a reflection of your brand. You want it to be a positive one. Once you’ve identified one, reach out and connect. Build the relationship. Ask for their ideas if their interested, but don’t feel obligated to grant them complete control and freedom. Influencer marketing works best when it’s a true partnership.
But what about the $64,000 question: does it work?
Are you game to give it a go? The payoff for a well planned and strategic influencer marketing campaign can far exceed your wildest expectations. Expect this tactic to continue to grow in 2018.
It’s easy to consider Facebook past its prime. It’s been around since 2004 – a lifetime in the digital realm – and the news and trends frequently focus on what’s new and emerging.
That’s a major mistake. Facebook is the platform to rule all platforms. Was, is, and will continue to be. If you only engage on two platforms, it should be Facebook and one other. Three? Facebook and two others. You get the idea.
The social media behemoth had 1.40 billion daily active users and 2.13 billion monthly active users as of December 2017. And that’s not all:
Long story short: be active on Facebook. Regardless of your age group or target, they are on that platform.
With numbers like that, Facebook could just sit back and count its ad revenue. But it doesn’t. It continues to evolve and innovate at a breakneck speed.
In 2018, there’s a lot going on at Facebook. These three should be on your radar:
Facebook may be old by social media standards, but it’s proof-positive that you can teach an old dog new tricks.
We already mentioned Facebook Messenger, but that’s not the only circus in town. The popularity of messaging platforms is exploding. WhatsApp (1.3 billion monthly active users), WeChat (963 million MAUs), and Facebook Messenger (1.2 billion MAUs) are leading the charge.
And with easy integration of both artificial intelligence and chatbots, you can automatically increase engagement and the customer experience.
Facebook research shows that 54.5% of US social media users prefer messaging channels over email, phone and online chat, and 67 percent of business owners plan to increase their messaging over the next two years.
Messaging allows you to reach your audience at scale and on their preferred channel. 89% of consumers would like to use it to communicate with businesses, but only 48% of businesses are able to do so. Those numbers don’t add up.
In fact, users would rather give up using the telephone, their morning coffee, and sex before they’d give up messaging. On average, 77% of users keep messaging notifications turned on so they never miss a thing. FOMO is a powerful motivator.
And I know from firsthand experience that you get achieve an 88% open and 56% click-through rate using Facebook Messenger.
Allow me to state the obvious: messaging is big, effective, and only getting bigger. With it, you can deliver messaging sequences, automate conversations with your users, create a sales funnel, and push out announcements, resources, and new content, to name just a few.
A chatbot – yes, the majority of bots are good – can automate your sales, help desk, complaint department, and more. You can communicate with your customers on their turf and whenever they want to, not the other way around.
Not convinced? Check out these ten examples of effective chatbots on Messenger to see how useful and entertaining they can be.
If you’re itching to give it a try, look to popular platforms and services to build and launch your own (many without the need for coding skills):
Bots aren’t evil. And messaging isn’t going away anytime soon. Take full advantage of both.
Introduced in August 2016 to compete with a similar feature on Snapchat, Instagram Stories quickly grew to over 100 million daily active users (DAU) in just a few months, hit 200 million DAUs in well under a year, and now boasts an impressive 250 million DAUs. It’s growth and popularity far outpaces that of Snapchat, and is still trending upward.
Are you using it?
About half of all businesses on Instagram post at least one Story each month, while 20% of those stories generate at least one direct message. How’s that for engagement?
The Story feature allows users to post both videos and photos that disappear in 24 hours. You can add filters, stickers, text, and drawings. You can even create simple polls to ask questions and collect valuable data on your audience.
Using the Instagram Story feature is not complicated, and even if you’ve never used Instagram before, you’ll quickly discover all it has to over.
Instagram itself has an impressive 800 million monthly active users, which is more than Twitter, Snapchat, and Pinterest combined. It should most definitely be part of your social media tool belt.
Include the recent Instagram Shopping functionality – a feature that allows you to tag up to five items within an image with a clickable link to more information – and you can increase engagement and sales even more.
While virtual reality creates an immersive experience, it does have some major drawbacks. For starters, it limits the mobility of the user wearing the VR headgear. And since most of us access the online world via our mobile devices, that’s a big issue.
That’s where augmented reality (AR) has a distinct advantage. Because users don’t have their vision restricted, mobility is not impeded. In fact, AR typically promotes greater mobility as users search for virtual elements within the physical world.
It’s already taking the gaming industry by storm. Remember Pokémon Go? The company behind it – Niantic – will be releasing Harry Potter: Wizards Unite in the near future. It will presumably have the same opportunity that Pokémon Go had for businesses to market themselves in partnership with the game.
Purchase a “lure”, and it not only lured the Pokémon to your business, but it also lured players to your physical location to capture them. Win-win.
Augmented reality is poised to have a similar impact on social media, allowing online personalities and products to be brought directly into homes, photos, and videos. And as it doesn’t require additional hardware other than your smartphone, most of us are already equipped to enjoy it.
Face filters and lenses fall under the AR umbrella, too.
Lens Studio by Snapchat gives everyone the ability to create and share custom lenses and “magical AR experiences”. Let your followers and fans play with your brand and products in the real world.
With augmented reality you can let your hair down and have some fun while still spreading brand awareness and engaging with leads and customers. Get in on it.
I personally think these seven will be the ones to watch in 2018. Pick one, pick a few, and try them out.
Social media is all about connection, relationships, and engagement.
But to do that, you need to stay current on the latest trends and popular features. Don’t jump on the bandwagon of every one – some will not be a good fit for you, your brand, and your customers – but it’s worth selectively choosing those that make sense to your business and goals.
Trends come. Trends go. But some survive to become tomorrow’s mainstays. Get in before the masses, and you stand to win big.
What other social media trends have you noticed in the past few months? What are you most excited about trying?
About the Author: Neil Patel is the cofounder of Neil Patel Digital.
]]>Earlier this week, I had the honor of kicking off the first day of a week of workshops for 50 women’s right leaders from the United States through a program called “Tech2EmpowerUSA.” The goal of the program is to connect these leaders with technology experts to create a connected movement.… Read More
]]>Earlier this week, I had the honor of kicking off the first day of a week of workshops for 50 women’s right leaders from the United States through a program called “Tech2EmpowerUSA.” The goal of the program is to connect these leaders with technology experts to create a connected movement.
All week, these women had the opportunity to visit a different technology company and get training on a variety of topics. On Wednesday, they were hosted at Twitter Headquarters for a training. My colleague, Cheryl Contee, kicked of the morning with an inspiring overview of the power of digital and social media for social good.
I loved her quote, shared by Twitter for Good: ““The way we defeat fake news is by making the truth louder.”
While social media and connectivity has only made the underbelly of extremes in our society more visible and spreadable, we can’t abandon the platforms. As Cheryl says, we have to make the truth louder and amplify the good...
]]>But I’m here to tell you that’s not the case.
Yes, if you do it correctly, SEO should bring in lots of traffic.
Ultimately, though, SEO is about revenue.
It’s about driving in new customers to buy stuff.
And that’s why most people do keyword research wrong.
Here’s the common mistake I always see.
People do two things when researching new keywords:
That’s a good start, of course. But it’s often not enough.
The problem is that it leaves a giant, black hole in your SEO strategy where it matters most: The bottom line.
Only comparing volume and competition leads you to make questionable decisions.
In this scenario, you typically select the highest searched keyword that you can compete for.
It’s like a popularity contest. Keywords are chosen for their ability to drive traffic, not for their ability to convert.
That’s the problem we’re going to fix today, in this article.
I’m going to show you how to side-step this common mistake. You’ll see the ‘missing ingredient’ from your keyword research. And you’ll discover how to not just get traffic, but more leads and customers, too.
The Buyer’s journey.
A recent study found that “55% of consumers visit stores before buying online.”
Wait a second. What?
People visit physical stores and then buy online?
That’s odd.
You’re used to seeing the reverse. People will research stuff online before buying.
The study goes on to confirm that “more than half (56%) of 18-24 year-old shoppers say they buy products sight unseen.”
The theory behind such a high rate of physical inspections comes back to the product.
The more “high-touch” it is, the more common it is that someone wants to see it or feel it in person, first.
That makes sense when you consider it.
You might buy socks on Amazon, without ever looking at them. But if you’re going to throw down a few hundred bucks on a new jacket, you’re going to want to make sure it fits properly.
What this means for companies, though, is that we live in an omnichannel world.
People not only research things online extensively before buying. They now also will research stuff offline, buy online, and vice versa.
Google calls this early research period the Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT). Their data shows that almost all consumers today will research extensively before buying.
And what’s happening, is that they’re slowing moving through the stages of the buyer’s journey.
Here’s a perfect example of what visitors are experiencing when they get sick:
A healthy person is never going to buy cough medicine.
Why would they? They don’t have a need for it just yet.
Only when their throat starts to hurt, do they realize they have a problem.
Next, they’ll take a look at all the various alternatives they could buy.
And that’s no easy feat, because we’re literally surrounded by medication.
Now, we know what customers are doing before buying (more or less).
Our goal is to construct a conversion funnel that lines up with each step.
Consumers own the shopping experience. They’re going to shop how they want, when they want.
No amount of advertising or campaigns we run will change that.
So don’t fight it. Instead, adjust and respond accordingly.
Bringing this back to SEO, it means you need to create pages on your site for each step.
This is the content mapping process. You take each customer persona, and figure out what they would want to see in the Awareness, Consideration, and Decision steps.
The reason we’re spending so much time here is because most website I see are lopsided.
They either have too much Awareness content, like blog posts. And not enough Decision-stage stuff that will convert they people they’ve brought in.
B2B companies often suffer from the reverse. They have too much Decision-stage content that only talks about their company, their products, or their services.
Why’s that a problem?
Because it means they can’t optimize for Awareness keywords to bring in enough search volume.
See what I mean?
Keyword research and optimization is completely dependent on your site content.
You can’t optimize an About page for a big, popular keyword like “content marketing.”
I mean, you can. But it won’t rank anytime soon.
That’s why one of the first things I do when starting work with any B2B company, for example, is to build out their content assets, first.
They need content targeting each funnel stage:
Before we can optimize each to bring in leads and customers.
I know. It’s kind of a chicken and egg problem.
But search engines are too sophisticated today.
You can’t fool them. At least, not for very long.
When companies come to me, suffering from lots of traffic but low deal flow, I like to use the following trick.
Treat SEO like PPC.
Yes, you heard me. I want you to take a PPC-based approach to keyword research.
PPC only focuses on keywords that convert.
You don’t care about traffic or clicks or impressions or any other vanity metric.
Literally, the only thing that matters, are the ‘money keywords’ that drive leads or sale.
Tiny variations on a word suddenly matter. One word substitution in a phrase becomes a big deal.
So I want you to organize SEO keywords by match types. Just like you’d do with a PPC campaign:
At the top of the funnel, people are simply looking around at various TVs.
In the middle, they’re looking for pricing information.
And at the bottom, they’re ready to purchase.
But more importantly, do you see the specific words they’re using at each point?
That’s what we want to focus on here.
People use specific words that indicate which stage of the funnel they’re in. That’s how you identify them.
And that’s how we’ll take them to optimize content in a few seconds.
Here’s a good starting point from the HubSpot’s Inbound Conference:
People in the Awareness stage often use “issue or opportunity” terms. That makes perfect sense when you think about it. People are just beginning to realize their problem.
Think about how you found this very post you’re reading right now.
Why’d you click on this one and not one of the hundreds of others that crossed your stream today?
Because you identified with the problem.
The Consideration stage is when people start looking for solutions. They start looking for “tools,” “suppliers,” or “services” that can remove this pain point from their life.
Here, they’re comparing alternatives.
There might be five different software options that solve their pain point. So they’re gathering data on which one is right for them.
Finally, “reviews,” “benchmarks,” or “tests” can help someone make the ultimate Decision.
Of course, real life is a little more complicated and nuanced.
But try to keep it simple.
These three ‘buckets’ are fine for including in your keyword research.
Now, when you’re going to start researching keywords, you’re not just looking for volume and competition.
Instead, you’re starting with funnel stage.
You’re deliberately looking at keywords under Awareness, for example.
Then, you can drill down into the volume and competition for each. So you’re only ultimately comparing queries in the same funnel stage.
For example, pull up Ubersuggest and type in your search queries.
Mine is “keyword research.” :)
Ubersuggest will do exactly what is says: suggest new potential variations based on the original keyword.
So you’ll get a massive list of potential options, all with their estimated volume, CPC, and competition measures.
But first, we need to make this data relevant.
Scroll down to the very bottom of the tool and hit “Export.”
Exporting the data into a CSV file will allow you to start adding more context to each keyword.
For starters, you’d want to start assigning a Funnel Stage from the three options we’ve covered above.
Now, you can add one more column for the important piece:
The landing page.
Keyword research is nothing without pages to optimize.
So let’s look at examples for each step of the funnel to see how you can complete this process.
“Las Vegas” gets over a million searches each month.
Crazy, right?
Just getting a tiny slice of that would get you tons of traffic.
But you know what?
Most of that traffic would be completely useless if you were selling products or services.
(Ad revenue might be a different story.)
The reason is because “Las Vegas” is just too general.
You don’t understand the search intent behind that query. Which means you probably can’t figure out how to optimize a page on your site for it.
People looking for this could be looking for the weather, for example.
They’re not exactly ready to buy show tickets or a hotel room just yet.
Not only that, but you’re also most likely competing against the big boys with huge budgets.
I like to look at the top few PPC results to get an idea of how smart advertisers are targeting different keywords.
And “Las Vegas” shows some tough companies:
That’s why most people suggest a long-tail approach to top-of-the-funnel keywords.
You can target a ton of less competition queries that are also experiencing the problem you’re describing.
Take “UX mistakes,” for example.
No, people won’t Google this and convert immediately. But you can easily target keywords like this with blog content:
You’re getting them into your website initially, so that you can send them into other resources or retarget them with ads down the line.
Write down all of the pain points customers experience. Follow that up with the benefits of your product or service.
Take these potential topics and start building out your categories for your blog.
Now, for each one, see if you can attach the following top-of-the-funnel keyword modifiers:
Plug these variations into Ubersuggest. It will spit out dozens of new awareness keywords, perfect for new blog post topics.
Now, see if you can find a few related ‘clusters’ of these keywords.
If you have a really popular one, that can serve as the ‘hub’ for the specific variations underneath.
Hub pages can be really long, in-depth resources, like my guides that span several different topics:
Each of these guides can internally link to relevant blog posts that cover similar topics.
And you’re building out a ‘web’ of relevant terms for Google to index.
Beyond just bringing in traffic, guides can also help you start turning strangers into leads.
Here’s how.
People in the consideration stage are now looking for options.
They’re looking for solutions to the pain they just realized.
Now, they’ve skipped over generic terms like “Las Vegas.” And are now looking for something specific, like “Las Vegas hotel rooms.”
Here, your objective changes.
You want to go from pages that will attract eyeballs to ones that will get people to stick like glue.
And that affects everything you do.
For example, someone who’s interested in a blog post around some pain point isn’t going to spend three hours on your site.
The time and energy someone’s willing to invest needs to rise proportionately, first.
Once you do get that ‘buy in,’ you can use in-depth resources like guides to keep them reading or coming back.
Remember what we learned earlier?
Consumers will often research at least ten different resources prior to purchasing.
So do you want those ten steps to be on your site, or someone else’s?
Now, let’s repeat the process we took in the last step.
Isolate those same key product or service benefits. But this time, apply the following variations:
People in this stage are comparing alternatives.
You don’t just want to ‘tell’ them about your features. You want to literally show them.
For example, head on over to the Crazy Egg recordings feature page.
Keep in mind that this is just one feature of several.
But we’ve gone through a ton of time (and money) trying to make it tell the best story.
We want to literally show people what the product does for them.
What does this have to do with keyword research?
Everything!
You want to transition someone’s interest in the middle of the funnel.
They’re looking for answers.
The keywords people use to find this page will bring with it a certain expectation.
They’re expecting to find something specific when they type in “ux design features.”
If the content on the page doesn’t line up with their expectation, they hit the back button.
And then you know what happens to your rankings?
They fall like a rock.
See, SEO isn’t just about keywords. It’s about optimizing for someone’s experience.
Ultimately, the best experience doesn’t just influence rankings.
It also dictates whether someone is going to take the next step to make a decision.
Or if they’re going to hit the back button on their browser to look for someone else.
You’ve scoped out a few hotels for your upcoming trip to Vegas.
What do you do next?
You’re going to look for price comparisons for the actual weekend in question.
Now, you’re getting into crunch time.
You want to make a decision. But only after weighing all the options.
This is where you often start seeing branded queries pop up, for example.
You’re going to start punching in dates.
Soon-to-be consumers in the Decision stage will also use queries like the following:
If you’re looking for the “best CRMs” in the last step, in this one, you’re pricing each one of them out.
You’re looking at the ‘next steps’ involved.
Kalia Strong includes a few other excellent modifiers to start regularly including in your bottom of the funnel keyword research, too.
At this point, someone is trying to decide if they should move forward. And if so, should they move forward with you?
Again, connect that back to your site content now.
Let’s say I’m interested in HubSpot. But I know from some initial research that it can get pricey.
So what do I search for when I’m trying to weigh my options?
Check out the very first paid result for this example:
(Now do you see why we think more like a PPC-er when doing SEO?)
SharpSpring has helpfully put together a product comparison for me, available for download, of course.
Of course, SharpSpring is a HubSpot alternative.
They’re positioning themselves against HubSpot.
So this page is optimized with “comparing HubSpot SharpSpring.”
SharpSpring’s URL structure gives away their “alternatives” SEO strategy.
They’re building out multiple pages just like this to bring in people who’re ready to make a decision.
Dig around on their site for a few seconds and you’ll see these comparison pages pop up again:
And again:
Obviously, these pages won’t get a ton of organic traffic by themselves.
But that’s the beauty of this strategy.
They don’t need to!
All of the keywords you’ve targeted earlier in the process were designed to bring in people.
They will get people interested.
These pages are built with one thing in mind: convert.
Then, each page can have it’s own relevant search query assigned:
That’s the chicken and egg problem illustrated.
On the one hand, you need to change how you’re segmenting keywords by funnel stage.
You want to bring in people at each step. Or transition ones from the step before.
BUT, you often can’t do that until you have the appropriate pages that also target each funnel stage.
Otherwise, you’re trying to optimize pages with irrelevant search queries. Ones with mismatching search intent.
So even if you did get clicks and visits, they won’t line up with visitor expectations.
Which means instead of buying, they’re going to bounce.
And go buy from someone else.
Traditional keyword research often fails.
It fails because people only consider volume and competition.
If they can reasonably compete for a term, they’ll go after the one with the best traffic metrics.
But traffic doesn’t mean much without buyers.
And too often, the most popular keywords only bring in traffic. They bring in people who’re looking for information around their problems.
However, these people are weeks or months away from acting to solve that problem.
That’s where the buyer’s journey becomes relevant.
You need to first consider funnel stages, and how to help people at each one.
Only then should you dig deeper into comparing search volume and competition.
Because then you’re comparing apples to apples. You need to make sure two keywords are directly related, first, before you can reasonably select one over the other.
Then, you can tack on different modifying words to bring up tons of related topics.
And this is where SEO starts.
Because you need to be armed with enough related searches, to then go out and build (or modify) the appropriate pages.
Without content and site pages targeting each step, those keywords aren’t going to do you any good.
Not only do the keywords need to target the appropriate search intent, but so do your pages.
That means if someone is looking for “best CRM,” they’re not looking for you to brag about being the “best CRM.”
They’re looking for a comparison of CRM alternatives so that they can choose who the ‘best’ is.
So it’s two sides of the same coin.
To convert more visitors, you need better search terms. But to dominate those search terms, you need better pages, too.
What are your top converting keywords and what do those pages have in common?
About the Author: Neil Patel is the cofounder of Neil Patel Digital.
]]>The post 5 Brands Share Their Content Marketing Process appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
]]>It’s a hazard of the job for content marketers. When you read or see a piece of high-quality content, you wonder how it got created. You ask yourself, “What does this company do to create great content? Is it great for business too?”
The simple answer is high-quality content serves both audience and business. “It’s written in such an energetic and engaging way that it will trigger the audience to take actions,” says Massimo Chieruzzi, CEO of AdEspresso.
If great #content is written in an engaging way it will trigger the audience to take action. @MassimoCw
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Nathan Ellering, head of demand generation at CoSchedule, says high-quality content is synonymous with highest-performing content. At his firm, that content includes five distinct characteristics: great topic, well-researched, optimized for search engines, comprehensive plus actionable, and optimized to capture leads.
High-quality content is synonymous with highest-performing #content, says @njellering.
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Quality content is “powerful enough to stop people in their tracks, make them think, and debate with themselves or others. It is user-centric, capable of solving a user’s most painful challenges,” according to Hotjar’s Louis Grenier and Fio Dossetto.
Quality #content is capable of solving a user's most painful challenges, says @LouisSlices & @content101.
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Content marketing strategists from these three brands plus two more willingly shared how they ideate, strategize, and produce that high-quality content, and evaluate its success. Read on to get some tips and insight that you can incorporate into your content marketing process.
We have internal and external copywriters based on the topic. Data-driven articles usually are written in-house. We typically pay above market rates to secure the best writers and avoid high turnover.
Every six months we review our buyer personas. We analyze the ROI of each one. We fine-tune them and sometimes add new ones or remove some. It helps us understand the needs of our customers and the problems they’re trying to solve with our product.
Each month we try to have a good editorial balance and have new content published for each buyer persona.
Each month @AdEspresso publishes new content for each buyer persona, says @MassimoCw.
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We try to listen to every signal regarding interesting topics we might cover in our blog: Twitter, Facebook, Quora, emails and, most of all, our customer support, which is usually the source with the better pulse on the situation when it comes to what users are looking for.
Once we define a topic, we write down a couple potential titles that might appeal to our users and are friendly for social sharing.
We trained our editorial team to do basic SEO analysis using Moz and SEMrush to analyze the potential search volumes of the keywords targeted in the new piece of content.
Use @moz & @semrush to analyze search volumes of keywords targeted in new #content, says @MassimoCw.
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Not every blog post needs to be a SEO hit but most of our traffic comes from Google, so we care about optimizing our content. That said, we’ll still cover a hot topic that can generate a big spike of traffic in the first few weeks mainly from social sharing.
We also compare search volume to purchase intent. For generic keywords, we need a high volume to justify writing the post. But for keywords that show high purchase intent, lower search volumes are fine because conversions could be higher with those posts than with the generic articles.
As part of this step, we also analyze if our existing content ranks for the keywords we want to target. If we do, we refresh that content rather than create something new.
To make every content piece unique, we run each blog post through our data-engineering team to see if it can extract meaningful data from our database to enrich the blog post and validate what’s written with real-world data.
Because we write about topics such as advertising in social media, our data from $30 million in monthly spending for Facebook ads gives us a huge advantage in using original data to produce useful content.
Once the content is finished, our editor-in-chief does a first review and works with the writer to have the post 100% aligned with our brand identity.
Before the content is published, we usually run a final SEO check to fine-tune the title, URL, and section titles. This process takes less than an hour and guarantees nothing has been overlooked.
Our content, from creating to editing, from SEO to graphics, is produced in-house mostly by a team of two. Editor Ash Read plans the content strategy and edits the content, while I write most of it.
We rely heavily on our editorial Trello board to keep our blog running. (It’s public if you want to check it out.)
At @Buffer, we rely heavily on our editorial @Trello board to keep our #blog running, says @alfred_lua.
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On a high level, we figure out what our audience wants to read by studying our blog post data and sending surveys to our subscribers. We find our audience prefers our long-form, educational blog posts around social media marketing.
We come up with content ideas using the following methods:
My process is straightforward (but not necessarily easy). I do thorough research, deciding what to include and what not to, and distilling the ideas into an easy-to-understand article.
As for content distribution, it’s something we’re still learning. SEO (using Google to help distribute our content), partnerships, and social media have worked recently.
We track and measure each post’s performance. Engagement metrics like traffic and time on page speak to the quality of the content. We also care about the number of sign-ups and customers who subscribed from the blog. To track these, we use a combination of Google Analytics and Looker (with the help of our data team).
Engagement metrics like traffic & time on page speak to the quality of the #content, says @alfred_lua.
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This information helps us generate new content ideas, and the cycle repeats.
While we accept some guest content, our five-person demand-generation team creates the majority of our content.
The team focuses on publishing content to attract an audience similar to our best customers. We measure every piece against the type of leads it attracts, then use that knowledge to develop new content ideas.
For example, we discovered a blog post targeting the keyword “marketing plan samples” provides a high number of marketing-qualified leads. So, we published another blog post targeting the keyword “marketing plan outline” to attract a similar audience.
We also generate new ideas based on successful content’s structure, angles, and research.
.@CoSchedule generates new ideas based on successful #content structure, angles, & research. @njellering
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For example, a blog post about the best times to post on social media was so successful at generating marketing-qualified leads that we used the same structure for a post about the best times to send email.
We share the blog post with our email list the day the content publishes. At that time, we kick off a robust social-sharing campaign that looks like this:
Optimizing our content for search engines has helped us double our traffic from organic search. (That’s why we rely heavily on keyword research before we write content to generate traffic long after the initial promotion ends.)
Optimizing #content for search engines has helped @CoSchedule double traffic from organic search. @njellering
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While we review many key performance indicators (like page views with Google Analytics), our number one goal is to generate marketing-qualified leads.
We use Kissmetrics to understand the output of every piece we publish. We give every piece a 30 days period after it publishes to generate results. Then we compare the pieces to one another to dissect trends from our best- and worst-performing content.
Ideas come from our entrepreneurial journey, lessons we’ve learned, and topics we feel strongly about as a team. Other content is user-led and based on surveys and interviews of customer segments. We want to understand the biggest challenges users face in their day-to-day work and career progression, so we can create content that truly helps.
Then we collect our content ideas in a regularly updated editorial road map on Trello.
The creation process involves individual and collaborative phases depending on the final piece. For written articles, the research phase informs the outline and first draft, which is then reviewed by internal proofreaders before a second draft is created. For video and audio content, the preparation process is similar, but it also involves external people (e.g., interview guests, videographers).
When we release new content, we post it on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and send an email alert to subscribers. For more complex projects, we work on outreach in advance by involving people who could help promote it in the creation process.
For example, we invited a few industry people to review the first draft of The Essential Guide to Growing Your Early-Stage Saas Startup. We opened the second draft to over 400 beta readers for feedback. By making readers part of the creation process, we want them to have co-ownership of the project and help us spread the word.
Make beta readers part of #content creation process so they will help promote. @LouisSlices @content101
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Doing manual outreach takes a lot of time, but it helps us create organic traction that keeps people coming back.
As a new content team, measurement is something we’re defining. As we don’t gate our content, our primary metric is reach. We focus on top-of-the-funnel readership, quantifying these numbers using Google Analytics. We also measure sentiment on individual pieces using our Incoming Feedback widget.
We always start with our ideal buyer and try to think about the problems they’re having. Most of the time, these problems might be addressed with our product. Sometimes the problem can’t be solved with our product and that’s fine too. As long as our customers are worried about a problem, we are too.
We brainstorm as a content team at the beginning of each month. What are the major pieces we want to write, and who will write them? Then we have an “outlines” session where the writers pitch their articles, including the title, sections and headers, and the keyword targeted. This process identifies any problems, gaps in knowledge, or unclear sections. Done well, the writing process is simple from here.
Writers pitch their articles w/ title, sections, headers, & keywords @Mention. @mrwhatman Read more>
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We keep it simple – posting on social media and sending an e-newsletter once a week to promote our blog posts. We also use Inbound.org and GrowthHackers, plus a few targeted LinkedIn communities.
We keep an eye on traffic to our posts, but that isn’t the most important metric. The top priority is leads generated, usually through an e-book download, webinar registration, or blog subscriber.
We can track from the first page visited so the dollar value of a new customer is clear.
The supply of content is rising, but the demand for content is finite. But these experts have pushed their boundaries and created a system to make their content a valued resource. When the right content finds the right audience, no amount of noise can cloud the signal.
Keep your audience at the center of your content marketing process. Learn more about how to do that at Intelligent Content Conference March 20-22 in Las Vegas. Register today. Use code BLOG100 to save $100 off registration.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
Please note: All tools included in our blog posts are suggested by authors, not the CMI editorial team. No one post can provide all relevant tools in the space. Feel free to include additional tools in the comments (from your company or ones that you have used).
The post 5 Brands Share Their Content Marketing Process appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
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